Zoli by Colum McCann Page B

unbound the kerchief and tied it in her hair. Feather blankets were laid out on the ground. We sat under the stars and we put a few coins in the bottom of a bucket so the money would get bigger under the moon. No Hlinkas came, no farmers walked up with pitchforks, it was the most peaceful night imaginable, with hardly even a raised word about dowry, mistrust, sin.
    Men kept their blackened hands behind themselves so as not to dirty Conka's dress, and even Jolana's little Woowoodzhi, who was born strange, danced. It seemed to me that the night could have go on for more than the three nights it did; we were blind with happiness.
    It was my first night drunk—I had not been allowed to drink at my own wedding. I whispered to my husband, Get rosin on your bow, Petr, and we went off into the night, that's exactly how it happened and, although I know that a wall to happiness is expecting too much happiness, it still makes me smile.

    While there were times that I yearned for a softer face to touch, or a neck without folds, it was never shameful to think that I slept content with my neck at the crook of Petr's arm. He lay under the covers with a string vest on. I suppose I began to think that I too had suddenly grown older beside him. Between one moment and the next, chonorroeja, I had grown a lifetime. The younger boys looked at me and made jokes that I should not buy any green bananas for Petr. They each had the eyes of Bakro, my suitor, but I did not gaze their way.
    Stanislaus had settled on Petr as my husband because heknew that I would still be allowed to guide the pencil, even when the war was over. Few others would ever allow their wives to put words on a page. I had gone far beyond the first dloc dloc, but I wrote in Slovak. Romani never looked right to me on paper, though it sounded beautiful in my head. I never wrote in front of Petr, nor did I read in his presence, what use would it be to bring mockery down on him? But I had fallen in with books, they were friendly to me in the quiet hours. For a long time, I remember, the only book I had was Winnetou, I, penned by a German whose name I can't recall. It was a book given to simplicities. Still, I walked out in the forest and read it enough times to know it by heart. It was about Apaches and gunfighters, a volume for boys. Finally I was given a different volume, The Lady of Öachtice, which I loved—it was cracked and torn with so much use.
    Stanislaus was given a copy of Engels by some men who worked in the salt mines. It was a dangerous thing to own and he sewed the pages inside his coat. I read the parable of the master and the servant, and while it didn't make much sense, it was the other voices, the Kranko and the Stens, that I truly liked. One day Stainslaus found a Bible printed in Slovak and said it was a handbook for revolutionaries, a notion I tested and began to like since there were ideas in there that made sense.
    And yet, still, it was really only song that held me, our own song, which kept my feet to the ground.
    New laws came upon us, even harsher than before. We were no longer allowed to travel at all. We stole back to Trnava and lay camouflaged in the forest, eight kilometers out. The chocolate factory was making armaments. The smoke drifted over us. We were joined by some of the settled Roma who left the town when their husbands were hung from the lampposts byway of reprisal: the law was ten villagers for every one of theirs. The mayor of the city gave the fascists the cheapest lives and what was cheaper to them than their Gypsies and, of course, Jews? On one steel pole eight were hung and left for the birds. For years afterwards no man or woman would ever take that street again, it was known as the Place of the Bent Lamppost.
    Conka had a bruise on her neck where Fyodor had been rough with her on the last night before he went into the hills to join the fight. Something in her sagged. She walked around like a sheet on a string between trees. She sang: If