‘Yes, Sir.’
Calque glanced at Sabir, frowning. There was something still niggling him about Sabir’s part in the proceedings – but he couldn’t put his finger on it. With the eye-man still on the loose, however, any misgivings about Sabir could wait. The eye-man’s horse had turned up unexpectedly, in a lather, twenty minutes ago, a little less than five kilometres down the road to Port St-Louis. Could the eye-man really have escaped that easily? And with Macron’s bullet still inside him?
Calque signalled to one of his assistants for a cellphone. As he dialled, he glanced across at Sabir’s retreating back. The man was still holding out – that much was obvious. But why? For what? No one was accusing him of anything. And he didn’t look the sort of a man to be consumed by thoughts of revenge.
‘Who found the horse?’ Calque angled his head towards the ground, as if he felt that such a movement would in some way improve reception – transform the cellphone back into its more efficient cousin, the landline. ‘Well put him on.’ He waited, his eyes drinking in the dawn-lit landscape. ‘Officer Michelot? Is that you? I want you to describe the condition of the horse to me.
Exactly as it was.’ Calque listened intently. ‘Was there blood on the horse’s flanks? Or on the saddle?’ Calque sucked a little air through his teeth. ‘Anything else you noticed? Anything at all? The reins, for instance? They were broken, you say? Could they have been broken by the horse treading on them after it had been abandoned?’ He paused. ‘What do you mean, how can you tell? It’s simple. If the reins are broken at their furthest extent, then it suggests that the horse trod on them. If they are broken farther up – at a weak point, say, or near the bit – then it means that the horse probably broke away from the eye-man and we still have the bastard inside our net. Did you check this out? No? Well go and check them this instant.’
68
Sergeant Spola had never been inside a gypsy caravan before. Even though this one was of the mechanised variety, he looked cautiously around himself, as if he had unexpectedly blundered his way on to an alien spaceship, rocketing towards a planet where intimate experiments were about to be conducted on his person.
Alexi was lying on the master bed, with his shirt off. The curandero was standing above him, a bunch of lighted twigs in one hand, chanting. The room was suffused with the scent of burning sage and rosemary.
Spola screwed up his eyes against the acrid smoke.
‘What’s he doing?’
Yola, who was sitting on a chair near the bed, put a finger to her lips.
Spola had the good grace to hitch his shoulders apologetically and retreat outside.
Sabir hunched down beside Yola. He looked quizzically at her, but her concentration was all on Alexi. Without looking at him, she pointed briefly to her head and then to that of the curandero, making a circular movement with her hands to encompass both as one entity; to Sabir, she seemed to be implying that she was helping the curandero in some way, possibly along telepathic lines.
Sabir decided to let her get on with it. Alexi didn’t look good and Sabir made up his mind that once all the mumbo-jumbo was over, he would exert as much pressure as he reasonably could to persuade Yola to allow Alexi to be treated in a hospital.
The curandero laid his burning twigs aside in a dish and moved to the head of the bed. He took Alexi’s head in his hands and stood silently, with his eyes shut, in an attitude of intense concentration.
Sabir, who was not used to squatting, could feel his thighs beginning to constrict with the tension. He didn’t dare to move, though, for fear of breaking the curandero ’s trance. He glanced at Yola, hoping that she might somehow deduce his problem and offer him some guidance, but her gaze remained firmly fixed on the curandero.
Eventually, Sabir allowed himself to slide backwards down the wall of the caravan until he ended up with his rump on the floor and his legs stretched out beneath the bed. Nobody noticed him. He began to breathe more freely again. Then the cramp hit him.
Grasping his left thigh with both hands, he squeezed for all he was worth, writhing away from the bed, his teeth locked together in a rictus of pain. He wanted to yell, but didn’t dare to disrupt proceedings any further than he already had.
Like a plastic match unravelling, he turned first on to his front, one leg stretched out behind him and then scissored over on to his side when the cramp came back.
He was beyond caring what anybody else thought of him by this time and began to drag himself, like a slug, towards the door, beyond which the ever-watchful Sergeant Spola no doubt awaited him.
