When the Summer Was Ours

by Roxanne Veletzos

  They settled on a small patch in the green belt by the pond near Sopron where one of the caravans had set down roots a few years prior. Here in Sopron, they ate freshly caught fish around fires, and danced night after night, and Aleandro played with the children he’d only watched from a distance throughout the first ten years of his life. It was no longer just the three of them but other families like theirs, families willing to share so that Aleandro wouldn’t go hungry. His father couldn’t play the taverns anymore, couldn’t repay them for the food, so he rolled up his sleeves and returned the kindness in the only way he could. One morning he came back with a sack full of tools that he’d bartered for work from one of the land farmers and began building. First there was their own hut—no more than a one-room wooden structure with a tiny sink and a butcher block cut from strips of wood he’d used for the siding. The other men joined quickly, and by next summer most of the families had moved out of their wagons, and the horses were now kept in a shed during the rains.

  It was in those days, when they all worked from dawn to dusk, that Aleandro began making drawings for his father, filling the spaces of words he no longer grasped. The way the walls would intersect inside, the way alcoves could be carved in the corners for sinks, baby cots. He was twelve by then, and his mother taught the camp children to read and count money, to keep their heads low against taunts and hurled stones from the non-Romani children in town, to make themselves immune, invisible. He never could understand how so much hatred could exist in a place that cradled such beauty. But inside the inner circle of his life, there was beauty indeed—music and dancing, and many arms to embrace him.

  It was the closest to a regular life that Aleandro had ever known, yet after a few years, he began missing the adventure of the open road. One day he picked up his father’s rusty violin and headed out on the road again. He was fifteen, restless with youth, and the sky that had always been his roof in summer drew him with the promise of something new.

  He followed more or less the roads he’d known as a child. He was good enough at the violin, even though he dreamed of drawing those houses and began drawing churches and beer halls, then after some time, only the people that gathered under those roofs. At Lake Balaton, he joined a flamenco group and was bewitched by the lead dancer—a girl much like him, with ripe lips and melancholic, liquid eyes, whose ample hips molded around the sound of his violin, and to whom he lost his virginity later that night. Many such nights followed, yet she was much older than him, and the way she ignored him during the day, despite the fevered whispers of the night, made him see what he was to her.

  One morning he left again and kept moving, past rows of houses on swollen banks and rivers that led him to new places, places he enjoyed discovering as much as leaving. There were more taverns and a few other women not unlike the dancer, and the years passed unbeknownst to him, until he was twenty and word caught up to him about what was happening in Sopron.

  Nothing prepared him for what he found when he returned. His mother, ill with typhus, barely recognized him. He couldn’t bring himself to ask about his father, but in his heart, he knew what had happened before he stepped through the door. He knew. Later, an elderly woman from the village brought in three children—twin boys of about five or six and a younger one, no more than a toddler, with a similar mass of curly, dark hair and huge eyes that pierced his chest.

  She’d been taking care of them, she explained to him. For his mother. For their mother.

  For the rest of his life, he would never forget the relief washing over his mother’s face when he promised her that he would stay. He took her place and loved those boys as she had; he protected them. For two years after he’d buried his parents, he kept his promise, and he would continue wherever life took them. Burgenland awaited, Vienna after that, maybe, and the open road in between, their steady companion.

  The road had always been his one constant, and he was ready for it again.

  * * *

  Aleandro inhaled deeply now, imagining the villa where Eva slept peacefully, maybe relieved or perhaps a little sad, already moving past him. It was late, nearly midnight, and he needed to save his strength for tomorrow, so he got on with the final task of the night. It didn’t matter to him that he would draw in the darkness—it was only a rough sketch he intended, a memento of his last moments here. But as he took out his pad and began, he did not continue past the first strokes. Rather, his eyes focused on the flutter of white, there just at the base of the valley, no more than a few hundred yards away.

