The Snow Gypsy

by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

  It was a far bigger gathering than she had imagined. There must be hundreds, possibly thousands of people camped out around the little seaside town. She wondered if it had always been like this or whether the prohibition of such meetings during the war had led to a surge in numbers now that it was over. Where on earth was she going to start searching among such a vast crowd?

  The bus dropped her right in the center of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, outside the medieval church. The building towered over the little fishing village like an enormous ship. Its walls were built like a fortress, with arrow-slit windows and castellated turrets. Above the great wooden door was an elegant metal cross whose lower end opened into a heart sitting on an anchor.

  She had read about the history of the place in a Baedeker’s guide to Provence. According to local legend, two female followers of Jesus—Mary Jacoby and Mary Salome—had fled Israel by boat after the crucifixion. Their servant, a dark-skinned Gypsy girl called Sara, had begged to be taken with them, and when the boat got lost in a storm, it was Sara who had guided the vessel by the stars and brought them safely to the Camargue. She became the Gypsies’ very own saint—and they came from all corners of Europe at this time of year to keep a vigil at her shrine in the crypt of the church before carrying her statue in a procession to the sea.

  There were queues of people going into the building. A gaggle of young women stopped to buy votive candles from a stall outside the door. They moved like flowers in the wind, their slender bodies swathed in vibrant dresses of taffeta and satin. Some were like carnations, in frilled gowns of bright red or deep pink. Some wore skirts of fluted yellow, like daffodils, while others were wrapped in the sultry purple of orchids.

  As they disappeared into the dark interior of the church, a crowd of others came to take their place, all clamoring for candles. Behind them came a group of men, perhaps thirty or forty strong, some playing fiddles or flutes as they walked, others shouting out to the women, calling their names and whistling.

  To be surrounded by so many people was dazzling, bewildering. Rose sank onto a bench in the shadow cast by the soaring walls of the church. She had to go and find somewhere to pitch her tent, but the thought of it was daunting. She didn’t want to encroach on the fields where the Gypsy caravans were parked. She wanted to keep a respectful distance—and in any case those fields already looked full to bursting. She wondered if she would have to camp on the beach itself. That might be the only available space.

  “Bonjour, mam’zelle!”

  Two Gypsy women with brilliant eyes and thick, shining hair came up to her, half a dozen children following in their wake. One of the women pointed at Rose’s rucksack. “Avez-vous des vêtements?”

  “Non!” Rose pulled the bag against her legs. “Je suis désolée.” I’m sorry.

  They wanted her clothes—but she had packed so frugally she had none to spare. Seeing the women’s faces harden, she pulled a paper bag from her jacket pocket. She’d bought sugared almonds at the quayside in Calais, and there were still a few left. She handed them out to the children, telling the mothers how proud they must be to have such handsome sons and daughters. It wasn’t empty praise. They were all strikingly beautiful, with the same blue-green eyes and caramel skin as the women.

  “Vous pouvez acheter.” You can buy. “Cette fille.” This girl.

  A child of about seven years old, with tumbling curls and a gap-toothed smile, was pushed forward. Before Rose could say a word, the child had climbed onto her lap. Her hair smelled of woodsmoke with a tang of patchouli.

  “Elle est très intelligente.” All the Gypsy art of persuasiveness was concentrated into the look the mother directed at Rose. For a fleeting moment she allowed herself to imagine taking the little girl. To have a child without the ties of marriage was something she had often fantasized about. But not like this. How could any mother sell her own flesh and blood? And how could anyone buy another woman’s child? She had never encountered anything like this among the English Gypsies. It was a delicate situation. How was she going to get out of it without offending them?

  “Quel dommage—ce n’est pas possible.” What a shame—it’s not possible.

  She kissed the little girl’s head and lifted her gently to the ground. Without a backward glance, she clipped Gunesh’s lead onto his collar and heaved her rucksack onto her back, closing her ears to the muttered oaths that followed her down the street. The dog, quick to sense the antipathy, turned his head and snarled.

