Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  *

  All day, Emil’s temperature soared up and down. He would eat nothing and sip only cold water. Towards evening, he seemed to sleep a little, then was suddenly awake, tossing and turning, unable to get comfortable.

  ‘Go and eat with the others,’ Tekla said to Anna, ‘you’ve been in here all day,’ but Anna refused, only consenting to lie down on Eva and Ludmila’s bunk and close her eyes.

  She dozed for a while, then awoke when Tekla was lighting the kerosene lamp.

  ‘How is he?’ she asked, sitting up, realising that she was hungry and thirsty, despite herself. Perhaps if Emil was quiet, she would go and see if there was a little bread.

  Tekla shook her head.

  Anna slipped from beneath the blankets and went over to Emil, still wrapped tightly in his. He was deadly pale and hardly conscious, his lips fluttering gently, as if he were reciting a story to himself.

  Tekla said, ‘If you won’t leave him, I’ll cook you some farina. The last thing we need is you falling ill as well.’

  ‘Is the fire still going?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll go now.’

  Anna sat next to Emil, a blanket around her shoulders, watching his face in the shadows. Darkness must have only just fallen but it felt like the middle of the night. She closed her eyes and prayed that her son might see daylight again.

  She had been praying for a while when she heard a gasping sound. She opened her eyes. Emil was fighting for breath. He began to cough. She raised him a little and grabbed the edge of her apron, holding it to his face so that he could cough into it. The spasm lasted several minutes. When he had finished, she laid him down again, stood and held her apron up to the lamp. In the yellow light, she saw that Emil had coughed up sputum streaked pinkish here and there. She had heard of this. People drowned in their own bloody fluids. ‘Oh God in heaven …’ she whispered to herself, her legs suddenly weak with fear. She raised her face to the lamplight. Who will save my child?

  She turned and dropped to her knees, opening the door to the locker beneath their bed, and pulling out the largest of the copper vats. Then she flew to the wagon door and wrenched it open, jumping down outside and falling on her knees beside the snowdrift that was backed up against the side of the wagon.

  A few metres away, the dark shapes of the other women were huddled around the orange glow from the fire. The rest of the camp was hidden in the darkness. The mist had gone and it was a clear night, the sky above her bright with stars. ‘Anna?’ she heard Tekla call.

  ‘Help me, Tekla!’ she responded weakly, the freezing air cramping her lungs as she exhaled in great clouds. She was using both her arms to pull the fine, powdery snow into the copper vat.

  Tekla ran to her. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘He’s dying,’ she sobbed. ‘We must pack him in snow, it’s the only thing left.’

  ‘No,’ said Tekla.

  Anna scrambled to her feet and tried to lift the vat – God give her the strength. Tekla tried to prevent her. Anna shouted. ‘Tekla! I am not going to lie next to my son and just wait for him to go blue! He can’t breathe!’

  Tekla lowered her voice and hissed fiercely, ‘It doesn’t work. It doesn’t bring the fever down. Božena carried Zdenka out into a snow drift and half buried her, what good did it do?’

  ‘We must do something …’

  ‘Listen to me! Put that down. On your son’s life, listen to me.’

  Anna dropped the vat down and sank down next to it. Tekla took a rag from inside her blouse and turned it in the snow, then handed it to Anna. ‘Put this inside your clothes until the snow melts and it is damp but not too cold. Lay it on his forehead. I will take the vat to the fire and melt the snow. We have to get the water not hot but not cold either, like a body should be. Then we will bathe him. If you freeze him he will only shiver more and his temperature will go up, not down. Do this!’

  Without waiting for her to reply, Tekla bent and lugged the vat on to her hip, then turned back to the fire, where the other women were peering anxiously towards them.

  As Anna rose, she felt herself sway and her vision blur. She loosened her shawl and put the snowy rag inside her blouse, as Tekla had instructed her, and the freezing shock of it suddenly clarified everything. Tekla was right. She must not panic. If she did, her son would die.

