Love Begins in Winter

by Simon Van Booy

  His head fell limply into his hands. He took his sandals off. In the hot morning sun his legs had begun to sting again.

  People walked around them.

  Then Molly reached down and fixed his caterpillar sock.

  “Put your shoes on if you want to go on the gondola,” she said.

  At the entrance to the boats there were other men dressed in the same striped shirts. They smoked and drank coffee in little cups. They raised their hands in greeting and nodded without smiling.

  Within a few minutes, the gondolier, Molly, and her son were in the boat. The boy said the boat looked like a mustache. He held on to his mother’s hand. He wanted her to know she had made the right decision. Hands have their own language.

  The gondolier stood like a mechanical toy and pushed against the bottom of the blue water with a long pole. Everyone was watching. Carlo walked alongside them and played his three notes.

  “Buongiorno!” the gondolier announced to passersby. A Japanese woman started clapping.

  Molly marveled at the people on their balconies. The restaurants too were filling up. The sinister cast of characters who had passed them during the night had gone, and the city swelled with a softer, gentler group who rose with the sun and woke only at night to fetch glasses of water.

  When they reached a wider stretch of the canal, the gondolier stepped down and opened the trunk upon which he had been standing. He undid the lock and lifted from it a large dark wooden box. He set it down on the bench between the trunk and the emerald seat upon which Molly and her son sat very close together.

  “What is it?” asked the boy.

  “You’ll see, big one.”

  From the trunk, the gondolier took a thin but heavy black circle and placed it on top of the box. Then he turned a handle quickly and pulled over a thick metal arm with a needle at its end.

  At first, Molly and the boy heard nothing but crackling. By the time the strong, sweet voice of Enrico Caruso echoed through the Venetian piazza, the gondolier was back on his trunk mouthing along to the words.

  People flocked to the side of the bridge and applauded. Children stared in silent wonder.

  The gondolier moved his mouth in perfect timing to the song. People thought he was really singing. But the voice was that of someone long dead.

  Molly leaned back and closed her eyes. She had never heard a man sing with such emotion. She put her arm around her son and realized that the love she’d always dreamed of was sitting in the seat beside her wearing sandals and socks with caterpillars on them.

  The song ended, but the needle kept going. The box crackled as they returned to where they had begun. The gondolier quickly tied his boat to the line of other boats. His hands were old and beaten like two worn-out dogs.

  The gondolier sat down on the bench next to the music box.

  “Again,” the boy said.

  The gondolier wound up the machine as he had done before. At the sound of crackling, the other gondoliers stopped what they were doing and turned to face him. He stood proudly on his trunk, cleared his throat, and began to sing.

  The piercing beauty of a lone voice soared determinedly from the canal into the piazza, drawing people from beds and flat-screen televisions to the edges of their balconies.

  For a few moments, the voice was even audible in the casino; cards were set down; heads tilted upward.

  “What’s the song about?” the boy whispered to his mother.

  “I don’t know,” Molly said.

  “I do,” her son said.

  The piazza crackled with applause.

  When it came time to say good-bye, the little boy didn’t want to let go of the gondolier. They could feel the beating of each other’s hearts.

  In the Square of St. Peter, the lines outside the tomb had grown very long. Young Italian men in jeans sold water and apples. Tour guides stood still and held paddles. Children fell asleep in carriages. Teenagers tore past on smoking scooters. Restaurant managers heckled passing tourists, who stopped for a moment and then kept walking.

  Occasionally, someone looked up and noticed that a statue was missing.

  The priest took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his eyes.

  “Madonna,” he said quietly.

  And before parting, the two men thought of a lone gondolier paddling the canals of a swimming pool in the Nevada desert—reeling in the forsaken with the song he had once sung to his daughter on a farm in Wisconsin.

  The Coming and Going of Strangers

  Walter’s Journey Through the Rain

  WALTER WHEELED HIS HOT, ticking motorbike up and down the muddy lane, breathing with the rhythm of a small, determined engine. Fists of breath hovered and then opened over each taken-step. He would soon be within sight of his beloved’s house. In the far distance, Sunday parked over the village like an old mute who hid his face in the hanging thick of clouds. The afternoon had seen heavy rain and the fields were soft.

  Tired and wet, lovesick Walter thought of the Sunday town streets, hymns and hot dinners, the starch and hiss of ironing; shoes polished and set down before the fire so that each shoe held a flame in its black belly; dogs barking at back doors. Early stars.

  He stopped and held his motorbike still. He listened for the sounds of the faraway town. At first he could hear only his own hard breathing. Then a bus growling up the hill; the creaking of trees; and then in the distance—seagulls screaming from the cliffs.

  There were scabs of mud on the black fuel tank of Walter’s motorbike. Leaves and sticks had caught in the spokes and marked the stages of his journey in their own language. Light had not yet drained from the world, yet the moon was already out and cast a skeletal spell upon the bare branches of trees.

  The road sloped downward for several hundred yards. In the distance, cows perched on steep pasture and barked solemnly out to sea. Walter imagined their black eyes full of wordless questions. What were they capable of understanding? The cold country of water that lay beyond the cliffs? Did they feel the stillness of a Sunday?

