‘Shh. We no longer talk about him. Or mention his name.’
‘What?’
‘The close family does not talk of its dead. Only other people do that. For the next month his name will not be mentioned amongst us.’
An old man came up to Yola and presented her with a tray, on which was a wad of banknotes, a comb, a scarf, a small mirror, a shaving kit, a knife, a pack of cards and a syringe. Another man brought food, wrapped up in a waxed paper parcel. Another brought wine, water and green coffee beans.
Two men were digging a small hole near to an oak tree. Yola made the trip to the hole three times, laying one item neatly over another. Some children came up behind her and scattered kernels of corn over the heap. Then the men filled in the grave.
It was at that point that the women began wailing. The back hairs on Sabir’s head rose atavistically.
Yola fell to her knees beside her brother’s grave and began beating her breast with earth. Some women near her collapsed in jerking convulsions, their eyes turned up into their heads.
Four men, carrying a heavy stone between them, entered the clearing. The stone was placed on top of Samana’s grave. Other men then brought his clothes and his remaining possessions. These were heaped on to the stone and set alight.
The wails and lamentations of the women intensifi ed. Some of the men were drinking liquor from small glass bottles. Yola had torn off her blouse. She was striping her breasts and stomach with the earth and wine of her brother’s funeral libation.
Sabir felt miraculously disconnected from the realities of the twenty-first century. The scene in the clearing had taken on all the attributes of a demented bacchanal and the light from the candles and the fi res lit up the undersides of the trees, reflecting back off the transported faces below as if in a painting by Ensor.
The man who had presented Sabir’s testicles to the knife came over and offered him a drink from a pottery cup. ‘Go on. That’ll keep the mulés away.’
‘The mulés?’
The man shrugged. ‘They’re all around the clearing. Evil spirits. Trying to get in. Trying to take…’ He hesitated. ‘You know.’
Sabir swallowed the drink. He could feel the heat of the spirit burning away at his throat. Without knowing why, he found himself nodding. ‘I know.’
20
Achor Bale watched the funeral ceremony from the secure position he had established for himself inside the shelter of a small stand of trees. He was wearing a well-worn camoufl age suit, a Legionnaire’s cloth fatigue hat and a stippled veil. From even as close as three feet away, he was indistinguishable from the undergrowth surrounding him.
For the first time in three days he was entirely sure of the girl. Before that he hadn’t been able to approach close enough to the main camp to achieve a just perspective. Even when the girl had left the camp, he had been unable, to his own entire satisfaction, to pinpoint her. Now she had comprehensively outed herself, thanks to her conspicuous mourning for her lunatic brother’s immortal soul.
Bale allowed his mind to wander back to the room in which Samana had died. In all his extensive years of experience both inside and outside the Foreign Legion, Bale had never seen a man achieve the seemingly impossible task of killing himself whilst under total restraint. That old chestnut of swallowing the tongue presented insurmountable physical difficulties and no man, as far as he was aware, could think himself to death. But to use gravity like that and with such utter conviction? That took balls. So why would he do it? What had Samana been protecting?
He refocused the night glasses on the girl’s face. Wife? No. He thought not. Sister? Possibly. But it was impossible to tell in this light, with the con tortions she was engineering on her facial features.
He swung the glasses on to Sabir. Now there was a man who knew how to make himself indispensable. At first, when he had established Sabir’s presence as a certainty in the camp, Bale had been tempted to make another of his mischievous telephone calls to the police. Remove the man permanently from the scene without any unnecessary recourse to further violence. But Sabir was so unaware of himself and therefore such an easy man to follow, that it seemed something of a waste.
The girl, he knew, would be a far harder prospect. She belonged to a defined and close-knit society, which did not easily venture abroad. Lumber her with a well-meaning Sabir and the whole process became intrinsically simpler.
He would watch and wait, therefore. His moment - as it always did - would come.
21
‘Can you walk?’
‘Yes. I think I can manage.’
‘You must come with me, then.’
Sabir allowed Samana’s sister to ease him to his feet. He noticed that, although she was prepared to touch him with her hands, she made great play at avoiding any contact with his clothes.
‘Why do you do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘Veer away from me whenever I stumble - as if you’re afraid I might be diseased.’
‘I don’t want to pollute you.’
