Ascension

  He knows that the wind that just hit him has caused one of the towers to sway towards the other, slackening the wire. He instantly prepares himself for the wire’s imminent tightening. He bends his knees and drops his arms, lowering his centre of gravity: there is a great danger of his being tossed into the air, which would be very difficult to recover from. Of course, there is also the danger that the wire might snap, but if that happened there’d be nothing Salvo could do. It would be over.

  The wire comes taut with a crack that cuts through the air. As much as he tries to hold to the wire, he can’t. He doesn’t panic when he feels the air under his feet. With honed reflexes he straightens his body and feels his upward momentum halt. For the tiniest part of a moment he is motionless, hanging in mid-air six inches above the wire, nearly fourteen hundred feet above the ground. Then he is moving downward and his feet connect with the wire. He bends at the knees, and every part of his body—from his toes up through his ankles, shins, thighs, into his stomach and chest, arms, neck and head—works to buoy his balance and keep him upright. Even his breathing plays a part in his struggle.

  All Salvo is aware of is his muscles tensing and relaxing, and the only sound he hears is the coursing of his blood. There is no past, no future, only this fraction of a second, and then this one and then this one. In four seconds Salvo lives more than many people do in a lifetime, with a singular purpose few can comprehend. He does not think; he does not even start to think. His survival depends on reflex, training and luck.

  Reflex and training he has. Luck, however, does not seem to be on his side today. Just as he feels his balance returning, just as it seems as though the situation is once again under control, his left foot slips off the wire. He is fast to act, and he manages to recover somewhat but not completely. His right leg is bent impossibly at the knee; his left hangs orphaned in the air.

  He freezes, considering his options. Just don’t move, he tells himself. There are things that can be done. He can try and lower himself even more, rest his pole on the wire and lift his left leg. Or he can try to stand, using all his strength to force his right leg to straighten.

  Neither option offers any guarantees. If he tries to stand up and doesn’t have the strength, he will topple. If he tries to lower himself onto the wire and a stong gust of wind comes before he is ready, he will be blown off. Better to go to the wire, he decides. At least that way if he fails, he can always grab the wire.

  Slowly, with great care, Salvo lowers his body. His right leg feels as though it is being burned with a torch. He can hardly keep his grip on his pole. His jaws are clenched so tightly he can hear his teeth grinding against each other, and his vision begins to blur. The pressure in his arms is relieved as the pole comes to rest on the wire, and as his left knee rises to the wire, the pain in his right leg lessens. For the next few seconds he rests. Do not stay here too long, he thinks, knowing that his right leg will cramp if he doesn’t stand up soon.

  He exhales, feels his lungs burn as the air escapes, and breathes in deeply, summoning all his remaining strength. There’s not much left, he knows. Better make good on what’s there. If I can stand up, I’ll be fine, he thinks. Just stand.

  And so he stands. It isn’t as hard as he expected; the wire has become solid under his feet, and the wind is gone. High above, the clouds have parted slightly, and a weak beam of sunlight streams down onto the wire in front of him. He confidently steps into the light, scanning the horizon. He is so far above the skyline of New York City, it seems small and insignificant from where he stands. Steel and bricks and concrete are reduced to lumps in a child’s sandbox.

  Salvo takes a step, then another. The wire feels good, like a familiar warm coat, and he is glad to be where he is. Fear has left him completely. He has faced the worst and has not fallen. That’s good, but don’t get too happy, a voice inside him says. You’re not on the other side yet.

  He pushes the euphoria to the back of his mind. There will be plenty of time for celebration later. He won’t think of it again until he’s down in the trailer with Anna, drinking a rye whisky.

