ALEANDRO KNEW SHE WOULDN’T COME. Yet here he was for the second night in a row, leaning on a large oak near the wine cellar. It wasn’t hope that pulled him back, but more that he knew a decision of his own had to be made. She would go on with her life, marry, think of him someday with pleasant detachment—a transient attraction in the final weeks before her marriage that had been, after all, mostly innocent. Eventually, even that would fade, but for him, it would always continue—beyond this night, beyond this summer. Here in Sopron, there would always be her.
And so he would say good-bye to their meeting place, to all they’d been to each other, to the town he’d intended to leave before Eva had come into his life. There was nothing to keep him here now, and he’d already delayed too long. So he would pack up his brothers and head out on the old, familiar road he’d traveled in another lifetime with his parents, when it was only the three of them. How he missed that road.
For a little while, Aleandro sat against the tree, letting his mind drift back to those early days of his life and all they contained: starry skies, open fields with scorched grass, hawks gliding through the golden translucence of sunsets. Through it all, the sound of hoofs beating the gravel, day melting into night, towns opening on the horizon, towns fading. They were the travelers, they were their own gods, they were masters of their destiny. They were free, as he hoped to be again.
In daytime, as they closed the distance between villages, his mother had made medicinal potions from herbs she collected along the way, and he would sit alongside his father as he guided the horse-drawn wagon. The sun beat down mercilessly, making him light-headed, and they passed the time talking. There were stories about the taverns in which his father played, about where their music came from, and Aleandro often picked up his violin and played for him. “Like this?” he would say, and his father would lean in closer, or ask him to move to the other side of him to hear him better. “You are getting there,” he would tell him, although the way his face beamed with pleasure was enough encouragement for Aleandro to keep sliding the bow over the strings.
In town markets, his mother sold her potions while he accompanied his father to the taverns. It was in those early days that someone had spat the word Cigányok at him and he asked his father what it meant. “It means you play from the soul,” his father explained, even though Aleandro knew that it meant nothing of the kind. He’d heard it thrown in his father’s face, too, despite the beautiful sounds that emerged from his violin, but by then his father, still young and towering, could no longer hear those words. He couldn’t hear anything anymore.
They settled on a small patch in the green belt by the pond near Sopron where one of the caravans had set down roots a few years prior. Here in Sopron, they ate freshly caught fish around fires, and danced night after night, and Aleandro played with the children he’d only watched from a distance throughout the first ten years of his life. It was no longer just the three of them but other families like theirs, families willing to share so that Aleandro wouldn’t go hungry. His father couldn’t play the taverns anymore, couldn’t repay them for the food, so he rolled up his sleeves and returned the kindness in the only way he could. One morning he came back with a sack full of tools that he’d bartered for work from one of the land farmers and began building. First there was their own hut—no more than a one-room wooden structure with a tiny sink and a butcher block cut from strips of wood he’d used for the siding. The other men joined quickly, and by next summer most of the families had moved out of their wagons, and the horses were now kept in a shed during the rains.
It was in those days, when they all worked from dawn to dusk, that Aleandro began making drawings for his father, filling the spaces of words he no longer grasped. The way the walls would intersect inside, the way alcoves could be carved in the corners for sinks, baby cots. He was twelve by then, and his mother taught the camp children to read and count money, to keep their heads low against taunts and hurled stones from the non-Romani children in town, to make themselves immune, invisible. He never could understand how so much hatred could exist in a place that cradled such beauty. But inside the inner circle of his life, there was beauty indeed—music and dancing, and many arms to embrace him.
It was the closest to a regular life that Aleandro had ever known, yet after a few years, he began missing the adventure of the open road. One day he picked up his father’s rusty violin and headed out on the road again. He was fifteen, restless with youth, and the sky that had always been his roof in summer drew him with the promise of something new.
He followed more or less the roads he’d known as a child. He was good enough at the violin, even though he dreamed of drawing those houses and began drawing churches and beer halls, then after some time, only the people that gathered under those roofs. At Lake Balaton, he joined a flamenco group and was bewitched by the lead dancer—a girl much like him, with ripe lips and melancholic, liquid eyes, whose ample hips molded around the sound of his violin, and to whom he lost his virginity later that night. Many such nights followed, yet she was much older than him, and the way she ignored him during the day, despite the fevered whispers of the night, made him see what he was to her.
One morning he left again and kept moving, past rows of houses on swollen banks and rivers that led him to new places, places he enjoyed discovering as much as leaving. There were more taverns and a few other women not unlike the dancer, and the years passed unbeknownst to him, until he was twenty and word caught up to him about what was happening in Sopron.
Nothing prepared him for what he found when he returned. His mother, ill with typhus, barely recognized him. He couldn’t bring himself to ask about his father, but in his heart, he knew what had happened before he stepped through the door. He knew. Later, an elderly woman from the village brought in three children—twin boys of about five or six and a younger one, no more than a toddler, with a similar mass of curly, dark hair and huge eyes that pierced his chest.
She’d been taking care of them, she explained to him. For his mother. For their mother.
For the rest of his life, he would never forget the relief washing over his mother’s face when he promised her that he would stay. He took her place and loved those boys as she had; he protected them. For two years after he’d buried his parents, he kept his promise, and he would continue wherever life took them. Burgenland awaited, Vienna after that, maybe, and the open road in between, their steady companion.
The road had always been his one constant, and he was ready for it again.
Aleandro inhaled deeply now, imagining the villa where Eva slept peacefully, maybe relieved or perhaps a little sad, already moving past him. It was late, nearly midnight, and he needed to save his strength for tomorrow, so he got on with the final task of the night. It didn’t matter to him that he would draw in the darkness—it was only a rough sketch he intended, a memento of his last moments here. But as he took out his pad and began, he did not continue past the first strokes. Rather, his eyes focused on the flutter of white, there just at the base of the valley, no more than a few hundred yards away.
