Sabir was close to delirium when they lifted him out of the wood-box. Later, when he tried to reassemble the emotions he had felt upon being forced into the box, he found that his mind had blocked them out entirely. For self-protection, he assumed.
For he hadn’t been lying when he said he was claustrophobic. Years before, as a child, some schoolmates had played a prank on him which had involved locking him inside the trunk of a professor’s car. He had blacked out then, too. The professor had found him, half dead, three hours later. Made a Hell of a stink about it. The story had appeared in all the local newspapers.
Sabir had claimed not to remember who had perpetrated the prank, but almost a decade on he had had his revenge. As a journalist himself he had become possessed of considerable powers of innuendo and he had used these to the full. But the revenge hadn’t cured him of his claustrophobia – if anything, in recent years, it had got even worse.
Now he could feel himself sickening. His hand was throbbing and he suspected that he may have picked up an infection during the course of the night. The cuts had reopened and as he’d had nothing to clean them with before reapplying the bandage, he could only presume that they had attracted a few unwanted bacteria along the way – the incarceration in the wood-box must simply have compounded the issue. His head lolled backwards. He tried to raise a hand but couldn’t – in fact, his entire body seemed beyond his control. He felt himself being carried into a shady place, then up a few stairs and into a room in which light drifted on to his face through coloured panes of glass. His last memories were of a pair of dark brown eyes staring intently into his, as if their owner were trying to plumb the very depths of his soul.
***
He awoke to a deadening headache. The air was stifling and he found difficulty in breathing, as if his lungs had been three-quarters filled with foam rubber whilst he was sleeping. He looked down at his hand. It had been neatly rebandaged. He tried to raise it but only managed one desultory twitch before allowing it to collapse helplessly back on to the bed.
He realised that he was inside a caravan. Daylight was streaming in through the coloured glass windows beside him. He attempted to raise his head to see out of the single white pane but the effort was beyond him. He collapsed back on to the pillow. He’d never felt so completely out of contact with his body before – it was as if he and his limbs had become disjointed in some way and the key to their retrieval had been lost.
Well. At least he wasn’t dead. Or in a police hospital. One had to look on the bright side.
***
When next he awoke it was night-time. Just before opening his eyes, he became aware of a presence beside him. He pretended to be asleep, and allowed his head to loll to one side. Then he cracked his eyelids and tried to pick up whoever was sitting there in the darkness without her being aware of his look. For it was a woman – of that he was certain. There was the heavy scent of patchouli and some other, more elusive smelt, that reminded him vaguely of dough. Perhaps this person had been kneading bread?
He allowed his eyes to open wider. Samana’s sister was perched on the chair at his bedside. She was hunched forward, as if in prayer. But there was the glint of a knife in her lap.
‘I am wondering whether to kill you.’
Sabir swallowed. He tried to appear calm but he was still having trouble inhaling and his breath came out in small, uncomfortable puffs, like a woman in childbirth. ‘Are you going to? I wish you’d get on with it then. I’m certainly not able to defend myself – like that time you had me tied up and were going to castrate me. You’re just as safe now. I can’t even raise my hand to ward you off.’
‘Just like my brother.’
‘I didn’t kill your brother. How many times do I have to tell you? I met him once. He attacked me. God knows why. Then he told me to come here.’
‘Why did you wink at me like that?’
‘It was the only way I could think of to communicate my innocence to you.’
‘But it angered me. I nearly killed you then.’
‘I had to risk that. There was no other way.’
She sat back, considering.
‘Is it you that’s been treating me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Funny way to behave to someone you intend to kill.’
‘I didn’t say I intended to kill you. I said I was thinking about it.’
‘What would you do with me? With my body?’
‘The men would joint you, like a pig. Then we’d burn you.’
There was an uncomfortable silence. Sabir fell to wondering how he had managed to get himself into a position like this. And for what? ‘How long have I been here?’
‘Three days.’
‘Jesus.’ He reached down and lifted his bad hand with his good. ‘What was wrong with me? Is wrong with me?’
‘Blood poisoning. I treated you with herbs and kaolin poultices. The infection had moved to your lungs. But you’ll live.’
‘Are you quite sure of that?’ Sabir immediately sensed that his effort at sarcasm had entirely passed her by.
‘I spoke to the pharmacist.’
‘The who?’
‘The woman who treated your cuts. The name of where she worked was in the newspaper. I went to Paris to collect some of my brother’s hair. Now we are going to bury him.’
‘What did the woman say?’
‘That you are telling the truth.’
‘So who do you think killed your brother.’
‘You. Or another man.’
‘Still me?’
‘The other man, perhaps. But you were part of it.’
‘So why don’t you kill me now and have done with it? Joint me like a sucking pig?’
‘Don’t be in such a hurry.’ She slipped the knife back underneath her dress. ‘You will see.’
19
Later that same night they helped Sabir out of the caravan and into the clearing. A couple of the men had constructed a litter and they lifted him on to it and carried him out into the forest and along a moonlit track.
