“A whole team?” says the younger with a grin.
She turns away and stares at the older man who smooths out the hairs of his eyebrow with his knuckle.
“We have a roof now,” says Zoli. “Electric lights that come on all the time, water that runs. The new directives have been good to us. Good times are coming. The leaders have been good to us. All I want is to find the box, that's all. Have you seen my things? ”
The older pushes himself wearily from the stove and sits down, carrying with him a bowl of kasha with small pieces of lamb scattered in it.
“You're lying,” he says.
“A blue lacquer box with silver clasps,” she says.
“For a Gypsy you don't even lie very well.”
Light crawls up and around the window-no curtains, she notices, no woman's hand in the cabin. She allows the tip of her knife to press deeper into her cupped finger.
“What's your name?” says the younger again.
Elena.
“That's a lie.”
The older man leans in, serious and gray-eyed. “There was a man out in these parts riding a two-stroke Jawa. An Englishman. He was looking for you, says you've gone missing. Says he's been searching all over. We saw him by the forest road. He wants to take you to a hospital. He looked like he should've been in the hospital himself, driving around with a broken leg. Hadn't shaved in a while. Said your name is Zoli.”
He slides the bowl of kasha across the table, but she does not touch it.
“I really need to find the box. It has so many precious things inside.”
“He said you were tall, with a lazy eye. He told us you'd be wearing a dark overcoat. That you might have a gold watch. Roll up your sleeve.”
“What?”
“Roll up your fucking sleeve,” says the younger.
He steps across and hikes her coat, wrist to elbow. The knife falls with a clatter to the floor. He stamps on it, picks it up, tests the blade with his thumb, then turns to the older. “I told you. Last night. I fucking told you.”
The older leans in further to Zoli: “Do you know him?”
“Know who?”
“Don't play us for fools.”
“I know nothing about a watch,” says Zoli.
“He said it was his father's. A precious timepiece.”
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
“He asked for petrol for his motorbike. He didn't seem much of a threat. He spoke a funny Slovak. He tried to tell me he grew up here, but I know better. Is it true, then, what he says? How did you get a man's name?”
Zoli watches as the younger one cuts the hairs on his arm with the knife, whistling at the sharpness of the blade. The older takes off his cap, something soft and compassionate in the lift. His graying hair, a little damp, lies pressed against his scalp. When he leans forward she notices a small scapular swinging at his neck.
“It was given to me by my grandfather,” she says finally. “It was the name of his own father.”
“So you're a real Gypsy then?”
“You're a real woodsman?”
The older laughs and drums his fingers on the table: “What do I say? We're paid by the cubic meter.”
So, she thinks, a workcamp for prisoners. They remain out here, all summer and winter. Minimum security. Morning until night, sorting wood, gauging it, chopping it, weighing. She watches as the younger rises and goes to the door where he takes an oilskin cloth out of the hanging pair of trousers. He unties a string from the cloth and produces a set of playing cards, slides them across the table to Zoli.
“Our fortune.”
“What?”
“Don't be a God-fearing idiot,” says the older, slapping the cards off the table.
The younger one retrieves them from the floor. “Come on, tell us our fortune,” he says again.
“I don't tell fortunes,” says Zoli.
“It gets lonely out here,” says the younger. “All I want is my fortune told.”
“Shut up,” says the older.
“I'm just telling her it gets lonely. Doesn't it? It gets real lonely.”
“I'm telling you to shut up, Tomas.”
“She's worth money. You heard him. He said he'd pay us money. And you said-”
“Shut up and leave her alone.”
Zoli watches as the older goes to a small bookshelf where he takes down a leather volume. He returns to the table and folds back the cover.
“Can you read this?” he says.
“Christ rides!” says the younger.
“Can you read it?”
“Yes.”
“For fucksake!”
“Here's where you are now. Right here. It's an old map, so it looks like it's Hungary but it's not. This is where Hungary is, along here. The other way, over here, is Austria. They'll shoot you before they lay eyes on you. Thousands of soldiers. Do you understand? Thousands.”
“Yes.”
“The best way to make it through is this lake. It is only one meter deep, even in the middle. That's where the border is, in the middle. They don't patrol it with boats. And you won't drown. They may shoot you but you won't drown.”
“And this?”
“That's the old border.”
He closes the book and leans in close to Zoli. The younger looks back and forth, as if a language lies between them that he will never understand.
“Ah, fuck,” he says. “She's worth money. You heard what he said. A reward.”
“Give her back the knife.”
“Shit.”
“Give her the knife, Tomas.”
The younger skids the knife across the floor and sighs. Zoli picks it up, backs across the hard stone floor towards the door, pulls down the handle. Locked. A brief panic claws at her throat until the older man steps across, leans forward, turns the handle upwards, and the door swings open. A blast of cold wind.
“One thing,” he says. “Are you really a poet?” I sang. A smgerr
“Yes.”
“Same thing, no?”
“No, I don't think so,” she says.
All three step out into the stinging light of the morning. The oldest extends his hand.
“Josef,” he says.
“Marienka Bora Novotna.” She pauses a moment: “Zoli.”
“It's a funny name.”
“Perhaps.”
“May I ask one thing? I was wondering. I think I've seen your photograph once. In the newspaper.”
“Maybe.”
“I ask only then-”
“Yes?”
“How have you come to this?”
He looks beyond her, eyes distant, and she realizes then that it is not a question she is called upon to answer, rather it is something he is asking himself, or some old self standing in the distance, amid the trees, and he will ask it again, later, when he feels the hard roll of axe handle in his hand: How have you come to this?
“There are worse things,” says Zoli.
“I can't think of them, can you?”
She turns her face towards the distance.
“Hey,” says the younger, “what are we going to say to the Englishman if he comes back?”
“Say to him?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps,” says Zoli, “you will tell him his fortune.”
At the top of a hill she looks north and south-Bratislava and its towers long gone now, not even a hint of them on the skyline. She is pleased by the silence as it reverberates from horizon to horizon. There are days when she walks great distances and the only sound she discerns is the swish of her own clothing.
At a lonely farmhouse she crouches behind a barn, listening. She crosses to the huts and undoes the string that holds the hasp. A few scrawny hens eye her from behind the wooden slats. When she reaches in, one erupts from the box with a long squawk and flies past her. Illegal, of course, to own chickens- they must belong to a family nearby. She reaches in a second time, keeping the gap in the door tight. In the uproar the others take to the air and she lunges and grabs one by the wing. She holds it in the well of her skirt, and breaks the neck with a simple twist, follows with a second. From the nesting boxes she fills her pockets with eggs and wraps them in the cathedral tea towel.
She unwinds a long piece of thread from her coat, ties it around the neck of the animals, and places them together at her belt, where they bounce against her thigh as she walks, as if still alive and protesting.