Part 1

LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. =1492= Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

Stories of Gypsy Life

Konrad Bercovici

HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS GIRARD, KANSAS

Copyright, 1929, Doubleday, Doran Co. Published by Arrangement

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

Page

The Mill on the River 5

Ripe Wheat 20

Sava 42

STORIES OF GYPSY LIFE

THE MILL ON THE RIVER

It was an old mill, Dimitru’s mill on the Bistritza River. It had been run by the family of Dimitru long before any other mills had ever been put on either side of the river, all through the Moldavia country. The dykes and the water wheels were of old oak, cut from trees in the forest when the country paid yearly tribute to Turkey and was ruled by the Fanariots of Stamboul.

Within the mill were fifty pairs of millstones which, grinding wheat and corn, had themselves been ground so thin that they had no weight to mill any more the hard grain growing in that part of Roumania. These old millstones were the pride of the family, for not another mill in the country could show so many.

When anybody said anything about Dimitru’s mill or the manner in which he milled, the tall, black-bearded, wide-chested, brown-eyed miller would stretch to his full height, and pounding the left side of his chest with his right hand, he would cry:

“Look at these stones! Fifty pair of stones have ground flour in this mill. I myself have used five pair. This is the sixth one on the shaft.”

Those millstones were like arms of the escutcheon of a nobleman, which no man was allowed to impugn.

At the inn Dimitru was looked upon with respect by the peasants. He was one of the oldest inhabitants of the village. Indeed, the village itself, clustered as it was about the mill, was known as Dimitru’s Mill Village. For not only did they mill flour there, but they cut logs that were let down from the heights of the Carpathians early every spring, and they pressed oil out of pumpkin seeds, and carded wool, and even worked things out at a lathe which Dimitru himself had installed there; at first merely to satisfy a whim he had had after he had first seen a lathe work in another village, and then, as he grew more proficient, to make furniture for most of the people in the village. Back of the mill there was a shop in which carts and wheels were made, and chairs and tables; and even small husking machines, patterned after one that had been bought in Austria. The water wheel provided the power for all the work.

The inn, the church, the school, the mayor’s office, the situation of every building was reckoned by its distance from the mill. During the winter, when there was only little work to do, the elders of the village would assemble in the mill, and watching the still in which the mash of plums and pears, grown in the neighborhood, was distilled into spirits, watching the drops fall into the receptacle that sat under the long copper worm, they would tell the tales they had heard from their mothers and grandmothers, who in turn had heard them from their parents and grandparents--stories of visitations of wolves; tales of sorceries, of witches which had risen up riding in the air on broomsticks, and of horses that could run so fast they disappeared from sight in less time than it takes to blink an eye. They recalled the different battles--battles with the Turks, battles with the Russians, battles with the Hungarians; births of five-legged calves and two-headed chickens, and the reappearances of deceased men whose ghosts were forever roaming about this, that and the other place.

Dimitru repeated an old tale of his own family, of how the stones of his mill had stopped once by themselves while some corn was being ground. From behind the stones groaned a voice which was recognized as being the voice of Vasili, Vasili Yoan Stefans, who had died only a few months before.

“Mill not this corn,” the voice had called. “It has been stolen from my granary by Panait, the Greek. Give it back to my wife lest my children starve this winter.”

The millstones refused to budge or turn until every grain of flour which had already been ground was swept out clean and returned to the bag from which the corn had been taken. And even then the stones would not move, although the water wheels turned and everything else was in motion. The wool was being carded, the logs were being sawn; only the millstones refused to turn. Not until the widow had been called and the corn belonging to her had been returned, and not until Panait had confessed to stealing the grain, had the stones turned again.

And there were many tales, similar to that one, centered about the mill. For the mill had also refused to grind grain when the Russians had invaded the country a century ago, and had refused to grind when the Turks had come. It was the mill on the Bistritza that ground wheat and corn and pressed oil and sawed logs and turned the lathe only for those belonging to the land. And Dimitru was the owner of that mill.

Dimitru had a son, and a daughter whom he had married off when very young. The son, like all the sons back in the family, was preparing himself to take over the mill of his father when the time should come. For even if he were to take a wife while his father was yet alive, there was enough room for him and his wife in the house. And even if he were to raise a family, there was enough room and enough field for him to pasture his dowry of cows and sheep, and to raise enough fodder for them. He had indeed already taken off a good deal of the burden of his father, for while the old man busied himself with his cart shop, preferring the lathe to the mill, George was in complete charge of the stones. And he was as good a miller as his father.

