CHAPTER 21
We sold the silver candlestick to a peddler for a coin, which kept us from begging for only a day. In the following days, it grew colder, and Helene had stopped smiling at the sky, which meant that I could no longer smile at the sky, either. The world was gray, and I was sad, though I didn’t really understand sad that well since we had been surrounded by sad often, so “happy” was when it didn’t feel right. I had grown suspicious of happy.
We continued to steal, and Helene was too hungry and cold to feel remorse. I stole some leather shoes that were too big, and Helene stole a dress and some slippers and a horse’s blanket, and she said sorry to the horse as she took it. And I stole a cardigan that had been left to catch a sliver of sun on someone’s back lawn, and it was pretty and pale blue with matching buttons. The fine, soft wool felt feathery against my bare arms, and for days I imagined the life of the girl who owned it: where she went and the conversations she had with her mother, but mostly the food she ate and the warm bed she slept in.
Helene and I became efficient at stealing. We would watch someone’s house, and when the man would leave for work, I would sneak to the back of the house while Helene knocked on the front door to ask for food. I would take something to eat: an apple, sometimes a whole pie, or a jar from the pantry. One time I took a jug of milk. If the person answering the door gave Helene something to eat or wear, we would leave some of the food at the front door as a kind of thank-you. If they didn’t, then we would take the lot. We sometimes stole soap to wash ourselves in streams and lakes, and we would enjoy hours reveling in the soapy water. But the weather became too cold, as did the water, and we had to stop washing.
We roamed from village to village without a plan, without a future. We didn’t expect charity.
Then one day, things changed.
We were at a new village down a long stretch of road far enough from a town not to be part of it, and the house was set well back from the road. In the fields behind were rows of fruit trees with pears plump and ready for their winter harvest. Though to get to the trees, we had to walk past the windows on either side of the little farmhouse, which billowed smoke from its chimney. Just the sight of smoke meant that it was most likely warm inside, but our intention was not to go in. We thought that we would come back later at night and pick the fruit but found we couldn’t last all day. We were starving, and without exaggeration, Helene’s ribs had risen out from her chest.
In a pen beside the house were chickens, and in another there were piglets. It was a pretty place, and for some strange reason, that day Helene said it felt wrong to steal from them. But I convinced her they would have lots of food with all that fruit. She looked me up and down, perhaps seeing how thin I had become also, and she finally agreed.
Helene went to the front door and asked the woman inside for food, and I heard the woman questioning her. I spied in through a side window and could see the woman, with her back to me, talking to Helene. I crept in through the back door to take a saucepan of warm oatmeal and half a loaf of bread, the bread placed under my arm so I was free to carry the saucepan that warmed my hands also. While I waited at the side of the house for the woman to shut the front door and for Helene to leave, I saw a man enter through the front gate. He hadn’t seen me yet, but he passed by Helene on her way out. The man looked at her curiously and was about to question her when he spied me.
I ran then, attempting to dodge past him, but he was far nimbler than I had imagined for an old man. I squealed as he caught me around the waist, and the saucepan of warm oats slipped from my hand and onto his feet. He carried me on his hip, while I hung by my middle and pushed at him to release me. My attempts to free myself were useless. He was very strong.
“Gypsies!” said the woman, who had opened the door again after hearing the commotion. “They stole from us.”
With the bread still squeezed tightly under my arm, the man put me down inside the house and told me to sit, while the woman shut the door behind us.
“You must tie her up and take her to the police!” said the woman.
The man stood in front of me with his hands on his hips. His face was very lined, and his hair was black and streaked with white, and he was nearly as tall as the door but skinny like a winter poplar. And he had a wide mouth but hardly any lips, and his face was neither angry nor happy, but it was just a face that appeared as if it had adjusted well to the way things were.
There was a faint knock at the door, and the man answered it to find Helene was standing there wrapped in her horse blanket. I remembered Aldo and Sybille and wondered if this new couple would have thoughts of selling our bodies.
The man said to Helene, “Are you looking for something?” in a big deep voice, and I thought for a minute we were doomed. And then he stepped aside to show Helene that I was sitting there.
“Off you go!” he said to me. “And take the bread with you.”
“You can’t just let them go!” said the woman. “They are criminals! You should take them to the police.”
“They are children,” said the man.
I thought it was a trap, but I stood up and walked, legs shaking, to the front door, and Helene and I left, and we kept looking over our shoulders as the man waved us goodbye. Then he shut the front door, and we began to run, then stopped again when I saw the saucepan on the ground. I picked it up and we scooped out the oats that had not fallen on the ground.
“I will take back the pan,” I said. “I don’t think the man is dangerous. And I want to thank him for the bread. We didn’t say thank you.”
Helene looked at me and pulled a strand of my hair and smiled and said that I was always a little strange in the head, just like Mama had said. But she agreed that they weren’t dangerous.
I knocked on the door, and this time the man answered and looked down at us from a great height.
“Thank you for the bread,” I said, and presented him with the empty saucepan. And he glanced in the pan that we had licked clean, and he appeared amused by something.
“Would you both like some milk?”
