Dark and Deepest Red(56)

“We can’t do this,” Emil said, feeling the hum of blood in his wrist.

She shook her head, like trying to shake her thoughts into place. “What?”

“This.” Emil swallowed, still getting his breath back. “You and me. We can’t be near each other.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re gonna get hurt. You already have.”

“Me?” She looked at his arm.

He didn’t look.

“It’s us,” he said, tracing paths between the nightmares that visited him as he slept and the ones she lived. “We’re what’s causing this.”

“Causing what?”

His eyes skimmed over the sodium-dusted table, then the red of her shoes.

“Emil,” Rosella said.

He flinched back to her. “I have to stay away from you.”

“What?” she asked. “Why?”

He hesitated over the truth.

If anyone in this town, anyone outside his own family, would understand, it would be Rosella. The Olivas were the one family who didn’t blink at the idea of baxtale xajmata, or at bringing food to their dead, or everything else that made most gadje glance at his family sideways.

The truth of his family’s history felt like pins on his tongue, things he needed to spit out.

“Emil,” Rosella said, his name turning harder on her tongue.

Emil took a long breath. “So back when my family lived in Strasbourg, there was a dancing plague.”

“A dancing plague?”

“Yeah. It’s exactly what it sounds like. People started dancing uncontrollably. Like they couldn’t help it. And they kept dancing.” He looked at the floor. “Even though it killed them.”

“Dancing killed them?”

“Some of them, yeah. Heart attacks. Strokes. They literally danced themselves to death.”

Saying the words felt like a draft on the back of his neck, like that unseen hand was nearing his shoulder blade again.

“When was this?” Rosella asked.

“Five hundred years ago.”

She was blinking in threes now, like she was trying to resolve an image. “Why were they dancing?”

“There are a lot of theories. Ergot poisoning. Something in the water. But most likely?” He gave a resigned shrug. “Some kind of mass hysteria.”

“And your ancestors,” Rosella said slowly. “They were there?”

“Worse than there.” Emil felt a tightness building in his jaw. “They were blamed for it.”

The look on her face mirrored what he’d felt when his father told him. The sudden understanding. All the blood rushing to his forehead, like hanging upside down off a bed.

“What happened?” she asked.

He sighed in a way that was more bracing himself than exasperation, but it was a little of both, and he knew it. Rosella’s family had skin brown enough that a little of him hoped maybe he wouldn’t have to explain this. He wanted her to guess, to just know. Then he wouldn’t have to say it out loud. This was all someone else’s pain, five hundred years old, and yet somehow it brought back the shame of hearing his parents getting a call from his teachers.

Rosella watched him. She waited for him to talk.

“So in the first few years of the 1500s, anyone Romani was banned from France and Germany,” he said. “It wasn’t long before the independent cities did the same thing. I don’t remember when it happened in Strasbourg. There are so many of these decrees sometimes I forget the dates.”

“But where was everyone supposed to go?” Rosella asked.

“Great question, since a lot of other countries were making the same decrees,” he said. “Some of my relatives assimilated. Some married gadje. My mom’s family got by doing that for a long time. Some disappeared into cities. Any of them who couldn’t pass knew that wherever they went, they could always be forced out. My relatives in Strasbourg”—he blew out a breath, feeling like he needed to clear out his lungs to finish saying all this—“well, they tried to pass.”

He touched the sodium bicarbonate on the resin countertop, the dusting of white coming off on his fingertips.

“Unfortunately, people talk,” he said. “And rumors that you’re Romani get you blamed for things, especially in the 1500s.”

“So what happened to them?” Rosella asked.

He shook his head, his jaw still held tight. “We don’t know. After that summer they don’t exist in city records. The best case scenario is they lost everything, their home, their business, all of it. They were driven out.”

“That’s the best case?” Rosella asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Because the worst, and most likely, is that they were executed.”

He winced under the memory of his own nightmares, that screaming that felt sharp as cut glass.

“Because they got blamed for the dancing plague,” Rosella said. It seemed more like she was confirming than asking.

“Yes,” Emil said.

“Because they were Romani,” Rosella said, with enough resignation that this time he knew it wasn’t a question. Her sigh fell like a slack balloon, as though the world disheartened her even if it didn’t surprise her.