  He pauses on the wire, centring his balance, adjusting his grip on the balancing pole. He catches a whiff of baby powder but ignores it, stopping memory from invading his focus. He takes a slow step forward, settles himself and lifts his foot to step again. At that precise moment, the wire drops once more. As he follows the wire downward, the wind hits him like a wave, more than he can handle. When the wire springs up he does not go with it. He pitches to the side, his left leg completely off the wire. He feels the wire snap into the back of his right knee and buttock, and his pole twists far to the side. He can hardly hold it and then his fingers release and the pole is no longer in his hands. His hands reach blindly for the wire, and somehow he manages to clutch it and capture the falling pole between his forearms. Whatever happens, he believes he must not lose the pole. His belief is pure instinct; at this point the pole is irrelevant, but Salvo has been walking the wire for so long that reflex overrides logic. He can hold onto the wire or hold onto the pole, but not both.

  His body corkscrews further to the side, and now only his right calf is on the wire, now only his ankle. Salvo is off the wire. He is falling. In his arms he still clutches the balancing pole.

  He knows instantly that he’s falling, he’s dead. He isn’t shocked and he isn’t afraid. Yet as he falls, he remains focused on one final task. He twists and writhes, hands still tight around his balancing pole, manoeuvring his feet so that they are beneath him, fighting to stay vertical. In the many still photographs that are taken of him as he falls, it appears almost as though he is still on the wire.

  He remembers a Romany proverb his father would mutter in times of hardship: Bury me standing. I’ve spent my whole life on my knees. Salvo has a different idea, though, one he has kept in the back of his mind nearly his whole life, one which will be his last earthly thought.

  Bury me however you do. I will die standing.

  TWO

  Salvo wiped the dust from his eyes and stepped quickly, trying to keep up with his father. It had been a hot summer, and the fields were as dry as the dusty road they were travelling. It was 1919, less than a year since the war had ended and the Romanian army had claimed this formerly Hungarian province. If four years of war hadn’t been hardship enough, now there was drought. The people of this rural section of Transylvania would have to go without for yet another winter.

  Salvo’s father seemed unconcerned at the prospect of things going from bad to worse. Miksa Ursari was a thin, gaunt man, with callused hands and scars on his back from having been beaten as a youth with a piece of barbed wire for stealing a chicken. He had indeed stolen the chicken, and hundreds more like it, and when the owners beat him he did not fight back, nor did he cry out. When they finally stopped, he got up and stole a horse and moved on to the next town. Revenge never even occurred to him. What would be the point? He was a Rom, a gypsy, and for a Rom the best way to get revenge was to live another day.

  All throughout Europe the Roma were scattered, some having settled into towns and villages, most remaining wanderers. Since the beginning of the war, more and more people had been displaced, more Roma found themselves refugees from battlefields, starvation and conscription. But now there were non-Roma fleeing as well. These gadje did not readily take to a life of transience. Miksa felt sorry for some of them. He had no idea what it was to live your whole life in one place and then to be cast out. Old women with appled faces and a lifetime of belongings behind them in ox carts—he felt worst for them. There were others, though, spiteful men with lowered eyebrows, whom he did not feel sorry for. Wherever he went there were gadje who would try to lay blame on those who had nothing to do with anything, and nearly always it fell upon the Roma. But while the Roma undoubtedly lied and stole, it was never on such a scale as to do any real harm, and they were certainly not the ones who had brought the war, any more than they were the ones who had lost it. Miksa Ursari knew that there were ma
ny people who were looking for an excuse to make scapegoats of the Roma, and he tried hard not to think about what might happen if there were too many of these people and they got too loud.

  So if Miksa seemed indifferent towards the drought, it was because he had other preoccupations. Still, he was far less concerned with the things on his mind than others were about the things on theirs. Life had always been hard; why should now be any different? There was no point in becoming obsessed with troubles. Even if life was mostly bad, there were still times that were not. And if you were to spend all your days worrying about the bad parts, you would miss the fleeting moments of good. Whether this was completely true Miksa was not sure, but he had learned that a man had to have a way of looking at things, and at twenty-seven, he thought his was as good as any.

  Nine-year-old Salvo tugged at his sleeve. Miksa knew he was walking fast, too fast for the boy to keep up, but he had pressing business waiting and could not afford to slow his pace.

