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
