István Kalányos

Life in a Gypsy Colony

(Excerpt)

...

The way back from school lay over open fields, meadows and pastures. At those times one would meet with a lot of people, especially older women, who were going home from the vineyards and hillsides overlooking our Gypsy colony, carrying grapes in baskets on their heads for their families.
At the sight of all those wonderful yellow and black bunches, this or that child who had eaten nothing at all since dawn-and so by then was exceedingly hungry-would try begging for some, particularly from those who were on their own, who might then find themselves completely mobbed.
"Auntie! Please give us a few grapes! I'm hungry, auntie. Stop and give me a few grapes."
"You're not getting any! These are for the family. Stop pestering me, or I'll tell on you to the teacher!"
"Just a small bunch, auntie! Just for me!"
"Me, too!" a second chimed in, the strongest and most manly in the group. The woman sensed that trouble was brewing, but she didn't want to take the basket off her head, because then all hell would break loose.
Like a startled fawn trapped by a pack of wolves, she attempted to keep the cadgers at bay with all manner of threats as she spun around. I knew there was going to be trouble—indeed, there already was trouble—only I didn't reckon on how we were going to get hold of any grapes. Then the bigger lad, who was a bit scatter-brained, went over to the woman and with an unexpected move shoved her over on her back well and true! My heart stopped! The next moment seven or eight boys and girls were swarming around the basket like wasps, and all but snatching the bunches out of one another's hands, they carried off all the grapes. The woman was left tugging at her hair in anger, crying and yelling at the top of her voice. "You rotten creeps! Dirty gyppos! I'll get the lot of you! You'll pay for this for the rest of your lives!" she screamed. She kept on sounding off, wailing and shouting, beside herself. The children scattered and greedily stuffed themselves with the plunder. I remained there a little bit longer. All I wanted to do was gather up in the basket what few grapes had been left on the ground and tell the woman that I hadn't had anything to do with it, that I was very sorry; however, the next thing I knew there was a smack on my nose, and it began to bleed profusely. It didn't hurt. Honestly, I'm telling you straight, as if it had been only yesterday. It didn't hurt in the slightest, except inwardly, in the sense of "Look here! You're catching it for what others have done." The woman, still hale and hearty, would have carried on hitting me, but I considered it better—even if purely out of self—interest—to take to my heels immediately, as my presence made her more distressed—her state, with all the yelling had by then almost turned into a nervous breakdown. I got back home with a bloody and well-boxed nose, and my first job was to give a blow-by-blow account of the whole thing to my mother. She knew the woman, and before the incident she had even met her on the path leading to the Gypsy colony, since everyone who had a vineyard or forest had to pass that way.
"And you lot attacked that good woman!" my mother shouted. "That good woman who's always been so good to me. Who always gives me peas or potatoes or whatever if I knock on her door! You laid hands on her?"
"No, Mother," I remonstrated. "It wasn't me; it was Laci, young Joe, Paulie, Marie, Margit—the lot of them. But not me. I wanted to help her, but she smacked me on the nose." Mother rushed out. The incident was distressing for her, because she was very well aware who was involved, and she was fond of the woman. My mother used to bring resinous kindling wood to the village in a big cloth bag slung round her shoulders. She gathered it from the stumps of old felled fir trees that were barely poking out of the ground. Using my father's mattock and axe, she would dig these up and then chop them up. The wood burned like petrol. She was quite skilled at gathering, so it was in big demand. Mother would carry stuff like that to the village in exchange for peas, potatoes, pork fat. She was in a regular fury!
"For you kids to torment Bessie, Purdicsán's wife, of all people! That good soul, with her good hand!" (That's what we called a woman who wasn't mean.) A few minutes later the entire Gypsy colony knew what had happened. Mother's strident voice had let every parent know what had happened that day on the way home from school.
"I hope you know what will come of this! How it will all end up!" she shouted in an ever-louder voice.
"It may yet happen that the men of the village will attack us in our own homes," she bawled.

