But now I picked up the confetti of candy-red satin and apple-red velvet and blood-red beads.
I wrapped them in crumpled tissue paper, my heart ringing with what I now knew.
I would never let this happen again.
When I grew up, I would never let my family, or myself, be where my grandparents had just been, having to cut our own work into pieces so someone else wouldn’t steal it.
I would never let this happen again.
And I kept those pieces as a reminder. I would find a way to make sure we never had to destroy something of ourselves just to stop other people from taking it.
Strasbourg, 1518
In the dark, all she has are her hands.
She wants to light a candle so badly she feels the ache of it in her fingers. With nothing but the faintest breath of moon outside, the darkness is so thick that Lala’s dress, her hair, her skin feel woven from night. But the sound of iron striking flint would wake her aunt as surely as a thief breaking the cellar door.
Lala pulls back the rushes, wild marjoram woven into the plaited mats to lessen the stale smell, and she unearths a wooden box.
If Tante Dorenia knew what Lala was doing, her glare would be enough to open the ground beneath her. Lala is sixteen now, a woman, old enough to know better than to take such risks.
Lala brushes off the lid, so no dirt will fall inside. It would seem a useless effort to anyone watching, anyone who could see her in the dark, since the box only holds more of the same. A scant handful of earth.
But this earth is worth every field in Alsace.
The sound of weight on the road—a crunching of rock, the give of the ground—startles Lala. Her eyes skim the parchment windows.
Her hands pause in the heart of the wooden box. The thrumming of blood at her throat grows hot. She cannot help the sense of having already been found out.
This box of earth is a sign of all they have hidden. To be caught would mean the loss of their home, their small trade of ink and dye, and far more. Perhaps no one would understand what Lala meant to do with this handful of earth, but that would be all the more dangerous. They would count the hiding of it beneath a rush floor as a sign of unknowable witchcraft.
It is the same reason Lala and Tante put away their secret altar, folding their best length of blue cloth, hiding the candles and dishes. If the magistrate’s men were ever of a mind to search houses, they could use it as evidence of whatever crime they liked.
The sound outside fades.
Lala’s heart quiets.
Nothing but an oxcart following the ruts in the road.
Lala’s fingers skim the inside of the box, the pale wood earth-darkened.
The soft creak of the ladder sounds above her.
“I have it,” she whispers as she hears Alifair transfer his weight to the floor.
He insists on going with her, and she is neither proud enough nor stupid enough to refuse. He already knows her secrets and Tante’s as well as they know his.
They go out into the night, and the farther they get from the house, the more that handful of ground turns heavy in Lala’s skirt. Its weight feels greater as she bends to pick the tiny wildflowers that flash in the dark.
She would have wished to do this in daylight, ribbons of sun gilding the earth from her mother’s and father’s graves. But with light, there would be the chance of questions, rumors.
What we are, Tante reminds her, they have made it a crime, wherever we go.
As though Lala could forget.
Lala follows Alifair, cutting only through land he knows. The flax fields, high with green-gold. The soft marshland. A sheep pasture owned by a man whose wife trades onions for Tante’s extra radishes. An orchard that hasn’t borne fruit since last winter’s frosts.
Alifair has always seen better in the dark than Lala. She imagines he learned growing up deep in the Black Forest, beech trees wreathing it in perpetual dusk. He crouches to pick meadow roses Lala can barely see. Their petals collect what little light there is, as though the moon is showing them to Alifair.
His sharp vision is something she has learned about him not only in the fields near their home, but in the minutes they’ve stolen in shadow. Last year, he started looking at her in a way that made her wonder if she should try kissing him again. When she did, the winter night was so dark that she made a mess of it, her lips meeting his jawline instead of his mouth, so it seemed more an odd greeting than a try at kissing him. But then his lips caught hers in a way so hard and decisive it showed his certainty about both her and the dark.
The damp grasses prickle Lala’s ankles. She lets the feeling chase off the memory of that kiss, the way his mouth took hold of hers.
The green ground offers a clean, sharp perfume alongside the stream. The ribbon of water catches the moon in time with its murmurs.
Lala draws the earth from beneath her underskirt. Alifair hands her the roses and then keeps a respectful distance.
This is the last of it, the ground she has kept, the packed earth she imagines still smelling of the lavender in her mother’s hair, and the knife her father kept in his boot, and the bitter salt of the fever that took them both. Every year, in the month that stole them, Lala has brought out a handful from the box, to loosen the world’s hold on their spirits.
A few years ago, in a thoughtful moment brought on by the coming of autumn, Tante Dorenia told her about how they once did this for all their dead. And Lala couldn’t sleep until she had resolved how to do it for Maman and Papa. Tradition would have called for it once, on the day of their burial. But it had been so long since her mother’s and father’s deaths, she worried it would take more than the one time.
She bends toward the stream and opens her hands. The flowers tumble away first, their sugar lacing the air. Then the earth twirls from her fingers.
She releases a long breath.
Now they will rest. Now her mother’s and father’s souls will be free from this ground, this life, from their own dream-troubled, salt-soaked deaths.
Lala prays over the flickering water, over the river stones grown cold in the evening.
As she opens her eyes, a flicker of motion draws her head up.
At first, she cannot catch it. She sees nothing but the dark trees and the distant road, worn down by carts and horses’ hooves.
But then Lala catches the streak of movement, the shape cut between the black trees.
The figure—a woman, Lala can tell by the kick of her apron and skirts—flails and writhes. She runs a few steps and then thrashes out in a way that looks caught between skipping and running.
Lala squints into the dark, trying to make out whether this woman is fleeing wolves or thieves.
Alifair inclines forward, and Lala knows by his posture that he means to help.
She lays a hand on his arm.
“No one can know we’re here,” she whispers.
“Then hide and I will help her.”
“You can’t. If anyone…”
She loses the end of the thought, both her and Alifair realizing, in the same moment, that the woman is not fleeing.
The woman throws her hands toward the moon, spinning in feverish motion.
“Is she…” Now it is Alifair who cannot complete his own thought.
Lala nods, half in confirmation and half in wonder. “Dancing.”
Emil
The turquoise of copper chloride. The bright blue of copper sulfate. The cherry-Coke red of cobalt chloride. Sometimes the things Emil took from the lab seemed more like paint pigments than chemicals.