Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  ‘Tell me, Václav,’ Josef said. ‘I’m a man of medium height and build, notable only for the limp in his left leg. How about you?’

  ‘Me?’ said Václav. ‘I am short and portly. I have a large nose, full beard and whiskers.’

  ‘And you, Yakali?’ Josef called over his shoulder.

  ‘Average height, muscular build, red scar across the back of my right hand.’

  ‘You’ve done better than us, Father,’ Justin called from the back of the line. ‘Neither of your sons have any distinguishing features at all.’

  ‘God be praised …’ muttered Yakali as they walked. ‘Praise be to God.’

  *

  The farmer Myclík sent his son to move them on. It was twelve days after Emil had been born. Josef had only known his son for five days but had already forgotten the time when he did not exist. When the boy slept, he fitted snugly into the curve where Josef’s neck joined his shoulder – he would undo his neckerchief and open his shirt to place him there. Even when Emil awoke and cried, Josef was unwilling to relinquish him. Anna had to demand the return of her baby for feeds.

  The others laughed at him. Their enforced stay near the barn was losing them income by delaying their arrival at the harvest, but it allowed the wagons to be cleaned, horse tackle to be mended – and a little joviality at the expense of the Rom Baró, who seemed under the delusion that none of them had ever met a baby before and needed to be introduced to his repeatedly.

  They were given no notice to quit the field. The farmer’s son arrived one morning and stayed to watch them load up their belongings. Anna was still marimé. She had been keeping away from the men, taking Emil to the shade of the trees on the far side of the field to nurse him. The other women would gather around them and flap them with fans – smiling, talking, neglecting their other duties. She waited under the trees until Josef signalled to her that it was time to pull off. As she carried Emil towards their wagon, the other men paid her the courtesy of turning their backs, to save her the effort of having to skirt behind them.

  They would stop twice on the way, even though it was a short journey. That way, by the time they arrived at the orchards, Anna would be able to step down from the wagon and greet the other families. Then the real celebrations could begin.

  Myclík’s son, the lazy, hatless youth, stood cross-armed while they loaded up, watching them with narrowed eyes as if he was cultivating his own insouciance. As the last wagon bumped and swayed onto the road, he spat on the ground and crossed himself. Josef was waiting nearby with a spade, to turn over the wagon tracks once they were all on the road. As he bent to the crumbled brown earth, he wished the soil bitter and the Myclík family a poor harvest. He had never minded the insults of the gadje all that much before, not the way that Václav or some of the other men minded. Now he felt as if young Myclík’s phlegm was aimed directly at his newborn son. He would like to take the spade to the young man’s shoulder, to teach him a lesson he wouldn’t forget in a hurry.

  He ran past the youth without looking at him, handed the spade up to Václav as he passed his wagon, then trotted to the front, where Justin was standing holding his harnessed horses. He jumped up on to the seat and took the reins.

  It was sunny again, but cooler than the previous days. A small breeze fluttered the leaves on the trees. Fat, pure clouds raced in battle formation across a hard blue sky. Josef gave a joyous cry, ‘Hey-ooh!’ as he flicked the reins and the horses gave a brief start and stumble before falling into step. There was no better feeling than that first lurch of the wagon. It was summertime; they were heading for the orchards; they were Kings of the World.

  CHAPTER 3

  The women waited inside the wagon. Tekla told Ludmila and Eva to check the cupboards and lockers to make sure everything was securely stowed. Anna nursed her baby, sitting on her bed with her knees raised to support him, her skirt a wide canopy, her unbuttoned blouse loose on her shoulders. The interior of the wagon was dark, the shutters closed against the bright sunshine outside, the cracks between them allowing a few thin strips of light. Anna hummed softly to her child.

  Ludmila paused in the act of lifting down a tin-framed picture of the Holy Mother to bend over them, close her eyes and inhale deeply. ‘I love that smell …’ she murmured, as she slid the picture flat beneath the bed. ‘Will he always smell like that? It’s so new, and old.’

  ‘Like fresh bread …’ Anna said without lifting her head.

  ‘No, more like meadows …’ said Ludmila, sitting next to Anna and peering at Emil’s forehead. ‘Look at his scar.’

