Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  She soaked halved lemons in hot water because he would not eat, would not take sauerkraut or garlic, and this was the only of the baxtale xajmata she could get into him. He needed every auspicious food he could swallow, as much as he needed their prayers to Sara la Kali.

  Tante ordered Lala to bring whatever blankets they could find, to stay with him when the delirium came, to talk him through the open-eyed nightmares of the sweat.

  “If he dies,” Tante said, her eyes hard and not looking at Lala as they boiled water, “it is on your head.”

  Lala had turned, startled.

  “I told you both to leave me,” Tante said.

  “You are my family,” Lala said. “My blood.”

  “And I am all the mother you have,” Tante said. “So you should have done as I ordered.”

  “And I suppose you want me to leave him now?” Lala whispered.

  “If you’re to be sick now, it’s done. It was done the moment you both disobeyed me and remained here.”

  Lala went out of the house. She wrapped her arms around the crab apple tree and sobbed into its bark. She wished the woman in the black and yellow skirts were there in a way so desperate it became an ache in her body.

  Now Lala hates this memory, tries to drive it away.

  But it stays, fluttering around her like a moth. It brings her to the night she dried sweat from Alifair’s body, soaking through all the sheets and rags they had. In his sleep, he laughed in a way that unnerved her in how much it sounded like crying. He drank water desperately, only to sweat it out within hours. In the dark, he shivered hard enough to tremble the straw mattress.

  Lala held on to him, her eyes shut tight, her mouth against his head as she whispered into his hair.

  I forbid you to die. I forbid it. I do not give you permission. You have my heart and you cannot take it with you.

  After hours on her knees before God, and hours crying out to Sara la Kali, this had been all the prayer she had left in her.

  The break of his fever the next morning, the deepening of his breathing, the way she was able to get salt-and-lemon-softened fiddleheads into him, seemed, at the time, as much of a miracle as Lala would ever hope for.

  But now, watching him on the wooden stage that was built for the disaster of the great dance, that miracle has dimmed like an ember. She understands, now, that for a girl like herself to love a boy like Alifair would take as many miracles as there are fish in the sea and stars in the heavens.

  In the unending moments of waiting for proud men to declare Alifair’s fate, she grows dizzy. Her mind weaves and lands on an old story about an earl and a pope. She does not know if it is true, but the way the story goes is that the pope offered the earl a kingdom so remote that even the earl’s finest horses and best knights could not bring him to it. The earl told the pope that the offer was the same as if he had said, “I give or sell you the moon. Now climb up and take it.”

  The boy who now stands, silently accepting his sentence, is as distant to her as the moon. Her kiss would never have made them both a world in which he could be hers. The heat between their fingertips, like ten small, identical stars, could not craft a Strasbourg in which they would both be allowed to live.

  When they pronounce the method by which he will die, Lala pitches herself forward.

  “Stop,” Tante says, touching her shoulder.

  But Lala pushes at the crowd in front of her.

  Two sets of soft hands catch her arms.

  Not soft because they are smooth; in truth, they are calloused and work hardened.

  Soft, because of the lightness of their grip.

  “You cannot help him now,” Henne says, tears weakening her voice.

  Geruscha has her other arm, and they pull her back.

  But Lala will not take her eyes from the boy with the bound wrists and the downcast eyes.

  All the canon priests’ talk of mercy, all their posturing that they would show lenience if he made a full confession, it has all been a lie.

  Lala cannot climb the steps to the wooden stage and take him. Her desperation cannot bring him closer any more than the sea can pull the moon down to her waters.

  Emil

  He shocked awake, sitting up in the dark room with sweat soaking the back of his shirt.

  The dreams he’d startled out of stayed, a weight on his body. The sound of heels striking the ground. The smell of dust on hillsides, and horses within the city walls, and bloodstained stones.

  A blur of the same black hair he and his grandfather had, the mix of curly and straight he always found in old photographs.

  Then there was the pierce of a girl’s scream, a woman’s scream, a sound that unfolded like light separating into its colors. The fear, the protest, the taking of blame that should never have been hers. The rush of voices telling her she must take it, that all this fury belonged to her.

  He still didn’t get a good look at her face; the memory, passed down through blood, must have been too watered down. But he saw that hair, and the brown of her skin, a brown that might have gotten her mistaken for the daughter of a Turkish father and French mother. A brown that could be blamed on sun or lied away as Italian or even southern German, Black Forest.

  The echo of that scream followed him. It was a ringing in his ears, a weight in his forehead, a stirring against the back of his neck.

  He shook his head to clear it. The sound stayed with him. He closed his eyes, dug his nails into his palms, paced the floor. Nothing.

  It was still with him early in the morning when he went out to the shed.

  It was in all of them, truth and history written into their blood. And this was the piece that had come alive in Emil, setting fire to his dreams. Maybe it was because that was where it had started, hundreds of years of being forced out of one place, then the next, then the next, until it seemed like there was no air on earth someone would not object to them breathing.

