The Reincarnationist Papers - Origins Prequel Read online

  “They will take a break soon. When they do, we can use your plates,” Marina said, slapping me playfully on my backpack. “I will make sure we sit next to the musicians. I have helped three of them.”

  The group played two more songs, and Marina danced with a tall Romani man as I drank and let myself be transported to an imagined past on their timeless notes. She motioned me over when the music stopped, and I joined her and the band of players that formed a line in front of a pot of food that boiled over a low campfire. We were the last to fill our plates and sit next to the men and their weathered instruments.

  She started speaking again in Bulgarian. I paid close attention but could only catch a few words like tattoo, Zurich, and underground as they spoke for many minutes.

  She finally turned to me during a break in their conversation. “They have not seen these people with that tattoo, and they have never been to Zurich, but they heard something about this from some others. They said they had to go to the place in blindfolds, and they had to walk a long way downstairs underground.”

  “Do you believe it?” I asked.

  Her face contracted into a stern grimace. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “I was hoping for something more from them.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said and tried to shrug it off. “Maybe my head is full of crazy ideas about those notebooks. I suppose I thought we would find the very same musicians that were described in the notebooks as being in Zurich and performing for the Cognomina. Perhaps that is foolish of me,” she said and waved her hand dismissively. “They did say I should speak to their elder before we leave tonight. They say his name is Perez and that he sometimes tells a story about a man with a tattoo on his hand when he drinks too much. It is a story from when he was a boy, so it could be fifty or sixty years ago. Who knows,” she shrugged and drank straight from the bottle again. “Let’s try to find him later. How do you like their food?”

  “It’s good. What is it?”

  “The musicians said it was a goulash made with a goat they got today. I didn’t ask where they got it,” she answered before I could ask. “Have as much food and wine as you want. I helped two of the musicians when they got in trouble. They say we are their guests tonight.”

  “Can you get more wine from your friends?”

  “Sure, are you ready for more?” she asked.

  I nodded, grabbed the bottle, and got to my feet. I walked over and refilled each of the musicians’ glasses and finally filled the two glasses Marina and I had used in the Forum.

  “Nicely done,” she whispered to me as I sat back down.

  “Perhaps you should make a toast,” I prompted.

  She smiled and raised her glass before making a toast in Bulgarian. Everyone raised their glass and drank, but they did not finish their drinks. She spoke with the musicians for a long time as we drank. She translated a few sentences for me as I studied the deep lines on the faces of the tanned men and imagined all the songs and stories that had been etched there.

  I thought about getting another plate of food, and I asked Marina if she wanted more, but she was busy laughing at a story the violin player was telling. I took my plate and edged away from them, waiting until the line at the large stew pot was gone before approaching. The old, heavyset Romani woman who held the large ladle smiled at me and stirred the steaming pot with a beckoning motion as I drew near. I arrived at the same moment that an older man approached. I looked at him and thought he could be a leader or an elder, perhaps even Perez. The four younger men who closely trailed the man kept their heads moving in a constant scan around him.

  I stepped back, feeling very much like the interloper that I was, and motioned for the older man and his men to go ahead of me. The older man stepped back, and one of the younger men walked up to me and then looked in the pot before nodding back to his boss. The woman working the pot tried to settle it by calling me forward with a Romani command and drawing a serving of stew from the depths of the iron cauldron. I turned to the five men and motioned for them to go ahead again. “Per favore,” I said in my best Italian, but the young guard who stood next to me placed a firm hand on my shoulder that told me clearly that the old man always ate last.

  I nodded that I had understood him as I stepped forward and took a second serving from the smiling woman. I stood to the side and ate as I watched the four guards go first. The old man walked up to the woman, placing a strong hand around the back of her neck before gently drawing her forehead to his lips. She slipped a thick arm around his waist and leaned into him as she filled his plate. The four younger men eyed me with suspicion as they escorted their leader toward a gathering of men seated in front of a large camper. I moved away and stood at the edge of the crowd that gathered around the musicians as they started playing again.

  I turned back to the music and saw Marina’s head dancing and swaying above the other dancers that all moved in synchronized steps to the accelerating rhythm of a new song. She saw me and called out for me to join her. “Come and dance with me. This is a Bulgarian song that they’re playing for me. Come,” she pleaded, “I will show you the steps.”

  She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the line of dancers next to her. “Left, then right,” she instructed. “Always step with the left on the beat.”

  I kept my eyes locked on the feet on either side and tried to mimic their movements.

  “You’ve got it!” she cried and reached over to place my arm tight around her waist as we moved together to the dueling accordion and violin.

  “I think I found the man you’re looking for,” I whispered into her ear. “Perez.”

  “Really?” she asked, moving her face close to me. Her dark eyes blazed in the reflected firelight, and for an instant, I imagined a passion for me there.

  “I’m pretty sure, but he doesn’t seem the warm and friendly type.”

  “Leave that part to me,” she said, squeezing me again as the musicians started on another song.

  We danced for an hour, got another two bottles of wine to drink and share, and finally got the courage to approach the large caravan where the older man I had seen earlier held court over a crowd of hard-looking men.