  *

  Emil did not die. They bathed him, and sat up watching him all night. By the time dawn broke, they knew he was out of danger, although Anna insisted he stay in bed for an entire fortnight, so frightened had she been by his illness.

  In the meantime, Tekla fell sick, but she did not die either. The others waited to become ill and just when it seemed the danger had passed, Anna, Josef and Ludmila fell sick for a day or two in turn, as if they were passing the disease around themselves like an apple, for each to take a bite. None of them became seriously ill like Emil and Tekla. Eva escaped altogether.

  As soon as they were all well again, Anna examined her behaviour during the crisis. She was ashamed. She had behaved like an ill-bred, superstitious Romni. If it had not been for Tekla’s presence of mind, Emil might have died. Some women keened as their children faded, rocking themselves, beating their heads against trees, crying out against what Fate had dealt them. She should have been above such panic. The illness had come amongst them because they were at the end of their resources. It had nearly taken her child because she had been weak and inadequate. She must work harder, be stronger, more like Tekla. Fate must never again have the chance to play a part in whether her child lived or died. It would be she, Anna Sariyia Maximoff, Kalderaška, who decided that from now on. God forgive her presumption.

  There were ways for a mother to feed her child, now that the weather was improving – ways in which the father took no part. These ways would be how Emil survived until spring.

  *

  Freezing February became a bitter March. Each morning, she would lift her shawl from the hook on the back of the wagon’s door and slip outside, instantly awake as the air embraced her. With any luck, Tekla would have already started the fire. The other women would join them silently in the icy darkness, taking it in turns to make tea for their men in order of precedence but as one in their misery.

  It is the only time we all hate our men, Anna sometimes thought, when we stand before the fire, waiting for the water, while our husbands and sons have a few more moments in the sweet land of sleep. We hate them then, with all our hearts.

  As she was wife to the Rom Baró, she stood nearest to the fire, bent over it so close that sparks stung her cheeks and the smoke made her cough. None of the warmth ever spread to the rest of her body. The others would huddle either side of her, Tekla muttering to herself, praying or chanting sometimes. Božena would puff on a pipe. Although it was still dark and the Black Huts no more than shapes in the gloom, there would be the occasional tweet of a dawn bird, a sign that light was there, around the corner, light if not warmth.

  By the time she returned to the wagon, Josef would be rising. She would hand him tea in his tin cup without speaking, then go to rouse Emil. He would sit up sleepily, his light brown hair in fluffy disarray and eyes glittering as she pulled the blanket up round his shoulders and handed him his tea. He had recovered his strength only slowly, but in the mornings he still had a little of the old mischievousness in his eye.

  ‘Are we going from door to door today, Dalé?’ he would whisper, putting the hot tin cup to his lips then away again, pulling a face, nodding hopefully.

  She would nod, sigh, smile. ‘Yes, Little One,’ she would whisper in return, reaching out a hand to smooth the hair back from his face. ‘We are going from door to door.’

  Ostensibly, the women and children went out each day to sell the charms that Josef made from small pieces of beaten metal and coloured pebbles. They brought in no more than a few hallers which the village women only gave them to get rid of them – those hallers hardly justified the amount of times Anna and Emil were chased down the path with a broom. But
sometimes, while they paused on the doorstep while the village woman fumbled in her apron, Emil would have time to squeak, as Anna had taught him, ‘Look, Maminka, the lady is chopping vegetables. Do you think she might give me a piece of carrot?’ Or sometimes it was. ‘Maminka! Maminka! What is that wonderful smell?’

  Anna always snapped, ‘Hush, Little František, don’t be so rude. The lady will think we are beggars.’

  Sometimes, it drew no more than a shrewd look. Mostly, the woman of the house would give Emil an indulgent grimace and go back into her kitchen, returning with a piece of carrot or a vanilla roll.

  Once, only once, that winter, were they ushered inside.

