Ascension E-Book

Steven Galloway

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

From the beloved, award-winning, bestselling author of The Cellist of Sarajevo, a beautiful, suspense-filled novel As a young Romany boy in Transylvania in the early years of the twentieth century, Salvo Usari's mother and father are killed in a tragic fire. Forced to flee his village, leaving his brother and sister behind him, Salvo embarks on a lifetime's odyssey that takes him through the dark forests of his homeland, to the bustling streets of Budapest - where he learns the skills of a wire-walker - and eventually to the United States. There he is reunited with his family, finds fame, and eventually risks everything to perform one final - death-defying - high wire act, as he walks between the twin towers of the World Trade Center...

Leseprobe

Steven Galloway was born in Vancouver in 1975. He is the author of three novels, including the international bestseller The Cellistof Sarajevo (Atlantic, 2008) which was a Richard & Judy book club choice in 2009. He lives with his family in Vancouver.

Praise for Steven Galloway’s international bestselling novel TheCellist of Sarajevo:

‘A grand and powerful novel… Your mind’s eye sees, your moral sense is outraged: your full humanity is exercised.’ Yann Martel

‘This gripping novel transcends time and place… A testimony to the struggle to find meaning, grace, and humanity, even amid the most unimaginable horrors.’ Khaled Hosseini

‘Accomplished and gripping… Powerful and lyrical.’ Spectator

‘The work of an expert… A controlled and subtle piece of crafts­manship.’ Observer

Also by Steven Galloway

The Cellist of Sarajevo

Finnie Walsh

First published in Canada in 2003 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House of Canada Ltd, Toronto, Canada.

This paperback original published by in 2010 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Limited.

Copyright © Steven Galloway, 2003

The moral right of Steven Galloway to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

978 1 84354 752 5 EBook ISBN: 978 0 85789 855 5

Designed by Chong Weng-ho Typeset in 11.5/15 Granjon by J & M Typesetting

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Lara

CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

There is a steady wind, and it blows cold on Salvo Ursari’s face and hands but does not deter him. He dips a hand in the pouch he wears at his waist, pinching out a clump of baby powder that he rubs onto both of his hands. Beyond the practical purpose of preventing the slippage of the seventy-pound pole he carries for balance, the powder has a distinctive odour that reminds Salvo of the past, of walks done half a lifetime ago, of his twin daughters when they had been tiny, shrieking infants, of his wife after bathing.

Salvo smiles as one such moment floods into his conscious­ness. It is nearly forty years earlier, his daughters barely two years old, and his wife has just put them down for the night. Salvo is lying on his back, trying to stretch out a hamstring he has needlessly overexerted. Through a wince of pain he sees his wife’s legs as she glides by him, pale, ghostly apparitions, and his eyes follow her as she moves across the room and sits on the ledge of the window. The streetlight outside illuminates her from behind, makes her glow, and Salvo is reminded how breathtakingly beautiful his wife can be.

A gust of wind brings him back to reality. Now is not the time, he tells himself. You are not a young man and you had better keep your mind on the task at hand.

At sixty-six, Salvo has been told he’s out of his mind to attempt a skywalk between the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center. Salvo partly agrees with this assessment, but it makes no difference. Of course he’s afraid, of course he knows the danger—few have suffered more than he as a result of walks gone bad—but that is of no consequence. It is his fear that lets him know he’s sane; the day he’s not afraid is the day he won’t go out on the wire. He knows he can do this walk.

Salvo is standing nearly fourteen hundred feet above solid ground. It is the highest walk Salvo has ever done, but height is unimportant; you’re just as dead if you fall from forty feet as you are from fourteen hundred. Distance-wise, Salvo has walked two and even three times as far, which is tricky because the longer the wire, the greater the danger that it will snap. A very long wire will sag in the middle, and there are few things more difficult than walking the downhill slope of a wire. At least Salvo has the comfort of this being a solo walk. He alone is responsible for the outcome of today’s endeavour.

For his efforts Salvo will receive a sum of twenty thousand dollars, but the promoter’s insurance company has steadfastly refused to extend coverage to Salvo himself; the policy only covers damage caused should Salvo fall onto someone or something below.

