Tide King

by Jen Michalski

  He took a few large leaps before losing his balance on the impacted stones of the slope, and he rolled and bounced, airborne at times, down the hill and into the river with a rush. The water filled his back and legs with white-hot pain, and as he drank the dark water, it seemed to leave him as quickly as he drank it in. He vomited hot into the cold space around him. The basin of night was bare on the east side of the Missouri. A skeleton of trees scraped the cloudless sky. No owls or night creatures convened, as was their ritual, to discuss all matter of nocturnal importance. It could have been hell on earth, or it could have been actually hell. All he knew was everything was dead, and he was alone, too tired to get out of the water.

  1938

  She dreamed of violins, playful notes that leapt up and down the scale like mice. They became louder, louder still, and when she woke up, they were outside, a cacophony of horseshoes, bells, the crunch of wagon wheels. From the door of the bone house, she watched the gypsy caravan disassemble in the valley below, two squat rusted trailers on tall wagon wheels from which eight Romani emerged. Older women in scarves, the color of cinnamon and tough as jerky, strung a clothes line between two trees. A man, his beard dark like ink, squatted in front of smoking kindling. She was so mesmerized by the emerging makeshift village of the travelers, she did not see him loping up the hill on the right side until he stood in front of her, a barefooted boy, thin and dirty but clean with youth and curiosity.

  He smiled at her and tapped his chest. “Ferki.”

  She smiled and tapped her chest. “Ela.”

  Ferki curled his fingers as if holding a spoon and ladled air to his mouth. He pointed toward the campfire, where some of the older women cut onions and forest mushrooms into a now-smoking pot. She followed him down to the campfire and sat to the side, waiting for the women to scowl and wave her away or look at her fearfully, giving her a generous serving of stew in the hopes she would leave them alone. Their eyes studied her in quick thrusts upward as they concentrated on peeling and cutting and feeding the fragrant broth that made her stomach claw against her sides in hunger. They asked Ferki questions in Romani about her. He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, his mouth full of gaps from his baby teeth, half-filled with incisors that sprouted like glaciers anchoring his gums. No, he did not know whether she was a Pole or a Jew or Russian, whether she was an orphan or a witch. He only knew she was a girl, a girl he wanted to play with.

  The women murmured among themselves. Finally, they looked at her and smiled, handing her an earthen bowl filled with stew.

  “Te avel angla tute, kodo khabe tai kado pimo tai menge pe sastimaste,” Ferki’s grandmother, named Tsura, said. Her eyes, cloaked almonds, sat far in her face, as if she saw everything from a distance deep within her. May this food be before you, and in your memory, and may it profit us in good health and in good spirit.

  Ela had known gypsies before. They had come through once, many years ago when her matka was alive, trading herbs, tinctures, some fabrics which were now part of her bed quilt. In the years since, she’d seen their caravans from the hill of the bone house, small plodding dots heading northwesterly, toward the sea. But they had not come this close in a long time. She watched the women boil dandelion roots and elderberries and sage while the men loaded a smaller wagon with fabrics, jerkied meat, and jewelry to take to the village to hawk.

  “Germans everywhere,” Ferki explained to her in broken Polish when she asked him why they were heading east. “The Russians no better. Jekh dilo kerel but dile hai but dile keren dilimata.”

  One madman makes many madmen, and many madmen make madness. She had heard talk in the village when she went down to trade her tinctures—small things, mixtures for gout, for headaches, for fever—that she remembered her matka making. Talk about Germans invading, about people leaving. It was not anything to which she’d paid much attention. Poland had changed so many hands since she’d been alive, it was hard to keep track of the ruling parties, their petty laws and greed. She floated above them, a ghost, a menace, a shadow. She did not understand why they fought so long, so hard, even died for a land they would only have for a little while. The land always won in the end, slowly grinding their organs to rot, their bones to dust. And yet every generation thought they would conquer it for all eternity.

  Except for her. Despite her best efforts, she remained to see the same mistakes over and over again.

