The Cadence of Gypsies

by Barbara Casey

  For the next several minutes, only the hypnotic ticking of the clock hanging on the wall between the kitchen and living room could be heard while each girl studied Carolina’s single page wrapped in acid-free paper. Then everyone started talking at once.

  The FIGs spent the rest of the day at Carolina’s bungalow going over the material Carolina had amassed in her years of research, taking only a brief cafeteria break for lunch and dinner. When the clock struck nine o’clock that evening, Carolina made them return to their rooms in the dormitory so they would be there when lights went out at ten. They would start fresh the next morning and make their plans.

  Chapter 8

  The young gypsy child called Bakro ran sobbing to his mother. “Milosh put a curse on me.” His mother knelt down and enfolded him into her arms.

  “Milosh doesn’t have the power.” She spoke quietly and in a voice she knew would comfort. “He is only playing games.” She glanced across the dirt path that had once been part of the beautiful gardens of the Old Villa toward the small trailer where the Bandoleer stayed with his wife and boy. She was angry, but she would not let her young son know. Instead, she would settle it with the wife of the Bandoleer. She had been much too lax with Milosh. He was getting out of hand and causing fear and bad feelings amongst the younger children. Pretending to put bad curses on them, and for what? Just to frighten! He needed to be punished.

  She took her young son by the hand and led him into their hut. “It is time for bed, Bakro. Wash yourself, and then I will tell you a story.”

  The young child did as he was told, for he had no desire to disobey—not like Milosh.

  * * *

  Jimmy Bob Doake heard a light knock on his office door. It was probably one of the hair-brained, ego maniac teachers wanting something. None of them seemed to be able to get things done during regular hours. It was always after hours when they needed something, usually when he was watching one of his favorite teams on television, or writing one of his poems. It was Ms. Lovel.

  “Hi, Jimmy Bob. I know it is late, but would you mind letting me into the machine room? I need to make some copies.” In her arms she held a large file of papers.

  “I don’t mind one bit, Ms. Lovel.” Unlike the others who taught at Wood Rose, Jimmy Bob liked Ms. Lovel. She was one of the few faculty members who didn’t carry a chip around on her shoulder. She always spoke to him when she saw him around campus and usually asked about his writing if she wasn’t in a hurry. Once, when he was trying to find a word to rhyme with “strange,” she gave him a helpful little book that explained not all poetry had to rhyme or even be in meter. There was something called free verse, a flowing type of poetry that apparently had no rules. He had learned a lot from the little book for since reading it, the sheer volume of poems he had been able to produce had almost tripled.

  He unlocked the room where various duplicating equipment and copy machines were kept and then dutifully stood guard outside the door to give Ms. Lovel privacy and to make sure no harm came to her. Once she had finished, he locked up everything and then escorted Ms. Lovel back to her bungalow. After all, it was late and it was dark. And it was his responsibility to make sure no harm came to any of the residents of Wood Rose.

  Back in her bungalow, Carolina went over the list of things she and the FIGs had discussed. There was so much to do. But now, at least, each of them would have a copy of the Voynich Manuscript as well as a copy of her own page so they could study them however they wanted. The most pressing thing was the problem of the passports. Carolina’s was up-to-date, as was Jennifer’s. Dara and Mackenzie, however, didn’t have passports. She checked her watch. It was after eleven o’clock, but he usually kept late hours anyway. And even if he was already in bed, he probably wouldn’t mind. She picked up the phone and dialed long distance to Chapel Hill.

  “Larry, I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Are you kidding? You know me better than that. What’s up, Carolina? I was starting to get worried about you. I haven’t heard from you in two days.”

