Mulengro, page 4
Janfri’s eyebrows lifted quizzically. It was odd that a Rom would wear black for it was considered a very prikaza color. Very unlucky. Except for drabarne—those who professed to be magicians. It was also curious that the Rom was a stranger. It was an accepted tradition that any Rom entering an area already claimed by a kumpania reported his presence to its rom baro as soon as he arrived. But times were changing, for the Rom as well as for the Gaje. Matters of tradition were not always so judiciously adhered to as they had been in the old days.
“A stranger in black,” he said, “does not necessarily have anything to do with draba.”
Big George leaned ponderously forward, a grim expression on his face. “Romano Yera died yesterday evening. His body was found by the shangle before midnight and they took it away to their police building downtown. What Joji saw was Romano’s mulo, o Boshbaro. Romano’s ghost walked last night in the company of a man wearing black.”
Black. Like the paint of the patrin on the wall of his house before it burned down. Beside him, Yojo drew in a sharp breath. The skin prickled at the nape of Janfri’s neck.
“Did . . . did Joji speak to them?” he asked finally.
Big George nodded. “But they passed him in silence. The stranger was a Rom—-Joji is sure of that—a scarred Rom with eyes like smoke, o Boshbaro. There was death in his eyes.”
“Joji . . . ?”
“Told me this before he left town,” Big George said. “Now tell me. You know both worlds, o Boshbaro—ours and that of the Gaje. What does this mean?”
“Prikaza,” Janfri said softly. “Very bad prikaza, Big George.”
The rom baro nodded. “So tonight I will call a meeting of the kris and we will discuss this thing. You will come?”
“Of course.”
“Then think on this, o Boshbaro, before you speak to the elders tonight: What is it that makes you and Romano like two beads on the same necklace?”
The prickling of Janfri’s skin changed to a stab of fear that traveled down his spine. He knew what Big George spoke of. The marhime patrin. The rom baro would not speak of it aloud because he knew of no reason that Janfri should be outcast. But someone thought there was good reason and Big George was emphasizing that Janfri should have an answer as to why he and Romano had been singled out before the kris met tonight.
“I will do that,” he said, rising from his chair. Yojo followed suit.
“Go with God,” Big George said.
Janfri nodded wearily. “Stay with God,” he replied.
Together he and Yojo left Big George’s tsera and returned to Yojo’s car. The black Lincoln was a twin to the rom baro ‘s dark green vehicle, though in slightly better shape. It, at least, still had both rear quarter panels.
“So,” Janfri said as he leaned his head back against the seat. “Do you still want to see me married to your daughter?”
“Why not?” Yojo replied. The thin smile that touched his lips was real, but there was still a subdued air about him. “You have done nothing wrong. Someone is working magic against you, prala—is this then your fault?”
Janfri sighed. “I don’t even believe in draba,” he said.
The smile left Yojo’s face. “Then you had better learn to,” he said grimly, “or it will be your mulo that some poor Rom will see in the company of this man in black.”
four
Rideau Ferry is a small collection of houses clustered on either side of the narrows that separates the Lower Rideau Lake from the Big Rideau. The village was originally called Oliver’s Landing, after Captain Oliver who ran the ferry service across the lake during the early 1800’s. Captain Oliver and his wife lived very well, the ferry service proving to be quite lucrative even if the good Captain did refuse to make night crossings. Travelers arriving too late to cross the lake were boarded in the Olivers’ cabin. Curiously enough, although the Captain said he took them over at first light the following morning, overnight guests were never seen again. It wasn’t until years later that workmen demolishing the old cabin discovered the grisly remains of numerous human skeletons buried under the cabin’s earthen floor and the true source of the Olivers’ wealth was explained. The residents of the village, needless to say, were quick to change the landing’s name to the one it presently bears.
The village lies about midway between Perth and Lombardy, approximately an hour’s drive southwest of Ottawa, and boasts little more than a small general store, two marinas, a motel and the Rideau Ferry Inn by way of commercial amenities. A highway now crosses the lake where in earlier time wagons and travelers—or at least those that arrived when there was still plenty of daylight—were ferried across. Most of the properties along the shorefront are houses or winterized cottages, the latter insulated as an afterthought and usually heated electrically.
