Arcadia (57 page)

“Yes. I know a few words in Bulgarian, I can help in that country.” She's shorn Iz to her shoulders now. It looks ridiculous, like half a black cooking pot on the back of her head. She begins to snip more carefully, talking all the time. “That's how we traveled. Helping each other. It was a long journey. Small roads always. Never through the big towns. Sleeping in the car. We find a place to stop each night and lie in the car and she teaches me English words. She talks to me in English all the time, whether I understand or don't. But always soft, you see. Kind. For me she's like an angel. In the orphanage we used to say, In the West, America, Germany, England, the people have so much money they piss gold. One day they come to Romania and take us to live in their houses big like castles, that's what we tell each other. We will have all the clothes we want and when the rich people die they will give us all their money. When Ygraine takes me away, at first I think she's one of those. I think, All the other kids pushed my face on the floor and bit me and told me the rich Americans won't choose me because I have dark hair and dark skin, and now it's me who's going to be rich and grow up pissing gold. And instead we drive along in this terrible old car, just driving, no airplane to England, no house like a castle. She makes me lie down in the back sometimes, down where the feet go, covers me with suitcases. After two, three days I understand, the English lady is not rich. She is not turning me into a princess. But I don't care, because by then I know she's better than rich. She's kind.”

The scissors click in silence for a while.

“I remember,” Iz says. “She found some sort of job working with children in Romania. After the Wall came down. I remember her ringing up to tell me she was going. That was the last time I spoke to her until . . .”

Iz is very out of practice at speaking. She keeps stalling like this, as if she doesn't have enough air to make words out of.

Silvia waits patiently until Iz holds still again and then goes on snipping.

“Of course I understand now what she did. She stole me. She went to the camp one day to take me to her lessons like normal but instead of going to the orphanage where she teaches she hides me in her shitty car and drives away. That's why we go only on little roads. When we get to the border, out of Romania into Bulgaria, we pay a man to put the car on his truck, we hide in the back. I don't understand what's happening. I think I fell asleep. I don't worry, because I know, you see. I know she's taking me the right way. So even when I get angry with her, because I'm just a small stupid child and sometimes I get angry, I don't run away. I don't care that she doesn't take me to a castle in England with servants. She says, Silvia, you are special, I'm going to look after you. That's enough for me. All my life until then, everyone else, the old women, the old men, everyone, they say, You are special, make us money. You have a gift, make us rich. Otherwise we'll beat you. Your sister taught me what this means, to have a gift. Before she appears everything is bad in my life, after she comes and takes me everything is good. I thought maybe she's a real angel. From heaven.”

Iz almost smiles. “You'd have been the first person ever to think that about Iggy.”

“She was a difficult woman?”

“Impossible.”

“Yes. I can imagine this. But to me—”

“Of course. How far did she take you?”

“Bulgaria, Greece. Through the mountains. Once we arrive in the south of Greece she tells me there is a plan. There's going to be a boat, sailing from Kyparissia. It's a little town by the sea on the west. In Arcadia.”

“Is that really a place? I didn't know.”

“Far from anywhere. It's a quiet town, very small. A good place to get on a boat and no one notices. Of course I don't think any of those things then, I just think, OK, this is how we're going to get to England, where I will be Ygraine's daughter.”

Rory's been feeling dozy. The mention of the boat wakes him up a bit, that and the name of the little town. Where's he heard this before?

“She was going to adopt you?” Iz says.

“Yes.”

“How could she do that? Without paperwork?”

“Your sister wasn't interested in the right papers.”

“No,” Iz agrees. “She wasn't.”

“I said to her, Yes, take me to England, it's the right place.”

“She asked you?”

“Of course. She knows my gift.”

Iz absorbs this for a while.

“That's why she took you,” she says. “Stole you.”

“Of course.”

“How did she know?”

“She came to my grandmother one day.”

“Your grandmother?”

“In the gypsy camp,” Rory says. He's quite glad of the chance to show he knows part of the story. “Not her real grandmother, she just made Silvia pretend she was. She said she could do fortune-telling but actually it was Silvia.”