  Carolina had first met Larry Gitani the beginning of her freshman year at the university. An extremely private person, yet he was the most “connected” human being she had ever known. No matter what came up, he knew someone who could take care of it. He didn’t talk much about his family, except to say his father was a widower, and he was from Italy. And sensing that he really didn’t want to talk about them, Carolina didn’t ask questions. They attended many of the same classes and both wound up going on to graduate school—she to study foreign languages and psychology, and he to study international law. There were many days and nights that they spent together bent over books and research notes, sharing a pot of hot black coffee parked within easy reach, and simply being together. They also shared many days and nights exploring Carolina’s adoption, something which she felt comfortable doing since he was her best friend. It was Larry who helped Carolina in her search for information about the region where she had been born and her birth parents; and it was he who discovered that they were gypsies.

  When Larry got his doctorate, he elected to stay at the university and teach, which is what Carolina had also planned to do until the job offer came up at Wood Rose. It was Carolina’s decision to leave the university that put a check on their relationship and where it was leading. That and Carolina’s overwhelming need to learn the truth about her birth; for without that, she knew she would not be able to succeed in any relationship, especially one that involved love and intimacy. Even though they didn’t see one another as often now, they still talked every day and the distance of thirty miles between them hadn’t changed her feelings for him or the fact that Larry would do anything in the world for her.

  “Do you know anyone in the passport office?” Carolina asked. “I need two passports as soon as I can get them. Is that even possible?”

  “Are these fake passports, or legit?” he asked.

  Carolina giggled. “They are for two of my students. I am planning to take them and one other student to Italy for a mini study course, but our time is limited. We need to leave as soon as we can.”

  “I assume you are talking about the FIGs.” Of course he was all too familiar with Carolina’s three students and their expressions of creativity. “No problem,” and he told Carolina what he would need. “Does this mean you will be going to Frascati?”

  “Yes.”

  Larry was well aware of Carolina’s interest in Frascati since she had shown him that wooden box and the things in it. This was a big step for her—to finally go to the place of her birth. “Are you going to be all right? I mean, do you know what you want to accomplish?” Ever the pragmatist, Larry’s concern was as logical as it was touching. “I assume this means you have told the FIGs—about everything.”

  Carolina explained about the Photinia frasen and her decision to make the trip now, taking the FIGs with her.

  “I guess you showed them your special paper?” That was what he called the paper with the strange script.

  “I did. And they immediately drew the same conclusions you and I did. We plan to go to the Villa Mondragone and do some research in the library there, assuming we will be allowed to. I hope to meet Signora De Rosa while we are there as well.”

  “I am happy for you, Carolina. Stay in touch, all right?”

  “Thanks, Larry. I will. This means more to me than you know.”

  Larry did know; he also knew that whatever she found at Frascati would have an impact on their relationship. Good or bad, he didn’t know. “Well, you can pay me back by having dinner with me when you get back so we can catch up.”

  He was right. They would need to catch up. He had always been there for her, patiently waiting; but she knew that couldn’t continue indefinitely. He wanted a commitment from her and she—consumed with trying to find out who she was—had been both unwilling and unable. Maybe, once she returned, she would be able to move forward with her life. Maybe, if it wasn’t too late, she could finally make that com
mitment.

  Later that night as she lay in bed, Carolina once again played the game: the psychic conflict between wanting primal familiarity or the search for novel experience. Familiarity was knowing and, more importantly, accepting without question who she was and her situation. The search for novel experience—her past, however, meant uncertainty, change, leaving the bounds of familiarity for something unknown. One was safe; the other, frightening. Yet, in the end, she knew what she must do. She had no choice. The decision had been made for her when she first learned that she was adopted. She wanted to learn the truth. Without that, she would never feel complete as a person.

  Sharing everything with the FIGs made her even more confident that she was doing the right thing to explore her past. From the moment she first made the connection between her page and the pages of the Voynich Manuscript, she had felt an immense responsibility, even a sense of obligation, to discover the meaning of it all—even beyond learning her own background. She might not ever learn what any of it meant or her connection with it, but she had to try. And by involving the FIGs, she had at the very least given them something they would treasure for the rest of their lives. Hopefully, when it was all behind them, regardless of the outcome, that alone would somehow allow her to move on with her life, as well as help the FIGs look forward to the many wonderful possibilities in their own futures.

