Duke of Egypt

by Margriet de Moor

  Words can describe things that are in fact alien to you. Yet something can radiate from them that your heart already knew. I’ll tell you about Parasja.

  Her grandmother on her father’s side saved her life. She was still small, about three, but she told me that she could remember everything and what she didn’t remember was told her later. It was after the April War of 1941, when the whole kingdom had surrendered after only ten days and the Ustashi in the north began wiping out the Gypsies. Parasja’s grandmother, Nenat Gian — imagine an imposing woman who smokes a stone pipe — was an experienced leader. We call them puri dai. She immediately prodded the family into action. She already knew in those first April days that it would be better if they left the campsite north of Zagreb. At a trot, with four caravans, the family took flight, Nenat and her blond husband Simon, their daughter, their two sons, all married and with children, and the family of Simon’s half brother Lajos, of whom you’ll hear more later. If I’m honest, I’ve got to say that he was an imbecile — well, a semi-imbecile and terribly proud into the bargain.

  For a year they made grueling journeys through the areas in the provinces that they knew from long ago. They traveled through Turopolje, Cazin, Banja Luka; nowhere did they find anyone they knew. But even in the smallest hamlets, they did find traces of rape and murder. Sometimes, when they stopped in a place where the people were on their side, they were told where the Ustashi were hanging out and how they could keep out of reach of those evil people. And then they went on.

  One day they were descending from the heights of the Prosara and after a considerable distance found themselves near the river Sava, where it is very wide. Downstream there were gigantic waterwheels that turn slowly with the power of the water and generate electricity. Can you picture it? Well, there what had to happen happened. I think that Nenat Gian must have badgered the family for at least an hour, she wanted to go on that same night, and she did, with Simon, with the family of Lajos, as well as Parasja who happened to be sleeping in her grandmother’s caravan. The others were too tired. Six adults and more than fifteen children said they would catch up the next day and that evening camped on the water meadow. Seven mornings later Parasja stood with her grandmother in the same spot. She always said that every second of her life she could still see the skirts of her mother, her aunts, and her cousins turning with the waterwheel in the river.

  Oh, you think that’s been told too quickly? Must I do it better?

  Well then, this is the story that Nenat Gian heard after seven days, when she appeared in the courtyard of a farmer who lived close to the site of the drama. The man took off his hat and crossed himself. It happened that very first night, he said. The family was camping on the grass on the bank. There was clover for the horses and good water. It had rained the whole day, but now it was dry and they lit a fire.

  Two men had come to the farm to buy milk and meat. They were skinny, friendly men. They offered him a Bukhara carpet for sale.

  Rada, thought Nenat Gian, Golubo! Her sons.

  Well then, they lit their fires, they ate, and they went to bed. What time was it then? Ten o’clock? Eleven? Everything went quiet and you heard nothing except the water of the river being scooped up by the paddle wheel, falling and flowing on as always. The Ustashi came just before dawn. They were in a good mood. They’d been patrolling in the area around Sisak for days and before they went back to Zagreb intended to catch another group of Gypsies they’d heard were traveling around in the vicinity. Who passes on that kind of information? How can one know? Betrayal is simply with us all the days of our life. Someone went into the café where the Ustashi were drinking, cheerfully, with their tunics open, and told them exactly where the vagrants were camped and how to find the place.

  Oh, and then everything took its rotten course. The Ustashi arrived in two trucks and stopped under the willows. And the Gypsies rushed in all directions and released the horses. They didn’t have the ghost of a chance. The men in army coats, cheerful, yes, but also impatient because of the sight of the women, threw a grenade among the horses. Two or three of them gave orders. The Gypsy men had to be arrested. Why? Did they want justification for their operation? A tangible reason? Close by was the camp of Jasenovac, a somber, dreadful place behind barbed wire. But with a gate open for everyone who didn’t belong to their own people. Serbs, Jews with their medallions on their chests, from the station they ran to the gate, driven on by the gunfire of the soldiers of the Ustasha state. There was an ironworks there, an embankment had to be built. A certain hangar, 3B, had no roof, no running water, and no food was ever brought there. It was the end of the line for the Gypsies.

