Everything is falling apart, he thought. We’ve struck an iceberg, and now we’re sinking.
Couldn’t this all have waited just a year or two? He was so close. Soon he would have his bachelor’s degree. If things went to hell then, he might still be able to land a job with a law firm. Perhaps come back for his master’s later or get it through one of the private schools. With a salary, he would be able to move. At least out of the Eighth District, to a place where the buildings weren’t falling apart and people didn’t mistake him for a filthy Gypsy all the time. “Just because you have dark hair,” as Lujza had put it.
He trudged up the stairs, making sure to stay close to the wall where the steps were most solid.
A teenage Roma boy was standing there, leaning against Sándor’s door—long, black hair and a macho attitude, skinny hips and tight jeans, dusty boots and an I-dare-you grin that was wide enough to reveal that he was missing one of his canines.
“Hey, czigány,” the stranger said, and it was only when the boy actually grabbed his shoulders and slapped his back several times that Sándor realized it was his brother.
ON THE DAY of the white vans, Sándor had been eight years old. There had been four vans. One was an ambulance, the second a kind of minivan, and the last two were police cars. But all of them were white.
The vans followed the switchbacks in the road, zigzagging their way down the hillside to the bottom of the valley where the village was. Reddish-yellow dust swirled up around them.
“Look,” Tibor said, scratching his nose with his index finger. “Someone’s coming.”
Sándor gave his fishing line a little tug, but it was depressingly clear that there was nothing on the other end besides the hook he had fashioned out of bent wire.
“What do you think they want?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” Tibor said. “Want to find out?”
Sándor nodded. It wasn’t often that strange cars came to Galbeno. He and Tibor left their fishing poles behind, hopped over the creek, and sprinted down the path that led back to the village.
“We can always come back later,” Tibor said. “Maybe the fish will bite when we’re not looking.”
They weren’t the only ones who were curious. People were craning their necks from the shelter of their porches, and the crowd of men in front of Baba’s house stood up slowly and haphazardly and set down their guitars. Attila, who had been harnessing his gaunt, brown horse to the firewood cart, passed the reins to his oldest son and disappeared into the house. Shortly after, he was back with a couple of empty sacks, which he tossed onto the cart, and gave the horse a slap on the flank that sent it off at a bumpy, reluctant trot down the wheel ruts toward the woods.
The vans bumped their way across the dusty square in front of the school and the local council office and continued a short distance down the village street before they stopped.
“That’s your house,” Tibor said. “What are they doing there? Your stepfather isn’t back, is he?”
“No,” Sándor whispered. For the first time he felt a ripple in his stomach that wasn’t curiosity or anticipation. His stepfather, Elvis, was in the district jail in Szeged and wouldn’t be home for at least another six months. That couldn’t be why the police cars were here. Unless he had escaped?
“Maybe we ought to stay put?” Tibor suggested.
Sándor shook his head. “It’s only me now,” he said. “When my stepdad is away, there’s only me to look after Mama and the girls.”
“And your little brother.”
“Yeah, him, too.” Sándor’s feelings for his one-year-old baby brother weren’t exclusively tender. It had been less obvious with the girls, but his stepfather had been unable to able to hide his excitement at finally having a “real” son. At his baptism they had let the stubby-fingered baby touch one instrument after the other, carefully watching for signs of excitement and familiarity, and when Grandpa Viktor had finally proclaimed that “the boy would be a great violinist like his father,” his stepfather had been bursting with pride.
No one had made that kind of fuss over Sándor.
But now his stepfather was gone, and four white vans were parked outside the house. Sándor could see Grandma Éva telling off two of the men who had got out of the cars. She had positioned herself in the doorway and was trying to fill it completely even though she wasn’t quite five feet tall, and the two men towered over her like giants.
Then more men climbed out of the cars, and Sándor couldn’t see his grandmother anymore. They rolled a gurney out of the back of the ambulance and into the house. Sándor accelerated, sprinting the last few yards down the street. By now there were so many people, the men from the cars and villagers too, that he had to push and squeeze his way through.
His mother was lying on the gurney. The gurney was being rolled back to the ambulance.
For a second, Sándor stood stock still, his heart hammering against his ribs. “Mama,” he said.
Even though he didn’t say it very loudly, she heard him. In spite of the noise and the angry voices, in spite of the engine noise from the vans, whose motors hadn’t been turned off even though they were parked.
“Sándorka,” she said. “My treasure. Come here.”
He ducked under the arm of a man in a gray EMT uniform and made it all the way over to the ambulance and the scratched aluminum gurney. He thought his mother looked the way she usually did. Yes, she had been sick, but why was it suddenly so bad that she had to go to the hospital?
When his other grandmother, Grandma Vanda, whom his oldest sister had been named after … when she had gone to the hospital, she hadn’t come back. She died.
Sándor couldn’t say a word. He couldn’t even make himself ask. He just walked over to her so she could grab hold of his hand.
“Watch out,” the ambulance attendant said. “We’re lifting the gurney now. Don’t get your fingers pinched.”
His mother had to let go of him again.
“It won’t be for very long,” she said. “Then I’ll be home again. You’ll take care of the girls and Tamás until I get back, right? Along with Grandma Éva.”
Then the doors closed, and the ambulance started driving away. The other cars stayed. And it quickly became apparent that the gadje hadn’t come only for his mother.
IT WAS SO wrong to see Tamás standing here, outside Sándor’s room, in the middle of a life that had nothing to do with him. Grown up, or almost—he still had a gangly teenager’s body, and there was a softness to his features that didn’t seem as tough-guy as the rest of him. Couldn’t he at least get his hair cut? Did he have to look so … so Gypsy? If anyone saw him, they would assume he was here to steal something.
“Come in,” Sándor said reluctantly. It was preferable to him hanging around in the hallway.
Tamás turned a slow circle in the middle of the room, checking it out. The proportions were a little odd because a dividing wall had been put up in what had originally been one large, well-lit room. Now Sándor and his neighbor each had half a window and a greater familiarity with each other’s bodily noises than they would have liked, since the dividing wall was pretty much just painted plywood. But apart from that.…
“This is nice,” Tamás said. “You’ve got a lot of books, though.”
“That’s because I’m a student.”
“Right. And which class did you get these for?” Tamás grinned broadly, pointing to a shelf full of well-worn paperbacks. He pulled one of them down, and Sándor instinctively reached out a hand to stop him.
“Morgan Kane,” Tamás read. “The Devil’s Marshal.”
“Don’t damage it,” Sándor said. “They’re really hard to come by these days.”
He couldn’t explain his fascination with the lonely, hard-hitting US Marshal. He was well aware that Westerns were not exactly what Lujza would call “literature,” and he pretended he only ever read them to improve his English. But the books consumed him, and he had followed the entire course of Kane’s life, from vulnerable, orphaned sixteen-year-old to aging, disillusioned killer. Or almost the entire course—there were eighty-three books in the series, and he only had eighty-one of them. He was missing The Gallows Express and Harder than Steel.