“More of his horseshit.”
“He says he has some of Stränsky's poems too.”
“Did he say anything about Conka?”
“He fell out of touch with everyone. They were made to stay in the towers, that's all he knows.”
Francesca's body stretches away from her as if, in their huddling, they might be able to extend each other.
“And the other man, the journalist?”
“He'd like to talk. That's what he said. He found an old book of yours, and went searching. He was just curious at first, enjoyed the poems, he said. He'd like to talk to you. Tomor-row.
“You can talk to him for me, Franca. Tell him something.”
“Tell him what?”
“Tell him I've gone somewhere.”
“You're going home, aren't you?”
“Of course I am.”
“What will I tell him?”
“Tell him that nothing is ever arrived at.”
“What?”
“Tell him that nothing is ever fully understood, that's what I'd like to say.”
A peace descends between them now, a quietness that travels across the sheets. Her daughter hikes herself onto an elbow, a little hill of shadow where her hip juts out.
“You know what he wanted to know? Swann. At the end?”
“Tell me,” says Zoli.
“He was a bit embarrassed. He kept looking at the floor. He said he just wanted to know one thing.”
“Yes…?”
“Well, he wanted to know what had happened to his father's watch.”
“That was his question?”
“Yes.”
Zoli watches as a small bar of light moves along the wall and down. Someone passes in the corridor outside and a series of shushes sound from the living room. She closes her eyes and is carried away on the notion of Swann resting on one small fixed point of an ancient clockhand, as if it all might come around again, as if it all could be repeated and cured. A single gold watch. She wonders if she should feel pity, or anger, or even amusement, but instead she locates the pulse of an odd tenderness for Swann, not for how he was, or what he has become, but for all he has lost, the flamboyance of what he had once so dearly believed in, how absolute it was, how fixed. What must it have been like for him, to break the border one final time and to move back to England? What must it have been like for him to return empty, to be back with less than he had ever imagined leaving with? Swann, she thinks, did not learn for himself how to be lost. He did not know the meaning of what it was to turn and change. She wishes now that she had kissed him, that she had taken his slack face in her hands, touched her lips against the pale forehead to release him, to let him walk away.
Zoli lays her head against her daughter's breastbone and feels the breath trembling through Francesca's body.
“You know what I want to do?” Zoli says. “I'm going to see him tomorrow. Then I'd like to get on a train and go back to the valley. I would very much like to wake up quietly in the dark. That's what I'd like.”
“You're going to tell Swann where you're living?”
“Of course not. I couldn't bear the thought of him coming there.”
And then Zoli knows for sure what she will do: she will take a taxi to the train station, stop off first at the hotel, move under the birdsong, call Swann's room, stand in the reception, wait, watch him shamble across towards her, hold his face in her hands for a moment, and kiss him, yes, on the forehead, kiss him. She will allow him his sorrow and then she will leave, take the train, alone, home to the valley.
“I'm happy there,” says Zoli.
A note jumps out from deep in the apartment, a hard discordant thing moving through the air, surrounded a second later by a new one, as if testing the old one, until they start to collide, rising and falling, taking air from each other.
“Idiot,” says Francesca. “I'll tell him to shut up.” Her body pulls taut, but Zoli taps her hand. “Wait a moment,” she says. The music rises and draws itself out, quicker, more turbulent.
“Get dressed,” says Zoli.
“Mamma?”
“Let's get dressed.”
Laughter bursts out with the music now and the smell of smoke filters along the corridor. The women step away from the bed. Their clothes lie scattered in the darkness. They fumble a moment: a nightgown, a blue dress, a high-heeled shoe. Francesca's arm gets caught in her sleeve, and Zoli helps it along. She strokes the side of her daughter's face. They stand together at the bedroom door.
“But you're in your nightdress,” says Francesca.
“I don t care.”
They cross the wooden floors of the corridor and a sharp silence fills the room when mother and daughter appear. Henri stands, wide-eyed, with a thin joint at his mouth. “Oh,” he says, swaying on his feet. Scattered around the room are the Scottish musicians. One of them, tall and handsome and curly-haired, stands and bows deeply. He stubs out his joint in a flowerpot. Francesca giggles and looks across at her mother. How glorious, thinks Zoli, how joyful, that it is all, still, even on this night, so unfinished.
Zoli nods to them and simply says: “Smoke away.”
The musician looks around, a little startled, fishes his joint from the pot. He straightens it, lights up, and laughs.
“What happened to the music?” says Zoli.
She used to play the sugar upon the metal, she recalls, in those old days when she gathered children at the back of her wagon-she would place a sheet of siding on a wooden saw-horse, sprinkle the sugar on the sheet, sometimes salt, or, if nothing else, seeds. She teased the violin bow along the very edge of the plate until the metal began to hum. The sugar jumped and swerved and found its own vibrating patterns: standing waves, circular clumps, solitary grains, like small white acrobats. Afterwards the children clamored to lick the sheet clean. She had loved those maps, their random patterns, their odd music, the way the children clapped the sugar into place. She had never thought of them as anything new or unusual, although she heard that others called them chladnis, sound charts-the sugar settling at the points where there was least sound-and she thought, even then, that she could have looked at the metal sheet and found a whole history of her people painted there.
“Go on,” she says. “Play.”
The curly-haired one strikes a note on the mandolin, a bad note, too high, though he rinses it out with the next, and the guitarist joins in, slowly at first, and a wave moves across the gathering, like wind over grass, and the room feels as if it is opening, one window, then another, then the walls themselves. The tall musician strikes a high chord and nods at Zoli-she smiles, lifts her head, and begins.
She begins.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS/AUTHOR'S NOTE
WE GET OUR VOICES from the voices of others. I am enormously indebted to a number of people who have helped me research, refine, and radically change the structure of this novel over the past four years. I can claim no familial link with the Romani culture-it is, I suppose, the novelist's privilege to play the fool, rushing in where others might not tread. I have scavenged from all over and am indebted to so many sources that it would be impossible to list them all. Our stories are created from a multiplicity of witness.
The following artists and writers have inspired me-Ilona Lackovä in A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia (University of Hertfordshire Press); Milena Hiibschman-novä; Bronislawa Wajs (Papusza) and Jerzy Ficowksi. I have found enormous help in the work of Ian Hancock from the Center of Romani Archives at the University of Texas. The Romani language and orthography are only now in the process of being standardized. As Hancock has written, the word “Gypsy” is intently disliked by some Roma and tolerated by others. The persistence of the use of “Gypsy” lies in the fact that there is no single Romani equivalent universally agreed upon. Time and scholarship is changing this. I have used certain spellings and constructions determined by geography, history, and political affiliations that were current at the time when the novel takes place, sometimes purposely confused. The choices and mistakes are purely mine.