  “Step quickly, Salvo, and I’ll tell you a story,” he said, knowing that his son would run to keep up before he would turn down the offer of a story.

  His father had judged correctly. Salvo picked up his pace, eager for one of his father’s tales. His father told the best stories of any Rom he knew, and the Roma told the best stories of anyone in the whole world. On clear evenings his father would often gather the family around a fire and tell them stories until Salvo had to fight to stay awake, and when he finally did slip into sleep, they continued in his dreams.

  Miksa Ursari swallowed, pushing the grit and dust down out of his mouth. He moistened his tongue and scratched at the stubble prickling his neck, racking his brain for a story to tell his son. He knew a lot of stories, but not all of them were good to tell an impressionable boy like Salvo, especially one who listened so intently and took every word as the truth. For a Rom, his son was ridiculously gullible. Miksa worried for the boy’s future.

  “Do you know why there are so many Roma in Hungary?” he asked the boy.

  “No,” Salvo answered.

  “Well then, I will tell you.” The tone of Miksa’s voice shifted from that of normal speech to that of a man who is telling a tale and doesn’t want to be interrupted. If there was one thing Miksa would not tolerate, it was being interrupted while telling a story. It caused him to lose his place and ruined any effect he was trying to create. There would be plenty of time for questions after the story was finished.

  “A long time ago, maybe before my great-great-grandfather was born, there were no Roma in Hungary. They passed through but they never stayed, finding themselves unwelcome. Then it came that one day a husband and wife and their baby were travelling through Hungary. Now, the husband, he was a great thief. He was so great a thief that it was said he could steal the tongue from your mouth while you were talking with him, and you would never even know it. That is what was said.

  “Well, he was a great thief all right, but not so great that he did not get caught. And the Hungarians who caught him took him to prison, leaving the young wife and her baby on their own in this strange land, with no horse and no ox and no mule. The wife walked for many days in the direction the Hungarians had taken her husband, the thief, hoping that if she could find the prison he was in, she could plead for his release.

  “On the third day of her walking she came to a village that was deserted. She was tired and her baby was hungry, so she went into a stable and sat on the straw floor and put the child to her breast to suckle. The wife was very beautiful, having had only this one child, and she had long, thick hair that she wore loose about her shoulders, where it fell down to the end of her back. She knew that it was dangerous for a beautiful young woman to travel alone, but she had a small knife and her husband had shown her how to use it, so she was not worried too much for her safety.

  “She was just falling into sleep when she heard a noise outside, and not wanting her child to cry and alert whatever was there, she put the child to her breast again. There was no noise for a very long time, and the young wife thought that maybe whatever it was had gone away. And then she saw a snake, a huge snake, slither through the door of the stable and right up to her.

  “This snake was enormous, long and wide as the forest’s oldest tree, long and wide and fat, with skin so tough and thick that an arrow could not pierce it. It had such an appetite that it had devoured everything in the village, the people and the livestock and the feed. Only a few lucky souls had managed to escape.

  “Most wives would shriek at the sight of such a beast, but this young woman was a Rom and the wife of a great thief, so she did no such thing. The snake slithered closer still, smelling her milk, wondering if it tasted as good as it smelled. The young wife recognized the look in the snake’s black eyes, and she knew what it was thinking, so she gently took the snake’s head and brought it to her breast, side by side with her own child’s.

  “There the snake suckled, so hard and furiously that the young wife thought it would pull the heart out of her, but she did not pull back. She gently stroked the snake’s head, caressing the scaly hide as if it were her own baby’s soft flesh.

  “After a time the snake fell asleep, and as he slept she reached into her skirts for her knife. She knew that her knife couldn’t cut into the snake’s strong skin, but she wasn’t deterred. She was the wife of a cunning man, and she thought of a plan. Taking great care that the snake did not stir from her breast, she took the knife and she cut off all of her beautiful, long hair. She braided the hair into a good strong rope. At her feet was a fetter used to secure the horses, which had all been eaten by the snake. She tied one end of the rope to the fetter, then took the other end and put it around the snake’s neck, tying the rope into a hangman’s noose.

