27.

28 June, 8:10 PM, near Spisz

The night sky was clear, and thousands of stars came out, strewn across the firmament like fluorescent sand. So far away from everywhere, the firmament did not have to compete with man-made light. Jake couldn’t remember the heavens so breathtaking since holidaying in the countryside as a child.

For half an hour at dusk, children would drag fallen tree branches from the forest beyond the edge of the field, and now a large bonfire raged in the middle of the tabor circle, its flames, twice as high as the people standing around, crackling and hissing, spewing sparks and shooting skywards to lick the darkness above the camp.

Women were cooking dinner, some around smaller fires, others on portable gas stoves. The men sat around in small groups talking and lighting up. A few have already brought out instruments and an improvised ensemble of two guitars, two violins, an accordion and a drum was playing the jigs, broken up with slower, wistful melodies. And the children, as children everywhere do, ran around, danced to the music, and played their games.

“A genuine Romani experience for you,” Marina said. She was standing next to him, looking at the big fire. The air has cooled down now, and they only dressed for a day trip, but the fire kept them warm even afar. “Not like your average Gypsy band at some fake traditional restaurant in Czernograd.”

“Thanks for bringing me here,” Jake said, the flames dancing in his eyes. He allowed himself to be take away by the sounds and the sights, the people and the ambiance. Tonight, for one blessed moment, the reality receded into the shadows and there was only the sky above, the fire below, and the protective circle around him and Marina, holding the night at bay.

Jake was fascinated by the bonfire. When he was little, he remembered going up for holidays with his family to upstate Vermont, near the Canadian border, where the locals would build fires almost every night during summer and sizzle sausages and bake potatoes in the ashes. Jake could sit in front of a fire for hours, hypnotised by the flame, poking it with stick, liberating the bursts of sparks. For some reason that he couldn’t recall anymore, they stopped going up north when he was about seven or eight, and all the future family holidays tended to be more and more removed from nature. He has missed fire.

Entranced, he did not hear when a shadow crept up to Marina’s side and whispered something in her ear. He only snapped out when she repeated his name for the second or third time.

“Someone wants to see you,” she said.

Then she led him by the hand towards an old wagon, plainer and less assuming than that of Nicu’s, but in some way he couldn’t quite put into words, more alive, as if the carved wood was breathing and a heart at its centre beating slowly. The wagon seemed to be sucking in the light and radiating something more ancient and powerful than any of the other home on wheels, some scent at once familiar and exotic, some warmth of a different kind than that of the bonfire. Jake shivered, suddenly feeling off-balance, the atmosphere of this strange place getting to him all too easily. It must have been the fire, the light, the heat.

They came up to the back of the wagon and up a few wooden steps. Marina knocked on the door while he stood two steps below her, unsettled and intrigued.

She did not wait for an invitation to come; instead opened the door, which made a tiny creaking noise, and led Jake in, from the darkness outside into the dusk within.

They stood in a tiny space, like a waiting room, in front of a drawn curtain of heavy and ornate fabric, with a musky smell of the age and a faint gleam of silver and golden threads woven into the elaborate pattern of swirling wines and branches and leaves.

An old woman’s rasping voice, almost a whisper, drifted from behind the curtain.

Jake wanted to say something, but it was almost as if Marina sensed this and squeezed his hand while with the other one she parted the fabric and led them through.

He had difficulty adjusting his sight. A solitary candle on a small round table before them cast a small, pale radius of light that left most of the interior in the shadows.

The voice spoke again, a short command.

Marina took the candle in its holder and with the light in front of her led Jake around the table, towards the back of the wagon. There was another piece of fabric, lighter and flimsier than the first, and she let go of his hand to part it for them.

He saw a small four poster bed against the wall, its muslin curtains drawn back to reveal a bundle, half-sitting, propped up against large pillows and covered almost to the neck with a quilt. A small head, dark and deeply lined like a dried fruit peered at them from underneath a colourful headscarf.