  “Even if we get nothing from this, at least we had fun tonight,” she said, looking over at me as we approached them. “And I will research the name Vasili Blagavich Arda from the notebook. So we still have that.”

  I wondered how she would introduce herself to him, but he called out to her first as we walked up to the ring of men seated around him.

  “You there,” he shouted in perfect but slightly slurred Italian, “beautiful woman. What is your name?”

  She let go of my hand and stepped to the edge of their circle. “I am Marina, Marina Lizhiva.”

  “Marina,” he said, not bothering to get up from his chair. “Marina Lizhiva,” he repeated. “My men tell me that you have helped several of our people with their - paperwork,” he spat out the last word as though he despised that necessary tether to the rest of the world.

  “Yes, it is always my pleasure to help Bulgarian people,” she said as she raised her high chin a bit higher.

  “Bulgarian people?” he mumbled to himself and nodded his head. “Yes, I suppose so. Then Marina Lizhiva, I thank you for helping them,” he said, raising a glass and prompting everyone to drink with him.

  “You are welcome, Mr…” she said with that familiar air of state authority, leaving the sentence open for him to finish.

  He kept his eyes locked with hers and started laughing as he spoke some unrecognizable Romani words to his men. “Marina Lizhiva,” he began again in Italian, “it is not polite to ask questions that you already know the answers to. I am the leader here, and these are my people, and for this night, this is our place.”

  “I’m sorry, I did not mean to…”

  “And tonight, you and your hungry friend are my guests in this place.” He smiled at me, but there was no warmth in it. “So welcome, pretty embass
y lady,” Perez said with a playful grin that let Marina know he knew who he was speaking with, “and please share with me the real reason why you left the comfort of your world to find ours tonight, something about people who have a tattoo?”

  All eyes turned to Marina. I watched her sharp profile as she swallowed hard and started in Italian. “Yes,” she said and then turned to me, “we are looking for information about people. People in Zurich who wear a distinctive tattoo on their hand. We heard that some Romani musicians might have played for them.”

  I cringed at the unintended tone of interrogation in her words.

  Perez sat in silence for a long time as though pondering his reply. “You are looking for information,” he said to himself, “and you heard that some Romani might know something.”

  I could see her thinking of how to apologize and reword the request.

  He bobbed his head from side to side as he searched for his next words for her. “You have a long face,” he said, cocking his head to one side to stare at her, “and a long nose in the middle of it.” His tone was serious but still somehow playful and disarming. “You should be careful not to stick it where it doesn’t belong, Marina Lizhiva.”

  A few of the men around him suppressed snickers as Marina stood there trying to think of a response.

  “Come forward, child,” he said, his tone warming to something closer to a welcome. “You are safe here tonight. Come forward and draw the symbol of this distinctive tattoo for me. I have known many people with tattoos on their hands,” he said in a loud joking Italian for all his people to hear, “perhaps I am the one you need information from.”

  Four of the seated men, two of whom had faded prison tattoos running from their forearms down to their hands, laughed as they rose and moved their chairs to make a path for her.

  “Grazie,” she said to them politely as she approached Perez in his chair. “And thank you, sir, for having us as your guests tonight.”

  He nodded and brushed off the comment. “Draw it for me in the dirt,” he commanded with a laugh. “I wish to see it.”

  Marina took a stick from the pile near the fire and drew the three pyramid tattoo symbol in the dirt in front of him. She stepped back and looked at it to make sure it matched what she had seen in the notebook. She then turned to Perez, who seemed transfixed by the symbol in the dirt.

  The old man stared at the symbol in the dirt for one breath and then a second. “How do you know of this?” he demanded of her, all laughter and playfulness draining from his firm face.

  She stood frozen. I could see the panic building on her face.

  Perez struggled up out of his chair and placed a hand on a seated man’s shoulder to steady himself. “I want to know how you know of this and what you think the Romani have to do with it,” he demanded.

  “I found it,” I shouted in Italian, drawing all eyes over to me. “It was a symbol included in a series of notebooks that I found. The notebooks were hand-written in Bulgarian. That is why she is here. She is my translator.”

  The old man snapped his rugged head toward me. “Go on,” Perez commanded.

  “We translated parts of the notebooks today, and the notebooks discuss a scene in Zurich with a group of people who have this tattoo,” I said, stepping toward Marina. “In this scene, which we think might be true, the Zurich group with the tattoo hire Romani musicians to play for them. Marina thought— I thought,” I corrected, “that we should come here and ask you.”

  “And now you have,” Perez slurred.

  “Can I ask you a question, sir?” I asked.

  The Gypsy king nodded to me.

  I swallowed hard and practiced the Italian sentence in my head before speaking. “Why does that symbol have meaning for you?”

  “We don’t want any trouble here,” said the youngest of his bodyguards. “Our leader has had a difficult life with much violence and death. Sometimes when he drinks too much, he tells stories about—”

  “Silence,” shouted Perez. “And get me another drink.”

  “Please go,” the young man whispered in my ear before moving away to get his leader another glass of wine.

