“I hate those doors,” says Francesca as she guides Zoli along the corridor, past a series of small signs, to where a giant version of the flier sits outside a large brown-paneled conference room.
Zoli recognizes some faces from Francesca's workplace, their wide-open smiles, and indeed a few of her own-a Rom always knows-she can tell in the swirl of faces, the eyes, the quick glances, the happy grasp of shoulders. My language, she thinks. She can hear it in snatches, like a bird in a room, one corner to the other. It feels as if air has entered her legs. She sways. A glass of water is thrust in her hand.
Zoli sips the water and feels a flush of emptiness. Why the fuss? Why the worry? Why not be back in the valley, watching the sun sink beneath the windowframe?
Across the hallway she sees Henri pumping hands with a tall man in a banded white hat.
“That's the poet,” whispers Francesca. “And across there, that's one of our big donors, I'll introduce you later. And that girl's from Paris-Match, a reporter, isn't she gorgeous?”
All the faces seem to blur into one. Zoli wishes for anger but can't dredge it up. She wants to reach out and grasp whatever she can find, a fencepost, a rosebush, a rough wooden railing, her daughter's arm, anything.
“Mamma?”
“Yes, yes, I'm fine.”
A bell rings and Francesca guides her along the corridor into the ballroom where circular tables have been arranged with shining cutlery and folded napkins.
Laughter sounds through the hall, but a gradual silence descends at the sound of knives tinkling against glass. A speaker stands up at a podium, a tall Swedish man, and his speech is translated into French. Zoli is lost, but happily so, though every now and then her daughter leans across and whispers the context of the speech in her ear-a sharp sense of our own experience, memory as a funnel, understanding Romani silence, no access to public grievance, the lack of preservation, the implicit memory at the heart of all things. They seem like such large words for small times, and Zoli allows them to wash over her as applause ripples through the room.
She watches her daughter walk onstage, swishing up in her beautiful blue dress, to give a brief welcoming speech in Romani and French both, and to outline the three days of conference, the Holocaust, the Devouring, Lexical Impoverishment, Cultural Values in Scottish Balladry, Police Perception of Belgian Roma, Economic Stratification, and, at the core, Issues of Romani Memory. How proud she is, she says, to see so many scholars, and so much interest at last: “We will not be made to stay at the margins any longer!” A great cheer goes up from the tables, and there is talk then of names and sponsors and donors and although Zoli has begged her not to mention her name she does so anyway, and it feels as if the room has hushed and the air has been sucked out to fill the space. There is a brief round of applause, brief, thank God, and no spotlight. Henri grabs her hand and squeezes it, and really all she wants now is to be back in the apartment, lying on the bed with her hands folded across her stomach, but it means so much to Francesca, all of this, she must remain, stand side by side with her daughter, and what does it matter anyway? It is such a small thing to give. She feels a small shame at the walls of her heart. I should stand and applaud her. I should sing out her name. All I have been is small against this. Petty, foolish, selfish. Zoli hikes the hem of her dress and stands, applauds as her daughter comes down the steps on her high heels, a beaming smile, a triumph.
They nestle in to one another. This is what I have, thinks Zoli. This is my flesh and blood.
Onstage the Scottish musicians begin to break the skin of the evening and the music fills the room-mandolin, guitar, fiddle. Laughter sounds out all around and movement blurs the hall. Waiters. Hotel staff. Tall men with leather patches on their sleeves.
Zoli leans back in her chair, touches her throat, and is surprised by the feel of the new necklace against her skin. She barely remembers putting it on. How long, she wonders, since she wore something like this? She closes her eyes to Enrico. He strides up the hillside, towards the mill. His coat is thrown off his shoulders before he even enters. He kicks the mud off his boots and closes the door.
Go, violin, she thinks, go.
The pulse of the music rises. Under the table, she releases one foot from its shoe. The air feels cool against her toes. She lifts off the second shoe and stretches backwards and feels a light tapping at her shoulder. A voice from behind. Her name. She turns in the chair and fumbles to get the shoes back on her feet. Her name again. She stands. He, the visitor, is fleshy, wiry-haired, mid-forties or so-something about him open and full, a wide smile on his face. He stretches out his hand, plump and soft.
“David Smolenak,” he says. “From Presov.”
The air around her suddenly compresses.
“I do have the right person, don't I? Zoli Novotna?”
She stares at the row of pens in his waistcoat pocket.
“Are you Zoli Novotna?”
It is the first time she has heard Slovak spoken in many years. It sounds so acutely foreign now, out of place, dredged up. She has, she thinks, been transported elsewhere, her body playing games, her mind tripping her up.
“Excuse me,” he says. “Did I get the wrong person?”
She scans the room and sees the rows of faces at table after table, animated with music. She stammers, shakes her head, then nods, yes and no.
“You had a book? In the ‘50s?”
“I'm here with my daughter,” she says, as if that might account for her whole life.
“It's a pleasure,” he says.
She wonders what pleasure it could possibly be, and feels a flush of heat at her core.
“Presov?” she says, as she catches the edge of the table.
“Would you have a minute, maybe?” he asks. “I'd love to talk to you. I read your book. I found a copy in a secondhand store in Bratislava. It's amazing. I've been to the settlements, Hermanovce, places like that. They're quite a sight.”
“Yes,” she says.
He balls up his fist, coughs into it, and says: “You're hard to keep track of.”
“Me?”
“I ran into you first when I was reading some articles about other writers, Tatarka, Bondy, Stränsky, you know.”
“Yes, yes,” she says, and it feels to her as if all of the windows have been closed all at once.
“I didn't know you were going to be here,” he says, almost stuttering. “I assumed…” He laughs the sort of laugh designed to fill spaces. “If it wasn't for Stepän, I wouldn't have known anything.”
He lights a cigarette and moves his hand in a coil of blue smoke. Zoli watches the smooth trajectory of the cigarette to his lips, and the movement of his hands in the air, the quick fingers. It is as if the words come out in odd streaks from his mouth-talk of Slovakia, the plight of the Roma, what it means now to European integration, and suddenly he is in Bratislava, he is talking of a towerblock called the Pentagon, graffiti in the stairwells, dealers in the dark shadows-what sort of dealers? she wonders-and something about an exhibition, about Stränsky's poems being resurrected, a strange word, she thinks, Stränsky would not like it, no, the very thought of him billowing through the gardens at Budermice, resurrected.
The journalist touches her elbow and she wants to say, No, please leave me alone, leave me be, I am in a garden, I am walking, I am not where you think I am, I am gone, but he is off again on a tangent about a poem, one of her old songs, something about the trunk of a linden tree. He was searching out Stränsky, he says, and discovered Credo, and then a chapbook, they were odd, these poems, rare, beautiful, in a dusty back issue, and when he went searching for the book he was told it could be bought in the secondhand shops, there was a small cult around it, that she is seen as a voice, a new voice from old times, and he has been looking, searching, digging, and then he says the name again, Stepan, how he helped out when he finally got in touch with him. He crushes the cigarette into a saucer on the table. The smoke rises and she watches it curl. Stepan, the journalist says yet again, and then he mentions something about a photograph taken at the piano of the Carlton Hotel, the clarity of it, the beauty, and she wants more than anything just to lean over and to pour water on the smoldering cigarette, to extinguish it, but the more she watches it the more the smoke rises in stutters.