by Willow Rose
He would then stuff his pipe and light it and nod a little to himself while thinking:
“Someday…someday soon.”
So it went on every morning for three years. While the world was fighting outside, he kept the dream alive inside.
And so it was this particular morning, too, when he woke up and prepared himself to go off to work. He washed his face, trimmed his mustache with a pair of scissors, put on his uniform, looked at the clock in the small pocket in his vest, and then peeked into the nursery—while stuffing the pipe—before he went downstairs for his morning coffee and toasted bread. Normally, that is before the war, he would get a sausage and even maybe some bacon to go with the toast, but these days he was satisfied just to get some real bread and—well not real coffee—but something that was nearly as good.
He kissed his wife, as always, put on his uniform jacket, looked at his watch a second time, because a train station manager is always on time, and then he put the pipe back in his mouth and opened the beautiful hand-carved wooden door that separated them from the outside world and its madness.
And there it was.
A small, braided basket right in front of his feet. The good Mr. Schneider could hardly believe his eyes. But since his wife had seen it too, it had to be true. Now, who would leave a big nice basket like that in these days when it was hard to get anything at all? he thought to himself, while taking the pipe out of his mouth.
The basket seemed to have a big blanket inside of it.
“Look there’s a letter,” Mrs. Schneider said, and kneeled beside the basket to get the small envelope.
“Maybe it is a gift from someone.”
She read it out loud for them both.
“Her name is Sara…?”
Mr. and Mrs. Schneider looked at each other with great confusion. Now, what was all this? Could it be?
Carefully, Mrs. Schneider lifted some of the blanket and the most beautiful sight met her. That of a sleeping baby girl, only three weeks old. Her hair was black as the night and her skin soft and smooth. She was breathing heavily and smiling in her sleep.
“Let me see,” Mr. Schneider said, and looked under the blanket as well. It was hard to tell exactly what he felt when he saw the little face, but that was always difficult to know with him. What he felt. That was what Mrs. Schneider had come to learn over the years. He didn’t talk much, and when he did it was mostly about trains and whether they were on time or not.
But this time she knew they felt the same thing. She recognized it in his eyes. It was instant love for this little girl that someone had left for them as a gift…as a true blessing in the middle of the worst of times.
“Hurry. Let’s take the basket inside before someone sees it,” Mr. Schneider said, and Mrs. Schneider never thought about it twice.
Inside the house, they unpacked the little girl, and Mr. Schneider hid the blanket, basket, and letter in the attic so no one would find it.
Then they put her in the crib.
Finally, they both thought, as they held each other and stared at her until she woke up, finally someone was sleeping in the crib.
That day they didn’t think at all of the war or going to work or even about trains. They just held Sara in their arms and took turns feeding her the bottle and tickling her tummy.
That day, for the first time in his life, Mr. Schneider was late for work.
Chapter Two
THE JINX
Over the next twelve years, Sara grew up to be a young girl. She wasn’t exactly the prettiest of the girls in the neighborhood, with her thick messy and curly black hair that always fell down on her forehead and covered her eyes (even though her mom always tied it nicely on the top of her head every morning, she would always come home from school with it like that), and maybe she wasn’t the most well-behaved either.
But Sara did have a good heart to her, her mother kept saying, when the neighbors complained about her climbing their trees, stealing their apples, or destroying their rosebushes.
The teachers didn’t know what to do with her, either. She always seemed to get into trouble with the other kids, and she had a hard time sitting still during classes. Then, one day, a teacher gave her a book.
“Try and read this,” she said, and suddenly Sara sat still for hours. She didn’t say a word to anyone until she was done with the book. Then she asked for another one, and the teacher gave her a new one.
As the years went by, she read more and more. Her teachers encouraged her to do so. That way she wouldn’t get in trouble and they wouldn’t be disturbed while trying to teach the other more well-mannered students.
But even though Sara meant a lot of headaches for Mr. and Mrs. Schneider, they still looked at her as their pride.
The neighbors never asked any questions as to where Sara suddenly came from, but there was a lot of talking about it over the picket fences when Mr. and Mrs. Schneider were not around to hear. The little tousled black-haired, brown-eyed girl didn’t seem to fit in anywhere in the nice Reidenburgerstrasse.
Only the nosy Mrs. Müller occasionally asked some questions. She would wonder how come the little girl’s skin seemed much darker than her parents’, how she got her black hair and dark brown eyes, since her parents were both so very blond and blue-eyed. But Sara never detected that there could be anything but mere curiosity behind it, and she just smiled and answered the best she could.
“I take after my grandmother, my mother always says.”
The nosy Mrs. Müller would nod and look at Sara with great suspicion, since in those times during that war, being dark skinned was not a good thing.
Finally, the war ended and all the hatred and fighting was over. So Mr. and Mrs. Schneider went on and did as the good doctor once had told them to do. They tried for another baby. A year later, to everyone's surprise, the tiny Mrs. Schneider didn’t just give birth to one child, she had triplets.
