Cursed Be the Child

by Mort Castle

  Evan Kyle Dean said, “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  The little girl smiled.

  — | — | —

  Forty

  It was ten-thirty when David brought Selena to the house of Pola Janichka. “The Rawnie awaits you,” said the sullen Rom who admitted them. The man stood back so that Selena Lazone might not defile him by even an accidental touch of her clothing. Selena Lazone was marhime. With his right hand, thumb thrust between first and second fingers, the Rom gestured to ward off evil.

  David spoke in Romany. He was shocked. He was hurt. He was insulted. Such rudeness from a Rom was a grievously painful thing; throughout the world, the Romany were justly praised as the most hospitable of people. David’s words oozed irony.

  Hanging a step behind him, Selena said nothing, her attitude and clothing, a utilitarian car coat over a simple, dark blue dress, was that of a supplicant and a penitent.

  The Rom shrugged apologetically. He meant no offense to David. As for the marhime woman, she was unclean, outcast from those of tacho rat, and her feelings need be of no more concern to him than those of a plant or a bug.

  David glared.

  The Rom said to go down the hall, which, like the bungalow itself, was long, narrow and dark.

  David led the way to a large, impossibly cluttered room.

  Dozens of candles provided shadow-dancing illumination. Some were in golden candelabra or silver or brass candlesticks; others were waxed to ashtrays or peanut butter jar lids. There was a lumpy sofa and against a wall stood a row of steel-tube armed chairs like those you used to find in budget shoe stores. There were plastic TV trays and an old sailor’s trunk, orange crates and slatted wooden folding chairs. On one wall hung an unframed painting depicting the signs of the zodiac; next to it was a poster for Superman showing Christopher Reeve in flight. Another wall had an elaborate religious tapestry depicting The Holy Virgin, Jesus, and St. Sarah the Black, the patron saint of the Gypsies, although not a saint recognized by the Catholic Church.

  On an antique sideboard with elaborate hand-carved scrollwork stood a framed picture of Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and his musical colleague, Stephane Grappelli. It was inscribed, “Pola Janichka, thank you for blessing our music.” Grappelli’s signature was a typically artistic scrawl; Reinhardt’s was a typically Romany “X.”

  Pola Janichka sat slumped, head bowed, perhaps dozing, at a card table that wouldn’t have brought six cents at a garage sale. The table was covered with a century-old, handmade lace tablecloth from the village of Brugge, Belgium. The crystal ball stood in the center of the table. In the past, Pola Janichka had said that the crystal ball originally belonged to Madame Blavatsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, or Jean Dixon; actually, she’d ordered it from the Johnson Smith catalog in 1947.

  “Puri Dai,” David said quietly. “I…”

  The old woman did not raise her head. “I know you’re here, sir. I know who you got with you. What does the marhime want?”

  Selena whispered, “Mandi…te potshinene penge lajav…”

  Pola Janichka raised her head, her angry eyes cutting off Selena. “No,” she said, “don’t you talk Romany. Romany’s not your language, not now and maybe not ever. You went away to be Ms. Gajo. You learn the Anglai so good that maybe you think someday you get to turn the letters when Vanna gives up the job. For right now, you got something to say to me, you can talk Gaje talk.”

  “I am here,” Selena Lazone said, translating from the Romany, although nothing like an exact translation was possible, “to pay for my shame. I beg you to lift the curse of marhime.”

  “A curse? A curse?” Pola Janichka sniffed. “That’s silly superstition, my fine Gajo lady, the kind of thing those ignorant Gypsies believe in. But a smart Gajo woman like you, a woman who reads books and everything, no, you can’t really believe in foolishness like a Romany curse.”

  Quietly and slowly, Selena said, “I believe there is good and I believe there is evil. That is not superstition; it is Truth for both Romany and Gaje, for all who live and all who will ever live. People are different and so they see good and evil in different ways, but all must choose one or the other in their own way.”

  Selena paused, then continued somberly, “My way is the Romany way, Rawnie. I understand this now. So that I may do what is good, so that I may serve O Del, I must be the Rom I was born to be.”

