Ascension (3 page)

S
alvo wiped the dust from his eyes and stepped quickly, trying to keep up with his father. It had been a hot summer, and the fields were as dry as the dusty road they were travelling. It was 1919, less than a year since the war had ended and the Romanian army had claimed this formerly Hungarian province. If four years of war hadn’t been hardship enough, now there was drought. The people of this rural section of Transylvania would have to go without for yet another winter.

Salvo’s father seemed unconcerned at the prospect of things going from bad to worse. Miksa Ursari was a thin, gaunt man, with callused hands and scars on his back from having been beaten as a youth with a piece of barbed wire for stealing a chicken. He had indeed stolen the chicken, and hundreds more like it, and when the owners beat him he did not fight back, nor did he cry out. When they finally stopped, he got up and stole a horse and moved on to the next town. Revenge never even occurred to him. What would be the point? He was a Rom, a gypsy, and for a Rom the best way to get revenge was to live another day.

All throughout Europe the Roma were scattered, some having settled into towns and villages, most remaining wanderers. Since the beginning of the war, more and more people had been displaced, more Roma found themselves refugees from battlefields,
starvation and conscription. But now there were non-Roma fleeing as well. These
gadje
did not readily take to a life of transience. Miksa felt sorry for some of them. He had no idea what it was to live your whole life in one place and then to be cast out. Old women with appled faces and a lifetime of belongings behind them in ox carts—he felt worst for them. There were others, though, spiteful men with lowered eyebrows, whom he did not feel sorry for. Wherever he went there were
gadje
who would try to lay blame on those who had nothing to do with anything, and nearly always it fell upon the Roma. But while the Roma undoubtedly lied and stole, it was never on such a scale as to do any real harm, and they were certainly not the ones who had brought the war, any more than they were the ones who had lost it. Miksa Ursari knew that there were many people who were looking for an excuse to make scapegoats of the Roma, and he tried hard not to think about what might happen if there were too many of these people and they got too loud.

So if Miksa seemed indifferent towards the drought, it was because he had other preoccupations. Still, he was far less concerned with the things on his mind than others were about the things on theirs. Life had always been hard; why should now be any different? There was no point in becoming obsessed with troubles. Even if life was mostly bad, there were still times that were not. And if you were to spend all your days worrying about the bad parts, you would miss the fleeting moments of good. Whether this was completely true Miksa was not sure, but he had learned that a man had to have a way of looking at things, and at twenty-seven, he thought his was as good as any.

Nine-year-old Salvo tugged at his sleeve. Miksa knew he was walking fast, too fast for the boy to keep up, but he had pressing business waiting and could not afford to slow his pace.

“Step quickly, Salvo, and I’ll tell you a story,” he said, knowing that his son would run to keep up before he would turn down the offer of a story.

His father had judged correctly. Salvo picked up his pace, eager for one of his father’s tales. His father told the best stories of any Rom he knew, and the Roma told the best stories of anyone in the whole world. On clear evenings his father would often gather the family around a fire and tell them stories until Salvo had to fight to stay awake, and when he finally did slip into sleep, they continued in his dreams.

Miksa Ursari swallowed, pushing the grit and dust down out of his mouth. He moistened his tongue and scratched at the stubble prickling his neck, racking his brain for a story to tell his son. He knew a lot of stories, but not all of them were good to tell an impressionable boy like Salvo, especially one who listened so intently and took every word as the truth. For a Rom, his son was ridiculously gullible. Miksa worried for the boy’s future.

“Do you know why there are so many Roma in Hungary?” he asked the boy.

“No,” Salvo answered.

“Well then, I will tell you.” The tone of Miksa’s voice shifted from that of normal speech to that of a man who is telling a tale and doesn’t want to be interrupted. If there was one thing Miksa would not tolerate, it was being interrupted while telling a story. It caused him to lose his place and ruined any effect he was trying to create. There would be plenty of time for questions after the story was finished.