  “It’s all right, boy,” she murmured. “Shush now.”

  Her colleagues at the veterinary practice in London had looked at her askance when she told them she would be traveling through Europe unaccompanied. To them it was dangerous and foolhardy for a lone woman to contemplate such a journey—especially sleeping in a tent. But she’d never felt afraid with Gunesh at her side. And there was nothing lonely about sleeping out in the open when he was curled up at her feet.

  “Quel beau chien!” What a handsome dog!

  A tall, pale man dressed entirely in black stepped out of the shadows. His dark hair hung down to his neck, and his cheeks sprouted long side whiskers. He stroked the Afghan’s neck, bending his knees to a squat so that his head was level with the dog’s.

  “His name is Gunesh,” Rose replied in French.

  “Gunesh?” The man glanced up at her, a puzzled look on his face.

  “It’s Turkish. It means sun—because of his golden hair.”

  “Ah!” This brought a smile to the pale face. He straightened up and stuck out his hand. “Jean Beau-Marie.”

  “Rose Daniel.”

  He cocked his head to one side, searching her face. “Où habitez-vous? Pas en Turquie?”

  “No. My father was Turkish but I’m from England.”

  “Gitane?”

  She could see that he was really confused now: a girl who looked like a Gypsy but came from England with a dog whose name was Turkish.

  “I’m looking for somewhere to camp,” she said, sidestepping the question.

  He nodded. “I can show you.”

  He offered to carry her rucksack, but she politely declined. As they walked he told her that he was a Gypsy chief from Alsace-Lorraine in the north of France. Following behind him, she thought what a somber figure he made in his black clothes, walking with his shoulders hunched over like a crow. Despite his friendly manner there was an indefinable sense of sadness about him. She wondered if she should trust him.

  He took her to the edge of a field, close to the temporary paddock where the horses that pulled the Gypsy caravans were quartered.

  “You don’t mind the smell?” He wrinkled his nose, waving a hand at a patch of ground beside the fence. It was just about big enough to take her tent.

  “No, I don’t mind.” She smiled. There was something very wholesome about the smell of horse dung. And it seemed fitting that her search for Nathan had brought her close to the animals he loved so much.

  Jean helped her to erect the tent and brought her firewood so that she could boil water. He looked puzzled when she offered him tea, so she brewed coffee for them both instead. He told her that he was the bell ringer in the church for the Gypsy fiesta. “Ring out the bad and the cruel,” he said, grim faced. “Ring in something better.”

  She wondered what had happened to him during the war. The look in his eyes made her wary of asking questions. Instead she told him about her brother and her quest to find out what had become of him.

  “There are Spanish folk at the fiesta.” He nodded. “There used to be more Spanish than any others, apart from we French.” He lifted the tin mug of coffee to his lips, draining the scalding liquid in one go. “Of course, there are less of all of us here than in years gone by.”

  Rose glanced at the vardos parked beyond the paddock. It still seemed like a terrific number to her, so she could only guess at what it must have been like before the Germans invaded. She should have realized, of course. It had been yet another shocking revelation in the harro
wing litany of war crimes: that Hitler had destroyed thousands of Gypsies in the same monstrous way he had wiped out Jews.

  “Have you spoken to any of the Spaniards yet?” Jean asked.

  Rose shook her head. “I haven’t had the chance.”

  “Do you speak Spanish?”

  “I learnt it at school, but it’s been a while since I spoke it.”

  “Well, your French is excellent.”

  “That’s because my mother was French. I learnt her language before I learnt English.”

  “The Spanish Gypsies speak to each other in kalo,” Jean said. “Do you know that tongue?”

  “If it’s anything like Romany, then yes, I do—a little.”

  He nodded. “I think you’ll get by. Would you like me to take you to meet some of the Spaniards?”

  “Could you? You’ve already been so kind.”

  “It’s nothing.” He held out his hands, palms up. It was then that she noticed the number tattooed on the inside of his left forearm.

  He caught her looking before her eyes darted away, back to the fire.

