The Fortune Teller(50)

She always told Aishe she was lucky, for Aishe had red hair. The Rom called it sun-hair and considered it a mark of good fortune. Aishe had gotten her red hair from one of her ancestors, who was not a Rom, but a wandering Sufi woman. She had joined their tribe when they crossed the desert hundreds of years ago. The woman had been near death from thirst, and Simza and Aishe’s ancestors had revived and welcomed her into their band. The story had become a legend in their family, and was one of Aishe’s favorites. She would beg Simza to tell it again and again.

Simza was full of stories, especially stories about their family’s past. She had a special treasure chest, colorfully painted, that had belonged to her own grandmother, Dinka, and had been passed down to her. It was filled with jewelry, silver spoons, delicate scarves, music boxes, and handmade dolls. Dinka had been the band’s best scavenger and had amassed a large collection of trinkets over her lifetime. Aishe loved to take out all the objects and ask Simza the story behind each one.

One day Aishe pulled out a wooden box filled with strange picture cards that had always fascinated her. “Where did Dinka find this one?” she asked her grandmother.

Simza looked up from the evening meal she was preparing over the fire, a rabbit stew in the big iron pot. “In Milan when she was just a girl,” Simza said. Then she dropped her voice dramatically, as she loved to do when telling a story. “A curse had spread over all of the city, killing almost everyone. The stench of rotting bodies traveled for hundreds of miles.”

Aishe put the wooden box back quickly, afraid to touch it now. Ghostly homes and decaying bodies could only have stemmed from evil spirits.

“Our band had been heading south when they heard the Black Death had taken thousands of lives. Empty houses meant treasure! So they came to Milan to search the cordoned-off areas.”

Aishe gasped. “They searched the houses?” Simza nodded solemnly, but Aishe caught the twinkle in her eye. She knew how much her grandmother loved a rapt audience.

“Every day they were in Milan, the phuri dai, the elder women, would whisper prayers for protection to the four winds and drape the children with charmed amulets to shield them from the bad spirits. Then the children would go off to scavenge what they could. Thousands of gadjos in Milan had fallen dead! It was their bad luck, their prikaza, that a little grandmother had come and killed them all,” she whispered.

The fire under the iron pot crackled and danced in agreement.

Aishe shivered, chilled by the wind, and wrapped herself up in her blanket. Little grandmother was the Rom’s name for a bad spirit. Gadjos were city-dwellers, and the Rom thought them impure and polluted.

“For three days Dinka searched the houses in the abandoned neighborhoods, no easy task with dead people rotting around you!” Simza bulged her eyes for effect and waved the rabbit’s legs, making Aishe squeal. “Dinka was now convinced all the ghost-eyes were watching her. She searched the last house in a panic and rooted out all the treasure. She had turned to leave when the wooden box caught her eye.”

“Then what happened?” Aishe whispered, her eyes flitting to the box again.

“She stuffed it into her bag and hurried out. On her way back to camp, she stopped at the river and offered prayers to the water.” Simza stood and reenacted the story to Aishe’s giggles. “She stomped on the ground and spun in a circle three times, commanding any fever that may have entered her body to flow out and into the earth. And she shook a tree—” She paused and pointed to Aishe.

“Four times,” Aishe answered like a dutiful student.

Simza nodded, pleased at Aishe’s memory. “Just like her grandmother had taught her. When she arrived back at camp, she opened her sack for her parents. They allowed Dinka to choose one treasure to keep. Instead of picking one of the fine dolls, she surprised them by choosing the wooden box.”

Aishe listened, wanting to remember every word of her grandmother’s story so she could store it deep inside. One day she would be the old woman by the fire with stories to tell and memories that should not be forgotten.

Simza smiled a toothless smile, her eyes sparkling again. “Maybe one day the box will belong to you.”

Aishe doubted anything in the chest would belong to her. Her parents, aunts, and uncles would inherit Dinka’s treasures first. And she had countless cousins.

Aishe didn’t agree with her grandmother’s opinion of the gadjos, that the people who lived in cities were always ill. She found cities exciting and dreamed of one day living in such a place, instead of always on the outskirts, by a river with their livestock.

Usually they would enter a town for just a day, their long caravan a chain of colorful moving houses on wheels. Their wagons’ exteriors were intricately painted, with artful trim and decorative embellishments. Their wooden cabins had shuttered windows, and the interiors had built-in seats, cabinets, wardrobes, and beds. The band would only stay in a town to trade and entertain. Then they would head to the forest to camp in a clearing, their wagons ringed together in a circle. By morning they would be on the road again, never to return to the same town.

Whenever Aishe asked why they had to leave, her parents explained that they needed to protect their spiritual energy, their dji, which they believed became drained when they spent too much time in jado, the non-Romani world. Aishe’s ancestors had left their homeland hundreds of years ago to become nomads, traveling the lungo drom, “the endless road with no destination.” Because of this, outsiders called them gypsies, though they despised the name.