  “You come with us.” Ferki kicked a ball made of old rags toward her. She moved it back and forth between her feet. He made a gun with his fingers and pretended to shoot her. “The Germans shoot Roma on side of road, in towns, in Serbia. Say we spread disease, are spies.”

  “I don’t know,” she answered in broken Romani. If she disappeared, the villagers would burn her house to the ground. The local priest would bless the earth. She would be a nomad. But they might kill the villagers, too. It was hard to know, these days, who would be called a witch and killed.

  “The land is our home.” Ferki spread his arms wide, as if to hug it. He smiled at her. He would be a beautiful man. She imagined the slight hook of his nose, his full, red lips, the fold and curls of his earlobes and the gentle slope of his hair over his head, the way its chestnut curls licked his ears and the back of his neck. She imagined clinging to his body, the itch of his chest hairs and groin as they rubbed against her, the pulse of his gorged member, but this would not happen. She may see him become a man, she may see him to the grave, but she would always be a girl, and the earth would not break her.

  He walked toward her, his arms still wide, and then he drew them around her. Had Antoniusz been the last man, the last person, to hug her? Ferki smelled like curry and sweat and dirt. She ran her hands along the smooth cliffs of his neck, pressed her cheek against his before grabbing the cloth ball and kicking it as far as she could. She watched as he ran, light, wiry, after it, the soles of his dirty feet catching the sun. She could not be broken, but if she was not careful, he would melt her.

  Ferki and Tsura followed her to the clearing where she had found the burnette saxifrage. She pointed at the sky and then the earth as Ferki explained to his grandmother, adding “cccrrracckkkk!” and waving his arms for theatrical flourish. Tsura touched the earth, no longer black, covered with a century of blown dirt and seeds, and began to dig. She motioned for them to help her, and they knelt in a circle, raking their fingers over the earth, the hole around them becoming bigger and bigger, layers of sediment and clay exposed until they happened upon a small area of white ash, several feet in, no more than a handful. Ferki’s grandmother scooped it into her palm and dropped into a leather pouch tied to her waist.

  Back at the bone house, Tsura gave Ela a knife, sharp with dull rubies on the handle. Ela held it against the creamy white of her inner forearm and pressed, the dark blood bubbling to the surface like lava. Tsura bottled the blood in a flask and pressed a cloth over the cut and then dressed it with a spiderweb that had been seeped in black wort.

  “We wait.” Tsura nodded at Ela’s dressed arm. “To see this healing.”

  “We won’t wait long,” Ela answered.

  In the bone house, Ela sat every morning and made a cut on her arm, from which Tsura could collect a sample. Then they ground and pestled the dried herbs and mixed them with the white ash. Ferki brought in the rats and frogs, which they cut and applied the paste to and waited. All the animals died.

  “Sometimes the Gods’ powers are one time.” Tsura searched for words. “I chirikleski kul chi perel duvar pe yek. The droppings of the flying bird never fall twice on the same spot. Then they cannot be taken advantage of, and so they are also properly revered.”

  “My grandmother means, if everybody can live forever, what is the use of it?” Ferti added, lying back on Ela’s bed.

  “But if no one can, it is of no use, and if one person can, it is a curse,” Ela answered. They looked at her in confusion, and she frowned. “Curse!” She said louder. She put her hands to her neck as if to choke herself and then po
inted to the sky.

  “No…you stay now. I want you stay. We will help you.” He rested his hand on her shoulder and smiled, his hodgepodge of teeth filling his face. She imagined his face growing around his teeth, his eyes burrowing deep into his face, his eyebrows covering them. His muscles growing, stretching his skin, and then the reverse when his muscles sunk like Tsura’s, hung from the bone. Skin slipped from her cheeks like curtains as if something inside her had been used, reused, finally abandoned.

  “Everyone has gift that is only theirs,” Tsura shook Ela’s chin in her hands. “Some can be seen more than others, that is all.”

