Moro embarked on a campaign of education and indoctrination. He instructed Varzha in the ways of the world, which in his view existed entirely in black and white. Romani or gentile. Varzha’s people on one side, and on the other the “icke-romer,” as Moro sometimes called them, the non-Romani.
Vengeance figured prominently in Moro’s world-view. An eye for an eye. Accept no blow without responding two-fold, four-fold, a hundred-fold. For a long time, Varzha trusted Moro. He was a rock to which she clung. Now, feeling the sadness of Dollar Boy’s passing, gazing at his coffin only a few steps away, Varzha questioned everything she heard. Was vengeance the only way forward?
Moro did all the organizing of mourners, she knew. The gathering was as much to honor Moro’s reach and power as it was to mark Dollar Boy’s death. The influence of Moro Part as a Kalderaš godfather could be measured not only by the number of mourners, but also in the speed with which they came together. A mere two days after the violent “Battle of Hede River”—as Moro was calling it, half in jest—here they all were.
Varzha wore black. No more the white-faced wedding dress girl—she was through with begging—she wore a modest silk dress for the funeral. Gold coins draped around her neck, strung on a black ribbon. Considering her presence at Dollar Boy’s death, Varzha thought she might be treated as an honored guest at the funeral. It was not so. She felt shunted aside and ignored. Lash Mirga’s family sat beside the casket and greeted guests. She knew not one of them.
Varzha recalled the only image she had seen of the great poet and singer, Papuszka. In the photograph, her wise face showed its age. She still wore her hair in long braids. To Varzha, Papuszka was a vision of the past. To be honored, yes, but not imitated slavishly.
Times changed. Varzha was not the same person she had been only a few days before. The supposed changeless realities of the Romani had become transformed, whether her people admitted it or not. The rules for a Kalderaš “maiden” were changing—even that word sounded old-fashioned now. Varzha imagined the world opening for her like the petals of a rose. She wondered what possibilities might exist for her, beyond the lockstep inevitability of marriage and family.
Mooning around Varzha at the funeral, Luri Kováč represented another figure stubbornly holding onto the past. The tongue-tied street mendicant had often taken up a post on Drottninggatan near to where Vago and Varzha usually stood. He had cleaned himself up for the occasion of the funeral, wearing a bright red felt vest. Shaved, trimmed, and well groomed, he now less resembled a bear than a bull.
Wherever Varzha went at the gathering, there was Luri. When she approached the casket to lay down her dollar offering, just as she most wished to be most alone with her thoughts, Luri approached and hovered beside her like a bodyguard. Though she was fond of him, she did not need the protections he offered up. In particular she did not believe that Dollar Boy’s muló, his ghost, might haunt her in the future. She was through with such superstitions.
Romani caskets were always extra large, in order to fit the possessions of the dead. For the journey into the afterlife, Dollar Boy’s body was adorned with clothes, photographs, his beloved iPhone, a collection of knives, tufts of hair from the animals he took care of at the Baron’s estate.
All the items had been smuggled out of the barracks at Gammelhem without the Baron knowing anything. In fact, none of the non-Romani knew the true circumstances of Dollar Boy’s death, not the Baron or Magnusson, not the police, no one beyond Moro’s inner circle. He merely failed to appear at the estate, failed to return from his vet run to Uppsala, failed to bring back Fenrir. Such was the absolute separateness of the Romani world from the gadje that a huge funeral like this could go off unremarked and unnoticed by the Swedish community at large.
Varzha meditated bitterly on the injustice that no elaborate funeral arrangements had been mounted for Lel. Her sworn sister, and Dollar Boy’s intended, had perished by her own hand after enduring the physical limits of brutality at the hands of foreign beasts. Through no fault of her own, the girl had died in disgrace. The Romani community turned its back on her. Such was the way of the world, Varzha thought. Perhaps her bitterness was itself gadje, influenced by their ideas of equality and social justice.
Pallbearers loaded Lash Mirga’s casket into a station wagon to begin its long journey across the sea, finally to arrive at a cemetery in Romania. The women’s lamentations wound down and the vehicles began pulling away into the night. Varzha found Moro sitting alone in the dance hall. The man looked tired, dazed by alcohol, but supremely satisfied at the obvious success of the gathering. He did not remark upon her presence as she sat down next to him on one of the folding chairs set up for the funeral.
Varzha stayed silent. Moro sighed. She sighed. There existed a bond between them. Moro had physically removed her from the clutches of the traffickers. He had carried her past the ravaged bodies, in a place where the sharp scent of death hung like a fog. He had set fire to the Hede River cottage as they left it.
The big man had always been gentle and kind to her. She felt not a whiff of judgment from him. On the contrary, she suspected that the Romani godfather admired her. Yet Varzha had not been prepared for repercussions of that terrible, elemental, insistent word, vengeance. The two syllables could be spoken easily, tossed off, as if they meant no more than a blowing of the nose, or coughing—something done and quickly forgotten.
She did not grieve
