Dark and Deepest Red(4)

Lala slips inside, quiet as a cat. She says a prayer of thanks to Sara la Kali that neither the little ones nor their mothers stir. Her steps fade beneath the sound of breathing and soft snoring.

She is so silent, it seems, that the only two voices in the house continue, unaware she can hear their low words. There is not yet enough light through the beams to reveal her.

Lala easily places the first voice. Tante’s.

“She is my niece,” Tante says, her words firm but her tone polite, deferring. “I know well enough to know what’s good for her, I should think.”

“And what’s good for her is denying her own name,” the other voice, a man’s, says. The words do not rise in a way suggesting a question. They would seem an accusation if the tone didn’t sound so magnanimous, as though it is up to him to give Tante permission.

That voice sends a shiver between Lala’s shoulder blades.

It belongs to a man who is older, but holds himself so straight that his back seems that of a young man’s.

He has done nothing to explain the shiver, apart from the fact that whenever he looks at Lala or Alifair, he has the pinched smile of someone tolerating a troublesome child. He calls her Lavinia in a way that seems pointed, as though to remind her what she misses by so rarely hearing her familiar name.

She wishes she had the nerve to tell him she already knows.

Lala pauses in the dark, listening, hoping they do not hear her.

“And the boy?” the man asks.

Tante sighs. “What of him?” she says, with more exhaustion than annoyance.

“Gadje already think we take their children,” the man says, and though it seems the beginning of a thought, he does not go on.

“He has no one to ask after him,” Tante says plainly.

The man lets out a brief sound, a curt hum, that at first seems considering but then dismissive.

It is not the first time such disapproval has been made clear to Lala’s aunt. If it is not over Alifair’s presence in this house, it is something else, mild scorn at the fact that Tante will invite Roma across her threshold, but will not meet them in the open.

Some pity Lala and Tante for passing among gadje, sure they are losing a little of their souls each day.

Some consider it unforgivable.

The sunrise barely finds its way in. Tante and the man are still only silhouettes.

“She’s in love with him,” the man says. “You must know that.”

Heat blooms in Lala’s cheeks as she waits for Tante to ask Who?

But after a moment of quiet, Tante only says, “And he hasn’t touched her.”

The heat in Lala’s face grows as she realizes how obvious it must be. How plainly it must show in the way she looks at this boy who first appeared in the crab apple tree.

It is worse than that. She first tried to kiss Alifair last year, and he stopped her in a way that was even more devastating for being so gentle, setting his palms on her upper arms, widening the distance between them.

She has never felt more sharply the slight distance between their ages. They were children together, looking for the shapes of horses in storm clouds, but now that slight distance has put him on one side of a border and left her on the other.

Lala holds her breath, urging Tante to keep the silence, hoping she will not be pressed into breaking it.

Tante knows better than to try to convince this man of Alifair’s Romanipen. Alifair was born a gadjo, but from so deep in the Schwarzwald that he came to Lala and Tante already understanding the breath and life of trees. The rest—the auspicious nature of certain foods, the different points of a stream used for washing—he learned.

The children of these families take to him quickly, waiting for him to play the next song on his Blockfl?te. But the mothers eye him warily, grateful for how he does not talk to them unless they talk to him first.

The older man’s voice cuts through the silence. Tante has outlasted him, and though it is a small victory, it is so clear Lala could sing.

“You let the boy stay here,” the man says, “he’ll have a baby on her by next year.”

Lala hears the catch in Tante’s throat, and knows she is trying not to laugh over how much this man thinks he knows.

Alifair has worked so hard to hide that he was given a girl’s name at birth, and has to conceal the fact of his body to be considered as the boy he is. He has done this work, learning to bind himself beneath his shirts, settling his voice as low as the other boys’, and he has done it so well that even this man doesn’t suspect.

They all bear the secrets of their own bodies. Lala and Tante, their blood. Alifair, a form he must hide, one that would make others declare him a woman if he didn’t.

Tante collects herself quickly. “We’ll see, I suppose.”

“Well,” the man adds, with a wave of his hand that shows against the coming light. “You have your own opinions of these things.”

Lala wishes she could glare at the man, for this slight over Tante remaining unmarried. Women have clucked their tongues at Tante’s choice, but somehow this feels sharper, as though it will leave a mark.

Lala’s protests grow heavy on her tongue. She slips from the wattle-and-daub house so she will not speak without meaning to.

The sky catches flame, orange and pink blazing through the deep blue.

A silhouette stands alongside the crab apple tree, both forms cut against the bright color.