Silvia nods at him. “One day an English woman comes in, in a shawl. The old women are very excited because the English have lots of money. My grandmother puts red on her cheeks, makes tea with too much sugar. She tells me to stand like this”—Silvia puts her arms straight at her side and bows her head—“and say nothing, only pour tea. But I have to be there, to listen, because of course my grandmother knows nothing without me. So the English lady comes in and bows to my grandmother, very polite, and looks at me, and says, ‘Who's this?' And as soon as I look at her I see the god in her face.”

She's stopped snipping. The fire spits and murmurs unaccompanied.

“God?” says Iz.

“I see it like a shadow. It's like she stands in front of the sun. I see the shadow of the light all around her. I know this light, I recognize it, it's what shows me everything I see. But I've never felt it bright like that before. My grandmother gives me a little cup to hold. For tea, for the leaves, you know? She pretends to see the future in the leaves. When I look at the English lady I drop the cup, I can't help myself. I say to my grandmother, This lady walks in light. My grandmother is so angry with me for breaking the cup, for speaking, she beats me in front of the English lady. Ygraine stops her like this.” Silvia snatches Iz's wrist and holds it up dramatically. “I think she's even angrier than my grandmother. She speaks very slowly, she doesn't know Romanian so well, but she says she's going to teach me with the other children, at the orphanage where I used to be. There's no argument. She says she will come to pick me up every second day, and every time she will look to see if I'm hurt. She says if she sees they have hit me she will call the police. Then she takes me outside, by myself, and she asks me, What did you say? I'm too frightened to tell her anything. But she knows. She can tell it's me who is the famous gypsy fortune-teller, not this horrible old woman. Later she told me she knew as soon as she looked at me. She said it's like love at first sight.”

“Iggy always thought that was the only kind.”

“The only kind of love?”

“Yes. She used to say you knew straightaway. Otherwise you were just trying to persuade yourself.”

“And you don't think so?”

“No.” Iz rubs her wrist where Silvia was holding it. Not because it hurt her, Rory thinks. It's more like she'd forgotten what it was like to be touched. “The opposite. You don't really know you love someone until after they're gone.”

Silvia smiles. “I don't agree.”

“Did you know her fortune? Did you ever tell her?”

“Of course. I told you, I know it's the same as mine.” She makes the roads-going-together gesture with her fingers like she did with Rory. “I told her we travel the same road. Towards the truth.”

“That's what you said? To Iggy? No wonder she stole you away.”

“I told her what I see,” Silvia says sharply. “I don't lie.”

“No. Of course.”

What I tell her is the truth. You want to know what happened to your sister? That's what happened. She came to the end of the road and the truth was waiting for her.”

There's a rather unhappy silence, so Rory says, “That god.”

They both look at him.

“He said so. At that other place, where I found you. He said”—he closes his eyes and finds the words branded on his memory like a permanent scar—“‘This is the end of her road. I'm the light she sought.'”

He'd forgotten how alarming it is when Silvia stares at you full-bore.

“You spoke to him? You saw him?”

He can't explain about the reflection so he just says, “Yeah.”

“God,” Iz says.

“Yeah. Well, not
God
god. Not like . . .” What's he talking about? “He said there were lots, not just, you know, like, one big one. And he said . . .” The words may be burned on his brain but that doesn't make them any easier to grasp. They're still livid and strange. “He had lots of names and they're all different but still him.

Iz exchanges a look with Silvia over her shoulder. Silvia arches her impressive eyebrows.

“Wasn't it frightening?” Iz asks him.

“Not really.”

Iz turns around in her chair. “Where did you find this boy?”

“Ah,” Silvia says. “Now this is an interesting question.”

Instead of answering, she comes around to the front of the chair, squats down, looks at Iz from the left and the right.

“I'm making you look like her,” she says.

Iz reaches forward and grabs at her arm. “Tell me what happened to her,” she says.

