A Swarm of Dust Page 4

  But suddenly Hudorovec began to speak Romany, for he realised no one understood his dialect. Immediately all their faces cleared, and everyone gathered round and shook their hands, for this was a convincing proof: no one but a gypsy could speak Romany, that was crystal clear. Questions began to rain down on them, Pišta Baranja invited them inside, they put down their stuff, one word led to another and Hudorovec said that … if no one had any objections … if it wasn’t too much of an imposition … that they might stay here, see how it went and so on. Why not, they all replied, stay, there’s room for three, they’d work, the summer wouldn’t be so bad, they could make their own house, there was plenty of wood and more than enough mud. And so it ended up that Pišta Baranja let them have some space in the second extension to his house, they put all their stuff there, and they ate with the Baranjas and sometimes with the Horvats.

  On the first day young Hudorovec accompanied the other school kids and from then on attended school regularly. Time passed. The community took in Hudorovec as one of their own, for they could see that he was a real gypsy – a little odd in his habits, it was true – but he had lived elsewhere and he would adapt, no problem.

  The sun returned, things began to blossom, trees and plants took on a lively green colour, and the first groups of gypsies began to leave the settlement. The Hudorovec family was there, eating with the others in turn, but they didn’t do a thing, they just settled in; the boy fought with the little Horvats, Baranjas and Šarkezis, the mother gossiped with the women, while the father was a strange one and spent most of his time wandering through the woods. All three of them had quite an appetite. And then Pišta Baranja called a meeting, a delegation went to Hudorovec and said … we’ve nothing against you, Hudorovec, you’re not in the way, you’re a gypsy like us and we’d give you the shirts off our backs … but build yourself a house, we’ll help you, and you have a woman to cook for you … it’ll be good for you and for us.

  And so they rambled on, it was difficult for them to say these things and they would have preferred not to, but they had no choice. They had noticed that there was a difference between them and Hudorovec, that he was very much his own man, and they became uncomfortable, for at these words Hudorovec did very little, they had seriously offended him, he frowned but he did not move, nor did he say anything. They were not prepared for such a reaction, they didn’t understand it. Hudorovec felt humiliated. But the others had experienced so many humiliations that they no longer felt new ones, and it was impossible to cause offence amongst them. And now Hudorovec was acting so oddly! It had never occurred to them that they might hurt his feelings, for they had only given him good advice. And yet he was being like this!

  After this conversation he stayed quiet for two days, he looked so disgruntled that his eyes bulged even more, he took to sitting in the woods, gasping for breath as if he had asthma or was carrying a heavy load. Then one day he reappeared and called his son. And they proceeded to move all the family’s possessions out into the open.

  The others stared: ‘Hudorovec, what the devil are you playing at, what’s wrong with you, man, we’re not throwing you out, take those things back inside!’ But Hudorovec said not a word and his eyes became sharper and brighter with satisfaction, for this was his idea of revenge. They all saw that the man was stubborn, defiant and that he could not be dealt with in a reasonable way, their way.

  Then he produced an axe from somewhere and began to carry it around, so that all the Baranjas, Horvats and Šarkezis could see it, and he did it without a grin, his face oddly distorted. The mother and boy used to sit among the trees the whole time. She would cook something in a pot and the boy would gather firewood. They kept whispering to each other, they spoke to no one else, and the community thought them strange, impossible to understand.

  Then one day the sound of an axe being used came from a nearby wood: Hudorovec and his son were cutting down trees. The wood lay below the top of the hill and spread across its slopes into the valley. To the left were some bushes above which stood the gigantic old chestnut tree. When a number of straight trees had been cut down, they moved to the other slope, across the stream and cut their way forward. Every evening they went down from the stand of beech trees, across the meadow and the stream and up into the woods. While the father swung his axe, the boy had to stand guard on the edge of the wood, which belonged to a local farmer, or so the Baranjas and Horvats said. The sound of trees being cut down continued to come from the woods. Then they dragged the timber into the valley, to the stream and beyond it to the settlement. It was hard work. The boy would have collapsed under the weight a hundred times if his father, at the front, had not cursed and threatened that he’d skin him alive if he didn’t keep up. The mother did not help, she had fallen ill and was drifting through the trees like a shadow. Finally, when the timber was all in a heap, Hudorovec silently chose a space near the other houses and began building.

  Then the Baranjas, Horvats and Šarkezis came and said that they would help, and that they had quite a bit of experience, and they’d do the roof first, and a lot more mud would be needed … and here and there … and this and that … Hudorovec didn’t say a word, but they helped and he didn’t drive them away. They kneaded the mud, adding wheat husks they had acquired from nearby farms. It wasn’t long before the Hudorovec family had a new home.

