The Fall of Light (30 page)

During those weeks they did not move on. Now their leader, Fin-bar imagined he must announce to them a destination, but he
himself had no clear idea of one. Not being of gypsy blood, he did not understand that such was not required of him; the gypsies
never journeyed toward an end, for motion was an end in itself Nonetheless, wrongly believing that this was needed to validate
his leadership, Fin-bar Foley sought to give it to them. So, one dawn, he rose from beneath the blanket where Cait the mer-girl
was grown large with his twin daughters and he walked out where the embers of the fire smoked and called the gypsies to rise
and move on. They did so, coming to life in the grey light and tackling up new horses for the way ahead. When they were ready,
Finbar looked along the line of them and felt a surge of pride as if he were some valiant captain trooping into battle. He
sat beside Cait in the front caravan and snapped the reins and drove the line of caravans down across that country that lay
to the south of the Maritime Alps. Nor by then was Cait the only pregnant woman among them, for in the weeks that followed,
one by one of all of those within the perimeters of childbearing years announced themselves to be expecting, as well as two
prune-faced women who boasted they were a youthful sixty. Finbar did not announce then that he would bring them to Bohemia,
or make speeches on the notion of a homeland, though these loomed in his mind. Indeed, he did not know where Bohemia was but
had like others before him fallen upon the idea of its being a spiritual home for gypsies and did not for one moment imagine
that he could be wrong. Still, he kept the destination secret. He told the gypsies only that he would bring them to a place
where they belonged, and where the weathers would be clement and the people welcome them like cousins lost.

That this was a fantasy of his own making, and born out of the
need to believe such a place would exist for his own children, did not stop him from believing in it. Nor did he realize how
his hopes fell into the selfsame shapes as those once dreamed by his father.

So, travelling with care for the pregnant, and with such slow indolence that measurement of progress was impossible, the gypsies
moved through Liguria like an oil of olives. They arrived at the banks of the river Po and followed along them and bargained
and traded with villagers there and heard tales of wars and battles and the affairs of a world in which they were no more
than shadows. One of the older women who was expecting her fourteenth child had a vision there of yellow birds flying in her
stomach. A night later three more of the women had the same dream and two nights later six more. They were uncertain of its
provenance, but to set at ease their wives and to make real the thing imagined, their husbands went and returned with a dozen
canaries in wicker cages. The visions vanished then and the canaries hung outside the front hoop of the caravans and rocked
there on perches and sang sometimes to the swaying of those roads. It was discovered the birds’ humour foretold the weather;
how they sang or perched or flew predicted the rains or wind to come, and the men, learning of this, were pleased to pretend
they had known all along and not bargained for the birds merely to placate their women.

Before it reached the sea, the gypsies left the Po and turned northward around the Gulf of Venice. It was the summer of that
year. The canaries sang sweetest and the sun shone and the swollen women took to lying in the grass and lifting their shirts
and smocks and exposing to the warmth the pale orbs of their future progeny. They said the sun would give them sons. Leaving
them so, Finbar sailed to the fabled city that was a thousand islands, and there in the shop of old Fabrizio Benardi he saw
his first map of the known world. He could not believe it. He unfurled it across four tabletops and moved his palms outward
upon it like two flat-bottomed boats travelling in opposite directions and revealing places of which he had never heard. Old
Benardi, who himself had never left Venice, had purchased the map from a navigator who had arrived from the Indies. He had
been assured the map was an authentic and accurate rendering even to the point of those islets previously considered too minor
to merit inclusion. On the map, Fin-bar studied the place where they were, and where he imagined Bohernia
to be. It was not so very far away. His sons could be born there, he thought at once, and the sons and daughters of all those
in the caravans. It would be a glorious new beginning. He lifted his hands and the world rolled closed. He spun around in
the dust that flew upward off all the handmade papers and scrolls of that shop and brought his face close to Benardi’s. Finbar
Foley was still an impressive figure, the breadth of his chest, the thickness of his eyebrows, his firm chin and fiery stare
all lent him the air of one not to be denied. He told the Venetian he had to have the world, and he offered him gold coins
he did not possess for it. The old man agreed the sale, and that afternoon Finbar Foley stole the coins at knifepoint from
a Jew he followed from the Rialto. He returned to Benardi’s in haste and later took the map back to the gypsies, along with
several bottles of ink, some sheets of yellowish paper, and a half dozen masks that Fabrizio Benardi thrust toward him when
he caught the scent of violent desperation burning the dust. That evening the gypsy men gathered to look at the map but to
Finbar’s surprise were only briefly interested in it. They could not match the shape of the lines drawn on the paper with
the endless terrain they had traversed back and forth in their lifetimes. It was no more like the world than the sketch of
a man was like a man. Though Finbar could not see it, it made less of the gypsies’ one great wealth, their intimate and unrivalled
knowledge of all the richly varied landscapes that existed. For they alone knew the world.

