Two men were digging a small hole near to an oak tree. Yola made the trip to the hole three times, laying one item neatly over another. Some children came up behind her and scattered kernels of corn over the heap. Then the men filled in the grave.
It was at that point that the women began wailing. The back hairs on Sabir’s head rose atavistically.
Yola fell to her knees beside her brother’s grave and began beating her breast with earth. Some women near her collapsed in jerking convulsions, their eyes turned up into their heads.
Four men, carrying a heavy stone between them, entered the clearing. The stone was placed on top of Samana’s grave. Other men then brought his clothes and his remaining possessions. These were heaped on to the stone and set alight.
The wails and lamentations of the women intensifi ed. Some of the men were drinking liquor from small glass bottles. Yola had torn off her blouse. She was striping her breasts and stomach with the earth and wine of her brother’s funeral libation.
Sabir felt miraculously disconnected from the realities of the twenty-first century. The scene in the clearing had taken on all the attributes of a demented bacchanal and the light from the candles and the fi res lit up the undersides of the trees, reflecting back off the transported faces below as if in a painting by Ensor.
The man who had presented Sabir’s testicles to the knife came over and offered him a drink from a pottery cup. ‘Go on. That’ll keep the mules away.’
‘The mules?’
The man shrugged. ‘They’re all around the clearing. Evil spirits. Trying to get in. Trying to take…’ He hesitated. ‘You know.’
Sabir swallowed the drink. He could feel the heat of the spirit burning away at his throat. Without knowing why, he found himself nodding. ‘I know.’
20
Achor Bale watched the funeral ceremony from the secure position he had established for himself inside the shelter of a small stand of trees. He was wearing a well-worn camoufl age suit, a Legionnaire’s cloth fatigue hat and a stippled veil. From even as close as three feet away, he was indistinguishable from the undergrowth surrounding him.
For the first time in three days he was entirely sure of the girl. Before that he hadn’t been able to approach close enough to the main camp to achieve a just perspective. Even when the girl had left the camp, he had been unable, to his own entire satisfaction, to pinpoint her. Now she had comprehensively outed herself, thanks to her conspicuous mourning for her lunatic brother’s immortal soul.
Bale allowed his mind to wander back to the room in which Samana had died. In all his extensive years of experience both inside and outside the Foreign Legion, Bale had never seen a man achieve the seemingly impossible task of killing himself whilst under total restraint. That old chestnut of swallowing the tongue presented insurmountable physical difficulties and no man, as far as he was aware, could think himself to death. But to use gravity like that and with such utter conviction? That took balls. So why would he do it? What had Samana been protecting?
He refocused the night glasses on the girl’s face. Wife? No. He thought not. Sister? Possibly. But it was impossible to tell in this light, with the con tortions she was engineering on her facial features.
He swung the glasses on to Sabir. Now there was a man who knew how to make himself indispensable. At first, when he had established Sabir’s presence as a certainty in the camp, Bale had been tempted to make another of his mischievous telephone calls to the police. Remove the man permanently from the scene without any unnecessary recourse to further violence. But Sabir was so unaware of himself and therefore such an easy man to follow, that it seemed something of a waste.
The girl, he knew, would be a far harder prospect. She belonged to a defined and close-knit society, which did not easily venture abroad. Lumber her with a well-meaning Sabir and the whole process became intrinsically simpler.
He would watch and wait, therefore. His moment – as it always did – would come.
21
‘Can you walk?’
‘Yes. I think I can manage.’
‘You must come with me, then.’
Sabir allowed Samana’s sister to ease him to his feet. He noticed that, although she was prepared to touch him with her hands, she made great play at avoiding any contact with his clothes.
‘Why do you do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘Veer away from me whenever I stumble – as if you’re afraid I might be diseased.’
‘I don’t want to pollute you.’
‘Pollute me?’
She nodded her head. ‘Gypsy women don’t touch men who are not their husbands, brothers, or sons.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because there are times when we are mahrime. Until I become a mother – and also at certain times of the month – I am unclean. I would dirty you.’
Shaking his head, Sabir allowed her to usher him towards the caravan entrance. ‘Is that why you always walk behind me, too?’
She nodded.
By this time Sabir was almost grateful for the perverse and mysterious attentions of the camp, for they had not only secured him from the notice of the French police and cured him from an illness which, on the run, may well have resulted in his death from septic shock – but they had also comprehensively upended his notions of sensible, rational behaviour. Everybody needed a stint in a gypsy camp, Sabir told himself wryly, to shake them out of their bourgeois complacency.
He had resigned himself, in consequence, to only eventually learning what they required from him, when and where it suited them to enlighten him. And he sensed, as he supported himself down the rootstock balustrade outside the caravan, that this moment had finally come.
Yola indicated that Sabir should accompany her towards a group of men seated on stools near the periphery of the camp. An enormously fat man with an outsized head, long black hair, copious moustaches, gold-capped front teeth and a ring on every finger, sat, in a much larger chair than everybody else’s, at the head of the convocation. He was wearing a generously cut, traditionally styled double-breasted suit, made notable only by an outlandish sequence of purple and green stripes laced into the fabric and by double-width zoot – suit lapels.
‘Who the heck’s that?’
‘The Bulibasha. He is our leader. Today he is to be Kristinori.’
‘Yola, for Christ’s sake…’
She stopped, still positioned just behind him and to the right. ‘The Chris you were searching for? That my brother spoke to you about? This is it.’
‘What? That’s Chris? The fat guy? The Chief?’
‘No. We hold a Kriss when something important must be decided. Notice is given and everyone attends from many kilometres around. Someone is elected Kristinori, or judge of the Kriss. In important cases, it is the Bulibasha who takes this role. Then there are two other judges – one for the side of the accuser and one for the person who