  “In the morning the snake awoke, and he was hungry, and he drank from the young wife’s milk with an appetite suited to such a voracious creature. So intent was he on his breakfast that he did not feel the rope around his neck. The young wife stroked his head and did not flinch. She allowed the snake to drink its fill, knowing it would grow careless with its hunger satiated. After what was a long time to the young wife, the snake grew full and ceased to suckle.

  “In one quick motion the young wife gathered up her baby, pushed the snake from her breast and darted towards the back wall. The snake lunged at her, fangs bared, but it was not fast enough to catch her, its belly full of milk. When it reached the end of the rope, the hangman’s noose pulled tight around its neck. The beast thrashed wildly to free itself, and the young wife was afraid the rope of her hair would break. But the rope held, and the harder the snake struggled, the tighter the noose became. Slowly the snake began to die, his air choked out of him. At last, his tail grew still and his eyes bulged out, and he was dead.

  “When the gadje who had escaped from the snake found out what had happened, they were grateful, and they immediately found the prison where the young wife’s husband was being held and had him freed. They welcomed the Romany couple and their child into their village and told them they were welcome there always. But the husband, he was a thief, and he didn’t want to steal from people who had treated him and his wife and baby so well, so the family left the village.

  “When other Roma heard how well the people of Hungary had treated the great thief and his young wife, they wanted to go to that village. The thief, not wishing to see anything bad happen to the village, did not say exactly where it was, but still the Roma went to Hungary. And a great many of them are still looking for the village where the thief and his young wife had been treated so well, as it has been said that if that village could be found again, the Roma would cease to wander.”

  Miksa continued walking at his brisk pace, and Salvo was half walking, half running to keep up with him. All that could be heard was their feet thumping in the dust and a faint wind rustling in the brittle branches of the trees.

  When he was sure that the story was over, Salvo spoke, his breath laboured by the pace his father had set. “Did her h
air grow back?”

  “What?” Miksa’s mind had drifted to other matters.

  “The young wife. Did her hair grow back?”

  “Oh, yes. It grew back longer and thicker and darker than ever, and she was even more beautiful than before.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “He grew up to be a great thief, like his father.”

  “Did he ever go back to the village?”

  “No. Like his father, he was grateful to the people of the village and didn’t want to steal from them. Besides, he was only a baby when he had been there, and he didn’t know where the village was.”

  Salvo thought about this for a moment. He was sure that, as a baby, he had been places he could no longer remember. He had been many places, even as far as his aunt and uncle’s house in Budapest, which he could recall, but also into eastern Romania and Bulgaria, which he could not. So it made sense.

  “Do you know where the village is?”

  Miksa looked at the boy. Why did he have to take everything so literally? “No, I don’t.”

  “It isn’t where we live?”

  “No,” Miksa said. “It isn’t.”

  They continued down the road, past a ditch that had a dead goat half sticking out of it, its rotting legs grotesquely splayed.

  “What about the snake?”

  “It was dead. It was no more.”

  “Were there any more snakes like that?”

  “I don’t think so. If there were, they probably all got killed in the war.”

  Salvo was relieved. He did not like the thought of such a beast.

  SALVO WAS THE SECOND OLDEST of the three living children in his family; his older brother, András, was eleven years old and very strong for his age, able to lift a large wash basin full of water. There was also a baby girl, Etel. There would have been six children, but three had died when they were very small. Salvo had not known them at all, really, so he hadn’t been saddened by their deaths, but he heard the keening of his mother at night and he was sad for her. He also heard words like influenza and diphtheria, and he wondered if he too would die. He kept himself awake, afraid that when he woke up he would be dead, but he always went to sleep and he always woke up very much alive, so lately he worried less.