  Pola Janichka said, “You are sincere in what you request? You truly wish to be Selena Lazone juvel Romano, yilo tshatsrio, y tacho rat?” A Gypsy woman, one of true heart and true blood.

  Selena hesitated. “English will not let me say what I wish to say. May I speak Romany?”

  “Whatever.” Pola Janichka sounded bored.

  In Romany, Selena pronounced an inviolate armaya: “Te shordjol muro rat may sigo sar te may khav.” She said that if she were not sincere in her request and in her repentance, “May my blood spill and my life thus end even before I have another meal.”

  Candle flames danced; reflecting them, the crystal ball became a miniature of the heavens encircling the world, golden stars winking and flashing in no meaningful pattern. There was the warm, airy silence that one never finds in life but only in fantasy, and the silence stretched and stretched.

  Until finally, in a voice that seemed not hers but that of a very old and very tired woman, Pola Janichka said, “Bater.”

  May it be so.

  “Bater,” Selena said.

  “You go on, you get out of here.” As though she only now remembered his presence, Pola Janichka animatedly spoke to David. “You like beer? I got beer. Blatz. In the refrigerator. You go drink a beer and watch the televisions. I got HBO. I got Sportsvision.” The old woman made a shooing gesture.

  As he started from the room, Pola Janichka told him to wait one second so that Selena could give him her coat.

  And he’d better make himself comfortable, she told him. There was lots of beer. Channel seven had some good old movies.

  She and Selena, they might be awhile.

  Then Selena Lazone and Pola Janichka were alone. “So sit down.”

  Selena pulled a chair to the table.

  Pola Janichka said, “You know, tschai, I loved you and I still love you, and I meant to give it all to you, everything, to teach you everything I knew. Then you ran off. Selena, that killed me a little bit.”

  Selena did not reply.

  “Selena, the draba powers, the magic that is yours… O Del gave you such a gift! And the teaching I gave you, another gift. And you said ‘No!’ And you throw my gifts in my face and you throw God’s gifts in His face.”

  Pola Janichka half-rose. She leaned across the table and slapped Selena.

  Except for an involuntary blink, Selena did not respond.

  “Did that hurt?” Pola Janichka said.

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” Pola Janichka said. She slumped back upon her chair. “I wanted to hurt. You hurt me, now I hurt you.” With a weary sigh, Pola Janichka changed to tshatsimo Romano, the language of truth. “You must greatly love one who hurts you and makes you cry. You made me cry nights and days and more than that, Selena Lazone.”

  “I am sorry. Pola Janichka, I did not mean to cause you pain. I wanted only to learn…”

  “To learn what?”

  “To learn who I was. To discover my place in the world. And I feared that would be denied me if I lived my life as the sorceress, the ababina, the Romany said I had to be.” Selena Lazone looked into the ancient and mystery-laden eyes of Pola Janichka. “I did not mean to cause you pain,” she said. “For that, I am sorry.”

  Pola Janichka said, “I am pleased you are sorry. A day will come and yet once more will I weep for you, Selena Lazone, but for those tears, you will not owe me nor your people an apology. They will be sad tears and good tears.”

  “I do not know what you mean.”

  “Then you are not meant to know what I mean.”

  “As you say, Rawnie.”

  “As the goo
d God, O Del, wills, Selena Lazone.”

  “Bater.”

  “Now we have much to do.”

  “Then let it be done.”

  “Bater,” said Pola Janichka.

  In a low and holy voice, Pola Janichka invoked the Rom, called on the collective power that beat in the living heart of the Gypsy people. She invoked the mule Romano, the spirits of the Gypsy dead, Gypsy spirits who would remain alive as long as they were remembered by the living. Pola Janichka invoked those who had come before, those who were and those who would come after. She invoked all Rom in the name of O Del, the living God, and in the name of a contrite Selena Lazone and in her own name, Pola Janichka.

  In Romany, Pola Janichka said, “Wrong can be forgiven but it should never be hidden.”

  “Nor can it be hidden,” Selena Lazone answered, as Pola Janichka had long ago taught her to answer.

  “Then together let us find the truth for you,” Pola Janichka said, not without a note of sorrow.

  The holy solakh commenced, the sacred ritual of truth and confession.

  Of forgiveness and redemption.