  Maybe it was because this was a time his mother and father had both studied, their fields intersecting in a span of years that included the dancing plague. What were they working on, Emil wondered, in the months before he was born? He wondered if the work of that moment, the thoughts swirling in this house, stirred up this particular corner of their family’s history, enough that it would always be written a little brighter in Emil. Even if he didn’t want it.

  He tried to focus on the work in front of him, the small task of finding things he wanted to show Rosella Oliva. In the language of flames and colors, he had told her what he hadn’t managed to say in years passing each other in the halls or at church. And the way she’d looked at him, the glow of the ion flames tinting her lips, he thought she’d heard him.

  Maybe he could do it again. Maybe he could tell her that he remembered the gardenias she grew with her mother by showing her the crystals of copper chloride, jagged and blue green as a geode made from seawater. Maybe, by showing her different hydrates of cobalt chloride that ranged from blue to purple to pink, he could explain the gradual shift that had left him nervous and quiet around her.

  Maybe he could even tell her about the awful moment of his family’s history that was now pulling him backward, how it made him nervous enough that he didn’t go after her last night, that he let her go home by herself.

  In the rose-quartz pink of manganese chloride, he would tell her about the stone walls of Strasbourg and brutal heat of that Alsatian summer. He could tell her about the canal houses painted the powder blue of copper benzoate, the water and algae the colors of nickel chloride. He could show her the stained-glass-blue of copper sulfate crystals, because he could not tell her in words that this was his heart, jagged, and almost familiar, and made of something that felt far more threatening than beautiful.

  But each time he blinked, she was there again.

  Not Rosella.

  His five-hundred-years-ago relative, her screams laced with fear and rage. She was there, and he recognized her by the brushstroke of her black hair and the brown of her h
ands.

  I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me, he breathed into the clinging haze of his own dream.

  He told her again, in case she could hear him across five centuries, across the moonless dusk that separated him from those who’d lived before him.

  I don’t know what you want me to know.

  The feeling of a palm landed on his shoulder.

  He turned around, looking for the hand and whoever it belonged to.

  He found only the dark in the unlit half of the shed, and the sky, still pink between the door and the frame.

  Heat breathed on his back. It cast a glow on his forearms.

  Emil turned back around.

  A stream of fire ran the length of the lab bench. It burned in every color he’d shown Rosella Oliva, all those flames tinted by ions. The blue green of copper. The marigold yellow of sodium. The purple of cesium and grass green of barium.

  His hands wanted to move. But those colors locked him there.

  This was what happened when he got near Rosella Oliva. This was everything that sparked and caught in the space between them. Between her, a girl whose last name held the lore of enchanted shoes, and him, whose family carried the history of a dancing plague, and the burden of blame for it.

  His muscles flinched to life even while his eyes stayed on that trail of flames.

  He went for the fire extinguisher (he could still hear Dr. Ellern’s voice—Turn the pin before you clamp down) and swept a cloud across the lab bench.

  He only distantly registered the last tips of the flames biting his sleeve.

  “Emil.”

  He heard Rosella’s voice in the same moment he felt her hitting his arm. It was more odd than frightening, her slapping at his wrist and forearm in a way that seemed startled, not angry.

  It took him a minute to put it together with the pain of the fire singeing the hair on his left forearm. He realized his sleeve had caught only in the moment of her putting it out.

  She looked at his arm, swearing under her breath. “We’ve got to get some ice on this.”

  He almost talked without thinking. Cold water, not ice. Another warning from Dr. Ellern. Ice on a burn can leave frostbite.

  But he couldn’t even talk. With her hands on him, he felt the color of flames catching between them. It was brighter and sharper than the pain throbbing into his arm.

  Whatever was lacing his dreams, whatever his relatives from five centuries ago wanted him to know, it led back to Rosella. He couldn’t pin it down yet, but it was an instinct as clear and true as his mother’s sense for when rain was coming.

  He should have felt it the night Rosella kissed him, with that flash of red folded inside the glimmer, that vein of blood.

  If he stayed near her, the space between them would turn to fire.

  He pulled back so fast he almost dropped the extinguisher.

  She blinked at him, eyes wide, but let him have the distance.

  He looked back at the bench, breathing hard. Whatever heat was left moldered under a layer of sodium bicarbonate.

  “It’s us,” Emil said, more to the ash-bitter air than to Rosella.

  The truth he hadn’t wanted to pick up and turn over in his hands now cut into him.

  Both of those nights out by the reservoir, a fever had taken hold of Rosella, the same kind of possession as five hundred years ago.

  She had danced, without wanting to. Something had compelled her to the edge of those rocks, and into the water.

  “We can’t do this,” Emil said, feeling the hum of blood in his wrist.

  She shook her head, like trying to shake her thoughts into place. “What?”

  “This.” Emil swallowed, still getting his breath back. “You and me. We can’t be near each other.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re gonna get hurt. You already have.”

  “Me?” She looked at his arm.

  He didn’t look.

  “It’s us,” he said, tracing paths between the nightmares that visited him as he slept and the ones she lived. “We’re what’s causing this.”

