Ascension

by Steven Galloway

  WITH THE MONEY THEY HAD MADE IN THE F-F, András and Etel bought a small house several miles down the road from Salvo and Anna’s farm. András was fifty-six years old, and a hard life was beginning to catch up with him. He spent his nights coughing, and in the days he sat in a chair in the front room and listened to records, any Romany music he could find. He knew he had turned his back on his heritage, that he had all but become a gadjo, and for this he felt a pain that nothing seemed able to soothe. He had done what he could, he knew, raising Etel and then János, and knew that if he had stayed in Europe, he would likely have died in Hitler’s camps like so many other Roma, but this fact did little to console him. When he realized that he and Etel no longer spoke to each other in Romany, and that János spoke only English, he knew that with himself and his siblings would die a thousand years of Ursari Roma. The name and blood would live on in his son, but this boy was a Canadian, not a Rom, and what was more, it was a good thing for him that it was such. János knew of their stories but never told them to others, and András doubted he would live to see his grandchildren to tell his stories to them. András knew this would make his father turn in his grave, and he felt shame.

  Etel, who had no memory of either of her parents and knew them only in story, felt none of this disappointment. In fact, she felt nothing. Etel Ursari was completely devoid of emotion, and she knew it, and she did not care. She believed herself a ghost, a machine, and though every night in her sleep she saw images of the fall, she was completely detached from it, as if she were watching a movie that had failed to engage her. She had been turned off and had no desire to be turned back on. She spent her days cleaning a house that did not need cleaning.

  For whatever reasons, both András and Etel failed to notice that János was acting strangely. Maybe it was because the change was gradual, or maybe it was because there was no one thing that marked a transformation. Either way, János’s entire attitude towards life had shifted. He was easily disturbed or excited, and he was getting more and more reckless as time went on. He bought a car and drove it with little or no regard for his own safety, putting it in the ditch several times in the first month he had it. He was not harmed in any of these minor mishaps, which had an unfortunate impact: János believed he was invincible.

  János was alone. Of the four children who had grown up on the Ursari farm, he was the only one who was not killed or severely injured in the fall. That it was largely because he had the sense to quit the wire at the right time did not factor into his thinking. After the fall, there was nothing that could harm him. Death was obviously not interested in claiming him. It had touched everyone else. He could see how his father and aunts and uncle were faring, and Daniel’s condition was not getting better. Only János, in his own mind, was untouched by the fall. If anything, it had made him stronger.

  In the spring Salvo decided that he would put in some corn. Since they had begun performing the House he had not been growing crops, but now he felt he should be doing something, and tending to the farm seemed as good a thing as any. He telephoned Jacob, hoping he would help him with the seeding, but no one answered the phone at his parents’ farm. After several days of attempting to reach him by phone, Salvo got into his truck and drove to the Blacke farm.

  As he got out of his truck, the front door of the farmhouse opened, and Mrs. Blacke came out. She was a small woman, older than Salvo, her hair thin and white. She came down the front steps and stopped ten feet from him.

  “Go away,” she said.

  “I need to speak to Jacob,” Salvo said soothingly, thinking the old woman was likely a bit senile.

  “You are no friend of his.”

  “Yes, I am. I am Salvo Ursari.”

  “I know who you are.” The woman spat on the ground and stared at him defiantly.

  Salvo was taken aback, not knowing what he had done to anger this woman or make her hate him so. As he wondered what his course of action should be, the door to the house opened again and Jacob stepped into the doorway.

  “Jacob,” Salvo called, and was surprised when he didn’t respond. Jacob looked awful. He appeared to have aged ten years in the three months since Salvo had spoken to him, and under his eyes, which were red and blinked as they came into the light, there were black bags. “Jacob,” Salvo repeated.

  “Why are you here?” Jacob asked, his voice raspy.

  “I need your help with some corn.”

  “What?”

  “Corn. I’m putting in some corn.”

  “And you think I will help you?” Jacob was incredulous.

  Salvo paused. “I was hoping—”

  “I’m all right, Mother. Please wait for me in the house.” Mrs. Blacke hesitated, then retreated into the house, placing a hand on Jacob’s shoulder as she passed him in the doorway. He stepped forward and pulled the door closed. “I would sooner piss on your grave than help you,” Jacob said.

  Salvo could not believe his ears. “What have I done to you?”

  Jacob laughed a sarcastic laugh. “That you don’t know speaks volumes.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I didn’t cause the fall.”

  “I’m only going to tell you this once: Get away from me, and don’t ever come back. I don’t ever want to see your face again. Understand?”

  “Jacob—”

  “Go. Now.” Jacob went into the house, closing the door behind him.

  Salvo stood there for a moment, then got into his truck and drove home, stunned.

  All day long Etel had known something bad was going to happen. The feeling had crept into her bones like a draft, and nothing she did would shake it. When the call came, she was almost relieved.

