Pamela understood what Yevgena meant as soon as she turned the stiff cover to reveal the first page, which was not so much a page as a shallow canvas box. There was only one person the things on this page could represent and it was someone she knew very well.
“Jemmy, of course, my beloved boy.”
“It’s beautiful,” Pamela said, running the tips of her fingers over a piece of tweed cloth, the bits of saddle leather, the lambent stones, and the random scraps of poetry and half-begun fairy tales, and a tiny sailboat set upon a blue silk wave. There was a golden curl, tied with a faded blue ribbon, and a sprig of holly leaves. Holly had long been believed to guard the entry to the world of the auld ones, and Jamie had ever been one who crossed back and forth over that boundary, seemingly at will. There was also a length of blackthorn branch, with its long lethal thorns, for Jamie’s life had always held dark in proportion to the light he shed in such abundance.
“The tweed is from a poor boy cap, he wore it everywhere for a bit. I was forever trying to hide it, it was such a disreputable looking thing and it seemed a shame to hide that beautiful hair, but I think that was the point. He was always trying to disappear and blend in, but he was not really built for that then. He clearly got very good at it later.”
Very good, indeed, Pamela thought wryly. So good, that MI6 had long considered him one of their best, if most reluctant, operatives.
“He saved me as much as his grandfather did, you know,” Yevgena said, touching the small, neatly tied curl of golden hair. “I love him as though he were of my own flesh. I did not think I could ever love a child so again. But Jamie draws love from the universe almost as much as he gives it back out.”
The next board belonged to Jamie’s grandfather, for Pamela had heard enough of him from Jamie, to recognize it at once. A Gypsy Moth plane made from light bits of balsa soared over a map of Africa, done in scraps of brightly-colored satin. There was an Aston Martin rendered in blues and a beautiful house that she recognized at once as the Paris abode he had shared with Yevgena. As with Jamie’s page, the sea was a presence, for Jamie had inherited his love of the ocean from his grandfather. There was a silver chain, its links broken, but still a running gilded line that had once graced a woman’s throat. Yevgena touched it gently, a smile tucked in the corners of her mouth.
“It was one of the first pieces of jewelry he gave me. It was a lovely Elizabethan locket. I tore it off my neck and flung it at him during one of our fights. I can’t even remember what we fought about. I always forgave him within hours anyway, and he forgave me before the fight was even over. He had a rare compassion, and the gift of forgiveness, which is no small thing in a man. And oh, how I loved him. Our life together was, of necessity, a thing of some secrecy. We could not marry, his wife would not give him a divorce. She said it was a sin, and perhaps she was right. It was not her fault he no longer loved her, but then I do not think it was mine either, for he had ceased to love her long before he found me. I never regretted loving him, not for a minute though I gave him many bad days, and that—that I do regret.” She turned from the page as though it had brought too close the man whose loss she still mourned. Pamela discreetly turned to the following page.
This next one was done in red velvet, with a small scrap of well-worn cloth that held long faded Hebrew writing and a tiny star of David in one corner. There was a delicate menorah, made from gold lace and a tree of life in the Kabbalah tradition wrought in silver wire.
“That page is for my father,” Yevgena said, “he was a scholar and a good Jew—what would have been called a righteous man in other times. The red is for my Russia with all her great heart, before the Soviets tore it out and left her bleeding.”
Pamela sensed that Yevgena would say nothing further on the topic of her father and so turned the page again. The next board was in browns and greens with small winking gems catching the dancing flame of the candles. On the board was a miniature caravan, beautifully detailed and set with semi-precious stones for windows, every detail of a real vardo present, rendered down into a work of art in fine. There was a carved wooden horse pulling the caravan along a road made from an old brown handkerchief, and a harness of real leather. There were also small bits of leatherwork adorned with flowers carved in scrolling strips and a violin constructed with wood and wire, a bow made from a willow twig and silken thread. There were watch parts too, a rusted spring, a cogged wheel. There was a scrap of red cloth—blood scarlet, and a ring—a simple band, neither silver nor gold, but what a very young man without means might give to his bride, hoping to one day replace it with something better, something finer to represent the love and the years of that unending circle. The ring was wrapped in barbed wire.
