Free Ascension by Steven Galloway

her, sort of, but it had been five years since he had last seen her, and even then he had only been four years old so he was not completely confident in his memory. There was no way to know if his aunt and uncle even lived in the same place. Salvo had, like any good Rom, correctly remembered the address on account of the street bearing the name of a musical instrument. The house number he had not been so sure about, but as soon as he saw the apartment building at 7 Viola Street, he knew he was where he was supposed to be.
    His aunt Esa had been a very beautiful woman when she had defied Romany law and custom by marrying a
gadjo
, hisuncle László. Her mother and father disowned her, as they were obliged by rule to do, and Esa moved to Budapest with her husband. When her parents died shortly before the war, she did not go back for their funerals. Her younger sister, Azira, Salvo’s mother, had ignored her banishment and visited her sister twice in Budapest, once before Salvo was born and the other time when he was four years old. Salvo’s father had accompanied them to Budapest, but he had refused to shake László Nagy’s hand and would not sleep under his roof. Salvo did not know whether his father’s hostility stemmed from personal reasons or if it was an attempt to avoid any possibility of the shame of László and Esa’s relationship attaching itself to the Ursari family.
    That mattered little now, though. It had taken Salvo two months to get to his aunt Esa’s house, and he didn’t care if she was an outcast or not. He remembered almost nothing of the journey; he had been in a haze of hunger and grief and fatigue. But he had made it. There had been times when he had thought he would not, but he was here and what would happen now did not matter because, finally, he had reached the end of his travels. Salvo fell to the ground.
    His aunt Esa stepped back, startled, one hand on the door. “What do you want?”
    Salvo was unable to speak. His mouth moved like that of a fish removed from water, gulping at the air.
    “What do you want?” his aunt repeated.
    Salvo closed his mouth and, with every ounce of strength he could muster, called up his voice. He received one word for his efforts. “Ursari,” he croaked.
    His aunt’s face remained blank for a moment, and then her eyes flashed recognition as she realized who he was. With astrength far beyond the usual capability of a woman of her size, she scooped Salvo into her arms and carried him upstairs.

    Esa Nagy tossed three large sausages into a pot of boiling water. She found sausages to be strangely ironic things. Take the intestine of an animal and stuff it with its own flesh or that of another animal. It was like you were eating a creature that had eaten itself. Still, sausages were cheap, easy to cook, and László couldn’t get enough of them. As hard as he was to please in nearly every other area, if she put a sausage on his plate he was happy.
    The winter of 1921 had been an unusually cold one, she reflected, glancing out the window of the kitchen. Or maybe it just seemed that way. After all, didn’t every winter seem colder than the last? That was, Esa decided, the very nature of winter. It had a way of making you think your suffering was new. A good trick, she thought. A very good trick.
    The children, Salvo and Leo, were in the front room playing. When Salvo had first arrived, Esa worried that they would not get along. More specifically, she worried that Salvo would treat Leo harshly because of his clubbed foot. She knew how the Roma treated those who were disfigured. She herself remembered how, when she had been a Romany child, she and her playmates had thrown rocks at a man with one eye. She did not wish for Leo to face that from Salvo.
    This had not proven to be the case, however. From the very beginning, Salvo had taken to protecting Leo from any special attention that might be accorded him due to his being a cripple. Three years his senior, Salvo