Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

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  To my father, who taught me to love books in the first place

  Cuando el camino es largo, hasta las zapatillas aprietan.

  When the road is long, even slippers are tight.

  —PERUVIAN PROVERB

  Chacun sent le mieux où le soulier le blesse.

  No one knows better where the shoe pinches than she who wears it.

  —FRENCH PROVERB

  Dance in red shoes, but make sure they’re the ones you’ve made by hand.

  —CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS,

  Women Who Run with the Wolves

  Rosella

  My mother told me once that being an Oliva meant measuring our lives in lengths of red thread. And probably, that was true.

  But growing up in Briar Meadow meant I measured mine by the glimmer that appeared over the reservoir every year.

  That was what they called the strangeness that settled onto our town for a week each October, a glimmer. Both for the wavering light that hovered above the water, and because it seemed like the right word for the flicker of magic that came with it.

  One year, the glimmer stirred the air between neighbors who hated each other. Families who’d become enemies over fence lines and tree roots suddenly burst into each other’s kitchens, trading long-secret recipes for tomato sauce or spice cookies.

  Another year, it was icicles that tasted like rose candies. My mother and I ate them all week, licking them like paletas, and tried to save some in our freezer. When the glimmer left at the end of the week, we found them vanished from between the frozen peas and waffles, and managed to be surprised. (My abuela called us fools for thinking we could hold on to Briar Meadow’s magic any longer than the glimmer let us.)

  And once, it was the thorns on the trees and bushes around town. They grew so fast even I could sit still long enough to watch them. The wood twisted into shapes, some simple as a corkscrew curl, others intricate as the figurine of a deer, others as sharp as little knives. Sometimes we woke up to find blood dripping down the points, and we couldn’t be sure if someone had pricked their fingers, or if the thorns themselves were bleeding.

  And maybe my mother was right about measuring our lives in red thread, because those drops of blood looked, to me, like the beads on the most beautiful shoes my family made. Red shoes, the kind everyone knew us for.

  They bought other colors, of course, but it was the red ones that carried the whisper of a magic not so different from the glimmer. Our red shoes bore the hint of something forbidden and a little scandalous. Parents bought them for anxious brides, who then kissed their grooms with enough passion to make the wedding guests blush. Women had pairs made for class reunions, strutting into the tinsel-draped auditorium like queens. Husbands gave them to their wives before trips meant to celebrate twenty- or thirty-year anniversaries, and the couple always came back with their eyes glinting, as though they’d just met.

  Well-crafted seams and delicate beading gave my family a trade and a living. But red shoes gave us a name. They made us infamous. They made us brazen.

  Until they came for us.

  Except that’s not quite true.

  They didn’t come for us.

  They came for me.

  Strasbourg, 1507

  The first time Lala catches Alifair on the land, he is stealing crab apples from a tree that belongs to her and her aunt. Though, as it turns out, he will come to be theirs far more than the tree, or the land, ever will. The crab apple tree, along with all others on the plot, belongs to them no more than the house, each paid for by the month.

  When Lala and her aunt first arrived in Strasbourg, they found that the stature and upkeep of the shabby wattle and daub had been much exaggerated by the friend of a friend. Lala stood in the shade of the roof, staring into the house’s face. The thatch hung so far past the walls that the whole structure seemed to be frowning.

  We are new women here, Tante Dorenia told her. We bring with us nothing of who we were.

  Nothing of who we were means Tante will not wear the dikhle, the pretty head covering of married women, not just because she is unmarried but because the gadje must find no sign that they are Romnia. It is for the same reason that Lala cannot even be called Lala, the name she has heard since the time she could speak. Now she is Lala only in Tante’s house and in her own thoughts. Everywhere else she must be Lavinia, her full name, prim and uncomfortable as a starched dress.

  Whenever Lala asks why they left the hills outside Riquewihr, left where they buried her mother and father, Tante says, What we are, they have made it a crime in our own country. So we will go somewhere no one knows us.

  When Lala weeps for her mother and father, as though she might call them from across the weed-tangled land, Tante whispers, We will always love them. We will mourn them. But we will not speak of them. We will hold them in our hearts but not on our tongues, yes? We will keep an altar for them and let their souls rest, will we not?

  To all this, Tante is quick to add, We will not lose ourselves here. Because there is work we will do here. Not only for our vitsa, but for others.

  The day Alifair appears, Lala spots him first. She shrieks a moment before realizing the moving figure in the branches is not a young wolf or a hawk but a boy. Older than Lala’s five years but still a child.

  Tante runs out from the house, wiping her onion-damp hands on her apron and telling Lala to stop carrying on every time she sees a badger, that truly they won’t hurt her if she doesn’t bother them.

  Tante stands beneath the tree.

  “Don’t look at him,” Lala whispers, trying not to stare herself.

