Zoli by Colum McCann

scrubbing, no cooking, no time spent looking after the children, but she didn't isolate herself, she couldn't, she was in love with that bare life, it was what she knew, it fueled her. She washed clothes in the river, beat the rugs and carpets clean. Afterwards she put playing cards in the spoke of a bicycle wheel and rode around in the mud, calling out to the children. Each of them she named her chonorro, her little moon. “Come here, chonor-roeja,” she called. They ran behind her, blowing whistles made from the branches of ash trees. Behind the tire factory she played games with them on what they called their bouncing wall. She threw a tire over a sapling for each new child that was born, knowing that one day it would fit snug and tight.
    Zoli was already well known amongst her people, settled and nomadic alike. She touched some old chord of tenderness in them. They would walk twenty kilometers just to hear her sing. I had no illusions that I'd ever belong, but there was the odd quiet moment when I sat with her, our backs against a wheelbase, a short span of recited song before Petr or the children interrupted us. When I cut brown bread don't look at me angrily, don't look at me angrily because I'm not going to eat it. At first she said that the writing was just a pastime—the songs were what mattered, the old ballads that had been around for decades, and she was only shaping the music so they'd be passed along to others. She was surprised to find new words at her fingertips, and when whole new songs began to emerge, she thought they must have existed before, that they had come to her from somewhere ancient. Zoli had no inkling that anyoneother than the Gypsies would want to listen to her, and the notion that her words might go out on the radio, or into a book, terrified her at first.
    Before their performances, she and Conka sat on the steps of her caravan as they aligned their voices. They wanted to get within a blade of grass of each other. Conka was a full redhead, blue-eyed, and she wore coins, glass beads, and pottery shards woven in a necklace strand. Her husband, Fyodor, stared me down. He didn't like the idea of his wife being recorded. I feigned bustle when really all I was waiting for was Zoli's voice to pull through, with her own songs, the new ones, those she had made up herself.
    One spring afternoon, near a remote forest, Zoli walked out to the edge of a lake and undertook a ceremony for her dead parents, brother, and sisters, floating candles out on the water. Three Hlinka guards had finally been charged with their murders and had received life sentences. There was no celebration among the Gypsies—they didn't seem to enjoy the revenge— but the whole kumpanija accompanied Zoli to the lakeside, and they stood back to allow her silence while she sang an old song about wind in a chimney turning back at the last moment, never reaching down to disturb the ashes.
    At the lake edge I trampled the reeds, fumbled with the batteries and clicked the lever on: she was beginning to stretch and move the language, and, like everyone else, I was chained to the sound of her voice.
    Later I sat with Stränsky while he transcribed the tapes. “Perfect,” he said as he pulled his pencil through one of her lines. He was convinced that Zoli was creating a poetry from the roots up, but he still wanted to put manners on it. She came into the city, alone, the railway ticket moist in her fist. Ner-vously she twisted the hair that had fallen out from beneath her kerchief. Stränsky read the poem aloud to her and she went to the window, peeled back some of the black tape from the glass.
    “That last part is wrong,” she said.
    “The last verse?”
    “Yes. The clip.”
    Stränsky grinned: “The timing?”
    Three times he reshuffled it before she shrugged and said: “Perhaps.” Stränsky positioned the metal. She bit her lip, then took the printed sheet and pressed it against her chest.
    I could feel my heart thumping in