  The men came back one afternoon with their wagon and motioned for the women to help pack the trailers. From their tight faces dripped worry that seeped into the camp. Were the Germans already here? According to the talk the men had picked up in town, their territory had been expanding further and further east, and the Russians further west. For months there were rumors of the Nazis taking the Jews and the gypsies to camps, an invasion of Poland. It was already hard enough to trade in the towns, Ferki told her, given the natural, centuries-long distrust of the gypsies, but the German would put them into Zigeunerlager, or work camps, or they might kill them on the spot. The Russians would send them to Serbia. Ela watched from the door of the bone house as Ferki carried bales of blankets on his young back, the bead of sweat that formed on the top of his lip. She wanted to hold his head close to her chest and kiss his brow.

  “I am worried for your safety,” Ela said to Tsura as she helped to pestle some of the burnette saxifrage.

  “Es okay. We survive a long time. But you will show us how to survive longer.”

  Tsura stood close, rubbing her hand. She put her finger in the bowl and held up a finger covered with grains. She poured the remains of the bowl into her pouch. With the ashes, it would be all they had to work with during their trip, wherever it was they were going. Heated words between the men, Ferki’s father and another, floated into the doorway. Whatever they decided, there would be no time.

  Ela looked around the bone house. It had always protected her, she thought as she grabbed Antoniusz’s wooden horse and brought it to her chest. But perhaps she had been the one who protected it. She wrapped it into the multicolored quilt and tied the ends and then sat on the bed.

  “Hurry,” Tsura called from the door and hurried outside. Ela listened to Ferki call her name. She dug her feet into the earth and closed her eyes. If she left her mother’s house, she could never get back to her. She was sure of it.

  “Ela!” Ferki’s voice was closer, just outside the house. She imagined the silk of her mother’s hair as it tumbled down her back, the touch of Matka’s hand on her shoulder, caressing it.

  Then it nudged her go, go. When she moved to the door, Ferki was already there, waiting. He grabbed her by the arm and they ran toward the trailer.

  They rode at night, traveling narrow cattle trails through the open fields, far from the little jumbles of villages scattered like campfires across the countryside, relying on the moon to reveal an intruder. They slept during the day deep in the forests, one eye open. They learned to tell the sound of a branch broken by a human foot from one made by a goat or mountain lion. There were uncooked potatoes to eat and cold pottage, a wheat stew. It took its toll on the younger Romani through temper, dark eyes, dry coughs, runny bowels. Tsura became sick. She lay in the back of the trailer under a pile of blankets with Ferki and Ela while Ferki’s parents sat outside in the front, where they had affixed a wooden bench to corral and guide the horse. Ela fed Tsura the mint and sage and burnette saxifrage she had ground into a tea, but her tinctures left Tsura almost as quickly as they entered her, and if they made a complete crossing of Tsura’s stomach, they exploded as hot, sour liquids from her as she shat out the trailer door, Ferki holding the rest of her inside by her arms.

  “My spirit has been taken,” she murmured, eyes closed, a sunken pillar in a pile of cloth, the reservoirs to her wisdom sealed forever. “Leave me behind.”

  “Never.” Ferki dabbed her face with a cloth, damp from the bucket of water that needed to last them all. For how long, no one knew. The forest they were traveling through was unfamiliar; they had encountered no brooks or rivers. No one wanted to think about what might happen next, but they each had taken pains to urinate into something that was theirs alone, a cup, a flask, a bowl, and guarding the precious liquid against the bumps and twists that the wagon wheels found on the forest floor as if cradling a zygote in their womb.

  “Do not waste the water on me.” Tsura tried to sit up. “If I stay, you will go faster.”

  “If you leave, we all will die.” He kissed her cheek. “As your soul goes, as do ours.”

  A meeting was held. The trailers would separate so they could travel faster, smaller, like coyotes and not dogs. Ela went with Ferki and Tsura and Ferki’s parents. They rolled onward in separate directions, their wooden wheels splitting stones and cracking branches, but still maddeningly slow. The horses spooked easily, and they stopped many times as Ferki’s father spoke softly to them, rubbing their necks. They could cover so much more ground on foot, Ela knew, but Ferki would not leave his grandmother, so she did not ask.