Samana’s sister walked beside him as if she owned him, or had some other vested interest in his presence. Which I suppose she does, thought Sabir to himself. I’m her insurance policy against having to think.
A squirrel ran across the track in front of them and the women began to chatter excitedly amongst themselves.
‘What’s that all about?’
‘A squirrel is a lucky omen.’
‘What’s a bad one?’
She shot a look at him, then decided that he was not being flippant… ‘An owl.’ She lowered her voice. ‘A snake. The worst is a rat.’
‘Why’s that?’ He found that he was lowering his voice too.
‘They are mahrime. Polluted. It is better not to mention them.’
‘Ah.’
By this time they had reached another clearing, furnished with candles and flowers.
‘So we’re burying your brother?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you haven’t got his body? Just his hair?’
‘Shh. We no longer talk about him. Or mention his name.’
‘What?’
‘The close family does not talk of its dead. Only other people do that. For the next month his name will not be mentioned amongst us.’
An old man came up to Yola and presented her with a tray, on which was a wad of banknotes, a comb, a scarf, a small mirror, a shaving kit, a knife, a pack of cards and a syringe. Another man brought food, wrapped up in a waxed paper parcel. Another brought wine, water and green coffee beans.
Two men were digging a small hole near to an oak tree. Yola made the trip to the hole three times, laying one item neatly over another. Some children came up behind her and scattered kernels of corn over the heap. Then the men filled in the grave.
It was at that point that the women began wailing. The back hairs on Sabir’s head rose atavistically.
Yola fell to her knees beside her brother’s grave and began beating her
breast with earth. Some women near her collapsed in jerking convulsions, their eyes turned up into their heads.
Four men, carrying a heavy stone between them, entered the clearing. The stone was placed on top of Samana’s grave. Other men then brought his clothes and his remaining possessions. These were heaped on to the stone and set alight.
The wails and lamentations of the women intensifi ed. Some of the men were drinking liquor from small glass bottles. Yola had torn off her blouse. She was striping her breasts and stomach with the earth and wine of her brother’s funeral libation.
Sabir felt miraculously disconnected from the realities of the twenty-first century. The scene in the clearing had taken on all the attributes of a demented bacchanal and the light from the candles and the fi res lit up the undersides of the trees, reflecting back off the transported faces below as if in a painting by Ensor.
The man who had presented Sabir’s testicles to the knife came over and offered him a drink from a pottery cup. ‘Go on. That’ll keep the mules away.’
‘The mules?’
The man shrugged. ‘They’re all around the clearing. Evil spirits. Trying to get in. Trying to take…’ He hesitated. ‘You know.’
Sabir swallowed the drink. He could feel the heat of the spirit burning away at his throat. Without knowing why, he found himself nodding. ‘I know.’
20
Achor Bale watched the funeral ceremony from the secure position he had established for himself inside the shelter of a small stand of trees. He was wearing a well-worn camoufl age suit, a Legionnaire’s cloth fatigue hat and a stippled veil. From even as close as three feet away, he was indistinguishable from the undergrowth surrounding him.
For the first time in three days he was entirely sure of the girl. Before that he hadn’t been able to approach close enough to the main camp to achieve a just perspective. Even when the girl had left the camp, he had been unable, to his own entire satisfaction, to pinpoint her. Now she had comprehensively outed herself, thanks to her conspicuous mourning for her lunatic brother’s immortal soul.
Bale allowed his mind to wander back to the room in which Samana had died. In all his extensive years of experience both inside and outside the Foreign Legion, Bale had never seen a man achieve the seemingly impossible task of killing himself whilst under total restraint. That old chestnut of swallowing the tongue presented insurmountable physical difficulties and no man, as far as he was aware, could think himself to death. But to use gravity like that and with such utter conviction? That took balls. So why would he do it? What had Samana been protecting?
He refocused the night glasses on the girl’s face. Wife? No. He thought not. Sister? Possibly. But it was impossible to tell in this light, with the con tortions she was engineering on her facial features.
He swung the glasses on to Sabir. Now there was a man who knew how to make himself indispensable. At first, when he had established Sabir’s presence as a certainty in the camp, Bale had been tempted to make another of his mischievous telephone calls to the police. Remove the man permanently from the scene without any unnecessary recourse to further violence. But Sabir was so unaware of himself and therefore such an easy man to follow, that it seemed something of a waste.
The girl, he knew, would be a far harder prospect. She belonged to a defined and close-knit society, which did not easily venture abroad. Lumber her with a well-meaning Sabir and the whole process became intrinsically simpler.
He would watch and wait, therefore. His moment – as it always did – would come.
21
‘Can you walk?’
‘Yes. I think I can manage.’
‘You must come with me, then.’
Sabir allowed Samana’s sister to ease him to his feet. He noticed that, although she was prepared to touch him with her hands, she made great play at avoiding any contact with his clothes.
‘Why do you do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘Veer away from me whenever I stumble – as if you’re afraid I might be diseased.’