The house that Ola Faher was renting was one of those. It had the look of a red-brick English cottage, with broad lawns, front and back, and a long pier going out into the lake. A tall cedar hedge was sufficient to cut down the noise of the highway that ran along the embankment to the east side of the property and, while the sound that traveled across the water from boaters in summer could be irritating, it was generally a quiet retreat, perfect for Ola’s purposes. The odd strains of the jazz bands that played in the Inn across the highway on Saturday night were more soothing than disturbing, though she could have lived without the rock bands that played there most of the week.
On the day following the murder of Romano Yera, Ola was drowsing in a deck chair on the pier. The afternoon was drawing to a close and when a sweep of heavy stratocumulus clouds moved across the sky to hide the westering sun, she packed up her chair and carried it back to the house. Though the air was still warm, something about the cloud covering as it put to bed the sun reminded her of the uneasy premonitions and visions that had been troubling her for the past few days. She leaned the deck chair against the side of the immense glassed-in porch that took up the whole south side of the house facing the lake, and went inside. There she wandered from room to room in the tiny cottage, trailing her hand along the mantelpiece and the back of the couch. She was restless and couldn’t relax. At length she returned to the porch and stared off across the lake.
She was a striking woman in her mid-thirties, with light brown skin and very dark eyes. She had taken to wearing her hair in beaded braids and at first glance most people decided that she was a black of African descent. It as a misconception that she tended to promote because it was still easier to be a black in Canadian society than it was to be a Gypsy. Especially for one of her vocation.
The Rom are rarely a solitary people. Though they value their privacy, even in the middle of a crowded tsera, they do not like to be far from their own people. But Ola was like Janfri Yayal in some ways—caught between maintaining her self-image as a Gypsy, but needing the Gaje world for the freedom it gave her. There was nothing romantic, to her way of thinking, about the poverty that most Gypsies were forced to live in because they could not adjust their lifestyle to that of the marhime Gaje from whom all Rom were forced to make their living. That was why the Gaje were on this world—to support the Rom.
There is an old Gypsy folktale that the Rom like to tell. It dates from when they first entered Europe in the late 1300’s and pretended that they were Egyptians on a pilgrimage to the holy places of Europe. It goes like this:
When Jesus was going to be crucified, a Rom blacksmith who was a slave was ordered by the Roman soldiers to make four nails. There was to be one nail for each hand, one for the feet, and one for the condemned man’s heart. The Rom stalled and stalled until the soldiers whipped him. Then he made the four nails. He called to God and asked Him to help the Rom, but God’s only reply was tears and the Rom cried with him. When he was to deliver the nails, he swallowed one of them and told the soldiers he had lost it. God, when he saw that the Rom had swallowed the nail meant for Jesus’ heart, said: “Rom, you are free to go and travel anywhere. You can steal your food and take what you need to live.” And that, the old Rom relating the tale would say with satisfaction, is why Gypsies travel and why they steal.
Still, the Rom stole less than the Gaje believed they did, and never for a profit. A chicken running loose might end up in a Rom stew-pot. Firewood was there for the taking, as was grazing. This was not theft, the Rom averred, for how could anyone claim they owned a forest or a field? But while they might have survived so in the old days, augmenting their incomes with metalwork, horse-trading, basketry, fortune-telling and even begging, those options were no longer open to them. Even the Rom no longer kept horses, but drove in cars like they were Gaje. Baskets made in the Far East were far cheaper to import and sell in North America than buying them from a Gypsy would be. There were shops that had the equipment to do automobile work far more cheaply and efficiently than ever a Rom could. Dukkerin, or fortune-telling, was outlawed in most places—at least when practiced by Gypsies.
So the Rom lived in poverty, subsisting by begging and welfare and the odd petty fraud or theft. They could not work at a Gaje job, nine to five, because that would put them into too much contact with Gaje and therefore label them marhime. But Ola could not countenance the poverty. She had seen her mother waste away, impoverished and alone except for her, and had vowed that it would not happen to her. She didn’t want wealth, nor worldly possessions. Merely the freedom to live in a clean environment, without harassment.