The area beneath the wire has been cleared. From where Salvo stands with his toes curled over the edge of the building, the mounted crowd-control policemen are barely visible, the crowd itself nothing more than a dusty smear. He dislikes that the audience is such a distant entity. Without the immediacy of the audience, without their energy to feed on, the wire can be a lonely place. The only consolation Salvo has is that he has performed so many times he instinctively knows how the crowd will react, can picture the people far below as clearly as if they were fifty feet away.

Salvo receives the signal to begin. He takes a deep breath, collecting himself, and offers up a silent prayer. He’s seen enough on the wire over the years to know that skill and luck are not enough to get across. To survive he needs God on his side. At the very least he requires Him to be a benign presence; the last thing he wants is to have God against him.

Hoping that he’ll have only earthly challenges to deal with, Salvo picks up his balancing pole. The wind moving across the wire creates a sound not unlike that of the highest string on a violin. As he steps onto the wire, the weight of his body momentarily silences it, before it resumes its singing. Each step Salvo takes interrupts this one-note song, but between steps it always begins again. It is as if this wire is trying to play me a death march, he thinks, and each step I take forces it to start over. As long as I keep taking steps, it can’t complete its song, and everything will be okay.

The wire digs into his feet through the ballet-style slippers he wears, and he can feel the wind go right through the cotton of his jumpsuit. Salvo doesn’t wear conventional, tight-fitting costumes. He doesn’t mind them when performing under a roof, but on a walk like this one he prefers slightly looser clothing, the folds of his snow-white jumpsuit acting like antennae, a way to feel the wind’s strength and direction.

For a man his age, indeed even for a man half his age, Salvo is in exceptional shape. He is thin and lithe and undeni­ably strong, his slight form belying a muscularity that is rare for his body type. His hair has turned from the darkest brown to a peppery silver with the utmost dignity, even if his hairline has slipped back a little. Thick, leathery lips lie on top of a set of teeth that, despite a minimal regimen of oral hygiene, are almost unnaturally bright. His face, still handsome after being weathered and beaten by sixty-six years of hard living, is quietly inviting, trustworthy. A person would, if they were to meet him on the street, be inclined to like him. But the most striking thing about Salvo is his eyes. Set deep in their sockets and veiled behind thick, dark eyebrows, they are the colour of an emerald forest, capable of being cold and piercing one moment, calm and soothing the next. They can speak kindness or anger more loudly than words. Whenever people think about Salvo, they think first of his eyes.

The sky is grey, gloomy, not at all the sort of weather that is good for a Fourth of July, let alone a wire walk, but Salvo would rather have this kind of weather than the bright sun and sweltering heat the forecasters had predicted. Hot air rising off the streets can create nasty updrafts, which are considerably more dangerous than a slight breeze. Still, he would not want to be up here in a thunderstorm.

You old fool, he reprimands himself, here you are 110 storeys in the air and you’re worried about getting struck by lightning. He pushes such thoughts out of his head, ignores the fact that here, almost fourteen hundred feet above the ground, carrying a large, conductive pole and walking on a steel wire, he is the human equivalent of a lightning rod. He takes another step forward, again silencing the wire.

Salvo settles into a state of intense concentration. He is barely a quarter of the way across, and the most difficult part of the walk is yet to come. The balancing pole is getting heavier with every passing second, but instead of becoming fatigued he makes it an extension of his body, its weight holding him steady. The fabric on the left leg of his jumpsuit snaps taut as he is buffeted by an unusually strong gust of wind. He uses the pole to correct his balance and makes a mental note to pay closer attention to these gusts. There is a fierce way the wind whips between these buildings that both frightens and invigorates him.

Once, a newspaper man asked him what it felt like to walk high above the crowd, with death looming beneath him and success a long way off on the other platform. Not knowing how to answer, he had told the man that it was like being a bird, an eagle, but he knew that wasn’t true at all. An eagle has wings. When an eagle flies, it knows it will not fall. He is a man, nothing more, but he is a man who dares do things other men merely watch and admire and envy. He used to walk for these people as much as for himself. Today, however, he is walking only for his own fulfilment. That is the difference with these solo walks. All the past successes and failures and problems of the world below are erased from memory. When he is among people, he is one of them, with hopes and fears and memories of things gone wrong. Here he is timeless, one man on a wire far above it all, in a separate place. He is not free, but he is as free as he will ever be.

