Page 24 - Vol V. #8

Monstrous Men (continued from preceding page) ergy saved—remember?”
command; one thing I loved about the country- side was the people’s openness and lack of fear about speaking their minds, unlike in the cities, where we did our jobs, walked the streets, sat in cafés, all without catching the eye of another person in case we somehow made an enemy of them, suspecting ourselves of things we were never sure of.
He expected me to finish the propaganda minis- try’s slogan for him, I saw. I just smiled, worldly, urbane.
“How can you stand this?” He meant the seven- eight clapping, which was at a beautiful, and tran- sient, point; it would get no better. I refrained from the retort, And how can you stand beating people in cells? The drop in his features told me that he sensed the question. He glanced up at the portrait of his master, and I saw his face compose itself, happy to be that of his official business again.
At the camp there were perhaps twenty Gypsies, of all ages from ninety to nine months. My guide deputised a youth to ride a horse up the road and look at my car. The equestrian asked me for the keys, and I saw that I had to agree, or offend him. In the cities we repeated myths about the revenge of slighted Gypsies, and, as I handed the keys over, I realised that I believed them.
I wanted to impress a girl one afternoon in my early twenties, and a colleague lent me his car. When I got back, he had gone, and his neighbours affected never to have known him, and refused to let me leave the car outside their block. In that car, I travelled the countryside at weekends and dur- ing holidays. I was on a deserted road when the engine gave out. With no idea what was wrong, I walked in hope of help towards the next village.
Dead Composers
I gradually noticed red cloths tied into the hedges, perhaps every half-a-kilometre. At a fork in the road, the cloth pointed away from the village, but I followed it all the same.
As I ate with them, they mentioned villages and roads and forests, single tracks and single elms by roadsides, a blind man at a crossroads that they had helped, a canal lock keeper who abused them, a woman weaving at her door who shared her meagre food. They told me about a man who had invited them to draw water from a village well, and another who had set the local boys to throw stones at them to drive them away from the well, in case they cursed it and it dried up. It was such a perfect picture of Gypsy life that I sensed it was all a story, but I appreciated the way they were pitching in to weave it together for me.
A Gypsy came to meet me. All his questions point- ed to one: was I an official of some kind? When
he had made up his mind that I wasn’t, he invited me to his camp which, marked by three red cloths tied into a hedge that had been cut down and put in place again, was up a barely navigable track.
They had been clearing out a wagon so that they could set up an oven to fashion an order of cop- per pans for a local landowner. Among the items displaced from the wagon was a wooden box con- taining, I noticed with astonishment, handwritten music. I asked if I could see it, and they laughed, and said that nobody could see music. All the same, my guide bade me examine it.
“You mark the path,” I thought out loud. He denied it. “Yes,” I went on, excited at my smartness, “you hide it and show it all at once.”
I picked up the first sheet. The writing was that of one of those composers who visited country people in the previous century, transcribing their music for posterity. I had seen some of it in the ethnographic museum. I was about to exclaim, That’s B’s music, when lack of breath and, I must say, guile, shut me up.
“No,” he insisted.
“That,” I marvelled, “is... genius.”
He warned me not to mention at the camp that I had spotted the signs. I was depressed by the
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