Ascension

by Steven Galloway

  “I will not.” She held her hands tight at her sides.

  “It’s best. The future will be difficult.”

  “I will go with you.” Etel made herself as big as she could go. “Ursaris hold together. You will not leave me.”

  András agreed, not letting on how relieved he was. Her loyalty made him proud, made him happy to leave the Mór Roma. The prospect of a life on the streets of a large city was less daunting, almost appealing. She’s right, he thought. Ursaris hold together.

  FOUR

  On the wire, thought of any sort was the first step towards a fall. Salvo learned as much as soon as Tomas bade him walk. What was on the wire was unlike what was on the ground; walking on the earth was a one-sided proposition. The wire was animate, the wire breathed, and the wire was always stronger than anyone who walked it. The only way to live was to work with the wire, to breathe in such a way that would not disturb its breathing, to walk softly at times and on places that the wire didn’t mind.

  Tomas had been right; Salvo learned quickly, far more quickly than the others Tomas had tried to teach. In less than two months he was proficient enough that Tomas felt sufficiently confident in him to book some performances, to trust Salvo with his own life.

  Training the girl, Margit, had been a more difficult proposition. Tomas wanted her to be part of the act, but while she was satisfactory in other areas, she did not take naturally to the wire. Tomas did not require her to walk, only to be carried or to balance, but it was clear that the girl didn’t trust him, which made her a difficult student. He resolved to use her in the act as sparingly as possible, limiting her to one or two tricks. She would still be useful on the road.

  The act was a simple one. Tomas was not a fan of skywalks, preferring instead the confines of a hall or a tent. Tomas would start the show with the dance of the drunk, in which he would lurch across the wire as though intoxicated. It was a good opener and always got a cheer. Next he would do some somersaults, which were more difficult. Then he would send Salvo out to do some handstands. On Salvo’s last handstand, Tomas would carry Margit out on his back, place a chair on the soles of Salvo’s feet and lift the girl onto the chair. He would then sit on the wire and eat an apple while Margit howled, only half pretending to be terrified. When he finished his apple, he would retrieve Margit from the chair, where she would first slap and then kiss him, much to the delight of the audience. Salvo would return to the platform for a short rest as Tomas prepared the finale. Both Tomas and Margit wore a belt with a brass ring at the front. Tomas would lead Margit to the middle of the wire and secure a rope between their two rings. As he lowered Margit from the wire, Salvo rejoined him. With Margit dangling in the air below them, suspended horizontally, Salvo would climb up Tomas’s back and do a handstand from his shoulders. It was a very difficult trick, and it always brought the audience to their feet.

  Whenever Salvo did this trick, he had to work very hard not to look at Margit’s face. He knew she was there, staring up at the wire, and he knew that if he looked her in the eye, he would lose his focus and fall. In general, he tried to have as little to do with her as possible. She was not Roma, that was certain, and the way she sometimes looked at him made him feel as though she might not like him. That they had much in common mattered little; the circumstance of each being a needy beneficiary of both kindness and cruelty from Tomas Skosa had not made them allies.

  Salvo’s training had been harsh. Tomas’s violence had ensured that lessons learned were not soon forgotten, but it had not been without cost. Since Salvo had arrived in Budapest he had been plagued by irrational fears, and though he was nearly twenty now, he experienced the sorts of dread commonly reserved for children. Chief among these was a fear of the dark. He knew this was irrational, but this did nothing to allay his fear and much to make him feel like a fool.

  Sleep was his only recourse, but the road to sleep made it worthless. In the moments before slipping away, surrounded by darkness, he was visited by memories of his parents’ burning house, of the cross falling on the new priest, of the glass soldier shattering on the floor. Other times, he had memories of things that had never happened: he was drowning, he was cut, he was crushed, lost, imprisoned. A thousand catastrophes heralded slumber. On the verge of sleeping, he’d be startled awake by his terror. After hours of this torture he would finally be so exhausted that even his fear could not rouse him, and he would sleep for a few hours.