Salvo is nearly halfway across now, making good time but not hurrying, and things are going very well. The wire is holding tight, and the wind isn’t bad. At the halfway point there will be a piece of red tape marking the place where Salvo has agreed to do a handstand, a special bonus for the crowd below. The promoters had also asked him to unfurl an American flag from his leg. He refused. Not only is such a stunt unnecessarily dangerous, but Salvo is a performer, not a politi­cian. Besides, he isn’t even American.

For Salvo, a handstand on a wire isn’t that difficult, and the height of this wire will actually work to his advantage. Because the audience is so far away, he has decided not to bother to ‘sell’ the trick. Ordinarily, if he were working at a lesser height, he would waver and wobble his handstand slightly, not so much that he would lose control but enough that the audience would wonder if he were about to topple. At this height, however, there’s no point in such theatrics, which is too bad. The selling of the trick is the real essence of it, but from a safety standpoint, at fourteen hundred feet, it’s a good thing he doesn’t have to bother.

Salvo lowers his body to the wire, bending at the knees and placing the pole perpendicular to his path. He bows his head and thrusts his legs skyward. His hands hold the pole on either side of his head, allowing him to correct his balance from side to side and to use his inverted legs to control his back-and-forth movements. Only the slightest of corrections is possible: if he over- or under-corrects he will fall. That gets most people, he knows. Once you over-correct, you have to compensate on the other side for your mistake, and more often than not that gets you wobbling from side to side until you lose it and you’re gone.

When his legs reach their apex he arches his back, and the handstand is complete. There follows a brief moment when the wind catches his body at an unfortunate angle, and he’s not sure if he will be able to right himself. His arms tighten, and his stomach and thighs strain to halt his momentum. A streak of pain shoots through his hip, but he ignores it and struggles to undo the damage. His torso has twisted slightly and he rotates it back into alignment, almost going too far, barely saving it. His left arm, exerted to its fullest capacity, begins to shake, but he continues to struggle, pushing his body so that it screams in protest, then pushing it still further, until he is balanced again and the danger has passed. He holds the handstand for several more seconds, partially to make sure he has fully regained his equilibrium before attempting to dismount, and partially to assert his control over the wind, to show it that it can’t blow him over that easily.

Satisfied that he has conquered the handstand, Salvo gingerly returns his feet to the wire. He pauses and lets the blood rush through the capillaries emptied by his inversion, feeling his flesh tingle as sensation returns, his face hot and red. When he has recovered completely, he stands, heaving up the balancing pole and continuing his journey. Salvo knows that what has just happened would have caused most wire walkers to crumple. He has seen others in less trouble give up, and if they hadn’t fallen they’d held on tight to the wire and either dropped into makeshift nets or were forced to traverse the rest of the way hand over fist. No matter which, the walk ended in defeat and disgrace. The difference between Salvo and other wire walkers is that Salvo has long ago learned to tell his body to keep going, even when it seems that he has reached the end of his endurance.

He imagines what it must be like on the ground, how the street would be so quiet that you could hear the person next to you breathing, except during his handstand, when some would have been unable to stop themselves from gasping. When he’d teetered to the side it must have seemed like something had burst; the whole crowd would have erupted into shouts and cries. After he’d righted himself and returned his feet to the wire, people would have applauded without reserve, smiling at the stranger beside them as if to say they’d known all along that this was how it would turn out.

His confidence and strength renewed, Salvo steps forward, glad to feel the wind across his face, glad for the cool freshness of the air, glad for the busy smell of the city and the solid, steady beating of his heart. Salvo knows that if he were to fall he would stand absolutely no chance of survival. After only one second he would be sixteen feet from the wire, travelling at a speed of twenty miles an hour. After five seconds he would be four hundred feet down, going nearly 110 miles an hour. At this point he would reach terminal velocity, the highest speed at which a human body can fall. That he would hit the ground a mere seven seconds later, twelve seconds after leaving the wire, he knows because he read it in the paper this very morning, a not so encouraging piece about today’s skywalk.

Salvo has long maintained that most people do not want to see him fall. Perhaps one in twenty do, and perhaps nine in twenty come so that they are present if he should fall. The other half of the audience is there to see him face death and make it. It is for these people that Salvo has spent a lifetime performing. He has fear, but he’s not afraid. He likes to think that if people see him face his fear, they will in some small way be able to do so as well. That’s what he thinks when he’s being most optimistic. Newspaper articles like the one that ran today do much to deflate him.

