28 June, 4:45 PM, near Spisz
He survived the whirlwind of introductions and now was trying to survive the whirlwind of hospitality. He was never good with names, and with the Romani ones he might as well have not even tried, much less remember the tangled web of family relationships linking almost everyone travelling with this tabor with one another. Younger men would size him up, women would try to peer into his soul and divine his secrets, and the elderly divided between the polite but cautious and the exuberant and open-hearted.
“You’re going to stay the night,” said Nicu. It was a statement of fact rather than an invitation, accompanied by a slap on the back. “Anyone who’s a friend of my dear brother’s little girl is welcome to share our food and our fire. And why travel for the night back to that big ugly city of yours?”
“Not a little girl anymore,” Marina tossed back her long locks in a mock tantrum. “What do you think?” she turned to Jake. “A night in the country, under the Ruthenian stars?”
It did not seem to Jake that it would be polite to refuse, lest his hosts think him some bigoted foreign boor, fearful of waking up – or not waking up – next morning with his throat slit and pocket empty. Besides, he owed Marina, who still refused to accept anything more than an occasional meal for all her help and attention along the way. And yes, why the hell not, didn’t he want to get out of his hotel room in Czernograd and see the real country, the old country, the magic country? Travelling Gypsies might not have been the most exotic encounter one could experience in Ruthenia and Galicia but it was still hell of a lot different to anything he would find walking along Lexington Avenue.
“I... don’t want to cause any inconvenience,” he put up the token polite resistance. “We don’t have anywhere to sleep...”
“Nonsense,” Uncle Nicu waved the excuses away. “We’ll have you fed, and we’ll find you a place to rest your heads.”
They had a late lunch of lamb kebabs and rice, and then they talked, sitting around in a circle outside Nicu’s exquisite wooden home on wheels. Nicu was the dominating presence, his wife Maria mostly silent and watchful, in with an occasional pointed comment, other relatives coming and going, the life of the tabor in the dying afternoon ebbing and flowing around them with its own peculiar rhythms.
“When Uncle Nicu was young, he lived for ten years in England,” Marina explained. “That’s where he learned the language.”
“That’s right,” Nico pipped in with his baritone, “I was working with horses, for racing stables. We, Romani, know horses like no one else, and horses know us, too.”
He waved around his arm so that Jake could see his stallion tattoo.
“When you were young…” Jake paused to think. “But didn’t this country just sort of… appear… only twenty, thirty years ago?”
“Hey, just because it… appeared… it doesn’t mean that it – we – didn’t exist,” said Marina. “What do you think, that we all suddenly popped out without any past, just starting with year zero? Czernograd fully built? That would be some magic!” she laughed and nudged him with her elbow. She had that roughish sort of familiarity that wasn’t at all unpleasant, if slightly adolescent.
“Frankly, I never really thought about it,” Jake shrugged. “But what you’re saying is that even when Ruthenia and Galicia did not officially exist, before it appeared, before anyone knew about it, you could still somehow come and go between it and the rest of the world?”
“Well, there’s always been some contact… and interchange,” Marina said. “And some people always knew about our country. Just as some of us knew about the rest of the world, and how to get there and back. Just not many of us. And of them. It was better that way. And safer.”
“But how?” he asked. “How did it all… work?”
“Oh well, it’s rather complicated,” she said. “You just have to take my word for it.”
“Is that still, like, top secret or something?” Jake asked.
“Not exactly, but you wouldn’t want all the mystery to disappear from our lives, would you?”
“I don’t know. It’s getting weirder and weirder,” Jake shook his head. “I still find it difficult to believe I’m somehow a part of it. Thank you, grandpa.”
“Welcome to the magic kingdom, as the RiG Tourism Agency says,” Marina pulled a face at him “We’ve had to live here our whole lives.”
“Yes, Jake,” Uncle Nicu joined in. “You’re one of us,” and reached over and slapped him on the back again, this time more gently, as if Jake has already managed to pass some initial tests.
“Only a quarter,” Jake said.
“One quarter, a half, one sixteenth, doesn’t matter,” Nicu said. “Always a Ruthenian.”
Like mafia, Jake thought, you can never really leave. Every time the family tries to get out, they keep pullin’ me back in.
Then when they were finally alone for a moment, Jake turned to Marina and motioned slightly with his head and eyes towards where two camper vans, one white, the other azure blue, were parked front bumper to bumper.
“That old woman over there has been giving me an evil eye the whole time since we got here,” he whispered.
“C’mon, Mr American,” Marina chided him, “you don’t really believe in evil eye, do you?”
“I’m in Ruthenia and Galicia,” said Jake, “I am supposed to believe in these things, right?” He shrugged. “She’s just been looking at me funny.”
“Don’t worry. That’s just the old generation. A lot of them don’t like gadje, people who are not Roma. They think that gadje are mahrime, polluted. When my father married a gadji, many of them did not like it, but now it’s changing; there’s more and more of that happening. And we’re sort of like Jews; a half-Jew is not really a gentile, he or she is still a Jew.”
“Like your uncle said about me being a Ruthenian, eh?”
“Yep,” she nodded. “Can’t escape your roots.”
Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash
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