The Snow Gypsy

by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

  “Un pan grande y cuatro galletas,” she said quickly.

  She tucked the loaf of bread and the four biscuits into her bag and set off down the street to find a place to buy a newspaper. The thought of poring over the property section with Rose set off a frisson of excitement. It banished the unbearable thoughts that had descended in the bakery to the dark corner of her mind where they lurked like savage dogs, always trying to escape. The banishment was only temporary, of course. Memories like that could never be held at bay for long. But having a dream helped. A couple of weeks ago, it had seemed no more than a fantasy—but winning the competition had made it less of a dream and more of a tangible reality.

  The man in the newspaper shop gave her a withering look when she handed over the money. Was it that obvious she was a Gypsy? Clearly he was wondering what a person like her was doing buying a paper. She glanced at the big black letters at the top of the page. El Correo. Yes, that was the right name—the one Rose had told her to get.

  When she got outside she hurried off down the street. Without speaking a word, the man in the shop had made her feel degraded, humiliated. She sank onto a bench in an ornamental garden with a fountain. Beyond the rainbow splash of the water, she could see the terracotta rooftops of houses and the ancient tower of a church. And beyond that, green rolling hills dotted with poplar trees.

  Nieve must never feel the way he made me feel.

  The words rang out in her head as if she’d spoken them aloud. Over those hills lay Madrid. A place where she and Nieve could shake off the past. A place where no one would whisper the word gitanas when they went into a shop. She glanced at the newspaper on her lap. It wasn’t just about moving to a new place. What Rose was teaching them held magical power—the power to give Nieve dreams of her own.

  The Gypsy wagons rolled away from Segovia, traveling south through the province of Castilla-La Mancha, across great plains dotted with vineyards, castles, and windmills. The sun beat down on the canvas roof, making it too hot for Rose and Nieve to stay inside. Instead they sat on either side of Lola, where the forward movement of the wagon created a welcome breeze. Rose had made two columns on a piece of paper, writing Spanish words on the right and their equivalent in kalo on the left so that Lola and Nieve could see the different patterns the letters made.

  “What’s sleep in your language?” Rose asked.

  “Sobar,” Nieve replied. “That’s Mama’s nickname for my uncle—instead of Cristóbal she calls him Cris Sobar.”

  Rose wrote the word down, concentrating on keeping the pencil steady as they bumped over a pothole in the road. She was past the stage of wincing inside every time his name was mentioned, but she still didn’t trust herself to look Nieve or Lola in the eye when it happened.

  “So dormir in Spanish, sobar in kalo.” She held up the paper for them to see. “Think of another word, Nieve.”

  “Chungo,” Nieve replied.

  It was a word Rose had heard Cristóbal mutter under his breath more than once in the past few days. It wasn’t like any Romany word she’d ever come across. “What does it mean?”

  “Malo,” Nieve replied. Bad. She glanced sideways at Rose. It was only a fleeting look, but Rose got the distinct feeling that the child had sensed what was going on and was testing her out.

  “Those are very different sounding, aren’t they?” Once again, she bent over the paper, hoping her voice wouldn’t betray her. The thought that Nieve might have even the slightest suspicion of what had happened was unbearable. She had grown very close to the child during the journey from France. She had even begun to fantasize that Nieve could be the child her brother’s fiancée had been expecting.

  In all their time together over the past few days, Lola had never spoken about the fact that Nieve was adopted—and Rose hadn’t let on that Cristóbal had told her. She longed to know more about Nieve’s story, but she sensed that it was buried deep with Lola’s painful memories of leaving her mountain home.

  The evening of the next day was their last one on the road. They camped a few miles south of the city of Jaén, in a grove of Aleppo pines on the slopes of the Sierra Mágina—the Mountain of Spirits.

  Rose pitched her tent on a forest floor dotted with wild orchids. When it was up she and Nieve went off to gather mushrooms for the evening meal.

  “There are wolves around here,” Nieve whispered. “Bears, too. And a thing called a lince.”

  “What’s that?”