Marina passed the candle holder to Jake and with light steps approached the bed. She knelt down by the side of it and said something in her father’s tongue. A hand, as shriveled up as the rest of the body, slowly appeared from under the quilt, and Marina cupped it gently in her own hands, kissing it like somebody might kiss a relic, a hand of a long gone yet powerful saint.

She stood up and turned to Jake. “This is Rawnie Rina, my father’s father’s mother,” she said, a voice somewhere halfway between a whisper and silence. “Rawnie, means ‘great lady’. She is old – very old. And she wanted to meet you.”

“What am I supposed to do?” he asked, not certain if the correct protocol required of him a similar show of respect.

The woman said something, and Mariana translated. “She wants you to sit by the side of the bed. Pull up that small seat,” she pointed to a low, three-legged stool by the wall.

Jake did as instructed. Rawnie Rina turned her face towards him and fixed him with her gaze. Age has not clouded her eyes; they seemed to burn with their own inner light. Or maybe it’s just the candle reflecting and your imagination doing the rest, Jake thought.

“She is ancient,” Marina said, standing somewhere behind him, “over a hundred years old, but no one knows exactly. Maybe not even her. But she remembers the old times, when the... forces were stronger, and many creatures walked this land that today are just pale shadows of their ancestors. She is a wise woman; we call them Chovihani, from a line of wise women that goes back... well, longer than family storytellers can tell. She’s one of the wisest anyone can remember, and she still looks after our clan... and the clan after her.”

It was a strange sensation listening to Marina, the carefree, modern, liberated Marina, the Marina of the university degree in English literature, the translator and the guide to business sharks and the pirates of globalisation, the twenty-first century Marina of short skirts, long nights and open mind, talk in this hushed tone of reverence, as if she was sharing her faith with a group of pilgrims in the holy of the holies.

“She says, welcome home,” Marina translated.

They are possessive, those people around here, Jake thought, ever ready to claim you as one of them. Maybe they just like reassuring themselves this way that they a part of the normal world, too.

“Thank you,” he said. “It’s good to be... here.”

“She says, it’s been too long.”

“Too long what?” he asked, noticing his own voice started matching her hushed tone.

“That’s what she says, it’s been too long. But you are here now,” Marina repeated, not very helpfully.

“Yes, I am,” he said, not knowing how to reply to this ancient woman. He wondered if she really knew why she wanted to see him and what she was trying to talk to him about.

“She wants you to give her your hand.”

He glanced over his shoulder for confirmation. Marina nodded.

Jake leaned forward on the stool and extended his right hand. He placed it at the edge of the bed and waited, unsure how to proceed. Slowly, like a snake cautiously emerging from its lair, her hand crawled out from under the quilt, found his and covered it. Her skin felt like well-tanned old leather, and it felt warm. Dry and warm.

“She says she can feel it.”

This time he did not even ask for an explanation. But...

“Can you feel it?”

...he could. Or he thought he could. Maybe it was the air inside, stuffy and stale, and almost hot, or maybe it was this... atmosphere. The aura. Something old, and alien. Dislocating. Disconcerting. Not Kansas. But... he felt like the warmth was emanating from her hand, spreading its tendrils through his hand, up his arm, to the core, deep inside him.

“She wants to see you hand.”

She pulled his hand toward her. Jake couldn’t lean any more forward on the stool, so he slid down, onto his knees, his stomach touching the wooden frame of the bed. She held the palm of his hand inches away from her face, staring at it through the slits of half-closed eyes, slowly moving her nose around like she was trying to pick up a scent.

“She says you will know soon.”

Her eyes now completely shut.

“Then you will meet each other.”

Her hand, still holding up his, trembling slightly.

“There are great things you have to do in your future.”

The wood digging into his belly, making him feel almost nauseous.

“She gives you her blessing.”

The voice now less than a whisper.

“Have courage.”

A hand on his shoulder.

He shuddered with a shock of surprise. He did not hear Marina come up to him from behind.

