The Gentling Box Read online

  “But—” She began to protest, having peeled some half dozen already, but Mimi was firm. I moved to the window and waited until I saw Lenore go on her knees to crawl toward the storage bin under the caravan. Then I spoke up.

  “Secrets be damned, Anyeta’s a whore,” I said, pacing, remembering the night Mimi lost our first child, a stillborn girl. I’d woken alone, to candlelight. Anyeta stood naked at the foot of the bed. “Your wife is marhime—unclean. You cannot lie with her all this month,” she’d said, grinning. It was not the first time she’d propositioned me and I threw her out. Mimi never knew, but she had no regrets about leaving the old woman or Romania when we decamped a few weeks later.

  “Witchcraft.” I shook my head. “It’s trumpery. She’s nothing but a clever whore, and you know it.”

  “Do I?” His deep-set eyes met mine, and it came to me he’d been cradling one arm beneath the heavy folds of his cape. I heard the faint slurring of the wool as he extended the arm beneath it. The hand he showed was studded with brown bulbous swellings of different sizes. The smaller knobs had the shiny look of tightly stretched skin. The largest—the size of an egg—hung like a soft sac from just above his wrist. He began to roll back his shirt-cuff, and the tumor made a flopping sound against his skin.

  “It’s pemphigus,” Mimi said.

  “Is it, gule romni?” He’d called my wife a healer, but his voice was thick with sarcasm. “This arm,” he said, “only this one, and there is a bloat like the rotting flesh of a fruit in the webbing between my shoulder and chest.” He started to undo his shirt.

  I felt myself go white. “No, no more.” I reached out to stop him. My fingers grazed the brown egg-like sac; it ruptured and began to ooze a thick mucky-looking fluid.

  He jerked his arm back, hiding it once more beneath the voluminous cape. He took three long strides to the door, then paused on the threshold. “She’s a choovahanee, I tell you. Don’t do anything foolish; don’t keep her waiting. Leave at first light.”

  “Yes,” I said vaguely; I had no intention of trekking across the border. The Romanian gypsies were a superstitious lot, and he’d called Anyeta a sorceress. I didn’t know what the course of his disease was, but it was clear he believed Anyeta had afflicted him; he’d brought her message because he was terrified she would do worse.

  “But you haven’t asked the way,” he said, pulling a small paper from his breast pocket. I saw it was a crude map, the route traced in pencil. I put my hand out for it and was suddenly aware of Lenore’s light step coming around the side of the caravan. She was singing softly to herself.

  “Go on, leave us now,” I said, edging him onto the stoop and pulling at the door handle behind me.

  Smiling that narrow unctuous grin, he pushed the map at me, then clattered down the stairs. The paper fluttered to the wooden boards. I bent down, scooped it up, found myself at eye level with the Romanian gypsy. Lenore now stood in the thin, trampled grass at the foot of the steps. Her skirt was spread between her hands and sagging a little with the weight of the potatoes.

  “Bahtalo drom,” she said politely, nodding at the stranger. She was wishing him luck on the road ahead.

  “Your grandmother’s very words,” he said, at the same time I saw the phrase scrawled at the top of the map. I frowned at the coincidence. He began to laugh softly, then pulled the heavy wool cape tighter across his chest and moved into the denser shadows. I listened to the muffled sound of his boots in the high summer grass; his footsteps faded, then finally ceased. It was then I realized, with something of a jolt, he had walked off into the night. I had imagined hearing hoofbeats climbing the hill and signaling his approach, but there was no horse in our campsite on the rise.

  ***

  “She’s dying, Imre.”

  Mimi had spoken first. I knew she would. She doesn’t keep things back or brood. None of us had eaten much dinner, Lenore was asleep, and my wife and I sat at the kitchen table, each with a small glass of brandy. The oil lantern overhead made a circle of yellow light against the white cloth, our hands; I looked at Mimi’s shadow wavering on the wall behind her.

  “You hated her,” I countered.

  “But she’s my mother,” she said, getting up and coming round to my side of the table. I watched her shadow flickering on the wall as she paced.

  “You couldn’t wait to get away from her, from all of them.”