  ‘I can’t believe how well it’s healing,’ Anna said. ‘Tekla, the paste you put on …’

  ‘All babies heal quickly,’ replied Tekla, as she squatted on the floor pulling string tightly around the stacked copper pans, to prevent them rattling. ‘It’s because they’re doing so much growing all the time, everything heals. Once he has hair no one will even know it is there.’

  ‘We will always know, though,’ smiled Ludmila, ‘won’t we? My tiny šav?’

  Anna lifted him up. ‘Pat him for me, Ludmila. The feeding makes me sleepy.’ She handed Emil to Ludmila, and lay down.

  The wagon jolted forward. Eva, still standing, fell against the wagon’s wall.

  ‘You might as well go and sit up with Josef,’ said Tekla to Eva. ‘Ludmila and I can walk. There’s no reason for all of us to be in here.’

  Ludmila and Eva exchanged glances. Normally Anna would sit up with her husband, as was her right, but with a newborn she would stay hidden from the envious eyes of the gadje for the length of the journey. Tekla was next in status and the privilege of sitting up should fall to her.

  ‘No, I don’t want to,’ said Eva quickly. ‘Ludmila and I will stay here and mind Emil while Anna’s asleep. You go.’

  Tekla leaned forward and bit the string, tied the final knot in one swift, fierce gesture, then rewound the loose ball with a windmilling motion of her hands. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with the pair of you,’ she said without looking at them. ‘She might have an excuse for being soft in the head but not you two.’ She rose and climbed the two wooden steps, opening the small door to the seat of the wagon, knowing that Ludmila and Eva would be pulling faces behind her back.

  As she turned to close the door behind her, Tekla saw in the suddenly light-filled wagon that Eva had sat down on the floor next to Ludmila and was stroking Emil’s swaddled back, both of them staring at him joyously. Their exhausted elder sister slept behind them, her eyes closed but her mouth still stretched in a smile: a perfect tableau – the three beautiful Demeter sisters and their beautiful baby boy. Tekla pulled the wagon door shut with a bang.

  *

  In his whole life, Josef was only to be on first-name terms with one gadjo. That gadjo’s name was Ctibor.

  Ctibor Michálek was a fruit farmer. His living was sour cherries and he had a lifelong relationship with them, one of great attachment punctuated by spells of disloyalty, for there were other fruit in Ctibor’s life. Apricots were an important romance for him, although they were never as vital as the cherries – and then there was his passionate affair with the peach. Farming peaches on his land was folly but Ctibor Michálek could not renounce his lust and, contrary to all expectations, succeeded in producing three small crops on a gentle, southerly slope before the bitter winter of 1929 froze the trunks and cracked them to the heart.

  That summer of 1927, he was still courting the peach, although he was anxious, as he explained to Josef while they walked round the orchards the day after the kumpánia’s arrival. ‘They blossomed early this year, Josef,’ Ctibor said, shaking his head at the memory. ‘And then we had a chill wind from the Urals. I don’t mind telling you, I was worried. The bees stayed at home. I came out myself and hand-pollinated each tree with a rabbit’s tail.’

  He sighed as if remembering a woman from his past. ‘I can’t pretend this year’s peach crop was the best. The apricots though …’ His face became radiant. ‘O
h, Josef, you should have been here for the apricots. The taste of them. It broke my heart to send them off for canning. I could have eaten the whole harvest fresh.’

  The two of them paused by a tree of Montmorencies, already ripe. They always made it before the English Morellos but they and the Russian Vladimirs were still planted in mixed groups, to allow them to pollinate. ‘Self-sterile,’ Ctibor had informed Josef once, explaining his farming methods. ‘There’s a lesson for Mankind in that, you know.’

  Ctibor lifted a hand to cup a cherry in the tips of his fingers and twist it gently from the stem. It amused Josef to see the man hold up a cherry, for Ctibor Michálek liked his wine and his nose had acquired a deep reddish hue, not unlike that of his fruit. Had a jay alighted on Ctibor’s shoulder at that moment, the bird would have been unsure where to peck.

  ‘They are wonderful things, these beauties,’ Ctibor was also fond of saying. ‘Other men, they can keep their cows and pigs and – with respect – their horses. Animals. You shovel it in one end and out it comes the other. Me, I am a happy man, filling the world with fruit.’