‘I don’t want to pollute you.’
‘Pollute me?’
She nodded her head. ‘Gypsy women don’t touch men who are not their husbands, brothers, or sons.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because there are times when we are mahrime. Until I become a mother – and also at certain times of the month – I am unclean. I would dirty you.’
Shaking his head, Sabir allowed her to usher him towards the caravan entrance. ‘Is that why you always walk behind me, too?’
She nodded.
By this time Sabir was almost grateful for the perverse and mysterious attentions of the camp, for they had not only secured him from the notice of the French police and cured him from an illness which, on the run, may well have resulted in his death from septic shock – but they had also comprehensively upended his notions of sensible, rational behaviour. Everybody needed a stint in a gypsy camp, Sabir told himself wryly, to shake them out of their bourgeois complacency.
He had resigned himself, in consequence, to only eventually learning what they required from him, when and where it suited them to enlighten him. And he sensed, as he supported himself down the rootstock balustrade outside the caravan, that this moment had finally come.
***
Yola indicated that Sabir should accompany her towards a group of men seated on stools near the periphery of the camp. An enormously fat man with an outsized head, long black hair, copious moustaches, gold-capped front teeth and a ring on every finger, sat, in a much larger chair than everybody else’s, at the head of the convocation. He was wearing a generously cut, traditionally styled double-breasted suit, made notable only by an outlandish sequence of purple and green stripes laced into the fabric and by double-width zoot – suit lapels.
‘Who the heck’s that?’
‘The Bulibasha. He is our leader. Today he is to be Kristinori.’
‘Yola, for Christ’s sake…’
She stopped, still positioned just behind him and to the right. ‘The Chris you were searching for? That my brother spoke to you about? This is it.’
‘What? That’s Chris? The fat guy? The Chief?’
‘No. We hold a Kriss when something important must be decided. Notice is given and everyone attends from many kilometres around. Someone is elected Kristinori, or judge of the Kriss. In important cases, it is the Bulibasha who takes this role. Then there are two other judges – one for the side of the accuser and one for the person who is accused – chosen from amongst the phuro and the phuro – dai. The elders.’
‘And this is an important case?’
‘Important? It is life or death for you.’
22
Sabir found himself ushered, with a certain amount of formal politeness, on to a bench set into the earth in front of and below, the Bulibasha. Yola settled on the ground behind him, her legs drawn up beneath her. Sabir assumed that she had been allocated this spot in order to translate the proceedings to him, for she was the only woman in the assembly.
The main body of women and children were congregated behind and to the right of the Bulibasha, in the position Yola always took in relation to him. Sabir noticed, too, that the women were all wearing their best clothes and that the older, married women were sporting headscarves and prodigious amounts of gold jewellery. Unusually, they were made up with heavy kohl around the eyes and their hair, beneath their scarves, no longer hung free, but was instead put up in ringlets and elaborate braids. Some had henna on their hands and a few of the grandmothers were smoking.
The Bulibasha held up a hand for silence, but everybody continued talking. It seemed that the debate about Sabit was already well under way.
Impatiently, the Bulibasha indicated that the man who had stretched Sabir’s testicles for the knife should come forward.
‘That is my cousin. He is going to speak against you.’
‘Oh.’
‘He likes you. It is not personal. But he must do
this for the family.’
‘I suppose they’re going to joint me like a pig if this thing goes against me?’ Sabir tried to sound as though he was joking, but his voice cracked halfway through and gave him away.
‘They will kill you, yes.’
‘And the upside?’
‘What is that?’
‘What happens if things go my way?’ Sabir was sweating badly now.
‘Then you will become my brother. You will be responsible for me. For my virginity. For my marriage. You will take my brother’s place in everything. ‘
‘I don’t understand.’
Yola sighed impatiently. She lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. ‘The only reason you are still alive today is that my brother made you his phral. His blood brother. He also told you to come back here amongst us and ask for a Kriss. You did this. We then had no choice but to honour his dying wish. For what a dying man asks for, he must get. And my brother knew that he would die when he did this thing to you.’
‘How can you possibly know that?’
‘He hated payos – Frenchmen – more even than he detested gadjes . He would never have asked one to be a brother to him except in the most extreme of circumstances.’
‘But I’m not a payo. Okay, my mother’s French, but my father’s American and I was born and brought up in the United States.’
‘But you speak perfect French. My brother would have judged you on that.’
Sabir shook his head in bewilderment.
Yola’s cousin was now addressing the assembly. But even with his fluent command of French, Sabir was having difficulty making out what was being said.
‘What language is that?’
‘Sinto.’
‘Great. Could you please tell me what he is saying?’
‘That you killed my brother. That you have come amongst us to steal something that belongs to our family. That you are an evil man and that God visited this recent illness on you to prove that you are not telling the truth about what happened to Babel. He also says that it is because of you that the police have come amongst us and that you are a disciple of the Devil.’
The Nostradamus prophecies as-1 Page 4
