Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  “She is my niece,” Tante says, her words firm but her tone polite, deferring. “I know well enough to know what’s good for her, I should think.”

  “And what’s good for her is denying her own name,” the other voice, a man’s, says. The words do not rise in a way suggesting a question. They would seem an accusation if the tone didn’t sound so magnanimous, as though it is up to him to give Tante permission.

  That voice sends a shiver between Lala’s shoulder blades.

  It belongs to a man who is older, but holds himself so straight that his back seems that of a young man’s.

  He has done nothing to explain the shiver, apart from the fact that whenever he looks at Lala or Alifair, he has the pinched smile of someone tolerating a troublesome child. He calls her Lavinia in a way that seems pointed, as though to remind her what she misses by so rarely hearing her familiar name.

  She wishes she had the nerve to tell him she already knows.

  Lala pauses in the dark, listening, hoping they do not hear her.

  “And the boy?” the man asks.

  Tante sighs. “What of him?” she says, with more exhaustion than annoyance.

  “Gadje already think we take their children,” the man says, and though it seems the beginning of a thought, he does not go on.

  “He has no one to ask after him,” Tante says plainly.

  The man lets out a brief sound, a curt hum, that at first seems considering but then dismissive.

  It is not the first time such disapproval has been made clear to Lala’s aunt. If it is not over Alifair’s presence in this house, it is something else, mild scorn at the fact that Tante will invite Roma across her threshold, but will not meet them in the open.

  Some pity Lala and Tante for passing among gadje, sure they are losing a little of their souls each day.

  Some consider it unforgivable.

  The sunrise barely finds its way in. Tante and the man are still only silhouettes.

  “She’s in love with him,” the man says. “You must know that.”

  Heat blooms in Lala’s cheeks as she waits for Tante to ask Who?

  But after a moment of quiet, Tante only says, “And he hasn’t touched her.”

  The heat in Lala’s face grows as she realizes how obvious it must be. How plainly it must show in the way she looks at this boy who first appeared in the crab apple tree.

  It is worse than that. She first tried to kiss Alifair last year, and he stopped her in a way that was even more devastating for being so gentle, setting his palms on her upper arms, widening the distance between them.

  She has never felt more sharply the slight distance between their ages. They were children together, looking for the shapes of horses in storm clouds, but now that slight distance has put him on one side of a border and left her on the other.

  Lala holds her breath, urging Tante to keep the silence, hoping she will not be pressed into breaking it.

  Tante knows better than to try to convince this man of Alifair’s Romanipen. Alifair was born a gadjo, but from so deep in the Schwarzwald that he came to Lala and Tante already understanding the breath and life of trees. The rest—the auspicious nature of certain foods, the different points of a stream used for washing—he learned.

  The children of these families take to him quickly, waiting for him to play the next song on his Blockflöte. But the mothers eye him warily, grateful for how he does not talk to them unless they talk to him first.

  The older man’s voice cuts through the silence. Tante has outlasted him, and though it is a small victory, it is so clear Lala could sing.

  “You let the boy stay here,” the man says, “he’ll have a baby on her by next year.”

  Lala hears the catch in Tante’s throat, and knows she is trying not to laugh over how much this man thinks he knows.

  Alifair has worked so hard to hide that he was given a girl’s name at birth, and has to conceal the fact of his body to be considered as the boy he is. He has done this work, learning to bind himself beneath his shirts, settling his voice as low as the other boys’, and he has done it so well that even this man doesn’t suspect.

  They all bear the secrets of their own bodies. Lala and Tante, their blood. Alifair, a form he must hide, one that would make others declare him a woman if he didn’t.

  Tante collects herself quickly. “We’ll see, I suppose.”

  “Well,” the man adds, with a wave of his hand that shows against the coming light. “You have your own opinions of these things.”

  Lala wishes she could glare at the man, for this slight over Tante remaining unmarried. Women have clucked their tongues at Tante’s choice, but somehow this feels sharper, as though it will leave a mark.

