Spindrift (Exit Unicorns Series)

by Cindy Brandner

  “You will understand that my Athalia’s story is only one in an unending stream of stories from that time and from my peoples—like a drop in a waterfall, but for me it is a story that matters much, so I do not tell it but one time before. To Jamie’s grandfather, you understand, for such stories are not easily told.”

  “I understand.” She did, for Yevgena had loved Jamie’s grandfather deeply, and he had been the only soul on earth, Jamie had told her, who knew Yevgena’s secrets and understood her soul and just what the Holocaust had done to her.

  “But tonight, because you ask, and because I believe you need to hear the story and I need to tell it, I will tell you.”

  She touched the photo that Pamela held, as though she could still trace the line of that delicate face and feel the warmth of her daughter’s responding smile.

  “I do not keep their images in front of me because it is too painful most days. I don’t want to look at those little faces, frozen there, innocent, unknowing of what awaited them. I feel that I should have known—why didn’t the cards tell me so that I could save them? I would have died a hundred times over, if it meant they were saved. But it is part of the curse of the Roma, that we are not allowed to see for each other, only for the gadje. You know this story—how a little gypsy girl stole the nail that was meant to go through Christ’s heart during the crucifixion? And so he was spared the pain of that last nail, and God gave to the gypsies the right to steal for all time. As with all gifts though, it came with a price, so that we could not see the future for those we loved most dearly. It is said also that until the nail she stole is found, the Gypsies will be hunted by the gadje, and so until then we must wander and run from the stranger.”

  She took her hand away from the picture, curling her fingers under and drew her shawl around her shoulders as though she had been seized with a sudden chill. All her age showed upon her bones in that moment as she looked down at the picture of her daughter, forever trapped in youth, never to know the love of a man nor the warmth of children.

  “She turned fourteen the day that photo was taken.”

  She moved to the other side of the vardo then and leaned down, as elegant as a line of inked poetry. She opened one of the small fitted drawers beneath the bed and took out what appeared to be a bundle of fabric, deep red velvet, tied about with leather bands. Pamela saw that it was not merely a bundle of fabric though, but that something long treasured lay wrapped within the red velvet. She unwrapped the bundle, unfolding the cloth gently, and Pamela had the impression it was something that she had done rarely, for a sense of the sacred was there in her touch and movements.

  They were small baby shoes, made of leather, soft from long travels and the tiny feet that had once worn them. She had such shoes herself, for her own daughter had not long grown out of hers. Yevgena placed them in her hand, and she held them, so light, so soft, and could not speak, for she understood what the shoes meant, how filled with meaning they were, these tiny repositories of history and love.

  The memory of the flesh never dissipated for a mother, for always she would remember the soft, dimpled body, the rosy cheeks, the particular scent of her own child. These shoes contained so many things: first steps, stumbles, the triumph of an unbroken string of steps, the green of spring grass and the crunch of autumn leaves, crumbling soft as smoke into the air under tiny feet. She thought of Isabelle and her scent, like a plant freshly budding, filled with sap and all the potential of soft green things just beginning.

  “These were Athalia’s shoes, her very first pair. She loved those shoes, and would not allow me to pass them on to her sisters. We did not have two pennies to rub together, but I felt it was not much to ask of this world—to have one’s own shoes, so we found another pair for her sister and allowed Athalia to keep her red shoes. Later, I was so glad I had let her have the shoes for her own. She kept them all her life, packed in the little leather satchel Mihai had tooled for her. But she couldn’t take them into the camp, we weren’t allowed anything but the clothes on our backs and they even took those once we were inside their gates.

  “A long time later, the shoes were given back to me by a ghost. That is the story I would tell you in part. As I said before, I have not told this story to anyone but James, but you know, Pamela, what it is to lose someone and not know to where they have gone and only to have small things by which to remember them.

  “Two things I would tell you of Athalia; first that she was a true Romany, born with the itch in her soles. Had she lived she would have kept to the never-ending road all her years. She was always the one to run into the forest and not linger on its edge. I will tell you this is part of why I am so fond of you, because you are also one to plunge into the forest and not wait for someone else to cut a path; you go despite knowing how badly you may get hurt on the passage. The first night you wandered into our camp all those years ago, you reminded me of my Athalia. You were a wild and beautiful creature, just as she was.

  “The second thing you must know about her is that she could see the dead. For her, ghosts were merely people who lived in the shadows and occasionally whispered to her of their troubles, and their hopes and fears. She was only three the first time I saw her by the fire, speaking to someone who was not there—at least not for my eyes—she said it was an old woman, who she simply called Baba, as we Russians call old women and grandmothers.

  “It frightened me at first, as it would any mother, but Mihai’s grandmother said it was only how the dukkerin worked for Athalia. She said that Athalia was one who could see through the veils between this world and that, and in her life, it would be both blessing and curse. It was for her to help the dead when she could and they would help her when they could in return. She said not to tell the rest of the kumpania though, for they would be jealous or afraid and make our lives more difficult as a result.

