The Stolen

by T. S. Learner

  ‘You’re honoured; this is a great delicacy,’ Vedel informed him as Latcos pulled the flesh apart and offered Matthias a hind leg. He sniffed it, then delicately bit a piece off. The other two laughed and Vedel spoke in Romanes.

  ‘He says you eat like a woman,’ Latcos translated, grinning, then joining Vedel, wolfishly began eating, fat running down his chin, the two men obviously relishing the experience. Matthias, studying them, followed. To his surprise the meat had a delicate, nutty flavour. While the two Roma conversed in Romanes they were interrupted by a short burst of birdsong. To Matthias’s astonishment Vedel put his hands to his mouth and duplicated the exact same sound. A second later they heard twigs snapping underfoot and two gypsies stepped quietly out of the forest; the older man, who looked to be in his seventies, used an old tree branch, smoothed down and whittled as a walking stick. As they approached, the old gypsy caught sight of Matthias and stumbled, as if in horror. The younger man caught his arm, murmuring encouragement. As they came closer Matthias could see the boy was not much older than sixteen. He was too shy to look any of the other men in the eye, but the older man stared at Matthias as if he’d gone into some kind of shock. Vedel scrambled to his feet, shouting a welcome, then gestured for them to join them.

  ‘Friends, not family – from another Vuršutarja far away,’ Latcos told Matthias in a low voice. Latcos handed them both a beer and they sat down on the spread tarpaulin. After a moment the old man reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a seashell that was inlaid with gold and had some markings etched upon it. He placed it carefully in front of him, before Matthias, as if protecting himself. An awkwardness settled over the four men until Vedel slowly lifted his beer bottle to toast the visitors. The young boy followed, then both Latcos and Matthias held theirs up – the bottles touching awkwardly mid-air as they all waited for the old man to make the gesture. Time stretched dangerously until finally the old patriarch lifted his bottle and a toast was made, breaking the tension. Vedel started to explain their presence to Latcos, who in turn translated for Matthias.

  ‘They have walked a long way – as far as two villages north of here. Rajko is the bulibasha, the leader of his community, and this is his grandson, Andro. It is an honour to have Rajko sitting here.’

  Without warning the old gypsy interjected angrily in a deep voice that seemed to resonate through the forest, his words directed towards Matthias. When he finished, Vedel and Latcos looked at each other, then Latcos began to translate.

  ‘He says he would kill you for being a ghost if he didn’t know your story.’

  ‘He knows my story? How?’ Matthias was angry. The purpose of their journey had to remain secret for their own safety.

  ‘Matthias, our uncle was well-travelled and well-loved. News of his murder has spread quicker than wind.’

  ‘But he knows my story?’ Matthias insisted, rattled by the intensity of the old man’s stare.

  Vedel cut in, speaking German for the first time since he had joined them that afternoon.

  ‘Rajko is Vlax, from Hungary. The Nazis took many of his people. When he heard of your existence, he thought it was one of those stories people made up to explain the past. So he decided he had to see you for himself.’

  ‘And?’ Matthias asked, his heart beating uncomfortably against his throat.

  The old man lifted his wrinkled and olive-skinned hand and pointed at Matthias, hissing something in Romanes.

  ‘He says he has seen you at Buchenwald thirty-seven years ago, not a day older than you look now. You murdered his first wife,’ Vedel translated solemnly.

  At this, Rajko lunged at Matthias, knocking him into the snow. Latcos immediately threw himself in front of the Swiss, while Vedel and the boy struggled to hold back the seventy-year-old, Vedel shouting at him in Romanes.

  ‘It was not me! It was my father! I have the same face, that’s all!’ Matthias yelled at his attacker, pulling himself up and brushing the snow from his clothes. Finally Rajko squatted back on his heels and, pointing again at Matthias, began to speak slowly and deliberately as if cursing him.

  ‘He says although you are pas Rom, because of your Nazi father you will have to change your blood to full gypsy blood. You will have to undergo an acceptance ceremony,’ Vedel told Matthias, at which Latcos spun round and began arguing furiously with both Vedel and Rajko.