  “Causing what?”

  His eyes skimmed over the sodium-dusted table, then the red of her shoes.

  “Emil,” Rosella said.

  He flinched back to her. “I have to stay away from you.”

  “What?” she asked. “Why?”

  He hesitated over the truth.

  If anyone in this town, anyone outside his own family, would understand, it would be Rosella. The Olivas were the one family who didn’t blink at the idea of baxtale xajmata, or at bringing food to their dead, or everything else that made most gadje glance at his family sideways.

  The truth of his family’s history felt like pins on his tongue, things he needed to spit out.

  “Emil,” Rosella said, his name turning harder on her tongue.

  Emil took a long breath. “So back when my family lived in Strasbourg, there was a dancing plague.”

  “A dancing plague?”

  “Yeah. It’s exactly what it sounds like. People started dancing uncontrollably. Like they couldn’t help it. And they kept dancing.” He looked at the floor. “Even though it killed them.”

  “Dancing killed them?”

  “Some of them, yeah. Heart attacks. Strokes. They literally danced themselves to death.”

  Saying the words felt like a draft on the back of his neck, like that unseen hand was nearing his shoulder blade again.

  “When was this?” Rosella asked.

  “Five hundred years ago.”

  She was blinking in threes now, like she was trying to resolve an image. “Why were they dancing?”

  “There are a lot of theories. Ergot poisoning. Something in the water. But most likely?” He gave a resigned shrug. “Some kind of mass hysteria.”

  “And your ancestors,” Rosella said slowly. “They were there?”

  “Worse than there.” Emil felt a tightness building in his jaw. “They were blamed for it.”

  The look on her face mirrored what he’d felt when his father told him. The sudden understanding. All the blood rushing to his forehead, like hanging upside down off a bed.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  He sighed in a way that was more bracing himself than exasperation, but it was a little of both, and he knew it. Rosella’s family had skin brown enough that a little of him hoped maybe he wouldn’t have to explain this. He wanted her to guess, to just know. Then he wouldn’t have to say it out loud. This was all someone else’s pain, five hundred years old, and yet somehow it brought back the shame of hearing his parents getting a call from his teachers.

  Rosella watched him. She waited for him to talk.

  “So in the first few years of the 1500s, anyone Romani was banned from France and Germany,” he said. “It wasn’t long before the independent cities did the same thing. I don’t remember when it happened in Strasbourg. There are so many of these decrees sometimes I forget the dates.”

  “But where was everyone supposed to go?” Rosella asked.

  “Great question, since a lot of other countries were making the same decrees,” he said. “Some of my relatives assimilated. Some married gadje. My mom’s family got by doing that for a long time. Some disappeared into cities. Any of them who couldn’t pass knew that wherever they went, they could always be forced out. My relatives in Strasbourg”—he blew out a breath, feeling like he needed to clear out his lungs to finish saying all this—“well, they tried to pass.”

  He touched the sodium bicarbonate on the resin countertop, the dusting of white coming off on his fingertips.

  “Unfortunately, people talk,” he said. “And rumors that you’re Romani get you blamed for things, especially in the 1500s.”

  “So what happened to them?” Rosella asked.

  He shook his head, his jaw still held tight. “We don’t know. After that summer they don’t exist in city records. The best case scenario is they lost everything, their home, the
ir business, all of it. They were driven out.”

  “That’s the best case?” Rosella asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Because the worst, and most likely, is that they were executed.”

  He winced under the memory of his own nightmares, that screaming that felt sharp as cut glass.

  “Because they got blamed for the dancing plague,” Rosella said. It seemed more like she was confirming than asking.

  “Yes,” Emil said.

  “Because they were Romani,” Rosella said, with enough resignation that this time he knew it wasn’t a question. Her sigh fell like a slack balloon, as though the world disheartened her even if it didn’t surprise her.

  He looked at her, with her staring eyes dark enough that he couldn’t pick out the points of black at the centers. Yes, she was a gadji, but she knew what it was to look how they looked in a town like Briar Meadow. And she could maybe guess what it was like to be his family five hundred years ago.

  “Yes,” Emil said. “Because they were Romani. And because they were unmarried women who made their own living. Because everyone thought they were witches. All of the above. Whenever something happens, people go looking for someone to blame.”

  She kept staring in a way he couldn’t read. Disbelief? Horror? Deciding to stay really still until he just forgot she was there?

  After everything he’d just said, the silence pricked at him.

  Then her expression shifted, like a flame changing from one color to the next.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  Which four brothers live under only one hat?

  (The legs of a table.)

  Which mother and son can you see only after sundown?

  (The night and the moon.)

  All this is an awful, living version of the riddles Lala’s father so loved.

  Tante says that the harder they were to solve, the more joy Lala’s father took in them. But what would he tell her now? How to save a boy who has made Lala’s confession his own is the most impossible riddle, the most stubborn knot.

  “Your favorite priest tried to speak for him, you know,” Tante says. “And they brushed him away as if he were a troublesome child.” She squeezes her eyes shut, giving a small shake of her head.