  Walter removed the basket of eggs from the milk crate strapped to the back of his seat. Then he lay the machine down on its side. A handlebar end disappeared into a puddle.

  It was the highest point in the county. Looking west, Walter knew from the few books in his uncle’s caravan that America lay beyond. He exhaled and imagined how night—like a rolling wave—would carry his breath across the sea to New York. He imagined a complete stranger breathing the air that filled his own body.

  Walter removed a glove and rubbed his face. The dirt beneath his fingernails was black with oil. Walter pictured his mother back at home, sitting by the fire with Walter’s baby brother in her arms—wondering what her son was doing out in the drizzle. His father would be out of his wheelchair and up on the roof of the caravan, whistling and hammering new panels above the sink where the leak was.

  “This country is nothing but rain and songs,” his father once said in his Romany accent.

  A young Walter had asked if that was good.

  “Ay, it’s grand, Walter—because every song is a shadow to the memory it follows around, and rain touches a city all at once with its thousand small hands.”

  Walter loved The Smiths. In the caravan last week, as his mother sat him down for a haircut, Walter showed her a picture of Morrissey.

  “Who in the world is that skinny fella?” she’d said.

  “Can you cut my hair like that—can you do it, Ma?”

  “Why would you want it all on one side?”

  Walter shrugged. “It’s what I want,” he said.

  “All right—if that’s what you want.”

  “Thanks, Ma.”

  “He’s a pop singer, is he?”

  Walter sighed. “He’s a little bit more than that, Ma.” Then Walter thought, How could any sane woman turn me down if I looked like one of The Smiths—which in his Romany Irish accent sounded like “The Smits.”

  One night, long ago, Walter’s father sang his
own song to seduce a woman he’d just met. She listened with her hands in the sink. She fell in love holding a dinner plate. It was not how she’d pictured it.

  Then several years later, he metered softly a different song to baby Walter as rain beat down upon the roof of the wind-rocked caravan.

  The Gypsies on the Hill

  WALTER’S FAMILY HAD LIVED outside the village of Wicklow on the east coast of Ireland for Walter’s whole life. Unlike the rest of his Romany family, Walter’s had stayed in one place, and contrary to Rom custom, Walter was encouraged to attend the local school and mingle with the people of the village.

  Everyone in the village knew who Walter was, and they knew why his family lived on the hill a mile or so outside town.

  In 1943, Walter’s two sets of grandparents escaped Hitler’s murderous dream and came to Ireland. In the early 1960s, at a Rom festival in the south of Ireland, Walter’s mother and father met in a sloping field. It was quite dark, but they could see each other’s faces. The evening was chilly. She was barefoot. Walter’s father asked one of her brothers where they were from. Then later on, he offered her some cake to eat. She took it from his hands and put it straight into her mouth without chewing. They both laughed. Later on she hears a knock on the caravan door. Her brother is reading. She is barefoot at the sink with her sleeves rolled up. Her brother knows who it is. He opens the door and goes out to smoke. The man is holding a guitar. Finally it’s happening, and she holds her breath.

  Two nights later, they ran away. Then, as was the custom, their families met and laughed and argued in equal amounts. Within a week, bride price was set and Walter’s parents (then in their teens) returned home.

  Walter’s young mother and father journeyed to Wicklow immediately after the ceremony, even though everyone joked about how they’d already taken their honeymoon.

  “It’s such a fine, wild, and desolate country,” Walter’s father said to his bride in the car on the drive. He was still quite nervous because she was a quiet girl. He spread a blanket across her knees. She shivered—though it wasn’t cold.

  Her camp was near Belfast, while his camp was always moving, mostly around Dublin.

  Both families made a living from selling used cars, car parts, and scrap metal, sharpening knives, and laying tarmac. The women told fortunes—a craft developed and perfected over centuries and based on the idea that all humans want the same thing: love and acceptance.

  After passing through the village, the young couple parked on a hill and began to pitch a marital tent in a field overlooking the sea. The tent was orange, and its sides were hung over cool hollow poles that fit inside one another.

  Once it was up, they lay inside under a thick blanket and told stories without trying. Outside the tent, clouds blew across the field and out to sea.

  A rabbit hopped up to the tent, then ran back into the hedgerow.

  After they were together, her body trembled. She pressed herself against him. He listened to the sounds of night and of the sea wrapping its cold arms around the thick rocks; the white froth of saltwater; a chorus of popping barnacles.

  In the morning, Walter’s father cooked a breakfast with food they’d brought—food that wasn’t polluted by non-Romany shadows.

  As half a dozen sausages thopped and spat, turning brown on one side, Walter’s mother heard a tiny splash. She was washing her face beside the hedge. The water was mouse gray. She turned and looked back at the tent; its tangerine orange sides billowed in the wind against the hard green of the hedgerow. She continued washing. It was such a windy day.