  Nieve clawed the air and made a growling noise.

  “A lion? Ah—a lynx,” Rose said.

  “And there are bandits as well. Uncle Cristóbal told me. When we stopped here on the way to France, we heard some trying to steal our horses.”

  “What happened?”

  “The men chased them off.”

  Rose wondered if she should have pitched her tent a little closer to the circle of vardos. “I think I’d better have Gunesh in with me tonight in that case,” she said.

  Nieve’s mouth turned down at the edges.

  “You can have him to stay with you when we get to Granada,” Rose said.

  “What about you? Aren’t you going to stay with us?”

  “I’m going to find a room in an inn. There won’t be anywhere to put my tent—and your house is going to be a bit crowded, I think, with you and your mother and your cousins. There’ll be a new baby, too, won’t there?” Rose felt her stomach contract.

  “But you’ll come and see us, won’t you?”

  “Yes, of course.” Meeting Cristóbal’s wife and children was going to be an ordeal—but she could hardly refuse to visit Nieve and Lola in their own home.

  Later, when the meal of rabbit and mushroom stew had been eaten and Nieve was tucked up in bed, Rose sat with Lola by the fire. It was just the two of them. Cristóbal had gone to play his guitar with some of the other men. The plaintive rise and fall of his voice drifted across the woodland clearing. Rose wondered how someone so heartless could produce something so profound, so spiritual.

  “It’s been lovely for Nieve, having you with us these past few days,” Lola said. “Lovely for me, too. You’ve been such good company.” Her eyes told Rose that these were not mere platitudes. She had noticed how the other Gypsy women were with Lola. How they excluded her from their tight-knit group with nothing more than their body language.

  “And I haven’t had to worry about Nieve wandering off on her own,” Lola went on. “She nearly drove me frantic on the way to France. Every time we stopped she seemed to disappear.”

  “I suppose she’s at an age where everything new is exciting,” Rose said.

  Lola nodded. “I know I should let her explore. Give her more freedom. But . . .” She trailed off, leaning forward to poke the fire back to life. “I’m terrified of losing her—that’s the problem. I’ve lost everyone that I’ve ever loved—and it’s made me overprotective.”

  “It must have been very hard for you, growing up during the Civil War.” Rose held her breath, hoping it didn’t sound as if she was prying.

  “It was the worst time of my life. I lost my grandfather the month the war started. He was a blacksmith, and we lived with him at his forge in Capileira. The Escuadra Negra came and dragged him away. We never knew where he died. But we found out that more than twenty men from our village were killed that day.”

  Rose listened in silence, staring into the blue-green flames rising from the pine twigs. The Escuadra Negra. The Black Squad. The very name was sinister. Lola would have been only eleven or twelve years old when the war started. The thought of a child seeing her grandfather dragged off to his death was horrendous.

  “The men who were left went into hiding higher up the mountains,” Lola went on. “They were joined by people like your brother. They carried out raids on fascist military bases and bombed bridges to cut them off. I told you, didn’t I, that my mother used to hide partisans in the house sometimes when they came to the village, and that Amador, my brother, used to take messages to them when he t
ook the goats out to pasture.”

  Rose nodded. She wanted to ask what had happened to them—but she was afraid of saying anything that might make Lola clam up.

  “I told you Amador was my twin, didn’t I?” Lola paused. Rose heard her blow out a breath. “We used to take it in turn to go out with the goats each morning. One day I was up on the mountain, and it started to snow. I was on my way down, and I heard shouting in the ravine below the village. I heard my mother’s voice. I ran as fast I could, but when I got there . . .”

  Rose reached across the space between them. Finding Lola’s hand, she closed her fingers around it.

  “There were bodies everywhere. All women, except for Amador. My mother was lying beside him, the two of them covered in blood, with the snow falling on top of them. I lay down beside them. I thought the blizzard would take me, too, that I would just fall asleep and never wake up. That’s what I wanted. But the goats had followed me down. They wouldn’t leave me alone. And then I heard a strange noise, like a cat mewing. But it wasn’t a cat. It was a newborn baby. The mother had been shot but not killed outright. She was still alive when I got to her.” Lola closed her eyes. “I had to cut the cord with my teeth. She asked me to take her child.”