  — | — | —

  Forty-One

  As he drove west on the unfamiliar US Route 30, Lincoln Highway, Evan Kyle Dean shivered and not only with the chill of weariness. The night had become almost insufferably windy and cold, and the rented Ford Escort’s heater produced gurgling and wheezing but virtually no heat. He wished he had put on his coat before getting behind the wheel.

  He yawned and waited for the increased rush of oxygen to revive him, but it did not come. He heard the wind’s cold muttering on the glass and steel surfaces of the automobile. He felt alone. It was a strange, almost unreal, torpor that, like freezing smoke, seemed to be swirling sluggishly in his arms and legs and chest and belly and brain. It was unnatural, like nothing he had ever before experienced.

  He was afraid he would fall asleep. The wind was a demonic lullaby urging him to nod off, to just let the car go where it would. But he had to keep driving, had to put the miles between himself and the Barringer home. He could rest only when he was so far away he could no longer sense the evil, invisible tentacles reaching for him.

  How many miles behind him were the Barringers, his sister-in-law, his brother-in-law, his niece? Melissa, what was she? Innocent child or impious child? Victim? Victimizer?

  Change lanes. Stay awake. The standard advice is, if you feel sleepy, you roll down the window and let the air blast you in the face, but he couldn’t bear the thought. It was so cold tonight, so damnably cold. So play little driving games to give yourself something to do. Move over a lane. Shift back. Speed up. Slow down.

  It was almost midnight, and he was exhausted.

  Then he saw it, the promise of rest—a neon-bright Holiday Inn sign no more than a mile or so ahead.

  The desk clerk politely took his Mastercharge card and gave him a room. It smelled of room freshener that couldn’t completely mask old cigarette smoke. He dropped his travel bag on the rickety luggage stand and hung his coat on the clothes rod. No surprises at a Holiday Inn and no closets, either. He did not mind. All he needed was a bed.

  He yanked down the bed coverings. Fully dressed, except for shoes and socks, he slipped between the sheets. In under 30 seconds, he was asleep.

  And dreaming.

  The relief is so overwhelming he thinks he might cry. He has escaped from an oily blackness into a world of familiar light. He is home. He is in his own living room with his own wife, Carol Grace.

  He kisses her passionately. He needs her. He loves her. He loves her. But…

  Carol Grace is not Carol Grace. She is Vicki Barringer, who says, “I need you.”

  The complacency with which he accepts the impossible metamorphosis assures him this is a dream. He need fear nothing that happens, because it is not truly happening; a dream comments on reality but is not reality. So let the dream proceed in its own dreamy way, and should anything prove too disturbing, he will end the dream.

  There is neither surprise nor transition before he is transported to bed with Vicki, kissing her breasts, kissing a meandering path down her belly, tasting salt on a rising and falling satin surface. He has no guilt. This is but a dream, and he is a dream adulterer. Conscious thought might be sinful, an affront to your fellow man and yourself and God, but dreams sprang from the unconscious and were beyond your rational control, often beyond your understanding.

  “I’m your girl. I’m your own little girl,” she tells him.

  That is right. She is his own little girl. He has always wanted a little girl, his own little girl.

  He wants to possess her. He will. His will be done. Now.

  He is inside her, inside her heated core, the clutching ooze and heat and clinging flesh. He feels a moment of foolishness as he is looking down at himself and Vicki, his little girl, watching the clumsy gyrations of his own naked buttocks.

  Participating in the dream as well as observing it, Evan Kyle Dean is experiencing the wildest, most frantic lovemaking he has ever known.

  She squeals and begs for more. Harder. “Give it to me! Oh, Daddy! Oh, Uncle! Give it to me! Give it to me! Oh, fuck me! Fuck meeee…”

  Then she turns her head to look back over her shoulder in salacious victory.

  With sinking dread but no surprise, he sees Melissa peering at him as he skewers her, as he fucks her, and she is laughing, and so, just as a test, he tries to stop fucking her or to make her change to Carol Grace, but he cannot do that. He cannot quit fucking the little girl.

  Evan Kyle Dean awoke.

  He sat up in bed.