  There were two of them left. Golubo had been killed. The eldest boys had also been killed.

  Dusan, thought Nenat Gian, Wansjo, Remi!

  Meanwhile it had begun to rain. The wind picked up. Rada, Parasja’s father, was tied to the shaft of a caravan. Around him on the wet meadow the children were hurriedly cut down and the women were pressed to the ground by two or three men at once. Not that much later, perhaps twenty minutes, the chore began of dragging the bodies to the river by their arms and legs. At this spot the bed of the river Sava is deeply hollowed out. On the bank there was a variety of plant that hangs forward, close together, with stalks full of leaves that bend and spring back above the water’s surface. The bodies floated to the surface after a few days. Parasja must have seen how a couple of them, with their skirts spread wide, were carried along in the dripping arc of the wheel.

  * * *

  As I’ve already said, her father was called Rada, Rada Georgevic. If I don’t tell you about him and what happened to him after the horror, I’m not telling you enough about Parasja. Right then, he and her uncle Janko were carted off that morning, wedged between Ustashi in a truck. Janko had been completely disoriented by what had happened, but Rada felt colder than a frozen stone covered in ice. As he endured the pressure of the shoulders and thighs of the men next to him, he knew that in less than an hour his life had changed into something hard and dirty. For starters, the members of his family were lying dead in the meadow.

  The route followed the bends in the river in a southerly direction and then turned off. Through the open back of the truck he could see burnt-out houses of Serbs in the landscape — black trees — it was strange to see a fat pig just wandering around.

  Near Gradina the road again came out by the river. There, in the shallows, was a wretched boat. They stopped. This is where they were heading for. This was the miserable ferry that linked the bank with the camp of Jasenovac on the other side. The Ustashi, tired and out of sorts by this time, fired a salvo to call the ferryman. From a hovel a man with oars appeared. Perhaps a minute after the ramp was raised, a yard or so from the bank, Rada and Janko dived into the water. Janko was lost immediately, a hail of bullets right through him. But Rada made it in the gray, overcast weather, floating beneath the surface, swimming, resting in the mist among the driftwood against the bank. It lasted for two days. Then he was noticed by a man with an axe in his hand. Who said nothing, but smiled earnestly at him in the reeds because he could guess what it was like to be on the run. Rada followed the woodcutter to a hut at the edge of a field of young corn. A woman pointed him to a sheepskin behind the stove. He slept in the warmth, in the smell of wood, and those who sleep feel a soft arm around their waist. Yet it made no difference at all to his fate.

  Now a man appeared, Josip Broz, remember that name. In fact, all his life everyone called him by his nickname, Broz, but Josip Broz was his real name and the woodcutter who took Rada to the mountains knew it. “Right! You want to fight? Well, what are we waiting for?” And then the name was mentioned that would remain of central importance to Rada. A day later he was with the partisans.

  Oh, and he liked it, that life where thought was action. Always on the move, sometimes on horseback, ten or a hundred men at once. The partisans captured village after village. The losses were enormous. They set up their bases in Muslim and
Serb regions, and liberated the country around. All of this happened under the command of a distant voice, Josip Broz, who maintained lengthy, friendly radio contact with his plukovniks from the front in the south. They were cruel times. For every German killed, fifty to a hundred Communists were put up against the wall. Both evil and good assumed abnormal forms. Those men of Josip Broz. Rada felt comfortable with the extreme violence they used, but was amazed by their well-washed and shaven faces. They also cursed little and didn’t rape very much. A soldier who had stolen two potatoes from a comrade had the barrel of a carbine placed against his head and: bang!

  Listen to the rest. In the summer Rada hears that Broz’s army has broken through a heavy encirclement, by Germans, or by the Italians, because don’t forget that the Italians are still involved, and that he is on his way to the north with his wounded and all. At that point Rada’s group gets moving too. They travel along roads of murder and destruction through massacred villages into Croatia. Every Ustasha they catch is killed — no one worries about that. But no civilian, good or bad, has anything to fear, because that’s the code of Broz’s troops. Northward, beyond Jajce, Rada is given a horse and sent on ahead as a scout for a munitions transport. By then he has long been regarded as a hardened soldier, brave and wild. Next morning he meets the already legendary Josip Broz at his headquarters, a man in a light uniform, tanned, steel gray hair, and with those blue eyes, perhaps you know them, that can stay cool in the worst fury. As for him, he too is expertly shaven.