Her trade was dukkerin, but fortune-telling on a far different scale than that traditionally practiced by Gypsy women when they could. Ola’s dukkerin reached the Gaje public by way of books that were a synthesis of practicalities and old Gypsy lore. She never sold the secrets of her people, not the true secrets, only the common-sense cures such as honey or honeysuckle berries for a canker in the mouth, or linseed tea to give an expectant mother an easy birth. The books were couched in a plainspoken, but mystical voice that was a combination of her own natural speech and the input of her collaborator Jeff Owen, who actually put the material on paper for her.
The Rom tell no fortunes for each other. They maintain their mystique as a defense against the Gaje—such as in tales of Gypsy magic and curses—but do not believe in magic themselves, or at least will rarely claim to. But in the paradoxical way of the Rom, they still knew it existed. That it was real. And that was Ola’s greatest barrier between her own people and herself. It ran deeper than her aversion to the poverty that her people allowed themselves to live in. Ola was a true drabarni—a woman who worked magic as well as medicine. Wherever she lived for some time, she gained control over her environment. It took time to learn the true names— even of inanimate objects—but once she did, they were hers to command. Even Gaje objects. Having lived in this cottage for the better part of a year, she could turn the lights on and off with a thought. The television could show her images as disparate as her own mind was capable of conceiving, even events that were actually transpiring a great distance from where she lived. Animals found human voices and conversed with her.
Such a person was not welcome in the tsera of the Rom. Nor accepted by the Gaje unless one was clever. Unless one spoke of the “potential within us all which I have realized” and other such phrases that Jeff was so capable of composing. But even Jeff was uncomfortable in her presence—for all that he knew nothing of what she truly was. So she lived in retreats such as this cottage in Rideau Ferry, lived here until the talk began again and she must move on. But at least no one knew her for a Rom. She was “that pretty black lady”—a curiosity still in such out-of-the-way places in the Ottawa Valley, but a known quantity. Not a Gypsy who the country folk thought they knew all too well from the stories their parents and grand-parents had handed down of when the kumpaniyi still traveled by wagon from town to town.
She knew there had to be another way to live, a way that harmonized her straddling of the two worlds, but to this date she hadn’t found it—at least not to her satisfaction. Instead she lived day by day, as a Rom will, while Jeff and their agent planned their career with this next book, and those appearances to promote the last one. Nothing to put her too much in the public eye—she was adamant on that count—but enough so that she was known to those who needed books such as the ones she and Jeff produced. Enough so that Kerio Rouge, whose mother was a tribeswoman from Gabon and whose father was a Parisian chemist, was looked to for advice and comfort.
Perhaps she truly helped some. She hoped so. The fan mail said as much, though sometimes there were other letters, filled with so much hate that she wondered how a man, Gaje or Rom, could exist with such an emotion festering inside of him. Such people who needed help the most were never the ones who sought it. But the ones she did help . . . they could be kind with their letters of thanks. For while she never told the true Romany secrets, she never lied either.
So here she was, she thought as she looked out over the darkening lake. Troubled, and alone. With foreknowledge, but unable to offer it to those who needed it this time. She had seen, in dreams and visions, Rom in danger. She knew where they were and who it touched most gravely. What it was that stalked them was not so clear. She only knew that . . . something did.
“Go to them,” a low-pitched gravelly voice said from behind her.
She turned to see the calico tomcat she called Boboko watching her with his impenetrable gaze. She had inherited him with the cottage and knew his true name, but it was never spoken between them. She wasn’t even sure if Boboko actually spoke—she’d warned him never to speak when anyone else was present—or if she merely heard the sounds that issued from his mouth as words. If she had been a Gaji, she would have gone into analysis by now.
“I can’t,” she said.
Boboko licked nonchalantly at a fat paw before replying. “Not can’t,” he said. “Won’t.”
