Zoli Read Free

seeks a pocket of silence, passes around more cigarettes, and flicks the matchstick to extinguish the flame.
    “So,” he says, “are motorbikes the new Roma horses?”
    He's briefly proud of his question until Boshor repeats it, not once, but twice, and then there's a giggle from the youngest girl and the men slap their thighs in laughter.
    “Shit, friend,” says Boshor. “We don't even have bridles anymore.”
    Another round of laughter goes up, but he pushes his question harder, saying surely horses are part of the ancient Gypsy ways. “Y'know,” he says, “pride, tradition, heritage, that sort of thing? ”
    Boshor's chair scrapes against the floor and he leans forward. “I told you, friend, we don't have any horses.”
    “Different times?”
    “It was better under the Communists,” says Boshor, flicking ash towards the doorway. “Those were the days.”
    And that's where his heart surges, he's momentarily high on the lift of it, and just by leaning forward, ever so slightly, he has Boshor by the neck-scruff, a newsman's trick.
    “Yeah, back with the Communists we had jobs, we had houses, we had food,” says Boshor. “They didn't knock us ‘round, no, friend, may my black heart stop beating if I tell a lie.”
    “Isthat so?”
    Boshor nods, and from a battered wallet takes out a photograph of a traveling kumpanija long ago in which the men are elegant and the women long-skirted. They are out on a country road, and a red flag with a hammer and sickle nutters from the caravan roof.
    “That's my Uncle Jozef.”
    He takes the photo from Boshor, turns it in his fingers, and wishes to Christ in the clouds above that he had clicked his tape recorder on, for now it has begun, but he wonders how he will reach into his pocket without attracting too much attention, if the small red light will shine through his jacket, and where he should begin his real questions. He wants to say that he is here about Zoli, do you know about Zoli, she was born near here, a Gypsy, a poet, a singer, a Communist too, a Party member, she traveled with harpists once, she was expelled, have you heard her name, did you hear her music, We sing to sweeten the dead grass, did you see her, is she still talked of, From what is broken, what is cracked, I make what is required, was she damned, was she forgiven, did she leave any sign, I will not, no, never call the crooked finger straight, did your fathers tell stories, did your mothers sing her songs, was she ever allowed back?
    But when he mentions her name—leaning forward to say, “Have you ever heard of Zoli Novotna?”—the air stalls, thedrinking stops, the cigarettes are held at mouth-level, and a silence descends.
    Boshor looks towards the doorway and says: “No, I don't know that name—do you understand me, fat-neck?—and even if I did, that's not something we would talk about.”

Czechoslovakia



1930S-1949
    T HERE ARE THINGS ABOUT youth that only youth knows, but what I recall most clearly was sitting in the back of the caravan, wearing red, staring out at the roads going backwards.
    I was six years old. My hair was cut short. I'd hacked it off with a knife. I tell this to you directly, there is no other way to say it—my mother was gone, my father, my brother, my sisters and cousins too. They had been driven out on the ice by the Hlinka guards. Fires were lit in a ring around the shore, and guns were pointed so they could not escape. The caravans were forced to the middle of the lake as the day grew warmer. The ice cracked, the wheels sank, and the rest followed, harps and wheels and horses. I did not see any of it happen, daughter, but I could hear it in my mind and, although there was great music to come along later, sweet sounding moments when our people were raised up and strong and valued, that will always be a time of looking backwards, listening and waiting for my dead family to catch up.
    Only Grandfather and I escaped—we had been out beyond the lake, traveling