  They took turns, Ferki’s father and Ela sleeping, then Ferki and his mother. With an eye open, they listened for the sound of the Nazis in the distance. They were arrogant, it was known, shouting and laughing in German, never needing the element of surprise because of their brute force.

  At least, Ela listened. Ferki’s father slept like death, silent and unmoving until the trailer stopped and everyone changed their positions, nibbled at the hardened biscuits and potatoes full of eyes and roots that lay like small islands at the bottom of growing sacks. When it was their turn to sleep, Ela lay awake, the dream world and the real world before her, holding hands, courting. She missed her time with Ferki; she longed to press her face into his neck, to be comforted by his smells as Tsuri’s began their own slow and inevitable leeching into the trailer, sweat and rot and bowels that festered in every corner. Sometimes he would tap on the roof of the trailer, softly, from where he sat on the bench to let her know he was there, that he was thinking of her. That he would not forget her.

  The trailer ground to a halt, throwing Ela forward, out of her half sleep. She shook Ferki’s father as he swatted at her with his hand.

  “Jal avree. Go away.” He frowned and furrowed his brow. “Another minute.”

  “We’re stuck.” Ela pulled at his ankle until he sat up. Outside, the horizon glowed orange, revealing the last few glimmers of the world. The trees huddled before them in dark shadows. They seemed to sway closer and then farther from them. Ferki’s father stumbled out of the trailer, kicking his legs as he struggled not to fall in the mud.

  “Come.” Ferki took her hand and they felt their way in the darkness, gathering branches, pressing them to their chests until they began to drop them. If they did not work quickly, they would lose time, the cover of night, to put distance between the rumbling trucks, the searchlights that sometimes swept through the trees ahead and behind them. Ferki and his father threw the branches they collected and leaves into the mud by the wheels as Ferki’s mother fed the horses the last few bits of straw. Ela walked the perimeter of the trailer, looking for berries and other edibles, medicinal plants for Tsura, when she saw Tsura staggering away from the back door of the trailer.

  “Don’t mind me.” Tsura smiled at her. “I have to go the bathroom. And then I will fly like a bird to the clouds, tweet, tweet, tweet.”

  “May I be of help?” Ela looked toward the trailer, which rocked back and forth, the wheels trying to catch the dry material.

  “No, no. The fresh night air.” Tsura said over her shoulder as she teetered, holding her skirts. “Already I feel better. Like the snakes in my ears.”

  It was only natural she would become delirious from her continued loss of fluids. Ela took her own skirt full of berries and jasmine flowers back to the trailer
and opened the wooden jewelry box that Tsura used to separate and store her herbs. Perhaps she could ground some more psyllium and mint together, making a fibrous concoction to better bind Tsura’s stools. But when she opened the door on the right, one of the wooden slots, the one where Tsura kept her belladonna root, was empty. Ela left her berries in a pile and ran out of the trailer.

  “Ferki!” she shouted as she ran in the direction that Tsura had taken into the woods. She had not gotten far when she saw her, slumped under an oak, face flushed, her chin pressed into her neck.

  “Puri daj! Grandmother!” Ferki had overtaken Ela and lifted Tsura’s head in his hands.

  “She ate the belladonna,” Ela explained, opening Tsura’s eyes, moving her head back and forth. Her eyes did not track; they locked on Ela’s shoulder. “Wake! Wake up! When did you take the belladonna?”

  “I saw her going through them this morning.” Ferki looked at her Ela, his eyes rimmed wet, his bottom lip loose, exposing his lower teeth. “The herbs. She said she was getting some mint to chew on.”

  “We need mustard and salt.” Ela put her fingers in Tsuri’s mouth. “To make her bring it up. If it’s not too late.”

  “You have to save her.” Ferki grabbed her arm and pressed his knife across the soft underside of her arm. He pulled it across and it sank, without resistance, into her skin. A sea of red spilled over the edges of the cut as Ferki pressed her arm to Tsuri’s lips. “Drink, Puri daj. Drink.”