‘Pollute me?’
She nodded her head. ‘Gypsy women don’t touch men who are not their husbands, brothers, or sons.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because there are times when we are mahrimé. Until I become a mother - and also at certain times of the month - I am unclean. I would dirty you.’
Shaking his head, Sabir allowed her to usher him towards the caravan entrance. ‘Is that why you always walk behind me, too?’
She nodded.
By this time Sabir was almost grateful for the perverse and mysterious attentions of the camp, for they had not only secured him from the notice of the French police and cured him from an illness which, on the run, may well have resulted in his death from septic shock - but they had also comprehensively upended his notions of sensible, rational behaviour. Everybody needed a stint in a gypsy camp, Sabir told himself wryly, to shake them out of their bourgeois complacency.
He had resigned himself, in consequence, to only eventually learning what they required from him, when and where it suited them to enlighten him. And he sensed, as he supported himself down the rootstock balustrade outside the caravan, that this moment had finally come.
***
Yola indicated that Sabir should accompany her towards a group of men seated on stools near the periphery of the camp. An enormously fat man with an outsized head, long black hair, copious moustaches, gold-capped front teeth and a ring on every finger, sat, in a much larger chair than everybody else’s, at the head of the convocation. He was wearing a generously cut, traditionally styled double-breasted suit, made notable only by an outlandish sequence of purple and green stripes laced into the fabric and by dou
ble-width zoot - suit lapels.
‘Who the heck’s that?’
‘The Bulibasha. He is our leader. Today he is to be Kristinori.’
‘Yola, for Christ’s sake…’
She stopped, still positioned just behind him and to the right. ‘The Chris you were searching for? That my brother spoke to you about? This is it.’
‘What? That’s Chris? The fat guy? The Chief?’
‘No. We hold a Kriss when something important must be decided. Notice is given and everyone attends from many kilometres around. Someone is elected Kristinori, or judge of the Kriss. In important cases, it is the Bulibasha who takes this role. Then there are two other judges - one for the side of the accuser and one for the person who is accused - chosen from amongst the phuro and the phuro-dai. The elders.’
‘And this is an important case?’
‘Important? It is life or death for you.’
22
Sabir found himself ushered, with a certain amount of formal politeness, on to a bench set into the earth in front of and below, the Bulibasha. Yola settled on the ground behind him, her legs drawn up beneath her. Sabir assumed that she had been allocated this spot in order to translate the proceedings to him, for she was the only woman in the assembly.
The main body of women and children were congregated behind and to the right of the Bulibasha, in the position Yola always took in relation to him. Sabir noticed, too, that the women were all wearing their best clothes and that the older, married women were sporting headscarves and prodigious amounts of gold jewellery. Unusually, they were made up with heavy kohl around the eyes and their hair, beneath their scarves, no longer hung free, but was instead put up in ringlets and elaborate braids. Some had henna on their hands and a few of the grandmothers were smoking.
The Bulibasha held up a hand for silence, but everybody continued talking. It seemed that the debate about Sabit was already well under way.
Impatiently, the Bulibasha indicated that the man who had stretched Sabir’s testicles for the knife should come forward.
‘That is my cousin. He is going to speak against you.’
‘Oh.’
‘He likes you. It is not personal. But he must do this for the family.’
‘I suppose they’re going to joint me like a pig if this thing goes against me?’ Sabir tried to sound as though he was joking, but his voice cracked halfway through and gave him away.
‘They will kill you, yes.’
‘And the upside?’
‘What is that?’
‘What happens if things go my way?’ Sabir was sweating badly now.
‘Then you will become my brother. You will be responsible for me. For my virginity. For my marriage. You will take my brother’s place in everything. ‘
‘I don’t understand.’
Yola sighed impatiently. She lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. ‘The only reason you are still alive today is that my brother made you his phral. His blood brother. He also told you to come back here amongst us and ask for a Kriss. You did this. We then had no choice but to honour his dying wish. For what a dying man asks for, he must get. And my brother knew that he would die when he did this thing to you.’
‘How can you possibly know that?’
‘He hated payos - Frenchmen - more even than he detested gadjes. He would never have asked one to be a brother to him except in the most extreme of circumstances.’
