§ 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.
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.
Well, then, she would let the cards fall where they may and prevaricate according to their pictures. Since only with concentration could she decipher the text below the pictures, she mostly memorized their meanings her mum had rendered.
One by one, Romy turned the cards face up – and stifled a gasp.
The Magician, the Emperor, and the High Priestess. With her own readings, this layout had come as no surprise, but to turn up in an inquirer’s reading . . . something was surely amiss.
If she expected to convince these two of her psychic powers, she could only be the Tarot’s Fool. A meal was at stake here. Or more, she inexplicably feared.
Nevertheless, she gamely flipped over the next card. The Tower card, with lightning striking around it, flames bursting from its windows, and people leaping from them in desperation. And, despite its ominous implications, she sighed with relief. It was not the Death card. At least, not immediately. Interesting, that.
She resumed laying out the rest of the cards, but Gunter’s elegant hand slapped over hers, halting her.
“That card – the one with the tower atop the jagged bluff – you paused after turning it over. Why?”
Observant, he was. And in need of a comeuppance. She shook off his hand with its deluxe watch and glibly rattled off, “The high and mighty shall fall.”
“And the high and mighty would be who?”
“The cards are always about the inquirer – yourself.” She returned his gimlet gaze with a defiant one of her own. A foolhardy gesture. Always make the gadje you read for feel better. “Hook them in, so they’ll come back,” her mum had admonished repeatedly. And reinforce that any lack of belief on the inquirer’s part will generate energy that will negate the positive outcome.
But Romy’s tongue just wouldn’t stop. The man’s arrogance annoyed her. “The Tower signifies plans built on false assumptions. That you sit in the comfort of your train compartment, oblivious to its shaking and rattling. The Tower will rattle your expectations.”
This time, his smile, reducing the length of his dueling scar, was tight and parsimonious. “As a gypsy, who practices gypping, you should know better than to bite the hand that fe –”
“ – that is dirty,” she finished cheerily. If she weren’t so preoccupied about Old Duke, most likely coughing his life away from smoking his murderous Gitanes, she would not have been so careless with her words.
“Dirty?!” The man called Gunter looked both stunned and enraged by her comment. As she had done before their arrival, his elegant fingers abruptly whisked from the built-in table the half dozen cards she had laid out. They fluttered onto the moth-eaten carpet.
“Gunter!” the young woman remonstrated. “Let her finish. Please.”
He emitted an exasperated sigh and plowed fingers through his pomaded, Leprechaun’s pot o’ gold hair. “This was your idea, Irina.” He nodded at Romy and negligently flicked his hand at the scattered cards. “Proceed then with your theoretical fortune telling skills.”
Knobhead.
When she wanted nothing better, indeed, than to bite that hand that fed her, her stomach’s growling prompted her to comply. She collected the cards – four in all – retrieving one, in addition, teetering on the table’s edge and one more from Irina’s lap
Nose wrinkling again, the young woman shrank from her touch.
Well, mere water, like exotic perfume, was a camp luxury.
Without shuffling, Romy re-laid the recovered six cards out before her.
Her mum would have said those six held significance in that they had escaped the deck. But then her mum had also said, all too often, “Happy is the Gypsy girl, with feet dirty from dancing and a heart reckless from romancing.”
And just look where that had gotten her mum.
Incredibly, the Emperor, the Magician, and the High Priestess were yet again among the cards. And the Death card, naturally.
Her stuttering fingers continued the layout. The Wheel of Fortune reversed and the Tower. Significantly, the Tower card was also reversed this time. Even more significantly, she thought, the six escapees were all Major Arcana Tarot cards.
According to her mum, those high cards were an indication of life-altering events that would have long-term effects. Her mum should have had her own lay out and heeded it.
Not that a card reading could have saved Old Duke’s daughter. Her Spanish side had been as impetuous and passionate as her Slavic husband’s – shooting and stabbing one another, as they had, till death did them part.
Well, not exactly. It took a few hours for them to die, rejoined, at last, in one another’s arms. As Old Duke would wryly describe his daughter and son-in-law’s demises, “How they did love, when they loved.”
Naturally, Irina noticed the Death card. A manicured fingernail that contrasted with Romy’s ragged ones nudged the spectral card. A gleaming sapphire ring on the young woman’s right hand could have bought food for Romy and her grandfather for an entire year. “What does that mean?’
If Romy wanted food for her stomach, now was the time for grand embellishment. She thought of the train on which the couple had arrived. Were they traveling for business or pleasure?
“Ye will go on a difficult journey, a time of severe discomfort, so that you can learn an important lesson.” The porcelain doll to Romy’s left had no idea what severe discomfort was.
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?