  It was three weeks after Emil had recovered from his illness. He was still thin and pale. The woman who stood at the door to the large stone cottage stared down at him for a long time, glanced once at Anna, then tilted her head to indicate they could step up.

  Anna observed the woman as she led them through into the kitchen. She was small and soft, wrapped in several woollen shawls, like a bundle of blankets. She was a pious woman, Anna could tell. It was her bent look. She moved slowly, and made a clicking sound as she breathed through the phlegm at the back of her throat.

  The small soft woman seated Emil on a wooden bench at the kitchen table, and then turned to the stove where a huge iron pan sat steaming. They had killed a pig the day before, she explained over her shoulder to Anna. The boy could have a bowl of strong soup.

  Anna remembered pig-kills from her childhood, when her family had been sedentary for a few years in South Bohemia. She could recall how the children would be given the job of stirring the blood with their hands. The blood was in huge buckets, black and smoking. They would sit round the buckets up to their elbows, stirring and stirring to prevent the blood from clotting. Her mother and the other women would be boiling barley and frying spices. A gadjo butcher would be hired to twist sausage skins from the intestines. Later, they would be given titbits as a reward. Anna’s favourite piece was the cheek.

  It never lasted long, a pig, not among the Roma, for it would have been shameful not to invite all your neighbours around to eat it. It was why the pigs were kept for fattening and selling and rarely killed. When the gadje killed a pig, they kept it hidden from their neighbours. They froze the meat in ice-houses, smoked it, stored the sausages. They tried to make a pig last forever.

  The woman turned from the stove and placed a bowl in front of Emil, whose eyes became full moons. He glanced up at Anna for permission to lift the bowl to his lips, but she nodded towards the woman who was going to the wooden dresser to fetch a spoon.

  Anna remained standing against the kitchen wall while Emil ate. The woman had not invited her to sit and she knew better than to push their luck, though the smell of the soup made juices run in her mouth, bathing her gums in acid. Her stomach was full of air. She felt herself sway, lightly. She had missed her bleeding time that month – she should have had one while Emil had been ill – but it was hard to believe she could have conceived during such a lean winter. She had long since given up hope of having another child. She would not say anything to Josef until she was sure.

  She exhaled slowly while she watched Emil, forcing herself to concentrate, to stop her knees from buckling and her mouth filling with bile.

  It was a joy to watch him eat, her small son with his eyes sparkling and his little legs swinging. The small soft woman was sitting next to him, revelling in his satisfaction, handing him more bread – he had finished the first lot with extraordinary rapidity – encouraging him to dip it into the soup and suck the gravy from it.

  ‘It’s good, eh? My soup? Good? Good?’

  Emil nodded happily. The woman clapped her hands together and rocked back and forth, smiling at him, then reached out a hand and ruffled his hair.

  Anna watched and felt all at once as though the bitter juices in her mouth were also the fluids running through her veins. She realised she was feeling pure, unadulterated hatred. The woman was a thief. She had stolen Anna’s joy – her rightful joy, the joy of sitting next to her child and feeling happy in the knowledge that she had provided for him. Look at how he was feasting. And look at how the woman was congratulating herself. Thief.

  She felt herself sway again. Small white spots appeared before her eyes. After the bitter cold outside, the kitchen was stuffy, the air thick with the smell of meat. Anna closed her eyes briefly, then opened them. If she fainted, Emil would not get to finish.

  On the opposite wall, above the dresser, was a set of delicately carved wooden shelves on which were rows of engraved eggs; purple, red and black, with gold tracery and tiny figures carved out of coloured wax. They were beautiful. They must have taken hours.

  There were some man’s boots by the door, old boots, a tin bucket and two little spades carved out of wood – children’s toys, spades for children who played at digging, who thought digging was a game. This was a house where the woman had time in the evenings to decorate eggs, not to sell at Easter but to put on a shelf for her family to enjoy. The children played at digging. Their father carved them spades. There was enough wood to make toys out of. Where were the children now? At a school, probably, one of those large buildings where gadjis sent their children to learn numbers and letters and forget how to gut chickens or raise a shelter – to be turned into foolish gadje like their parents. What kind of mother hated her children so much that she sent them away from her each day when they were scarcely big enough to walk? No wonder the gadje sometimes came and stole children from good Roma families. They could not bear to see how much they were loved. It shamed them.

