Then the van drove through a gate in a fence and up the driveway to some tall, gray buildings. The door of the minibus was opened, and an adult stranger, an old bald gadjo in white clothes, pointed at Sándor and the other boy.
“Those two go to the blue wing,” he said. “The girls go over to the red wing, and the little one needs an exam at the health clinic.”
It took a second before Sándor understood that the gadjos wanted to split them up.
“No,” he said then. “I’m going to take care of them.”
“We’ll do that,” the bald gadjo said. “Now you just go over to the blue wing with Miss Erzsébet. That’s where the big boys live.”
Miss Erzsébet took his hand. She was young and pretty and also gadji, but he didn’t want to hold her hand.
“No,” he said. “I’m their brother.”
But they wouldn’t listen. A gadji lady, who was also dressed in white, had already picked Tamás up and was starting to walk away with him. Another woman had taken the girls by the hand, one on either side. Vanda’s face was swollen because she had cried the whole way, but now she was quiet. Her eyes were dark and frightened. Feliszia just looked confused. She hugged her pink stuffed rabbit, filthy as it was.
He tore himself away from the Erzsébet woman, but she grabbed him again, this time by the arm, hard. Then he bit her.
He could still remember the feeling, the tiny little hairs on her arm poking softly into his tongue, the salty taste of her skin mixed with a soapy bitterness he later learned was moisturizer. As he bit, he felt the skin break, and the saliva and blood mixed in his mouth.
So many years and he could still remember that, maybe because that was his last true act of rebellion.
You’ll take care of the girls and Tamás, right?
Mama, I was only eight.
The bus stopped at the end of the line, and he got out.
GALBENO WAS STILL Galbeno. Most of the houses had electricity now, but otherwise not much had happened in the past fifteen years. A small valley with a creek at the bottom, dusty grass and prickly shrubs, the odd fir tree that survived the quest for firewood because it was so full of resin that it would be foolhardy to toss it into the fireplace. Up on the eastern slope sat the cemetery with its crooked, white headstones, with a bigger population now than the village, which for a long time had been a dwindling cluster of houses along a road that didn’t go anywhere.
His arrival was instantly noticed by at least twenty people. An older woman who was sweeping in front of her house. Seven or eight kids in the middle of a water fight at one of the village’s three communal water pumps. Two men who were fiddling with an old, rust bucket of a car, three others who were watching and commenting. He knew they recognized him.
“Szia,” one of the men by the car called out, raising his hand in a casual greeting.
“Szia,” Sándor called back, without knowing who he was talking to. It could even be Tibor; Sándor wasn’t sure he would recognize him now. He had forgotten so much. Only a few names lingered in his mind.
He hoisted his duffel bag over his shoulder and started walking down the road toward Valeria’s green house. He hadn’t brought his suitcase or the cardboard boxes he had packed his things in because he didn’t want it to look like he was moving in. True, he had no idea where he would be living after May 15, but it wouldn’t be here; he had made his mind up about that. He might have to spend a few weeks here until he found something else, but he wasn’t moving in. Ferenc had been generous enough to store his boxes for the time being, though it meant he practically had to climb over the furniture to make it from one end of his room to the other.
Two little girls raced past him, giggling, and he knew he wouldn’t make it to the house unannounced. He could already hear their high-pitched, excited voices: “Valeria, Valeria, Sándor’s home!”
His mother appeared in the doorway. Then she came out to meet him, her arms outstretched.
“Sándorka! My darling.”
She embraced him and pulled his face down so she could kiss him warmly on both cheeks. Then she did it again, just to be sure.
“Mama.”
She was so small. It had come as a shock to him the first time he had seen her once he was a grown up—she was a tiny woman who didn’t come any higher than the middle of his chest. She was thin and more sinewy than he remembered her, her face tauter. There was something birdlike about her lightness, as if she had air in her bones where other people had marrow.
He knew women in their forties in Budapest who looked like young girls, and often behaved like that, too. That was not the case with Valeria. Her hair was still black, and she was so small that her T-shirt and jeans would fit a twelve-year-old. But no one who saw her face would mistake her for a teenager. Life had left its mark on her. There was a determination and a will to survive in her that weren’t the result of hours spent at the gym.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
“Yes, yes.”
“When?”
He couldn’t help but smile in spite of everything that had happened.
“Mama, I ate.” An apple and a sandwich from the kiosk at the bus station, but that was plenty. His stomach couldn’t handle anything more.
“Well, then we’ll have some coffee. And you can tell me why you’ve come.”
Because naturally there had to be a reason for him to show up like this, in the middle of exams.
“Where’s Tamás?”
“Tamás? He’s not here.” Her eyes darted away as she said it, and he guessed it was because she wanted to hide something from him. Did she know what Tamás was up to?
“Mama, where is he? Do you know what kind of a mess he is in?”
She didn’t answer right away.
“Have a seat,” she said, pointing to the bench by the door. “I’ll make some coffee.”
“Mama!”
“He left, Sándorka. He has to earn money, too, doesn’t he?”
“Doing what?”
“The violin, of course. But there’s no one willing to pay around here anymore. Do you know how many men in the village have jobs?”
Sándor shook his head. How would he know that?
“Fourteen. And eight of those are just doing temporary work paid for by the council.”
He knew things were bad, but not that bad. From what he remembered from his childhood, nearly everyone had jobs most of the time. “People used to have jobs,” he said.
“Yes. When the Communists were in charge, the Roma had no trouble getting work. Now it’s just the Hungarians. And hardly anyone hires musicians these days. So Tamás is abroad now.”
“Where?”
“Germany, I think. No, wait.… Somewhere up north. I think it was Denmark.”
It would be nice to think that Tamás had only nicked his passport because he didn’t have one of his own and wanted to go to Denmark to play his violin and earn some money. But Sándor remembered the interrogation room and the questions the ever-patient Gábor had asked him, over and over again. Are you interested in weapons, Sándor? Why did you go to hizbuttahrir.org—you’re not a Muslim, are you? Where does your money actually come from, Sándor? For seventy-two hours.
NBH wasn’t in the habit of wasting their time on street musicians.
THE HOUSE’S ONLY habitable room was home to six people. Sándor’s stepfather Elvis didn’t live here anymore. He and Valeria had split up several years earlier. Both Sándor’s sisters were married now, but neither of them had actually moved out. Vanda used to have an apartment in Miskolc, but then the building was renovated, and some of the apartments combined into something larger and more “in keeping with the times,” as the property owner put it; when the tenants were due to move back in, for some reason or other there wasn’t room in the lovely, remodeled building with tiled bathrooms, renovated kitchens, and steel balconies for the three Roma families. So Vanda was living with Valeria again with her two little boys while her husband worked as a painter in Birmingham to earn money so they could get another place. Feliszia, who was seventeen now, had married a boy her own age from Galbeno, just a few months ago; he and his father were putting a roof on one of the abandoned houses on the outskirts of the village “so the young people would have somewhere to live.” Valeria quipped that at the speed those two were working; the young people would be middle-aged before they could move in. And besides, it wasn’t what Feliszia wanted. She wanted to move to Budapest or at least Miskolc, but certainly away from Galbeno.