“A couple thousand of us arrived there late in the afternoon. It was already getting dark. I was too tired to look around. I can still picture the brilliantly lit road in front of me and in the distance the gate between granite pillars topped with fat bronze eagles. The letters over the gate were in bronze too. ‘Jedem das Seine,’ I can still hear a man next to me muttering. Like most of us, he died there in the last few months.
“We weren’t exactly welcome. Two thousand five hundred men squeezed into a barrack that could just about cope with the five hundred that were already there. I met a Sinto from Bremen whom I knew vaguely. Among the fifty thousand prisoners there was also an uncle of mine, Uncle Mauschi from Weimar. I didn’t know him at the time. The Sinto from Bremen and I walked down the central gangway. We looked around us at the bunks, which you couldn’t even see the full depth of. I didn’t know what was worse, the stench of sick intestines, the human heads that gave us hostile looks from those bunks, or the skeletons on trestles and planks which we didn’t realize were the lucky ones because they were able to stretch out a bit in their sleep. ‘Sixteen of you to a bed!’ cried a Russian from barracks squad and the Sinto from Bremen and I climbed up.
“This was the Little Camp, the worst one. The Big Camp was scared of disease and kept the newcomers apart. The Sinto and I slept with our feet in each other’s armpits. That was the most comfortable. If it leaked on us, we hoped that they’d soon transfer the guy with dysentery in the bunk above us to the other side.
“One rainy winter morning, near Barrack sixty-one, I saw my uncle Mauschi. He’d been driven into the Little Camp with two others through the high barbed wire on a wagon for delivery. The other two were lying down, he was sitting bolt upright with hollow eyes. A ‘Muslim,’ an inmate who had given up. I saw him, but I wasn’t sure if it was him. ‘Are you Uncle Mauschi?’ I asked. ‘Are you still of this world?’ Only after a while did he look at me. ‘Can you say anything?’ I asked. Then he said, ‘I’m Mauschi from Weimar, your father’s brother.’
“In mid-March my number and the Sinto’s were called for work in the quarry. You threw the boulders into tip carts, and a couple of you pulled them up the hill. ‘Wanna buy?’ I asked one of the Dutchmen who was working there, and I showed him one of the cigarette holders that the Sinto and I made, wonderful things of glass and ebonite. The Dutchman looked, and sighed. ‘How much?’ he asked. It so happened that the Sinto and I sometimes went to Barrack thirty-two in the Big Camp. I can’t explain the relief of being there. They had tables and stoves, and the songs by Zarah Leander coming through the loudspeakers sounded quite different there.
“Easter came. Marvelous weather. For days nothing but air raid warnings. Gradually the discipline broke down, and instead of working everybody was talking about the Americans who were already in Thuringia. In the Big Camp people were making plans all the time, but we in the sewer went further and further downhill. I didn’t even notice that I’d begun shuffling about and talking in a whine, the signs of the ‘Muslim.’
“The tension mounted every day, but nothing happened, except that even then, late at night, a transport arrived from the east. Very quickly, Gerard, the atmosphere became almost unbearable. Great groups of people were herded out of the gate, but lots more people refused to go and went into hiding. On our very last day the Sinto kicked open a cupboard door in the Czech barracks, and I crawled in behind him shivering, with a fearful headache. Everything looked yellow. I already had typhus, you see. The sirens wailed, wailed again and fell silent. We went to the windows. We saw a white flag on the tower. We heard gunshots and machine-gun fire. Somehow or other I got to the parade ground. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Through the gates came an American tank.
“Right then we’d been liberated. Among the Americans there were huge soldiers with gleaming white teeth. They evacuated the Little Camp in just a day, and some of them cried at the sight of us. They took me to the other side of the barbed wire, where there was a hospital. I was put to bed and given food, but not too much. The atmosphere of those last days, Gerard, I can’t find words for it.”
“Try.”
“Well, it was a treat. But there were crows flying past the windows. A lot of us were lying there dying.”
“And how were you?”
“In the evening there was singing. They put gramophone records on. Orchestras were playing.”
“And how were you?”