  From that day on he and Comrade Stari — the Old Man, as the leader was sometimes called — went on quite a few expeditions together. Through Kula, Prozo, Bosanski Petrovac, they came to the small Bosnian town of Bihac. A meeting was held, proud, large, at least five times as large as the population of the town itself, since by the end of that year Broz’s army numbered eight divisions, each with three complete brigades. That’s what you call power. Rada looked at the red flags, shouted the Smrt Fašizmu!, death to Fascism! and drank raki from crates full of bottles requisitioned from the best distilleries. But peace was not the order of the day for him. Happiness, that is, the portents of joy, is something he experienced only when he felt the heartbeat of war again.

  They captured Jablonica. In February they cut through the lines of the Chetniks on Prenj Mountain and retreated into the heart of Montenegro. There, at the end of the winter, the most violent battles of the war were fought between partisans and Chetniks. A battle between brothers, oh, is there anything more furious and magnificent than a battle for one’s own land? I know that Rada didn’t give a damn. Our kind doesn’t fight for this or that area. Nevertheless here we have Rada, one of Broz’s plukovniks, a man with a ragged mustache and terrifying courage, cruelty, low cunning, everything necessary to sharpen the knife in his heart. A man of utter fury. Do you understand when I say that the loyalty to Broz, the affection for that soldier, emanated from his former life?

  Let me tell you the rest of the story. Rada was there when whole divisions of Italians deserted and the Germans, very strong, with elite troops, were forced to give up area after area. The winter was severe. The sky ideal for bombardment. At night the snowfields spit flames and earth. Rada moved from firefight to firefight with his battalion, to areas where everything exploded. When they sang at a serene hour and hot coffee was made and they said, “Soon, after the war, everything will be better,” he strolled off with a look of indifference and stretched out on the ground to sleep.

  Oh, and then one fine day he was with them when they entered the capital. The White Palace was requisitioned by Broz. The Royal Palace and a beautiful villa went for the partisan marshal, who among his people had a Gypsy taking beautiful care of the horses in the stables in the back garden. Things were to turn out differently. Fact is, things would go to the dogs. Damn it, just imagine. In that jubilant city, in the footsteps of the famous Broz, Rada could not know that ten or eleven years later he would be hunted by the police, a criminal, who in peacetime had a nostalgia and predilection for weapons.

  In May 1955 in the prison grounds of Mitrovica an execution was called off at the last moment. When Rada was let out of the gate, he realized that the marshal, the man whose bust you find in even the smallest village, had heard about his case. You see. And had remembered a comrade from the struggle.

  Is this the end? The story of a life? Let me say that someone saw him sitting in a café in Zagreb not long afterward. A rascally Gypsy, with a mustache out to his ears, playing tunes on an accordion.

  But you’re right. I must get back to Parasja. Are the children asleep? Leave the dividing door open and sit down again. That’s enough about Rada. Did she ever see him again? No, never. Not that I’m aware of. That said, one last thing: Wasn’t he her father? Oh. Let me talk. I like a good sprinkling of digressions. Because the story about Parasja, here in my head, is a plain that I can travel through for days without crossing. That I can’t see the end of. Where’s the road? There isn’t one. Really not. Parasja is my blindfold.