“That is my husband’s page,” she said touching the edge of the red cloth. “Mihai. My first love, the father of my babies.”
“How does a Russian Jewish girl end up married to a wandering Rom?” Pamela asked for she had always wondered about Yevgena’s history, and somehow the night made it so the question could be asked.
“The simplest and most complicated reason of all—love. You know how this is, you have one plan, one idea of your life and then someone comes along, and it doesn’t matter where it takes you, you know you would follow him to the ends of the earth, and all your plans and grand ideas crumble like the fairy palaces they are in the face of real love.”
It was as though the sight of the things that represented Mihai had unlocked something in Yevgena, had brought something up from the vault of memory into the night which must be given voice and breath. For when she spoke again it was in that incantatory tone of storytelling and history, that tone which rolled out roads and vistas with words strung into sentences and paragraphs, becoming lives spoken into ephemeral shades that furled upon the air for a moment, held there in the translucent glass of storytelling and memory.
“I grew up near Minsk, before the Soviets came to power, in a beautiful house set in the great woods. We had money, but as a child that had no meaning to me. I only knew my parents loved me, that my mama wore the most beautiful clothes and smelled wonderful, and that my father was so strong and wise, I was certain nothing could ever touch us. Such, of course, is the tale of a child well sheltered, well loved. But a child cannot know the dark winds that start as a small disturbance somewhere, just a minor thing, a thought in the mind of a man. Then that small disturbance becomes something larger, a breeze that begins by knocking things over, pulling spindrift from waves, taking branches from trees, building day by day, year by year until it becomes a thousand-year storm that will kill all in its path.
“I was seventeen and ripe, as they say, for the plucking, when I met Mihai.” She smiled, and it was the soft smile of a woman who remembered love, who remembered a desire so strong it could erase the years that stood between that first moment and the here and now. “And perhaps it bears mentioning that I was also ripe for rebellion. It was his violin that proved my undoing. The gypsies were parked on the edge of our wood. Many people would have chased them away, but my father, being Jewish and understanding persecution intimately, would not persecute others. We would often share food, have a big fire up near the house and then inevitably out would come the violins, the songs, the vodka. It was such a night that was my undoing. And you know, my darlink girl, the power of the gypsy violin, both plaintive and mad at the same time.”
“Yes,” Pamela said, remembering a night of both dance and music and a blue caravan in a ring of moonlight. Her daughter Isabelle had been conceived that night. She understood the magic of such a night, indeed.
“What was he like, your man?” she asked, turning from her own memories which were still too tender to the touch.
“He was a big man, dark, capable, not unlike your Casey, truth be told. He was good with his hands, he could carve and weave and mend almost anything—wood, metal, leather, cloth—it mattered not to him. If it was broken, if it was torn, he had a need to mend it and make it whole once again. And he could play
a violin like a demon possessed,” she smiled, “it was how he seduced me—with his music. I had no hope after that first night. I was drawn to him as the sea surges toward the moon.
“I was wearing a scarlet dress. It was silk and made for dancing. The wind that night was from the south, and when the wind comes from the south in Russia, it carries yearning into a woman’s soul. It smells of the sea and the rebel mountains and pearls and amber and it brings every cell in a woman’s body to quivering. Such a wind wants things, and it makes a woman want them too. So there I was in my red dress, lingering beyond the edges of the encampment, uncertain of what I was doing, when the music began. Just a note, drawn out long, like desire itself plucked from the night. I went toward it, that note, it was fated I am certain, though there have been times since, that I wish I had gathered up those scarlet silks of mine and run back home. It would not have saved me in the end, I suppose, but…” she waved one long, fine-boned hand as if to dismiss her regrets, setting the candle flames to dancing in grotesque shapes across the barreled vault of the vardo’s ceiling.