  Rose tried to imagine her fourteen-year-old self confronted with something so gruesome. How Lola had had the courage to save that newborn’s life in such horrific circumstances was staggering. That she’d even known what to do was astonishing.

  “I called her Nieve because of the blizzard,” Lola went on. “She’s always felt like my daughter, even though I’m not the one who gave birth to her. She knows I’m not her real mother, but she doesn’t know what happened. I just told her that her parents died in the war.”

  “Did you know her—Nieve’s mother?” Rose held her breath.

  Lola shook her head. “She wasn’t from my village.” She glanced at Rose, her eyes full of concern. “I know what you’re thinking. And the answer is, I don’t know. I didn’t stay around long enough to find out her name. I knew that if I’d been at home when the men came, they would have killed me, too. So I set off up the mountain and didn’t stop until I got to Granada.”

  “You walked all that way with a baby? Through the snow?”

  “It took me two days. Some of the goats came with me. Without the milk, Nieve would probably have died.” Lola picked up a bunch of twigs and threw them onto the glowing embers. Sparks flew into the night air, dancing like fireflies. “She’s very fond of you, you know. I wish she was your brother’s child—that would be amazing, wouldn’t it? But I don’t know how you could ever discover the truth—unless you were to find him, of course.”

  “Can you remember anything about Nieve’s mother? What did she look like?”

  “She had black hair, like mine—like nearly everyone in our part of Spain.” Lola shrugged. “And dark eyes—very dark, like black olives. She was young—but not as young as me. Early twenties, perhaps. I kept one thing of hers—a shawl with peacocks on it. I wrapped Nieve in it. She still has it—sleeps with it every night, like a comfort blanket.”

  “Who would I ask? How on earth would I start?” Rose shook her head. It was so little to go on—a young pregnant woman with black hair and a peacock scarf. And Cristóbal had warned her that people would be reluctant to talk.

  “You can only try,” Lola replied. “I wish I could take you there myself. But like I said, I can never go back.”

  Rose wondered if that was because of the ghastly memories or because Lola was still afraid, eight years on, of those men with guns. Fear remains in the blood. That was what she’d said. Could her life really be in danger if she went back to the Alpujarras? Rose sensed that there was something Lola wasn’t telling her.

  “I suppose we’d better think about getting some sleep,” Lola said. “We’ve got a long way to go tomorrow if we’re going to make it to Granada in daylight.”

  Rose started to get up, but her right leg prickled with pins and needles.

  Lola was already on her feet. She took Rose’s arm and helped her up. Rose stamped her foot on the ground to get the circulation going; then she turned to say good night.

  “Good night, Rose.” The glimmering light of the fire lit up Lola’s face. She opened her mouth to say something else, but no words came out.

  “What? What is it?”

  “It’s just . . .” Lola glanced at the wagon.

  “What?”

  “What if you were to find out that Nieve was your brother’s child? You’d take her away from me, wouldn’t you?”

  Rose laid her hands on either side of Lola’s shoulders, holding her at arm’s length and looking her straight in the eyes. “You don’t believe that, do you? You’re her mother—in every way that matters.” She shook her head slowly. “Don’t get me wrong—I’d be the happiest woman on earth if Nieve turned out to be my niece—but I’d never, ever, try to take her away from you.”

  “Thank you,” Lola whispered. “I just needed to know.”

  Chapter 14

  Granada, Spain: June 6, 1946

  Rose closed the door of the attic room and made her way down the twisting wooden staircase. Mornings were the best time of day at the posada, the walls of the inner courtyard dripping with watered flowers, filling the air with the scent of jasmine and myrtle. The past two nights it had been too hot to sleep. There was a tiny window in her room—but opening it had made little difference to the temperature, and it had allowed an army of mosquitoes to fly in and feast on her exposed flesh.