  * * *

  Dara’s thoughts turned toward the mental exercise as she always did whenever familiarizing herself with a new language. It was her private world—her private language; it was how her mind functioned. It was what made her a genius.

  First she established the root of each main word, or symbol in some cases, and assigned it a certain “weight” or number. By knowing this, she could then figure out the origin of the word; and from that, it was just a short step to recognizing its meaning. It was her own system, something she had taught herself as a child; but it worked, whether she was learning a new alphabet, the characters from an obsolete Chinese dialect, or hieroglyphics.

  Next, she visualized the symbols or words she had noticed were most often repeated in the Voynich Manuscript, she thought of the manuscript’s peculiarities, and then, turning away from the normal or obvious, she tried to think what was abnormal and what was missing. The entire process was exciting to her; but even more exciting than working on translating the Voynich Manuscript was thinking about going to Italy with Mackenzie, Jennifer, and Carolina. Except for when the social worker brought her from Virginia to live at Wood Rose, Dara had never been anywhere.

  A “late baby,” Dara’s seven older brothers and sisters had already left home by the time she was born, so there was only her and her mama. Her first memories were those of always feeling hungry and the pungent odor of swamp mud. They had a small garden, she remembered, but nothing much ever came of it, and there was an old, smoke-blackened pot sitting out front in the yard that her mama burned kerosene in to keep the snakes away. Dara was smart, though, and she learned at a young age what she needed to do to survive. Home was a rusted-out trailer set back in a thicket near a ditch bank that usually flooded whenever it rained. Years later, Dara no longer remembered what the inside of the trailer looked like. She only remembered her and her mama sitting on the outside stoop listening to tree frogs and cicadas while muddy flood waters lapped at their feet.

  Property belonging to the United States Navy was just across the ditch bank, protected by a chain-link fence in order to keep anyone out who didn’t belong. What she remembered about her mama was her beautiful, red painted mouth. She never knew her father, probably because her mother didn’t know who her father was. That didn’t mean Dara didn’t know any men; her mama had many male friends, all who would show up late at night dressed in their nice starched uniforms.

  Most of the men wouldn’t talk to her. But if they did, she would ask them to teach her new words. After all, they had traveled to foreign places, and Dara knew just enough to understand that people in other places spoke different languages. Sometimes the words they taught her weren’t nice words, and they would laugh at her when she repeated them. Or sometimes they were made-up words just to get her out of the way. But it didn’t matter. She played her game with the words, thinking about the heavy parts of the biggest words, giving them a number, and figuring out where they came from.

  Neighbors who didn’t have much more than Dara and her mama would occasionally give them food or maybe some clothes. And sometimes when one of the men left a little money, Dara’s mama would take her into town to buy a piece of nickel candy at the store. That’s what happened the last time Dara saw her mama. “You wait here, pretty girl,” her mama had told her, poking her finger into one of the sausage curls on Dara’s head to smooth it out. Dara waited hours for her mama to come back for her. But she never did.

  When social services stepped in, Dara was given clean clothes to wear and food to eat. She was also given a battery of tests—psychological and educational performance evaluation tests they were called—to see where she should be placed in school. Astonishingly, she ranked off the charts. Thinking it was a scoring error, the child psychologist administering the tests gave them to Dara again, along with several different tests. This time Dara scored even higher, especially in the area of verbal skills—word recognition, association, and assimilation. Dr. Doris James, head of social services for the State of Virginia, was consulted. And it was she who decided to send Dara to Wood Rose Orphanage and Academy for Young Women. Dr. Harcourt was a long-time friend, and she knew of the sterling reputation he had maintained at Wood Rose over the years. She felt confident that Dara Roux, a gifted child with an obvious proclivity toward foreign languages, would be given the attention and encouragement she needed. In return, the State of Virginia would pay Wood Rose for taking care of her.

