Zoli by Colum McCann Page B

with sent a thrill along me—she called me Stephen rather than Stepän, she liked the strange way it brought her teeth to her lips. She would giggle sometimes at the Englishness of what I did, or said, though it didn't seem English to me at all. I bought her a fountain pen from the market in the old town, discovered books for her to read, gave her ink, which Conka used to stain their dresses. I began to learn as much Romani as I could. She touched my arm, looked my way. I knew it. We had begun to cross that hollow that had come between us.

    A light snow fell in early September, six months after Petr died. I strayed from the camp. On a sandbar in the river were the footprints of wolves. They plaited their way towards a final twist in the riverbank and disappeared into a light forest. She was standing by the water, listening to the small thumps of snow from the branches. I came up behind her, put my hands over her eyes. My fingers went along her neck and my thumb lay in the hollow of her shoulder. My mouth touched briefly against her cheek. She pulled away. I said her name. A sharp intake of breath as she took off her red kerchief. She had, in mourning, cut her hair quite close to the scalp. It was against tradition. She turned away and walked the riverbank. I followed, put my hands over her eyes once more. She went up on her toes in the snow, a soft crunch. I rested my chin on her shoulder, felt the press of her back against me. My hand to her waist, she breathed again, and her kerchief was wrapped around my fist. She turned, pulled at the neckline of my shirt, moved within the shadow of my shoulder, pushed the small cloud of her stomach against my hip and held it there. We went to the ground, but she rolled away. She had not, she said, seen the underside of a tree since she was a child, how strange the leaves looked from underneath. We did not make love, but in the snow she said any fool could tell what had gone on, and she stamped up and down in her shoes. She left, full of tears. The ill-fitting lid of Petr's old lighter clinked, marking the rhythm of her steps. I sat for the next five hours, terrified, but she returned, tripling her route so as not to be followed, bright with eagerness, and I forgot as we pressed against the cold bark of a tree. I could almost hear the wolves returning. The moles onher neck, a perfect dimple on her left breast, the arch of her clavicle. I traced my finger down the path of her body, pulled a ring off her little finger with my teeth. I had suffered so many fantasies over the previous few months, it was terrifying to think that this was a riverbank, not some dingy alley, where I had dreamed Zoli, afraid of nostalgia, in printing rooms, corridors, against hard machinery.
    Zoli believed there was a life-spring that went down to the center of the earth and that it ran both ways but mostly it rose from the well of her childhood. It was what she talked about, in her hard country accent, her days traveling with her grandfather, the roads they had covered together, the silences. When she talked about him she took her kerchief all the way across the bridge of her nose and covered her face. She figured her skin too dark, too black, too Gypsy to be in any way beautiful, that her lazy eye somehow marked her, but it seemed to me that for those few days that the moon was rolling along the ground. I was quite sure that eventually we would be caught together, that people would know, that the children would see us, or Conka would find out, or Fyodor, or Vashengo, and we were alert enough to know that the snowmelt would finally flood the bend, but it didn't matter.
    She heard an owl hooting one evening, and froze in terror, covered her eyes, said something about the spirit of her grandfather returning, shamed.
    “We can't do this,” she said, and she stepped off, feet snapping on the cold leaves.
    The train to the city was strangely old-world, brown-paneled, the wind rattling at the broken