Burning (3 page)

We had been parked in the godforsaken desert for twenty-four hours, and already I thought I would most likely die here.

It was unthinkably hot. Probably it wasn’t so bad for the men; they came and went as they pleased, driving into the little town we’d passed for supplies and distraction, but for the women—my mother, my sisters, and me—the heat was oppressive and crushing.

The first day had been the worst. Certainly it was a clever idea; my sister Violeta’s husband, Marko, is a clever man. He had heard about the festival the
gazhè
call Burning Man and had learned that it took place not far from Reno, where we travel each year to purchase inventory for our family’s used car business.

Marko had explained to my father, who had heard nothing of this “Burning Man,” about the kind of
gazhè
who would attend—how fifty
thousand
of them would make their way up this two-lane highway in the desert on their
way to a spiritual festival, and how certainly a large number of them would be interested in stopping to have their fortunes told.

Marko was eager that my father should take his advice, and eager that that advice should prove to be solid. He wanted very much to please his new father-in-law, to prove his cleverness.

Because the territory did not already belong to any of the other Roma
kumpànya
, we would be stepping on no one’s toes if we left a few days early and earned some extra cash before heading into Reno. We would have to travel several hundred miles out of our way, but if Marko was correct and the
gazhè
were willing to pay, we would be more than adequately compensated for our efforts.

It sounded like a fine idea, as we drove out of perpetually rainy Portland, where we made our home. It sounded like a good idea still as we drove south through the length of Oregon. But now, I felt that no amount of money could make up for the discomfort of living for a week in the mouth of hell.

The river of cars on the highway looked almost like a hallucination brought on by the heat; there was no logical explanation for why so many would want to come here, to this flat, barren land, in the middle of the hottest season.

But Marko was right, and my father was pleased. Many of the drivers, upon seeing our signs, pulled to the side of the road and waited in a line in the heat to have their fortunes told.

Most wanted to hear the same thing—that they would
find love, that they would be transformed, that freedom and joy awaited them just up the road.

We took turns sitting in a tent behind our camp, seeing customers one after the other. Some preferred the cards; others wanted their palms read. It made no difference to me.

The heat was the worst, I suspect, for Violeta. Heavy now in the seventh month of her first pregnancy, the heat had to feel like an even greater punishment to her than it did to me. She is better than I am, though; she complained little.

A great change had come over her since her marriage. Before she was married last year to her Marko, she was slow always with her work and often found a reason to pass it off to me.

Now it seemed she took particular joy in washing the laundry and preparing the evening meal. She wore a smile on her face. Perhaps it was because now the clothes she washed, the foods she prepared, were her husband’s.

Maybe too she was particularly happy because unlike most newly wedded Gypsy brides, she was not at the moment under the thumb of her husband’s mother. Having paid a bride price of close to twelve thousand dollars for her, naturally Marko’s parents were not entirely pleased that Violeta and Marko were traveling with my father’s
vìtsa
rather than theirs.

Usually a young couple stayed with the groom’s parents at least until several children had been born, and for the first few months of their marriage Violeta and Marko had done just that. But Violeta had a temper, and everyone knew that Marko’s mother, Clara Nicholas, did, too.

It wasn’t very long before the household had been rearranged and my little sister Anelie and I had been forced to give up our room to Violeta and her groom. Now we slept on the hide-a-bed in the living room, as sharing a room with our brothers would have been unacceptable according to our customs. This was almost a blessing, since Alek was close on thirteen now and bossy, and little Stefan was still terribly spoiled even though he was now almost three and a half, and he had learned from Alek the fine art of acting like a little prince. At least in the living room, Anelie and I could whisper to one another at night.

It was even worse out here in the desert. Here Violeta and Marko traveled with their own little tent, but the family’s motor home was far too small to sleep the rest of us. Anelie and I gave up the bunk beds to the boys and slept in the fortune-telling tent, rolling out our mats each night after the final customer had left.

The only town within walking distance—or driving distance, for that matter—lay about three miles behind us. I had been surprised when I’d seen the name of it: Gypsum, Nevada.

I wondered, Might it be a good omen, or bad, that the nearest point of civilization other than the temporary city the crazy
gazhè
had erected on the playa had a name so similar to that of my people?

Gypsum—Gypsy. Of course, among ourselves, most of my people preferred to be called Roma, or Romani. Even more often, we preferred not to be called anything at all, but to blend in. We did not correct teachers in our grammar school
when they assumed we were Italian or Mexican; we did not offer our cultural story to the neighborhood children who shared our street but were never invited into our homes.

There was a simple reason for this: most people hate us and distrust us, the Gypsies. Across the world this is true. For some reason most
gazhè
do not know—or perhaps it is more to the point that they do not
care
—about my people’s oppression.

In the years I attended public school, up until I was eleven, my real education, the history of my people, I learned only from my family. Inside the walls of the school I never heard a teacher speak of the five hundred years the Roma had spent enslaved throughout much of Europe. No one taught the children in my classroom about Hitler’s treatment of my people, how a quarter of a million Gypsies had perished at the hands of his Nazis.

One of my strongest school memories came from my first-grade year. The teacher was pretty, with blond curls. She was unmarried even though she was at least twenty-five or twenty-six. She wore pants like a man but wore a lovely floral perfume as well.

Every day after lunch she would read to us from a book of fairy tales and we children would sit in a semicircle at her feet like obedient puppies. Her name was Miss Cameron. I adored her.

One day she read to us a story titled “The Princess and the Gypsy.” I had been so excited to hear it—a story about a Gypsy princess! Perhaps it would be like the stories my mother told us at night.

But the story began at the bedside of the little princess, who looked nothing like any Gypsy I had ever known. Her hair was flaxen, her eyes sky blue.