But although he joked and played around with most of the young girls who came to the mill, although he danced with all of them at the inn, teasing, singing, joking with them, there was not one who could say that he was giving her preference over the others. Tall, dark, with big brown eyes, the lashes of which were always covered with a thin white powder, the dark, tufty brows looking like those of an old man because of a fine flour powder always on them, he was a good dancer, and his voice rose above the voices of the others when any singing was being done at the inn. At the wrestling matches on Sunday there were few youngsters who dared to match him. And he was gay and always happy. And it was known that although he was allowed to take one-tenth of the flour he milled, in payment for milling it, from everybody, he took only half that amount, and sometimes not even that from the poor and the widows of the country. Indeed, many a widow had brought half a bag of corn and returned home with a full bag of corn flour, George yelling at the top of his voice, when the widow claimed there had been some mistake, that he was an honest miller.

“You have brought one bag of corn and not two, widow of Jorga,” he would silence the protesting woman, not giving her any chance or time to explain herself.

“You have brought one bag, and I know you have brought only one bag! Am I a miller, or a thief, or what?” he would shout, and show great anger, as he would push her out of the mill.

One winter night, while the wind was howling, and the water wheel, raised from the frozen river, was squeaking and groaning, and the storm was beating savagely against the windows and doors of the mill, one of the villagers sitting about the walled-in stove, in the ashes of which the potatoes were being baked, asked:

“George, whom are you going to marry?”

Dimitru gave his son no time to answer. “He will marry the one who will bring him a good enough dowry,” he answered, instead of his son.

One by one they passed in review all the marriageable daughters of the village. They knew all of them. And when Dimitru had shaken his head to the last one, the _staroste_--the elder of the village--trembling and with shaking fists, thundered into the face of the man:

“Is it, then, the death of one of the married men that you are waiting for, to marry your son?”

George had been making fun of all that was said. He had taken it all as a joke. But to the thundering voice of the _staroste_ he replied:

“I wish everyone long life in this village, and in every other one. When I am ready to marry, I shall make my own choice.”

“Indeed, my son wants to get married to some pauper. I have given six pair of oxen as dowry to my daughter, six pair of oxen and one hundred gold pieces. But he may want to marry some pauper!”

“A time will come,” George answered. “My time will come. But it shall be of my own choice, not of anybody else’s.”

“Well said,” spoke the gray-bearded _staroste_.

Old Dimitru remained silent.

Then they all sat down to sample the new prune juice that was dripping from the copper worm. It was better that such discussion end in joy, so they sang their saddest songs.

Finally George remarked, on looking toward the idle stones, “It is a pity they should be idle so long.”

George was never happy but when the stones turned around.

“This is a water mill,” his father answered. “When the Bistritza freezes, the mill freezes.”

“I know, Father.” He was a miller and lived only when the mill lived. “But it is a pity that the stones should not be turning when the Bistritza freezes.”

“If it were a windmill, you would be saying half the time the same thing,” another man of the group mused.

“If it were a horse mill, the mill would not be turning at night,” another man said in jest.

Whereupon one of the men, who had served in the army, and had been far away in a large city, began to speak about a large, steam-power mill which he had seen on his travels. A steam mill. One prepared logs to fire the engine during the summer, and then in winter one had the mill go whether the river was frozen or not.

George mused impatiently, “What a pity the Bistritza freezes!”

During the first month of the winter, after the river had frozen, he had had some work to do. He had sharpened every tooth and smoothed out the grain of the stones, until the teeth were as sharp as steel edges. He had cleaned and adjusted and readjusted everything. He had made it all ready to go, and now he was anxious to hear the whirl and turn of the mill, grinding and crunching all that was shoved into it.

“What a pity the Bistritza freezes!”

His father looked at him and then replied: “It is a thing I am going to put into my will, that this is a water mill and it shall remain so. This mill has ground fifty pair of stones.”

George was tired of always hearing the same thing. He left the company to go to his own room above the shaft.

Soon after, the peasants tightened their wolf-fur coats about them and returned to their homes, after wishing one another good luck. It was snowing and storming. Wolves were prowling on the road.

Dimitru still pottered about in the cart shop, working on a new corn-husking machine he was trying to perfect; then, tired, he, too, went to his room, where he lay wondering what was to become of the mill after he was no longer there. Was it to be desecrated? Was it to be forever forgotten as the water mill on the Bistritza? Was all the pride of generations to be sacrificed to that new thing of which the returned soldier had spoken? Outside the wind was howling, the lugubrious plaint of the hungry wolves was coming near and nearer, the wheel was creaking on its axle, straining the ropes that held it to the thick iron staples embedded in the stone of the walls. Whom was that son of his to marry if he wanted to marry of his own choice? It had not been so with him. His father had chosen him a bride, decided on the dowry, and married him off. Yet he had been happy! George should do as he had done. He was the father, the master.... With these thoughts the old man fell asleep.

Early that spring, after the river had broken, and the logs began to descend to the mill, and the wheel had begun again to turn, George, very busy and very happy, forgot all about the frozen months.