  “The Irish say that a man can become used to anything, even being hanged, and so it was that I came not to think so much of Athalia’s gift. The souls that came to her were sometimes troubled, but she would point them on the luongo drom of the dead, that long road that leads into the lands of the Western stars. We did not tell anyone, for the Roma are afraid of spirits attaching themselves to the living, it is why the vardo was once burned with the departed who had lived in it, so that there was no trace and nothing for the dead to cling to. No one wanted the mullo hanging about the campfire, once a man was dead, his name was no longer spoken lest it draw him in from the cold night of the departed. And so I told Athalia she must not speak their names, but only refer to them as Baba if they were female or Dadushka if they were male—even if they were young. She would tell me their stories, and I would listen, worrying now and again, if one of the ghosts seemed too comfortable in her company and was remaining when they should have set off down that long road of the dead.”

  Yevgena paused to refill their glasses. She put a very healthy dose of palenka in each cup. The samovar had kept the tea hot, and steam rose out onto the air like small phantom hands, curling in supplication. Pamela took a swallow, grateful even for the fumes that rose up the back of her nose making her eyes water, simply for the warmth and sense of normalcy it provided. The cold felt close tonight and frost grew in fine spectral branches on the windows of the vardo, as if the spirits of All Hallow’s Eve had lingered, and were asking admittance to the warmth inside. Outside all the kumpania had retreated to their beds, or games of cards beside simmering stoves. The campfire had died down and the only light in Yevgena’s vardo now came from the two flickering candles that sat upon the table.

  Yevgena took a drink of her own tea, and then gazed down into the depths of the silver-set glass, as though it was a scrying mirror into the past, holding the words and images to which she gave voice. When she looked up her eyes were caverns, hollow and dark with the visions she held.

  “Of course there came one day a ghost that did frighten me. One cannot commune with spirits forever and not come to the one that terrifies you to the roots
of your very being. Only I did not expect it to be the spirit of a little girl.

  “I remember it was October, and of course, the veil is thinner then, allowing the dead to cross back and forth with greater ease than at any other time of year. It was a night much like this one, cold with the frost coming down and the scent of snow in the air. It was past time for Athalia to be abed. I had to go looking for her, and I was cross, for it had been a long day with the twins fussing because they were teething. I found her at the edge of the forest, her bones half in shadow, half in firelight. I called to her, not wanting to stand out there in the cold. It always took me so long to warm once I was chilled. I just wanted my bed, and the warmth of my Mihai. She did not hear me though and I knew it was because she was seeing something there from which no mother’s voice could pull her away. I walked to where she was and saw that she had that strange look that came over her at such times, as though she were looking back along time itself, down that hundred-thousand-year road, through dust and darkness to see something—something that spoke to her across the ages, as though it stood simply over a gate, through which one might slip if one could only pull the latch. I asked her ‘Athalia, who are you talking to?’

  “I remember even now, what she wore, this pale green dress, so that she looked like spring and how I could, for the first time, see the woman in the fine bones of her face, coming to take away the child. I felt that terrible ache of a mother’s heart, when she sees her baby melting away into a grown woman. And I had a terrible fear for her, as though right then I felt the abyss yawning at her feet, at all our feet.

  “She said to me, ‘Mama, can’t you see her? She’s standing right there, she’s all alone, she’s been alone for a very long time. She’s so sad Mama, sometimes I hear her crying at night. All her people are gone, every one of them, her mother and her father and her sisters and brothers too. She says she knows what is coming for us, it happened to her people too. Someone stronger and angrier came along and killed them all. She called them ‘the blood men.’ She said these men coming for us are the same—fire in their heads, blood on their hands. She said they will not stop until the entire world feels their wrath; she said they will not stop until the last one of us is gone.’

  “The look on Athalia’s face, as though she were yearning toward the girl, as if she thought she could help her somehow, help her find that long lost road into the past so that she might make her way home, it terrified me. I thought she might slip through that gate then and there, and leave me forever. Perhaps it would have been a great kindness if she had. I told her to tell me about the girl, to describe her, I thought such a homely action would dispell the strangeness that lay over that small clearing in the forest. It only frightened me more though.

  “‘She’s short and stocky and she has a kind face, but a very heavy brow. Her eyes, though, Mama, her eyes are so dark and deep and filled with loss, but still they have kindness in them. She has a lot of hair on her arms and legs. She got lost a long time ago, she says, so long ago, she doesn’t know how much time has passed. She lost count of the moons long ago, she only knows that many and many have come and gone. She ran away and hid when the blood men came for her family, she said they had great arrows and axes, and they killed her father and sisters and brothers right away. Her mother, she says, they kept for last. Her dying was slow in coming, and her mother cried much before it arrived. She hid so long she fell asleep there in the woods, and when she awoke everyone was gone, and her people were ashes. She says I must go, before I and my people are ashes too. It is too late for her; she is caught here where her people died.’”

  Yevgena looked down, the shimmering colors of the tarot contrasting with her veined hands, pale as the hands of a ghost. Pale as the hands of a girl who was lost in another time, so far removed from her own world that she didn’t even know herself for lost.