  “Oh?” Tante asks. “And why not?”

  “They’ll think we’re trying to steal him.” Lala keeps her whisper low, even if Tante won’t match it.

  Lala may be small, but she’s old enough to listen. She knows how many gadje mothers and fathers suspect Romnia of being witches who have nothing better to do than steal their children.

  Tante tilts her head to look at Lala. “And who exactly will think that?”

  With a prickling of guilt, Lala realizes there is a reason Tante does not ask if the boy is lost, or if anyone is missing him. It is clear from his dirt-stained clothes and hungry look that he is on his own.

  The boy’s eyes shine out from the crab apple branches, more feral than frightened, like a cat caught in a lantern’s light.

  Lala barely knows anything of their neighbors, or of this place her aunt has brought her. But it seems enough like Riquewihr that she knows what would happen to this boy, or what already has. Farmers’ wives chasing him off. Merchants beating him to make sure he never comes back.

  Tante sets her hands on her hips, tilts her face up to the tree, and asks the boy, “And what are you good for?”

  Not a taunt.

  A true question.

  Without hesitating, the boy comes down from the crab apple tree. He has hardly set h
is bare, dirt-grayed feet to the ground when he climbs the great oak next.

  Lala watches at Tante’s skirt. She winces as the boy ascends into the clouds of wasps that fill the space between boughs.

  He plunges his arms into those swarms and grabs handfuls of oak galls, not once being stung.

  He climbs down, jumping from the lowest branch.

  Soon, Lala and Tante will learn that this boy knows how to keep secrets. Theirs, and his own. As young as he is, he knows how to fold away the things the world would punish him for.

  He holds the oak galls out to Tante Dorenia.

  Tante looks between the boy and the tree.

  “Now that,” she says, “is worth something.”

  Emil

  Emil sat at the top of the stairs, letting his parents believe he was asleep.

  “It’s harmless, Yvette,” his father said.

  They must have been in the kitchen. It was always easier to hear them when they were in the kitchen than the living room. The sound bounced off the hard floor and counters instead of disappearing into the sofa and rug.

  “His teacher used the word alarming,” his mother said. “Our son somehow managed to alarm his grammar school. You want us to ignore that?”

  Emil listened harder, his back tensing.

  Something about the way his parents said grammar school made him feel like he was still in kindergarten.

  “All he said was something about us having an ancestor table on holidays,” his father said. “It was everyone else who turned it into summoning ghosts from graveyards.”

  Now the understanding hit Emil in the stomach. And as soon as it touched him, it turned to shame at how stupid he’d been. Stupid enough to think anyone at school would understand, or want to.

  Last year, he’d told Rosella Oliva about his family’s altars—the white candle, the dish of water, the food left for the dead, the good cloths they used only for this. She’d taken it as naturally as him telling her the name of a particular butterfly. She’d told him about her own family’s altars each November, the photos and candles laid out, the food and flowers brought to those they’d lost.

  And that, how easily she’d understood, had made him careless around everyone else. He’d forgotten that most gadje buried their dead and then acted like they were as far away as another galaxy.

  “You know how this is,” Emil’s father said. “You mention something harmless, and suddenly they think you’re talking about Satan worship.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” His mother’s voice rose, good for listening but bad for Emil’s sudden wish not to hear her. “Unfortunately, whatever they turn it into is what everyone else believes.”

  “Just let it be forgotten,” his father said.

  “And in the meantime, what?” his mother asked. “We let them say whatever they want about our son?”

  “It’s not worth arguing with them.”

  “We can explain.”

  “And what do you think that will accomplish?” Emil could hear his father stop his pacing in the kitchen. He was still now. “This happened to the Olivas last year, remember? Rosella brought in those pictures of the calaveras, and half a dozen parents decided she was trying to frighten their children with skeletons.”

  The mention of Rosella made Emil both wince and listen harder.

  “And the Olivas talked to the school to clear it up,” Emil’s mother said. “You’re only proving my point.”

  “I am not, because I wasn’t done,” his father said. “The Olivas tried to explain, and it ended with Rosella having to apologize. Apologize, for who she and her family are. And a week later she came home wearing lipstick.” His father said this last part with the resigned flourish of giving a story’s moral.

  “What are you saying?” Emil’s mother asked. “One wrong move, then what? Next week our son will be a smoker?”

  “We can’t ask him to hide everything about himself,” his father said. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “When has that ever mattered?”

  The words made Emil go still, at the same time the kitchen went quiet.

  His mother and father wanted him to be proud. He knew that. They had taught him early the names of their vitsi, so he would know what kind of Romani he was. The words Manouche—his mother’s vitsa—and Sinti—his father’s—were some of the first he remembered learning.