  A dove, he thought for an instant, then realized that it couldn’t be—it was too low. Straining his eyes in the darkness, he watched it a bit longer as it continued to expand and take shape.

  Eva. She was still at a distance, and Aleandro stifled the urge to run to her, to crush her to him. To crush her in order to prove she was real. Instead, he stood there and watched Eva come toward him the same way he’d watched her depart two nights earlier and he had to steady himself on a tree. Only when she got closer did a stab of shock slice through his stupor.

  “Eva. Eva, what happened?”

  He stared at the proud expression on her face, which he knew so well and worshipped, at the deep shadow the size of a plum on the marble skin of her cheek. There was a fissure in the corner of her lip, which she touched protectively, as if to conceal it, then a glint of relief sprang into her impenetrable gaze and she rushed into his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured in the collar of his shirt. “I was hoping to find you. I didn’t know where else to go, and I needed to find you. I needed to see you.”

  “My God. Eva, look at me,” he kept saying, but she would not. She was shaking, and all he could do was draw her closer, hold her tightly as he knew she needed, even though he, too, was shaking with fury. He would kill whoever did this to her. He would, and he said it out loud. “Just tell me who did this to you, Eva. I will kill him. I will kill him with my bare hands.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Eva said, lifting her cheek from his chest and gazing across the darkness. “These bruises mean nothing to me now. There are worse wounds to heal. These bruises have set me free.”

  * * *

  Later, Eva recounted what had happened at the villa—the photographs of their time together, the open palm that had split her lip, the fist that had turned the room to blackness. How afterward she found herself in her room with the door locked and knew it was futile to bang on it or shout out. There was no one to hear her now. There was no one in the house but her and her father. The next night she climbed out of the second-story window and crawled down the bougainvillea vine, not caring that she might break her neck. She never wanted to see her father again, she declared, her face twisted with anger, with humiliation. She would never go back. She could never go back to any life that included her father.

  She broke into tears saying it, as if putting it in words made it real, and so he took her hand and led her inside the wine cellar, their meeting spot, where on the concrete floor he laid out the blanket they’d always kept there, lit the kerosene lamp, and set his sketchbook down in a corner.

  “Here, lie down for a bit. Rest,” he said and sat down beside her, pulling her head in his lap. “You don’t have to go back, Eva. You are safe here. We can stay here as long as you want.”

  They didn’t speak for a while, and the silence between them agitated him more than her tears. Moments ago, he was convinced he would never see her again, and now she was here with him and there wasn’t a thing he could do to ease her pain. In a way, it was worse than losing her.

  “Eva, come with me,” he found himself saying. “We will leave in the morning with my brothers; we will get away from this place. I will find a way to take care of you, Eva. Besides my brothers, you are all that matters to me in the world. Come with me.”

  She didn’t answer at first, and he realized how absurd his proposition was. How could he take care of her? How, when he could hardly take care of himself, of his brothers? And had
n’t he encouraged her to return to Budapest? Yet now he couldn’t imagine another man soothing her, holding her. And it was him that she’d come to—not her fiancé, nor her friends, not even Dora. Him. He was meant to protect her, to love her, to keep her safe.

  “Have you ever been to Burgenland?” he continued, fueled with sudden hope. “It’s not far from here, on the other side of Lake Fertö, in Austria. It’s a place much like this, but I can get work there. I’ve already been offered a steady job playing at one of the taverns, and there will be enough for a while, enough until we can figure out someplace else to go. Anyplace that you want, Eva. I will take you wherever you want to go.”

  Still no words from her. She was motionless, not a muscle stirring, and for a moment he thought she’d fallen asleep, so he went on stroking her hair. Eventually, he lay down on the blanket next to her, aching with his own exhaustion and the weight of his thoughts. They stayed like that for a while, their bodies curved like spoons, the light from the kerosene lamp casting their shadows on the barren walls, dancing demons.

