Ascension (13 page)

Though not at all handsome, Tomas Skosa was not without charm. He was quick to discern between a woman who saw him as a provider and someone who saw him for what he was but, being self-destructive, wanted him anyway. Few saw him as he really was. Not in the beginning, at least. Most saw a man who loved to dance, a man who could be funny one moment and serious the next, a man who spent his money freely, who appeared to listen when others spoke. They believed in all these things because they were true. But there were other things about Tomas Skosa that they didn’t know and would like to find out.

He pulled on his pants and stood, his shift in weight waking the sleeping girl. She looked at him, bleary-eyed and disoriented. Then, seeming to remember where she was, she pulled up the bedclothes to cover her nakedness, shame in her face.

Tomas smiled; this girl had plenty of latitude left in her.

Salvo waited at the door. He double-checked the address, confirming he was at the correct place. A rustling came from the door, which opened tentatively.

“Balancing boy. Are you early?” Tomas ushered him inside.

The rooming house was reflective of a poor quality of tenant. Someone had kicked a hole in the plaster at the base of the stairs, from the looks of it quite a while ago, and the walls were streaked with stains and handprints. He followed Tomas up the stairs to the second floor and into a room at the back of the building. The room was cluttered with bottles and clothes and smelled of stale cigarettes and dirt. There was a chair and a small table in one
corner, a bed in another. A coal burner stood beneath the window that overlooked an alley. Salvo was startled to see a girl, two or three years younger than him, sitting on the bed, her legs drawn up and arms laced tightly around them, her whole body wrapped in a blanket.

Tomas sat in the chair, motioning for him to sit on the bed. Salvo declined, remaining standing. “You have a job for me?” he asked.

“That depends. What was your name?”

“Salvo Ursari.”

“Yes. I am Tomas Skosa. You have heard of me?”

Tomas seemed irked when Salvo replied that he had not. He shook his head and went to the window. It opened with ease. Tomas turned his back, unbuttoned his pants and pissed out the window. “Introduce yourself to the girl,” he said.

Salvo turned to the girl, who was visibly shocked by Tomas’s actions. “I’m Salvo,” he said.

She looked at him but did not respond.

“Tell him your name, girl,” Tomas said without moving.

The girl swallowed. “Margit.” She flinched at the sound of her own name.

Tomas buttoned up his pants and motioned Salvo to the window. It faced a narrow alley, affording a view of the windowless back of another building, twenty-five feet away. A thin wire stretched from directly below Tomas’s second-storey window to the other building, anchored by a hook at each end. Below, the alley was mud and trash.

“Can you walk it?” Tomas asked.

“Walk what?”

“The wire. If you can walk the wire, I may have a job for you. If not, you can go.”

Salvo hesitated. “I don’t know. I can learn.”

Tomas sighed. “Anyone can learn. I will give you one afternoon. If at the end I think you could be of use to me, you will have yourself a job. Otherwise …” His voice trailed off.

Salvo considered this proposition for a moment. “I can do it.” An ongoing association with this man did not appeal to him, but the wire did. Since the steeple, since he had seen the wire walkers in the park, he had felt a nagging inside him that now declared itself again. “I will do it.”

Tomas looked at him, assessing him, and nodded. “Take off your shoes.” He turned his attention to the girl. He reached into his pocket and threw a coin onto the bed. “We will need food. And a bottle of wine. Be quick about it.”

Margit hesitated, looking at her clothes, which lay in a heap at the opposite end of the room. “My clothes,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

“What about them? I’ve seen what you have already, girl.” Tomas’s eyes darted sideways to Salvo, who looked down at his feet. He heard Margit gasp as Tomas yanked the blanket from her grasp. Salvo kept staring at his feet as the girl sat stunned, then bolted across the room, dressing as hastily as possible. When the door shut behind her, he bent down and removed his shoes. Salvo hoped she would not return.

Tomas turned his attention to Salvo. “Your balance is good. That will help you. But the wire is not about balance.” He put a hand on Salvo’s shoulder. “There are two things out there: there’s you, and there’s the wire. If you let anything else exist, it’s over. Out you go.” His hand thrust Salvo roughly towards the open window.

Gingerly, Salvo stepped out the window and placed one foot on the wire. It was cold and felt as though it was cutting into his skin. “Position the wire between your biggest and second toe. Let
it run down the centre of your foot. Now the other foot. Knees bent. Upper body straight. Now stand. Still.”

Salvo stood as still as possible on the wire. The ground was fifteen feet below. If he fell it would hurt, but he would probably not be seriously injured.

“Immobility,” Tomas continued, “is what you strive for, but immobility is impossible. You could not move your arms. You could not move your legs. Even if you could fix your eyes on one point and not blink, you would still see. And your blood would still flow, and your heart would still pound in your ears. Yet you must always
try
for immobility. The wire must have a time of its own, so that each movement of your body is as natural and unconscious as breathing, so that there is as little difference between mobility and immobility as possible. First you will learn this lesson. Then you will walk.”

Tomas slammed the window shut, leaving Salvo standing alone on the wire. How long he stood he had no idea. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours. Eventually, though, he felt he could stand no longer. His legs ached and his feet felt as though they were being sliced in half. His knees buckled and he fell to the ground. He was shaken but unhurt. The window above hadn’t opened, and there was no way to get back up on the wire.

He walked around to the front of the rooming house, opened the unlocked door, went up the stairs and down the hall. He knocked on Tomas’s door. There was no answer. He opened the door and peered in.

Tomas leapt forward and slammed his fist into the side of Salvo’s head. Salvo dropped to the floor, where he was met by a kick to the stomach. At first all he felt was blinding pain. Gradually the pain began to recede to a dull throb, and he once again became aware of his surroundings. Tomas pulled him to his feet.

