Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(2)
The young, pretty woman wore a stylishly red wrap-around dress and platform heels. A saucy red beret topped her frost-blonde hair. She wrinkled her pert nose at the rank smell of Romy’s cooked cabbage rolls that pervaded the space, drafty though it was.
“May you be lucky,” Romy said in the traditional Romany greeting and donned a welcoming, wide-toothed smile.
Since being forced into the camp, she had seen her resource of customers steadily dwindle. She gestured to the built-in bench seats at either side of the table and took up the wobbly, spooled-back chair between them.
She shuffled the cards. A childish habit of needing to go first, since she had been second by a mere matter of minutes. But the habit also bought time to get out of the way of herself. “Which of you is the inquirer?”
From behind the emerald-green, velveteen curtain, her grandfather would choose that time to hack up phlegm.
She silently groaned. The sound could only mean more washing of bedclothing, when there was already so little water available at the camp. Luckily, she wasn’t fixated on dust, food crumbs, mud, and clutter.
The young woman to her left arched a perfectly delineated, brown-penciled brow toward the curtain. Then her rouged lips curved into a meant-to-please smile for the golden-hair, slender god across from her.
Granted, the rather ragged dueling scar, the Schmisse, a badge of honor, diagonally bisecting his right cheek, added to his Teutonic good looks.
Dueling scars had been popular amongst the upper-class Germans involved in fencing, but after German military laws banned duels of honor following World War I, the dueling practice had subsided until 1933, when the Nazi government legalized the practice once more.
Romy’s Gypsy blood could relate to the cult. Sure, it was important to flaunt one's dueling prowess, but it was also important to flaunt that one was capable of taking the wound that was inflicted.
And wasn’t that just like the Aryan arrogance, to assume courage meant facing off with an opponent who played by the same rules – and at any point could call a time out?
“My grandfather, he is ailing” she apologized. She could have said her grandfather was on fire, and the polished princess on her left would have registered the same indifferent reaction.
Old Duke was ailing body and soul. The Irish Traveller’s spirit was ailing for his Shamrock Isle.
The young woman began removing her white kid gloves. Blimey! White kid gloves, would ye believe? “You go first, Gunter,” she told her companion with a loving smile.
Romy set the deck in front of him. “Shuffle, if you will, and cut the deck into three piles.”
True Gypsies, Romany folk and Irish Travellers, were adept at storytelling. For a thousand years, although most of the Gypsy clans could neither read nor write, they had kept the history records of their odyssey by word of mouth.
So, she knew she had a fifty-fifty chance of getting the card reading right. If need be, she could throw in a wee elaboration.
Aye, elaborate she could. A lifetime – well, for nearly two decades – she had devoted to spinning all sorts of plausible stories. Legends, myths, fairytales, and outright lies – and in a variety of languages, at which she was adept, even the fading Gaelic language. Stories of faeries and dragons and unicorns and leprechauns – and, of course, the story of the Great Disappearing.
In her brief life alone, it had been a tough time to be an outsider across Spain, France, and central Europe; to be a threat to orderly, bourgeois society. Thousands of nomads had disappeared as garden or cannon fodder.
She cocked her head to the right, a habitual gesture, to better hear the Aryan aristocrat.
He blinked, his intelligent gray eyes adjusting to the diminished light filtering from the wagon’s dust-coated pair of windowpanes. His gaze flitted over the scarlet scarf she used as a cummerbund, taking in, it seemed with mild surprise, her blue eyes and butterscotch-colored ringlets escaping from beneath the purple paisley diklo, the head scarf, knotted at her nape.
Traditionally, only married women wore the head scarf; but then, she had never been the average Gypsy.
Even her hair coloring was different. “Burnt sugar” her grandfather would gibe, when describing her. Because, of course, she burnt nearly everything she cooked. Still, the Irish Travellers of Ireland were noted for their fair colored beauty.
Regrettably, Romy’s skin was neither fair – mottled with freckles, as had been her high-spirited, half-Spanish mother’s – nor was she a beauty, not with her dreadfully gaping front teeth. At least, she was no beauty, as far as she was concerned. And certainly not when matched against the healthy, well-honed beauty seated on her left.
“What is it you want to know?” Romy asked, suiting her speech to the Germanic ones of her customers.
To her right, the man shrugged shoulders made even wider by the cut and padding of his expensive suit. “You are the fortune teller. You tell me what I want to know.”
Arsehole. “The cards will tell you, not what you want to know, but what you need to know.” She crimped a perfunctory smile. “Go ahead, shuffle.”
The man shifted a warm, reassuring smile to the woman across from him, before dexterously shuffling and dividing the deck twice into three piles.
So, was it about the young woman’s affections the man really wanted to inquire? Romy briefly pondered this, then she gathered up his three card piles.
No, he was sure of his partner. He was here because she had wanted to come. His body posture, relaxed and in charge, confirmed that. Still, the impatient tattoo of his fingers on the cigarette-burned tabletop indicated he was both concerned and alert about something other than the present excursion to the Gypsy encampment would seem to dictate.