Ascension (6 page)

“Where should I look?”

His father turned, anger in his face. “How do I know? Just go and find him, Salvo, and do it quickly.”

Salvo nodded and jogged down the street. On the next street over lived a girl that András was fond of. Maybe he was there, Salvo thought. Of course, he could be almost anywhere. András was a fantastic wanderer, a true Rom. You never knew where he would go, and neither did he. He could be ten miles from here or he could be right behind you. There was no way to tell.

There were, however, places that he most definitely would not be. That was how it was in this town when you were a Rom. Some places you went and many you simply did not. The Roma lived on one of two streets, an unstated rule that was known by all,
whether Roma or gadje. Similarly, there were stores and market stalls that Roma went to and those that they did not. No one seemed to know who had instituted these rules, and no one much cared. Most Roma didn’t want to associate with
gadje
any more than most
gadje
wanted to associate with Roma. It was very much a mutual feeling.

There were exceptions. Salvo himself had no particular misgivings towards
gadje
, other than a healthy measure of wariness when dealing with them. His mother’s sister had even married a
gadjo, a
Hungarian, and they now lived quite happily in Budapest. Salvo had visited them before the war, and he remembered his aunt and uncle as kind people. He also remembered the old priest, who was a good man, but he was a priest and thus subject to different conditions than an ordinary
gadjo
.

He continued his jog down the road and turned onto the street of the girl who András liked to visit, but when he got there all he saw was an old woman attempting to milk a goat that was little more than skin over bones. Salvo went further down the street, hoping to stumble upon him, until he reached the end of the road, at the foot of mountains, where there was a withered bit of forest few ventured very far into. He backtracked up the street and onto the main road. He ran for a short distance and turned onto a street where no Roma lived, but where there was a man who often bought goods of dubious origin, a man that the Ursari family and András in particular often had dealings with. The man’s shop was closed up, however, and there was no sign of his brother.

There was a place back on the main road where Roma went to drink gritty coffee and smoke acrid cigarettes, and it occurred to Salvo that his brother might very well be there. He was beginning to worry that he had been gone from the house for too long. He wondered how long it had been since he had started his search. Perhaps
half an hour? Maybe longer? He had no way to tell. Salvo was still contemplating how much time had elapsed when he stopped dead in his tracks. Coming down the main road like a legion of ants was a mob of
gadje
, brandishing clubs and sticks and various other weapons. Some, the ones who had been soldiers, even had rifles. They were shouting, swearing, and they were moving fast.

Salvo ducked into the stable beside the blacksmith’s, moving rapidly towards the rear of one of the horse stalls. He didn’t see the smith and didn’t know if the smith had seen him. He edged in beside a sable mare, putting his head up against the horse’s flank, smelling the horse smell and speaking softly to the animal. As the throng grew closer the horse became agitated, shaking its head and snorting and stamping a poorly shod hoof against hard-packed earth. Salvo was afraid that the horse would crush him against the side of the stall, or catch him with one of those steel-clad hooves, and he realized that if he were to be discovered hiding here, it would be assumed that he was attempting to steal the horse. He cursed himself for not having taken the time to find a better hiding spot.

As the mob passed the stables he knew that he had made the right decision. He heard the words
gypsy
and
revenge
stand out among the furious drone, and he knew that if he had seen the mob, it was at least possible that someone in the mob had seen him. He was only one pair of eyes and there were many contained within the crowd.

Just when he thought that the raven horse was about to squeeze out what little breath was left in him, and just when he was sure that someone would discover him, the mob had passed. He could hear it moving down the street in the direction he had come.

Salvo waited until he was sure the mob was well away before emerging from the horse stall. He thanked the horse for not
crushing him, the sound of his voice soothing the frightened animal. The street outside was quiet and deserted. It was hard to tell if the people who were supposed to be there were hiding from the mob or if they had left to join it. Either way, there was no one on the street but himself. He stayed to the side of it, ready to conceal himself if he encountered anyone he shouldn’t, but he went all the way to the last place he thought his brother might be without seeing a single person.

