They built no house upon the land, preferring their own caravans, but often they came to visit my father and to trade horses with him, a business at which my father and the Gypsies both were adept.
One year at harvest time they came to my father to buy a complete threshing outfit; a steam tractor, separator, water-tank wagon, cook car, hayracks, and even pitchforks.
Several days of discussion and bargaining preceded the actual purchase, but the deal was finally consummated in my father’s office.
This was a small room in the corner of the great red barn used by him as a veterinary hospital. It contained a rolltop desk, a swivel chair, and an old leather settee and had linoleum on the floor.
It was a day I shall never forget.
The Gypsies began to arrive at daybreak. The men wore black suits and had bandanas tied over their heads under their black hats, and some had gold rings in their ears. The women wore brightly colored dresses and shawls, with many necklaces of gold coins, and bracelets upon their arms. By the time the last had arrived there were at least thirty in our yard.
They knew my father and liked him, so there was much talk and laugher as they relived old horse-trades in which first one and then the other had been bested, before they settled down to business.
When the time came for payment they paid in cash on the floor of my father’s office. And they paid in gold.
The women lifted their outer skirts, revealing a series of petticoats containing hidden pockets around the waist. From these they each took several gold coins until my father was paid in full, a shining heap upon the linoleum floor. It amounted, I believe, to six or seven thousand dollars. I always intended to ask my father the amount merely to satisfy my curiosity, but now it is too late.
Too late?
Perhaps not…perhaps in some other time, further along down the years.
Among the Gypsies who came that day was one who took no part in the proceedings, for he was a stranger among them, a man from another tribe, another land.
He was a tall old man, though very straight and strong, with piercing black eyes, white hair, and a fine, high-arched nose and high cheekbones. He sat alone on a bench beneath the cottonwood tree at the end of our porch, and the others treated him with great respect, perhaps even fear.
He was sitting on the bench when I emerged from the office, following some others. I felt his eyes upon me. Others walked between us yet his eyes did not waver, so I stopped at last and stared at him and he at me.
“So?” he said. “Here you are.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you know me, then?”
“I believe I do.”
The sun was hot and I stood in the sun. The others had drawn away, not seeming to be aware, not talking at all, nor seeming to listen.
My father was in his office sacking up the gold, and I could hear the chink of coins and a fly buzzing. A horse stamped in the dust near the corner of the barn.
“It has been a long time. A very long time.”
I said nothing, for I had few words, yet within me there stirred a kind of awareness, a kind of knowledge, and a listening.
“You will have much to learn, but it will come to you quickly, to you above all.”
The afternoon was still. Within the house dishes rattled and soon my mother would call me.
“You were born to him?” His eyes indicated the office where my father was.
“Yes.”
“He is a good man, a strong man. This I have heard.”
“Yes.”
“You will be like him, I think. Like him, but different, for you will know. You, of us all, will surely know.”
What he was saying to me was unlike anything that had been said to me before, yet the words seemed right and I found nothing strange in them.
“You will coor the drom,” he said, “and if you need to know more, come to me in the springtime at the Sea Mary Church on the Gulf of Lyon, or at Burgos in the fall…and if you should meet a man with a golden dorje, tell him who you are.”
My father came from his office then, and the Gypsies were drifting to their wagons. The tall man got to his feet and rested his hand on my shoulder. He looked at my father and said, “You have a fine son. Let him go his way.”
—
When they were gone my adopted brother, who had stood listening, asked, “What does it mean? To coor the drom?”
“To go tramping,” I said. “He meant that I should travel across the world.”
Yet I could not have explained how I came to know Romany words.
Only a short time before I had become fascinated by maps, having them always before me. Already I could read the simplest books, and knew the continents and countries by their names and shapes.
“Pa,” I asked later, “where is the Gulf of Lyon?”
“On the coast of France,” he replied, and accustomed to my questions he did not ask why I wished to know.
That was the first indication, but nothing happened again for a long, long time.
And yet…?
On a summer’s day I had gone with my father into the country, and while he discussed business I walked up a low hill to where the sun lay warm upon the grass, and lay down near a big, old tree. After a while I dozed, yet what I then experienced was no dream, or if a dream it was unlike anything I would normally think of as such.
For I was not asleep. Distantly I heard the sound of a mowing machine, the murmur of my father’s voice as he talked, and the lazy drone of a bumblebee. Occasionally wind stirred the grass, but when it ceased there was only the warmth of the sun on my back.
Beneath all of this I had been for some time aware of another sound, a faint but definite beat that grew in volume until suddenly I knew, I who at the time had seen nothing larger than a rowboat, that what I heard was the rhythmic beat of many oars moving in unison.
At the same time I gradually became aware of movement, of water rustling about a hull, and the realization that I myself was aboard that boat, moving with it, looking along the boat’s length from some high point near the stern.