“The windows were open. Damn it, Gerard, I died listening to a trumpet!”
“You know what I’d like?”
Gerard held up the bottle and looked. “Well? What, Jannosch?”
“For us to hitch up two of those nice horses of yours to the plow and get right out onto the land. I see you dug up a potato field next to the corn.”
“Right away?”
They took the shortest route through the attached barn. There stood the old plow, its blades covered in rust. Jannosch and Gerard put the heavy Gelderland mare in the middle. She’d still know what to do, and the two young horses would follow her.
“Giddyap!”
Along a cart track between the cornfields an old- fashioned team of three horses pulled a plow on which two men sat so close together that their shoulders touched. At first their whole gait was a bit lopsided and swerved about. Once they got onto open ground, they started moving at a swift pace.
Gerard let the other man drive. He watched the hands full of gold rings on the reins. And on all sides, as far as the horizon, he saw his forefathers’ fields. The sun was still high in the sky when he heard a sharp voice in his ear.
“Oh boy, before the war, this is where we came all the time, didn’t we? Gelderland, Brabant, all over the country with a group of caravans and all the family. Sleeping where you wanted, eating when you wanted, playing the violin with your brothers. At night we were often on our way to the horse market, lamps on the seat, the horses for trading in a line behind the caravans. Oh boy, d’you know how great it was to be alive?”
They approached the place where a wide-branching walnut tree had once stood. Blocking the path was the long life of blossoms, birds, and sleeping animals on its trunk.
“Giddyap! Turn!”
The three horses swerved immediately to the left, then to the right, and moved back into the grove. The land was being plowed.
Each minute another piece of land appeared plowed. The autumn sun grew paler. Jannosch and Gerard had grown silent. They were smoking. They cupped their hands around the flame of the lighter and looked together at the horses’ backs among the furrows.
“Oh man, d’you know how good a cigarette like this tastes?”
3
They got married. They were married under Dutch law on the thirtieth of that same month of September.know exactly how Lucie went to the washhouse that morning, chuckling to herself, with long strides. Her mother’swedding dress was too short and too tight for her, revealing her highly polished brown shoes. With her nose close to the narrow mirror against the back wall she showed me how she painted her mouth with bright red lipstick. For a moment I caught her eye. Defenseless, with a smile that shot up into my heart like a flame. Happiness can be most unsettling.
In the village, people sniggered when the wedding procession came past. One Opel Olympia with the happy couple and the father, two Opel Olympias with farmers from the Noordoostpolder, and two low-slung American Fords with Gypsies from the camp in Enschede, where the news of the wedding had somehow wafted. The guests parked on the village green and crossed over to the town hall. Everyone says that it was windy that day, and that Lucie and the Gypsy women were walking about like flapping banners. Personally I remember a windless day, and sunlight deep into the council chamber — where Lucie and Joseph got up politely to write their names in huge letters in the register.
In the afternoon a whole lot of us were there under the apple trees. The party had started without much planning. Joseph really hadn’t notified his family, because marrying into a gadjo family is the last
thing to be proud of. So the Gypsies who’d come over from Enschede and the farmers were drinking gin on opposite sides of the room. One of the guests must have got sufficiently in the mood to go to his car where there was a harmonica waiting in the trunk, because clapping and singing of quite legendary passion suddenly erupted. A fire flared up and Gerard allowed his free-ranging chickens to be caught and have their necks wrung with a deft movement. Dance! said the music that afternoon. Whirl around above an abyss of mutual understanding, go! In the generosity of drunkenness, show your real face for once! That’s what it was like that afternoon. It was the most beautiful afternoon of the year. What I remember of that party is a row of cars on the sunny roadside and a little farther off, to the left of the house, an orchard full of gentiles and travelers. You saw them dancing and eating and drinking together in good nature. Music makes people a little childlike, more forgiving, but anyone who looked closely, as I did, saw two worlds still sadly divided from each other.
Except for that one couple. The feud didn’t apply to them.
“D’you know,” said Lucie to her husband, “I think I’m going to be faithful to you all my life.”
“You’d better be,” said Joseph.