“We should go now,” she said.

Jake stood up, unsteady, his head filled with fog, swimming in the musky smell, the old woman’s warmth still lingering underneath his skin. He could hear and feel blood pulsating in his ears, heart still racing from the jolt.

Marina knelt again by the side of the bed, kissed Rawnie Rina’s hand and tucked it back underneath the quilt. The old woman looked asleep, her eyes closed and lips slightly parted, very still, but the chest rising and falling with every shallow breath.

They came out of the wagon, onto the grass. The night should have felt warm, but Jake felt cold, as if he had just left a steam bathhouse to plunge into an icy pool. He suddenly felt ridiculous as if the bubble of magic or illusion, whatever you chose to call it, has burst on contact with the air outside, the solid air of the night. What the hell has just happened and why did he allow himself to get caught up in it? It was like something out of a B-grade story; the old Gypsy woman, the candlelight, the hypnotic voice, the words that could mean anything and nothing. He felt the urge to reach down to his pants and check if his wallet was still there, and just as soon as the thought crossed his mind he felt ashamed.

You had your palm read – or was it sensed? - by the clan’s matriarch, boyo, he though. Get a grip on yourself and tick that box on your list of exotic things to do overseas.

He took a deep breath.

“What the... what has happened there?” he said.

She took him by the hand and in silence led him away from the circle of the tabor, into the dark.

They stopped halfway toward the woods’ edge. In front of them the jagged contours of the tree line barely standing out, a shade denser, against the night sky; behind them the ring of vehicles, light from the bonfire seeping through the spaces between.

“I’m sorry if it... freaked you out,” she said, a step or two ahead of him, facing away.

He didn’t quite know what to say. “It was just a bit strange, I guess.”

“She’s very important to us all,” Marina said. “When they’re young, women aren’t important among our people, because they’re mahrime, you know...”

“Unclean,” he remember.

“Yes. But when they’re no longer tempting, when they no longer bleed, they start to get status. Particularly when they... know things... about the past and the future, about healing... about spirits. And she does. She did for decades. She’s been around forever.”

“So what does it all mean?” he said. “The things she said.”

“I don’t know,” Marina said. She turned back towards him. “She says things... She says things she sees... Sometimes I’m not sure that she knows what they mean. It’s like trying to retell a dream after you awake. Or trying to describe something that you’ve never seen before and don’t have the words to...”

“Well, that was first time anyone tried to read my palm,” he tried to crack a smile. Not that she would see it in this dark.

“Well, maybe it will all become clear,” she said. “Sometime... Maybe soon.”

Not much use in predicting the future, then, is it?

He started walking slowly, counterclockwise, one short step after another.

“Jesus.”

His legs connected with something solid his eyes did not pick up in front of him. Pain shot up from the toes of one foot and the knee of the other leg. Arms flaying for an uncertain second, he managed to steady himself and stay upright.

“You’re right?” he could hear Marina running towards him, her steps crushing twigs on the ground.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said through clenched teeth. “I think I’ve run into a stump or something.”

Jake took a few steps back. He still could not see clearly what it was, except that there was something there. Hindsight enhances the senses wonderfully.

Marina was now by his side. She took her phone out of her pocket and flicked the screen, turning it into a torch.

Jake’s first thought was that the stump was shaped funny. His second thought was that perhaps it wasn’t a stump. His third thought, which crossed the finish line only a fraction of a second behind his previous one, was that he was looking at a cross, a two branches really, roughly tied to form the familiar shape and planted into the ground. It was leaning slightly off the vertical, but that was probably not the original design but rather the result of the collision a few moments ago.

“Oh shit,” he whispered. “Are we camping next to a cemetery?”

It was the first thing that popped into his head. It would sort of make sense; Gypsies, cemeteries, all the cliched mumbo-jumbo. He didn’t know much about the Romani people, but he knew that many people out there in the countryside didn’t like having Gypsies as neighbours, even for a few days. The dead, on the other hand, were beyond caring and petty prejudices.