The sun was warm upon my back, for the sunshade above me possessed neither back nor sides. My finger stirred, and the hand I looked upon was my hand, yet much older, and upon the second finger was a ring bearing a strange device, a triangle with a peculiar design upon it. The ring, I knew, was important for what I was about to do.
“I will cross the bridge,” I seemed to be saying mentally, “and enter the Red Pavilion.”
The remark was puzzling, out of context, and did not belong to what I was then doing or thinking. Yet it was the first of such random thoughts, all part of a reconstruction that had begun to take place within the boy that I was.
The boat glided to a stop, grated against a stone-faced quay, and two slaves offered me their hands. I stepped from the boat into the hot, bright sun, and looked upon a city.
Turning, I glanced at the boat, seeming to really see it for the first time. There were forty rowers, twenty to a side, a high, curved prow, and a still higher decked stern over which was stretched a fringed awning of green. Under that awning was the single, fixed chair in which I had been seated.
“We have been waiting, Master. We have waited a long time.”
Turning my back to the boat I found waiting for me a covered chair with four stalwart bearers and two armed guards. The man addressing me was a tall man with a fine, high-arched nose and black piercing eyes.
“Mine was a far journey,” I heard myself saying, in a voice that was mine, yet not mine. “I had duties. I could not come until now.”
“A useless journey, I fear. They will not listen, Master. They have been too long at peace, and they cannot envision what will happen. The will to fight, if they ever possessed it, is gone from them. They wish to treat with the enemy, and believe he will come in peace.”
“We cannot permit it. If this is lost, two thousand years of knowledge goes with it.”
Once more I looked at the river. The
waters were brown, moving with infinite power. Far off, where this river began, its waters were clear and cold, flowing down from mountains where glaciers were, down through dense forests among green ferns and over moss-covered rocks. I had come from there, and even beyond there. How long must I remain in this hot and humid land?
Turning to the chair that awaited me I heard my father’s voice calling, and the chair seemed to fade, and the hot, white glare of the sun, and I smelled the warm green grass below me, and the dark, rich earth. So I got to my feet and walked back down the slope to where my father waited beside the car, and I walked as in a dream, a strange question alive within me.
Who was I? What river was that? What was I? Above all, what had I been?
By that time I had been several years in school, my education no different from those about me. Ours was a pleasant, attractive, and busy town where two small rivers met in a valley. I played a little basketball, hiked along the rivers, boxed in the gymnasium, and spent long hours in the library. Of the dream, or whatever it had been, I said nothing at all, to anybody.
It remained within me, and with it a sense of waiting, of preparing for something that was to come. Preparing to begin something…or was it simply to begin again?
My mind was impatient with its progress, demanding more and ever more. When each day’s school was complete, I hurried to the library, searching for I knew not what. Yet sometimes in my reading I would chance upon a name…or unbidden a name would come into my thoughts and I would search feverishly through books and maps to find it.
Thaneswar.
Why did such a name come to me suddenly, from out of nowhere?
There were other names, names found in no book, upon no map.
Sanathirtha…Jalandhar…Hari-Yupuya.
Suddenly I knew that last name. It was the city where I had left my boat to stand in the hot, white sun. Yet nowhere upon any map could I find such a city.
Of these things I said nothing, and after a time the memory of the boat and the landing grew dim, and I rarely gave thought to it.
Often, however, when reading old books I would find myself upon familiar ground as if some bygone knowledge had awakened within me. This struck me as absurd, yet it became increasingly necessary to guard my tongue to avoid seeming anything but normal.
Not that I came suddenly upon wisdom, for the foolishness every youngster must go through to grow up was still upon me. Often I succeeded in making an ass of myself, in saying or doing things that in a future time would make my ears grow red with embarrassment. Yet in those areas where I concentrated I found my thoughts leaping ahead, knowing what was to come, understanding arguments before they were offered.
Each year the Gypsies returned and several times they visited us and once I visited them with some youngsters of my own age.
The old man with the rings in his ears was not with them, nor could I learn anything about him. He had traveled with them a short time only. Vaguely they implied he had come from Hungary or Romania and was known to them through some obscure family connection.
There had been something familiar about him, something remembered or half-remembered.
More and more I spent time in the library, reading avidly from first one book, then another. Once, looking through an old book, rarely read by the look of the checkout slip stuck to the flyleaf, I came upon an etching of an ancient temple door. Under it was the caption: Unknown Ruined Temple.
Yet that temple was not unknown to me, for surely as I looked upon the picture I knew what lay within that door, knew I had been there, and upon occasion I had climbed those steps, stood within that door.
“Too much imagination,” I told myself, and turned the page.
These things filled me with restlessness, and occasionally I wondered what would happen if I tried those same conditions again…lying on a hillside, the warm sun on my back…or possibly if I just relaxed and waited?
Yet even after the idea came to me I did nothing; it was not from lack of faith in the experiment, but simply the demands of day-to-day living. For the time had now come for me to go wide upon the world, to find my own destiny, in my own way.