  “But I was so young. I was nothing in that troupe, I had no status, no place. Gule romni!” She spat the words. “Not even that, not even a healer, just a girl puttering and playing with herbs.” Mimi lowered her eyes. She looked sad, a little anxious. “Imre, there are things you don’t know—”

  “What—those secrets? Dukkeripen—saying the future? It’s ridiculous, too asinine to even consider. You’ve told me a hundred times it’s nothing but keen observation. You watch for the rubbed flesh on the fourth finger where a woman has taken off her wedding ring and thinks she’s going to fool you. Or for that slightly anxious look in an old maid’s eyes. And then you tell them what they want to hear. Christ, even Lenore knows it—that silly play acting about the Empress—”

  “Maybe you don’t understand because you’re a diddikai,” she said.

  She’d called me a half-breed; well, I was—my mother was English, but my father was a gypsy and I’d lived with one troupe or another all my life. She was a puro-rati, a pure-blood, but it was the first time she’d ever made mention of what I thought of as a minor difference between us. I stared at Mimi, but her face was closed.

  “My mother—she—” Mimi hesitated, biting her lip. “She helped me get you.” If it were true, I thought, recalling Anyeta’s naked appearance by my bedside, she would have kept me for herself.

  “I had a crush on you,” she went on, “but you didn’t know I even existed; and then my mother made me a charm to wear on my wrist, to bind you to me. It was a mulengi dori, and I tied it into seven knots and—”

  As a rule, Mimi was not at all superstitious and I felt my anger rising. I struck the table with the flat of my hand. “Are you going to tell me you believe that a piece of string that someone used to measure a dead man for his coffin brought us together? We’ve been in love twenty-two years, Mimi! Twenty-two years!” I seized her wrist. She tried to jerk it out of my grasp, but I held on. “I’ll grant you that it was your mother’s influence that forged the bond between us—but it was because you despised her! Have you forgotten?”

  I squeezed her wrist harder, and below the fragile bones the flesh of her hand paled, revealing even more clearly than usual a patch of livid wrinkled scar tissue—the faded remains of a hideous burn—in the center of her palm. “Have you forgotten? Have you?”

  “No,” she whispered. Tears glistened at the rims of her eyelids, and I knew I shouldn’t press her, but I did.

  “Tell me,” I said, “if she was such a great sorceress, if she had so much power, tell me why she had to hold her own child’s hand against a cast iron tea kettle while that child screamed and squirmed and begged her to stop?”

  “She caught me spying,” Mimi breathed, and I thought she looked younger, more vulnerable with the memory. I let go of my wife’s wrist and she stepped back, rubbing at the tender flesh.

  “And what did she say? ‘The next time I catch you watching me, Missy, I’ll put out your eyes. . . .’”

  “Yes,” Mimi hissed.

  “And is that what you want for our child, for Lenore?”

  “No, no!” She shook her head, her dark hair swayed around her shoulders; the shadow behind her rippled in tandem.

  “Is this a fantasy then? Grandma Anyeta sitting wrapped in her shawl by the fire telling her beloved granddaughter the old gypsy tales, while you play nursemaid, make honeycake and fluff the pillows?”

  “Yes,” she said, but too low for me to catch. Her eyes showed it.

  “Everything she did healed, forgotten, forgiven? Tell me why you want to go!”

  “Guilt,” Mimi said. She sat heavily at t
he table. “If only you know how it makes me feel inside, how the hatred for her is all mixed up with these terrible hating feelings I have for myself.” Mimi’s voice went high and tight. “You think I don’t know what happened the night I lost Elena? She taunted me with it! Told me not to trust you at the same time she was gloating. ‘He’s delicious, darling, but you’ll have to watch him like a hawk—a handsome man like that, and so very good with women. But then, you must know,’ and she put her hand low on my belly, like this,” Mimi said, touching herself, “and gave it a nasty little squeeze.”

  “And did you think I betrayed you—with her, with anyone?”

  “No. But I would find myself flirting, fantasizing about other men, half-wishing something would start up between us, and it made me afraid that deep down I was just like her, a woman who used men, a whore.” She shook her head slowly. “And even that isn’t the worst. Sometimes,” she pressed her hands to her eyes, “Oh Christ, Imre, sometimes Lenore would do some little thing—trying to help, she’d drop a loaf of bread I had ready for the oven, and I’d hear the roaring clatter of the pan against the floor and see the white dough shapeless on the dirty boards, and my mind—I just—” She stopped, grinding her teeth.

