A Gypsy Song (The Eye of the Crystal Ball - The Wolfboy Chronicles) (2 page)

“Jinx … jinx … jinx.”

They called her “The jinx” because of what always happened when she got mad. Accidents that no one could explain. Things falling without anyone touching them.

“Jinx … jinx … jinx.”

What no one knew, including herself, of course, was that Sara was telekinetic. She had the ability to move objects by effort of her will alone. That meant she could move things with her mind without touching them. But since Sara wasn’t aware of this talent of hers yet, she had no control over it. And she had no control over her temper, either.

So when her classmates yelled at her and took her book, things started flying around. Books, papers, pencils would fly in the air and chairs would move around on the floor. So when the teacher came back, the classroom was an utter mess and everyone told him that Sara did it. Which was the truth, of course, but there is always more than one side to a story like that.

Sara knew that but unfortunately her teacher didn’t. So she got punished. One hundred strokes across her fingers with a stick. Being a very sensitive man, the teacher never liked to punish his student. But back then that was what they had to do.

“I am so sorry,” he said between every stroke. “But I have to set an example for the others.”

He said it over and over again as the strokes fell across her fingers and burned their way into her little innocent heart and poisoned it with that thirst for revenge that is so damaging for it. She didn’t feel any anger towards her teacher for doing what he did. He didn’t know better she kept telling herself.

But she did feel anger towards Gertrud, and one day she followed Gertrud as she went home from school. When Gertrud was alone in the street, Sara took out her books and let them fly high in the air like birds in the sky. For the first time, Sara deliberately made something move by the will of her mind. She moved them towards Gertrud and they surrounded her like birds attacking from the air. Fifteen of her biggest and heaviest books first circled around Gertrud’s head and then began to dive and almost hit her. Sara kept letting them attack Gertrud until she started screaming and got on her knees begging for Sara to make it stop.

So she did.

Gertrud never teased Sara again. And Sara made a promise to herself, that she would never use her will to move anything again. Not on purpose at least.

 It was at that time Sara started wondering if she wasn’t quite like other girls at her age.

Later that same year, she discovered the wind. Whenever the north wind began to blow she would get the strangest feeling inside. She could stand in the schoolyard or walk in the street among other people who wouldn’t notice it, and she would be the only one to stop and smell it. By breathing that wind she would get a strong longing within her body. It sometimes felt like it would crush everything inside of her, like it would devour her from the inside.

It was the longing for distant places, the longing for foreign countries far, far away. And she had to fight the urge to follow the desire deep within her to travel with the wind and let it take her to those exotic places where it came from. This urge grew stronger and stronger for every day that passed by, an urge she wasn’t sure she could keep on resisting for much longer.

Maybe that was why she loved her books so much, because they had the ability to take her away on journeys to strange places and strange worlds. One day she could be a knight in shining armor fighting the dragon to save his beloved, the next she was in the jungle with wild animals surrounding her or the captain of the
Flying Dutchman
crossing the oceans at the coast of Africa. Or a sheik in the desert, a pilot in her plane crossing the Atlantic for the first time, or even Captain Nemo on
Nautilus
exploring the undersea world.

And when she didn’t read about it, Sara dreamt about the big wonderful world that was just waiting out there for her to explore.

 It didn’t take long for the neighbors, teachers or parents to start wondering about what was happening to her. Her mind seemed always to be drifting in class, the teacher thought. Her look was always distant when she passed them, the neighbors thought. She never said a word to them anymore, her parents thought.

And none of them understood what was going on with her. Neither did she. All Sara knew was that she couldn’t find rest anywhere, she felt the wind calling for her, luring her away from the life she knew so well, tempting her with promises of exotic music, tasteful food, dancing and laughter.

“There must be something better for me out there,” she kept thinking, standing at the cliff next to the village church overlooking the valley.

There was, and she didn’t have to go and look for it.

It came to get her.

THE GYPSY GIRL

Just like the
last time, they came in the middle of the night. No one on Reidenburgerstrasse noticed them until the very next morning, though, but then news would travel fast. After all, a convoy of more than fifty horse-drawn caravans wagons (some of them were hand-carved in wood and painted in beautiful colors) wasn’t that easy to miss. Let alone the cats, dogs and birds and even a couple of elephants and a bear that came along with them. Everywhere people were sticking their heads out the windows of the wagons and the most enchanting music filled the air.

Nothing this exciting had happened on the quiet street for years, well, hardly ever come to think of it. So you really can’t blame the neighbors for the gathering, staring or talking in the street wearing nothing but their bathrobes on top of their pajamas.

“What are those?” Mrs. Nieberman from number ten asked.

“Like a circus or something,” Mrs. Hagenhoff from number eight replied.

“No, nothing like that,” Mrs. Müller interrupted them with a satisfied expression. Didn’t she always say that there was something suspicious with that girl? Now they all knew.

“They are gypsies.”

A sound of fear and turmoil immediately emerged among the spectators. Everybody knew that no respectable town ever wanted gypsies around. They were thieves and beggars and the strangest things would always happen when they came around. Strange accidents and people dying for no apparent reason. They were all jinxed and meant bad luck for a town. That is what the rumor said, that is.

And there was always some truth to a rumor. No one knew that better than Mrs. Müller.

“We sure don’t want people like them around in our nice neighborhood,” Mrs. Nieberman said.

“No, that would certainly be an atrocity,” Mrs. Hagenhoff said without even knowing what the word meant.

“I will be damned if I am gonna just stand here and watch as thieves and beggars take over this town,” Mrs. Müller said while she walked with determination in the direction of the convoy. She knocked at the window of the front caravan and put her hands at the waist she used to have when she was younger.