And the Gypsy was a bent old crone just like the evil queen who gives Snow White the poison apple.

In Miss Cameron’s story, the Gypsy stole the princess from her cradle and whisked her away to a drafty, leaky old caravan, where she raised her as her own, training her to pick pockets. The climax of the story occurs when the Gypsy sends the little child into a crowd to steal, but rather than taking coins from pockets as she’s been taught to do, she puts flowers in them instead. The king and queen hear about this marvelous child, take one look at her, and realize she is their long-lost daughter. The Gypsy crone, of course, is hauled off to some uncertain—but certainly terrible—fate, never to be heard from again.

The happy queen pictured at the end of the story, reunited with her little princess, looked just like Miss Cameron. The girl in her arms looked nothing like me.

I think that was the day I truly began to understand the difference between
us
—my people—and
them
—the
gazhè
we walked among. It was then that I began to hide.

But there were times when it was to our benefit to play the part the
gazhè
expected of us. This week, for example—lines of people would not be waiting to have their palms read by Italians or Mexicans. They wanted Gypsies, the real thing.

With us they got them. The White family—and the
Nicholas clan, too, Marko’s people—both of our families could trace their roots back many generations, to Eastern Europe.

We knew when to blend in, chameleon-like, and we knew when it paid to embrace the stereotype. So today I was dressed the way I should be to impress the
gazhè
: I wore a full skirt with many pockets that came in handy, strappy sandals, and a low-cut white blouse that gapped open when I leaned forward, and my hair, despite the terrible heat, was unbraided and loose.

My hair. Thick, dark waves of it tumbled across my shoulders, down my back, pulling on my scalp, heavy and hot, like a cape I wished I could shed.

I would have liked at least to pull it back into a twist, but each time I tried Violeta pulled it free, admonishing me, “The
gazhè
like to see you with your hair loose. And,” she added slyly, “Romeo likes to see it down, too.”

Romeo Nicholas—Marko’s younger brother, just weeks older than I, and my fiancé. He was traveling with us, too, in the hope that he would learn from my father about buying cars. It had been decided between his father and mine that next month, when I became of legal marriageable age, he and I would wed.

My mother was proud that the bride price I had fetched was fifteen thousand dollars. That was more than any other Gypsy girl in our circle of relatives and friends.

I could not help but feel pride, also, though as the wedding date drew nearer, this pride had become tempered with
another sensation, one I did not like to name. The bride price is compensation paid to the bride’s family for the loss of her future earning power. At telling fortunes, I was fantastic. The Nicholas family hoped that I would bring a lot of money to their
vìtsa
.

We would share with them, of course, the money Violeta was earning on this little side trip into the desert. And being with her, at least, made me happy. Even in the middle of the desert, Violeta and Anelie were my best friends.

I would feel very sorry for any girl who did not have a sister. I was fortunate to have two—one older, one younger—and I was the bridge between them. I had watched Violeta ahead of me become a woman, become a bride and a wife, and also I had the privilege of guiding Anelie toward womanhood. She was eleven and still just a child, and what pleasure it gave me to watch her giggle and play with the other children.

She did not have much longer to enjoy this freedom. I could tell by the slightest beginning swell of her nipples, visible only when she was undressed, that her womanhood was almost upon her.

And then everything would change.

I sighed and stood up from my place in the shade cast by the tent we’d erected. Hands on the small of my back, I leaned first one way and then the other, enjoying the pleasant sensation of stretching my body.

Mother and Anelie were in the tent with a client. Anelie would be sitting quietly in a corner, unobtrusively watching and learning as I had done for years. Violeta was in the motor
home with Stefan trying to get him to eat something—he was irritable because of the heat, as we all were.

Father, Marko, Romeo, and Alek had been gone for close to an hour. Soon they would return with food, and I would begin to prepare dinner.

Romeo, if he was as similar in behavior to Marko as he was in looks, would make a fine husband. And, Violeta liked to tell me, giggling, that I should hope Romeo resembled his brother when it came to lovemaking as well.

I did not want to think about this—not now, not yet. So I reached into the folds of my skirt and extracted my phone.

My family, like all Gypsy families, has very strict rules about what women can and cannot do. Unmarried girls cannot go out unchaperoned. Women cannot have sex outside of marriage. Women must do all the housework, for it is women’s work. A woman must not sleep with others when she has her monthly blood, for during this time she is unclean. In very traditional families, like mine, a woman cannot show her legs, but she may show her chest, for the body from the waist up is clean, from the waist down, unclean.

But there are other areas where the rules are less clear. Probably because the rules were made before modern inventions like television, radio, movies, and my favorite possession, my phone, complete with a screen and Internet connectivity.

We can listen to music, we can read what we like, we can interact with others through Facebook, email, and texting—though our parents assume that the people with whom we are speaking are our people.

My parents never told me I
could not
have an email account, or that I
could not
download American books. Of course, it was very likely they didn’t know that this was even a possibility. But parents do not need to know everything.

At home in Portland I was rarely truly alone—our house was always full of cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends stopping in to confer with my father, to bring something to my mother. And anyone who entered had to be offered food. So I was often busy preparing for and serving and cleaning up after the guests.

And with only a thin wall separating my bed on the couch from the room where Violeta and her husband nightly renewed their love, even at night I felt not alone.

Perhaps that was another good thing about this trip into the desert. Here there was space—so much of it. I could spread my arms wide and spin and spin and never bump into anyone or anything—if only it wasn’t too hot to move. I could crouch in the shadow of the tent and read
The Catcher in the Rye
on the tiny screen.

What a strange boy, that Holden Caulfield. I did not understand him. He had a sister and a brother; that was something to be happy about, even if death had claimed his other brother. And he had parents who seemed to love him. But his family was disjointed like so many
gazhikanò
families are. Perhaps that was his problem.