“A long time ago, maybe before my great-great-grandfather was born, there were no Roma in Hungary. They passed through but they never stayed, finding themselves unwelcome. Then it came that one day a husband and wife and their baby
were travelling through Hungary. Now, the husband, he was a great thief. He was so great a thief that it was said he could steal the tongue from your mouth while you were talking with him, and you would never even know it. That is what was said.

“Well, he was a great thief all right, but not so great that he did not get caught. And the Hungarians who caught him took him to prison, leaving the young wife and her baby on their own in this strange land, with no horse and no ox and no mule. The wife walked for many days in the direction the Hungarians had taken her husband, the thief, hoping that if she could find the prison he was in, she could plead for his release.

“On the third day of her walking she came to a village that was deserted. She was tired and her baby was hungry, so she went into a stable and sat on the straw floor and put the child to her breast to suckle. The wife was very beautiful, having had only this one child, and she had long, thick hair that she wore loose about her shoulders, where it fell down to the end of her back. She knew that it was dangerous for a beautiful young woman to travel alone, but she had a small knife and her husband had shown her how to use it, so she was not worried too much for her safety.

“She was just falling into sleep when she heard a noise outside, and not wanting her child to cry and alert whatever was there, she put the child to her breast again. There was no noise for a very long time, and the young wife thought that maybe whatever it was had gone away. And then she saw a snake, a huge snake, slither through the door of the stable and right up to her.

“This snake was enormous, long and wide as the forest’s oldest tree, long and wide and fat, with skin so tough and thick that an arrow could not pierce it. It had such an appetite that it had devoured everything in the village, the people and the livestock and the feed. Only a few lucky souls had managed to escape.

“Most wives would shriek at the sight of such a beast, but this young woman was a Rom and the wife of a great thief, so she did no such thing. The snake slithered closer still, smelling her milk, wondering if it tasted as good as it smelled. The young wife recognized the look in the snake’s black eyes, and she knew what it was thinking, so she gently took the snake’s head and brought it to her breast, side by side with her own child’s.

“There the snake suckled, so hard and furiously that the young wife thought it would pull the heart out of her, but she did not pull back. She gently stroked the snake’s head, caressing the scaly hide as if it were her own baby’s soft flesh.

“After a time the snake fell asleep, and as he slept she reached into her skirts for her knife. She knew that her knife couldn’t cut into the snake’s strong skin, but she wasn’t deterred. She was the wife of a cunning man, and she thought of a plan. Taking great care that the snake did not stir from her breast, she took the knife and she cut off all of her beautiful, long hair. She braided the hair into a good strong rope. At her feet was a fetter used to secure the horses, which had all been eaten by the snake. She tied one end of the rope to the fetter, then took the other end and put it around the snake’s neck, tying the rope into a hangman’s noose.

“In the morning the snake awoke, and he was hungry, and he drank from the young wife’s milk with an appetite suited to such a voracious creature. So intent was he on his breakfast that he did not feel the rope around his neck. The young wife stroked his head and did not flinch. She allowed the snake to drink its fill, knowing it would grow careless with its hunger satiated. After what was a long time to the young wife, the snake grew full and ceased to suckle.

“In one quick motion the young wife gathered up her baby, pushed the snake from her breast and darted towards the back wall. The snake lunged at her, fangs bared, but it was not fast
enough to catch her, its belly full of milk. When it reached the end of the rope, the hangman’s noose pulled tight around its neck. The beast thrashed wildly to free itself, and the young wife was afraid the rope of her hair would break. But the rope held, and the harder the snake struggled, the tighter the noose became. Slowly the snake began to die, his air choked out of him. At last, his tail grew still and his eyes bulged out, and he was dead.

“When the
gadje
who had escaped from the snake found out what had happened, they were grateful, and they immediately found the prison where the young wife’s husband was being held and had him freed. They welcomed the Romany couple and their child into their village and told them they were welcome there always. But the husband, he was a thief, and he didn’t want to steal from people who had treated him and his wife and baby so well, so the family left the village.