  “I was a prisoner. In the place they called Auschwitz. The Nazis killed my family.” There was no emotion in his voice. He might have been commenting on the weather. “My mother, my father, and my sister. All gassed. They tried to work me to death in the coal mine, but I wouldn’t die.” He was staring at the blue ink mark on his arm. “Most days I wish I had.”

  She drew in a long breath. She had read, of course, about the horrors of the death camps. But to hear about it from the lips of someone who had endured them was utterly heartbreaking. She felt a sudden kinship with this stranger—a need to tell him her own story. “My mother’s sister and her husband died in one of the camps. They were Jews, living in Paris.”

  His eyes searched her face. She had given him the answer to the puzzle of her looks: that she was a member of a race as despised as his own people.

  “They were herded onto a train one day and never seen again,” she went on. “It was soon after the war started. The summer of 1940. My father was there when it happened. He’d gone to stay with them on the way to search for my brother in Spain. He was rounded up, too. He died of a heart attack, trying to stop the Nazis pushing people onto the train.”

  Ring out the bad and the cruel. Ring in something better.

  She didn’t see his lips move. It was as if he’d repeated the words inside his head and somehow transmitted them into hers.

  She couldn’t bear to think of what Jean must have seen at Auschwitz. The unjust imprisoning and killing of anything had always tormented her. As a student she had been unable to stomach the vivisection practiced on animals. It had been the main reason for her rejection of mainstream veterinary science in favor of herbal treatments for animals. But in Auschwitz, vivisection had been carried out on Jews and Gypsies—some of them women and children. No wonder Jean looked haunted.

  “I’ll take you now if you like—to find the Spanish folk.” She heard his knees crack as he rose to his feet.

  She nodded. Lifting the flap of her rucksack, she burrowed inside for the gifts she’d bought in Arles. And for one more thing—the photograph of Nathan. She had taken it what seemed like a hundred years ago, the day she turned eighteen, at the house in Cheshire. Nathan had been out on his favorite horse, Pharaoh, and she’d snapped him with her new camera as he was about to dismount, his face glowing with exertion and his hair blown wild by the wind.

  As she followed Jean through the sea of caravans, she pressed the photograph to her heart. She could feel the surge of her own blood, the panic rising in her belly at the thought of what lay ahead. Spain was a big country. What were the chances, really, of anyone from the area Nathan had gone to being here at the fiesta? She’d told herself countless times to be prepared for disappointment—that coming here was clutching at straws. But meeting Jean had fanned the tiny flame of hope in her heart. Despite the brutality he had endured, he had survived. If, as she had sometimes wondered, Nathan had been taken prisoner, there was a chance that like Jean, he was still alive. Maybe he had even managed to escape but was too traumatized to return to his former life.

  “Those are Spaniards—over there.” Jean was pointing to a group of about twenty people, all eating and laughing around a campfire.

  Rose felt her mouth go dry. This was it. There was no turning back.

  Chapter 7

  Cristóbal picked up his guitar and lowered his legs over the side of the wagon. “Come on,” he called over his shoulder, “I want to show you where we’ll be performing.”

  Lola was giving Nieve a wash and brush up. The child had been allowed to run wild these past few days on the road. There was mud under her fingernails and bits of twig in her hair. “We’ll catch you up,” she called back. “Which way is it?”

  “Head for the church,” Cristóbal replied. “It’s in the square right in front of it.”

  It took Lola longer than she expected to detangle Nieve’s hair. The child wriggled like a worm on a hook and shrieked as if Lola were brandishing a knife, not a comb.

  “Shush!” Lola shook her head, exasperated. “People will think I’m murdering you!”

  “Well, that’s what it feels like!” There was steely defiance in the little face. Nieve’s eyes were bright with tears, but she wouldn’t let Lola see her cry. She was much too proud for that.

  “If you want new ribbons, you have to have tidy hair.” Lola held her at arm’s length, checking her from head to toe. “Okay—you’ll do.”

  Nieve scrambled out of the wagon ahead of Lola.