  Lala’s protests grow heavy on her tongue. She slips from the wattle-and-daub house so she will not speak without meaning to.

  The sky catches flame, orange and pink blazing through the deep blue.

  A silhouette stands alongside the crab apple tree, both forms cut against the bright color.

  One of the women. Lala didn’t realize anyone else was awake.

  Lala draws near enough to see the woman’s dress, the yellow apron over the black skirt. The delicate cloth of a worn but well-cared-for dikhle covers her head.

  The woman is placing her hands on the bark of the crab apple tree.

  “What are you doing?” Lala asks, and then gasps at her own rudeness. It is no better than interrupting a priest who kneels in prayer.

  But the woman offers her a smile, shown by the growing light. Not a tolerating smile. One as true as the color in the sky.

  “Lowering a fever,” she says simply, as though she assumes Lala will understand.

  Something behind Lala catches the woman’s attention. She looks past Lala, into the growing light.

  Lala turns around.

  Halfway between the tree and the lane stand Geruscha and Henne, two girls in plain clothes and unadorned hair who live even farther outside the city walls than this house. They have taken to Lala and Alifair so easily, and seem to like them so beyond reason, that it unsettles Lala. Henne brings over vegetables from her mother’s garden. Geruscha endlessly admires the scraps of blue cloth Tante Dorenia sometimes gives her.

  Geruscha and Henne pause, bread in their hands.

  They know they have interrupted something.

  Lala’s heart falls.

  As though Lala and Tante did not have enough gadje watching them.

  Now Geruscha and Henne have seen Lala with this woman, this woman in her dikhle, with skin the same brown as Lala’s, both of them standing at the crab apple tree as though it is a dear friend.

  Geruscha and Henne leave the bread, and back toward the lane.

  But it is already done. Lala knows that, even before they vanish against the brightening sky.

  It doesn’t happen all at once, the way the families stop coming. But they do stop coming, judging the risk too great, either to Tante Dorenia or to themselves.

  Lala never finds the nerve to tell Tante why. She leaves her aunt a thousand reasons she could assume—her being an unmarried woman, her taking in a gadjo boy, and raising him with Romanipen at that.

  Lala knows it lessens their risk, no longer having families here, or women setting careful hands on their trees.

  But Lala cannot help hating Geruscha and Henne for taking it from her.

  Rosella

  The first time I saw them, the most beautiful pair of red shoes my family ever made, began with a nightmare. It was the year the glimmer left blood on the rosebushes, and I dreamed of nothing but red staining the petals and twists of thorns.

  I was still small enough that when I had nightmares, I went looking for someone else in the house. So I crept downstairs, avoiding all the spots that creaked.

  That night, my mother and father had taken our rust-reddened car out of town, meeting with the shops that would carry the work of my family’s hands. They left me with my grandmother and grandfather, who let me have lit
tle sips from the coffee they drank as they worked.

  I snuck toward the workroom, listening for the sound of my grandparents’ voices.

  But there was another voice besides my abuela’s soft chatter and my abuelo’s low laugh. A man’s voice.

  People came from all over for Oliva shoes, made by my parents or—if they were really willing to pay—the stiffened but skilled hands of my grandfather. They came to our corner of Briar Meadow, where the houses thinned out, the way my father said stars spread farther at the edges of the universe. Families brought daughters to be fitted for satin heels or velvet ballet flats. They thrilled at the shoes’ beauty, and the stories that they made girls hold themselves prouder and taller, or made their hearts lucky, or gave them grace that stayed even after they slipped them off.

  I stopped at the cracked door.

  A tall, blond man was talking to—no, not to, at—my grandfather.

  “You expect my daughter to wear these?” He shook a pair of red shoes at my grandfather. They were as deep as cranberries, covered in vines of red-on-red embroidery.

  Anyone who owned a pair of our red shoes handled them as gently as antique ballet slippers, each pair packed away into attic trunks and under-bed boxes, stuffed with paper to keep their shape.