  Anna looked at the woman, who now had her head bent over Emil, close enough to inhale the vapours from the soup. Perhaps that explained her indulgence. She felt bad about sending her own children to school, so she was spoiling Emil, reassuring herself that she was a good mother after all. At church on Sunday, she would feel calm and satisfied because she had done a kind thing. She had fed a starving little gypsy boy a bowl of good strong soup. (Being good to a gypsy child got you into Heaven – whereas being good to a gypsy adult made you a sap.)

  The woman glanced up and saw Anna observing her. Anna had not the time to compose the venom from her look. She forced her lips into an unconvincing smile.

  The woman rose to her feet and said hastily, ‘Finish now, boy, and be off.’

  Emil looked from his mother to the woman, confused by the sudden change of tone. He hurriedly scraped the last of his soup and snatched up the piece of bread that remained on the table, cramming it into his mouth. He swung his legs over the bench, jumped down and ran to his mother.

  With Emil back at her side, Anna felt strong enough to thank the woman convincingly.

  The woman flapped her hands to acknowledge the thanks and indicate they should leave. She was unable to meet Anna’s gaze. She knew she was the one who should be giving thanks. Anna had shared her son for a few brief moments and given the woman a chance to save her self-satisfied gadji soul. The woman would remember how she had been kind to the poor little gypsy boy for years to come. She would remind herself of it every time she did an unkind thing. Every time she beat one of her own children she would say to herself, they have no idea haw lucky they are.

  They backed out of the house and the woman slammed the door shut before they had even descended the step.

  As they strode down the lane, Emil – his mouth crammed with the last piece of bread – looked up at Anna and said, ‘Dalé, why didn’t the gadji give you any soup?’

  Anna marched along, her fury and hunger adding needless haste to her steps. Emil was trotting to keep up, spitting breadcrumbs as he went.

  ‘She gave you soup because she wanted to feel good about herself,’ Anna replied. ‘And she didn’t give me soup because she wanted us to think that she was good but not weak. She thought that if she gave us both soup we would think she was stupid. Then we would go back again, and take more and more from her.’

  ‘But we won
’t be coming back to this village …’ Emil said, frowning.

  Anna slowed down her walk. The cold was biting at her shoulders. She managed a small smile. ‘I didn’t mean she thought we would go back. I meant us, any of us. The People. White people always think that if they are generous to one of us they will have a hundred on their doorstep. That’s why they are afraid of us. Men and women who have lots of things are always afraid. They are afraid of losing them.’

  She stopped, bent down, and took Emil by his shoulders, turning him towards her to pick the crumbs from his coat and push them into his mouth with a finger. ‘Remember that, son of mine. It is a great weapon. We have nothing at the moment. Things are very bad. But having nothing is also a strength. We are hungry now but it was worse when we had just a little. I know it’s hard to believe when a gadjo sends his dog out of the house to chase us away. But he does it because he is frightened and because we are powerful.’ She had finished. She brushed down the coat, out of habit, even though all the crumbs were gone.

  Emil looked at his mother and gave a small, sly smile. Then, from inside his coat, he withdrew the piece of bread that he had concealed there while eating the soup.

  He lifted it to his mother’s mouth and her teeth snatched at it, nipping his fingers. He pulled the hand back and yelped in mock pain, then threw his hands up in the air and whirled around, shrieking with delight.

  Anna squatted on her haunches, chewed at the bread and watched as her small and perfect son spun round in the middle of the road, suffused with joy at his own cunning.

  *

  They had arranged to meet Josef by the small cluster of trees outside the village. Tekla was there already. Ludmila and Eva had been left behind at the Black Huts.