This Land is no Stranger Sarah Hollister (best biographies to read .txt) 📖

over the deaths of the traffickers. But sitting there in full view of a boy cut down before he had much time to live, Varzha was no longer certain of her own righteousness. Or of Moro Part’s.

Together she and Moro had brought back the body of poor Dollar Boy and disposed of the Baron’s old Scania truck. They watched the vehicle plunge into the icy waters of a lake somewhere in the fjäll. Varzha was unclear exactly where. The sight of the huge truck breaking through the ice was spectacular. Its destruction made the switch to the greater comfort in Moro’s well-heated Mercedes sedan all the more pleasurable.

So it was over, Varzha thought. But on their drive back to Stockholm, Moro began to speak about loose ends left untied. He reminded her that Jarl Voss still walked the earth.

“The Turkish traffickers, yes, they won’t bother us again,” Moro said. “But Jarl Voss escapes retribution. This is not a suitable outcome. This is not our way.”

    Varzha wondered if such a worm of a man as Jarl Voss was worth her anger and her effort. Moro often made reference to an ancient tradition among the Kalderaš Romani, to destroy enemies “unto the third or fourth generation,” as the Old Testament advised. He spoke about the Romans sowing the fields of Carthage with salt, in order that no phoenix would ever rise from those ashes.

For the time being, she and Moro Part sat quietly together, experiencing a pleasant air of exhaustion, grief and camaraderie. They idly watched the workers cleaning up the remnants of the gathering at the big dance hall. Finally she broke the silence.

“Why must it be unto the third or fourth generation?” she asked.

Sleepy Moro did not want to be disturbed. “Tomorrow, we talk.”

But Varzha felt the need to put her mind at ease. “Jarl Voss, well, he’s a gay boy, so he probably won’t have kids. How do we destroy him unto his children, much less his grandchildren and great-grandchildren?”

“You are thinking wrong,” Moro told her. He sat upright and stretched, then recited the Biblical passage. “For I am the Lord thy God, a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon their children unto the third and fourth generation, to them that hate me.”

“Third or fourth? Which is it?”

“I’ve always thought to err on the side of making certain,” Moro responded.

“So, okay, the fourth generation. But what does that mean in the case of Jarl Voss? I still don’t understand.”

“You have to go the other way,” Moro instructed her, interrupting his lesson with an enormous yawn. “Jarl Voss, he represents the first generation. Who is his father?”

“Elias Voss,” Varzha answered. Moro had schooled her in the Voss family’s genealogy.

“Yes, so that is what?”

“The second generation.” She marked the count on her fingers, careful to use the left hand in the way that her grandmother had taught her, then stopped—shaking her hands as if shaking off the old superstitions.

“And who is Elias Voss’s father?”

“Vilgot Voss,” she answered. “Vilgot Voss is the third generation.”

Here was the other side of Moro Part. Not the kindly man who watched over her and Vago and petted them and brought them pizza. This was the Old Testament voice from the past. Varzha came to the sickening realization that Moro did not believe the job was done.

“Yes, all right. And Vilgot Voss’s father?”

“Loke Voss, the fourth generation.”

“So there you have your answer.”

“Loke, the old man, he’s like a hundred years.”

“No one is too old to die. In fact quite the opposite. He should be dead already.”

The overhead lighting abruptly went out in the dance hall, so that the only illumination was the flicker of prayer candles. The sweet strains of a sad song floated over the dim interior. It was Vago Luna, playing his child-size violin, “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

Luri Kováč performed a lonely solo soft-shoe in the center of the empty, unlit floor. The few Romani women who still remained in the cavernous space began to weep again.

Moro held up the four fingers on his massive, paw-like left hand, folding them down one by one.

“Jarl Voss, Elias Voss, Vilgot Voss, Loke.”

45.

Human joy has many different expressions, but human grief is more single-minded.

Four hundred and fifty kilometers to the northwest of the Stockholm dance hall where the Romani memorialized Dollar Boy, another funeral gathering occurred with far different mourners in attendance. Though they were fewer and perhaps less exuberant than the Roma, the same black thread ran through the weave.

Jarl had not delivered his dead cousin to the Voss Medical Center in Sveg. Ylva kept yelling at him to go to the big hospital facility that the family had funded. Repeating the demand over and over, she was clearly off her nut. Go to the Medical Center, she kept insisting.

“Better a mortuary,” Jarl told her.

Ylva struck him in the mouth again. This time he slugged her back. Vanquished, the poor girl retreated, weeping, clutching Malte’s dead body in her arms. They drove like that for the rest of the way to Västvall.

Junior Voss had smoothly orchestrated the public announcement of his nephew Malte Voss’s death. A tragic accident, a bitterly ironic end to the life of such a brilliant marksman—that he would die by a stray rifle shot while tramping through his beloved forest at Västvall. The local constabulary accepted the version of events presented to them. The source of the bullet was delicately left uninvestigated. There were many hunters in the woods of the Voss estate that day. A communal bear hunt had been organized, with rounds going off all the time. Lynx, red fox, many hares and even a wild boar were taken, though no bear.

And tragically, supposedly, one human.

“He died doing what he loved.” What a vile formulation, thought Ylva Voss, the dead man’s unconsummated soul mate. Malte didn’t want to die doing what he loved. He didn’t want to die doing what he hated. He was thirty years old. He didn’t