Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

Rains fell. One night, when all were sleeping, a gypsy by the name of Nimez hitched his caravan and dismantled its extension and moved down to the beginning of the line of caravans and made camp on the opposite side. When the others woke up he was already established in a superior trading position and had set out a stall of tin pots, ladles, bent spoons, two-pronged meat forks, prongs from meat forks, keys without locks, spikes, hooks, tin Vs of no particular usage, and other such oddments. He had put on a purple shirt and was standing before his caravan, looking down the road. Some of the gypsies were disgruntled but could not say so, for it would reduce them to no more than petty merchants. But the following night, several of the caravans were hitched and moved about in a dark ballet until the dawn arrived and found them settled in two lines either side of the muddied road. No one said a thing.

“Have you seen what has happened?” Finbar said to Cait as the girls rolled in her lap. “They have made a street.”

“What is so bad about that?” she asked him. “Don’t be afraid of the new thing. It might be wonderful.”

And he did not believe her, but neither did he know how or if he could stop it.

The place changed before his eyes. As the warm days of May came with hordes of flies, the pregnant women grew irritated under the canvas. They told their husbands they were useless. They heard that the wife of Nimez had cool silken sheets and Moroccan perfume. When their husbands lurched over in the bed to kiss them, the women shooed them away and said how could there be love in a place that smelled like horse manure. They asked why was it that their men were so slow to see the future. Did they want it to bite them in the ass? The women said the future had arrived. For, since the gypsies were no longer going to sell and barter and tell fortunes and stories and beg their living travelling miles along the roads, they must now make it from all that passed there along the road between the caravans. It was that simple.

In the morning the gypsies moved the horses farther toward the woods. By that afternoon any traveller coming down the road took two hours to pass the various booths and stalls and pitches and hagglers that were in his way. Some did not pass at all. So it was that there was soon a dealer in mirrors, a brewer of medicines, a maker of elaborate mechanical contraptions, a scarred man who offered body piercing, a trader in boar hide, a sharpener of knives, a woman who needled tattoos, and others various and sundry of that kind.

From these and others who were delayed along the way, the gypsies heard tales of the greater world. The travellers and traders spoke in all languages, and their meanings were not always clear. Nonetheless soon the gypsies understood that there was calamity everywhere, and they were better off staying there by the lake. The summer drew on. The street lengthened and the flies buzzed over it. Without anyone noticing it, the caravans themselves began to lose their origins. Nimez worked in the dark to build a kind of foundation beneath his and was one day able to sell the wheels to a passing Macedonian, who bore them off tied either side of two oxen. Other wheels were soon removed, too. Then, when a bearded Magyar stopped around the fireside one night and told them that in the empire of the Ottoman’s gypsies could still be bought and sold as slaves, the following day the horses were sold and the gypsies cut short their hair.

In all this trading, Finbar Foley took no part, and although still their leader he was soon the poorest among them. He kept his horse and did not remove the wheels from the caravan. In the mornings when he woke he caught in his nostrils the bitter smells of the street that were the smells of envy and avarice, and he was disgusted at what he had allowed to happen. He rose and took his daughters in his arms and took them off away around the lake, then to where the birds flocked and plashed in the waters and where things were simpler. He caught fish for their dinner, and they ate it every day, though Cait wondered why he did not barter some of it for the vegetables of Kaleth the grower.

“I will not,” he told her, “and I don’t want you to ask me again.”

“This time maybe your son will be born a fish!” she shouted back at him.

When the time for birth came it was not like the year before. This time there were many along the street who were able as midwives, and they visited in and out of the wheelless caravans without betraying excitement or tension, either deeply weary of this action of life or fearing displays of emotion would soil the decorum of that neighbourhood. Nor did the gypsy fathers come out and gather, but there was a muted and melancholic dullness to the street, and the births took place one by one without announcement or celebration. For his part, Fin-bar again went out to the great lake in the darkness and wished that his son would be born well. He dove into the waters and made a net of his shirt and swam there until he had a trout thrashing in the raised bag of it. He came up to the caravan, where Cait had finished her labour.

“Is he born a fish?” he asked.

And the whiskered midwife again came out and said: “He is not. But he has no penis.” She smiled the whiskered smile. “He has two heads.”

The second pair of twins was identical to the first. When he saw them for the first time, Finbar threw back his head and exploded with laughter. He laughed and Cait laughed and the first twins, Rose and Roisin, made a noise like laughter, too. He laughed until the tears ran from his eyes and he looked down at the two newborns and saw their red and tiny faces and said:

“Two more roses.”

And he kissed his two forefingers and flew them down unto the infants’ heads.

“Roseleen and Rosario.”

“Is there nothing else that springs from your penis but roses?” Cait asked him, and she smiled and his heart grew large inside him and might have taken the form of white birds with wide wings, for he felt then so light and full of hope.

The days thereafter were soft and warm. The street became a small village. But, without the constant journeying of the past, the gypsies grew restless easily in the mild late-summer nights and took to sudden knife fights for little reason. They visited the giant-bosomed whore, Cassandra, in the small hut she had erected at the end of the street, whose loose planks creaked and sometimes fell outward as her customers’ heads banged against them. Not to be offput, in midcoitus she called out to those who were queued outside to repair the damage unless they wanted their wives to see. While some ecstatic customer bobbed up and down on her chest, she made above his head the gestures of hammering to the gaping others and told them to hurry up in case she caught a cold and closed. After such loving then, the gypsies came out into the night with an empty dissatisfaction they could not explain and took to flashing their knives without provocation and spilling the innards of each other in the street. They did not fight to the death, but slashed at chests and midriffs and took a kind of perverse glee in how the blood slowly emerged like dye on the fine white shirts their opponents wore to visit Cassandra. To arrive in that street in the summer nights of that year, it might have seemed the gypsies were rivals for the love of a fabulous beauty and were engaged in a fight for her honour. But it was in fact not hers but their own honour that they sought to recapture. They knifed each other to be men, and whether you were the gypsy wounded or wounding did not really matter. In the daylight the scars were bandaged and masked and the little village seemed as normal. The bloodstains in the street vanished under the traffic and trade.

Now all of this Finbar Foley knew yet could do nothing to stop. He grew more and more isolated from those he was supposed to lead, and when the gypsies saw him in the street it seemed to him they lowered their eyes and busied themselves with merchandise. He said nothing to any of them now. In the evenings he did not unfurl the map of Benardi or mention again the notion of Bohemia. Secretly he allowed the first seeds of returning to his home country to settle in his mind, but he did not tell this to Cait, for he could not face the idea of such defeat. Then, one morning in the month of October, there arrived in the village a ghost whose name was Malone. He was a figure ancient and thin unto transparency, with baleful blue eyes and the bones of his cheeks like stumps polished and poking outward through the flimsiness of his flesh. His head was bruised and scabbed. As he walked down the street he blinked incessantly, and when the gypsy traders called to him of their wares he babbled words they did not understand and stepped on in his shoeless way. They cursed after him then and disregarded him further, though he stopped in the middle of the street and said something back to them which was again indecipherable and easily mistaken for ravings. Then he drifted on slow and ghostlike and without baggage and in the dim brown light of that season seemed little different from the dead.