I looked back at Helene, and she made no sign, and the decision was left to me, and I said, “Yes,” in a very frail voice, as I had grown more wary of kindness.
He turned and went inside and left the door open, and I waved Helene to follow, and once inside, the man shut the door again and told us to sit down at the table.
Around the room were photographs: a wedding portrait and pictures of the man and some others who weren’t in the room. And the other woman wouldn’t look at us but sat nearby folding washing, but I knew she was looking at us from her side-eye because I knew she didn’t trust us, not like the man.
“Where are your families?”
We looked at each other, and Helene said it was “just us” and we were sisters, and we told him our names.
The man looked at both of us curiously and shrugged.
“My name is Jerome, and this is my sister, Lenore,” he said.
“Is that all the family you have?” I asked. And the woman looked at me suddenly, as if offended, and I was expecting the elbow from Helene, but she was too far away to reach me.
The man laughed a little then.
“Yes,” he said, “it seems we both have small families.”
He cut us some cake with apple baked in the middle, and we ate that, too. He talked about his three horses, two of which he was planning to sell, and we told him about us, about our mother leaving us on the side of the river, and then Layla, and then how our medicine killed a baby. When I said the last one, Helene was closer and elbowed me in the ribs that time.
“I doubt it was the flower,” he said. “That would have been no help or hinder. The baby was probably always to die. There are some conditions that can’t be helped.”
I felt better, but Helene didn’t. She didn’t believe him like I did. She thought it was still her fault. She always took things too hard, fell too hard, thought too hard, and one day she would die hard also
. But that was years to come.
Then Lenore left the house to go toward a small building at the back, and the man turned to us and spoke quietly.
“My sister has aches in her hands, and she could use some help in the kitchen, and I could use some help with the orchard. I have to pick the pears and wash them, then take them to sell. For your help I can give you a bed to sleep on.”
“And food?” I asked.
The man laughed up to his eyes. “Oh yes, food would come with it as well.”
I liked him already. When Lenore came back inside, he told her that we were staying.
“There is no place for them here,” she said, narrowing her eyes at all of us.
“They are staying,” he said. “We can do with the help.”
“They are thieves,” said Lenore, but she did not look our way, as if she might catch a gypsy curse.
Jerome did not say anything else immediately, but after some thinking time, he asked us to wait outside.
Helene and I sat below the window, which was opened a fraction to let out the wood smoke, and we listened to the conversation happening inside.
Lenore said she didn’t trust gypsies: “They could have family close by that might break in and rob us.” And Jerome said that he believed what we said. And this went back and forth, and Lenore said that if he went against her wishes, she would leave, and he said she would never do that, and she went quiet for a moment. And then she said it was on his head if anything happened. And he said there was nothing that was going to happen. I made a vow then, to myself, that nothing was going to happen, because I knew us; I knew Helene and knew we didn’t do anything bad apart from steal.
Jerome then called us in and said we could stay temporarily, and I said that we didn’t have any family nearby who would steal and that our family didn’t want us, and no other family wanted us, either, and he then just looked at me with watery eyes, waiting to see what else I might say. I made sure I was standing a safe distance away from Helene’s elbow. Lenore sniffed and looked away, and she had gone red in the face.
Jerome said the first thing we had to do was to have a bath and we could boil some water from the stove and then use the bath that was at the back of the house in a small room attached. We sat in the bath and soaped each other and washed each other’s hair until we were squeaky and shining and clean, and then cold.
We were shown around the property and told the jobs we would do, like brushing the horses and collecting eggs and cleaning out the animal pens and picking the fruit because Lenore’s legs ached and Jerome couldn’t bend and reach as well as he used to. Lenore slept in another room that was separate from the house, connected by a pathway.
Helene and I slept in a single bed, and it was the best bed we had ever had. It was soft, and we rolled down into the middle of it, but we didn’t mind sleeping on top of each other. And I said to Helene, “Do you think he will make you marry him?” and I had said this too loud, and there was a knock on the wall, and Jerome called out, “Don’t go talking such merde.” Helene grimaced and told me to talk quieter, and then we laughed into our hands and talked in signs by the light through the window.
The next day Jerome opened a chest full of coats and dresses and trousers that had belonged to his wife and son. We learned that Lenore had lost her husband in a war and Jerome had lost his wife and son to influenza in the years after he returned from a war. He said we could wear what we wanted, and Lenore looked like someone who had just dug her own grave. Jerome asked if we could sew, and I told them how I could mend and sew and that women in wagons all knew how to sew. We remade the dresses that were too big so that they would fit us. Jerome said that Lenore might teach us to use her sewing machine, and I was very excited about this, though Lenore still hadn’t said anything to us, pretending to be busy in the kitchen. All that week, we hand-sewed dresses and undergarments until we each had a dress and a skirt and a blouse.
Jerome was kind to everyone. One day, at the edge of town, I saw a group of gypsies who were cold and thin. I told Jerome about them, and he gave me a basket of fruit to take to them and a jug of warm milk. And that wasn’t the only time. There were other wanderers over the years who were on the receiving end of Jerome’s kind heart.