And I can still see them wandering down the path a little way, the two of them, moving with a step that is very like an absolute insight into the world, and then I’m jealous. I observe the easy behavior of a couple of creatures who seem to know themselves and each other, their heartbeat, their circulation, like animals, and I feel excluded down to my fingertips. Not because I don’t know the atmosphere around those two, the secret, it’s just that I’ve seen the secret flowing away before my eyes, like sap from a notched tree, without thinking of cupping my hand underneath it.
Gerard saw it too. He saw that his daughter was completely crazy about that lad. She had his blessing. If anyone said to him that afternoon, “To a Gypsy!” he would nod, pour himself another drink, and reply, “That’s right, friend.” He felt no urge at all to discover why, but it didn’t worry him in the slightest that somebody had moved into his house who drank coffee and smoked all day. Somebody who talked very loud but, in the mornings, refused to talk to a soul before he went to the water pump in the yard — despite the expensively fitted shower — and put his head and his hands under the cold jet.
If you ask me, he had long since forgotten that first time he’d taken his son-in-law for somebody else completely. That bunch are easily mixed up, aren’t they? When he saw a slim Joseph opening the wide stable doors in a dark suit, he didn’t think of Jannosch. When he saw the young man looking terribly worried and thinking aloud in a strange language and repairing a harness or bridles, he had no feeling of déjà vu. Although Gerard thought it was nice, since his daughter’s marriage, to have a weather forecaster, a mechanic, and a horse dealer who still knew the art of making a horse walk so lopsidedly that the owner became embarrassed about its build, that still didn’t mean at all that he was reminded of something that had pierced his heart like a thorn.
There are things that you simply can’t face. What are you to do? Forget them? Turn on your heel? Get confused and absolve yourself of reacting logically to the indescribable illogicality of the way the world is made?
Since that one winter evening during the war, Gerard has had to wrestle with the fact that he came back from the arrest and Jannosch didn’t. There was a time when he held his breath whenever he heard the dogs barking: Perhaps the door of the farmhouse would now creak open and he would see the Gypsy, in black as always, come into the kitchen. “Afternoon!” His heart leaps up. With a huge gesture, he opens his arms.
Hocus-pocus of conscience. Mists, differences in air pressure between good and evil. What should and should not have happened? Who else but you was in the thick of it? Gerard was a pawn in the resistance in Twente, a foot-soldier, and he did the run-of-the-mill, deadly dangerous work. Plotting, hiding people, carrying out raids, lying by the railway at night, driving through the woods at night — there were quite a few who did that. Why? The fact that heroism for the sake of heroism exists — and treachery for the sake of treachery — isn’t such an easy idea to come to grips with. As far as principles are concerned, obedience to God is a lot more plausible. Or patriotism. Or loyalty to the House of Orange. How much of that is true? That the simplest of simple things — the will not to bow to pressure — loves to seek justification in a higher motive? Gerard is a farmer, a widower who lived a fairly retiring life with his daughter. Only years later did the motif of Jannosch and his inexorable fate begin to cry out to him. Friendship, and he no longer felt innocent.
When Jannosch was arrested one January evening in 1944, it was less unusual for him than for those arrested with him. The authorities put him up against the wall, searched him, twisted his arms behind his back, and pushed him through the rain to a car with its doors already open. This was all familiar. He was well past thirty. By the time you are thirty you have got used to spending a night in a cell periodically. There was always an unpaid fine, or a residence permit that should never have been issued, or a complaint by a lady from Buss that you’d taken the washing off her line.
The three police cars drove back toward the town very fast. Within an hour Jannosch, separated from his fellow culprits, was taken to a cell past a row of gray doors in the prison. Inside, a bed, walls all around, and the iron peephole at eye level. Jannosch, already with a swollen jaw, sat down. Shortly he would get a merciless beating at the first interrogation, but for now he was still resting with his elbows on his knees. He yawned and concentrated on the thundering clatter of a gate slammed shut elsewhere. He has experienced this before. Right. This has happened before. By the light of a single bulb, he sank into the daze of solitary confinement.