It doesn’t matter now, however, because he is advancing steadily and feels certain he will not fall. He is three-quarters of the way across and moving at a good pace. The wind has died down, stopping the wire’s singing. Sweat covers his face, and he licks his lips, savouring the salty taste of his hard work. His hip is throbbing a little, but Salvo doesn’t mind the pain, having grown used to it long ago. He pictures the crowd below grinning with anticipation; he has completed the handstand and, he believes, even managed inadvertently to sell it. He has visions of his wife, Anna, down on the ground below, pouring rye whisky over ice—one for her, two for him. He always drinks two ryes after a walk; to him, the smell of whisky has become the smell of success.

With his next step he feels the wire slacken. Not a lot, but a little, and that’s how trouble starts. He is not overly concerned; his crew can tighten the guy lines and winch up his wire, and everything will be fine. But as he takes another step the slackening grows, and for the next three steps it continues to worsen. He is now more than a little worried and contem­plates stopping to wait for the wire to tighten. Just as he is weighing his options the wire does begin to pull taut. He breathes a sigh of relief and picks up his pace.

There is still a little slack in the wire when Salvo is hit hard from the side by a gust of wind, the strongest yet. He strains against the force of the blow, dipping his pole precariously low to one side, legs and arms and stomach fighting for equilibrium. A split second later the wire beneath his feet drops at least three inches. Salvo drops with it, aware that the worst is happening.

Because of their massive height, at their summit the twin towers of the World Trade Center can sway as much as four feet in any direction when confronted with a hard wind. Although Salvo had no intention of walking in any wind capable of blowing an entire building four feet to the side, even a slight movement could threaten him. To compensate, the wire has been mounted onto large, stiff springs at either end. The springs are strong enough that it would take a fair amount of force to move them, only barely less than it would take to snap the wire in two.

He knows that the wind that just hit him has caused one of the towers to sway towards the other, slackening the wire. He instantly prepares himself for the wire’s imminent tightening. He bends his knees and drops his arms, lowering his centre of gravity: there is a great danger of his being tossed into the air, which would be very difficult to recover from. Of course, there is also the danger that the wire might snap, but if that happened there’d be nothing Salvo could do. It would be over.

The wire comes taut with a crack that cuts through the air. As much as he tries to hold to the wire, he can’t. He doesn’t panic when he feels the air under his feet. With honed reflexes he straightens his body and feels his upward momentum halt. For the tiniest part of a moment he is motionless, hanging in mid-air six inches above the wire, nearly fourteen hundred feet above the ground. Then he is moving downward and his feet connect with the wire. He bends at the knees, and every part of his body—from his toes up through his ankles, shins, thighs, into his stomach and chest, arms, neck and head—works to buoy his balance and keep him upright. Even his breathing plays a part in his struggle.

All Salvo is aware of is his muscles tensing and relaxing, and the only sound he hears is the coursing of his blood. There is no past, no future, only this fraction of a second, and then this one and then this one. In four seconds Salvo lives more than many people do in a lifetime, with a singular purpose few can comprehend. He does not think; he does not even start to think. His survival depends on reflex, training and luck.

Reflex and training he has. Luck, however, does not seem to be on his side today. Just as he feels his balance returning, just as it seems as though the situation is once again under control, his left foot slips off the wire. He is fast to act, and he manages to recover somewhat but not completely. His right leg is bent impossibly at the knee; his left hangs orphaned in the air.

He freezes, considering his options. Just don’t move, he tells himself. There are things that can be done. He can try and lower himself even more, rest his pole on the wire and lift his left leg. Or he can try to stand, using all his strength to force his right leg to straighten.

Neither option offers any guarantees. If he tries to stand up and doesn’t have the strength, he will topple. If he tries to lower himself onto the wire and a stong gust of wind comes before he is ready, he will be blown off. Better to go to the wire, he decides. At least that way if he fails, he can always grab the wire.