Then and there I could hear not a few of the men holding out the prospect of a thrashing for their children, but then the whole fuss died down just as quickly as it had started. I tossed and turned in bed all that night, much to the disgust of my younger siblings, with whom I shared my bed. In my confused mind's eye I saw before me our teacher's, Mr Szoldinger's, angry face and bald skull, which— especially when he became very angry—would turn redder than you would have believed possible. In order that the pate should always look nice and shiny he would rub it for a good 5-10 minutes with a neatly-ironed handkerchief. He lived in lodgings with the Bíró family; he was a bachelor and highly respected around here. Well, anyway, I and—I suppose—anyone else who was taught by him were really afraid of him. He had the bad habit of walking around almost the whole time during lessons and patting the poker for the schoolroom's old heating stove in the palm of his hand, and he wasn't slow to lash out with it at the back of anyone who failed to pay attention for a moment.
I don't know when I finally managed to fall asleep, but morning came round all too soon. My mother had another go and predicted that a good hiding was in store that day.
"Now, listen here!" she began, while I tried to crumble a slice of dried-out bread into my mug of steaming-hot chicory coffee. "Tell the teacher that you did nothing wrong and you weren't one of them, but don't tell on the others! Understand?"
"Yes!" I jumped up and scooted off, because I didn't want to listen to what would have followed. I had enough problems as it was, and I was thinking that it wouldn't be a bad idea to put on an extra layer under my thin britches. That way the strokes from that thick hazel rod wouldn't hurt quite so much when one had to bend over the desk for a beating.
By then, you see, I had witnessed more than a few "deskings" at school. There had been times when as many as five or six would be hunched over the front desk, and the teacher would dish out to each of them such a stiff punishment that I thought they must all die there on the spot. In truth, the teacher had not so far favoured me with this special treatment, but even so, on these occasions it had hurt me just as much as it did them. At the instant of the thwack I would gasp out in the same way as those who were at the receiving end of the "blessing", which was often richly deserved.
The party wasn't so cheerful on the way to school as it had been the previous day. They pointed at each other, all saying at the same time that the one who had knocked the woman over was responsible.
"You can't say that about me!" remonstrated Laci, who was so overage that he would have passed for a man. Incidentally, he was my uncle. The poor lad had not been blessed with too many brains and had been nursed at his mother's breast until he was six. My grandmother, like it or not, had been obliged to trudge off to the school and feed him by the garden gate at the back to get him to go back home. He was mocked for it by the Gypsies in the colony, too! Indeed, to the present day he still gets grief on that account.
"I'm not even going to school. I'm going to bunk off," he yelled and started to beat the ground with the cloth bag in which he carried his two readers and exercise books.
"Then you're only going to catch it at home," I tried to restrain him, but by then he had already turned on his heels and set off back to the colony.

The whole business bothered me, as I sensed that the real problems were only just beginning. I said not a word to anyone right up to the school gate. My fears were well founded! The children who were clustered round the gate were calling out that we were in for it for having beaten up the poor woman. "My God!" I thought to myself, "What's next? Maybe we're going to end up in gaol!" There was a great turmoil in my heart and mind, particularly since I had spotted the woman to whom it had all happened. Indeed, there she was already, waiting with the two male teachers. In the classroom she was asked to point out who had been responsible. She was standing before us, but I didn't see the fire in her eyes that had almost seared me the day before. She calmly ran her eyes over the group before she spoke:
"This lot are all guilty! They all deserve a beating, and a good hard one at that!" My blood ran cold! Now was the time when I ought to have been piping up to say it hadn't been me, I had only wanted to help, but she had thumped me on the nose in return and made it bleed. Yet, by then the woman was already being taken out the door—amidst profuse assertions that, rest assured, they would be getting what was coming to them. We stood petrified in front of the bench. The whole class was standing, with no one daring to sit. Now Joey on my right started blubbing, and within perhaps a minute there were four of them in tears.
"My God! What next!" I tried to gather my thoughts, but shortly I was sobered by the snap of a voice.
"Everyone be seated except for the bunch of scamps," yelled Szoldinger. He had the habit, when he was highly agitated, of rapidly twitching his nose, which for some reason struck us children as terrifying.
"Well, you lovely little bunch, which one of you is going to tell me exactly what happened yesterday? But right this second, or else I'm going to get very upset!" At that the whimpering, from boys and girls alike, grew even louder with all the moaning and wailing.
"So, young Kalányos, what happened? Tell me!"
Dear God, what was I to do! Whose name should I spill or not spill, as Mum had told me not to mention anyone by name? My heart was pounding; I felt I was no longer alive. Fear gained total mastery over me, but something was prompting me to hold my tongue.
"Cat got your tongue? Nothing to say for yourself?" he yelled close up. "You'll be wagging that tongue soon enough, damn you!"
As to what happened next—that I can't really say. Only second-hand, from what I was told later. All I know for sure is that I came round lying flat on my back on the teacher's desk, soaked through and covered in blood. I could see a crowd of children around me handling and wiping me. Blood was pouring from my head. I later learned that the enraged teacher, in his wrath, had intended to cuff my head or neck; and when I, in self-defence, had jerked my head away from the direction of the blow, he had struck my head with all his might.
"This needs stitches," I heard a doctor saying, because they had called for one.
"And we're going to have to make an official report, because it's a really nasty wound!"
"The child needs to be taken to Lenti straightaway—to the surgery—because as I see, he's about to pass out again."
As to when I'd passed out the first time, I didn't know, but this last statement I heard loud and clear directly from the doctor's mouth. I didn't give a damn about anything; everything was all the same to me. I was lying on a table and around me were lots and lots of moving figures, everyone explaining something, until I finally heard the voice of that kindly teacher, "Uncle" Józsi Molnár.
"Come on, children! All of you, out into the yard! I don't want to see any of you in this room!"
A truly decent soul, he was. Even at a time like this, one could detect no real malice in his voice. He took a close look at me, probed with his stubby fingers in my blood-soaked hair, which now stank so much of iodine that I was near to vomiting. "That's a good wallop you got there, lad, but I don't think this is what Mr Szoldinger had in mind, as far as I can gather."
"I'm not mad at Mr Szoldinger. I only wanted to say that it wasn't me, but I was scared to, really scared," popped out. "I don't want the teacher to get into trouble. I don't want that!"