The timbre of his voice was a pleasant tickle in her ear. Once she’d come to puberty and understood that animals would gain speech around her, she soon learned which voices she could abide and which she couldn’t. Both a budgie and a small lapdog she’d tried to keep as companions had maddened her with the shrill pitch of their voices. A big lab had almost deafened her. Boboko was infinitely superior, even if he tended to play on his own Gypsylike mystique and philosophize too much.
“You know,” she said, turning back to the window, “that for a Rom to share her dook with another Rom is almost marhime.”
Boboko grinned like the cat in a Gaje storybook that Jeff had loaned her once telling of a young girl’s adventures after she fell down a rabbithole.
“Almost is not quite the same as certain,” the cat replied.
“They must come to me. Then, if there is marhime to be laid, it will be with them, not with me.”
“You might as well be marhime as it is—considering the way you’re living now. By yourself. Alone.”
“I have you,” Ola said. She had to smile at his infernal logic. Then the seriousness of what they were discussing returned to her and the gentle look that the smile had brought to her features was erased by a thoughtful frown.
“Can you stop any further deaths?” the cat asked.
“Only if they listen to me.”
“And will they listen to you?”
Ola shook her head slowly.
“Bater,” Boboko purred. So be it. He enjoyed using Romany words with her, sometimes pretending he knew them long before she’d taught them to him.
Ola nodded. “They must come to me,” she repeated. But the truth of the statement did nothing to ease her pain. At length she turned from the window and went into the kitchen to begin their supper. Though she wasn’t hungry herself, she knew that Boboko never lost his appetite. To him, human concerns were almost as indecipherable as Gaje ones were to her.
five
Try as he might, Tom Shaw couldn’t shake his memories of the previous night. By the time he finally got home, after spending the better part of an hour trying to track down the man he knew as John Owczarek, his wife Gillian was already asleep. He had put away his guitar—he and John had been on their way home from a rehearsal at Doug Martin’s when they’d spotted the fire—and undressed down to his boxer shorts before he realized that he wasn’t going to be able to sleep tonight. At least not right away. Not with what he had on his mind. He could understand John’s shock at the loss of his home, but what baffled him was the sheer strangeness he’d sensed in his friend—a distancing from the event, a withdrawal into himself, a change in him until the man looking back at Tom was a complete stranger who merely happened to bear a very strong resemblance to the man he’d known.
There is no John Owczarek.
What the hell was that supposed to mean? And why had John just taken off like that? He’d been stunned—that was natural. But he hadn’t even approached the police and identified himself as the owner of the house. He’d just stood there staring at the fire as though the building that the flames were devouring belonged to someone else. It had been spooky and that feeling merely intensified when Tom woke the next morning and tried calling around to find John.
Doug had heard about the fire but had not known it was John’s house. Phillip Baker, who was producing the new album that they’d been rehearsing for last night, hadn’t heard the news and asked Tom to call him back once he’d gotten in touch with John. Angie Kelly, John’s agent, was out of town until the weekend. With his finger poised on the rotary dial to make his fourth call, Tom suddenly realized that he didn’t know who else to try. He’d known John for three years, become rather good friends with him during the past eight months or so, but it occurred to him now that he really didn’t know very much about the man at all. The blank wall he’d abruptly run up against brought the knowledge home like the slam of a door closing in his face. It was as though—
There is no John Owczarek.
Jesus, he thought as John’s words came back to haunt him. He ticked off what he did know. John was a brilliant musician—especially when performing the folk music of his native Hungary. Or at least Tom assumed he was of Hungarian descent. John had never said where he was from and now that Tom thought of it, there was a darker cast to his complexion than you might normally find in someone originating in one of the Slavic countries. He had an almost mid-Eastern set to his features as well. Tom shook his head. John had kept his distance in some ways, but not so you’d think he was standoffish. His humors were broad and sudden. His sorrows vast—especially when he played pianissimo, with his violin tucked under his chin, his eyes shut tight, head cocked to one side, the whole of his body as still as an inheld breath except for the slow graceful sweep of his bow arm. He never talked politics or religion, liked spicy foods . . .