The café was empty but it was not locked up, and there were tin cups of coffee sitting on some of the tables. The coffee was still warm. In the corner, a lit cigarette lay on the floor, its wispy smoke wafting upwards. The people who had been there had clearly left very recently, and they had left in a hurry. It suddenly dawned on Salvo where the mob had been heading. His chest clenched, and he turned and ran as fast as he could in the direction of his house.

Miksa Ursari had gone into the house as soon as Salvo left. Azira was in the back room assembling clothing and other necessities, and Miksa began to collect his tools. He put them into a brightly coloured trunk, its corners battered and caved in by rough travel. Azira came into the front room and looked at him questioningly. As quickly as he could, he explained to her the church and the steeple and the cross falling on the priest. She did not interrupt him even once, and when he was finished she placed one hand lightly on her stomach and pointed at the door with the other.

“Go warn the others,” she said.

“There is no time.”

“Yes. These
gadje
will go for any Roma who are left.”

Miksa swallowed. She was right. Their anger was about more than a dead priest.

“Go. You must. I will do what must be done here.”

Miksa nodded in agreement. “Salvo has gone to find András. He should be back soon.” He stood and ducked through the narrow doorway into the blinding light.

The first place Miksa ran to was the Romany café. There were about ten men there, and he told them what had happened and advised them to leave this town until things settled down. No one needed to be told twice; this was not the first time such a thing had happened.

Avoiding the main street, Miksa ran to the road where Salvo had first gone. There was no time to go to each house, so he went up and down the road yelling as loud as he could, “The
gadje
are out for blood. Everyone should go away from here.” There was no way to tell how many people heard him, but some did. They came into the street and saw that it was him, and they went back inside their houses to gather their things.

He did this again on his own street, where there were fewer people. He was at the point where the side road met the main road when he heard the approaching mob. They were moving fast, and Miksa was tired from his recent exertions in the heat. He forced his legs into a run and sprinted for the house.

Salvo reached the top of the road just as the mob spotted Miksa darting into the house. Such was Salvo’s haste that he nearly caught up with the crowd and stumbled into them; only their preoccupation with his father saved him from detection. As the mob rushed his house, Salvo slipped behind a cart that lay abandoned in the tall grass outside a house belonging to a Rom who was imprisoned in a Romanian army camp up the road. No one knew quite why the man was being held, but his house had gone untouched since his incarceration four months ago.

Salvo peered over the top of the cart and watched as the mob swarmed around his home. Someone tried to open the door, but
it had been barred from the inside, and the window was too small to crawl into. Besides, someone else speculated, this Rom was dangerous and could not be trusted to submit to punishment without violence.

That Miksa Ursari had no intention of surrendering himself was true, but he also had no intention of fighting the mob. He looked at Azira and the baby crouched in the corner of the front room, and he knew that the situation was dire. He began to assess his options. If he were to go outside, the crowd would, at the very least, throw him into some jail for a deathly long time, but he thought it more likely that they would kill him. He remembered being somewhere in Germany and seeing a crowd rip apart a man accused of raping a girl. They had torn his limbs right off and flayed the skin from his bones and ripped out his eyes in a matter of minutes. He shuddered to remember the sight. No, he thought, it’s no good to go out there.

So he would stay in the house. The door was strong, and unless someone in the crowd got overly ambitious, they should be safe. It would not take long for the mob outside to grow restless, and he hoped that when they did they would move on, looking for an easier target.

It is likely that Miksa would not have come to this conclusion if he had been able to see what Salvo did. Once the crowd realized that they couldn’t get into the house and the people inside were not going to come out, someone called for a torch. Salvo’s mind seized; surely they would not light the house on fire with his father and mother and sister inside it. But with every subsequent action taken by various people in the crowd, it became more and more apparent that that was exactly what they planned to do.

