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night exactly like this. A deserted campsite near the Black Sea. A flickering campfire lighting up the bottoms of sparse trees and the side of the camper van. Janos, Gypsy Number Two, brings out his Chinese-made violin and, after a screechy start and the application of additional rosin, serenades Svetlana who sits, wrapped in a blanket, on a boulder near the fire. He plays a Hungarian folk song he has practiced for weeks. The first part of the song is slow and gentle with an ever-so-light touch of horsehair on strings.
    Svetlana turns toward him, her curls black and skin bronze in the moonlight. “Gypsy music is so sad when it’s played slowly.”
    Halfway through the sad section, Svetlana stands and begins dancing about the campfire, arms extended, making her blanket into wings. Then, when the sad passage is ended and he launches into the exuberant czardas , Svetlana dances faster and faster, spinning about the campfire, throwing the blanket aside and revealing the fact she has removed her blouse and wears only tight, white slacks.
    Svetlana in the moonlight, bronze on top and pure white from her waist down, a pair of disjointed legs dancing in the night until, during the heat of the czardas , she climbs atop the picnic table and removes her slacks. She is all bronze then, his sweaty fingers clinging to the violin as she dances for him in the light from the fire. All bronze like some of the icons in Kiev’s cathedrals. Later, when he says this to her, she laughs and says he is the one made of bronze.

    After passing through a small village and putting on the high beams, Janos saw a figure walking on the shoulder of the road. As he approached he saw a man in an American-style cowboy hat carrying a duffel bag over one shoulder. The man walked briskly swaying from side to side, bow-legged like a Cossack.
    Janos shut off the CD player and slowed the camper van, expecting the man to stick out a thumb. But the man kept walking. Janos reached into the door pocket beside him to be certain his Makarov 9mm pistol was butt up. He glanced toward the back where the sofa was jack-knifed out into a bed and pillows were stuffed beneath blankets to resemble someone asleep. When Janos braked to a stop, the man stood at the front corner of the camper van for a moment, smiling, then walked back to the door and opened it.
    “Would you like a ride?”
    “Yes,” said the man, removing his cowboy hat as he climbed in.
    The man put his bag between the seats, glanced back, and when Janos held one finger to his lips, nodded, and spoke softly in order not to awaken the pillows stuffed beneath the blankets.
    His name was Anatoly. When Janos asked if he was a Cossack, Anatoly laughed, saying he wished he had been born in the distant past. Instead, he was born shortly before the Chernobyl explosion in one of the villages closest to the site. Because he was a boy during the evacuation, he had been unaware of the danger. Like most children from the Zone, he had gotten plenty of iodine. But he wondered if he would live past his forties. The reason for this was his recent work salvaging parts from the condemned graveyard of vehicles near Chernobyl.
    “Why did you return to the Zone?” asked Janos.
    “Because there was no work in the village to which we were sent. Everyone simply sits in their Chernobyl boxes, drinking vodka, smoking cigarettes, and speaking of death. You were correct when you mentioned Cossack because my jobs in villages involve riding horses. My trip to the Zone was a short one, but not on a horse. I wanted to see the Zone once more before I traveled south. I move from village to village. Many fields are still plowed using horses. However, I might go to Nikolaev. They say there are jobs building ships.”
    “Are the ship builders looking for Cossacks?”
    Anatoly held his hat up. “This was a gift from the job at the vehicle graveyard. With this the sun will not add to my percentages of contracting cancer. It is useful in the