“I saw him there, on the edge of the fire, and a terrible need rose up in me. He was so beautiful, so fierce standing there against the night and the moon and the great fir trees. It was like my blood had been replaced by pure want in my veins. He came toward me, the song slowing, the notes dying away on the scent of amber firs, until he stood before me and the final note left the strings and flew off into the night. I sometimes fancy that it is still out there, traveling on its way out to the stars, one perfect note, keeping something of that beautiful young man and that scarlet-dressed girl alive.
“He said to me, ‘I hoped you would come. I played for you.’ He had seen me many times, around my family’s property, and said he had known he must have me or die.” Yevgena closed her eyes for a moment. “I understood exactly what he meant, for I felt it too. I ran away with him by the time two more moons rose full above those same amber-scented trees. It was a terrible thing to do to my parents, but they would have forbidden me to marry Mihai and he was in my blood by then, without him, there was—how to say—no air. I could not breathe properly, until I was with him each night. It was magic, it was utter recklessness of the blood and body, but every young woman should experience that at least one time in her life. But of course, as it often happens in such times, I fell pregnant.
“We conceived her in the forest, with a waxing moon floating overhead, and the moss thick as velvet beneath us. She was always rooted in the forest and perhaps that was why. She needed the forest—its secrets and silences, its deep soil and darkness, all her life. She pined for it when kept from it too long.”
“She?” Pamela asked gently, not wanting to disturb the mantle of memory that had settled around Yevgena like a fine, floating silk, vaporous and filamented with sparks of things recalled as though they had happened only yesterday.
“Our oldest child, Athalia. My sweet baby.” Her hands clutched tightly around the ends of her shawl, the bones and veins stark against the deep red wool.
“Mihai insisted that we marry right away, before anyone knew we were expecting a child. And so I ran away to live with the Gypsies. My father disowned me, said I was not welcome in his home anymore. I never saw my mother or father again. I never knew what happened to them, though I searched for many years. My father was both a Jew and an intellectual, so I always suspected he fell under Stalin’s bloody scythe, and my mother was his wife and that was enough to convict and kill a woman in Soviet Russia.
“It took the women of the kumpania a time to accept me, I was gaje, after all. I was determined though, and I could speak their tongue well enough to get by, and soon became fluent in it. It was only because of who Mihai was, the son of a man they looked at as their king, that he got away with marrying an outsider. That and Athalia softened them toward me. Babies will do that, and Athalia was special. I know mothers always believe this of their children, but Athalia was one of those children who your countrymen would say was touched by the fairies. She enchanted everyone who came near her.
“It wasn’t an easy life, especially not for a girl who had been spoiled and sheltered her whole existence. I was in love, though, and you know how much that eases away the difficulties, at least for a time. There was no love big enough to surmount what was coming for us, but we did not know this and ignorance was certainly bliss in those times.
“We moved with the seasons. At first I found it difficult, living that way, but I soon came to love it even with all its discomforts. When you live upon wheels, you learn to love movement and suddenly one day, without your willing it, you realize you could not live in a fixed abode anymore. The walls are movement too, they are permeable in a sense, so that the outdoors is always with you and the song of a thrush becomes as much a part of your household as the basin you wash your dishes in. We lived more outdoors than in, even when the weather was foul. I came to love how the wind rocked the vardo at night, like a mother rocking her child. I loved how I felt autumn in my bones, the mist and flame of it, and how spring crept up through the floorboards and came in my windows at night with the smell of sap and pitch and earth moving. I loved the changing scenery, always taking in a new view, a new set of challenges, rummaging in the forest for edible things, picking berries just before they froze on the bough, cracking the ice on streams to get that day’s water. Using the water that you had cooked vegetables in to wash the baby later. But oh how I loved baths when I was able to have one, such luxury, hot water up to your ears, to be warm right to the marrow of your bones. Mostly, though, I came to love all the ways of the luongo drom, that never-ending road that is the way of the Roma. Once the itch is there in your body, your feet, it is something that never truly goes away. Yes, it was a good life, for a time.”