So Sara’s life changed dramatically. Her mother was busy feeding all the babies and trying to get them to fall asleep, and to Sara it seemed as if there was always someone crying in the house, even at night. If it wasn’t one of the three babies, Mrs. Schneider would be the one sitting in the rocking chair crying.
And Sara was always in the way of her parents now. So she started to take care of herself. She would fix herself dinner and breakfast, and she even took care of her father when he came home tired after working double shifts at the train station, in order to make enough money to feed the rapidly growing family.
“These are hard times, no one is making enough money to get by these days,” he would say to her, as if she understood. Then he would sigh deeply at the sound of another baby crying, take off his shoes, and go sit in the living room, smoking his pipe and grumbling.
And Sara kept wondering what had happened to them. They never talked to each other anymore, and they certainly didn’t talk to her.
At school, things changed as well. When Sara turned ten, things started to happen to her. Not to her body or anything like that, but around her. Stuff would move around or even fall from a table.
But it only seemed to happen when she got mad. Like really mad. Like when someone in her class teased her. And they started doing that a lot the next couple of years, since they discovered what would happen. It made it more fun. But they were clever and only did it when the teachers were not looking.
Worst of them all was Gertrud Wagner.
Sara’s favorite thing was to read. She always had her nose in a book and could finish several of them during a week. And Gertrud, with her pack of female wolves—as Sara liked to call them—one day took a book from her.
“What'cha reading?” she said, and Sara tried to stay calm until they started pushing her and hiding her book from her while chanting and singing. Sara had a big temper, so it didn’t take them long to get her upset enough.
“Jinx…jinx…jinx.”
They called her “The jinx” because of what always happened when she got mad. Accidents that no
one could explain. Things falling without anyone touching them.
“Jinx…jinx…jinx.”
What no one knew, including herself, of course, was that Sara was telekinetic. She had the ability to move objects by the effort of her will alone. That meant she could move things with her mind without touching them. But since Sara wasn’t aware of this talent of hers yet, she had no control over it. And she had no control over her temper, either.
So when her classmates yelled at her and took her book, things started flying around. Books, papers, and pencils would fly in the air, and chairs would move around on the floor. So when the teacher came back, the classroom was an utter mess and everyone told him that Sara did it. Which was the truth, of course, but there is always more than one side to a story like that.
Sara knew that, but unfortunately, her teacher didn’t. So she got punished. One hundred strokes across her fingers with a stick. Being a very sensitive man, the teacher never liked to punish his students. But, back then that was what they had to do.
“I am so sorry,” he said between every stroke. “But I have to set an example for the others.”
He said it over and over again as the strokes fell across her fingers and burned their way into her little innocent heart and poisoned it with that thirst for revenge that is so damaging for it. She didn’t feel any anger towards her teacher for doing what he did. He didn’t know better, she kept telling herself.
But she did feel anger towards Gertrud, and one day she followed Gertrud as she went home from school. When Gertrud was alone on the street, Sara took out her books and let them fly high in the air like birds in the sky. For the first time, Sara deliberately made something move by the will of her mind. She moved them towards Gertrud and they surrounded her like birds attacking from the air. Fifteen of her biggest and heaviest books first circled around Gertrud’s head, and then began to dive and almost hit her. Sara kept letting them attack Gertrud until she started screaming and got on her knees, begging for Sara to make it stop.
So she did.
Gertrud never teased Sara again. And Sara made a promise to herself that she would never use her will to move anything again. Not on purpose at least.
It was at that time Sara started wondering if she wasn’t quite like other girls her age.
Later that same year, she discovered the wind. Whenever the north wind began to blow, she would get the strangest feeling inside. She could stand in the schoolyard or walk on the street among other people who wouldn’t notice it, and she would be the only one to stop and smell it. By breathing that wind, she would get a strong longing within her body. It sometimes felt like it would crush everything inside of her, like it would devour her from the inside.
It was the longing for distant places, the longing for foreign countries far, far away. And she had to fight the urge to follow the desire deep within her to travel with the wind and let it take her to those exotic places where it came from. This urge grew stronger and stronger every day that passed, an urge she wasn’t sure she could keep on resisting for much longer.
Maybe that was why she loved her books so much, because they had the ability to take her away on journeys to strange places and strange worlds. One day she could be a knight in shining armor, fighting the dragon to save his beloved, the next she was in the jungle with wild animals surrounding her, or the captain of the Flying Dutchman crossing the oceans at the coast of Africa. Or a sheik in the desert, a pilot in her plane crossing the Atlantic for the first time, or even Captain Nemo on Nautilus exploring the undersea world.
And when she wasn’t reading about it, Sara dreamt about the big wonderful world that was just waiting out there for her to explore.
It didn’t take long for the neighbors, teachers, and her parents to start wondering about what was happening to her. Her mind seemed always to be drifting in class, the teacher thought. Her look was always distant when she passed them, the neighbors thought. She never said a word to them anymore, her parents thought.