  ‘What’s going on? What’s an acceptance ceremony?’

  ‘No,’ Latcos shouted. ‘I will not let you do this; this is dangerous. They have my word you are my half-brother. This should be enough.’

  ‘Just explain the ceremony to me!’ Matthias’s raised voice made the others fall silent.

  ‘Normally we never let a gadjo into the Romanimos – the Roma way. But occasionally someone is accepted. The chosen person must drink a potion from the magical gypsy cup belonging to the bulibasha, the leader of the community,’ Vedel finally said.

  As if on cue, Rajko reached into the leather satchel around his shoulder and pulled out an old copper cup inscribed with symbols.

  ‘If the gadjo is unworthy the potion will kill him; if he is worthy of becoming a Rom he will live and afterwards his blood will be changed to full gypsy blood,’ Latcos said, avoiding Matthias’s gaze. Then he leaned forward and whispered, ‘My brother, this could kill you.’

  Matthias thought about Helen, her statement about the importance of acceptance and the role of ceremony, how she’d learned never to belittle another culture, no matter how alien, and that in the end all rituals stemmed from the same basic human needs. And was he not Latcos’s brother, the son of a phuri dej?

  ‘I will do this, for Keja, for my mother,’ he announced. Immediately Rajko got up and, holding his cup, walked into the forest. Latcos leaped up and followed him for a few paces.

  ‘Where’s he going?’ Matthias asked Vedel nervously.

  ‘To collect the herbs for the potion. He will find them under the snow and, after he’s made it, you drink.’

  Just past the trees Latcos stopped Rajko. ‘Poison him and I kill you,’ he murmured quietly in Romanes, before letting the old man’s arm go and watching him disappear into the shadow of the forest.

  The concoction swirling round in the copper cup was an amber colour; green herbs floated on the top along with pieces of straw. Having just been poured from a boiling pot balanced on the campfire, a thin vapour of steam curled up from the surface. The pungent scent, drifting across the expectant faces of the waiting gypsies, reminded Matthias of the smell of burned hops.

  Rajko held out the copper goblet and addressed Matthias solemnly in Romanes, which Latcos translated.

  ‘Drink now and by first light you will either be of gypsy blood and I as the bulibasha of my familiya, will welcome you as a Rom, or you will be with the angels. Do you agree to take our law into your soul?’

  ‘I agree.’

  Matthias, staring straight into the black eyes of the old man, took the goblet and drank the contents, a searing, bitter liquid that instantly made him want to retch. Fighting the convulsion, he managed to keep the drink down. Rajko rocked back on his heels. A new look of respect glazing his features, he stood, brushed the leaves from his trousers, then pointed to the first star now clearly visible over the jagged tops of the pine trees. Latcos turned to Matthias, his face full of concern. ‘He wants you to mark the first star as the beginning of your journey.’

  Matthias looked up. Venus, just below the white crescent of the moon, was a bright twinkle that seemed to oscillate between crimson and yellow light. As he stared the star seemed to begin throbbing. Suddenly he buckled over as pain rippled through his stomach.

  ‘Are you all right, my phral?’ Latcos, hoisting one arm over his shoulder, helped Matthias to stand upright. ‘We go to the clearing: ghosts will come to you, unanswered questions, your own demons. Some are too weak to survive, so you must be strong. I will watch over you until you are back with us.’

  The whole forest had begun to sway around him as if in a
violent storm. In the distance Matthias could hear a faint reverberation that seemed to be approaching, like the subterranean rumble of a huge train. He allowed Latcos to support his weight as he led him through a small cluster of trees into a tiny clearing, the undergrowth soft with young evergreen branches that had been cut and laid to make a carpet. Latcos lowered Matthias down. Now his jaw rattled with a trembling fever; as his stomach cramped, he curled up in a foetal position.