Silvia sighs. She puts the scissors down and sits on the rug next to the cat. She scratches its head. She's facing the fire, her back turned to the others.

“All I can tell you is what happened to me,” she says. “Maybe Rory can say more.”

He'd just been starting to feel properly sleepy again. He sits up. “What?”

“Maybe.”

“How would I know?”

She turns around. Her face is transfigured by firelight.

“Because you were there,” she says.

W
e came past Korinthos. There were many boats there but all too big, too many people, too many papers. She has to find somewhere small. Quiet. So we go south, west, into empty country. We end up in Arcadia. She talks to men, pays them more money, I guess. I don't know. I remember she tells me one day that we're not going to sleep in the car, we're going to have a room in a taverna. Like a tiny hotel. It's just a village in the hills, small, very poor, a village taverna with three white rooms, but I remember I'm so excited to sleep in a bed, I think it's like a palace. She's very excited too, very happy. She says next day we're getting on a boat, on the way to England. It's a beautiful warm evening, we eat outside, by a mountain river. She's smiling all the time. She's not always happy but that evening she looks like maybe she'll come off the ground. She says to me, Silvia, do you know, in the mountains here there is an old temple which belongs to the god Apollo. She says he's the god of oracles; he's the one who shows people the future. She's laughing. She says, That must be your god, Silvia.

“We're talking in English, I remember. I remember the funny way she says his name,
Apollo
,
with the English
o
. She tells me she wants to go and say thank you to this god. She's going to leave me in the white room in the taverna and walk to the temple in the night. I want to go with her but she says no, I need to sleep, the next days will be tiring and maybe it's hard to sleep on the boat. So when we're finished eating she takes me to the little room, puts me in bed. She says she will wait to go until I am asleep and come back before I'm awake, so I won't even know she isn't there all the time. I remember her sitting in a little wooden chair by the bed, saying that, and I look at her and think, Yes, that's perfect, I won't even know. I trust her so much. She can say anything to me and I believe it here, you know? In my heart. I close my eyes and I never see her again. It's the last thing she ever said to me.

“I woke up early. Maybe even when I'm sleeping I can feel she isn't there. The room is locked and she's taken the key. I wait a long time but I know something's wrong. I climb out of the window and down to the street and go looking for her. Walking. I'm very frightened but I'm more frightened of being by myself without Ygraine so I walk up into the hills alone, the way I think she went. All the time I'm calling, Ygraine, where are you, Ygraine, unless a car comes by, then I hide in the trees. It's a steep road. I keep walking like that until it's just coming light.”

“Getting light,” Rory says.

“Then I meet this boy.”

She stops for a long time.

“What boy did you meet?” Iz eventually asks.

“This boy,” Silvia says, without turning away from the fire. “Rory.”

Iz looks at him.

“How old are you?” she says.

“Ten.”

“And this was . . .”

“Twenty years ago,” Silvia says. “Nineteen ninety-three, ninety-four, I'm not sure. I told you, it's impossible. But it's the truth.”

Iz shuts her eyes for a moment. “I didn't say I don't believe you,” she says. “I spent too long saying that to someone.”

Rory's sitting bolt upright now. Something inconceivably strange is expanding inside him, impermeable to thought, like a black hole.

“I think because he's a boy, alone, younger than me, it's safe to talk to him. I don't know enough Greek so I talk to him in English. He doesn't look like a Greek boy anyway. He answers me in Romani. My own language.”

Rory knots his fingers together. They feel solid. They're picking up the warmth of the fire. He can hear the cat purring. Everything's steady and straightforward. Everything feels normal.

“He knows my name. He calls me Silvia. I think, He must be a spy, from the orphanage maybe, he wants to take me back there. Or he's from the police. But he knows things about me and Ygraine so I don't knock him down or run away. I think he must know where she is. He says he wants to show me something.” Silvia's reaching to the back of her neck. She unties a knot under her hair and takes off her necklace, the little pouch on its cord. She loosens the pouch and tips its contents into her hand. “He gives me,” she says, swiveling around, “these.”