We made several trips to towns and villages, and Helene and I would take turns sitting on the front cart seat beside Jerome, since there was only room for two. People were polite in the town, but Helene felt uncomfortable with people looking at us and staring as if we had borrowed someone else’s life. I didn’t care if they stared. One day we were delivering fruit to a store in one of the villages, and the owner nodded toward Helene and me where we waited in the cart.
“You sure about those?” he said to Jerome. “They bring bad luck.”
“That is a lot of superstitious merde,” snapped Jerome, who walked away, climbed back onto the cart, and didn’t look back. But I looked back and saw the owner shaking his head as if he knew better.
Then it was Christmas, and we had ham and potatoes with rosemary, and green beans, and then fruit pies with cream. We had never celebrated Christmas before, and Jerome told us stories from the Bible, and Helene would go through the pages with wonder when no one was looking, though she couldn’t read the words.
Jerome made us another bed, and it was squeezed in next to the other one, and all of a sudden, Helene was fourteen and I would soon be twelve. I can’t say Lenore was ever warm, but she had developed a level of tolerance toward us, though she liked Helene a lot more than she liked me. Helene was patient and helped Lenore in the kitchen some nights, whereas I hated chopping vegetables and I was impatient and clumsy. Eventually I was banned from kitchen tasks, but not Helene. I preferred cleaning out the chicken pen anyway and brushing and feeding the horses and sewing rather than helping in the kitchen. And so it was that we had our other chores when the fruit-picking seasons and deliveries were over. And when there were no tasks, Helene and I would spend hours riding the horses bareback, to exercise them, in the paddock beside the house or wandering over the hills behind us to explore the woods.
One day I asked Lenore why we weren’t allowed to go near the town after dark, which had been the rule since we had arrived. She said that her brother was very old-fashioned and protective of young girls. I asked her if he had been protective of all the people he owned.
She pulled a face and made a blowing sound from her mouth. “No one owns you, you silly child! You’re free to go whenever you want.”
When I spoke to Helene about it, I was surprised that she agreed with Lenore and also said that I was silly. Till then I had always believed that you were the property of the owner of the house you shared, like it had been in the wagons.
Jerome said that he wouldn’t have to sell his horses now that I was there to groom them. He gave us each a saddle, and Helene and I would gallop Carmello and Mira around in the paddock, and life was good and freer than ever. I named the young filly Hester since he’d never bothered to name her with plans to sell her, and she would soon be grown enough to ride.
Helene and I were only supposed to stay there for a month to help with the fruit picking and put meat on our bones, but then the month passed and we were not asked to leave. In the years to come, we would pick the pears in the autumn through to winter and the apples in late summer through to autumn, and we would fill the tray with fruit behind Mira the cart horse. And pies with fruit were plentiful.
CHAPTER 22
We had learned to read and write from Lenore, who had been a teacher, and both Helene and I wrote letters to each other to practice. Lenore would correct them, and I was just slightly better at words than Helene, who was slower, more careful, who sat and thought longer about things. But soon Lenore grew tired of teaching us, and one day insisted we go to school. We did not want to go, but Jerome agreed with Lenore and from then on took us each morning in his trap, and each day we would walk the long distance home.
It was hard at first because the children who had been schooled
on gypsies by their parents seemed to know everything about us before we arrived. Their curious stares made even me feel uncomfortable. When adults did it, it was simply annoying, but now I was with peers, who were the harshest judges of all. It was quiet for a couple of days, and then came the relentless tormenting by other children, though I did not recognize it as unjust at the time. To me it was just life, a new battlefield that I must endure and survive, and for Helene it was about getting to the other end of the day without attention. But it was not to be. We were a curiosity.
One day I turned around to the bucktoothed girl behind me who had been throwing pieces of sticks at the back of my head, and I told her that as a gypsy I was allowed to grant a death wish on three people during my lifetime and that she was on my list and that day I would go home and burn a drawing of her and cast a spell. And she had screeched and bawled, and the teacher had sent me home for the day. But the toothy girl said nothing and let us join in her games, and after that we were part of “the group.” However, I soon noticed that Helene and I weren’t invited home with any of the other children and they were not allowed at ours. So while we could play their games, we knew that we would never be like the other children.
Although I loved the idea of fine gowns and dreamed of wearing them and marrying someone wealthy and debonair, there was a greater part of me that wanted to run free like the boys did. I would tie my skirt up, and sometimes after school Helene and I would part, and I would leave her so that I could run through the streets with the boys or swim with them in the creek in our underclothes. I was twelve then, and though tall I was still very thin and boyish looking. Sometimes I would stay out too long, and Lenore would scold me when I got home. Jerome would just sit there with a pipe and not watch me and not say anything, and the silence was even worse punishment than any scolding.
For the next three years, we went to school, and Helene was moved up a class and finished before me because she studied much harder. And by that time also she had lost interest in exploring the woods and running in the fields behind the orchard. Many in the town of Bailleul still referred to us as the “gypsy orphans,” a title that was beginning to infuriate me, even when it was said harmlessly. Jerome would ignore everything that was said. Jerome had the ability to let most things slide off his shoulders.
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