Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(4)
Lighten up the reading. Now!
“But Sleeping Beauty will not for long be lacking her handsome, charming prince. The short period of discomfort is a very important part of your life journey from which you will return happier than you have ever been in your life.”
“And this?” Gunter jabbed at the reversed Tower that once again how turned up.
“A transformation. A redemption. The stakes are high. Where the journey is risky. But think grand. Because the lady’s reward is grand.”
There was still the Wheel of Fortune, reversed, to be addressed, but, insanely, Romy didn’t think the card applied to ether of those two. Aye, insanely, she felt it applied to her own circumstances. Foul forces out of control. She shivered. Could things be any worse?
Yes, Old Duke could die.
She wrapped up the reading with another toothy smile for, first, Irina, then Gunter, who was obviously in charge of the purse strings. “You two will find eternal bliss.” Certainly not together, if at all.
She held out her palm.
He rolled his eyes but dug out his wallet and slapped a couple of marks into her open hand.
After the couple departed – entertained sufficiently by her act, she could only hope – she flung back the faded, threadbare curtain.
Her grandfather propped himself up on both elbows. His eighty-year-old, bony frame once belonged to a strapping young man who had tamed horses and seduced maidens – both Romany and gadjis. But, at only nine, he had been just as skeletal, when he and his parents had fled the Great Irish Famine for the Continent, for Spain.
“Will ye look at this, Old Duke!” He had always been old to her – old and weathered and wise. Yet his still strong, craggy features indicated he must have once been irresistibly handsome. “Tis in the money, we are!”
Only with him did she lapse into Irish brogue. With his refusing to practice anything but his native Irish Gaelic, she had been forced to learn the languages of the various European countries in which they found themselves.
She fluidly spoke most of the Romance languages – French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and, of course, Romanian. Those had come naturally. Dutch, German, Polish, and Russian had come with a little difficulty, despite her father’s Slavic origins.
Old Duke closed his blue-veined hand over hers. “Put it away. A penny saved is a –”
“— is not much.”
He gripped her bone-thin wrist with surprising strength. His thick thatch of iron-gray coils tumbled over obdurate, rheumy eyes like water rushing over rocks. “Listen, granddaughter. The Irish pipes. I want to – ”
She sighed. “Old Duke, I dunna hear them.” These days, he so often lived in the past. Seeing and hearing what existed only in his clouded mind.
His gnarled hand swished the air in a frustrated gesture. “Nay, nay! Not the Irish pipes. I mean listen to me. Tis the Irish pipes I want to hear again. Tis home I want us to go. Home to Ireland.”
So, did she. Like most Irish Travellers, she wanted to make that trek up the holy mountain of Croagh-Patrick, where Saint Patrick had fasted for forty-four days. She needed most badly to repent her sins, which seemed to be escalating with each passing day.
Of course, Old Duke foolishly had marriage in mind for her. Her parents might have once contracted her in marriage to Giorgio, but Old Duke had always been set in taking her back to Ireland and the Ballinasloe Horse Fair and Festival, where Irish Travellers hoped to find good husbands for their daughters to carry on Gypsy traditions.
After all, the Travellers were the world’s most savvy horse dealers, and none would beat them at their game.
The way Old Duke described it, Ireland sounded like paradise. Especially when contrasted to the scheiss-smelling place they now inhabited. But escaping Marzahn with her grandfather in tow was about as likely to happen as one of Old Duke’s leprechauns arriving with a pot o’ gold, rather than the pot o’ scheiss that was the Gypsies relocation site.
Besides, how did one ever escape Hell’s hounds, whether those of the Nazis’ or of one’s own guilt?
§ CHAPTER TWO §
It was Octoberfest, though there was nothing to be festive about in Romy’s mind . . . except they were back. The wealthy Gadje couple from off the train a fortnight earlier. They picked their way through refuse toward Romy’s wagon.
The area’s grass had long before been trampled or grazed out by the wagons’ shires. Romy was feeding their own scrawny Gypsy Cob, Rainbow, the few bony scraps leftover from the last meal she had prepared, the day before. Or was it the day before that?
Much of the wealth of a Gypsy family was in the shires they owned and bred. No longer. At least, not in Germany.
And no longer were the Gypsy men robust. No longer were they wild and free. Where in years before the brawny Gypsy men – in loose fitting shirts, wide belts, baggy pants, and knee-high boots – had trained their horses, they now were forced to work at the nearby quarry in garb that better belonged on scarecrows.
And the once swaggering Giorgio was scarecrow thin. At fourteen. she had been betrothed to him. But after that one street raid . . . well, her value as a bride had plummeted in his parents’ eyes.
She straightened from resting against the vardo’s large, iron-clad spoke wheel. She wiped her dirty hands on her once exuberantly colored skirt and tugged close her old purple cardigan. The chunky knit was irreparably snagged and rifted.