  “Are you all right?” he whispered when she suddenly shifted away from him and sat up. Her fingers on his lips kept further words from coming. In the weak light, her hair was diffused in a halo of gold, and her fingertips on his mouth stirred something deep inside him. He searched her eyes, but he couldn’t see them. Couldn’t see them in the backwash of light.

  “I will come with you, Aleandro. I will.”

  Swept with disbelief, with happiness, he could not hold himself back any longer, so he kissed her, cautiously at first, with more tenderness than passion, then more deeply. She tasted of tears, and he thought he’d never known such a sensation of pain and sweetness, and how much better it was than what he’d imagined. He buried his hands in the silk of her hair, drew her beneath him, and kissed her again, kissed her warm mouth and her neck, and the base of her throat, where her pulse raced.

  He loved her, he was in love with her, he adored her, he would remember murmuring incoherently. Did she say that she loved him, too? He couldn’t be sure, for his head was swimming. Perhaps it was only a sigh, or the crickets outside in the hush of the night, singing. For a moment he was sobered by the thought that she was merely acting on impulse, that he was taking advantage of an emotional moment and he drew back from her, closing his eyes. Releasing her.

  It was not the end. When he opened them, she was still there, kneeling beside him. As if in a dream, he watched her undo the tiny shell buttons on her dress and it slid away from her shoulders, easily, without resistance. He stared at the staggering beauty of her, the tiny breasts and the crescent beauty mark low between them, wanting to ask if this was what she really wanted.

  Then her hand was on his, lifting it to her burning cheek, and it was more than he could take. More than a man, nearly twenty-three years old and bursting with love, could take. When he reached for her again, it was hungrily, without reservation, without fear.

  12

  FIRE. HIS EYES SNAPPED OPEN, his nostrils filling with the acrid smell. In the silvery light of early dawn, he breathed in deeply, hoping he was mistaken. Beside him, Eva slept peacefully, her pale arm draped over his bare chest, her breath slow, warm in the space between them. Taking care not to wake her, he untangled himself from her and sat up, all of his senses shooting back into his body like a great thunderbolt. He fumbled around, groping for the kerosene lamp, but he couldn’t find it. The lamp had long burned out in the night.

  “Don’t go.”

  She was awake. Her arm came around his waist, and she pulled him back on their blanket, laughing a little, her lips moist on his shoulder. “Don’t leave,” she said, and it took all his strength not to fall back beside her, not to drown in her beauty and the scent of her skin once more.

  “My love, I’m not going anywhere. I’m coming right back. I just have to check something. It’s probably nothing, it’s probably just…”

  A thought smashed into him like a tidal wave, causing a small, involuntary cry. It was only a filament of a thought, something unformed, yet it eviscerated the night’s dream.

  “Eva,” he said now, more insistently, pulling his shirt over his head, struggling to get his boots on. “Eva, do not leave here. Wait for me.” He leaned over her now, his lips nearly touching hers. The bruise on her cheek had deepened, become more violent, and he brushed his fingers over it lightly. He hated leaving her, never wanted to leave her again, and yet he couldn’t tell her why. He hoped he was wrong. God, how he hoped he was wrong.

  “I’ll be back before you know it, all right? I’ll be back in a flash, I promise. Please don’t go anywhere.”

  There was no time to wait for her answer as he bolted out of the cellar.

  * * *

  Outside, a terrible orange halo billowed out over the horizon, the air a blanket of suffocating smoke. His heart pounded. He couldn’t see more than two feet ahead of him, and the air grew thicker as he approached the shanty town at a full run. It was only when he got closer that the sight halted him, making him falter. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing; it was impossible to take it all in. Moments ago, he was in Eva’s arms, and now this.