  But the man shook this pair so hard I worried the beads would tremble away. He wielded the red shoes, the workroom lamplight catching the glass beads.

  The tight-woven satin looked adorned with tiny drops of blood, and I shivered with some echo of my dream.

  “Red?” The man spat out the word. “For a debutante ball?”

  My grandfather did not cower. But he didn’t meet the man’s eye either.

  My grandmother stepped between them.

  “Your daughter asked for red,” my abuela said, her face hard.

  “She would never,” the man bellowed. “She would never ask for a color that made a mockery of the whole event.”

  “Well,” my abuela said, turning through her receipt file and refusing to match the man’s volume, “it seems she would, and she did.”

  The man ignored my grandmother, setting his eyes onto my grandfather. He stood half a head above my abuelo, lording every inch over him.

  A hollow opened in my stomach.

  The man slammed the shoes down.

  The slight rattle of glass beads made me wince. I felt it on the back of my nightgown.

  Then the man’s gaze shifted. He studied the shoes, the fine stitching and beading. He couldn’t even hide how he admired them.

  It was a look I’d seen before, when someone wanted a pair my grandfather was making for someone else, the moment of admiring turning into wanting.

  But there was something sharp in this man’s eyes. Possessive.

  “We’ll expect white ones by the end of the week,” the man said.

  My grandfather nodded, showing neither fear nor defiance.

  The hollow in my stomach turned hot. A week? For a pair from scratch? With my grandfather’s other commissions, he’d be up every night until his fingers bled.

  “And we’ll accept these”—the man plucked the shoes off the table and stuffed them back into their tissue-lined box—“as an apology for the delay.”

  Anger roiled in my stomach and rose up into my chest.

  The man would take those red shoes, those beautiful red shoes, and demand white ones (how would my grandfather make full-beaded white shoes in a week without his fingers bleeding on the pale satin?) and he wouldn’t even pay for them.

  My grandmother took a step forward. “Oh, no, we would never ask you to do that.” Even from behind the door I could catch the mocking in her voice. “We would never expect you to bear the sight of something so offensive to you. Here.” She snatched the shoes from the box. “I’ll save you the bother of carrying them home.”

  She slipped a pair of scissors off a work table and, quick as a magic trick, cut the red shoes into pieces.

  I had to bite my own hand to keep from gasping.

  The pieces fell like confetti between the man’s horrified face and my abuela’s proud glare.

  My eyes flicked from the gleam of my grandmother’s scissors to my grandfather’s face. I braced for the pain that would twist his expression. Every cut, every whine of the scissors’ hinges, must have put a crack in his heart.

  But wonder opened my grandfather’s eyes as wide as I’d ever seen them. No pain. Only awe, like he’d just fallen deeper in love with my grandmother.

  At the sound of the blond man shifting his weight, I ran back upstairs, dodging the creaky places in the wood.

  I breathed hard in the dark, and I waited.

  After the man was gone, after I heard the shuffling-around noises of my grandparents shutting off lights and going to bed, I snuck back down to the workroom.

  I had spent whole afternoons in this room, watching my grandfather’s dark, weathered hands shape the heel of a shoe, or my father guide cloth through the sewing machine. I studied my mother’s calloused fingers stitching patterns and constellations, and my grandmother hunching over her desk, making careful accounts in heavy books that seemed a hundred years old.

  I had wanted to be part of my family’s craft since I first filled my palms with glass beads and felt like I was holding the stars. My parents could keep me busy with hours of threading needles and sewing tiny stitches, the things my father said were the first skills he learned.

  Even without turning on a light, the workroom seemed stuffed with magic. Dyed satin and velvet spilled from the shelves. Tiny buttons sparkled in their glass jars. The length of beads my mother left on stretches of silver cord glittered like salt crystals. Every-color thread confettied the surfaces. When my mother asked me to help clean up, I pretended I was a bird, gathering up scraps to build a bright nest.