  Latcos squatted beside him. ‘Don’t fight the spirits that come to you. Let the potion take you where it wishes – this way it will be easier and over quicker.’ His voice, distorted, sounded like the rasping of an old woman, and Matthias, barely conscious, strained to acknowledge it. As his eyes rolled up towards the night sky he saw that it was filled with great rolling white clouds that appeared to be gathering like mountaintops ready to cascade down upon them. He let himself slip into darkness.

  ‘For years we thought you were dead, that the Nazis had killed you. Another small white skeleton like so many others, mountains of them…’ The gypsy sat with his back towards Matthias, legs crossed, his veined hands turning a small metal thing Matthias couldn’t quite see, over and over.

  The great roaring that had consumed Matthias before was now somehow infused into the very surroundings, air itself appearing to throb silently. He picked himself up off the ground, wondering whether he was conscious or swept into the netherworld of the potion. He tried looking in the direction of the man sitting before him. Before them spread a dawn – a great panorama of purple, pink, crimson and azure, but it was not a landscape he recognised; it was an entirely flat horizon devoid of trees, buildings, any evidence of humanity and stretched so far at either side it was possible to see the curvature of the Earth. The gypsy took his hat off and Matthias could see the gaping wound on the back of his head. He turned to face Matthias, and Matthias recognised him from the photographs Latcos had showed him. His uncle, Keja’s brother Yojo, his amber eyes twinkling with intelligence.

  ‘But then Keja would suddenly feel you, or dream you, seven years old, fifteen years old, as if some buried part of you was calling out for her. I was the only one who knew, the only one she could tell of her terrible shame, of the way he had tortured her, tried to flatten her spirit like a beaten piece of copper. But although you had come out of him, she had seen something in you lying in her arms, the cord still hanging from your body. Even then in those first seconds of life you reached for her and held on. You were hope in all that evil.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Understand, I was the one that found her after the war, abandoned in the camp, the brown triangle still stitched into her rags. It took nine months before she spoke, another two years before she told me how she had survived, why she hadn’t been forcibly sterilised like most of our women. What you do with your life will make good her shame, my nephew. Half-blood, quarter-blood, the ties are still there. Gather what is yours by right. No one is born against such odds without a reason. Avenge her, avenge my death…’ He reached over and placed the small metal object into Matthias’s hand. It was a bloodstained bullet, the one that had killed him.

  In that moment Matthias felt a stickiness spreading across his palms and fingers. He looked down; the bullet was bleeding over his hands. Horrified, he dropped it into the snow where it lay, a crimson blossom against the white.

  ‘Matthias…’ Now it was Marie sitting before him, her long legs tucked under her, a thin silk dress he’d loved billowing gently against her breasts. She seemed oblivious to the snow and the freezing air. He stumbled forward, the impossibility of her instantly dismissed.

  ‘Marie? Is it really you?’

  ‘Of course – why shouldn’t it be?’ she said, the gently teasing tone to her voice poignantly familiar. And as she said it he forgot that she had died at all. Instead he reached out, the warmth of her leg under his fingers palpable, real. The faint smell of crushed strawberries filtered down through her hair, a scent triggering memories so intense he fought not to weep.

  ‘Matthias, listen to me. Our daughter, her haunting… those are the last terrifying seconds of my death she relives over and over…’ Marie’s voice floated over him and through him as if she were speaking both from within him and outside him. A terrible possibility swept through him.

  Shocked, he sat up. ‘She never told me… Marie, was your death really an accident?’

  ‘I don’t know…’

  ‘Tell me!’

  But she’d already begun to leave him. Wanting to keep her with him, he grabbed her wrist, the flesh as warm as his own, then realised there was no heartbeat pulsating through her veins.

  The dawn sky and the smouldering embers of a campfire rippled back into his senses. Swaying, Matthias kneeled over to vomit. Latcos, sitting nearby, rushed over to help him. ‘Welcome back, brother, you are now a true Rom.’

  The three other gypsies were waiting for him back beyond the forest. A pot of steaming black coffee sat on a small campfire. As they approached, Rajko stood up.