  She and András rushed to the hospital where János was in serious but stable condition. Drunk at two o’clock in the afternoon, he had driven his car into a telephone pole, destroying both the car and the pole and badly injuring himself. The police were at a loss to explain the accident; witnesses reported that he hadn’t been going particularly fast, and he had made no attempt whatsoever to avoid the pole. It was assumed he had passed out and lost control of the car, something neither Etel nor András believed.

  Etel called Salvo and Anna from the emergency room, and the four of them sat together while János underwent surgery to repair a lacerated kidney and a punctured lung. It was the first time the four of them had been together for any length of time since returning to Canada. At first no one spoke much. For three hours they sat in near silence, until Anna could bear it no longer.

  “Why do so many bad things happen to this family?” she said, standing up.

  “We are Ursari,” András answered. “It has been happening forever.”

  “I am not Ursari,” Anna said.

  “Then it must be your own bad luck.”

  “We have made our luck,” Etel said. “And it is not all bad. Once we were the best wire walkers in the world.”

  “Look where that got us,” Anna said.

  “We could be the best again,” Salvo said.

  Etel looked incredulously at Salvo. “You don’t actually believe that, do you?”

  “I am not sure,” he said.

  “I will never step on a wire again as long as I live,” Anna said. She jammed her hands in the pockets of her coat and walked down the hall towards the cafeteria.

  “Nor I,” András said when she was gone

  Salvo began to speak, but András cut him off. “This is not your decision, Salvo. For thirty years I have walked the wire with you, and always I let you be in charge. Most times you were right, but there were times when you were not, and bad things happened. I am not saying these things were your fault. Probably they were not. But it is time for me to be the one who says what I do, and I say I will not go back to the wire. I have no love for it left. The price has been too high.”

  Salvo turned to Etel. “And you?”

  “I could walk again,” Etel said. “I was always happy on the wire,
and I do not regret what we have done. Bad things happened, but bad things happened before the wire and they will happen again. But I do not think I will walk any longer. I am not young any more, and we will never be what we were. I will miss the wire, but it is done for me.”

  “But what about—”

  “You must understand,” András said, “that the wire has never been for us what it is for you. Any fool can see that on the wire you are a different person. There is where you are alive. But we are not like that. We can live on the ground. We don’t need the wire the way you do.”

  Salvo leaned back in his chair and thought about this, trying to understand what András had said. “Why did you walk all these years?”

  “Because it was better than not walking. It was exciting. We were famous, people loved us, and we made money. That is not bad for an orphaned Rom,” András said.

  “But you would have walked for free,” Etel said.

  Salvo knew this was true. He had never much cared what the F-F had paid. “I am sorry,” he said.

  Etel smiled. “Do not be sorry. We are not complaining. We are simply stopping.”

  Anna returned with a tray holding four cups of coffee just as a doctor arrived, holding a clipboard and looking very serious. “András Ursari?” he asked, looking at the three of them.

  András stepped forward, fear washing over his face. “Yes.”

  “Your son is out of surgery. The operation went well, and he should be awake in a few hours. You may see him then.”

  “He will live?”

  “It’s too soon to say for sure, but it looks like he will recover.”

  “Thank you.”

  The doctor smiled a slight smile, then retreated behind a set of swinging doors.

  Etel shook her head. “That boy is lucky,” she said.

  “He will not think himself lucky when I get a hold of him,” András said. “There will be no more of this foolishness.”

  Salvo and Anna left soon after that; Daniel could not be left alone in the house for more than a few hours at a time. On the way home, Salvo told Anna that the act was over, that the others would not walk any more.

  “I will not pretend that I am sorry to hear it,” she said.

  “They are not angry. They are simply finished.”

  “I am not angry either,” Anna said, but neither of them believed her. They drove the rest of the way home in silence.

  ONE MORNING WHEN ANNA RETURNED from a trip to the grocery store and began to fill the cupboards, Salvo looked up at her from the kitchen table, where he sat, motionless. She was shocked when he suddenly burst into tears, burying his hands in his face. “What is wrong?” she asked.

  “Daniel hates me,” he said, collecting himself. “That is why he will not speak.”

  “He does not hate you,” Anna said.

  “Yes, he does,” Salvo said. “And so do you.”

  “No,” Anna said. Her voice surprised her with its lack of conviction.

  “Yes. It is not hard to see. You just don’t know it yet.”

  Anna considered this theory, and as she considered it, she knew it was true. “They are dead,” she said.

  “Because of me.”

  She wanted to tell him that he was wrong, but she could not. Anna nodded, swallowing. “And because of me. It is both our faults. Maybe I do hate you. But I hate myself too. We have done an awful thing.”

  Salvo was on the verge of tears again. “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Anna said. She did not move closer to Salvo. She picked up her cup of tea and went into the other room.

  Salvo followed her. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter how sorry you are. Of course you’re sorry. But that doesn’t change anything, does it?”

  Salvo said nothing.

