A Gypsy Song (The Eye of the Crystal Ball - The Wolfboy Chronicles) Read Free Page A

tell you," she said with a thick voice. "These are your real parents. We have just been borrowing you. They love you and will take good care of you. It is the best for all of us. These are hard times for everybody, remember? With the three babies in the house we have too many mouths to fill.”
    Now Mrs. Schneider was crying overtly.
    “You are so strong, Sara. You will be fine. It is the best for you to go back to who you really are. We will miss you but maybe you will come back and visit one day?”
    Sara threw herself in Mrs. Schneider’s arms and hugged her for quite a while.
    “Now go on,” Mrs. Schneider said in tears and the strange woman and man started walking with Sara between them, both of them holding her hands.
    Sara looked back just before she entered the caravan with her new parents and waved at Mr. and Mrs. Schneider. She too had tears in her young eyes.
    Mrs. Müller and the other women from Reidenburgerstrasse had to move away from the street in order for the caravan wagons to leave with all their noisy and messy people and animals inside of them.
    Later on, the women would loudly agree that this day wasn’t one of the proudest in the history of Reidenburgerstrasse, but silently in their minds they would all think the same.
    That it definitely was the most exciting.

THE ROMANI
     
     
    In the caravan , Sara was greeted by a lot of small curious faces. They all belonged to children of different ages and all were staring at her. For the first time in her life she felt a little shy. She kept wondering why all those faces were looking at her.
    She sat down on a small chair, and the man and woman that had come to get her got on top of the wagon. She heard a sound like someone yelling and then they were moving.
    After they had driven for awhile, a little girl came to Sara inside the caravan. She looked at the other girls behind her before she had the courage to address Sara.
    “Is it true? Are you really her?” she asked.
    Sara had no answer to that.
    “Am I really who?”
    The little girl got shy and looked at the floor. An older girl took over.
    “Are you really the great Moeselman’s daughter?”
    “How should I know?”
     The girls in the caravan all looked at each other. Could it be that she didn’t even know who she was? they murmured.
    She didn’t, but soon her new parents would tell her. As they stopped for the night in a clearing in the forest, her mother and father approached her while she was sitting by the bonfire and eating her meat. (It had been a while since she last tasted real meat, so she was really enjoying it.)
    “You like your new home?” her father asked. He was the one named Moeselman she now knew. That was his gypsy name. Her mother’s was Settela.
    Sara looked around to try and find the home he was talking about when he grabbed her chin and turned her head so she was looking at him.
    He smiled and put a fist to his heart.
    “This is home,” he said while pounding the fist to his chest. “We don’t need walls to keep us from the world. We don’t need a yard and a picket fence. Home is where the heart is.”
    Sara ate some more of the meat while staring at him.
    “Because you are gypsies?” she asked.
    “Romani,” Settela corrected her with a mild voice. “We don’t like to be called gypsies, we are Romani and proud of it.”
    Sara looked at her.
    “What is the difference?” She asked.
    Settela and Moeselman looked at each other and then they burst into a huge laughter.
    “You are so right, in the end it really doesn’t matter what we are called” Settela said. “But gypsy is a name the world has given us and Romani is what we call ourselves. That is our origin. That is your origin, too.”
    Sara looked at her with great confusion.
    “But I thought I was German?”
    Moeselman grumbled, for he didn’t like the fact that his daughter had to grow up among the Germans while their leader was trying to eradicate the Romani people, but he had to admit that it was