Slowly, with great care, Salvo lowers his body. His right leg feels as though it is being burned with a torch. He can hardly keep his grip on his pole. His jaws are clenched so tightly he can hear his teeth grinding against each other, and his vision begins to blur. The pressure in his arms is relieved as the pole comes to rest on the wire, and as his left knee rises to the wire, the pain in his right leg lessens. For the next few seconds he rests. Do not stay here too long, he thinks, knowing that his right leg will cramp if he doesn’t stand up soon.

He exhales, feels his lungs burn as the air escapes, and breathes in deeply, summoning all his remaining strength. There’s not much left, he knows. Better make good on what’s there. If I can stand up, I’ll be fine, he thinks. Just stand.

And so he stands. It isn’t as hard as he expected; the wire has become solid under his feet, and the wind is gone. High above, the clouds have parted slightly, and a weak beam of sunlight streams down onto the wire in front of him. He confi­dently steps into the light, scanning the horizon. He is so far above the skyline of New York City, it seems small and insignificant from where he stands. Steel and bricks and concrete are reduced to lumps in a child’s sandbox.

Salvo takes a step, then another. The wire feels good, like a familiar warm coat, and he is glad to be where he is. Fear has left him completely. He has faced the worst and has not fallen. That’s good, but don’t get too happy, a voice inside him says. You’re not on the other side yet.

He pushes the euphoria to the back of his mind. There will be plenty of time for celebration later. He won’t think of it again until he’s down in the trailer with Anna, drinking a rye whisky.

He pauses on the wire, centring his balance, adjusting his grip on the balancing pole. He catches a whiff of baby powder but ignores it, stopping memory from invading his focus. He takes a slow step forward, settles himself and lifts his foot to step again. At that precise moment, the wire drops once more. As he follows the wire downward, the wind hits him like a wave, more than he can handle. When the wire springs up he does not go with it. He pitches to the side, his left leg completely off the wire. He feels the wire snap into the back of his right knee and buttock, and his pole twists far to the side. He can hardly hold it and then his fingers release and the pole is no longer in his hands. His hands reach blindly for the wire, and somehow he manages to clutch it and capture the falling pole between his forearms. Whatever happens, he believes he must not lose the pole. His belief is pure instinct; at this point the pole is irrelevant, but Salvo has been walking the wire for so long that reflex overrides logic. He can hold onto the wire or hold onto the pole, but not both.

His body corkscrews further to the side, and now only his right calf is on the wire, now only his ankle. Salvo is off the wire. He is falling. In his arms he still clutches the balancing pole.

He knows instantly that he’s falling, he’s dead. He isn’t shocked and he isn’t afraid. Yet as he falls, he remains focused on one final task. He twists and writhes, hands still tight around his balancing pole, manoeuvring his feet so that they are beneath him, fighting to stay vertical. In the many still photo­graphs that are taken of him as he falls, it appears almost as though he is still on the wire.

He remembers a Romany proverb his father would mutter in times of hardship: Bury me standing. I’ve spent my whole life on my knees. Salvo has a different idea, though, one he has kept in the back of his mind nearly his whole life, one which will be his last earthly thought.

Bury me however you do. I will die standing.

Salvo wiped the dust from his eyes and stepped quickly, trying to keep up with his father. It had been a hot summer, and the fields were as dry as the dusty road they were travelling. It was 1919, less than a year since the war had ended and the Romanian army had claimed this formerly Hungarian province. If four years of war hadn’t been hardship enough, now there was drought. The people of this rural section of Transylvania would have to go without for yet another winter.

Salvo’s father seemed unconcerned at the prospect of things going from bad to worse. Miksa Ursari was a thin, gaunt man, with callused hands and scars on his back from having been beaten as a youth with a piece of barbed wire for stealing a chicken. He had indeed stolen the chicken, and hundreds more like it, and when the owners beat him he did not fight back, nor did he cry out. When they finally stopped, he got up and stole a horse and moved on to the next town. Revenge never even occurred to him. What would be the point? He was a Rom, a gypsy, and for a Rom the best way to get revenge was to live another day.