By the time the ambulance had arrived, I knew that no one else besides myself had been picked on, and Mr Szoldinger had not punished anyone else. I felt a true sense of bliss. I will be so bold as to swear to that even now, because there had been others who were smaller, skinnier and slighter than me who might not have been able to withstand a big thrashing.
I felt I had been a tiny bit heroic—a true hero! This was now the second time I had carried the can for the others, the second time I had paid the price for their larking about. I received seven stitches to my head, and then there was a policeman who took a statement from me in the clinic itself. He asked questions and wrote down my answers before asking if I had been among those who had attacked the woman.
To begin with, I just goggled at the policeman, wondering how he, too, had now come to hear of it.
"I was there, but I didn't touch her," I mumbled, because I felt that it was starting all over again from the beginning.
"You do know, don't you, that she has put in an official complaint about the lot of you, and if it turns out that you were any part of it, then you may end up in a home. You know, the prison for young offenders," the policeman informed me in a colourless voice. "And that will be very bad for you."
Knowing what I do now, I think I can guess what the policeman was playing at, but at the time I was not in a position to tell whether things were looking bad or good. It was a police car that took me home, and en route they said nothing at all to me. My head was throbbing; I was all water and blood—to say nothing of my head. My hair had been shaved off over quite a large area, and the dazzling white bandage stood out from a long way off. When the car drew up before our cabin, there was a crowd waiting for us. The other kids had taken the news home in good time. My mother was beside herself, tearing out her hair.
"Ferkó!"—that was my father—"You'd better bump that man off, because if you don't, I'll do time for it myself! That dirty Gypsy-hater, because the lousy bastard hates Gypsies, that's for sure!"
My mother raged and tore her hair out, and then she held me to her and shouted, "Just look! He cracked my child on the head, and now he's covered in blood! That stinking animal!"
She would have carried on except that the policeman now chimed in.
"Please stop this language; otherwise, I'll have to report you or take you in! Do you understand? And the rest of you, scatter!" By now raising his voice. For a few seconds there was a deafening hush, then eight or ten of the men started advancing on him. I sensed that big trouble was brewing. These were strapping fellows, and their movements had a deliberate air about them that made even the policemen start to back away. My father was the boldest of those stepping up to him. His curly shock of hair looked somehow even bushier than usual. He came to a halt in front of the policeman and started shouting. "Listen here, sergeant! You can tell that lousy Gypsy-hating teacher that I'll make a hash out of him! How can anyone do this to a child?"
"Calm down, men!" This is the policeman. "There are proper channels for dealing with this business. The law will investigate who did what!"
It was plain that he was genuinely scared. The Petróc Gypsies had a truly bad reputation for scrapping. Once they got going, there was no God on earth they had any regard for! The policeman was well aware of this and sensed that he was in no position now to do anything other than calm tempers. He knew that if all hell broke loose, they would make mincemeat of him; so all he said, very quietly, was that he regretted the incident, but it would have consequences, so teachers could not do such things. It was plain that my father's agitated and aggressive demeanour had alarmed the policeman. Legs shaking, he climbed into his canvas-topped jeep and drove off. I was relieved that there had been no trouble.
As evening drew on, my father and several friends got on their bicycles and pedalled over to Iklódbördôce. I heard him telling the others that they had to find a way of laying their hands on that scum. I frankly wished I could rush off and tell the teacher to look out, because a bunch of angry men were on their way for him and wanted to beat him up. My father and the others came back late that evening, and I was privately very happy to hear him telling my mother that they hadn't managed to catch him. They would try some other time.