  It was early morning. Josef had paid his customary visit to Ctibor at sunrise and had already drunk real coffee and eaten a fresh meat and onion roll, warm and fragile from the huge new oven in Ctibor’s tiled kitchen. Now Ctibor passed him a cherry from the Montmorency tree, and Josef took it from his hand, sliding it between his lips and tasting the dew from its skin before he applied gentle pressure with his teeth. The fruit became tense, then burst, splitting to the stone and flooding his mouth with sharp and purple flavour. It tasted of dawn.

  They were standing at the top of the long, northerly slope, from where Josef could look down across the still-misty, grey-green orchard, where the pickers were already moving in the early light, their baskets hanging at the hip from wide straps across their chests. All his kumpánia were there and over a hundred others; Czech and Moravian Roma mostly, a few Lowari.

  No other farmer in the whole of Bohemia employed as many Roma as Ctibor Michálek. His harvests had become famous as a place for the vitsas to meet and exchange news, for marriage agreements and the settling of debts. A series of divanos would be held throughout the harvest to settle disputes, lasting all the long, long evenings when the smell of ripe cherries would wash over the fields in slow waves, all the way to the ice-house near the railway substation where the canneries kept their trucks.

  Ctibor’s devotion to the Roma went back a long way. Ctibor had married young, and for love, a Jewish girl called Sarah whom he had met when he went to be measured for his first tailored suit. When he married her, his family had cut him out of their lives, his father declaring he would never see a penny from the shoe-polish factory in Kladno in which he was a partner.

  Ctibor had left the factory after only six months of work and as a consequence the bank would lend him no more than the price of twenty acres, scarcely enough for a peasant to feed his family. Ten years later, he was worth his father, brother and cousins put together. Disdainful relatives whispered that a Jewish wife had brought him luck with money but Sarah was a mousy woman who took no interest in business. She had been cast out by her own family in her turn, for marrying a Gentile. Her father had held a funeral service for her.

  It was not the Jews who had brought Ctibor luck, so he declared to Josef at least once each season. It was the Gypsies.

  Less than a year after he had purchased that first small plot of land a Romni had come begging at the door of their wooden shack, with four small children in tow. Sarah was frightened of them, but Ctibor insisted that the woman and her children be invited in and given stew and bread, all the stew and bread, in fact, which he and Sarah had been saving for their supper.

  The woman and her children had eaten swiftly and silently. As she was leaving, the woman paused on the step and turned back to Ctibor, beckoning. She walked him down the path, the children trotting anxiously behind her, to where Ctibor had begun to plant his first one-year-old saplings in neat rows. She told him he must replant them at once, nine trees in a circle for good luck, and always use Gypsy labourers to pick his fruit. Then he would become a fortunate man.

  Josef had not the heart to tell Ctibor that the woman was probably more concerned with finding employment for her people than with Ctibor’s future fortune. Ctibor swore that from that moment, his trees were blessed. ‘I am a Rationalist,’ he told Josef once, ‘and a Humanist and a Socialist – but a man must be allowed a little superstition in his life, otherwise his life is grey. I allow myself this, and see, the combination of superstition and a regular spray of self-boiled lime sulphur has given me the best crops in the district.’

  *

  After Josef left Ctibor on the slope above the orchards, he descended to the far fields, swinging his stick lightly in the morning air. The real business of the day could now commence. He had told Ctibor about Emil, of course, and Ctibor had clapped his back and congratulated him, but the conversation had moved swiftly on. Ctibor’s wife was barren. The two men had subtly lamented their childlessness to each other in the past. Josef would not have expected Ctibor to make a grand fuss of his news. There were limits to any friendship.

  But now there were other Roma to tell, and a mulatšago to be organised, to christen the boy. The first who must be informed were his own distant kin, the Tent-Dwelling Kalderash led by Tódor Maximoff. He must get to their tents quickly. Nobody must tell them but himself.