  More than a dozen huts had caught fire like they were made of flimsy paper, the rooflines a row of crumbling embers. Cypress trees a hundred years old had erupted like matchsticks, tongues of black fumes lapping up to the sky, as if intending to consume the heavens themselves. It was the height of summer and the grass dry, and the flames were racing through the reeds. People—his people—were running in all directions, disoriented, screaming, the horses were whinnying inside the shed. Someone released them, and in a matter of seconds, they trampled past him, a wild herd headed for the hills. One of the horses toppled and couldn’t get up; it lay there in agony. No one saw Aleandro; no one called to him for help. He was invisible.

  He pounded on the door of his hut. A shallow flame slashed from the base of the structure toward the roofline, and he knew that he didn’t have much time. Rivulets of sweat poured down his back, gathering in his waistband, trickling down his legs. He pounded again, launched his foot into the door, shrieking his brothers’ names. There was no movement in the window, nothing but stillness, darkness, and the air trembled in his blurred vision. He kicked the door harder, alternating feet—left foot, right foot—and finally it gave way.

  “Lukas! Tamás! Attia!”

  By the hearth there was a slight movement, a stirring. Coughing, holding the collar of his shirt over his mouth, he stumbled through like a blind man. “My God,” he heard himself shout. “My God! What are you thinking?”

  He had found them. Three pairs of eyes stared at him, as if he were an apparition, as if he had come too late to do anything but watch the fire come in through the walls. They didn’t even seem aware of his presence even though he shouted at them, shook them, shouted again.

  “Let’s go now. Get up!” He grabbed Lukas first, heard him whimper as he twisted in his arms, and this single action seemed to shift something in the others, to snap them from their stupor. In near tandem, they rose with their arms linked, holding on to each other.

  “That’s right, that’s good, don’t be afraid! I will get us out of here, do you hear me? Here, grab my hand, Attia! Good, that’s good. Now hold on tightly to your brother’s, and don’t let go. Yes! Keep your eyes on me, only on me!”

  Outside, more flames, more smoke. But the smoke was a blessing, for it didn’t allow them to see. They couldn’t see what was happening, but they could smell it; he could smell the burned flesh, and it made him weak with nausea. Everything was a dream, a nightmare from which he couldn’t wake. He carried buckets of water, threw them onto the grass between the huts. A chicken caught fire; it scampered past him and toppled to the ground in a sickening burst of flame. The ground underneath him was a river of fire. He doused the bottoms of his trousers with water. He was choking, trying to pull air into his lungs.

  He did not know how long it lasted, how they were able to contain it, n
or how much time had passed since he’d left Eva. Time lapsed, lost all meaning. He was sitting on the charred ground among the ruins, covering his face with his hands. Shadows moved past him. He drew his hands away, and they were black, covered in soot. Soiled with the loss of everything his father had built.

  Yet he was alive. He moved his hands around to prove it. He was alive, and he pushed himself from the scorched grass and went to look for his brothers down by the water, where he’d delivered them, knowing they would be safe. When he saw them, he ran to them and pulled them into his arms, and then he was weeping out loud—weeping into their shoulders and their tiny chests, whispering their names and what he thought was a prayer.

  * * *

  “What happened?” he asked Tamás and Attia sometime later, as they sat together in the grass, still too weak to move. “What happened last night while I was gone?”

  He didn’t really expect them to know, but the way they looked at each other and lowered their eyes jolted his tired heart. They knew something, of that he was sure. “Tell me, boys!” he insisted. “It’s all right. You are safe now. What happened?”

  “There was a man,” began Tamás, almost fearfully. “He came ’round looking for you. He banged on some doors and did a bunch of shoutin’ and cursin’, but no one could tell him where you were, no one would really speak to him, so after a while he gave up and left. Then some other men came, ’bout a half hour later, on horses, carrying rifles. Everyone just ran inside, and we did, too—we locked the door twice as you taught us. Then we smelled fire. But we stayed inside. We stayed inside ’cause we knew you’d come. We knew you’d come to get us.”

  “You did good,” Aleandro mumbled, even though he felt punched in the stomach. “But tell me, Tamás, this man who was asking for me, what did he look like?”