The Snow Gypsy(12)
“If it’s anything like Romany, then yes, I do—a little.”
He nodded. “I think you’ll get by. Would you like me to take you to meet some of the Spaniards?”
“Could you? You’ve already been so kind.”
“It’s nothing.” He held out his hands, palms up. It was then that she noticed the number tattooed on the inside of his left forearm.
He caught her looking before her eyes darted away, back to the fire.
“I was a prisoner. In the place they called Auschwitz. The Nazis killed my family.” There was no emotion in his voice. He might have been commenting on the weather. “My mother, my father, and my sister. All gassed. They tried to work me to death in the coal mine, but I wouldn’t die.” He was staring at the blue ink mark on his arm. “Most days I wish I had.”
She drew in a long breath. She had read, of course, about the horrors of the death camps. But to hear about it from the lips of someone who had endured them was utterly heartbreaking. She felt a sudden kinship with this stranger—a need to tell him her own story. “My mother’s sister and her husband died in one of the camps. They were Jews, living in Paris.”
His eyes searched her face. She had given him the answer to the puzzle of her looks: that she was a member of a race as despised as his own people.
“They were herded onto a train one day and never seen again,” she went on. “It was soon after the war started. The summer of 1940. My father was there when it happened. He’d gone to stay with them on the way to search for my brother in Spain. He was rounded up, too. He died of a heart attack, trying to stop the Nazis pushing people onto the train.”
Ring out the bad and the cruel. Ring in something better.
She didn’t see his lips move. It was as if he’d repeated the words inside his head and somehow transmitted them into hers.
She couldn’t bear to think of what Jean must have seen at Auschwitz. The unjust imprisoning and killing of anything had always tormented her. As a student she had been unable to stomach the vivisection practiced on animals. It had been the main reason for her rejection of mainstream veterinary science in favor of herbal treatments for animals. But in Auschwitz, vivisection had been carried out on Jews and Gypsies—some of them women and children. No wonder Jean looked haunted.
“I’ll take you now if you like—to find the Spanish folk.” She heard his knees crack as he rose to his feet.
She nodded. Lifting the flap of her rucksack, she burrowed inside for the gifts she’d bought in Arles. And for one more thing—the photograph of Nathan. She had taken it what seemed like a hundred years ago, the day she turned eighteen, at the house in Cheshire. Nathan had been out on his favorite horse, Pharaoh, and she’d snapped him with her new camera as he was about to dismount, his face glowing with exertion and his hair blown wild by the wind.
As she followed Jean through the sea of caravans, she pressed the photograph to her heart. She could feel the surge of her own blood, the panic rising in her belly at the thought of what lay ahead. Spain was a big country. What were the chances, really, of anyone from the area Nathan had gone to being here at the fiesta? She’d told herself countless times to be prepared for disappointment—that coming here was clutching at straws. But meeting Jean had fanned the tiny flame of hope in her heart. Despite the brutality he had endured, he had survived. If, as she had sometimes wondered, Nathan had been taken prisoner, there was a chance that like Jean, he was still alive. Maybe he had even managed to escape but was too traumatized to return to his former life.
“Those are Spaniards—over there.” Jean was pointing to a group of about twenty people, all eating and laughing around a campfire.
Rose felt her mouth go dry. This was it. There was no turning back.
Chapter 7
Cristóbal picked up his guitar and lowered his legs over the side of the wagon. “Come on,” he called over his shoulder, “I want to show you where we’ll be performing.”
Lola was giving Nieve a wash and brush up. The child had been allowed to run wild these past few days on the road. There was mud under her fingernails and bits of twig in her hair. “We’ll catch you up,” she called back. “Which way is it?”
“Head for the church,” Cristóbal replied. “It’s in the square right in front of it.”
It took Lola longer than she expected to detangle Nieve’s hair. The child wriggled like a worm on a hook and shrieked as if Lola were brandishing a knife, not a comb.
“Shush!” Lola shook her head, exasperated. “People will think I’m murdering you!”
“Well, that’s what it feels like!” There was steely defiance in the little face. Nieve’s eyes were bright with tears, but she wouldn’t let Lola see her cry. She was much too proud for that.
“If you want new ribbons, you have to have tidy hair.” Lola held her at arm’s length, checking her from head to toe. “Okay—you’ll do.”
Nieve scrambled out of the wagon ahead of Lola.
“Hey! Wait for me!” Lola was still lacing up her boots. She’d changed out of the dusty skirt and the old shirt of Cristóbal’s that she’d worn while they were on the road. Now she wore a fresh white blouse and a skirt of lilac blue. The color was echoed by the cornflowers she had picked from the edge of the field and tucked into her hair.