‘But I’m not a payo. Okay, my mother’s French, but my father’s American and I was born and brought up in the United States.’
‘But you speak perfect French. My brother would have judged you on that.’
Sabir shook his head in bewilderment.
Yola’s cousin was now addressing the assembly. But even with his fluent command of French, Sabir was having difficulty making out what was being said.
‘What language is that?’
‘Sinto.’
‘Great. Could you please tell me what he is saying?’
‘That you killed my brother. That you have come amongst us to steal something that belongs to our family. That you are an evil man and that God visited this recent illness on you to prove that you are not telling the truth about what happened to Babel. He also says that it is because of you that the police have come amongst us and that you are a disciple of the Devil.’
‘And you say he likes me?’
Yola nodded. ‘Alexi thinks you are telling the truth. He looked into your eyes when you thought that you were about to die and he saw your soul. It seemed white to him, not black.’
‘Then why is he saying all this stuff about me?’
‘You should be pleased. He is exaggerating terribly. Many of us here feel that you did not kill my brother. They will hope that the Bulibasha gets angry with what is being said and pronounces you innocent.’
‘And do you think I killed your brother?’
‘I will only know this when the Bulibasha gives his verdict.’
23
Sabir tried to look away from what was happening in front of him, but couldn’t. Yola’s cousin Alexi was giving a masterclass in applied histrionics. If this was someone secretly on his side, then Sabir decided that he would rather sup with the Devil and have done with it.
Alexi was on his knees in front of the assembled judges, weeping and tearing at his hair. His face and body were covered with dirt and his shirt was torn open, revealing three gold necklaces and a crucifix.
Sabir glanced at the Bulibasha’s face for any signs that he was becoming impatient with Alexi’s dramatics, but, to all intents and purposes, he seemed to be drinking the stuff in. One of the younger children, whom Sabir assumed must be one of the Bulibasha’s daughters, had even crept on to his capacious lap and was bouncing up and down in her excitement.
‘Do I get to say my piece?’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Someone else will talk for you.’
‘Who, for Christ’s sake? Everybody here seems to want me killed.’
‘Me. I will speak for you.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘I have told you. It was my brother’s dying wish.’
Sabir realised that Yola didn’t want to be drawn any further. ‘What’s happening now?’
‘The Bulibasha is asking whether my brother’s family would be happy if you paid them gold for his life.’
‘And what are they saying?’
‘No. They want to cut your throat.’
Sabir allowed his mind to wander briefly into a fantasy of escape. With everybody concentrating on Alexi, he might at least manage a five-yard head start before they brought him down at the edge of the camp. Action, not reaction - wasn’t that how they trained soldiers to respond to an ambush?
Alexi got up off the ground, shook himself and walked past Sabir, grinning. He even winked.
‘He seems to think he put that over rather well.’
‘Do not
joke. The Bulibasha is talking to the other judges. Asking their opinion. At this stage it is important how he begins to think.’ She stood up. ‘Now I shall speak for you.’
‘You’re not going to do all that breast-beating stuff?’
‘I don’t know what I shall do. It will come to me.’
Sabir dropped his head on to his knees. Part of him still refused to believe that anyone was taking this seriously. Perhaps it was all some gigantic joke perpetrated on him by a tontine of disgruntled readers?
He looked up when he heard Yola’s voice. She was dressed in a green silk blouse, buttoned to one side across her chest and her heavy red cotton dress reached down to just above her ankles, interleaved with numerous petticoats. She wore no jewellery as an unmarried woman and her uncovered hair was bunched in ringlets over her ears, with ribbons alongside and sewn into, the chignon at the back of her head. Sabir underwent a strange emotion as he watched her - as if he was indeed related to her in her some way and that this intense recognition was in some sense relevant in a manner beyond his understanding.
She turned to him and pointed. Then she pointed down to her hand. She was asking the Bulibasha something and the Bulibasha was answering.
Sabir glanced around at the two surrounding groups. The women were all intent on the Bulibasha’s words, but some of the men in Alexi’s group were watching him intently, although seemingly without malevolence - almost as though he were a puzzle they were being forced to confront against their wills, something curious that had been imposed on them from the outside and which they were nevertheless forced to factor in to whatever equation was ruling their lives.
THE NOSTRADAMUS PROPHECIES Page 5