  “Maybe you lived for the wire. That’s your problem. But I never did. What I lived for was you, and the children. So tell me, what’s left for me?”

  Salvo wanted to tell her that he was left, but he couldn’t. Instead they sat in silence, until finally it was time for Anna to give Daniel his food and medicine. She left Salvo alone. He sunk his head into his hands and wondered if things would ever be good again, if there was any way to recover.

  Then Salvo had a moment of unusual clarity, struck with an understanding he had never reached before. When his parents were killed, when the F-F burned, when the House had collapsed, though others near him had always been hurt, even killed, he had always managed to escape physical harm. He had stood on the steeple of a doomed church, and he had cast out his soul. He tried to live a life without pain. And though his body remained unscarred, he had caused and received more than one man’s share of sorrow in his life and, until the death of Elsabeth and Mika, had tried to feel nothing. But this, he thought, is something I can no longer do.

  For the first time since 1919, Salvo turned his eyes heavenward. What he offered up was not a prayer, not yet, but it was close.

  I have lived for a long time, God, thought Salvo. It has taken me until now to see the things I have done. I have been on the wire and I have not fallen, and it does not matter. A man who is not alive cannot die. I was never invincible. We are all glass soldiers.

  ONE SUMMER MORNING ANNA went into Daniel’s room and he was not there. What she would think odd later was how her first thought was that he must have ascended to heaven. She rushed out of the room and found Daniel leaning heavily on the wall, working his way towards the stairs. When he saw her he fell, and after she got him back to his bed, he refused to give her any clue as to what he had been trying to do.

  If he had spoken, Daniel might have told her that he was trying to get away from them. He would have told her that he was an epileptic, and that he’d hidden the fact from them, at first out of shame and then because he knew he would not be able to walk the wire if his problem were known. He would have told her how he’d had a seizure on the wire, first freezing, then, after he hit the ground, full on. He was surprised he hadn’t had one since the fall; he supposed that the many pain medications he was on somehow prevented them.

  After Salvo, the wire had meant the most to Daniel. His adopted father had been like a god to him for as long as he could remember, and Daniel had wished for nothing more than to be like him. Whenever he was on the wire, Daniel had pretended he was Salvo, and that was what had given him the courage to walk the wire.

  Now everything was ruined. That no one knew he had caused the fall made it worse, because he knew he could never tell them, and he knew that for the rest of his life he would live in fear that they would find out. Combined with this painful secret was the certain knowledge that he would never walk the wire again, and that he had killed his sisters and ruined his father and mother. He had smelled sunflowers. There had been time for him to back out of the House, but he had gone anyway, because he didn’t want to give up his secret. It needn’t have happened, he knew, with a pain worse than any broken back.

  Daniel resolved that as soon as he was able, he would go far away and never come back. If there was a way short of suicide for him to get away from himself, he would do that too.

  IT WAS ALWAYS LITTLE THINGS that began it. Earlier in his life Salvo’s fears had been recurring ones, but now they could be found in things he had never given two thoughts to before. One sunny Sunday he and Anna took a drive into Vancouver, and they had a picnic on the beach looking out on English Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Salvo had seen the ocean a hundred times in his life. He had crossed the Atlantic to come to North America, and even though he had been seasick the entire way, he had never been afraid of the ocean. But as they sat on their blanket looking out at the freighters anchored in the bay, Salvo was overcome by the irrational belief that a giant wave would at any minute sweep them off the sand and carry them under. The very idea of the vastness of the ocean—an idea that Anna had remarked only moments earlier was an appealing one to her—caused the muscles in his calves to contract so hard that both his ankl
es made a cracking noise. He sat paralyzed, and sweat began to run down his face and into his eyes and mouth. He tasted its saltiness and it reminded him of the ocean, and this compounded his fear.

  Anna had seen Salvo’s panic attacks before, and she knew something of his insomnia, though they had never discussed it. She had written it off as nerves, and since it disappeared sometimes for years, she didn’t give it much thought. This time, however, she noticed it was happening, and she took in the full scope of his terror and saw that no matter how hard she tried to calm him, to convince him that everything was okay, he would not or could not listen. All that could be done was to wait for it to pass, and this took longer and longer each time. There were occasions when she thought that it was likely he was losing his mind. Salvo, too, secretly wondered this. He could not tell if his wondering was part of his affliction or the part of him that remained, so he did not know whether to believe it. He did not know much of anything.

  In the fall of 1968, Martin Fisher-Fielding pulled the trigger on a deal he had known for nearly ten years would have to be done. In so doing, he sealed his fate in the annals of circus history. For the princely sum of 111 million dollars, he sold his seventy per cent stake in the Fisher-Fielding Circus Company to a Dutch entertainment consortium, and the show that had revolutionized the industry and made his family a household name passed out of Fisher-Fielding hands forever. By all but the few who knew that he had no other choice, that the circus was on its knees and waiting for a death blow, he was vilified. People spat on him in the streets, and friends of forty years did not return his calls.