  “Black anger would spiral, screaming through me, and I’d hear myself screaming, ‘I told you to leave it alone, Lenore! And now look at this! The bread is ruined, it’s been rising all morning, and now when I’m ready to bake it’s ruined!’ And my hand would flash up. Christ, I’d want to hurt her, hurt her bad, and I’d see you.” She began to weep quietly. “And at the last second, I’d get hold of myself and stop. I’d take Lenore and hug her and we’d both be crying. Lenore, because I’d frightened her, and me because I knew if I’d hit her, I would lose you forever.” She paused, and I sat stunned, silent.

  “You were my strength, Imre,” she said simply. “Without you I would have been just like Anyeta. But you kept me from it. Because you were loyal to me, because you knew how to love me and Lenore. Because you were kind and good.”

  Mimi wiped her eyes and I took her moist hands in mine. “These things are more reason yet to stay away from her,” I said.

  “No, I have to see her. I can’t forgive myself until I forgive her—”

  I felt another surge of anger. Anyeta deserved not forgiveness but to die, tortured. “Forget this guilt—you did nothing! It was her. Why don’t you understand that she did these vicious things, that none of it was your fault—”

  “I want peace of mind. I have to go—”

  “No, I don’t want Lenore anywhere near her—”

  “It’s twenty years, Imre. People change. Maybe she has no secrets, no place in the kumpania.” Mimi’s dark violet eyes took on a far off look, and I thought about how she’d lapsed into the Romany of her girlhood. “Maybe she just wants my forgiveness before she dies.”

  “No, I won’t have it.” But even as I said the words, I knew it was only the last of my anger showing itself against the backdrop of the helplessness I felt, the control I was trying to maintain. I felt my ire draining rapidly. Already I could see myself packing the caravan in the gray gloom before dawn, consulting the stranger’s pencilled map.

  “My mother needs me. I need to see her.” Mimi’s voice held a peculiar note and I found myself wondering what really lured her. Did she need to forgive herself for despising Anyeta all these years? to exorcise the specter of those old painful memories? Or was it her mother’s dark promise? Tell Mimi I have secrets.

  “All right,” I nodded, giving in. I didn’t believe in sorcery. And I expected no deathbed apologies or change of heart from Anyeta, but Mimi was my wife, we were a family, we would go.

  -4-

  Romania

  “A miserable trip through a miserable country,” I said aloud, looking up at the moon casting its harsh light high on the tall alien peaks of the western Carpathians. Mimi had urged me to drive hard, and the days were a kaleidoscope of images: Lenore wailing, “Now I’ll never see the Empress!” and taking her last look at the massive stone towers of the Lanchid Bridge when we crossed the Danube from Buda to Pest; the long sweep of the puszta, the grassy plains with their herds of wild horses that stretched north to the Nyirseg region, my boyhood home; and then as we crossed the border near Oradea and the land began to rise, the kaleidoscope shifted, revealing bad roads, hurried meals, old, crumbling towns, lumpy women and closed-face men in their crude shapeless shoes bowing at the wooden shrines.

  Sorceress or not, with each passing kilometer I dreaded more and more the thought of facing the old woman. Far off a wolf howled and I shivered. Mimi and Lenore were sleeping in the caravan. I had a cold, I was tired. I stopped the wagon, unsure of the way, and leaned out over the edge feeling queasy when I registered the drop.

  “Christ.” Sheer rock face rose straight up on the left. To my right was a valley, shrouded with mist; here and there trees broke through and glittered darkly. The descent looked menacing. I wanted to stop and sleep a while but there was no place to tether the horses. I curled my toes in my boots trying to warm them a little, sniffled, then gave the reins a flap. The caravan lurched forward. I caught the sound of the wolf’s mournful cry; it was still distant, but the lead horse suddenly laid back its ears, snorted in fear and began to bolt.

  The rear wheel slewed out until I thought it would buckle under the weight, the wagon tilted and swayed. I saw the sharp outcroppings of the rocks loom up in a second of heart freezing clarity, and then the horses countered the strain, jerking us right, but we were still roaring downhill through the night.