***
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disrupt proceedings like that. Only I got the cramp.’
Yola sat down beside him and began rubbing at his leg. Sabir was by now so far indoctrinated by gypsy custom that he looked guiltily around in case any of her women friends might see her and be outraged at her polluting – or being polluted by (he still didn’t quite understand which) – a gadje.
‘It’s all right. The curandero is very happy. You took away much of Alexi’s pain.’
‘ I took away Alexi’s pain? You’ve got to be joking.’
‘Yes. Under the curandero ’s hands it transferred itself to you. You must feel very close to Alexi. I had thought that it would transfer to me.’
Sabir was still in far too much pain to even consider laughing. ‘How long does this transfer last?’
‘Oh, a few minutes only. You are a…’ Yola hesitated.
‘No. Don’t tell me. A conduit?’
‘What is that?’
‘Something which leads to something else.’
She nodded. ‘Yes. You are a conduit. Unless the pain finds somewhere else to go, it will stay with Alexi. That was why I came to help. But the pain would not necessarily find me. It might find another target, that could not deal with it. Then it would return, much stronger and Alexi might die. The curandero is very pleased with you.’
‘That’s big of him.’
‘No. Don’t laugh, Damo. The curandero is a wise man. He is my teacher. But he says you, too, could be a curandero. A shaman. You have the capacity inside you. You only lack the will.’
‘And any understanding of what the heck he’s talking about.’
Yola smiled. She was beginning to understand Sabir’s gadje diffi dence by this time and to attribute less importance to it than heretofore. ‘When he’s finished with Alexi he wants to give you something.’
‘Give me something?’
‘Yes. I have explained to him about the eye-man and he is very worried for us both. He picked up the evil on me that the eye-man left and he has cleaned me free of it.’
‘What? Like he was cleaning Alexi?’
‘Yes. The Spanish call it una limpia – a cleansing. We don’t really have a word for it, as no gypsy can be cleaned of their ability to pollute. But evil that another has planted on us may be taken off.’
‘And the eye-man planted evil on you?’
‘No. But his own evil was so strong that his connection to me – the relationship he forged with me when I was standing on the stool, waiting to be hanged – this was enough to pollute me.’
Sabir shook his head in disbelief.
‘Listen, Damo. The eye-man read a story to me at that time. A story of a woman being tortured by the Inquisition. This was a terrible thing to hear. The evil of this story settled on me like dust. I could feel it sifting through the bag covering my head and settling about my shoulders. I could feel it eating into my soul and blanketing it with darkness. If I had died straight after hearing this story, as the eye-man intended, my lacha would have been tarnished and my soul would have been sick before God.’
‘Yola, how can someone else do such a thing to you? Your soul is your own.’
‘Oh, no, Damo. No. No one owns their own soul. It is a gift. A part of God. And we take it back to Him when we die and offer it to Him as our sacrifice. Then we are judged on the strength of it. That is why the curandero needed to clean me. God works through him, without the curandero knowing how or why it is done, or why he has been chosen – just as God worked through the prophet Nostradamus, who was chosen to see things that other men could not. The same thing happened with your cramp. God chose you to take Alexi’s pain away. He will be well now. You’ve no need to worry anymore.’
Sabir watched Yola walk away from him and back towards the caravan.
One day he’d understand all this, surely? One day he’d re-attain the simplicity that he’d lost as a child – the simplicity that these people he loved appeared to have held on to in the face of every last obstruction that life cared to put in their way.
69
The curandero still travelled by horse-drawn caravan. He had found himself a pitch at a riding stables about two kilometres out of town, on the right bank of the Etang des Launes. His horse presented an unnatural slash of brown amidst the predominant white of the gardien ponies in the corral.
As Sabir approached, the curandero pointed to the ground outside his front steps. Yola was already squatting there, an expectant expression on her face.
Sabir gave a vehement shake of the head, one eye still fixed on Sergeant Spola who was lurking near his car at the roadside. ‘I’m not squatting anywhere. Believe me. I’ve never had cramp like that before. And I don’t want it again.’
The curandero hesitated, smiling, as if he didn’t quite understand Sabir’s use of the vernacular. Then he disappeared inside the caravan.