One week later, we were summoned to the police station. The whole family took the train to Lenti, where we found the woman and my teacher on a bench, talking with one another.
"Anyone who did not receive a summons must leave the premises immediately," a diminutive police officer shouted over in our direction. "Only the people who have been cited should come forward." At this he announced my name, then my father's. As a result, the rest of our noisy escort had to stay outside, which I was very happy about, while my father and I went into the room to see the detective.
The woman and the teacher were seated at a distance from us, and their faces showed that they weren't there of their own choice. In the teacher's case, it was very clear that he was in great torment, sitting with his head bowed and only occasionally casting a sideways glance in my direction—and only in my direction. He truly had not harmed me at other times, and I had the feeling that he favoured me, judging me differently from the others. Maybe that was because the clothes I wore were a bit cleaner than those of the others, or because my handwriting was neat and I was good at reading. Still, whether for one reason or another, one thing was for sure. I had always managed to avoid "deskings" from him, even the poker, and now it had come to this! How was this going to end?
The detective took statements from everyone, and we, too, duly responded when our turn came. The woman was no longer belligerent; she was almost transformed. She had heard what happened to me and was very sorry. The teacher for his part insisted that he had not been aiming to clout me round the ear—not at all—and he was very sorry. When the policeman asked me if I was angry with the teacher in the light of what he had done to me, I felt that the time had come when I could speak frankly and uphold the truth of what the teacher had said. "Please, I don't want the teacher to be punished. The whole thing was an accident," I burst out all in one go, to the great surprise of the policeman and my father.
I wasn't at all bothered by what my father might be thinking. He had, indeed, wanted to see the teacher punished and would most happily have killed him. To my own huge surprise, the woman did not wish to press charges on anyone, so the detective made the following proposal:
"Look here, all of you! All I want to say is that it would be best if all three of you can come to an agreement here and now! Because if you can't, there could well be a prolonged period of attending court, and the case will go on and on. That's not good for anyone, and since the kid has said on the record that Mr Szoldinger wasn't to blame—and his word is decisive—it would be best if we close the case now and everyone can peacefully go home. Believe me, that would be the best solution; there really isn't any other way of handling your problem. So, I'm waiting for your responses," he said as he placed a new sheet of paper in his typewriter. My father kept his mouth tightly shut. For him the best solution would have been to punish the teacher, or something else, and his cheekbones twitched nervously, almost trembling. The woman was the first to speak, saying that she for one had no wish to see anyone punished. My father gave a long sigh before he managed to croak out that if that was how things stood, then he, too, would withdraw from pursuing the complaint; but he asked the teacher to give his word that he would never, ever lay his hands on a child in future.
The detective typed furiously. It seemed he was glad that the matter could be settled this way, and he did not have to pass it on to other authorities. After the papers had been signed, the detective accompanied us out of the room. In the middle of the corridor-like anteroom I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked back, and it was my teacher, who with a grateful look in his eyes said simply, "Thank you, and do forgive me!"
I almost fainted. What was this? A teacher asking forgiveness of a Gypsy boy? Someone like Szoldinger, no less! This couldn't be real! It must be a dream! Yet, it had happened. I'd be blowed if it hadn't happened! From the entrance the detective asked the teacher to return, saying he wanted a quick word. My father and I were well aware that the detective no longer had anything to discuss; he merely didn't want the teacher to be leaving together with us on the road to the station. The detective didn't trust my father. He well knew the world of the Petróc Gypsies. I have no idea when he let the teacher go, but one thing's for certain. He wasn't on the train which we took home.

...

 

István Kalányos
was the first Roma fully qualified to drill oil and has worked on Middle Eastern contracts with teams from Hungary. Now, at the age of 53, he is unemployed and the chairman of the Roma Self-government in Babócsa, a village just over the border from Slovenia. This is an excerpt from his first book, soon to be published.