  But he also knew enough, from what his parents told him and what he’d overheard. He knew how much of his family had survived by trying to pass as gadje, and how many who couldn’t had spent years getting driven out of places they lived, or worse. When a child went missing, his grandmother had had to move, the weight of a whole town’s scorn and the threat of all those suspicions driving her away. No one bothered apologizing when the little girl turned up days later, laughing at the harried adults, having hidden in a friend’s attic.

  A small meow sounded behind Emil. Gerta, announcing her presence in the hall. The kitten batted at the hem of his pajama pants, like she knew he didn’t want to be alone.

  During the last glimmer, she’d come out of the woods with the other forest cats, fluffy and green-eyed, with early snow dotting their fur as they decided which houses would be theirs. (Gerta decided that she hated everyone, but hated the Woodlocks the least.)

  Emil heard his mother crossing the kitchen. He picked up Gerta and went back toward his room before his mother got to the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” his father called after her.

  “To check our son’s room for cigarettes, of course,” she called back.

  Emil shut his door as quietly as he could. The exaggeration in his mother’s voice made him almost sure she was being sarcastic, but he briefly debated jumping into his bed and pretending to be asleep just in case.

  His mother passed his room. Then he knew for sure.

  Emil leaned against the door and looked down at Gerta, pawing his shirt. He looked at his own hands, at the shade of brown, in a way that felt unfamiliar, unsettled.

  That brown made most of the school look at him differently, him and his friends who were their own shades of brown.

  Most of Briar Meadow didn’t know what Romani meant, and if they did they thought it was the same as another word, one that stung every time he heard it.

  Emil closed his eyes, realizing he’d just decided something.

  With his family, he could speak of his Romanipen. Every time his cousins came over, or he and his parents baked hyssop into unsalted bread, gave it life, like blowing on embers.

  With everyone else, he had to hold his Romanipen hidden inside him, a map to a country he had to pretend didn’t exist. In this house, he could be who he was. Outside, he had to be like everyone else.

  He would keep altars with his family. He would help his mother with the recipes that carried the luck of baxtale xajmata.

  But he wouldn’t ask to know more. He wouldn’t learn any more about their family than his mother and father insisted on. Because if he did, it would spill out of him.

  If he did, he would just make the same mistake again.

  Strasbourg, 1514

  Wer Zigeuner schädigt, frevelt nicht.

  Whoever harms a Gypsy commits no crime.

  It is law that spreads across borders like a blight through fields. And it comes alongside decrees that Roma must leave kingdom after kingdom, city after city.

  Zigeuner. The term the gadje use for Lala, and Tante Dorenia, and all like them, bites like the teeth of a gadfly.

  It is nearly sunrise when Lala goes in from keeping watch with Alifair.

  The wattle-and-daub house has become a place where those fleeing can stop, for the night or for long enough to clear a child’s cough or an old woman’s fever. Tante tends to the families. Lala bakes bread and makes their vegetable patch and root cellar stretch into pot after pot of soup. Alifair gathers scrap firewood from the forests at night, his sharp eyes watching for anyone who might catch him.

  Then, like a fla
me burning through a map, the law consumes Strasbourg.

  Tante thought they might be safer in a free city, not beholden to kingdom laws. But now the magistrate issues an order for the apprehending of any Roma in Strasbourg.

  Alifair goes out into the trees, collecting frost-chilled berries for a baby to teethe on.

  So many families have already gone, fleeing to the forests and mountains to escape laws that will forever be against them. But those who have remained, Lala and Tante and Alifair quietly aid. The hollow-eyed men, the frightened mothers, the families desperate to leave before the arrests, crowd into the wattle and daub. The breath of more bodies than ever before fills the house.

  Alifair comes back and hands Lala the iced-over beads of the frozen berries. With a small nod, he leaves again. Tonight a few are moving on from Strasbourg, and Alifair helps the vardos to a far road in the last of the dark.

  She watches him go, his form against the dark trees.

  With each family they see safely off, Lala feels her own heart growing stronger. Her spirit defies the gadje who would arrest these men and women and their children. Her own Romanipen puts deeper roots into her soul.

  Even though it means being so close to all she is not allowed to have. Rromanès, a language she has never been taught. Aprons and layered skirts with more red and age-softened lace than Tante will ever let her risk. Particular ways of braiding hair. The careful embroidery of clovers and horseshoes, roses and certain leaves, the sun and the moon. Things they cannot chance the gadje recognizing.

  Lala slips inside, quiet as a cat. She says a prayer of thanks to Sara la Kali that neither the little ones nor their mothers stir. Her steps fade beneath the sound of breathing and soft snoring.

  She is so silent, it seems, that the only two voices in the house continue, unaware she can hear their low words. There is not yet enough light through the beams to reveal her.

  Lala easily places the first voice. Tante’s.