  It was a little better once Tomas took their act on the road. As they criss-crossed Europe, Salvo felt his fatigue so acutely that his fears had less energy with which to manifest themselves. He slept on trains when he could, otherwise attempting to sleep during the day. When they weren’t travelling, Tomas usually rented a cheap room for the three of them, where Salvo was intended to sleep on the floor, but after several nights of listening to Tomas and Margit, he more often than not slept in the hall.

  Salvo knew that Tomas Skosa was a very good wire walker, if also a brutal teacher. Salvo knew he must do exactly as he was told, and once he mastered the basics he found that there was much more that he could learn from Tomas—not only the mechanics of walking the wire but the psychology as well. Despite his many faults, Tomas Skosa knew the wire inside and out. He was known by other wire walkers wherever they went. Some hated him, others admired him, but none disputed his excellence.

  His past was a mystery. Everywhere they went Tomas seemed to know people, but no one appeared to know where he came from, how he learned to speak so many languages: Hungarian, French, English, German, Italian and, Salvo suspected, Romany. Whenever they arrived in a new town, Tomas would disappear for several hours, not saying where he was going, and was equally tight-lipped upon his return.

  It was during one of these vanishings, this time in Munich, that Salvo and Margit had what Salvo later realized was their first real conversation. They had checked into what was, for them, an unusually nice hotel, and Salvo was resting for that night’s performance, grateful for the peace that Tomas’s absence had afforded. Margit sat in a chair by the window, mending a tear in one of Tomas’s shirts.

  “I do not like the hanging trick,” she said, startling Salvo. She rarely spoke.

  “Why?” Salvo asked. It was by far their most popular trick.

  “I just don’t.”

  “Oh.” Salvo closed his eyes, assuming the conversation was over.

  “He is an awful man,” she said.

  Salvo did not answer, his eyes darting towards the door, expecting it to burst open.

  “To both of us, he is awful.”

  “He taught us the wire,” Salvo offered.

  “He taught you the wire. Me, he carries. He will teach me nothing. Besides, he only teaches you so that he has someone else to perform with. He is doing you no favours.”

  Salvo shrugged. “What can we do? It’s not so bad.”

  Margit’s eyes returned to her sewing. “Someday …,”she ventured, but she did not finish.

  That night, as Salvo did his handstand on Tomas’s shoulders, he was for a brief moment unable to keep himself from looking at Margit’s face. She met his gaze and held it, her face expressionless. Salvo looked away.

  He felt something brush his cheek, light and soft. Close as it was to his face, he could not see what it was, and he started to panic. An orange-and-yellow blur fluttered into view: a butterfly, Salvo realized. It bumped into him again, harder this time, and then disappeared from sight. Salvo froze. He couldn’t see the butterfly, and he was paralyzed by fear. When Tomas gave him the signal to end his handstand, he couldn’t move.

  “Come down, boy,” Tomas growled.

  Unable to speak, Salvo remained upside down, his mind stuck in a loop: I don’t want to die.

  “I said come down. I can’t stand like this forever.”

  Tomas’s legs began to tremble. His strength was fading. Still Salvo couldn’t move. Finally he caught a glimpse of the butterfly, several metres to his left, drifting away from them. His fear subs
ided enough to allow him movement, and he dismounted Tomas’s shoulders and helped him pull Margit to the wire. The crowd extolled the trick, unaware of how close the troupe had come to falling.

  Afterward, Salvo was sure that Tomas would beat him. He was determined to take it standing up, not to let Tomas see his pain. He did not flinch when Tomas’s arm cocked backward; he stared Tomas straight in the eyes. To Salvo’s surprise the blow never landed. Tomas’s arm hung back, stuck in mid-air. There was something new in Tomas’s eyes. He knows, Salvo thought, that violence no longer affects me. He may as well punch a piece of meat.

  “If you ever freeze on me again, I will kill you.” His voice lacked conviction, but still Salvo knew he meant it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, but Tomas had already walked away.