  “Hey! Wait for me!” Lola was still lacing up her boots. She’d changed out of the dusty skirt and the old shirt of Cristóbal’s that she’d worn while they were on the road. Now she wore a fresh white blouse and a skirt of lilac blue. The color was echoed by the cornflowers she had picked from the edge of the field and tucked into her hair.

  It was easy to find the place Cristóbal had gone to. The church tower dwarfed the other buildings of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Lola wondered how such a magnificent structure had come to be erected in what was just a small fishing village. She had thought it was only big cities, like Granada, that had great turreted fortresses. But this place echoed the might of the Alhambra in the way it dominated the landscape around it.

  She spotted her cousin in front of the great wooden door, playing his guitar to a group of women. Lola saw one of them giggle softly as he glanced up at her. The others exchanged furtive looks from beneath dark-lashed eyelids. The women were all young—no older than herself—and had clearly taken great care over their appearance. Their dresses made a rainbow of colors—red, orange, yellow, turquoise, violet—and their hair shone blue black where the sun touched it.

  “Oh, Cristóbal,” Lola muttered under her breath. “You just can’t resist, can you?”

  “What can’t Uncle Cristóbal do?” Nieve tugged at Lola’s sleeve.

  “Nothing, cariño.” Lola took Nieve’s hand as she scanned the teeming village square. “Let’s go and look for those ribbons, shall we?”

  The child nodded eagerly. “And when I’ve got them on, I want to go and show them to Saint Sara!”

  Lola frowned. “She’s not a real person—I mean, she was, once upon a time. But now she’s . . . well, she’s like a doll—a very big doll made of wood.”

  “I still want to show her my ribbons.” Nieve stuck out her bottom lip.

  “Yes, of course you can. We’ve got plenty of time.” Lola ushered Nieve past the women simpering over her cousin. “I’m sure Uncle Cristóbal won’t mind.”

  Rose stood in the shadow of one of the vardos, waiting for Jean to explain who she was. But Gunesh was not so polite. Perhaps it was the smell of rabbit stew that sent him bounding from her grasp. The Gypsies didn’t seem to mind. They clustered around him, clearly taken with his statuesque good looks. As his owner, she commanded their interest even before she’d handed out her gifts of coffee and tobacco.

  Jean exp
lained that the people in the group were mainly from northern Spain. Some of the men had fought as partisans during the Spanish Civil War, but none had gone as far south as Granada.

  “I’d still like them to see my brother’s photograph.” She took it from her jacket pocket and handed it to him. “He would have traveled through northern Spain if he managed to get to France.”

  If Jean thought it was a waste of time, his face didn’t show it. He passed the image around and Rose watched the men’s faces. There was much scratching of heads and narrowing of eyes. Clearly they wanted to help. But no one recognized Nathan.

  One of the men gesticulated at Jean. Rose couldn’t tell if he was speaking Spanish or kalo, his voice was so gruff.

  “He says there’s a group from Granada in the next field—he’s offering to take us to them.”

  The gloom that had settled on Rose dissolved in a heartbeat. Murmuring hurried thanks to the others, she grabbed Gunesh by the collar and followed the man through a maze of wagons. To her right she caught glimpses of the sea, glinting amber in the afternoon light. A pair of flamingos glided across the sky, their long bodies silhouetted against the orange orb of the sun. Despite the nearness of the water, Rose couldn’t hear the rumble of the waves on the beach. The cacophony in the field drowned out all other sounds. Fires crackled, dogs barked, horses snorted, and babies wailed. Men yelled at dogs, and women screeched at children. Fortune-tellers called out to Rose as she passed by, and flower sellers stepped in her way, thrusting bunches of jasmine and lavender under her nose.

  It was a relief when they reached the dirt track that separated the two camping areas. Skirting around the edge of the field, their guide took them straight to the place where the Granada Gypsies had set up home. He indicated a circle of a dozen or so vardos, distinguished from the others by bunches of dried pomegranates hung on string from the carved wooden fronts of the wagons. Pointing at the tawny globes rattling together in the breeze, he turned and muttered something to Jean.