“If you ever let yourself fall again, I will make that seem like a handshake,” he said. “You stay on the wire no matter how tired you get. If you fall, you grab the wire. You crawl to the window, and you get back on the wire. But you never give up and seek ground. Understand?”

Salvo nodded, but his jaw was set and his face was hot.

Tomas pushed him to the window and opened it. “Out you go.”

As he stepped out the window he saw Margit sitting in the corner of the room. She watched him with wide eyes, her hands clutching a piece of bread. He wished she hadn’t come back. He couldn’t know that she had not gone straight to the store, that upon leaving the rooming house she’d run fast in no particular direction, desiring only to be away from there. He couldn’t know that she had stopped, heaving for breath, and turned back in the direction she had come, stopping to buy food and wine for Tomas. He didn’t understand the way Tomas did that she had nowhere else to go, and that the streets were for her a very different place than they were for Salvo.

As it had before, the wire stung his feet. Before sliding the window shut, Tomas offered one last piece of advice. “Make the wire yours.”

Salvo again stood until he thought he could stand no more. He wanted to give up, to drop to the ground, but he wouldn’t allow himself. He would neither fail nor give Tomas the satisfaction of seeing him fail. He forced himself to stay still.

Time stopped. His body ached, muscles strained past caring. He concentrated on immobility, on remaining motionless, on the stillness of his movements. Slowly, the wire began to reach into him. It snaked its way up his shins, through his calves, up his spine. It pierced his brain and was gone.

Salvo was warm. He saw the faces of his father and mother, his brother, András, and his dead sisters. He saw his Uncle László and Aunt Esa, his crippled cousin, the girl Margit and the new priest and the villagers. He saw everyone he had ever known and everything he had ever seen. Then, it all vanished. It was night, he was in a freezing alley on a wire, standing above mud and garbage and the piss of a man he knew he hated but needed, and he was untroubled. None of it mattered.

The window opened.

“Come inside,” Tomas said. “I have a job for you.”

Despite the welcoming nature of the Mór Roma, after five years András still didn’t feel as though he was one of them. There was something about them that he didn’t share, and he could tell that they knew it as acutely as he did, even if no one could quite put their finger on what it was.

András remembered his father’s stories well, and he often thought that they were far better than Vedel’s, but he never said as much. His father would tell his stories no more, so there was no point in wishing to hear them, and anyway, one does not frown in the face of hospitality.

There was one story Vedel told that András initially liked. It was a favourite with many, and often it was told by others when Vedel wasn’t in the mood. They never got it right, András thought, and he hardly ever listened unless Vedel was the one telling it.

“If this is not true, then it is a lie. Troka, you pay attention to this,” he would say, and everyone would laugh at Troka Mór, a boy a little older than Salvo whose pathetic attempt at a beard was much maligned.

“There were two men, one a Rom and the other a
gadjo. They
were friends, not the sort who would die to protect each other, but the sort who would compete over anything, like jealous brothers. But they did like each other, that much for sure.

“The
gadjo
had a beard, a very fine beard, thick and long, and the Rom grew no beard at all.” At this point Vedel would usually look pointedly at Troka, and many would laugh.

“The Rom became jealous of his friend’s beard. ‘Friend,’ he said, ‘that is a very beautiful beard you have. How would you like to sell it to me?’

“The bearded man gave this some thought, and he decided it was not a bad idea. They agreed upon a price, but the Rom had a condition. ‘I will buy your beard, but it has to stay on your face.’

“The price was good, so the
gadjo
accepted this condition, and a sale was made. Every day the clean-shaven Rom would come and see his friend, and he would take care of his beard. He trimmed it well and washed it in expensive lotions. Often he would bring people by to admire the beard, not caring if the man whose face the beard was on was busy or not.

“He would cut it into a point, or put a hole into the middle of it, or pour scented oils on it. If his friend protested, he’d say, ‘What’s mine is mine, friend. You sold me this beard. The law is on my side.’ And he was none too gentle, either, when tending the beard, often pulling it and tugging it, sending his friend to tears.

“Eventually, the man whose face the beard was attached to had had enough. ‘Please, friend, sell me back my beard. I’ll pay whatever you ask.’ The Rom refused. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m very happy with this beard. It’s very soft and thick, and it’s strong.’ He yanked on the beard to show his point, and the poor man yelped. ‘I’ll give you any price you ask. Just let my beard alone.’ ‘Sorry, friend,’ the Rom replied, ‘but it’s not your beard.’

“Finally, after many weeks, the Rom agreed to sell back the beard, and he made a good profit on the sale. The
gadjo
went straight to the barber and had his beard shaved off, and he never grew it back as long as he lived.”

András liked this story for the same reason the others did; he enjoyed hearing of a
gadjo
being tricked. What he did not understand, however, was why the
gadjo
didn’t beat the living blood out of the Rom for abusing his beard so. The more András thought about it, the more he was convinced that this was in fact what the
gadjo
, or for that matter, any reasonable man, would do. That was the problem with so many of Vedel’s stories: in many of them the
gadje
were stupid and easily tricked, the reality of the likelihood of violence ignored. He’d seen for himself that it took quite a bit of work to trick the
gadje
, and that they were more than willing to inflict physical harm on the Roma who had duped them.

Most Roma probably already knew that. But what András also realized—after wondering why the bearded man had tolerated such behaviour—was that every time they pulled one over on the
gadje
, the
gadje
hated them even more. As long as they kept it up,
gadje
would always hate Roma. He had little remorse for this fact, and didn’t wish to change it, but he saw it nonetheless.