Page 25 - Vol V. #8

“Where did you get this?” I asked, and I sensed another tale about to begin, but before it could get going my guide signalled for silence.
“Can any of you play it?” I wondered, and they laughed.
“We have no use for it.” The guide indicated the oven, and the tools laid out around it.
I said, “Then why don’t you give it to...musical Gypsies?” There were plenty of those; I had wit- nessed their performances at country weddings, full of unsettling expertise, the way they held the music sweetly on the brink of chaos but never let it go there.
They looked at one another. A silent decision was made for the guide to tell me, “There is bad blood between us at the moment.”
“Ithought I was being cunning, but really I knew that nobody can
“Why?” I asked, but they had told me enough. Some of them moved eyebrows and shoulders in scorn. “Then you don’t value it.” I thought I was being cunning, but really I knew that nobody can out-think a Gypsy; that’s why people have always shunned Gypsies or hated them.
out-think a Gypsy...”
I read the opening bars of a piece in eleven-eight. I hummed the tune, and somebody shouted bravo and clapped. Then they all clapped the compli- cated rhythm like it was in their blood, and they closed in, faces bright with the joy of making noise.
“Can I buy it from you?” My question broke the silence; it was the one towards which we had all been heading, I knew. As the others went about their business, my guide sucked in his breath.
“It has great sentimental value for us,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed, a little sadly. I’d just seen perfect tunes whose authors were long dead, and the transcribing composer too, he was long buried, as all the good ones are, and I imagined the glory that would fall on my head when I revealed those melodies to the world. “I’m sure it has.”
(continued on page 65)
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