  Breakfast was the only meal provided at the inn. Rose appeared to be the sole guest—she hadn’t seen anyone else coming or going since she’d arrived. The innkeeper’s daughter—who didn’t look much older than Nieve—brought her coffee and a tostada. A long bread roll cut in half lengthways, it was spread with tomato puree and slices of melted manchego cheese. It was delicious—but difficult to eat without showering her clothes with crumbs and smearing the sides of her mouth. She was glad there was no one to see her.

  When she had finished she clambered back up the stairs to wash her hands and face. Surveying her reflection in the mottled square of mirror above the basin, she reached for the earrings Jean Beau-Marie had given her. The blue stones caught the sunlight as she hooked them in her ears. In Turkey, where her father came from, blue stones were worn to ward off the evil eye. Perhaps these earrings carried the same power. She hoped so. Because today she was going to need all the help she could get.

  The inn was at the top of Calle Guinea, a steeply sloping street in the Albaicin—the ancient Moorish quarter of the city. The air outside smelled of scrubbed stones and wet dung. Rose made her way past shops selling brightly colored rugs and lamps of filigree metal. As she turned into the Camino del Sacromonte, she saw a Gypsy flower seller with a big basket of posies.

  “¡Jazmín, jazmín! ¡Hermoso, fresco!” Beautiful, fresh jasmine. The woman’s shouts echoed off the walls of the buildings.

  Rose stopped to buy some posies. She would give them to Juanita, along with the silver bells threaded on silk ribbon that she had bought to hang on the baby boy’s cradle.

  The house where the family lived was on a road that snaked along the hillside. As Rose climbed higher she caught glimpses of the towering terracotta walls of the Alhambra. Lola had promised to take her there this evening, before her performance at the tavern in the palace grounds. Rose tried to focus on that rather than the ordeal she was about to endure.

  She rounded a bend that led her past the first of the cave houses of the Sacromonte district of the city. The fronts of the buildings looked like normal houses, but viewed from the side, it was obvious that they were something quite extraordinary. Lola had described how the Gypsies who first settled there had been cave dwellers, and they had gradually built out from the natural sandstone, enclosing the caves to protect themselves against the burning heat of the sun in summer and the cold winds that blew down from the Sierra Nevada in winter.

  Rose’s first s
ight of the snowcapped mountains that formed the backdrop to the city had come when the wagon trundled the last few miles along the road from Jaén, the frozen peaks shimmering red and gold with the dying rays of the sun. Her spirits had soared at the sight—not just because it was so beautiful, but because the answer to all that she was seeking lay on the other side of those gilded slopes.

  The thought of Lola crossing that snowy wasteland with a tiny baby and nothing but goat’s milk to sustain them was incredible. Her bravery and determination were awe inspiring. No wonder she had become a champion dancer, with qualities like that.

  As Rose made her way along the road, she saw a trio of Gypsy girls standing outside a tall metal gate that formed the entrance to a low-slung cave dwelling. They wore aprons over long dresses of flowered cotton. Their glossy blue-black hair was pinned up around faces that shot looks of guarded curiosity as Rose passed by.

  No doubt they were used to being ogled by tourists. But Rose didn’t look like a tourist. On the journey from France, she had started to dress more like the women she was traveling with. She had bought a shawl in Segovia and two lengths of Indian cotton, one with swirling stripes of blue, mauve, and amber and the other patterned with an abstract design of rainbow-colored feathers. She was wearing one of the skirts she had sewn, and with the sprig of pink bougainvillea she had pinned in her hair, she looked not unlike the women at the roadside.

  She slowed her pace, examining each house for the distinguishing features Lola had described. But before she found it, she spotted Nieve and Gunesh walking toward her. The dog gave a joyful yelp and came bounding toward Rose, almost knocking her over as he leapt up to greet her.

  “Hello, boy! Have you missed me?”

  Gunesh nudged her chin with his nose.

  “He’s been a good boy this morning,” Nieve said. “Rafaelito was crying, and Gunesh licked his face until he stopped. Chico’s never done that.”