Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves
Parris Afton Bonds
For my precious Gypsy friend and psychic,
Paula Mullins
§ CHAPTER ONE §
The Magician, the Emperor, the High Priestess – two males and a solitary female.
And if she turned over the next Tarot card, she invariably would find Death waiting. What were the odds?
In one swipe from the table, with its chest of drawers built beneath, the Irish Traveller’s stubby fingers whisked the worn-out cards onto the vardo’s frayed carpet.
Since the forced relocation two years before, those four cards had shown up time and again in spreads Romy Sonnenschein idly laid out during periods of boredom.
Not that the twenty-year-old gave any credence either to synchronicity or to Tarot cards. Her fabricated readings were merely a means of earning a living for her and Old Duke, her only family now.
Well, almost. There remained her twin, whose existence would mean a lifetime of penitence for her. But, God have mercy, surely, a person was not the sum total of their worst crime.
Two weeks prior to the 1936 summer Olympics, in anticipation of the 700th anniversary of Berlin, the Nazi’s had interned Gypsies away from visitor’s eyes. She had maneuvered the one-horse drawn wagon – a work of art, if she said so herself – as close as possible to the camp entrance and train tracks.
Within the hour, she had let down the rainbow arc of steps leading to her vardo’s double doors. Above, the sign in German she had laboriously painted hung from the wagon’s bowed roof:
“Psychic * Tarot”
with a moon and stars underneath, and then below them,
“The Cards Know All”
The few curious, venturing into the Gypsy campsite from the comfort of their pristine train compartments during layovers, rarely crossed her palm with enough Reichsmarks to keep food on the vardo’s table, much less finance an escape for her and Old Duke back to his native Ireland.
That lush and beguilingly beautiful Eire that Marmaduke recalled from his Irish Traveller childhood was a far cry from the cramped and shite-smelling 130-wagon encampment to which she and her grandfather were confined.
The concentration camp was wedged between Marzahn’s railroad tracks and the borough’s sewage dump that served nearby Berlin. Three rusty, stingy pumps provided water for the thousand or so Gypsies.
So much for hope of a bath, much less washing the crockery. Romani never shared cups, plates or even cutlery – not even with their own family, and then all these items were washed in running water only.
Due to their strict hygiene rules and more frequent bathing, Gypsies had avoided the medieval periodic plagues, and, mayhap, that was why they were said to be in league with the Devil and had earned the reputation for occult powers.
One never looked a Gypsy in the eye for fear of that occult power of hypnotism, and Romy employed that stare of supposedly magical power – or tried to – whenever backed into a corner.
All over Germany, both local citizens and local police detachments had begun forcing Roma into municipal camps. The police in Bavaria, as she unfortunately had experienced, had maintained a central registry of Roma as early as 1899.
This concentration camp was not one in the official political sense. The encampment lacked a barbed wire fence and was not administered by the Schutzstaffe, the elite guard of the Nazi party – yet.
Nevertheless, the Nazi camp’s one-thousand undesirables were entirely at the mercy of the despotic uniformed guards and their dogs, restricting free movement into and out of the camp.
Those mastiffs. They struck a paralyzing fear in her that went back to her and her brother Luca’s arrest, five years before. Back to the Angel of Death, the ghoulish Dr. Pfister, a pioneer in twin research at Sachsenhausen.
The Gypsies’ own mangy curs were yapping now, signaling the approach of visitors. “Romy,” her grandfather rasped in his snippy, snappy brogue, “gadje, they are coming!”
At the back of the hooped-ceiling vardo, behind its curtained partition, he lay in his bunk, where he had been napping. Since vardos travelled on a tarmac road’s left side, shuttered windows on the vardo’s left side, as well as, at the wagon’s rear, gave view to the beaten down path leading from the train tracks to the assortment of gaily painted wagons.
Or, at least, they once had been gaily painted.
“Aye, Old Duke!” Quickly, she dropped to her knees and gathered the scattered cards where they mingled on the carpet with a chicken bone, a discarded wad of hair tugged from her hair brush, and, hurrah, her prized guitar pick.
She had been searching for it, as well as, her well-thumbed tambourine. They had landed beneath the small coal-burning, cast-iron cooking stove.
“You open for business?” a male’s precise and smooth-as-silk voice called out.
She looked over her shoulder and eyed, standing in the double-wide doorway, a man of medium height and a young woman, both smartly turned out.
Realizing she had her arseside to the pair, Romy leaped to her feet, her red-and-maroon flounced skirt swishing about her clunky boots. With an upraised arm, her multitude of cheap bracelets clinking hollowly, she beckoned them inside. “Willkommen!”
Dressed in a steel gray suit, the handsome man stepped aside for the nubile goddess to enter and, doffing his silvery felt fedora, followed her.