A young girl bearing a red sparkling scarf in her hair and golden earrings stuck her head out. She was no more than a child the shocked crowd realized.

“Yes?” She smiled with bright white teeth in her beautiful and exotic looking dark face.

Mrs. Müller was now so upset she snorted at the girl.

“Young lady. We wish to talk to your parents immediately,” she said and looked back at the crowd of women with some satisfaction. If anyone could bring things back to order, it was her.

“But I don’t have any parents,” the girl answered with another smile. “I am an orphan.”

A sound of shock went through the crowd. Who were these people? they all seemed to be thinking. Who was taking care of that child when she didn’t have any parents? She should at least be at an orphanage where they would know how to take proper care of a situation like hers.

 “But sweet, little child, who is taking care of you then?” Mrs. Müller asked.

“No one and everyone. We all take care of each other in our tribe.”

Another wave of shock went through the crowd.

“But certainly someone must be making the rules. You are, after all, only a child. Now tell me, who is making the rules in your tribe. Who is in charge?”

The young girl pointed at the Schneider’s house where the door all of a sudden opened. Out came Mr. and Mrs. Schneider along with their daughter and two very strange looking people. A man and a woman as far as Mrs. Müller could tell. He was tall and dramatic in his appearance. She found his eyes wild and cruel and his right hand was constantly resting on the grip of a short curved dagger in his belt. On the top of his head he wore a red scarf around his black curly hair. His white shirt was opened so his black-haired chest with golden necklaces showed.

Mrs. Müller put a hand on her chest.

“My oh my,” she said and caught her breath.

The woman was small and just as dark as him. She wore a sparkling dress with thousands of colors and patterns in it. Her scarf was purple and she, too, wore golden earrings. She was holding the little girl’s hand while talking to the Schneiders.

Mrs. Müller stretched her neck in order to better hear what was said when Mrs. Schneider kneeled in front of little Sara.

“You be a good girl now,” she said. “This is your real mother and father and they will bring you back to your people now.”

“But Mom …”

“Shh, now do as I tell you," she said with a thick voice. "These are your real parents. We have just been borrowing you. They love you and will take good care of you. It is the best for all of us. These are hard times for everybody, remember? With the three babies in the house we have too many mouths to fill.”

Now Mrs. Schneider was crying overtly.

“You are so strong, Sara. You will be fine. It is the best for you to go back to who you really are. We will miss you but maybe you will come back and visit one day?”

Sara threw herself in Mrs. Schneider’s arms and hugged her for quite a while.

“Now go on,” Mrs. Schneider said in tears and the strange woman and man started walking with Sara between them, both of them holding her hands.

Sara looked back just before she entered the caravan with her new parents and waved at Mr. and Mrs. Schneider. She too had tears in her young eyes.

Mrs. Müller and the other women from Reidenburgerstrasse had to move away from the street in order for the caravan wagons to leave with all their noisy and messy people and animals inside of them.

Later on, the women would loudly agree that this day wasn’t one of the proudest in the history of Reidenburgerstrasse, but silently in their minds they would all think the same.

That it definitely was the most exciting.

THE ROMANI

In the caravan
, Sara was greeted by a lot of small curious faces. They all belonged to children of different ages and all were staring at her. For the first time in her life she felt a little shy. She kept wondering why all those faces were looking at her.

She sat down on a small chair, and the man and woman that had come to get her got on top of the wagon. She heard a sound like someone yelling and then they were moving.

After they had driven for awhile, a little girl came to Sara inside the caravan. She looked at the other girls behind her before she had the courage to address Sara.

“Is it true? Are you really her?” she asked.

Sara had no answer to that.

“Am I really who?”

The little girl got shy and looked at the floor. An older girl took over.

“Are you really the great Moeselman’s daughter?”

“How should I know?”

 The girls in the caravan all looked at each other. Could it be that she didn’t even know who she was? they murmured.

She didn’t, but soon her new parents would tell her. As they stopped for the night in a clearing in the forest, her mother and father approached her while she was sitting by the bonfire and eating her meat. (It had been a while since she last tasted real meat, so she was really enjoying it.)

“You like your new home?” her father asked. He was the one named Moeselman she now knew. That was his gypsy name. Her mother’s was Settela.

Sara looked around to try and find the home he was talking about when he grabbed her chin and turned her head so she was looking at him.

He smiled and put a fist to his heart.

“This is home,” he said while pounding the fist to his chest. “We don’t need walls to keep us from the world. We don’t need a yard and a picket fence. Home is where the heart is.”

Sara ate some more of the meat while staring at him.

“Because you are gypsies?” she asked.

“Romani,” Settela corrected her with a mild voice. “We don’t like to be called gypsies, we are Romani and proud of it.”

Sara looked at her.

“What is the difference?” She asked.

Settela and Moeselman looked at each other and then they burst into a huge laughter.

“You are so right, in the end it really doesn’t matter what we are called” Settela said. “But gypsy is a name the world has given us and Romani is what we call ourselves. That is our origin. That is your origin, too.”

Sara looked at her with great confusion.

“But I thought I was German?”

Moeselman grumbled, for he didn’t like the fact that his daughter had to grow up among the Germans while their leader was trying to eradicate the Romani people, but he had to admit that it was the best hiding place. Then Settela explained.

“Yes, sweetheart, of course you would think so. But the thing is … during the war being a Romani was really difficult. Some people tried to have us all killed. And a lot were killed. So we decided to hide you from those people and gave you to the Schneider family. But we always knew we would come and get you back one day.”

“But you didn’t hide those other kids?”

“They are not daughters of the great Moeselman. They are not going to be leader of the tribe one day. You are, since you are Moeselman’s first and only child. You are going to be the first woman to lead this tribe.”