  “I thought at the time, how little the world changes, how little bad men change, for clearly her mother had been raped and tormented before her captors saw fit to kill her. I understood why the girl was caught fast there, for it is what terrible loss does, it makes us circle around the absence of what was once there, but no longer is. We circle and circle because we cannot understand that love can be gone forever, through no volition of our own, but taken by outside forces, by men of blood with fire in their heads.

  “She told me all this in the voice of prophecy, which was this very distant voice she used at such times, as though something else spoke through her. It was terrifying to see my child so, to watch a stranger stand in her body, look from her eyes and tell me things I had no wish to hear.

  “They came, those men of blood with fire in their heads, they came for us only a year later. It started so simply with the insistence on identity cards, a small thing, but I knew it was only the beginning. By then we were trapped in a net so large and complex that there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. We were hearing the stories coming out of Germany about Roma being imprisoned for being ‘work-shy’, that they were forbidden to move about in ‘hordes’ which was any time more than one Gypsy moved about anywhere. Then there were the terrible rumors that they wanted to sterilize us, that Gypsies were meant for extermination just as the Jews were. The sword swung both ways for me, I could get cut no matter what I did. I was Jewish by birth and Romany by marriage.

  “We were living near a farm in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, tucked away into the forest’s edge, thinking naïvely that the Nazis would not come for us there. We were rounded up at night, someone in the area must have told the soldiers about us. All I remember now of that night is the soldiers bursting into our little home, grabbing us, hauling us out into the dark and the cold. It was all confusion, noise and terror so deep that it has never really left me. We were forced to walk the sixty miles to the camp, with the Nyilakereszt guard screaming at us all the way there—to keep the babies quiet, to make our daughters quit their crying, to quit asking if we could stop for a moment. There were many babies who died on that death march. Mihai went terribly quiet during that walk. There was something so dark and frightening in his eyes. I think he knew, he would not admit it to me, but I think he had his grandmother’s gift in portion enough to understand we were little more than the walking dead at that point. What it means to a man—the man who has loved and protected his woman, his children—to know that there is nothing he can do to save them, protect them, keep them alive? I think it broke something in him on that long walk because he knew what it meant, he understood just what these blood men were willing to do. I think I still was hoping something would intervene and save us. A mother cannot quite believe that hearts can be that hard, that men of blood can have a fire that cruel in their heads.

  “When we got to Komarom, they separated the men from the women and children. I never saw Mihai again. Just like that, the man who had been my lover, my husband, father to my children, was gone forever. I was told later by one of the other men who knew us, that he had died of the typhus. I remember only seeing the back of him, and then that was lost in the panic and rage as they took our twins. They tore them screaming from my arms. Such a thing burns into a woman’s soul, so that the echo of it is always there for the rest of your life, piercing your ear and heart. Sometimes I still hear the twins crying at night in my dreams. I never even had a chance to say goodbye to my husband, I saw his face in a flash and then he was gone. It seems that some part of me still stands there, waiting to see his face, willing him to turn back, as though a bit of my spirit is caught like cloth on barbed wire, doomed to flap in the wind for all eternity.”

  Pamela reached across the table, and took Yevgena’s hand, lending her what strength she could for the telling of the rest of the tale. Yevgena’s hand was cold, the bones beneath the flesh taut with the tension of relating something she had only told once before.

  “And then there we were, we women and young girls at the mercy of men who possessed none. They stripped us naked, humiliating enough for any person, but Roma have
very strict morals about modesty, and so to be stripped and standing there in front of the guards while their eyes roamed over us, especially the young girls, was horrifying. It was such a violation, for they looked on us with hatred, as though we were merely farm animals for the slaughter. They made crude jokes about us and what they would do to each of us, given the chance. And, of course, they were given the chance. I had many children, but I was still beautiful in those days, and so was my Athalia. This did not escape the notice of the guards, nor those who ruled above them.”

  Her voice was so low now that Pamela had to strain to hear, and it was as chill as the November air that breathed out dark and thick around the vardo. “Chaya and Liora died within the month, half-starved and sleeping in that disease-ridden hole, it was inevitable. So many of the children died, adults too—typhus is a scourge, once it gets started it is like a raging fire, it is almost impossible to stop the spread of it. No one there was trying to stop it, though, it simplified things for them.

  “Within weeks it was just Athalia and I, stuck there in that way station, knowing every day that they could stick us on a cattle car bound for Dachau or Auschwitz. We were each other’s strength, she was the only reason I had left not to slash my wrists open on the barbed wire, could I get near enough to do so. And then,” Yevgena said, voice barely audible above the soft hissing of the stove, “she got sick. It started so simply, a sore throat, but in the camps such things were often harbingers of much worse to come because there was no avoiding the cold and the mud and the misery. There was no filling an empty belly, no warm boots or coat, no blankets to stop the shivering at night. She had a cough and then a fever, and then she just got weaker and weaker. I did everything I could to try and make her better. I hid my ration of bread in my coat pocket so that I could sneak it to her. I scrounged up tea on the camp’s black market. I wanted to beg for help, but that would have been signing her death warrant, for they would have sent her off to the gas chamber, then and there. It was what they did. If you were weak or so bone tired that you could hardly move anymore, they simply exterminated you.”