The Snow Gypsy(9)
By this evening they would all be in Provence. After ten days on the road, Lola was more than ready. Unlike her fellow travelers, she was not used to the nomadic life. She and Cristóbal had always been house dwellers, not wanderers. In Granada there were both kinds. The Gypsy population waxed and waned like the moon. Cristóbal didn’t own a proper vardo, like the carved beauties the others in their party possessed—he’d had to fashion one from a wagon borrowed from Antonio Lopez, the mule man. He’d made a roof from bent bamboo and waxed canvas. It leaked a little in the rain, but he’d convinced her it would last for the few weeks they would be away.
She felt the breeze as she stirred up the embers of the fire. Cristóbal would need strong coffee to rouse him from the wine-soaked slumber he had fallen into last night after accompanying her on the guitar. She had danced beneath the stars for the others in the forest clearing, using a wooden board to stamp out the palos. It hadn’t been easy, performing on a dance floor no wider than her shawl, but it had been good practice for the days ahead.
She wondered what they would be like—these foreign Gypsies. French, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish. Cristóbal, who had been to Les Saintes-Maries back in the thirties, had told her that although they all shared the same kawlo rat, she would see many differences between her own people and those from other lands—not just in appearance but in character.
He had said all this as a preamble to advising on the kind of man she should choose as a husband. He seemed obsessed with the business of finding her a mate. It was a side of family life she loathed, this attitude of Gypsy men toward single female relatives of childbearing age. It was so controlling. So patronizing. She reminded him that she had walked across a snow-covered mountain range at fourteen years old with a newborn baby and only a few goats to keep the pair of them from starving to death. If she could survive that, she could survive anything life might throw at her—and she didn’t need any man mapping out her future.
“Mama!” Nieve appeared beside her, barefoot and rubbing sleep from her eyes. “What’s for breakfast?”
“Mushroom tortilla,” Lola replied. “And you’re picking the mushrooms.” She smiled at Nieve’s downturned mouth. “I’ll buy you hair ribbons at the fiesta if you can find more than ten.”
“How will I know when I get to ten?”
“You can count them on your fingers, like I showed you.”
The child examined her hands, a frown wrinkling the smooth skin between her eyebrows.
“One, two, three, four . . . ,” Lola began, starting with the thumb of her left hand.
“Five, six . . . ten!” Nieve held up all her fingers at once, a cheeky grin lighting up her face.
Lola rolled her eyes as she handed her a basket. “Put your boots on!” she called out. But Nieve had already vanished, fairylike, into the trees.
A sudden gust of wind rustled the leaves. Lola shivered, pulling her shawl tighter. It wasn’t the cold, not really. More like an irrational twinge of foreboding. It was only in the past few months that she had allowed Nieve to go anywhere on her own. Cristóbal’s children had been teasing their cousin about being a mama’s girl. And Cristóbal himself had told Lola it was high time she gave the child a bit of freedom. But Lola couldn’t help the creeping feeling of unease that came over her whenever Nieve went off alone. It was the fear of losing her. Suddenly and without warning. The way she’d lost her brother and her mother.
Rose awoke to the aroma of coffee. A tray had been placed on the minuscule table beneath the train window. The steam from the spout of the silver pot had formed a trickle of moisture on the glass. She wondered how she hadn’t heard the steward bring it in—or sensed the change in the light when he’d pulled up the blind. She hadn’t expected to sleep so deeply.
She propped herself up on one elbow and craned her neck. Outside was a swirling landscape of lilac, gold, and green. The wind rippling through fields of sunbaked lavender. She retrieved her wristwatch from the narrow shelf beside her bed. In just under an hour, the train would reach Avignon. Then she would board another train for Arles. After that a bus would take her the short distance to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
She’d never slept on a train before. In years gone by, she would have broken up a journey like this in Paris. But the thought of spending even a single night in the city where her aunt and uncle had lived—and where her father had died—was utterly unbearable.
She’d pulled down the blind as soon as she boarded the train in Calais. It was the only way to avoid glimpses of places that would remind her of happier times, when she and her parents and Nathan would picnic in the Bois de Boulogne or take a boat trip down the Seine on their annual visit to Aunt Isabelle and Uncle Maurice.
From the deck of the ferry, France had looked as gray and ravaged as London. Stepping off the boat onto French soil, she had felt like a mourner arriving at a funeral. She’d climbed onto the train that would take her south, weighed down by the thought of the hundreds of Jewish families who had been forced into cattle wagons to travel in the opposite direction, to the death camps. People like her aunt and uncle. People like herself.
But here in Provence, it was as if the war had never happened. The fields of lavender and sunflowers rolling past the train window were broken only by lines of poplar trees and the odd red-tiled farmhouse. There were no bombed-out buildings. No sense of decay. It was a landscape that looked timeless.