Dark and Deepest Red(9)
Emil stared at his father. “That’s wonderful.”
“How are you my son? You have no appreciation for history.”
“History.” Emil shrugged off his backpack. “As in, it already happened. There’s only so far you can get if you’re always looking back.”
“Thanks a lot,” his father said.
Emil sighed. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
His parents, both history professors, had a marriage that seemed half-built on finding the same things interesting. They’d met during a conference panel, and as far as Emil could tell, that was the academia equivalent of a fairy tale.
“I just meant it’s what you and Maman love,” Emil said. “And you’re good at it. But I don’t, and I’m not.”
His father gave a smile that was equal parts fond and wry. It always made him look like a grandfather, older than his sprinklings of gray hair warranted. “Yes, yes, you and your chemicals.”
Emil breathed out. You and your chemicals. At least they were even. Emil’s father had about as much interest in Emil’s favorite subjects as Emil had in his. His father’s desk perpetually held old records, two-tone pictures, age-yellowed papers kept in plastic sheets, wood-cut prints of old churches. Some were pages fallen out of long-misplaced family Bibles, the names in ornate, back-slanted script. Some were copies his mother had made on her last trip to le Bas-Rhin. Tourists went to France for Paris and Nice. His mother went for les Archives Départementales, with its centuries-old documents in barely legible Middle French and High German.
“You know.” His father’s eyes drifted toward the floor. “You can’t go where you want to go without knowing where you’ve been.”
Emil’s back tensed.
The burning of ancestors’ vardos. Words stricken from their vocabulary. Being forced from villages, or fleeing in the dark fold of midnight, because there was so often a relative who could feel the threat coming before anyone else, like smelling snow in the air. Fighting back with iron shards and pipes and whatever there was to be found when there was no warning, and there were the old and the small to protect.
What he’d put up with in Briar Meadow—the ignorant questions, the word gypsy said in a way that felt like it was sticking to his skin, the pointed looks whenever something went missing—it was so small compared to what those before him had endured. But that made him more, not less, ashamed of it. He couldn’t help thinking of it as some kind of failing on his part.
Outside of this house, he couldn’t be who he was. He’d known that since the day his parents got that call home. But the more he knew about his family, the harder it was to leave his Romanipen behind every morning.
“I know where we’ve been,” Emil said. He started up the stairs, saying, more to himself than his father, “and I kind of wish I didn’t.”
Strasbourg, 1518
At daybreak, Lala burns the wooden box, turning to ash the last of her parents’ belongings.
She watches the wood crumble, the shade of the oak trees dulling the flames’ gold. She offers a prayer of thanks to Sara la Kali, She who watches over Lala and Tante and all like them.
Once the embers have gone as dark as her hair, Lala draws away from the wattle fence.
Alifair is up in the oak trees. He never flinches, not even when wasps crawl along his wrists.
He slips a hand between their buzzing clouds to reach the darkest oak galls. They whir around him but never sting, even as he steals the growths they have laid their eggs inside.
Ever since the day Alifair first appeared in their crab apple tree, this has seemed as much a kind of magic as Tante knowing how long to keep linen in the woad dye. The wasps do not mind him, for some reason as unknown as where he came from. Both his French and his German carry a slight accent, like two kinds of grain mixing in a sieve, so no one can guess which side of the Zorn or the Rhein he was born on.
When she catches his eye, they share a nod, a signal they know as well as each other’s hands.
Within minutes, he is down from the tree, she has set aside the bay in her apron, and they meet behind the cellar door.
Lala pulls him to the stone wall. He throws his hands to it, bracing as she presses her palms into his back. His mouth tastes like the lovage he chews after each meal, like parsley but sweeter.
Lala has never asked him whether that first kiss was because they had both gotten older, or because he had grown less skittish about his own body, a body that once tethered him to the girl’s name he was given when he was born.
Now Lala knows not only the facts of his body but the landscape of it. She knows where there is more and less of him. She knows where he is both muscled and soft, full-hipped and full-chested, strong in the shoulders and back. The strips of binding cloth beneath his shirt give him the appearance of a heavier man, rather than one laden with a girl’s name at birth.
Lala hears footsteps coming in from the lane, and goes still.
“I should go,” Lala says, almost moaning it, eyes still shut.
“Later,” he whispers, the word coming as a breath against her neck.
Lala squints from the cellar into the light, looking for a stout form—Geruscha—and a second figure with a tight-woven bun, the seldom-talking Henne.
For months, Lala held her breath over the two of them, fearful that any day the magistrate’s men would come to Tante’s door on the report of these two girls. But their efforts at friendship have only persisted, despite the frosted politeness Lala offers them (cold, so as not to encourage them, but cordial, so as not to offend these two girls who saw her with the woman in the dikhle).