  *

  Tódor Maximoff and his kumpánia had pitched their encampment, as usual, in a far field behind a row of fir trees, symbolically distant from the wagons and tents of other Roma. They did not mix easily. Josef they tolerated, because he was distant kin and Kalderash, although not quite Kalderash enough. Josef knew they looked down on him and his kumpánia because they did wage-work and gave their children Czech names sometimes – because Josef shaved his chin and waxed his moustache instead of keeping a black fluffy beard. He did not like the fact that Tódor Maximoff looked down upon him, and liked even less that he found himself looking up. Tódor was a giant – and his physical size seemed like no more than the literal manifestation of his status amongst other Rom. Most men’s heads only reached Tódor’s huge beard. The silver buttons on his coat were the size of hen’s eggs and his wealth was rumoured to be fabulous. He was pure Kalderash. He made Josef feel assimilated, almost Czech by comparison. Sometimes Josef felt a little ashamed at how Czech they were – at others, he thought, I live in the modern world, that’s all.

  The Tent-Dwellers were especially nervous of Anna and the other women. Tódor’s kumpánia were strict adherents to the purity laws – his wife Zága wrapped a cloth around the handle of a mug of tea before she handed it to him, so the contact with her flesh should not contaminate her husband’s beverage. On the rare occasions that Anna accompanied Josef on his visits to the tents, she kept her distance, even from the other women, and the air around would become stiff with mutual disdain.

  As Josef neared the circle of tents with their striped awnings, a small voice cried out from the trees that lined the left of the path, ‘Devlesa arakhav tu!’

  Josef stopped and looked around.

  By the side of the path, leaning up against the trunk of a sloping fir, was a boy aged eight or so dressed in an embroidered blouse and waistcoat but naked from the waist down. His hat was tipped at an unlikely angle and an unlit cigarette butt was hanging from his lower lip.

  Josef bowed deeply.

  The boy stood up, spat the cigarette butt on the ground, bowed in response and repeated solemnly, ‘Devlesa arakhav tu.’ I find thee with God.

  Josef restrained an amused smile and replied seriously, ‘O Del anel tu.’ May God lead thee.

  The boy grinned, turned tail and scurried back into the camp to announce Josef’s approach, his bare feet kicking up leaves and twigs behind him.

  Tódor Maximoff was seated on a small wooden stool in the centre of the tents, smoking a pipe, but at Josef’s approach he rose and opened his
arms.

  ‘Jóno Maximoff!’ he bellowed, abandoning the formal forms of address, as a compliment. ‘It has been too long! You should have come to England. My wife’s braids are full of five-pound pieces. She makes music when she walks!’

  Tódor’s expeditions to England were legendary. He went every three or four years and had, Josef inferred, just returned from one such trip. He was famous there. He had shown Josef a copy of his picture in a newspaper, disembarking at Dover. Earnest young men with spectacles and worn leather briefcases came to his camps, he said, clutching notebooks and begging to study the way he and his kumpánia spoke. (They came in handy, the earnest young men, as Tódor had mastered French, Italian and Spanish along with his native Hungarian and Russian but English defeated him. The young men could usually get by in one or other European language and so acted as translators in return for permission to follow them around like puppies.)

  ‘My wife will only wear Hungarian gold!’ Josef declared in response, grasping the man in a hug then pushing him forcefully away. ‘It takes two horses to carry her!’

  ‘My daughters’ knees are crippled by our wealth!’

  ‘Aa … ah … Phrála, children are indeed a blessing …’ Josef laughed, stepping back so as to fully appreciate Tódor’s expression when he imparted his news.

  Tódor looked at him quizzically.

  ‘You have not heard …?’ Josef feigned astonishment.

  Tódor showed him his palms. ‘I am an ignorant man!’

  Josef beamed, silently, his lips pressed tightly together, to force Tódor to guess. Tódor narrowed his eyes and shook his head slowly from side to side, trying to work it out.

  Suddenly, Tódor’s eyes popped open in surprise. ‘Jóno … Jóno …’ His voice became a growl as he spread his arms wide. ‘This cannot be … truly?’

  Josef threw his arms wide and yelled. ‘I have a son!’

  Tódor flung himself at Josef, grabbing him round the shoulders with his full weight still in motion, hurling them both to the floor. They rolled over in the dirt together until Josef begged the giant to stop by shouting. ‘My coat! My coat!’