  “Whoa!” I stood up, screaming at them to halt, the wind whistling past my ears. My voice echoed and rumbled in the canyons, but in my terror it came back to me as Run, run, run!

  The team was in a frenzy. I saw their sides heaving, the thick cloud shapes from hard breathing, heard the sound of their hooves and the racketing caravan, and a flash went through me—someone else was controlling the horses, I thought wildly. We were going to be killed. Now moving through dense forest, the road dipped. We rounded a sharp turn and the carriage lanterns bobbed and swayed crazily. Up ahead, lights gleamed dimly through the heavy fog, and for a brief instant I was disoriented. I heard the sound of muffled voices.

  “Back, get back,” someone warned. A pale hand appeared and faded eerily in the mist.

  The road widened through the wall of trees, and in a panic I realized there was another caravan dead ahead of us. I yanked the reins, closed my eyes, threw my arm up and tensed, waiting for the crash. The wagon slewed and jolted against an ancient oak on the right. I felt the blood rushing to my head. Everything came to a sudden and immediate stop at the impact.

  In the moments that followed I was groggy and confused. Footsteps and voices seemed to come and go in the cold fog. Through a haze I thought I saw a tall woman in a white gown, laughing with her head thrown back; I thought I heard a man growling at her angrily, “Keep off, you’ve done enough.” But the white figure blurred, then slipped through the trees, and I slipped into a darkness of my own.

  ***

  “Imre, Imre,” a voice called low in my ear. “You passed out.”

  I opened my eyes, blinking, and an old man’s face came into focus. His cheeks were thin, with no pad of flash under the chin; his eyes were hooded, set under heavy white brows. He dragged on a cigarette, and I saw a gold signet ring gleam on his middle finger.

  “You remember me?” he asked.

  My eyes flicked from the ring to the gaunt face. “Joseph?”

  He nodded, absently rubbing one knee. He walked with a limp, I recalled; he was a Lovari gypsy—like my father—one of the skilled horsemen. He was the leader of the troupe Anyeta belonged to. My fingers strayed to the base of my skull where I found an egg-shaped bulge, and his eyes caught the movement.

  “Gave your head a hell of a knock.” He indicated the rear wall of the caravan. “Lucky you weren’t thrown.”

  “Mimi, Lenore,” I began.

  “Sleepi
ng—they’re all right.” He flicked the cigarette over the side of the wagon.

  “That’s impossible,” I started to say, rising from the seat. He laid hold of my coat lapel, his piercing eyes meeting mine.

  “They sleep,” he said, briefly touching one dry finger to my temple. “And sleeping easily, they dream. Listen.”

  It seemed to me I heard the sound of breathing inside the wagon—a soft, peaceful riffling. “They’re asleep,” I whispered. He nodded, and his hand dropped away from my face.

  “Your vurdan’s scraped some, but the wheels are sound.” He paused. “I’ve been waiting here the last two nights for you.”

  I thought of the flash that went through me when the horses bolted. Had he meant to kill us, stopped in the road like that?

  He sat forward, his eyes glittering, and I had the feeling he sensed what was going through my mind. I shivered, dismissing the thought. It was fatigue, the cold, the jarring accident, the damn country—riddled with superstition and dread—all combining to make me confuse fact with fancy.

  “Anyeta’s dead,” Joseph said.

  I felt my stomach tighten. We made the trip for nothing, I thought dismally, and slumped against the chill wood.

  “It’s better this way,” he said. “Nobody wanted you to come—nobody wanted Mimi to come. They were beshitting themselves with fright, convinced the old sorceress would give Mimi her powers, and they’d be right where they were before—under some witch’s thumb.”

  “You don’t believe that. You’re the leader, tell them—”

  “My son Vaclav is the prima. He leads the gypsies now.” He gave a weak smile, and the image of his son—a big, arrogant man—went through my mind. I’d never liked Vaclav. “It doesn’t matter what I believe, but you might do well to stay away—’til afterwards. The funeral’s the day after tomorrow.”

  “’Til she’s buried, you mean.”

  “It wouldn’t be hard,” he said. “You could take the wagon, drive beyond the pass, meet me here two or three nights from now. There’s enough forks and turnings that without me guiding, you’d probably miss the camp even in daylight.”