A dove, he thought for an instant, then realized that it couldn’t be—it was too low. Straining his eyes in the darkness, he watched it a bit longer as it continued to expand and take shape.
Eva. She was still at a distance, and Aleandro stifled the urge to run to her, to crush her to him. To crush her in order to prove she was real. Instead, he stood there and watched Eva come toward him the same way he’d watched her depart two nights earlier and he had to steady himself on a tree. Only when she got closer did a stab of shock slice through his stupor.
“Eva. Eva, what happened?”
He stared at the proud expression on her face, which he knew so well and worshipped, at the deep shadow the size of a plum on the marble skin of her cheek. There was a fissure in the corner of her lip, which she touched protectively, as if to conceal it, then a glint of relief sprang into her impenetrable gaze and she rushed into his arms.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured in the collar of his shirt. “I was hoping to find you. I didn’t know where else to go, and I needed to find you. I needed to see you.”
“My God. Eva, look at me,” he kept saying, but she would not. She was shaking, and all he could do was draw her closer, hold her tightly as he knew she needed, even though he, too, was shaking with fury. He would kill whoever did this to her. He would, and he said it out loud. “Just tell me who did this to you, Eva. I will kill him. I will kill him with my bare hands.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Eva said, lifting her cheek from his chest and gazing across the darkness. “These bruises mean nothing to me now. There are worse wounds to heal. These bruises have set me free.”
Later, Eva recounted what had happened at the villa—the photographs of their time together, the open palm that had split her lip, the fist that had turned the room to blackness. How afterward she found herself in her room with the door locked and knew it was futile to bang on it or shout out. There was no one to hear her now. There was no one in the house but her and her father. The next night she climbed out of the second-story window and crawled down the bougainvillea vine, not caring that she might break her neck. She never wanted to see her father again, she declared, her face twisted with anger, with humiliation. She would never go back. She could never go back to any life that included her father.
She broke into tears saying it, as if putting it in words made it real, and so he took her hand and led her inside the wine cellar, their meeting spot, where on the concrete floor he laid out the blanket they’d always kept there, lit the kerosene lamp, and set his sketchbook down in a corner.
“Here, lie down for a bit. Rest,” he said and sat down beside her, pulling her head in his lap. “You don’t have to go back, Eva. You are safe here. We can stay here as long as you want.”
They didn’t speak for a while, and the silence between them agitated him more than her tears. Moments ago, he was convinced he would never see her again, and now she was here with him and there wasn’t a thing he could do to ease her pain. In a way, it was worse than losing her.
“Eva, come with me,” he found himself saying. “We will leave in the morning with my brothers; we will get away from this place. I will find a way to take care of you, Eva. Besides my brothers, you are all that matters to me in the world. Come with me.”
She didn’t answer at first, and he realized how absurd his proposition was. How could he take care of her? How, when he could hardly take care of himself, of his brothers? And hadn’t he encouraged her to return to Budapest? Yet now he couldn’t imagine another man soothing her, holding her. And it was him that she’d come to—not her fiancé, nor her friends, not even Dora. Him. He was meant to protect her, to love her, to keep her safe.
“Have you ever been to Burgenland?” he continued, fueled with sudden hope. “It’s not far from here, on the other side of Lake Fertö, in Austria. It’s a place much like this, but I can get work there. I’ve already been offered a steady job playing at one of the taverns, and there will be enough for a while, enough until we can figure out someplace else to go. Anyplace that you want, Eva. I will take you wherever you want to go.”
Still no words from her. She was motionless, not a muscle stirring, and for a moment he thought she’d fallen asleep, so he went on stroking her hair. Eventually, he lay down on the blanket next to her, aching with his own exhaustion and the weight of his thoughts. They stayed like that for a while, their bodies curved like spoons, the light from the kerosene lamp casting their shadows on the barren walls, dancing demons.
“Are you all right?” he whispered when she suddenly shifted away from him and sat up. Her fingers on his lips kept further words from coming. In the weak light, her hair was diffused in a halo of gold, and her fingertips on his mouth stirred something deep inside him. He searched her eyes, but he couldn’t see them. Couldn’t see them in the backwash of light.
“I will come with you, Aleandro. I will.”
Swept with disbelief, with happiness, he could not hold himself back any longer, so he kissed her, cautiously at first, with more tenderness than passion, then more deeply. She tasted of tears, and he thought he’d never known such a sensation of pain and sweetness, and how much better it was than what he’d imagined. He buried his hands in the silk of her hair, drew her beneath him, and kissed her again, kissed her warm mouth and her neck, and the base of her throat, where her pulse raced.
He loved her, he was in love with her, he adored her, he would remember murmuring incoherently. Did she say that she loved him, too? He couldn’t be sure, for his head was swimming. Perhaps it was only a sigh, or the crickets outside in the hush of the night, singing. For a moment he was sobered by the thought that she was merely acting on impulse, that he was taking advantage of an emotional moment and he drew back from her, closing his eyes. Releasing her.
It was not the end. When he opened them, she was still there, kneeling beside him. As if in a dream, he watched her undo the tiny shell buttons on her dress and it slid away from her shoulders, easily, without resistance. He stared at the staggering beauty of her, the tiny breasts and the crescent beauty mark low between them, wanting to ask if this was what she really wanted.
Then her hand was on his, lifting it to her burning cheek, and it was more than he could take. More than a man, nearly twenty-three years old and bursting with love, could take. When he reached for her again, it was hungrily, without reservation, without fear.