Yevgena touched the back of one of the tarot cards, glimmering in the candlelight, worn from decades of readings, slick with all the hopes and tension that had been invested in them.
“This deck once belonged to my husband’s grandmother. I have never known anyone who could read the cards as she could. Often I did not want her to read mine, because she was too accurate and once you have people you love, a husband and babies, you no longer want glimpses into the future, lest you hear bad tidings. One night, though, not long before she died, she read my cards for the last time. There was nothing unusual about the reading, she had taught me how to read the cards herself, and so I knew the little tricks and ways of it. But I understood too that she had something special, that she could see into the future in ways that others could not.
“That night, however, she pulled a blank card—there are no blank cards in a tarot deck and so we both sat there with our skin crawling, wondering what it could mean. I think that card was the big hole in the world that was coming for us, that card was the Nazis. Not even the Hanged Man could predict such a thing, so there was that blank card, because there was nothing that could symbolize such horror. I think it started for me right there, with that blank card, that night. I could feel it after that and the dread grew with each day. I could feel the rising tide of blood that was building and coming for all of us. I never had a moment of peace after that night. I was haunted by that card.”
Pamela shivered, drawing her sweater tight around her shoulders. She could see it all too clearly, as though Yevgena’s bleak words had conjured it into being there within the snug confines of the vardo—what it must have been to feel that wave coming and know there was no way to outrun it, nowhere to hide from it.
“You still want me to read them for you?” Yevgena asked, dark eyes fastened to her own.
Pamela shook her head and shivered slightly. “No—not tonight.”
“Good, tonight I think this is the wise decision.” Yevgena stood, dark hair spilling over the crimson wool of her shawl. “The tea should be ready now. We will put some of my famous brandy in it, to chase the winter night away.”
Before she turned to fetch the tea, Yevgena handed her a small pile of photos retrieved
from a pocket in the reliquary. They were black and whites, their square edges dull and soft with long wear. The one on top was a girl, delicate in her lines, her face turned three-quarters to the camera, as though she knew well enough to keep some part of herself back, not to let the camera have all of her. She was so vivid even in this old picture, though, that it seemed she might step whole from time and space, carrying the scent of the forest and the yearnings of a southern wind into the old vardo with her.
“That is my Athalia, my first born. Mihai let me choose the names for the children; he was ever easy like that. Athalia means ‘God is exalted’, and then came Chaya, which means life and my littlest girl—Liora, which means ‘I have light.’ Their names seemed almost a joke to me later, as if I had cursed them with names that did not hold up under the Nazis. But a child is so small, and evil is so large. Last were my little boys, twins, Pali and Yoska.
“My Athalia was like a bird, small-boned and fine as a drifting feather, always darting here and there, from this fire to that, from one vardo to another, and then into the edge of the forest. She could not resist the lure of dark things, and the forest was the biggest dark thing she had ever known until the war. She was brave, my girl, so brave, and she remained so until the very end. Always the one still willing to walk the forest at night.”
“Will you tell me of her?” There was a delicate contract between storyteller and listener, between the story of the teller and the desire of the listener to really know. She wanted Yevgena to understand that her story had meaning to her, that she wanted to know it, but only if Yevgena felt she could tell it.
Yevgena placed the tea on the table, steaming in its silver samovar. Beside it she placed cups—glass ones in silver filigree bases. The filigree was carved into the shape of clambering briar roses, both beauty and thorn, delicacy and brutality together.
She uncorked the brandy, the scent of plums fermented into liquid gold filling the vardo with its heady aroma. Pamela poured a dollop in her own cup, and one in Yevgena’s. Brandy first and then tea, Yevgena had taught her that long ago, so that the tea’s heat would purl through the brandy and release its full flavor. Yevgena poured the tea and then sat, cupping her hands around the heat of the glass.
Spindrift (Exit Unicorns Series) Page 12