And none of them understood what was going on with her. Neither did she. All Sara knew was that she couldn’t find rest anywhere; she felt the wind calling for her, luring her away from the life she knew so well, tempting her with promises of exotic music, tasteful food, dancing, and laughter.
“There must be something better for me out there,” she kept thinking, standing at the cliff next to the village church overlooking the valley.
There was, and she didn’t have to go and look for it.
It came to get her.
Chapter Three
THE GYPSY GIRL
Just like the last time, they came in the middle of the night. No one on Reidenburgerstrasse noticed them until the very next morning, though, but then news travelled fast. After all, a convoy of more than fifty horse-drawn caravan wagons (some of them were hand-carved in wood and painted in beautiful colors) wasn’t that easy to miss. Let alone the cats, dogs, and birds, and even a couple of elephants and a bear that came along with them. Everywhere, people were sticking their heads out the windows of the wagons and the most enchanting music filled the air.
Nothing this exciting had happened on the quiet street for years; well, hardly ever, come to think of it. So you really can’t blame the neighbors for gathering, staring, and talking in the street, wearing nothing but their bathrobes on top of their pajamas.
“What are those?” Mrs. Nieberman from number ten asked.
“Like a circus or something,” Mrs. Hagenhoff from number eight replied.
“No, nothing like that,” Mrs. Müller interrupted them with a satisfied expression. Didn’t she always say that there was something suspicious with that girl? Now they all knew.
“They are gypsies.”
A sound of fear and turmoil immediately emerged among the spectators. Everybody knew that no respectable town ever wanted gypsies around. They were thieves and beggars, and the strangest things would always happen when they came around. Strange accidents and people dying for no apparent reason. They were all jinxed and meant bad luck for a town. That’s what the rumors said, that is.
And there was always some truth to a rumor. No one knew that better than Mrs. Müller.
“We sure don’t want people like them around in our nice neighborhood,” Mrs. Nieberman said.
“No, that would certainly be an atrocity,” Mrs. Hagenhoff said, without even knowing what the word meant.
“I’ll be damned if I’m gonna just stand here and watch as thieves and beggars take over this town,” Mrs. Müller said, while she walked with determination in the direction of the convoy. She knocked on the window of the front caravan and put her hands at the waist she used to have when she was younger.
A young girl bearing a red sparkling scarf in her hair and golden earrings stuck her head out. She was no more than a child, the shocked crowd realized.
“Yes?” She smiled with bright white teeth in her beautiful and exotic-looking dark face.
Mrs. Müller was now so upset she snorted at the girl.
“Young lady. We wish to talk to your parents immediately,” she said, and looked back at the crowd of women with some satisfaction. If anyone could bring things back to order, it was her.
“But I don’t have any parents,” the girl answered with another smile. “I’m an orphan.”
A sound of shock went through the crowd. Who were these people? they all seemed to be thinking. Who was taking care of that child when she didn’t have any parents? She should at least be at an orphanage, where they would know how to take proper care of a situation like hers.
“But, sweet little child, who is taking care of you then?” Mrs. Müller asked.
“No one and everyone. We all take care of each other in our tribe.”
Another wave of shock went through the crowd.
“But certainly someone must be making the rules. You are, after all, only a child. Now, tell me, who is making the rules in your tribe? Who is in charge?”
The young girl pointed at the Schneider
’s house, where the door all of a sudden opened. Out came Mr. and Mrs. Schneider, along with their daughter and two very strange looking people. A man and a woman, as far as Mrs. Müller could tell. He was tall and dramatic in his appearance. She found his eyes wild and cruel and his right hand was constantly resting on the grip of a short curved dagger in his belt. On the top of his head he wore a red scarf around his black curly hair. His white shirt was open, so his black-haired chest with golden necklaces showed.
Mrs. Müller put a hand on her chest.
“My, oh my,” she said and caught her breath.
The woman was small and just as dark as him. She wore a sparkling dress with thousands of colors and patterns in it. Her scarf was purple and she, too, wore golden earrings. She was holding the little girl’s hand while talking to the Schneiders.
Mrs. Müller stretched her neck in order to better hear what was said when Mrs. Schneider kneeled in front of little Sara.
“You be a good girl now,” she said. “This is your real mother and father, and they will take you back to your people now.”
“But, Mom…”
“Shh, now do as I tell you," she said with a thick voice. "These are your real parents. We have just been borrowing you. They love you and will take good care of you. It is the best for all of us. These are hard times for everybody, remember? With the three babies in the house, we have too many mouths to feed.”
Now Mrs. Schneider was crying overtly.
“You are so strong, Sara. You will be fine. It’s best for you to go back to who you really are. We will miss you, but maybe you will come back and visit one day?”
Sara threw herself in Mrs. Schneider’s arms and hugged her for quite a while.