All throughout Europe the Roma were scattered, some having settled into towns and villages, most remaining wanderers. Since the beginning of the war, more and more people had been displaced, more Roma found themselves refugees from battlefields, starvation and conscription. But now there were non-Roma fleeing as well. These gadje did not readily take to a life of transience. Miksa felt sorry for some of them. He had no idea what it was to live your whole life in one place and then to be cast out. Old women with appled faces and a lifetime of belongings behind them in ox carts—he felt worst for them. There were others, though, spiteful men with lowered eyebrows, whom he did not feel sorry for. Wherever he went there were gadje who would try to lay blame on those who had nothing to do with anything, and nearly always it fell upon the Roma. But while the Roma undoubtedly lied and stole, it was never on such a scale as to do any real harm, and they were certainly not the ones who had brought the war, any more than they were the ones who had lost it. Miksa Ursari knew that there were many people who were looking for an excuse to make scapegoats of the Roma, and he tried hard not to think about what might happen if there were too many of these people and they got too loud.

So if Miksa seemed indifferent towards the drought, it was because he had other preoccupations. Still, he was far less concerned with the things on his mind than others were about the things on theirs. Life had always been hard; why should now be any different? There was no point in becoming obsessed with troubles. Even if life was mostly bad, there were still times that were not. And if you were to spend all your days worrying about the bad parts, you would miss the fleeting moments of good. Whether this was completely true Miksa was not sure, but he had learned that a man had to have a way of looking at things, and at twenty-seven, he thought his was as good as any.

Nine-year-old Salvo tugged at his sleeve. Miksa knew he was walking fast, too fast for the boy to keep up, but he had pressing business waiting and could not afford to slow his pace.

‘Step quickly, Salvo, and I’ll tell you a story,’ he said, knowing that his son would run to keep up before he would turn down the offer of a story.

His father had judged correctly. Salvo picked up his pace, eager for one of his father’s tales. His father told the best stories of any Rom he knew, and the Roma told the best stories of anyone in the whole world. On clear evenings his father would often gather the family around a fire and tell them stories until Salvo had to fight to stay awake, and when he finally did slip into sleep, they continued in his dreams.

Miksa Ursari swallowed, pushing the grit and dust down out of his mouth. He moistened his tongue and scratched at the stubble prickling his neck, racking his brain for a story to tell his son. He knew a lot of stories, but not all of them were good to tell an impressionable boy like Salvo, especially one who listened so intently and took every word as the truth. For a Rom, his son was ridiculously gullible. Miksa worried for the boy’s future.

‘Do you know why there are so many Roma in Hungary?’ he asked the boy.

‘No,’ Salvo answered.

‘Well then, I will tell you.’ The tone of Miksa’s voice shifted from that of normal speech to that of a man who is telling a tale and doesn’t want to be interrupted. If there was one thing Miksa would not tolerate, it was being interrupted while telling a story. It caused him to lose his place and ruined any effect he was trying to create. There would be plenty of time for questions after the story was finished.

‘A long time ago, maybe before my great-great-grand­father was born, there were no Roma in Hungary. They passed through but they never stayed, finding themselves unwelcome. Then it came that one day a husband and wife and their baby were travelling through Hungary. Now, the husband, he was a great thief. He was so great a thief that it was said he could steal the tongue from your mouth while you were talking with him, and you would never even know it. That is what was said.

‘Well, he was a great thief all right, but not so great that he did not get caught. And the Hungarians who caught him took him to prison, leaving the young wife and her baby on their own in this strange land, with no horse and no ox and no mule. The wife walked for many days in the direction the Hungarians had taken her husband, the thief, hoping that if she could find the prison he was in, she could plead for his release.

‘On the third day of her walking she came to a village that was deserted. She was tired and her baby was hungry, so she went into a stable and sat on the straw floor and put the child to her breast to suckle. The wife was very beautiful, having had only this one child, and she had long, thick hair that she wore loose about her shoulders, where it fell down to the end of her back. She knew that it was dangerous for a beautiful young woman to travel alone, but she had a small knife and her husband had shown her how to use it, so she was not worried too much for her safety.

‘She was just falling into sleep when she heard a noise outside, and not wanting her child to cry and alert whatever was there, she put the child to her breast again. There was no noise for a very long time, and the young wife thought that maybe whatever it was had gone away. And then she saw a snake, a huge snake, slither through the door of the stable and right up to her.

‘This snake was enormous, long and wide as the forest’s oldest tree, long and wide and fat, with skin so tough and thick that an arrow could not pierce it. It had such an appetite that it had devoured everything in the village, the people and the livestock and the feed. Only a few lucky souls had managed to escape.