That first hour in a cell he found particularly difficult. So here he was. His body had obviously been confined again. He looked at the surface of the opposite wall and in his brain there was the sense of the other times he had done that. No different from that time in Venlo or in Eisden. No different, either, from the way his father and his uncles had sat looking at that wall. The game’s up is scratched into the plaster. Not because you parked your caravan without a permit, to tell the truth, but because you people are a big nuisance. You people speak slang. Our constitution objects to your peripatetic trading, your ingenious deals, and your Gypsylike behavior in general.
Jannosch was just a lad when he and his father and uncles had parked the caravans on a broad Brabant embankment. Beyond the poplars there was a rippling river. Ducks with their tails in the air were searching for food among the tall reeds. The line of caravans had been followed by the gendarmerie from Zundert onward. The gendarmes were aware that those types with their dark appearance often had valid papers. A nuisance, but there were always mayors who didn’t see any reason to frustrate men who had enough means of existence, and women who smoked cigars but were silent when their husbands spoke. In these cases Article 41 of the Penal Code sometimes provided a solution. There was always some excuse. With a bit of effort you could throw someone in the cells for parking a caravan by the side of the road. You could create a criminal record for someone and subsequently deport him from the country with his whole family. And if you wanted, you could stop him at the border on his way back. The sun was shining. There was a slight wind. The horses had already been chased into the tall grass when the gendarmes, adjusting their coats, appeared.
There it was. Footsteps and the jingling of keys outside the door. Jannosch readily got up for the nighttime interrogation. Hard to say how many times he’d been beaten up by some hero or other of some European state, often enough in any case, but that night things were rougher than usual. Two Dutch members of the security police, Oosterlink and Plugh, wanted to know the names of everyone in the resistance group, which from their point of view was understandable. He was beckoned into a brightly lit room with a table with a Remington typewriter on it. Oosterlink and Plugh received him with smiles. Jannosch knew that he wasn’t sa
fe. Anyone would have known it. You didn’t need experience for that. Don’t forget that he was one of those that weren’t called by their name.
Gypsy, said the police. Gypsy plague, said the paper. A thorough, international solution to the Gypsy problem was a topic of conversation in the offices of the Department of Justice in the 1930s. You could see ideas on the desks were really not so far in advance of reality. Registration by number, fingerprints, and if possible permanent supervision. In that atmosphere people like Jannosch mustn’t be surprised to see an overworked policeman sometimes fly off the handle. To see him vent something with a rubber truncheon that, if you understood it properly, was nothing but a well- meant, indeed paternal, exhortation to live in a house. In that atmosphere, still in the climate of the Depression, working people who were roaming around the southern Netherlands could be chased with rakes and shovels to try their luck farther away over the border, while the police just looked on.
But on his way to the horse market in Antwerp, Jannosch was stopped at the Belgian frontier. Things happened so fast that the horse and the front wheels of the caravan were already in Belgium, while the back was still in the Netherlands. No chance of the Belgians letting the family in. No possibility that the Netherlands would take them back. After five days both the Belgians and the Gypsies got fed up with it. Just at the moment that Jannosch and his people were going to take off, the Belgians, who happened to be drunk, came up with the idea of emptying their revolvers above the horses’ heads, simply to frighten them. The horses reared and fell. The Gypsies leaped forward and the gendarmes, only half knowing what to do, tried to force the whole lot back, swinging their truncheons menacingly. With the alcohol, they took their violence to extremes.
Oosterlink and Plugh went further. When Jannosch was brought back into his cell, he was no longer conscious and his head looked alarming. He’d thought, they’re going to kill me anyway, so he’d hit back, and the treatment had become protracted. He hadn’t given anything away. He’d just cursed, sofdy and coarsely in his own language, because he knew that talking with someone in a position of power was impossible. He hadn’t mentioned a single name. Not even his own. On the table next to the Remington there had been a scrap of paper with a photo from his inside pocket. None of them had taken the information seriously. Gypsies — the irritating fact was well known — changed names easier than they changed hats. Forged, scrounged, or bought papers had always been a matter of life and death in their world.
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