  “It is not a story,” Perez said, taking a seat and motioning two men out of theirs so that Marina and I could sit opposite him. “It is why I am here,” he shouted and slapped his chest, “and it is why many of you are here.”

  I sat in the cheap plastic chair and reached my hand over to touch Marina’s. I thought about the bodyguard's request for us to leave, but there was no way we were going now. We both sat quietly, somehow knowing that our silence would bring the tale out of the man.

  “I saw the tattoo once,” the old man said, reaching for Marina’s hand and turning it so that the palm was down. “It was here, between the man’s thumb and forefinger, and it was just as you drew it, Marina Lizhiva,” he said with a fatherly warmth. “It was on the hand of a man who saved me, who in a way saved most of this clan. My father was the leader of this clan then, and he called the man Dante. I was just a boy then, a boy who was fascinated with cars and machines of any kind. I remembered the sound of the thing as it approached our caravan,” he said as his hard eyes filled with tears from the past. “It sounded horrible, like loud engines driving a collection of mechanical squeaks and clanks.”

  Perez looked behind him to the weathered sedan parked behind his caravan and chuckled. “We traveled with horse and wagon then, and I remember running forward with the other boys to see the German armored troop carrier. Each boy stood behind his father’s legs and peered out at the thing as it sputtered to a stop, blocking the isolated dirt road in front of us. It had truck tires in the front but loops of dirt-caked tank track in the back. One blond soldier drove the hulking vehicle, which carried ten armed infantrymen standing up above the gray-painted armor in the back. They knew we were Romani,” Perez said, “and they probably would have rounded up the entire clan if they thought they could have, but they only had twelve men in total if you included their officer.”

  “What happened next?” asked one of the boys standing at the edge of the circle.

  Perez took a sip from his glass and looked at the boy. “They took only the children like you. It was easier for them. The officer wore a black uniform, and I remember him saying that the parents could claim their children after they had been registered in the town. My father, Ruslon,” Perez said as he and several of the older people crossed themselves in remembrance. “My father knew it was a trap, but to fight there on the road would have been very bad. So the German soldiers took us from our family, and they put us in an abandoned convent in the south of Italy that the soldiers used as a detention camp.”

  Perez lowered his eyes to Marina’s slender hand. “That place is only three hours from here by car, but I have never been back. It was hard for us. I remember that I tried to cheer up the other children by telling them that my father would come for us. But the days passed and became weeks. I tried to comfort the youngest by repeating our clan’s nursery rhymes as the guards shaved our heads and wrote down our names and the names of our mothers and fathers. The older girls sang old Romani songs when the doctor arrived and measured the sizes of our heads and compared the color of our eyes to sets of lifeless porcelain eyes on a narrow board in the doctor’s hand. I tried to laugh as the soldiers put me and the others into ridiculously oversized striped uniforms that conveyed an unspoken assurance that they would still fit us in the coming year. I whispered imagined stories of our rescue in our own comforting language as the doctor and the guards detailed their tasks in their grunting tongue. But not even the games where we would pretend to shoot the officer and his soldiers dead could soothe us from the finality of that defeat when the doctor tattooed the numbers from our uniforms onto our arms,” he said as he turned his browned forearm for her to see the number tattooed there.

  “And then one day, the Romani, your aunts, and your uncles,” Perez said in a louder voice, now addressing all of those around him, “they came with guns, and the
y killed the Germans and took the children like me back home to our mothers. And on that day,” he continued as he held her hand, “on that bloody day, this foreign man they called Dante, who was not of our blood, he shot dead the German officer who ran the camp. This man, Dante, had that tattoo on the back of his hand. Right here,” he concluded and pointed a crooked finger at her hand as his iron-like eyes began to well with tears.

  The young guard offered a handkerchief to his leader and whispered in his ear. Perez nodded and dabbed at his eyes as he continued. “My father would sometimes tell stories about the rescue and his friend Dante. The stories usually came when he drank too much, maybe like tonight,” he said with a smile. “He said Dante was a British soldier who found our group behind the German lines and offered to help lead the rescue mission. My father said that he was very smart and knew many things. He said that Dante had started some trouble with the Germans, but that he was an excellent fighter and that the rescue might have failed without him,” the old man said.

  “I just remember his tattoo, the shot he took to kill the officer, and his magic tricks,” Perez said with a chuckle. “He could make a cigarette come out of your nose or a piece of candy come out of your ears. He stayed with us for about a week after the rescue. All the children loved Dante, and I remember his magic tricks calmed down the children after the family came for us and killed the Germans,” Perez said, taking a deep breath and then a long sip from the glass in his hand.

  A dozen questions ran through my head, but I resolved to wait for him to trickle out the details at his own pace.

  “So you asked me, young man, what the symbol she drew means to me,” Perez said, rising on unsteady feet to address his people as he kept his eyes on me. “The Romani are a private people, distrustful of others who we do not know. The symbol is a reminder that there is goodness out there in the world beyond our campfires,” he said, spreading his arms out toward the darkness beyond their camp. “I know it. It saved my life,” he said, choking on the emotions in his words as he looked at the faces surrounding him. “That goodness might have saved all of us.”