Dark and Deepest Red(3)

“We can’t ask him to hide everything about himself,” his father said. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“When has that ever mattered?”

The words made Emil go still, at the same time the kitchen went quiet.

His mother and father wanted him to be proud. He knew that. They had taught him early the names of their vitsi, so he would know what kind of Romani he was. The words Manouche—his mother’s vitsa—and Sinti—his father’s—were some of the first he remembered learning.

But he also knew enough, from what his parents told him and what he’d overheard. He knew how much of his family had survived by trying to pass as gadje, and how many who couldn’t had spent years getting driven out of places they lived, or worse. When a child went missing, his grandmother had had to move, the weight of a whole town’s scorn and the threat of all those suspicions driving her away. No one bothered apologizing when the little girl turned up days later, laughing at the harried adults, having hidden in a friend’s attic.

A small meow sounded behind Emil. Gerta, announcing her presence in the hall. The kitten batted at the hem of his pajama pants, like she knew he didn’t want to be alone.

During the last glimmer, she’d come out of the woods with the other forest cats, fluffy and green-eyed, with early snow dotting their fur as they decided which houses would be theirs. (Gerta decided that she hated everyone, but hated the Woodlocks the least.)

Emil heard his mother crossing the kitchen. He picked up Gerta and went back toward his room before his mother got to the stairs.

“Where are you going?” his father called after her.

“To check our son’s room for cigarettes, of course,” she called back.

Emil shut his door as quietly as he could. The exaggeration in his mother’s voice made him almost sure she was being sarcastic, but he briefly debated jumping into his bed and pretending to be asleep just in case.

His mother passed his room. Then he knew for sure.

Emil leaned against the door and looked down at Gerta, pawing his shirt. He looked at his own hands, at the shade of brown, in a way that felt unfamiliar, unsettled.

That brown made most of the school look at him differently, him and his friends who were their own shades of brown.

Most of Briar Meadow didn’t know what Romani meant, and if they did they thought it was the same as another word, one that stung every time he heard it.

Emil closed his eyes, realizing he’d just decided something.

With his family, he could speak of his Romanipen. Every time his cousins came over, or he and his parents baked hyssop into unsalted bread, gave it life, like blowing on embers.

With everyone else, he had to hold his Romanipen hidden inside him, a map to a country he had to pretend didn’t exist. In this house, he could be who he was. Outside, he had to be like everyone else.

He would keep altars with his family. He would help his mother with the recipes that carried the luck of baxtale xajmata.

But he wouldn’t ask to know more. He wouldn’t learn any more about their family than his mother and father insisted on. Because if he did, it would spill out of him.

If he did, he would just make the same mistake again.





Strasbourg, 1514


Wer Zigeuner sch?digt, frevelt nicht.

Whoever harms a Gypsy commits no crime.

It is law that spreads across borders like a blight through fields. And it comes alongside decrees that Roma must leave kingdom after kingdom, city after city.

Zigeuner. The term the gadje use for Lala, and Tante Dorenia, and all like them, bites like the teeth of a gadfly.

It is nearly sunrise when Lala goes in from keeping watch with Alifair.

The wattle-and-daub house has become a place where those fleeing can stop, for the night or for long enough to clear a child’s cough or an old woman’s fever. Tante tends to the families. Lala bakes bread and makes their vegetable patch and root cellar stretch into pot after pot of soup. Alifair gathers scrap firewood from the forests at night, his sharp eyes watching for anyone who might catch him.

Then, like a flame burning through a map, the law consumes Strasbourg.

Tante thought they might be safer in a free city, not beholden to kingdom laws. But now the magistrate issues an order for the apprehending of any Roma in Strasbourg.

Alifair goes out into the trees, collecting frost-chilled berries for a baby to teethe on.

So many families have already gone, fleeing to the forests and mountains to escape laws that will forever be against them. But those who have remained, Lala and Tante and Alifair quietly aid. The hollow-eyed men, the frightened mothers, the families desperate to leave before the arrests, crowd into the wattle and daub. The breath of more bodies than ever before fills the house.

Alifair comes back and hands Lala the iced-over beads of the frozen berries. With a small nod, he leaves again. Tonight a few are moving on from Strasbourg, and Alifair helps the vardos to a far road in the last of the dark.

She watches him go, his form against the dark trees.

With each family they see safely off, Lala feels her own heart growing stronger. Her spirit defies the gadje who would arrest these men and women and their children. Her own Romanipen puts deeper roots into her soul.

Even though it means being so close to all she is not allowed to have. Rromanès, a language she has never been taught. Aprons and layered skirts with more red and age-softened lace than Tante will ever let her risk. Particular ways of braiding hair. The careful embroidery of clovers and horseshoes, roses and certain leaves, the sun and the moon. Things they cannot chance the gadje recognizing.