Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

In truth by that time Finbar Foley had led the gypsies on the long walk south out of the snowy mountains and bartered with what things they had and those they found for the timber that made new caravans. It took some time before they were again ready and equipped to travel, but the pause was welcome to all.

During those weeks they did not move on. Now their leader, Fin-bar imagined he must announce to them a destination, but he himself had no clear idea of one. Not being of gypsy blood, he did not understand that such was not required of him; the gypsies never journeyed toward an end, for motion was an end in itself Nonetheless, wrongly believing that this was needed to validate his leadership, Fin-bar Foley sought to give it to them. So, one dawn, he rose from beneath the blanket where Cait the mer-girl was grown large with his twin daughters and he walked out where the embers of the fire smoked and called the gypsies to rise and move on. They did so, coming to life in the grey light and tackling up new horses for the way ahead. When they were ready, Finbar looked along the line of them and felt a surge of pride as if he were some valiant captain trooping into battle. He sat beside Cait in the front caravan and snapped the reins and drove the line of caravans down across that country that lay to the south of the Maritime Alps. Nor by then was Cait the only pregnant woman among them, for in the weeks that followed, one by one of all of those within the perimeters of childbearing years announced themselves to be expecting, as well as two prune-faced women who boasted they were a youthful sixty. Finbar did not announce then that he would bring them to Bohemia, or make speeches on the notion of a homeland, though these loomed in his mind. Indeed, he did not know where Bohemia was but had like others before him fallen upon the idea of its being a spiritual home for gypsies and did not for one moment imagine that he could be wrong. Still, he kept the destination secret. He told the gypsies only that he would bring them to a place where they belonged, and where the weathers would be clement and the people welcome them like cousins lost.

That this was a fantasy of his own making, and born out of the need to believe such a place would exist for his own children, did not stop him from believing in it. Nor did he realize how his hopes fell into the selfsame shapes as those once dreamed by his father.

So, travelling with care for the pregnant, and with such slow indolence that measurement of progress was impossible, the gypsies moved through Liguria like an oil of olives. They arrived at the banks of the river Po and followed along them and bargained and traded with villagers there and heard tales of wars and battles and the affairs of a world in which they were no more than shadows. One of the older women who was expecting her fourteenth child had a vision there of yellow birds flying in her stomach. A night later three more of the women had the same dream and two nights later six more. They were uncertain of its provenance, but to set at ease their wives and to make real the thing imagined, their husbands went and returned with a dozen canaries in wicker cages. The visions vanished then and the canaries hung outside the front hoop of the caravans and rocked there on perches and sang sometimes to the swaying of those roads. It was discovered the birds’ humour foretold the weather; how they sang or perched or flew predicted the rains or wind to come, and the men, learning of this, were pleased to pretend they had known all along and not bargained for the birds merely to placate their women.

Before it reached the sea, the gypsies left the Po and turned northward around the Gulf of Venice. It was the summer of that year. The canaries sang sweetest and the sun shone and the swollen women took to lying in the grass and lifting their shirts and smocks and exposing to the warmth the pale orbs of their future progeny. They said the sun would give them sons. Leaving them so, Finbar sailed to the fabled city that was a thousand islands, and there in the shop of old Fabrizio Benardi he saw his first map of the known world. He could not believe it. He unfurled it across four tabletops and moved his palms outward upon it like two flat-bottomed boats travelling in opposite directions and revealing places of which he had never heard. Old Benardi, who himself had never left Venice, had purchased the map from a navigator who had arrived from the Indies. He had been assured the map was an authentic and accurate rendering even to the point of those islets previously considered too minor to merit inclusion. On the map, Fin-bar studied the place where they were, and where he imagined Bohernia to be. It was not so very far away. His sons could be born there, he thought at once, and the sons and daughters of all those in the caravans. It would be a glorious new beginning. He lifted his hands and the world rolled closed. He spun around in the dust that flew upward off all the handmade papers and scrolls of that shop and brought his face close to Benardi’s. Finbar Foley was still an impressive figure, the breadth of his chest, the thickness of his eyebrows, his firm chin and fiery stare all lent him the air of one not to be denied. He told the Venetian he had to have the world, and he offered him gold coins he did not possess for it. The old man agreed the sale, and that afternoon Finbar Foley stole the coins at knifepoint from a Jew he followed from the Rialto. He returned to Benardi’s in haste and later took the map back to the gypsies, along with several bottles of ink, some sheets of yellowish paper, and a half dozen masks that Fabrizio Benardi thrust toward him when he caught the scent of violent desperation burning the dust. That evening the gypsy men gathered to look at the map but to Finbar’s surprise were only briefly interested in it. They could not match the shape of the lines drawn on the paper with the endless terrain they had traversed back and forth in their lifetimes. It was no more like the world than the sketch of a man was like a man. Though Finbar could not see it, it made less of the gypsies’ one great wealth, their intimate and unrivalled knowledge of all the richly varied landscapes that existed. For they alone knew the world.

Despite their indifference, later that night Finbar showed the map to Cait with all the excitement of a New World discoverer. He fingered her their route through the mountains, and pointed the way ahead, and was too rapt in his own fervour to notice her brown eyes turning longingly back to fix on that western island where they had begun.

When they left there, the caravans and wagons creaked under the weight of the pregnancies. They passed northward through lands governed by Hapsburgs and met old peasants on the roadside who asked them what the world was like to the south. There were some among them who remembered the armies of Napoleon and when those same places they stood in had been renamed the Illyrian provinces. And they told of how the maps of that country had been drawn and redrawn many times and the people lived on hungry among the linden trees no matter who their sovereign. And the gypsies agreed and understood this and took their time there and shared what they had and sang songs in the night ancient and sorrowful.

At last the caravans moved on and the summer passed into an autumn mild and tender. Misreading the map, Finbar took them east across the great Hungarian plain when they should have gone north. He allowed the road to take them and they journeyed ever more slowly as the women’s pregnancies neared their time. In the vast wilderness of steppe they saw none but foxes and trundling boars and herds of deer standing or moving like dancers to some music in the wind. It was a place great and empty, and crossing it, the gypsies felt the smallness of themselves and their caravan as though all others in the world had perished. Even the canaries hushed then. The wheels rattled. The birds sat on their perches and swayed. Finally they came to the shores of the huge Lake Balaton. And, as though there were some ancient folkloric mechanism that operated there, once they saw and heard the lapping of the waves the women’s waters broke in unison. Their cries rang out from each of the caravans and at once the canaries burst into song. The gypsies made quick camp and the men lit fires and stood about them and were silent while the few women who were not with child hurried back and forth with cloths bloodied and sleeves rolled. The night fell like a velvet curtain and while the women cried and the men waited stars were spun upon it out of the dark.