‘He understands French, doesn’t he?’ Sabir whispered.
‘He speaks Sinto, Calo, Spanish and Romani-Cib. French is his fifth language.’ Yola looked embarrassed, as if the mere subject of how much the curandero might or might not be able to understand was subtly out of order.
‘What’s his name?’
‘You never use his name. People just call him curandero. When he became a shaman, he lost his name, his family and all that connected him to the tribe.’
‘But I thought you said he was the cousin of your father?’
‘He is the cousin of my father. He was that before he became a shaman. And my father is dead. So he is still the cousin of my father. They called him Alfego, back then. Alfego Zenavir. Now he is simply curandero.’
Sabir was saved from further bewilderment when the curandero re-emerged, brandishing a stool. ‘Sit. Sit here. No cramp. Ha ha!’
‘Yes. No cramp. Cramp a bad thing.’ Sabir looked uncertainly at the stool.
‘Bad thing? No. A good thing. You take pain from Alexi. Very good. Cramp not hurt you. You a young man. Soon gone.’
‘Soon gone. Yes.’ Sabir didn’t sound convinced. He backed on to the stool, stretching his leg carefully out ahead of him like a gout victim.
‘You married already?’
Sabir glanced at Yola, unsure what the curandero was getting at. But Yola was doing her usual trick of concentrating intensely on the curandero and pointedly refusing to notice any strategies Sabir might care to use to gain her attention.
‘No. Not married. No.’
‘Good. Good. This is good. A shaman should never marry.’
‘But I’m not a shaman.’
‘Not yet. Not yet. Ho ho.’
Sabir was beginning to wonder whether the curandero might not in fact be short of a few marbles – but the stern expression on Yola’s face was enough to disabuse him of that notion.
After a short pause for prayer, the curandero felt inside his shirt and drew out a necklet, which he placed around Yola’s neck. He touched her once with his finger, along the parting of her hair. Sabir realised that he was speaking to her in Sinto.
Then the curandero moved across to him. After another pause for prayer, the man felt around inside his shirt and drew out a second necklet. He placed it around Sabir’s neck and then took Sabir’s head in both his hands. He stood for a long time, his eyes shut, holding Sabir’s head. After a while Sabir felt his eyes closing and a rather comforting darkness obtrude itself upon the surrounding day.
With no apparent effort, Sabir suddenly found himself watching the back of his own eyes – rather as an intruder in a cinema might find himself staring at the reverse image on the rear of a projection screen. First, the approaching darkness turned to a roseate hue, like water that has been imbrued with blood. Then a tiny face seemed to form itself a long way away from him. As he watched, the face slowly began to approach, gaining in precision the closer it came, until Sabir was able to make out his own features clearly imprinted on its physiognomy. The face came closer still, until it passed clean through the notional screen in front of him, to disappear via the rear of Sabir’s own head.
The curandero moved away from him, nodding in satisfaction.
Sabir opened his eyes as wide as they would go. He felt tempted to stretch himself – rather like a cormorant drying its wings on a rock – but for some reason he felt physically abashed in front of the curandero and contented himself with a series of small circular movements of the shoulders. ‘I saw my own face approaching me. Then it seemed to pass right through me. Is that normal?’
The curandero nodded again, as if what Sabir said did not surprise him. But he seemed in no mood to speak.
‘What is this?’ Sabir pointed to the necklet resting just above his sternum.
‘Samana’s daughter will tell you. I am tired. I will sleep.’ The curandero raised a hand in farewell and ducked in through the doorway of his caravan.
Sabir glanced down at Yola to see what effect the curandero’s strange behaviour might be having on her. To his astonishment, she was crying. ‘What is it? What did he say to you?’
Yola shook her head. She ran the back of her hand across her eyes like a child.
‘Come on. Please tell me. I’m completely out of my depth here. That much must be obvious.’
Yola sighed. She took a deep breath. ‘The curandero told me that I would never make a shamanka. That God had chosen another path for me – a path that was harder to accept, more humbling and with no certainty of achievement. That I wasn’t to question this path in any way. I was simply to follow it.’