Despite their indifference, later that night Finbar showed the map to Cait with all the excitement of a New World discoverer.
He fingered her their route through the mountains, and pointed the way ahead, and was too rapt in his own fervour to notice
her brown eyes turning longingly back to fix on that western island where they had begun.

When they left there, the caravans and wagons creaked under the weight of the pregnancies. They passed northward through lands
governed by Hapsburgs and met old peasants on the roadside who asked them what the world was like to the south. There were
some among them who remembered the armies of Napoleon and when those same places they stood in had been renamed the Illyrian
provinces. And they told of how the maps of that country had been drawn and redrawn many times and the people lived on hungry
among the linden trees no matter who their sovereign. And the gypsies agreed and understood
this and took their time there and shared what they had and sang songs in the night ancient and sorrowful.

At last the caravans moved on and the summer passed into an autumn mild and tender. Misreading the map, Finbar took them east
across the great Hungarian plain when they should have gone north. He allowed the road to take them and they journeyed ever
more slowly as the women’s pregnancies neared their time. In the vast wilderness of steppe they saw none but foxes and trundling
boars and herds of deer standing or moving like dancers to some music in the wind. It was a place great and empty, and crossing
it, the gypsies felt the smallness of themselves and their caravan as though all others in the world had perished. Even the
canaries hushed then. The wheels rattled. The birds sat on their perches and swayed. Finally they came to the shores of the
huge Lake Balaton. And, as though there were some ancient folkloric mechanism that operated there, once they saw and heard
the lapping of the waves the women’s waters broke in unison. Their cries rang out from each of the caravans and at once the
canaries burst into song. The gypsies made quick camp and the men lit fires and stood about them and were silent while the
few women who were not with child hurried back and forth with cloths bloodied and sleeves rolled. The night fell like a velvet
curtain and while the women cried and the men waited stars were spun upon it out of the dark.

All this time Finbar had feared in secret for Cait’s pregnancy. He had suffered dreams where he saw her sex bleed a river.
The blood was thick and gushed alarmingly and flowed across the floor and out the door to the sea, and all the time Cait was
lain on her back and the gypsies were gathered about her, awaiting the birth. Then in the dream the child was born and its
birth was a kind of fluidity or issuance without effort and the gypsies were amazed and applauded. Then they began to laugh.
And the laughter took the shape of white gannets and these then were beating in the air above where Cait lay. And when Finbar
looked down to see his child, the birds were swooping to attack it, and he had to wave his arms about and it was still moments
before he looked down and saw the infant had been born with the lower body of a fish.

He woke then, lathered in a white film with his eyes wide. But the dream recurred on many nights through the pregnancy, and
sometimes
in the dark he had woken to find the air beneath the hoop of canvas heavy and putrid with the smell of fish and silvery scales
upon his tongue.

So, on the Night of Labours, Finbar Foley passed into a kind of torment that, though not equal to that of his wife, wrung
him like a cloth. The first of the children was born just after midnight to the sexagenarian mother, who made no cry at all
but claimed the birth felt like a hairball dropping softly out of her insides. Her son, Primo, was borne out on the night
by his ancient father, and the others who were still attendant on the arrival of their own offspring greeted it with half-glad
nods and thin smiles. The child did indeed resemble a ball. Its head was very large and covered with a downy fur, and although
the other fathers-to-be did not say anything, there passed through each of them the same painful vision, imagining how such
a huge ball could pass out through the smallness of a woman’s sex. The births came on in waves then. The cries and excitements
of the midwives passed along the caravans and flamed torches were held aloft and there were embraces among those who were
uncles and cousins and bottles of a clear, fiery liquid flashed in the starlight. It was a wonder, the synchronicity of those
births like some vast clock set in the heavens and chiming the beginning of a new gypsy age. Or so the fathers said. Hot-faced
and exulting in their achievement that was nothing at all, they proclaimed, they made announcement, they sawed the air with
their hands and predicted marvels. Moving from one to the other, and taking the congratulations he was given for bringing
them there, Fin-bar secretly studied each child for oddities. Secundo was a big boy also, born without defect. As were all
the others that were pressed into his arms as if for benediction during that long night. Finbar took them and held them an
instant and tried to look pleased, but the truth was that with each perfect one, his soul was tormented further by the certainty
that his own child would emerge a monster.

