Chapter 1
I had never once wondered whether I was different from the other children. I was a child like any other. That’s what I believed. That’s what I felt. I had no way of knowing otherwise.
It took a small wooden stool, Michette, and a late spring day for me to understand.
I couldn’t have been more than five years old.
It’s strange how I don’t clearly remember faces, or exact words, but I remember the taste of cherries. So vividly that sometimes it feels as though I can still sense it now, somewhere on the roof of my mouth—sweet and slightly rough, with the hard pit pressing between my teeth. After that, I never liked cherries again. Or perhaps it wasn’t the cherries themselves that changed.
It was May. The cherry tree in the yard was full, dense, as if it could no longer contain itself. We sat beneath it, perched on a small three-legged stool made by old man Ispas, pecking at the fruit like two insatiable sparrows.
The dress I was wearing had belonged to Michette. It was old for her, but for me it was the most beautiful dress I had ever owned. I loved it so much that it never crossed my mind it could mean anything other than beauty. I didn’t yet know the difference between “mine” and “left behind by someone else.”
Michette laughed. She always laughed, her head thrown back, speaking quickly, as if afraid she wouldn’t have time to say everything. She told me about Paris, about lace dresses and chocolate.
“I’m going to run away there, you’ll see,” she had told me the night before. “I’ll marry a prince and eat nothing but chocolate.”
I believed her. I believed everything she said.
I don’t know how the game began. I only remember the moment she placed the small white kitchen stool on my head—round, with a smooth rim.
“Wait till you see how it looks on you!” she said, laughing.
I laughed too.
At first, it was just a game. Then she tried to take it off.
It wouldn’t come off.
She pulled again. I felt it tighten, pressing into my temples, as if the skin of my scalp were being lifted along with the wood.
I screamed.
That’s when she stopped. She looked at me.
Her eyes widened, suddenly emptied of laughter.
“Wait… just wait…”
She tried again, harder this time. The pain rose like a flame. I screamed again.
And then she ran.
She ran without saying a word, without looking back, as if it wasn’t me left there with the stool wedged onto my head, but something she needed to escape from.
I was left alone.
I pulled at it too, with both hands. But it felt as though I would tear my head off along with it. The pain was so great that I could no longer understand anything. It was as if I wasn’t there anymore—only the pain was.
I began to cry.
I don’t know how long I stayed like that. Maybe a few seconds. Maybe longer. Then I ran.
I knew I wasn’t allowed on the terrace when Mrs. Lena had guests. I knew that very well. But in that moment, nothing I knew seemed to matter anymore.
I burst in.
There was shade under the vine. Mrs. Lena sat at the table with two friends, in thin voile dresses, serving jam and coffee. Everything was calm, composed, like a photograph.
Michette was there, beside her mother, perched on the edge of her chair.
I stopped for a moment in the doorway, then blurted out:
“Mrs. Lena, please, help me!”
I don’t know how I looked. I could only feel the tears running, that I couldn’t breathe properly through the mucus, and that wretched little stool pressing on my head like a punishment.
Mrs. Lena stood up slowly, with a movement that held more concern for her dress than for me, and before looking at me, she glanced—almost imperceptibly—toward her friends, as if she needed to take the measure of her reaction from them.
Only then did she turn her eyes toward me, and in that instant I felt, for the first time, a sharp, lucid certainty—that she did not truly see me, that her gaze passed straight through me and settled somewhere else, in a place where I did not exist.
“Luludi,” she said slowly, pressing each syllable. “What are you doing here?”
I took a step forward, driven more by pain than by courage, feeling the stool press harder and harder into my temples.
“I’m… I’m stuck… I can’t get it off…”
“What are you doing here?” she repeated, more firmly this time, turning slightly toward the other women, as if asking for their approval. “Don’t you know that your kind isn’t allowed here?”
Her words didn’t settle into me all at once; they passed by me like a distant noise, layered over the pain in my head. Mrs. Lena had always been, at most, indifferent to me—never had she given me the impression of being cruel.
“Michette put it on me,” I said, feeling my voice begin to break. “Please, I can’t take it off.”
She didn’t turn her gaze toward her as she spoke to me.
“Michette, my dear, isn’t she lying? You don’t play with gypsies.”
I turned my head with difficulty.
Michette was looking at me, motionless, and for a moment—no longer than a heartbeat—I believed she would laugh and tell the truth, that she would jump off her chair and come to me, as she always did when we played.
“That’s right, maman,” she said.
That was all.
In that moment, the pain receded somewhere far behind, as if making room for something else—colder, deeper—that filled my chest.
“Michette, don’t lie anymore,” I said softly, not recognizing my own voice.
I don’t know where I found the courage to say that.
Mrs. Lena stepped toward me, and as she came closer, it seemed to me that she was growing, rising above me like a heavy shadow under which there was no longer any space left for me.
I didn’t get to say anything else.
She struck me.
I don’t know how she found that narrow space between the wood and my cheek, but her palm came down sure and hot, and the moment it touched me I felt my skin flare up, as if it had left a mark that would never, ever fade.
It was the first time she had hit me.
“You little liar!” she said, her voice sharp. “Dirty gypsy! You dare say my child is lying?”
I could no longer cry—or perhaps I was still crying, but the crying had no sound, no tears, as if it had been trapped somewhere inside me, unable to come out.
“Ispas!” she called.
He appeared almost at once, from somewhere I hadn’t noticed, as if he had been standing there all along, waiting—old Ispas, his shoulders slightly hunched, his gait calm, like a man used to being summoned for all the small and heavy things in the yard.
“Take this little gypsy brat away! I don’t want to see her again!”
Then, turning to Michette, her voice suddenly soft, altered:
“You see, my dear? That’s why it’s not good to mix with them. Look at them—how they forget the hand that feeds them.”
Then her expression changed again, and frowning at Ispas, she said in a cutting voice:
“If you don’t keep your little gypsies in line, I will. There are too many of them as it is, eating for nothing. Do you understand?”
Ispas muttered a “yes” into his mustache.
And then, for the first time, I understood that Ispas was a gypsy too. That he was like me. Or that I was like him.
Was that what I was?
Ispas was old, dark-skinned, and he almost always smelled of work.
Was that what I was?
I didn’t hear the rest.
Old Ispas took hold of me without a word and lifted me up, and for a moment I hung there, my head weighed down by the stool, my cheek burning, feeling the world pull away from me without quite breaking loose.
I didn’t struggle.
There was nothing left to struggle for.
Only then did I understand that some people are worth less than others—and that this begins from the very start, without your knowing, without your choosing.