  * * *

  All of her life Mackenzie had been afraid. She had been afraid that by not living up to someone else’s expectations—it didn’t matter whose—she wouldn’t be adopted. So she focused on those things she enjoyed the most and caused the least amount of criticism. Even at a young age, that focus was on numbers. She loved them—playing with them, seeing how many ways she could make them relate to each other in unusual ways and relate to her. Then, at age seven, because of her obvious exceptional mathematical skills, she was transferred from the orphanage in upstate New York to Wood Rose Orphanage and Academy for Young Women where another seven-year-old child with exceptional abilities had recently been admitted. It was at Wood Rose that Mackenzie broadened her focus to include calculus, algebra, algorithms, geometry, and numerical codes.

  Dara Roux, Mackenzie soon learned, was the “other” gifted student, and the two became inseparable, each sensing the other’s needs as only one with brilliance could. And when the two girls turned nine years old, the age when the possibility for adoption drops by 85 percent, Mackenzie’s old fear of failure was replaced by a new fear. This was the fear of not fitting in with the other girls at Wood Rose who also had not been chosen to live with a forever family. Dara wasn’t afraid of anything, and when she learned of Mackenzie’s new fear, she was quick to console her. “Who wants to be put in a family with all those rules?” reasoned Dara. “You wouldn’t be able to do anything—not like we can do here.”

  Mackenzie silently calculated that being one kid out of 38 under the watchful eye of 10 Wood Rose faculty members and 25 members of the staff and administration didn’t increase the odds in her favor that much of being able to do whatever she wanted. But, as the years passed, and with Dara as her best friend, her fear diminished, and her lisp only became pronounced in situations that caused extreme nervousness.

  With the arrival of Jennifer, the strong union between Mackenzie and Dara was stretched to include this strange girl who was either poised for battle or locked in a silent world of musical notes. It had been only Dara and Mackenzie for so long. But even as different as Jennifer was, they could each relate to the other; she fit in. They shared the common goal of trying to
survive in an environment where they were considered odd and different. Therefore, within a short time, Jennifer also became Mackenzie’s and Dara’s friend.

  When Carolina came to Wood Rose, for the first time in her life Mackenzie actually knew what happiness felt like. Unspoken dreams suddenly became possibilities under Carolina’s tutelage, and she began to visualize her future filled with accomplishments and successes once she left Wood Rose. And now with all of this about the Voynich Manuscript, the reality of a successful future was even closer than she ever dared to hope.

  She sat up in bed and flipped on the flashlight she kept under her pillow. Then she reached for the calculator that was never far away and began methodically punching in figures. Even as unrelated and disconnected everything seemed to be in the manuscript, there was a certain mathematical logic to it. As Dara had pointed out, maybe it was two languages that had been combined.

  * * *

  A cadence had started beating in Jennifer’s head the moment she saw the Voynich Manuscript. It was beating now as she lay in bed, in the darkness of her room. She wasn’t sure what it meant; only, like before whenever a new musical composition stirred in her mind, it first came to her in a black and white image—like a charcoal drawing. Over time it would gradually change to color; and along with the color would come a beat—the cadence she called it; first softly, then pronounced, loud, and vibrating. But it was after the black and white image and after the colored image—when she felt the vibration of the cadence—that she knew she needed to capture its musical essence. This was when she wrote the notes on eight-stave musical paper as she heard them in her mind. This time, as she wrote the notes, she knew it was part of the answer to deciphering the manuscript.

  The massive rock that she had been carrying with her for as long as she could remember, even before her parents’ death, had started to get smaller since coming to Wood Rose, especially with Carolina’s arrival. In fact, even with all of the exciting events of the day, there was hardly any sign of it at all. Jennifer shifted slightly against her pillow as though to test it. It was still there, but it didn’t hurt nearly as much.