‘Most wives would shriek at the sight of such a beast, but this young woman was a Rom and the wife of a great thief, so she did no such thing. The snake slithered closer still, smelling her milk, wondering if it tasted as good as it smelled. The young wife recognised the look in the snake’s black eyes, and she knew what it was thinking, so she gently took the snake’s head and brought it to her breast, side by side with her own child’s.

‘There the snake suckled, so hard and furiously that the young wife thought it would pull the heart out of her, but she did not pull back. She gently stroked the snake’s head, caressing the scaly hide as if it were her own baby’s soft flesh.

‘After a time the snake fell asleep, and as he slept she reached into her skirts for her knife. She knew that her knife couldn’t cut into the snake’s strong skin, but she wasn’t deterred. She was the wife of a cunning man, and she thought of a plan. Taking great care that the snake did not stir from her breast, she took the knife and she cut off all of her beautiful, long hair. She braided the hair into a good strong rope. At her feet was a fetter used to secure the horses, which had all been eaten by the snake. She tied one end of the rope to the fetter, then took the other end and put it around the snake’s neck, tying the rope into a hangman’s noose.

‘In the morning the snake awoke, and he was hungry, and he drank from the young wife’s milk with an appetite suited to such a voracious creature. So intent was he on his breakfast that he did not feel the rope around his neck. The young wife stroked his head and did not flinch. She allowed the snake to drink its fill, knowing it would grow careless with its hunger satiated. After what was a long time to the young wife, the snake grew full and ceased to suckle.

‘In one quick motion the young wife gathered up her baby, pushed the snake from her breast and darted towards the back wall. The snake lunged at her, fangs bared, but it was not fast enough to catch her, its belly full of milk. When it reached the end of the rope, the hangman’s noose pulled tight around its neck. The beast thrashed wildly to free itself, and the young wife was afraid the rope of her hair would break. But the rope held, and the harder the snake struggled, the tighter the noose became. Slowly the snake began to die, his air choked out of him. At last, his tail grew still and his eyes bulged out, and he was dead.

‘When the gadje who had escaped from the snake found out what had happened, they were grateful, and they immedi­ately found the prison where the young wife’s husband was being held and had him freed. They welcomed the Romany couple and their child into their village and told them they were welcome there always. But the husband, he was a thief, and he didn’t want to steal from people who had treated him and his wife and baby so well, so the family left the village.

‘When other Roma heard how well the people of Hungary had treated the great thief and his young wife, they wanted to go to that village. The thief, not wishing to see anything bad happen to the village, did not say exactly where it was, but still the Roma went to Hungary. And a great many of them are still looking for the village where the thief and his young wife had been treated so well, as it has been said that if that village could be found again, the Roma would cease to wander.’

Miksa continued walking at his brisk pace, and Salvo was half walking, half running to keep up with him. All that could be heard was their feet thumping in the dust and a faint wind rustling in the brittle branches of the trees.

When he was sure that the story was over, Salvo spoke, his breath laboured by the pace his father had set. ‘Did her hair grow back?’

‘What?’ Miksa’s mind had drifted to other matters.

‘The young wife. Did her hair grow back?’

‘Oh, yes. It grew back longer and thicker and darker than ever, and she was even more beautiful than before.’

‘What about the baby?’

‘He grew up to be a great thief, like his father.’

‘Did he ever go back to the village?’

‘No. Like his father, he was grateful to the people of the village and didn’t want to steal from them. Besides, he was only a baby when he had been there, and he didn’t know where the village was.’

Salvo thought about this for a moment. He was sure that, as a baby, he had been places he could no longer remember. He had been many places, even as far as his aunt and uncle’s house in Budapest, which he could recall, but also into eastern Romania and Bulgaria, which he could not. So it made sense.

‘Do you know where the village is?’

Miksa looked at the boy. Why did he have to take every­thing so literally? ‘No, I don’t.’

‘It isn’t where we live?’

‘No,’ Miksa said. ‘It isn’t.’

They continued down the road, past a ditch that had a dead goat half sticking out of it, its rotting legs grotesquely splayed.

‘What about the snake?’

‘It was dead. It was no more.’

‘Were there any more snakes like that?’

‘I don’t think so. If there were, they probably all got killed in the war.’