At the inn Dan, Petru’s son, whose farm was across the river and who was reputed to be very wealthy, came to meet Dimitru, the miller, to talk over matters of matrimony between his daughter Veta and George. After the bottle of wine was between them, Dan opened the conversation.

“There is no other man would offer the dowry I offer. What say you?”

“I say that my son George must receive as much as I have given my daughter as dowry. Six pair of great oxen, one hundred gold pieces, and all the other things.”

Dan, red-haired and easily excited, rose from his chair. “Is my Veta a cripple?”

Dimitru answered calmly: “She is not ... but George is a better man than the one who married my daughter.”

They both sat down again. It was not fitting they should be heard quarreling by the others.

“Am I a miller to be able to give such dowry?” Dan remonstrated. Then, as an afterthought, he added, “One should be able to accumulate wealth by building a mill the other side of the river so people won’t have to lose time rowing back and forth.”

“The mill is on this side,” Dimitru answered. “It is on this side.”

“Since millers ask such dowry, it may come to pass that there will be a mill on the other side also.”

Upon that the two men left the inn.

On reaching the mill Dimitru asked his son, “What say you about Veta, Dan’s daughter?”

George was busy cleaning the flour funnels. He was as if snow-clad. He wiped his face with his sleeve and answered: “It is long since I have seen her. They have their own inn on the other side. I remember her well, however, beautiful and strong.”

“You will marry her,” Dimitru announced briefly.

“Who says I will?” yelled George. He was furious.

“I say so. I have talked to her father about dowry and things.”

“Marry her, then, yourself. I shall do my own choosing when I am ready.”

“You will do what I say, George.”

“In the mill, because the mill is yours.”

“And do you know what will happen if you don’t marry Veta? Dan will put up a mill on the other side and starve our stones. Do you understand?”

George paled. But the next instant he stopped the whirr of the mill to be better heard and said to his father:

“Even though she be the fairest on earth, I say ‘no.’ I am not a horse or an ox to be marketed that way. Let him build ten mills.”

Upon that he returned to his work, while the old man muttered, “You will do as I say,” and went to his shop.

A few days later, bricks were being brought in big carts and deposited on the other side of the river. Bricks and beams and lumber, and gypsies came to dig the foundation of a large building.

Dimitru’s heart stopped beating when he saw that Dan really intended to build a mill. He sent word he wanted to speak to him, but Veta’s father refused to come. The old miller could not sleep nights, nor could he work at his lathe. The noise of the work across the river maddened him. Another mill was rising. Another mill, and his son seemed not to care. He asked George to go to the dance across the river and get better acquainted with Veta.... The mill had to be stopped. George refused. He would not be traded away. He would take a wife of his own choice, mill or no mill. Veta was out of the question.

When the foundation had risen above a man’s height from the ground, Dimitru, compelling his son to come along, rowed across the Bistritza to have a talk with Dan. He found the man busily engaged in giving orders, flushed by the activity about him.

“What is it you are doing, Dan, Petru’s son?” Dimitru asked, as if he did not know.

“As you see, my neighbor across the water--putting up a mill for the people on this side of the river, so that they shall not have to row across to your mill.”

“But a good half of my milling comes from your side of the river,” Dimitru answered.

“That is just why I am putting up the mill,” Dan replied sarcastically.

“But that is impossible! My mill has been there for over a hundred years,” remonstrated Dimitru. “Are you going to starve the stones?”

“To each one his own way of doing,” replied the would-be miller. “But young men demand such dowries, nowadays, they can only be made by milling and not by farming.”

“But we have been millers for hundreds of years,” Dimitru insisted.

“I hope my grandchildren will be able to say the same thing about this mill,” Dan retorted. “Perhaps things will change, and people will begin to row from your side of the river to this mill, for I shall mill cheaper than you do.”

“So that is what you want to do,” cried Dimitru. “Starve me out!”

“You see,” Dan retorted, “I have only daughters in my house. And the young men about this place want big dowries, which only millers can give to their daughters.”

While the two men were speaking, Veta, Dan’s daughter, came riding upon a small horse. George raised his fur cap as he saw her, and approached to help her from the saddle. Instantly the two older men looked at each other with a look of understanding. Perhaps the problem was nearer a solution than they had just thought. The conversation between them lost its acridity as they saw the two youngsters together, Dimitru saying:

“It is not a mill that I should like for my son as dowry. He already has one.”

To which Dan answered, “I have not offered the mill as dowry, have I?”

They tried conversation on other subjects, but it always reverted to what one had to offer as dowry, and what the other one would be willing to accept for his son. In the midst of that, Dimitru, having remarked a too great interest in his son for the girl, abruptly decided to leave for the other shore.

“Go on and work your mill, son. This is no time to idle. Come.”

“Come dance at our inn,” George urged Veta, as he jumped into the boat.

