They could hear the village dogs yelping one after the other as the ghosts passed by, and they kept barking for a long time after to keep the ghosts from returning.
Every successive day brought back the light again.
In the memories of older people in the area, the boy and his grandfather are preserved as two figures in tattered clothes who reappear every spring looking haggard and pitifully thin as they turn into the muddy yards. At that time of year the plump peasant gleams with the extra weight he has put on during his idle winter. If a dog barked angrily, they would stop outside the fence or hedgerow. They never walked side by side; the boy either lagged behind or walked in front of his grandfather, and when they talked while walking they shouted. And they never wound up side by side, as if there weren’t space for that, or as if neither of them needed help or encouragement from the other. The old man wasn’t tall, but the dignity of his bearing heightened his figure in the peasants’ eyes. The women would have liked to touch and hold the little boy, for his beauty moved them, but he radiated only refusal.
For a long time Tuba seemed untouchable; later he seldom longed for physical contact with anyone.
The old man carried a large sack on his left shoulder; he also carried his axe on the left so he had one hand free. He parted his thick gray hair in the middle; according to an ancient law, no barber’s scissors could touch it. And if the masters or the gendarmes were to do that to a Gypsy, as sometimes they did — and the old man imprinted this possibility deep in the little boy’s mind — no greater shame could befall him in his entire bitter life. The way he’d avoided this shame, his grandfather told him, was that when they had wanted him in the army, he took out another birth certificate in the priest’s office in Korpavár. One had to claim to be a few years older or younger when filling out forms so as not to be taken away.
The priest always found somebody in his book with a convenient birth date.
And ever since then he and his children have been going around with this false name. When he went to see the priest in Korpavár, the real Tuba had been dead a long time.
And his grandfather was four years older than it said in his papers.
According to ancient custom, two tight plaits of hair called kader in Romany framed his nicely furrowed, stern face; he allowed no emotion to move a single muscle of his face because that would offend his forebears.
By the way, this sack on his shoulder was the big sack with which peasants frightened misbehaving brats. The Gypsy will cut you in two, put you in his sack, and take you away. He carried the sack as his ancestor had done. The strutting foolish peasant believes he is cussing you, but in his language too, cigány, Gypsy, means human being.
And he feels good when he says, hey, cigány, this or that. For us it’s like he’s not saying anything.
Grandfather Tuba remembered old events as he had heard about them from the stories of his own grandfather; if he could not remember something he rounded off the story by giving his own version. János Tuba told stories the same way to his fellow workers, saw the old fire his grandfather had built in place of the fire around which the road workers sat, and while he filled in the missing pieces from his own experiences he saw his grandfather squatting in the slow-moving veils of smoke, scraping the dying embers with his stick.
When Bizsók was with them, János Tuba skipped over certain things on purpose, so as not to initiate a Hungarian into important knowledge; or he might stretch some facts in other parts of the story.
But among themselves none of these men liked talking about himself or about real events of his life.
And the evenings were not too long either.
After work they had to wash up, and even though they neither washed nor mended their clothes — they took their clothes home and left these chores to their women — they always found things that had to be put in order. While one cleaned the trailer, another would cook. The Gypsies ate what they had cooked together, but Bizsók ate separately. Occasionally they would all go out for a spritzer or, more rarely, a beer, and Bizsók would go with them if only because he didn’t like their being on their own. Four Gypsies appearing in the inn of a strange village was something fearsome; in some places it was not even advisable to go in. Sometimes one of them would want to be alone and would stay back while the others went out. Winding up in the midst of strangers’ lives increased their sense of belonging together; Bizsók looked somewhat askance at this but, as their supervisor, realized that these experiences gave them material to talk about. And since he also had to forge his team into a socialist work brigade, after such an outing he could enter in his log that the brigade members had practiced socializing in their communal life after work.
Tuba was more likely to go out on his own or more frequently to stay back in the trailer.
Bizsók did not like this much.
Sometimes Tuba’s army buddy would show up; the men would find them together when coming back to the trailers, the mustached Hungarian who’d come with Tuba when he joined the team. He always arrived as if materializing out of the ground, and he disappeared in the same imperceptible way. Bizsók had nothing to say about that. He liked that someone had such a loyal friend. They were similar in build too. He always vanished without a word and returned without saying anything; the men could not ask a person like that where he had been or what he had been doing. At most they could tease him, and he could respond in kind. They all noticed that during the days after his friend’s appear-disappear visit, Tuba himself would vanish. But not always. This was impossible to predict, just as it was impossible to comprehend how the mustached man from Budapest always found them no matter where they happened to be working. Bizsók was puzzled, but he neither said nor asked anything. Still, he was left with a tiny ache that reminded him of something he preferred to forget. And he did not like the way the man with the mustache grinned constantly. But over his long years of work, he realized, having thought a lot about it, that the grinning friend had come with Tuba the first time so that the Gypsy would not be alone when he applied for work. Bizsók liked this in Tuba’s friend, with whom he never spoke and whose last name he had a hard time remembering.
He barely remembered the man’s first name, Gyula, because he wanted to cast it out of his memory, and that is when the name would reappear unexpectedly.
Whatever the men did, whether together or separately, they were all very careful, more so than with anything else, not to touch another man’s life, not with words or looks. This basic rule was not to be broken by anyone. Once, the day after such a violation, Bizsók told the malefactor to return his work permit; the man left immediately. Everyone knew what had happened, but in the closeness of their lives they could preserve their self-respect in the future only if no one talked about another man’s private affairs. Of course, there are unguarded movements or words with potential consequences, inadvertently open or meaningful looks that one remembers later. An error may slip into one’s interpretation that may darken another man’s face or brighten it.
Bizsók did not understand many things, but the three other Gypsies could not understand how it was that Tuba could disappear and miss two workdays with impunity. Bizsók would have fired any of the others for such a violation.