  The priest didn’t know exactly when the young Hudorovec began to trouble him. Certainly not until the mother brought him to church. That was when he began to stand out in his mind. But it possibly began before, during conversations with village teachers who spoke with fear of the boy’s strange qualities. Although the other schoolchildren reacted with him in a relaxed way, he seemed too taciturn. He was completely different from the other Roma children. They represented a good third of the school and were a special branch on their own. Even their appearance was different from the farmers’ children: ragged and dirty, their books and exercise books tatty and creased, they were as careless as you could imagine, although they were clearly bright. They liked getting into fights and were always causing trouble. But from the first day, Hudorovec was a surprise. He was placid, hard-working, different. He came to school in poor, but clean clothes. He gave the impression that he simply didn’t care what was happening in school. He never listened and during lessons he stared thoughtfully at the bench in front of him. But whenever the teacher asked him a question he answered quietly, slightly hoarsely, without any awkwardness, and always gave the answer that was expected and sometimes more.

  Yet he always spoke coldly, looking at no one, staring into space, as if he saw in front of him nothing but air. The priest’s eyes were immediately opened after the first mass that the mother attended, bringing the boy with her. He spoke to Geder about it that very evening and was almost a little excited, which was unusual for him.

  ‘You know, Geder,’ he said, ‘on Sunday I met the Hudorovec family. Actually, not all of them, the father wasn’t there. Her and the boy. And that boy, I tell you … In the presence of the mother I asked him if he sincerely believed in God and he stared at me for a while as if wanting to take a good look at me, and what I felt was akin to horror, because he wasn’t really looking at me and didn’t see me. Then he suddenly said, very calmly: “I don’t know, Father”. I was stunned by his honest reply. When I chatted with him I realised that this child – for he’s still really a child – lives in a strange state of obsession, which he clearly cannot grasp rationally, or else is afraid of. He reminded me of someone who is about to act, but still does not know whether he will do so or not. And I get the impression that he does not know what the action should be. He looks as if he is caught up in this tension, this suffering! If you could see his face! Take a look at him some time, look in his eyes and you’ll see a kind of disgust, as if he has been completely shocked by something. And yet when he stares like that into the distance, his eyes almost glow, as if he is longing for something beautiful. To say that the boy is torn would not fully describe it, si
nce it’s not that simple. And listen: evidently he’s the best pupil in the school. I asked him what the teachers were like, how they got on and he said: “I give them the answers they want to hear”. I looked at him in disbelief: “Surely you answer what you think is right, don’t you?” And after a while he shakes his head. “Why ever not?” I asked him. Now he replied very decisively: “What they say does not come from them, but from elsewhere, and it seems to me that what they don’t know is different … They scare me. I want that other thing, what I call theirs, even though it scares me … ” That’s roughly what he said, Geder. I couldn’t repeat his exact words, I was a bit shaken. But imagine! The child seems intelligent, but Geder, I’ll say this only to you: I get the impression that he’s not quite right. A strange child, strange and mistrustful. That also worries me, Geder, because you never know when it might grow into something sinister.’

  It was the last day of May. Young Hudorovec was sitting on the hill and looking at the land below. He was crouching on the grassy edge of the fields that sloped down towards the valley and among which were houses, vineyards and orchards. He could see the plain all the way to the horizon, but on the right the outline of the mountains was very hazy because of the mist; you could see them properly only when the air was very clear. On the plain were villages, woods and fields; far away were two bell towers, indicating a small town. He liked these strange places very much, for where he had lived until now everything was very different. For quite some time he had enjoyed coming up here in the evenings, to get away from the settlement. As soon as he got accustomed to the idea that the distant horizon was new to him and in his mind he began to seek other new things, then his thoughts strayed to the past of their own accord and images, events, faces appeared before him.

  Where he grew up there was no plain, there were hills everywhere, although not so high, and when you climbed to the top of one you saw more of the same. There, the view was always interrupted. Here, when he looked into the distance nothing disturbed his view. You could see where the earth met the sky. He soon noticed something interesting about this; when they first came to the plain his mother said that the people there, whenever they were thinking about something, looked straight in front of them as if staring into the distance; but in their old home, when people were thinking, they looked down, or even up at the sky, as if they couldn’t see into the distance and this had become part of their habits.

  This was the first thing that gave him pleasure: that he could look ahead and see no end in front of him. He quite enjoyed staring into space. Everyone said he thought too much. Now, when there was no longer any barrier before him, the images in his mind became denser, more visible – as if they had come closer. Sometimes he reached out his hand, because he had the feeling that he could touch everything that he could see in front of him. He felt relaxed in some way, whereas where he’d lived before everything felt more cramped. Of course, he never thought about this fully consciously. It was just a feeling flowing in his veins. The new world had possessed him so completely that past events, even though not all that remote, seemed wreathed in mist. Although his thoughts often strayed to the past there was quite a bit of effort involved, he had to try hard to extract the image from the mist. When he looked more clearly he saw that it wasn’t actually mist, but rather traces of this new world obscuring the images from the past. It was as if the new world was preventing him from looking at the past. But this was again only a surface appearance that he could barely penetrate. It wasn’t the new world that was holding him back, but he himself, unwilling as he was to return to the anxiety of the past. He was not clearly aware of any of this. But within him floated an uncertain awareness that there must be something in the past that he was afraid of and wished to save himself from. For on remembering the past he felt anxious, whereas as soon as was submerged in his new environment he felt a relaxed sense of joy.