CHAPTER II
There were bleak years before me, and hardships to endure. There were books to read, there was music to hear, and paths to explore. Often my feet were blistered with walking and my hands with work. Hunger made spare my flesh, and thirst parched my throat, yet I grew in strength, for strength does not grow out of softness but out of the use of strength.
My hands took easily to the ax and shovel. Never did I despise labor, nor the sweat of it. I hauled on the heavy lines on tramp freighters, swung a double-jack in the mines, or worked in lumber camps or on construction jobs.
Always I studied, finding my way slowly to knowledge, learning to strike quick and hard when the occasion demanded, and to move on before I became too deeply involved in situations not good for me, or ways foreign to those I preferred.
In San Pedro, while waiting for a ship to anywhere at all, I lived the best I could, for hard times were upon the land, and many were the men I met there. One of them was Sleeth.
He came from where I knew not, and when he passed he went to somewhere beyond my knowledge, yet for a few weeks we spoke often.
When first I saw him he was coming into the library of the Seaman’s Church Institute, a dark, slender man with good shoulders. He was of a medium height or somewhat less, wearing neat but shabby clothes, and he did not look like a seaman, although the place was a club for seamen.
What he read in that library I do not know, but after a while we talked, of books and ships and far-off lands. He was a romantic, as men who follow the ships are apt to be, but what else he was or why he was there he did not say.
Often I saw him about the hall, playing checkers or chess, and at both he was a wizard. Nor was there any limit to what he could do with figures. He was fantastic.
Several times I saw him watching me, and one day he said, “When you get a ship, where would you like to go?”
“To the Far East.”
“Why?”
I shrugged, I guess. “I don’t know. It has always interested me.”
“Yes, I suppose it would.”
“Have you been there?”
“Many times. I am going back, someday.”
“What’s a dorje?”
He was tying little knots in a cast-off string, quaint, intricate weavings that he created deftly with amazingly quick movements of his fingers. It was a way he had, playing with string. At my question his fingers stopped.
“It’s a Buddhist symbol,” he said, “a thunderbolt symbol. In fact, that’s what ‘Darjeeling’ means…dorje-ling. The place of the thunderbolt.”
He stood up, putting his string in his pocket, then drawing his palms along his thighs as though drying them. “Where did you hear about a dorje?”
I laughed, to make nothing of it. “Oh, a man I met when I was a kid…he was a Gypsy. He told me if I ever met a man with a golden dorje I should tell him who I was.”
He did not look at me, merely said, “Stick around here at night. When the shipping office is closed and a ship comes in to refuel sometimes they’ll take the first seaman they can find.”
“I don’t have an AB ticket. Just a couple of discharges as an ordinary seaman.”
“I know a man who has one you can use. He took it as security for a loan and never saw the man again.” He paused for a moment, looking out the window at the gently falling rain. “I think I can get it for you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He looked down at his hands. They were skilled, capable hands, hands of strength. The sort of hands one might imagine a sculptor to have. “I wish we’d met further along,” he said suddenly. “There’s so much you could tell me, so much I want to know.”
He looked at me suddenly. “I am caught in the middle, you know, and I can’t remember some of the things I must remember. You could tell me how, you more than anyone.
&
nbsp; “Look”—there was desperation in his tone—“do you remember anything at all?”
His words made no sense, and yet, in a strange sort of way I understood what he was getting at. “A little, I think. I…I’m not sure.”
“I have an awful feeling I’m needed,” he muttered, “but I don’t know where, or how to find out. When I first saw you…there in the library…I knew you, all right. I just couldn’t believe it. You of all people. And then to discover that you haven’t arrived…that you can’t help me.”
I had no idea what to say, so I said nothing, yet I was perfectly aware that something was happening to me, that I was approaching a point of no return.
“The Gypsy…do you know where I could find him?”
“At Burgos, in the fall. Or at the Sea Mary Church on the Gulf of Lyon. That’s what he said.” And then a thought came to me. “His name was Adapa.”
“I thought so. My God, Adapa! I’ve got to find him.” He put the accent on the first syllable, as I had, and the sound of it gave me a curious sensation. “I hope nothing’s happened to him.”
He looked at me sharply. “You’re going out east, then. Get word to me, will you? You’ll know all about it soon, and when you do, get word to me. Maybe by that time I’ll not need it, but do what you can.”
He paused again. “Somebody has to get into Central Asia. Somebody who knows where to go. We need a new location, something farther west. Or somebody has to write something…you know…with the key words and a guide for us. It’s hell to have to blunder along.
“For so many years there were a half-dozen places a man could go. You, for example, if you had access to the records you could put yourself in tune within hours. You could arrive.”
—
The following morning I was drinking coffee at a restaurant counter, with only thirty-five cents left in my pocket. Sleeth came in and sat down beside me, moving quickly as he always did.
Volume 1: Unfinished Manuscripts, Mysterious Stories, and Lost Notes from One of the World's Most Popular Novelists Page 43