Salvo was relieved. He did not like the thought of such a beast.

Salvo was the second oldest of the three living children in his family; his older brother, András, was eleven years old and very strong for his age, able to lift a large wash basin full of water. There was also a baby girl, Etel. There would have been six children, but three had died when they were very small. Salvo had not known them at all, really, so he hadn’t been saddened by their deaths, but he heard the keening of his mother at night and he was sad for her. He also heard words like influenza and diphtheria, and he wondered if he too would die. He kept himself awake, afraid that when he woke up he would be dead, but he always went to sleep and he always woke up very much alive, so lately he worried less.

Before the war had started, Salvo’s family had owned a tame bear. Their family name, Ursari, meant ‘bear’ in Romany, and the family had made a living from the animal, who could do several tricks and was very smart. The bear’s name had been Bella, which someone told them meant ‘good’ in Italian. Bella Ursari the Bear, or ‘Good Bear the Bear’, supported Salvo’s family for seven years, but when the war started there was not enough food, and even though he ate better than anyone else, Good Bear the Bear got sick and, after a while, he was dead. Salvo had not seen his father cry when his younger sisters and brother died, but when Good Bear the Bear finally died, his father had buried his face in the creature’s fur and cried like a young widow at her own husband’s funeral.

For a long time after that Salvo’s father refused to go out. He sat cross-legged on the floor and drank strong coffee and smoked cheap cigarettes, eating little, rarely sleeping, and never, ever telling stories. Then, in the spring, Salvo’s mother’s stomach began to swell, and three days before the war ended she gave birth to a girl.

After that Salvo’s father seemed to forget about Good Bear the Bear and set to work providing for his family. He knew how to work as a blacksmith, and he made a little money shoeing horses and doing the odd repair job. The war had brought a shortage of skilled labour, but as more men returned from military service there was less demand for his work. Most people would rather go to a Hungarian smith or a Romanian smith than a Romany smith, even if the Rom did a much better job. The only jobs Salvo’s father got lately were those that were either too difficult or too dangerous for anyone else.

The road curved to the left, and as father and son rounded the corner, a church came into view. It was still half a mile away, but its steeple was tremendously high, so high as to be seen from a long way off. It was a very old church, at least four hundred years old—remarkable given the amount of fighting this land had seen in that time and the fact that the church was made out of wood. Rarely did a wooden structure see such an age in a place where people were prone to setting torches to buildings during times of upheaval.

The church was not particularly large, but it did not have to be. There had never been more than six or seven hundred people living in the vicinity, and of that number perhaps only two people in five were regular Catholic churchgoers. The main part of the building was two storeys high, with a steeply sloped roof designed to withstand the large amount of rain that usually fell there. Its white paint had long ago peeled away. Though the church was well maintained by the new priest and his helpers, there was simply no paint to be had.

On the west side of the church, directly above the entrance, was the steeple Salvo had seen from half a mile down the road. It stretched from the roof up towards the sky for eighty feet— square for the first fifty, then tapered for the last thirty and peaked with a flattened knob less than four inches across. What was most remarkable about the steeple, however, was the lack of a cross upon its summit.

The church did possess a cross for the steeple, the cross itself perhaps more valuable and remarkable than the actual church. It was said to be over nine hundred years old, made from an iron that had been forged in Rome and sent from a pope to celebrate the coronation of Saint Stephen, the king who had brought Christianity to Hungary. The cross was on its way to Budapest when the knight sent to accompany it had become ill and died, as luck would have it, in this very village. Since then it had consistently graced the steeples of a succession of churches built on this spot.

When the war came the old priest was worried that the church might be burned, and he had the cross taken down. Exactly how he had done it no one knew; he had died soon after. There had been a succession of temporary priests, but none of them much cared for the place, and they had left one by one. It wasn’t until a year ago that a new priest had finally come and stayed. He did not mind this place so much, he said, but he did not like that the cross was not upon the steeple.

While it was decided that the cross should be restored to its proper place, no one knew how it could be done. Various people from the church had tried, but none had even succeeded in climbing the steeple, let alone in getting the hundred-pound cross to the top. Finally the priest had put up a small reward for anyone who could figure out a way to raise the cross. Knowing the inventiveness of the Roma, he made sure that the news of the reward would reach them, and that is how Miksa heard of the problem.