  Dreams, he told himself, neither holy revelation or self-condemnation. A pornographic fantasy staged on his mental movie screen, and given recent events, one with none too ambiguous symbolism! There was, however, he mused, nothing symbolic about the erection he still sported. There was no reason for concern, though; indeed, it made him feel he was not so many decades removed from that youngster who’d awakened each and every morning with his manhood at attention!

  Evan Kyle Dean lay back. He fluffed his pillows and, beneath the warm comfort of the blankets, folded his hands on his chest. Eyes closed, he concentrated on nothing and felt his breathing deepen so that each exhalation came all the way up from his toes.

  He was not sure when exactly he went from waking to sleep, but he knew he was dreaming because what he saw could not be real.

  She is an angel, an ectoplasmic imitation of flesh. She burns with divine light. She is naked, of course, but there is nothing in the least sexual about her nakedness. She is the perfect image of a perfect child, the Angel of Innocence, and he knows she has chosen this form to suit him.

  “Evan Kyle Dean,” the angel says, “will you be the beloved and chosen of the Lord?”

  “I will.”

  “You are a good man?”

  “I am.”

  “You are a righteous man?”

  “I am.”

  “Then save me, righteous and good man who would be the Lord’s beloved, the Lord’s chosen. Save me, and I will reveal to you my name.”

  He thinks of the Old Testament’s Jacob who wrestled all night with the angel, who strove to learn the celestial being’s name and did not. Jacob became Israel, the Father of Nations, of the Chosen People.

  Now he would be told the mystical name of his angel. He will learn her name and will come to learn the secrets of the seraphim.

  “Save me, Evan Kyle Dean, save me and be honored among the most godly.”

  He sees it then, surrounded by blackness. It has a naked man’s flabby body, made all the more sickening by its pink-whiteness, and its erect penis is a purple-capped weapon. Its head is not the head of a man, but of a rat. The rat’s fangs gleam yellow and wet. The sharp nose twitches, whiskers testing the air.

  This is the enemy; this is the hideous shape evil has chosen to assume. The Rat.

  “Take me from here, Evan Kyle Dean,” says the angel.

  He will. He will ta
ke her wherever she wishes to go.

  She wants to go out.

  But it is cold out, so cold.

  The Rat is coming for her. Help her. Save her. Learn the angel’s name.

  Evan Kyle Dean got out of bed. He did not want to be cold. He could not stand any more cold tonight, so he took his coat and slipped it on. He did not, however, put on his socks and shoes. He looked at the green LED clock numbers on the television’s top panel. It was 5:48 in the morning. His conscious mind registered that. He opened the door of the motel room.

  Where is she? Where has his angel gone?

  Here, Evan Kyle Dean, I am here.

  He put his hand in his right hand coat pocket. His fingers touched something smooth and cool. He took it out.

  His angel has changed. She is small and perfect. He can hold her in the palm of his hand.

  Coat flapping, Evan Kyle Dean walked barefoot through the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. The icy wind whirled viciously around him.

  Angel’s eyes shine so very bright. Her eyes become bigger. Their radiance fills him. There is nothing but the light of angel eyes.

  He hears her laughter.

  And he knows, held captive by her growing, gleaming eyes, that she is not an angel, but a spirit who means his destruction. He knows he is betrayed.

  The wind was encircling him, holding him, paralyzing him.

  He understands he has betrayed himself. The admonishment from Proverbs 3:5 comes to him. “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” A good, righteous man. That’s what he arrogantly thought himself. He thought himself “God’s anointed,” but the anointing was by Evan Kyle Dean and not by the hand of the Lord. He asks the question of himself that King David the Psalmist asked of all men: “How long will you love vanity?”

  Huge, glowing, hellish eyes accuse and condemn him like a mirror.

  A whisper, “My name is Lisette…”

  The dream ends…

  …but he could still see the enormous eyes. He stood in the center of the eastbound passing lane on Route 30, a prisoner of the wind and the night and the evil. In his right hand, he held a china doll, the figure of a little girl in an old fashioned bonnet, a basket of eggs on her lap. He felt drained, without strength. He could not move as the truck bore down on him, headlights looming larger and larger. A horn blared, a loud and lonely and futile sound.