  ‘You are now part of his family,’ Latcos announced formally as Rajko stepped forward to embrace Matthias, followed by Vedel and Andro. Vedel handed him a tin cup full of strong black coffee and they all sat as Vedel told Rajko and Andro the purpose of Latcos and Matthias’s journey. Settling back on his haunches, Rajko lit his pipe and began talking in a deep baritone, Vedel translating in a soft voice.

  ‘Now I can trust you with my history of my family. At the beginning of the war we were travelling through Austria from Hungary. The men wove baskets to sell and the women told fortunes and picked apples for the farmers. It was a good life, not easy, but it was the pure life, the life on the road. We had set up camp near a village we visited because the peasants there were friendly. We knew about the Germans, but this war was the gadjé’s business, and although we’d heard about Jews being taken, up until then our family had been left alone. The soldiers came early one morning and told my father, the bulibasha, that they were going to rehouse us in a beautiful village and that we should come with them. They had guns and dogs, what choice did we have? The whole familiya, women, babies, babas, everyone was loaded up onto trucks and they drove us for two days and nights into Germany. No water, no food, and on the third day we arrived at Buchenwald, at the special camp they had there for the Rom, hundreds of families packed together worse than animals, and every day children would swell up and die of the water cancer. The gadjé soldiers didn’t care about gypsy law or the feuds between the clans: Manush would be living with Vlax, Kalderash, Kale, Sinti, every Rom thrown in together. My three children – two boys and a girl – they starved to death within three weeks. My fourteen-year-old brother was hung for stealing a rotten potato, and my wife was shot in the head by the man who has your face. The face I saw again six months ago at a marketplace near Karl Marx Stadt – only then you had the years etched in your face.’

  ‘Ulrich Vosshoffner!’ Matthias exclaimed.

  Latcos asked the old man a question; he replied with an impassioned tirade and emphatic gestures. Latcos turned to Matthias. ‘I asked if he could remember exactly where he’d seen “you”. And he told me he could do better than that – he can lead us to where “you” are living, because he followed him home that day in the market. And now he will be able to help “you” kill “yourself” in the most ignoble death of all, the father to be killed by the hand of the son.’

  The three other Rom froze, waiting for a reaction from Matthias. He studied the wrinkled face of the man sitting before him and then, leaning forward, kissed him on both cheeks. Astounded, Rajko dropped his pipe into the snow.

  It was a small village, really more a hamlet at the edge of a main road that ran into the city of Karl Marx Stadt, or Chemnitz – its pre-Soviet name – as Vedel defiantly called it. A sad place of fifty or so dwellings built around a square that boasted a medieval fountain, a neglected church with a poster advertising dances for the young Communist league, a small town hall, a police station with a flagpo
le from which hung the yellow, black and red striped DDR flag with its distinctive coat of arms, and a couple of down-trodden cafés. It was in this village square that the market took place every Sunday, the same market at which the old gypsy had sighted Ulrich Vosshoffner. Once a thriving town with farms surrounding it, it had been consumed by factories – mainly leather works and steel – three of which were visible from the square: ugly, squat concrete buildings from which soot-blackened chimneys yawned up into the white sky.

  Matthias stood next to a statue at the top of the square; originally a monument to the fallen dead, the current regime had placed Stalin atop what had obviously once been a statue of Bismarck. Besides this travesty, leaning irreverently against the great man himself, was Latcos, who had dressed Matthias to look more like a local farmer in a state-issued boiler suit and Russian fur hat with earflaps.

  Rajko was pointing out the café where he’d seen Vosshoffner having a strudel and coffee, and the path he took tracking the Nazi to his car. The night before, Matthias had argued for a chance to confront Ulrich, to try and get information out of him about the statuette with the threat of exposing his true identity to the Stasi – which would certainly lead to a trial and execution. He promised they would betray him to the local police anyhow. But Latcos wanted the right to kidnap the former Nazi and put him in front of a Kris – the Rom court – ensuring that he would be tried by the relatives of his victims. Either way, Matthias and Latcos had reassured Rajko that he would get his revenge for the murder of his family. But first they decided to search his house for evidence, then wait for him to trap him.