How Huge the Night

chapter 16





Woman





The younger of the dark women was Marita. Strong cheekbones and flashing black eyes. Then there was the old one, whom everyone called Grandmother, and obeyed. Gustav was in awe of her. When they’d first come to get Niko, Grandmother had slung her over her shoulder—“like a sack of potatoes, Nina!”—and carried her to the camp.

It was Grandmother who brought her the dress.

She laid it on the foot of the bed and stood there, fixing Niko with a sharp look from her good eye, and said something extremely commanding in Romany. Then in Italian, which didn’t help. Still, the voice and the dress said it: You’re all better. Get dressed. Now.

“Gustav,” Niko whispered. “What’s Italian for pants?”

“Bit late to fool ’em now.”

“Gustav, I mean it. I’m not wearing that thing.”

Gustav cleared his throat, said something halting in Italian. The old woman snapped out something in Italian or Romany or both about how she’d have no girl wearing pants in her wagon or some such thing and dropped a commanding finger at the dress, and Niko folded her arms and the old woman started shouting. Niko sat up in bed and shouted back in Yiddish. “My father is dead! You hear? He’s dead, and he told me to cut my hair and burn my papers and call myself Niko, and you people may have saved my life, but you’re not my father and you’re not my mother either! I’ve done what my father told me since the day I left home, and that saved my life too, so I don’t want to hear what a nice girl does or doesn’t wear, I want my pants!” The old woman was looking at her with hard, shocked, angry eyes, and Niko’s eyes blazed back at her. Gustav was staring at Niko, his mouth open, something oddly like joy in his face. The children were staring too. Marita stood in the doorway, her dark eyes bright. Then she was gone.

Marita came back with Niko’s old pants, clean, off the line. Grandmother turned and left. Gustav left too. Marita gave Niko a long look, opened a drawer, and pulled out the long band of cloth Niko had used to wrap around her chest. Clean and folded. Her mouth fell open at the sight.

Marita smiled.





She was well. She was Niko. She walked on her crutches beside the wagons with Gustav, hearing the horses’ harnesses jangle, breathing the cold clean air. She sat inside the wagons, rocking with their movement, playing with the children. “What’s this?” she would ask in Italian. “Cos’ è?” And Drina and little Mari would laugh and tell her, and she would repeat it and they would laugh again. She shared their mattress at night; Marita was their mother; Marita, with her deep black eyes and her loud laugh, who had showed her how to tie the cloth round her chest twice as tight as before. Marita who had saved her life.

When the wagons stopped, Marita would clap her hands and marshal her children: Gustav and the boys to go fetch firewood, Niko and the girls to chop potatoes, vegetables, anything—meat if they were lucky—into the big soup pot over the fire. And it was by Marita’s campfire they sat when they were done, and warmed their feet and ate their fill. And people came and went around them, dozens of people old and young, sitting on folding chairs and logs and the ground, laughing and talking in Italian and Romany and both, interrupting each other, slapping each other on the back, their laughing faces lit by the fire. And then maybe someone would start singing. And the women would jump up and dance, fast and faster, graceful and wild. Sometimes they almost made Niko want to be a girl.