  But now I picked up the confetti of candy-red satin and apple-red velvet and blood-red beads.

  I wrapped them in crumpled tissue paper, my heart ringing with what I now knew.

  I would never let this happen again.

  When I grew up, I would never let my family, or myself, be where my grandparents had just been, having to cut our own work into pieces so someone else wouldn’t steal it.

  I would never let this happen again.

  And I kept those pieces as a reminder. I would find a way to make sure we never had to destroy something of ourselves just to stop other people from taking it.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  In the dark, all she has are her hands.

  She wants to light a candle so badly she feels the ache of it in her fingers. With nothing but the faintest breath of moon outside, the darkness is so thick that Lala’s dress, her hair, her skin feel woven from night. But the sound of iron striking flint would wake her aunt as surely as a thief breaking the cellar door.

  Lala pulls back the rushes, wild marjoram woven into the plaited mats to lessen the stale smell, and she unearths a wooden box.

  If Tante Dorenia knew what Lala was doing, her glare would be enough to open the ground beneath her. Lala is sixteen now, a woman, old enough to know better than to take such risks.

  Lala brushes off the lid, so no dirt will fall inside. It would seem a useless effort to anyone watching, anyone who could see her in the dark, since the box only holds more of the same. A scant handful of earth.

  But this earth is worth every field in Alsace.

  The sound of weight on the road—a crunching of rock, the give of the ground—startles Lala. Her eyes skim the parchment windows.

  Her hands pause in the heart of the wooden box. The thrumming of blood at her throat grows hot. She cannot help the sense of having already been found out.

  This box of earth is a sign of all they have hidden. To be caught would mean the loss of their home, their small trade of ink and dye, and far more. Perhaps no one would understand what Lala meant to do with this handful of earth, but that would be all the more dangerous. They would count the hiding of it beneath a rush floor as a sign of unknowable
witchcraft.

  It is the same reason Lala and Tante put away their secret altar, folding their best length of blue cloth, hiding the candles and dishes. If the magistrate’s men were ever of a mind to search houses, they could use it as evidence of whatever crime they liked.

  The sound outside fades.

  Lala’s heart quiets.

  Nothing but an oxcart following the ruts in the road.

  Lala’s fingers skim the inside of the box, the pale wood earth-darkened.

  The soft creak of the ladder sounds above her.

  “I have it,” she whispers as she hears Alifair transfer his weight to the floor.

  He insists on going with her, and she is neither proud enough nor stupid enough to refuse. He already knows her secrets and Tante’s as well as they know his.

  They go out into the night, and the farther they get from the house, the more that handful of ground turns heavy in Lala’s skirt. Its weight feels greater as she bends to pick the tiny wildflowers that flash in the dark.

  She would have wished to do this in daylight, ribbons of sun gilding the earth from her mother’s and father’s graves. But with light, there would be the chance of questions, rumors.

  What we are, Tante reminds her, they have made it a crime, wherever we go.

  As though Lala could forget.

  Lala follows Alifair, cutting only through land he knows. The flax fields, high with green-gold. The soft marshland. A sheep pasture owned by a man whose wife trades onions for Tante’s extra radishes. An orchard that hasn’t borne fruit since last winter’s frosts.

  Alifair has always seen better in the dark than Lala. She imagines he learned growing up deep in the Black Forest, beech trees wreathing it in perpetual dusk. He crouches to pick meadow roses Lala can barely see. Their petals collect what little light there is, as though the moon is showing them to Alifair.

  His sharp vision is something she has learned about him not only in the fields near their home, but in the minutes they’ve stolen in shadow. Last year, he started looking at her in a way that made her wonder if she should try kissing him again. When she did, the winter night was so dark that she made a mess of it, her lips meeting his jawline instead of his mouth, so it seemed more an odd greeting than a try at kissing him. But then his lips caught hers in a way so hard and decisive it showed his certainty about both her and the dark.