There was one man in particular who seemed to be spearheading the burning of Salvo’s house. Salvo recognized him from
the church. He had never seen him before that, and he thought that he must be one of the ex-soldiers who had moved into the village immediately following the Romanian annexation of Transylvania. He was a large man, nearly six feet tall, with a neatly trimmed beard that grew into a point at the chin. His hair was brown and his forehead was creased with wrinkles. When he called for a torch Salvo heard his voice, rough and deep, his tongue thick with an accent the boy could not quite place.

The man was handed a torch, and he lit the oily rags with an expensive silver lighter. Salvo had never seen such a lighter. A long, thin flame rose out of it, spreading onto the torch and into the sky. Even though it would still be several hours before the sun went down, the light from the torch was clearly visible to Salvo, and he could see wavy lines of heat radiate from it. A sticky line of tar-black smoke followed the heat skyward. The man returned the beautiful lighter to his pocket and moved to the edge of the house.

Other people had been reluctant to go right up to the structure, perhaps afraid that the inhabitants would be armed, but this man was not, or if he was he hid it well. He casually walked around the perimeter of the dwelling, as though on a lazy Sunday stroll, stopping occasionally to hold the torch to the desiccated limbs that formed the roof. He lit the house in five places, showing no emotion as orange streaks of flame shot up the roof. He stepped back to evaluate his work. Seemingly satisfied, he tossed the torch through the tiny window and returned to the crowd.

The fire seemed to have a hypnotic effect on the mob. Where before there had been much shouting and pushing and jostling, now the crowd stood relatively still and quiet, as though transfixed by the flames.

Salvo watched from his hiding place as the fire engulfed the roof. He desperately wanted to rush forward, to individually smash
apart every member of the mob and cut a path to the house, but he knew he could not, and he forced himself to stay where he was. He knew his father, and thought it was only a matter of time before his family would emerge from the burning building. As the flames grew brighter and the smoke thicker, he began to worry, his fear reaching a crescendo when a part of the blazing roof collapsed.

W
HEN
M
IKSA
U
RSARI FIRST REALIZED
that the mob had set his house on fire, he yelled to Azira to lie down on the floor and cover herself and the baby with blankets. He hurriedly emptied the trunk he kept his tools in. When the torch was thrown into the front room, he stamped it out as best he could and hurled it into the back room. With a medium-sized pickaxe he put two holes in the bottom of each side of the chest and dragged it to the centre of the room. Ignoring Azira’s protests he took his daughter, Etel, from her arms and placed her in the chest. Over her he draped the tanned hide of Good Bear the Bear. The girl did not cry as he closed the lid, but after it was closed he heard her shrieking. He went to where Azira lay just as a shower of fire fell from the roof. Its debris landed beside him, continuing to burn on the dirt floor. He never had any intention of leaving the house. He did not think that the walls would burn, being made of stone and plaster. As he pressed his face to the earth, trying to escape the smoke that was rapidly filling the air around him, he knew that while he would probably not burn to death, there was a good chance that he and Azira would be suffocated.

He remembered something he had heard about poison gas, and he thought that it was possible that it would help here too. He removed his shirt and tore it in half. Then he rolled onto his back and pulled open his pants and urinated on the two strips of cloth as best he could. He gave one to Azira but she would not put it to
her mouth. He held his soaked rag to his own mouth with one hand, and with the other he forced the second rag over his wife’s face. After several seconds she stopped resisting him, surrendering to the necessity of the situation.

The rags dried quickly with the intense heat and did not seem to help. Miksa did not know how long they had been lying on the floor of the burning house when Azira stopped gasping and lost consciousness, but the fire was still going strong as he felt himself slipping away. He felt as though he was inside hell’s own furnace, and he could not control his coughing. He briefly thought about trying to make it to the door and out of the house, but found he could not move. It was then that Miksa Ursari knew he was going to die. He found he did not want to die, which surprised him. He’d always liked to think he was ready to accept whatever came. That he wasn’t ready for death somehow gave him some small consolation. If he were to have no sorrow over losing his life, then it wouldn’t have been much of one. This fleeting notion was soon overwhelmed by despair, though, and the tears that ran down his face were not entirely the result of smoke.