“There is a big dance at our inn tomorrow, Sunday,” the girl answered.

Then the oars splashed in the water, and the boat was rowed across with vigorous strokes by father and son.

Late that night, as the two men were anchoring the water wheel over Sunday, the father said to his son:

“I shall ask as dowry that he stop working on his mill.”

Instantly George rose to his full height and looked his father straight in the eye.

“You might have asked me,” George remonstrated, “for I happen not to wish to marry Veta.”

“You do not?” Dimitru asked furiously. “But I do want you to marry her, and marry her you will. I shall not live to see the stones of my mill idle when they should be milling--live to see how the corn is rowed across the river to be milled in the other mill, led by ungodly German wheels turning of themselves. For it is a steam mill he is putting up.”

“This is certain,” George answered, “you cannot make me marry her.”

Then he left his father and went to his room. He was furious. Because his father had spoken so compellingly, Veta, of whom he had thought rather agreeably, had lost her favor in his eyes. He was going to marry whom he pleased, and not because of fifty pair of dead stones that lay around there, requesting him to do otherwise.

The following day, Sunday, he went to the inn on his side of the river, in his best clothes, looking around for any likely girl whom he had not previously remarked, so that he could make love to her, knowing full well that his father was watching his every movement. In the midst of the dance Veta arrived. She was fairer than most of them, and she had put on her best garb. Upon her bare, full neck she wore the gold necklace, her white silk shawl hung down from the comb in her hair, and her high, well-modeled boots, that reached to her knees, were decorated with veins of red and green leather.

The old man smiled to himself when he saw her, sure that George could not resist her: she was so beautiful. He was also certain that she had come to dance with his son, sent probably by Dan, her father, who already regretted what he had done. Ah! He was not going to let Dan off so easily if he saw Veta loving his son.

But the girl seemed to pay no attention to George after a perfunctory greeting. At the dance she locked her arm into the arm of the son of the blacksmith and danced with him in the second, and third, and fourth dances, avoiding dancing with George. It enraged the old man. Seating himself near his son, who was resting between dances, he said:

“That shrew is trying to play with you.”

“Nobody can play with me,” George answered.

“She thinks that if she can make you love her, her father will get off with less dowry than he should pay.”

“Who says I want her?” George answered.

At the end of the fourth dance Veta beckoned to George to come outside; she wanted to talk to him. He followed her out quickly.

Once outside, the girl told him rapidly:

“My father wants to compel me to marry you. I don’t want to.”

“And mine wants to compel me to marry you, and I don’t want to,” George answered.

“Then it is understood,” Veta replied, after looking the boy straight in the face. “Are we cattle to be married against our will? We do not want it. I always knew you to be a man, George.”

“No, we do not want it.” And they shook hands on that.

They reentered the inn as unobtrusively as they had gone out. George watched her walk ahead of him and thought:

“What a spirited girl! And that fool of a father thinks he can compel her to marry somebody she does not want to!”

RIPE WHEAT

The wheat blades, heavy with the large berry nests, swayed golden in the light of the setting sun. The bells of the little church tolled the call to prayers. God had been good to the peasants of the Dobrudja land. There had been rain in time, and the locusts had kept away from the marshlands of Tcherna. The peasants, accompanied by their wives and children, all in their Sunday clothes--the embroidered waists with the red-and-green skirts and the high boots with the vamps of colored leather--crowded the road leading to the house of God.

They had been going to that church every evening while their wheatfields ripened. They were praying that no calamity overtake them; for they had already suffered enough the previous three years. Two years of drought had robbed them of all their labor, and on the third clouds of buzzing locusts had suddenly settled upon their fields and devoured all, leaving only dry stalks, before moving on, flying lower, because heavier, to other fields to do the same work of destruction.

But now all seemed past danger. They offered thanks to the Lord and promised gifts of candles and oil for the lamps under the icons of the church. On the morrow, they were to begin harvest. Returning from the church, talking softly among themselves, still awed by the sacred ritual, they looked over the scythes to see if they were sharp enough and the curved handles strong enough.

It was only after the evening was over that gaiety entered the square, thatched mud huts of the Roumanian peasants. A lone gypsy fiddler had appeared at the inn. It was One-Eyed Naie, who traveled from one village to another without ever remaining anywhere more than a night. Some people said it was because of an oath he had taken. Others said that he was continually running away from a curse which followed him for a sinful deed in his youth. But it did not matter. Naie was a good fiddler. Already the villagers were assembling at the inn.

Tomorrow they were going out to harvest their fields. Many brought their curved long-handled scythes to the inn to show them to one another, and to whet them still sharper with the oilstones they carried in their belts while talking to friends. They had had their first meal in more than two weeks; for they had kept “post”--had abstained from eating meat while they were praying God’s mercy.