  From the corner, Margit smiled out at him.

  The next night they did not perform. They would leave Munich the following day, bound for Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Bonn, Cologne, Dortmund, Hannover, Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin. They went to a beer hall in a working-class part of the city. Salvo and Margit sat at a table in the back, while at the other end of the room Tomas met with a strange man. The man, though he wore clothes of the same manner as everyone else in the tavern, looked out of place. There was something about him that did not fit in. He was trying too hard to look like a man without secrets to hide.

  The man listened intently to Tomas, his eyes scanning the room, assessing each new person who came through the door. After five minutes of what was essentially a one-way conversation, Tomas placed a piece of paper on the table. The man pocketed the paper and pushed an envelope towards Tomas. He stood and without shaking Tomas’s hand exited the tavern.

  Salvo didn’t pay as much attention to Tomas’s conversation as he might have if he wasn’t half drunk. Not usually much of a drinker, Salvo had consumed three mugs of strong German ale already and was halfway through his fourth. He hadn’t been drunk more than three or four times in his life, and his head was swimming. A polka band had set up on a makeshift stage, and as they launched into a song a few scattered patrons got up to dance. Salvo stood, surprised at his own unsteadiness. He extended a hand to Margit.

  “Dance?”

  Surprised, Margit stood and followed him tentatively towards the space of floor that had been cleared for dancing. She started a polka, then stopped and stood still, eyes darting from side to side nervously.

  The dance Salvo danced was not a polka. In his mind, the music he heard was different. His eyes were closed, and his feet were moving to a tune he hadn’t heard since he was a small boy. He had been drinking to chase away the panic that had been battering his eyelids since the night before, leaving him sweaty and shaking. But the drink had only amplified his fears. Then he had remembered a story told to him by his dead father, and he had had a sudden urge to dance. He heard his father’s voice as he moved, an overscore to the music in his head.

  “Once, long before you were ever born, in another place that is not here, there was a Rom who could hear the voices of dead men, angels, God and the devil. He heard voices so loudly that he thought he would die, and so many that he could make no sense of anything they said.

  “All the other Roma thought he was crazy. Some wanted to kill him because they suspected he was possessed. Others thought he might be some sort of angel, so he was not killed. But both those who thought him devil or angel feared him, because he spoke of things they did not understand and did not want to understand.

  “As always there came a time when there were people that wanted to do harm to the Roma. It was obvious they must go to a different place, and with much haste, but it was not known where they should go. On all sides there could be danger, a peasant army approaching from any direction.

  “A child was playing a fiddle by the fire. The Rom who heard voices noticed that when the boy played his fiddle the voices were not as loud, nor were there as many. He told the boy to play faster and louder, and when the boy did, one voice began to come to him more clearly than the rest.

  “But the voice was still not loud enough, so the Rom who heard voices called for the great musicians of the tribe to bring their instruments and play the best and most beautiful music they knew. They hesitated to do this, not sure whether this Rom was leading them to death or wasting their time, but they were makers of music above all else, so their desire to play won out over their suspicions.

  “As they played their best and most beautiful music, the Rom who heard voices began to dance. As he danced, the voices subsided one by one by one until there was only a single voice in his head, one clear, loud voice that spoke with such authority that the Rom who heard voices knew it immediately as the voice of God.

  “God told the Rom who heard voices where the peasant army coming to kill them was, and where they would find safe haven. When the Rom stopped dancing and told the others what he knew, many did not believe him. He told them he was going where he had been directed, and it was up to them whether they came.

  “The other Roma were moved by the strength of his pronouncements, and the clear, not-at-all-crazy look in his eyes—a look that had never been there before—and they decided to go with him. When they were safely delivered, the Rom who heard voices was no longer considered crazy, and many times in the future he danced before the fire, always able to hear the voice of God over the voices of lesser demons. And if he is not dead, he may still live.”

