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Conka's, but Grandfather said that it hardly mattered, the important thing was the right word, to pull it out, or squeeze it short, and then dress it up with air from my lungs. When we sang, Conka and I, he said that we were air and water in a pot and together we boiled.
    In the nighttime, we tried to fall asleep by the fire, but our favorite stories kept us up late and when a story was really good we had no legs to hold us up. Her father slapped us and told us to go to our beds, we'd waken the dead. Grandfather carried me and put me beneath the eiderdown where my mother had once stenciled a harp using thread that came from cottonwood trees.
    One evening, Grandfather carried home a carpet of a man's face, and he hung it on the wall above the drawer full of knives. It was a portrait of a man with a gray beard, a strange gaze, and a high forehead. It's Vladimir Lenin, he said. Don't tell a soul, you hear me, especially the troopers if they come along. Later that week he bought a second carpet—this one was the Holy Virgin. He rolled the Virgin into a tight circle with string, and positioned her above Lenin, so that if a stranger came into the caravan, he could reach up with his knife and cut the string and the Holy Virgin would come down on top of Lenin in a rush. Grandfather thought it hilarious and sometimes he cut thestring just for fun, and if he was drunk he would talk to their faces and call them the greatest of bedfellows. If there was a rumble outside in the camp, he would quickly cut the string and shove his leather-bound book into a hidden pocket at the back of his jacket. Then he stood outside with his arms crossed and a scowl on his face.
    He would sooner have invited in typhus than a trooper.
    If they forced a check on us they pushed their way past him without asking, stomped their boots on the floor, but they never found Lenin or the book. They tore the place up and tossed teacups to one another. From outside we could hear the smashing, but what was there to do, we just waited until they came out, down the steps, their boots shiny at the knees and scuffed at the toes.
    When they were gone, we cleaned the mess, and Grandfather rolled up the Virgin again, let Lenin look out once more.
    Grandfather went to the Poprad market one day and didn't come back for four more. He had built a wall for a man who had given him a wireless radio. He carried it into the camp with great fanfare, put it down by the fire, and music jumped out. Vashengo's father came to look at it. He liked the music indeed and everyone gathered around and fiddled with the knobs. But in the morning, a group of elders came and said they didn't like the children listening to outsiders. It's only a radio, said Grandfather. Yes, they said, but the talk is immodest. Grandfather took Vashengo's father by the arm and they walked down by the river and worked out a plan: he would only listen to music and not the other shows. Grandfather took it with us to our caravan, turned it very low, and listened anyway. It's my duty to know, he said, and he ran the little yellow dial along theglass panel, Warsaw, Kiev, Vienna, Prague, and the one he loved the most, though it didn't get any sound: Moscow.
    One day I heard him slam down the wooden backing on the ground: This bloody thing needs batteries, can you imagine that?
    He came back a couple of days later with a sack full of batteries over his shoulder and his clothes covered in flecks of gray. He told us that the gadze now wanted walls held together with cement—all his other walls he had built with rocks and air—but if that's what he had to do for batteries, that's what he had to do.
    Soon everyone grew to like the radio. Mostly we listened to music, but every now and then government voices came through. In the caravan, Grandfather tuned it in to whatever he could find, all the different languages. He spoke five—Romani, Slovak, Czech, Magyar, and a little Polish—though Eliska said he should forget all that red