  But the more he tried to suppress the past with the new world, the more he actually uncovered it, or it revealed itself to him, for in spite of the fear of anxiety, there was a desire for it somewhere inside him, probably because it wasn’t merely anxiety, but was mixed with longing. He noticed that in this new environment it wasn’t only him who changed, but also his mother. In a special way, she distanced herself from him; it felt as if she was no longer near. She was like a performance in front of him, but one that tormented him with a physical closeness that he no longer perceived. His father, on the other hand, had not changed at all; he still saw him as a rough body right beside him, he could smell his sweat, his words rang in his ears like hammer blows, his laugh was just like it was in the old place.

  There had been no settlement in the old place: they had lived in a ramshackle house in the woods and the nearest gypsy family was five kilometres away. Below the wood was a village. The village children chased him, threw stones, called him ‘smelly gypo’ and accused him and his family of stealing things. He didn’t like going into the village, he only went to church, as he had been taught, and to school. Otherwise he wandered through the woods, saying little, growing up solitary and wild. He had a sister who was two years older than him; she was different, she enjoyed meeting up with the village rascals, she was mean and rude, she beat him as much as their father, who had the habit of responding to every little thing with the flat of his hand. In such moments his mother was the only one who defended him, he always ran to her and cried. It seemed that she loved him much more than the others. Sometimes, like an animal, she resisted Hudorovec’s violence, putting herself in between them so that the blows rained down on her. The father and sister were allies and were often absent. His mother was the one who had to go from house to house with her basket, begging; she was the one who had to humbly grit her teeth when people made fun of her, or shut the door in her face, or if the children followed her along the road, yelling; she had to cook, fetch firewood, look after the house, their clothes. But when her husband and daughter returned, she was insulted, scorned, beaten. Hudorovec had an old nag that he rode around, he often met with untrustworthy people and got involved with strange goings on, sometimes he was even absent for long periods and children teased the mother that her man was dead and buried. All the money he gained simply disappeared; what he didn’t drink, he lost at cards or squandered it in some other way. No one in the family ever knew what he was up to or where.

  Young Hudorovec devoted all his thoughts and every step to his mother; he lived with her, suffered with her. He regarded his father and sister with repugnance and fear, but he never revolted, he never tried to run away from this hopeless situation. He was calm and quiet, he obeyed every word of his tormentors. He was somehow convinced that this was the only possible state, for he knew nothing else and so could not long for it. For years things had remained unchanged, at least as far as he remembered, and his relationship with his mother was always the same. She never complained about her husband or daughter, they never even spoke about it, it simply happened and seemed to him self-evident, just as he did not think about his relationship with his mother, but simply lived and felt it.

  Things began to shift when he started to leave boyhood behind, around the age of twelve. Perhaps similar things had happened before, but he had perceived them differently or been indifferent to them – he wasn’t sure. It was a single incident that helped him to realise that he had long lived in a reality that he didn’t know. He used to return from school by the same path that left the road and cut across the fields towards the woods. The path turned and ran along the edge of the trees to a copse that stood alone among the fields, before finally entering the woods. He had once seen his sister in the copse with three lads from the village; they were perhaps a year or two older than her. He had hidden behind a bush and watched. The youths were trying to convince her of something, then she spoke and held out her hand, they each gave her something, but from that distance he couldn’t see what. Then his sister reached for her waist, lowered her skirt, stepped out of it and, naked from the waist down, lay on t
he ground. Then the largest lad undid his trousers and lay between her legs, while the other two watched.

  At this point his memory was fainter and all he remembered clearly was that he stared at the scene for some time, then leaped up and ran home as fast as he could in tears, into his mother’s arms. ‘What is it? What is she doing?’ he sobbed out. His mother was frightened and stared at him. ‘What don’t you understand?’ she finally said. She was surprised, for usually it was unnecessary to explain these things to gypsy children. But young Hudorovec did not know, he had grown up more or less alone, in the woods, and had never spent much time with the other kids. His mother was no less scared than he was, she tried to find the right words, but they would not come, since she never spoke much and certainly not about such things. She explained to him in different ways that everyone did this, even his father and mother and, it seemed, his sister, for she was already fifteen years old, and he would also … ‘Why? Why?’ his eyes beseeched her. ‘How do I know!’ she said, staring at him. ‘It’s just nice, it can be pleasant. I was still little when I found out about it, so how come you don’t know?’

  His mother couldn’t get over her surprise. And for him a new era began. When his sister returned home, he looked at her with new eyes, in fact he looked at everyone differently. Between him and his mother an unusual relationship developed, a kind of embarrassment, with each feeling guilty in front of the other. He started to observe his sister’s body, which hitherto had not excited him at all. He saw it was different from his. But the strangest thing of all was that the image of his sister was soon replaced by his mother’s. He clung to his mother’s body with curiosity. And a fear that he did not understand entered his feelings for her. It appeared often, confusing him.