  Then Walter’s father heard something—a feeble scream in the distance. He looked up from his sausages and saw two specks on the cliff several hundred yards away. He dropped his fork in the grass and ran. Two children stood at the edge beside an empty stroller. The older child was heaving violently and looking down at the water.

  Then the young child started to scream.

  At least a hundred feet down in the sea, something bobbed.

  The water was dark green.

  Walter’s father kicked off his boots and then jumped.

  When he hit the water, several bones in his right foot split.

  His wife saw him disappear. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emerged.

  Everyone thought they were dead because there was simply no trace of either of them. The police launched a boat. Not even a sock or a small shoe. Not a trace.

  Walter’s mother was taken to the children’s house by the police and given tea, which normally she wouldn’t have been able to drink because of Romany custom.

  The mother of the children sat very close to Walter’s mother. Eventually they held hands.

  The children sat at their feet.

  They were still and their faces were empty.

  More family trickled in through the thick farm door. People screamed and then talked quietly. An unmarried uncle sobbed into his hand. Then two women of the family approached the Gypsy in the chair. They touched her shoulders, knees, and then held on tight because it was too late—too late for anything except blind, gentle, wordless touching.

  Then the sound of breaking glass upstairs.

  Men’s voices.

  The sound of something heavy hitting the floor.

  Time unraveling without notice.

  Then suddenly—a miracle.

  Almost midnight and the police are pounding on the door.

  Lights go on.

  People in chairs come to life.

  The fire is a dark blood orange.

  More screaming, but a different kind as a man and small girl are helped from the back of a police car.

  The man is dark-skinned. A Romany. The child clings to him.

  They are wrapped in thick blankets. They both have messy hair. The child is too afraid to take her eyes off the Gypsy who jumped off a cliff to save her. His face has never been so still. He’s not fully convinced they’re alive. Not until he sees his wife will he believe it’s not a dream—a fantasy prelude to the life beyond death.

  The mother loses a shoe as she runs for the frightened bundle of child. The child reaches out, then once buried in the familiar bosom explodes with tears and shrieks.

  Walter’s mother slaps her husband across the face, then kisses it all over.

  More headlights turn into the driveway.

  The rattle of teacups from the kitchen.

  Joy fills the house.

  Men grab the hair on one another’s heads.

  Screaming and jumping.

  The sound of breaking glass.

  Singing.

  The Gypsy and the girl were found together walking up the cliff road toward town. They had been swept several miles from the spot where the child had fallen in. The outgoing tide had pulled them away from the rocks.

  His arms were raw, burning.

  His black eyes blazed with the fury of staying alive.

  Soaked clothes weighing them down.

  Finally man and child dumped upon a shallow sand-bar, then carried up the beach on the spreading foam of a breaker.

  Walter’s father had lost all sense of time. Perhaps years had passed. Perhaps they were the only two people alive on earth. Perhaps they would live together from now on. Such thoughts entered his mind as he watched the child cough and cough and cough.

  Walter’s father removed all her clothes and tucked her frigid body under his clothes so that only her head stuck out. As her body sucked the heat from his, she quieted and fell asleep.

  She was not dead, he knew that. He could feel her breathing. He could feel her life attached to his.

  Finally a car in the distance. Walter’s father signaled weakly.

  “Fuck off, Gypo,” the driver shouted through his window.

  More walking.

  Then an old farmer with a wagonful of sheep.

  He had been in the war and recognized immediately that desolate look of the figure in his headlights.

  The farmer saw that the man walking up the
dark road was soaked through. Then he noticed a second head. He pulled to the side of the road and hurried them into his wagon, freeing several sheep to make room. Then he drove back to his house without stopping to close the gate.

  His wife found blankets. Sugar lumps dropped liberally into china cups.

  The farmer watched the fire and wondered if they might stay.

  It wasn’t until Walter had stopped shivering that he told the farmer how the little girl wasn’t his—that he’d simply found her beneath the surface in the swirling black, in the cold, their arms like vines destined to forever entangle.

  The farmer looked very serious.

  His wife telephoned the police from the hall phone.

  The next day, as Walter’s father and mother were packing up their orange tent, several old Land Rovers turned in to the field through an open gate. Then several more cars. Even a police car. Walter’s mother helped her husband stand. His leg was bandaged. The pain was like fifty wasps trapped inside his foot.

  A large group of people walked toward them, headed by the children from the cliff and their parents. They stopped walking several yards off and the little girl’s father approached Walter’s father. He stood opposite and extended his hand. When Walter’s father went to shake it, the young man simply leaned forward and hugged him. Several people in the group started clapping. The policeman removed his hat. Women made the sign of the cross upon their anoraks.

  The man handed Walter’s father an envelope.

  “For what you done, Gypsy,” the man growled. His cheeks glistened.

  Walter’s father looked at the envelope.

  “It’s a letter from me to you, and a deed. We’re giving you this here land we stand on.”

  Walter’s father had been warned about getting mixed up in the affairs of non-Romanies.

  “Take it,” the man insisted. “Mary, Mother of Jesus, take it, man.”

  Walter looked up at the sky and exhaled.

  What would his family say if he started deal-making with non-Romanies.