His fear was without reason. But as the night drew on and it became clear that Cait was to suffer the longest labour and her
screams came piercingly out of the caravan where three women attended her, the fear grew to certainty. He went up to the caravan
and dared to lift the flap of the canvas to look in and see the river of blood. But one of the women spun around at once and
cursed at him and shook her
whiskered chin and pulled the canvas closed again. He stood there and heard his wife cry and briefly he thought of his own
mother and whatever world she had gone to. He threw back his head then and shouted out a sound, and the gypsies about him
did not understand it, for it was in a language not theirs. And he shouted it again and added before it the name of his family,
and shouted it out to the swirling stars of that night by the great lake in the country that was like none any Foley had ever
seen before. He shouted the words, and boars in the woods unseen stopped, foxes froze. He shouted the words and in so doing
echoed his own father years before when teaching the boys in games of hurling the cry of defiance that led to victory.

“Abu! O Fhogli abu!”

Finbar Foley shouted it out and then raised his fists and shook them in the air as if at the face of some celestial beast.

The other gypsies who were about him then were startled but saw the urgency of his cry and were moved to join him. They all
raised their fists and shook them and were a chorus that would not be denied.

And like all swift and traceless epiphanies, it came to Finbar Foley then that he must catch a fish. He looked out across
the dark, mutable waters of the lake. He heard the laps and slaps of soft collapse as the waves sighed, and then he was running
out to the water’s edge and followed by the loud surge of the newly made fathers. None had any idea at first what he was about,
but each had drunk the burning juniper-flavoured whiskey that was of that place. They splashed into the chill waves and yelled
as the cold bit at their calves. But Finbar was farther out still and was waist-deep and then dove out of sight. The gypsies
stopped and were like puppets suspended. Their faces were like things fixed in rigid pose, not knowing if he was to come back
again. They knew the tales of whole lands hidden beneath the surfaces of lakes, they knew the lore of demons and water sprites
and other faery enchantments and of the many who had disappeared without a trace. There was a long moment in the stillness
and silvered dark of the lake. Then Finbar broke the surface again. He stood and shook a wide corona of lake water from his
long hair and then dove again. This time the meaning of his actions translated itself to the fathers, and in a great rush
then they too dove down into the lake. The scene if not beheld was one such as beggared imagination. Like strange nocturnal
seabirds
the gypsies plunged in the cold waters, some rising as some were vanishing. Bodiless heads appeared and bobbed and then flapped
out winglike arms, while next to these were the disappearing legs and lower bodies of others. The lake was alive with them,
diving and surfacing again, breaking the glittered reflection of sky and its scintilla of stars. They were like some that
had drunk a potion or been charmed under a spell. As though their lives depended upon it, the gypsies dove for fishes. These,
coming through the lake in vast schools of gentle fluttered motion, can only have been amazed as the men’s bodies crashed
down and appeared bubbling before them, the faces wide-eyed and blind in the night water. The men’s hands reached and grasped,
they made slow, broad arcs of attack, causing wild underwater currents and whirling eddies so that the fish themselves were
spun about and swam flatly and sideways like ones demented. Still, the gypsies caught some of them. They made nets of their
shirts, some of their trousers. Others managed the impossible and bare-handed the fishes into the air. They broke up through
the surface with a cry and held aloft in the small light the flashing trophies. The gypsies bobbed there on the cold water
and did not know what to do then until Finbar himself appeared with a great thrashing fish and shouted the same cry as before
and stepped forward and waded out of the lake with the capture in his arms. The others followed then. They walked up the banks
in the night with the fishes in their arms and were like an image out of some perished mythology, fathers cradling with bewilderment
the changed forms of their sons. They came to the caravan where Cait was silent now and they stood around in a throng, the
men with fishes and the others who held torches. Then Finbar knelt down and placed the one he had caught on the ground before
the caravan. All of the gypsies followed suit until there was a small hill of fishes flapping and thrashing out of their element.