  Salvo had heard no voices, but he was plagued all the same. Since the appearance of the butterfly his fears had grown. They were irrational. They were constant. As he danced, he willed them away. But they did not listen. They were ever-present.

  The music had stopped, the song Salvo wasn’t dancing to having ended. Many people, including Margit, were staring at him. He stood, wondering what to do.

  A voice from the crowd called to him harshly. “We don’t do those dances here, Rom.” Salvo was too drunk to completely understand their German, but he caught their tone and the word Rom. He saw Tomas moving towards him but was unsure of his intentions; Tomas had never expressed any opinion one way or another about the Roma. Salvo felt rough hands on his shoulders and was pushed to the floor. He barely pulled his face out of the way of a worn leather boot, then felt another sink into his ribs. He yelped with pain, then heard the sharp crack of fist impacting jaw. From the ground he watched as Tomas slowly and calmly beat back his attackers, mashing one man’s nose, tearing at another’s ear.

  Margit pulled at his arm, and with her help, he staggered to his feet. If he were not so drunk, his ribs would have hurt more, a consolation that mattered little to him then. Tomas’s ferocity had not gone unnoticed, and those who before had seemed likely to join in the trouble had apparently thought better of it. When the three moved towards the door of the tavern, leaving four men on the floor with varied injuries, no one made a move to stop them.

  With Salvo leaning heavily on Margit, they walked back to their hotel. No one spoke. Every breath sent a spark of fire through Salvo’s broken ribs, and the cold, fresh air had sobered him enough that he was able to think a little more clearly. “Thank you,” he said to Tomas, who was walking in front of them.

  Tomas said nothing and kept walking.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have drank so much.”

  Tomas stopped abruptly, turning around. “That dance you did—”

  “I won’t do it again.”

  Tomas paused, appearing hesitant. “It was a good dance.”

  Salvo was taken aback. “Thank you.”

  Tomas nodded and continued towards the hotel. Salvo looked at Margit, who appeared equally shocked, and then they, too, resumed their walk.

  That night Salvo slept soundly. He was too tired to be afraid of anything, even himself.

  After leaving the Mór Roma, András felt more acutely that he hadn’t been one of them. They were not his family. In light of the circumstances of their parting, he was glad.

  He realized, however, that this feeling of d
islocation might be lessened if he were again surrounded by kin. And then there was Etel. She would need family, something outside of him, to keep her from withdrawing from the world. Though he had long ago decided that he would give his life for his sister, he knew chances were that that would not be enough; it would be an empty and useless gesture. Partly because nothing he could do alone would be sufficient, and partly because they had nowhere else to go, András and Etel made the journey to Budapest.

  Like his brother before him, András remembered Viola Street. He could not, however, remember exactly where on this street his aunt and uncle lived. After asking people in the neighbourhood, he finally found someone who recognized their name. The woman did not know Esa or László Nagy well, but she remembered where they lived.

  Etel stood behind András as he knocked on the door of 7 Viola Street. When no one answered, she followed András as he entered the foyer and made his way up the stairs. The building was musty, but Etel didn’t mind; she almost enjoyed the smell. At the top of the staircase András stopped, and Etel bumped into him.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  András smiled, his eyes moving from doorway to doorway, looking for something familiar.

  “Is this the right place?” Etel asked.

  “Yes. I think it’s this one,” András answered. He motioned to the door of an apartment facing the street. Slowly, they approached it. András knocked.

  Immediately the door opened. András barely recognized the thin, greying woman who answered the door. He remembered his aunt Esa as a beautiful, proud woman. She could not have turned into this tiny, sad figure who stood before him.

  “Aunt Esa?” he said slowly.

  “My name is Esa, but I am not your aunt.”

  “It is me, András Ursari. Your sister’s son. And this is Etel, your niece.”

  “I know your face. Salvo thought you were dead.”

  Andreas stepped back, shocked. “Salvo is alive?”

  Esa Nagy nodded and spat on the floor. “He was here, and he has ruined us.”