“When other Roma heard how well the people of Hungary had treated the great thief and his young wife, they wanted to go to that village. The thief, not wishing to see anything bad happen to the village, did not say exactly where it was, but still the Roma went to Hungary. And a great many of them are still looking for the village where the thief and his young wife had been treated so well, as it has been said that if that village could be found again, the Roma would cease to wander.”

Miksa continued walking at his brisk pace, and Salvo was half walking, half running to keep up with him. All that could be heard was their feet thumping in the dust and a faint wind rustling in the brittle branches of the trees.

When he was sure that the story was over, Salvo spoke, his breath laboured by the pace his father had set. “Did her hair grow back?”

“What?” Miksa’s mind had drifted to other matters.

“The young wife. Did her hair grow back?”

“Oh, yes. It grew back longer and thicker and darker than ever, and she was even more beautiful than before.”

“What about the baby?”

“He grew up to be a great thief, like his father.”

“Did he ever go back to the village?”

“No. Like his father, he was grateful to the people of the village and didn’t want to steal from them. Besides, he was only a baby when he had been there, and he didn’t know where the village was.”

Salvo thought about this for a moment. He was sure that, as a baby, he had been places he could no longer remember. He had been many places, even as far as his aunt and uncle’s house in Budapest, which he could recall, but also into eastern Romania and Bulgaria, which he could not. So it made sense.

“Do you know where the village is?”

Miksa looked at the boy. Why did he have to take everything so literally? “No, I don’t.”

“It isn’t where we live?”

“No,” Miksa said. “It isn’t.”

They continued down the road, past a ditch that had a dead goat half sticking out of it, its rotting legs grotesquely splayed.

“What about the snake?”

“It was dead. It was no more.”

“Were there any more snakes like that?”

“I don’t think so. If there were, they probably all got killed in the war.”

Salvo was relieved. He did not like the thought of such a beast.

S
ALVO WAS THE SECOND OLDEST
of the three living children in his family; his older brother, András, was eleven years old and very
strong for his age, able to lift a large wash basin full of water. There was also a baby girl, Etel. There would have been six children, but three had died when they were very small. Salvo had not known them at all, really, so he hadn’t been saddened by their deaths, but he heard the keening of his mother at night and he was sad for her. He also heard words like
influenza
and
diphtheria
, and he wondered if he too would die. He kept himself awake, afraid that when he woke up he would be dead, but he always went to sleep and he always woke up very much alive, so lately he worried less.

Before the war had started, Salvo’s family had owned a tame bear. Their family name,
Ursari
, meant “bear” in Romany, and the family had made a living from the animal, who could do several tricks and was very smart. The bear’s name had been Bella, which someone told them meant “good” in Italian.
Bella Ursari
the Bear, or “Good Bear the Bear,” supported Salvo’s family for seven years, but when the war started there was not enough food, and even though he ate better than anyone else, Good Bear the Bear got sick and, after a while, he was dead. Salvo had not seen his father cry when his younger sisters and brother died, but when Good Bear the Bear finally died, his father had buried his face in the creature’s fur and cried like a young widow at her own husband’s funeral.

For a long time after that Salvo’s father refused to go out. He sat cross-legged on the floor and drank strong coffee and smoked cheap cigarettes, eating little, rarely sleeping, and never, ever telling stories. Then, in the spring, Salvo’s mother’s stomach began to swell, and three days before the war ended she gave birth to a girl.

After that Salvo’s father seemed to forget about Good Bear the Bear and set to work providing for his family. He knew how to work as a blacksmith, and he made a little money shoeing horses and doing the odd repair job. The war had brought a shortage of skilled labour, but as more men returned from military service
there was less demand for his work. Most people would rather go to a Hungarian smith or a Romanian smith than a Romany smith, even if the Rom did a much better job. The only jobs Salvo’s father got lately were those that were either too difficult or too dangerous for anyone else.