  At the time when her father escaped the executioner by the skin of his teeth, she was seventeen. A girl with blacker than black hair that, divided in two, flowed down her Tartar’s face. Her lips laughed of their own accord, I’ve never seen that since. Even later when I lived with her sadness, her face kept the expression of a woman with a radiant humor. She had been brought up in the tradition. Nenaft Gian and her husband Simon, the latter recently dead at the time when this takes place, had instilled the old Gypsy law in her. The Romani Krissi flowed through her head and her heart. So it was nothing less than a disaster when, in the summer of 1956, I think, she chose the wrong man. The wrong one: Imagine a twenty-year-old Rom, a Dutchman, but with a Lowara pedigree, which like hers went back via the Balkans to prerevolutionary Russia and from there to God knows where. And with a grandmother on her father’s side whose Ursari family came from the area of Karnobad, near Burgas in eastern Bulgaria. They were bear trainers and horse dealers. Well, this is how it went: In the summer in question the twenty-year-old Rom, touring Europe incessantly in his car, bumped into his Ursari family in Bosnia. He saw immediately that these were people who knew how to live. Uncles, aunts, children who delighted in dancing feet. What he also saw at once was the black tent of half-rotted goatskin in which Dragica, the old woman of the family, chose to live. It was the ancient kind of shelter of the former mountain dwellers. He felt at ease with those people. He felt like traveling with them for the rest of the summer.

  On we go, then! At the end of August, getting on for the feast of Santa Maria, he alighted with his family on the site of an abandoned monastery near Maricka, which is north of Banja Luka. The sun had already set. He was helping out with pitching the tent and with the caravans. He saw the vague outlines of other caravans. They told him that they belonged to such and such a family. Almost immediately he realized, with his eye and his heart, that there was something wrong between the two families, but no one told him anything that evening. The next day, he met her. It was a look, nothing more, exchanged in a field among the horses, but Dragica had seen the truth straight through the ragged goatskins. “Hey! Gypsy! Did you speak to that woman?” she cried as he walked past.

  “Yes,” he lied. “Aren’t I allowed to, then?”

  “You mustn’t tempt the evil God.”

  Then she explained to him why there must be no intermarriage between the two families.

  “Take off your shoes and come and sit next to me. By the ancient Virgin of my mother, by the white scorched God, how on earth can I avert the disaster!”

  It had begun with a matter of offended honor, she told him. Her eldest son, Bajka, had called Parasja’s imbecile uncle an asshole. Yes, Lajos the madman who two years ago at the entry into the horse market at Sitnica was determined to ride at the front at all costs. His argument was that he was the eldest of three sons who were already married men. Now Bajka, according to everyone, had a level-headed nature, created for friendship and honor. Although most of the horses th
ey were going to sell had been groomed and bridled by his people, he was intending to let Lajos, that knucklehead, have his way. Near Sitnica the group of horsemen reached a small bridge. It was no more than a plank across a pool. At the edge of the mud there were pigs. Lajos pushed forward so abruptly on his stallion that Bajka had no choice but to go through the pigsty. Yes, and pandemonium followed. Men roared, rage bared its claws. Simon, old but still in the saddle, tried to persuade his half brother with his whip to make a timely excuse. But then that word, in all its ugliness, came from Bajka’s mouth. Asshole — it was heard by everyone.

  Dragica took a drag of her cigarette and shook her head. She hugged herself. “From then on the worst thing was the fermenting of rancor. The two began spying on each other. I saw the drama catching fire long before things came to a head one evening toward dusk. The crunching of bone, their fists could easily have settled it. But at a fateful moment Lajos fell and hit his head on the rusty reinforcement of a concrete edge. His eyes stayed open. A light-colored liquid ran from his hair. Then he lay in a coma for at least twenty days in the hospital of Jajce. There are still screws at the side of his head.”

  Ah, that’s murder! There’s no doubt about it. And murder calls forth murder. Two families are at the beginning of a vendetta that cries out for victims. Not exactly a pleasant prospect. For cases of this kind we have the krissi, the very secret judiciary of the Sinti and the Roma. A sentence, severe, by impersonal judges, is the only thing that can cure what cannot be remedied. The trial of Uncle Bajka was held two months after the crime. A café in Trieste filled with men who had traveled, sometimes from very distant countries, because of the gravity of the matter. There were hundreds of them. The parties directly involved had been able to put their case, but had to remain silent during the session. The verdict came in the middle of the night. Bajka had to pay his victim a fine of thirty thousand German marks. In order not to offend the latter, he must stay out of his immediate vicinity for five years. In the meantime no man from his family would be able to marry a woman from the victim’s family.