“No, not a cemetery,” said Marina. “It’s ours... It’s protection. Against werewolves. And other creatures.”

“You’re kidding me,” Jake said. He noticed that where the horizontal and the vertical of the cross were tied with what looked like a narrow leather strap, the juncture was over-woven with a long piece of a climbing wine.

“Hey, you’re in Ruthenia and Galicia now, aren’t you?” she said. Indeed he was, and now he recalled Deputy Inspector Milosz’s warning. Beware of Volvos. And beware of werewolves.

Marina turned off the light. “There are five of those put up in a circle beyond the circle of the tabor, before every nightfall. Like a pentagram of sorts. They are meant to protect from intruders. Including human ones.”

“Human ones?”

“People here are still superstitious, you know. Whatever works to keep them away,” she shrugged.

He came over to her side.

“No wonder you wanted to get away from it all,” he said.

She didn’t answer and he felt foolish.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to say... that you’ve run away... from your own people.”

“No, you’re right,” she lifted her gaze and looked him in the eyes. “It’s easier to get lost in a city. No need to put up crosses around you before the night falls.”

Jake put his hand on her forearm and squeezed gently.

“But I haven’t been running away,” she said. “You can’t. You can’t outrun your blood.”

He hesitated for a second but then leaned forward. His lips touched hers and they felt warm, too, but it was a different warmth, soft and wet, with a scent at once familiar and completely new.

“I’m sorry-“ he pulled back an inch, feeling her breath on his mouth and the lingering taste on his lips.

“Stop saying you’re sorry,” she whispered. “Stop being sorry. Just be.”

She brought her face towards his and parted his lips with hers. Her tongue slid inside his mouth like a sweet, sweet snake and he took her in and inhaled her, tasted her and danced with her. She put her arms around his neck and he put his hands around her waist, drawing her towards him. Her breasts pressed against his chest and he felt the heat again, spreading through his body, rising like a drowning tide towards his head.

A minute – or an hour – later, she pulled back and exhaled. Their foreheads and noses aligned and touched, as if they were both reflecting each other in a mirror. “We better get back,” she said. “Before they send out search parties looking for us.”

They walked back towards the tabor, slowly and reluctantly, and sneaked in back into the circle, the same way they left, through the gap next to Rawnie Rina’s wagon. Like thieves, they made sure no one saw them return from. The music was still playing, but slower and quieter, the last of the food was being eaten, and the languid conversations continued to meander around the fire, now glowing rather than burning fiercely like before.

Uncle Nicu was sitting outside his wagon, smoking a long pipe, talking with a few other men, one of them his cousin that Jake got introduced to before.

“Rawnie Rina wanted to meet Jake,” Marina told her uncle in English.

Nicu nodded and kept puffing on his pipe; all understood, no need for more explanation.

“We prepared a tent for you to sleep tonight,” he finally said. “It’s a warm night, you will be very comfortable. It will be a scorcher of a summer this year,” he added and the men around him murmured in agreement.

“Thank you very much for your hospitality,” Jake said. “I didn’t want to put you up to any trouble.”

Nicu took the pipe out of his mouth, blew a cloud of bluish smoke, and waved the curved wooden shape in his hand. “You’re our guest,” he said. “Guests bring blessing, not trouble.”

The men all nodded again.

“Well, thank you again,” Jake said.

“Maria will show you,” Nicu motioned to his wife who now came out of the shadow. She must have been sitting on the back steps of the wagon.

They said their goodnights and Maria led them to a simple tent, not very far away, pitched against the side of a camper van that belonged to Marina’s aunt, Nicu’s younger sister.

“Ladies first.” Jake held back the flap and let Marina get in.

She didn’t move.

“This is not how it works,” she giggled. “This is not city. Out here it’s still pretty…” she searched for the word, “traditional.”

Oh.

He let the flap fall back down.

“Goodnight,” she said and then became a ghost.

Photo by Court Cook on Unsplash