Robertson Davies - The Rebel Angels

How he made so much money, I do not know. Many people think that business and a fine concept of life cannot be reconciled, but I am not so sure. Make money he undoubtedly did, and when he died we were surprised to learn how much. Yerko could not have carried on alone, but he knew how to sell to advantage to a rival firm, and in the end there was a handsome trust to maintain Mamusia, and a handsome trust for me, and Yerko was quite a rich man. Of course everybody has his own idea about what it is to be rich; truly rich people, I suppose, don't really know what they have. But Yerko was rich beyond anything that a Hungarian Gypsy musician would have thought possible, and he wept copiously and assured me that it would all come to me when he died, and that he felt the hand of death on him very frequently. He was only fifty-eight and as strong as a horse, and lived a life that would have killed any ordinary man years ago, but he spoke of death as something to be expected hourly.

The root of much trouble was that I was to get the whole of the money that was in trust for me when I became twenty-five, and would receive all the capital of Mamusia's trust when she died. It appeared to her – and no amount of explanation or reasoning on my part or that of the puzzled men at the Trust Company's offices could persuade her otherwise – that I had scooped the pile, that her adored Tadeusz had somehow done the dirty on her, and that she was close to destitution. Where was her money? Why was she never able to lay hands on it? She received a substantial monthly cheque, but who was to say when that might not be cut off? In her heart she knew well enough what was what, but she delighted in making a Gypsy row in order to see the Trust men blench and swallow their spittle as she raved.

What had happened was that she was experiencing that intoxicating upsurge of energy some women have when their husbands die. She grieved in true Gypsy style for Tadeusz, declared that she would soon follow him to the grave, and took on tragic airs for several weeks. But working up through this drama, part genuine and part ritual, was the knowledge that she was free, and that the debt of gadjo respectabilty she had owed to her marriage was paid in full. Freedom for Mamusia meant a return to Gypsy ways. She went into mourning, which was old-fashioned but necessary to assuage her grief. But she never really emerged from mourning, the fashionable clothes disappeared from her cupboards, and garments which had a markedly Ciganyak look replaced them. She wore several long skirts and, to my dismay, no pants underneath them.

"Dirty things," she said when I protested, 'they get very foul in a few days; only a dirty person would want to wear them."

She had returned to Gypsy notions of cleanliness, which are not modern; her one undergarment was a shift which she gave a good tubbing every few months; she did not wash, but rubbed her skin with olive oil, and put a heavier, scented oil on her hair. I would not say that she was dirty, but the North American ideal of freshness had no place in her personal style. Gold chains and a multitude of gold rings, hidden away since her days as a Gypsy restaurant fiddler, reappeared and jingled and clinked musically whenever she moved; she often said you could tell the ring of real gold, which was like no other sound in the world. She was never seen without a black scarf on her head, tied under her chin when she went out into the gadjo world, but tied behind when she was indoors. She was a striking and handsome figure, but not everybody's idea of a mother.

Mamusia lived in a world of secrets, and she had in the highest degree the Gypsy conviction that the Gypsies are the real sophisticates, and everybody else is a gadjo – which really means a dupe, a gull, a simpleton to be cheated by the knowing ones. This belief ran deep; sometimes sheer necessity required her to accept a gadjo as at least an equal, and to admit that they too had their cunning. But the essential sense of crafty superiority was never dormant for long.

It was this conviction that led to the worst quarrels between us. Mamusia was a dedicated and brilliant shop-lifter. Most of what we ate was pinched.

"But they are so stupid," she would reply when I protested; "Those supermarkets, they have long corridors stacked with every kind of thing anybody could want, and trash nobody but a gadjo would want; if they don't expect it to be taken, why don't they guard it?"

"Because they trust the honesty of the public," I would say, and Mamusia would laugh her terrible, harsh Gypsy laugh. "Well, actually, it costs more to guard it than to put up with a certain amount of thieving," I would go on, rather more honestly.

"Then they expect it. So what's all the bother?"; this was her unanswerable reply.

"But if you get caught, think of the disgrace! You, the widow of Tadeusz Theotoky, what would it be like if you were brought into court?" (I was also thinking of my own shame if it should come out that my Mother was a clouter.)

"But I don't intend to be caught," she would reply.

Nor was she ever caught. She never went to the same supermarket too often, and before she entered she became stooped, tremulous, and confused; as she padded up and down the aisles she made great play with a pair of old-fashioned spectacles – her trick was to adjust them, trying to get them to stick on her nose, and then to make a great business of reading the directions on the label of a tin she held in her right hand; meanwhile her left hand was deftly moving goods from a lower shelf into the inner pockets of a miserable old black coat she always wore on these piratical voyages. When she came at last to the check-out desk she had only one or two small things to pay for, and as she opened her purse she made sure the checker got a good view of her pitiful store of money; sometimes she would scrabble for as many as eighteen single cents to eke out the amount of her bill. Pitiful old soul! The miseries of these lonely old women who have only their Old Age Pensions to depend on! (Fearful old crook, despoiling the stupid gadje!)

I ate at home as little as I decently could, not only because I disapproved of Mamusia's method of provisioning, but also because the avails of shoplifting do not make for a balanced or delicious menu. Gypsies are terrible cooks, by modern standards, anyhow, and the household we maintained when Tadeusz was alive was a thing of the past. The evening meal after our great fight about Hollier's visit was pork and beans, heavily sprinkled with paprika, and Mamusia's special coffee, which she made by adding a little fresh coffee to the old grounds in the bottom of the pot, and boiling until wanted.

As I had foreseen, a calm followed the storm, my bruised face had been poulticed, and we had done some heavy hugging and in my case some weeping. Among Gypsies, a kiss is too important a thing for exchange after a mere family disagreement; it is for serious matters, so we had not kissed.

"Why did you tell him about the bomari? said Mamusia.

"Because it is important to his work."

"It's important to my work, but it won't be if everybody knows about it."

"I'm sure he'll respect your secrecy."

"Then he'll be the first gadjo that ever did."

"Oh Mamusia, think of Father."

"Your Father was bound to me by a great oath. Marriage is a great oath. Nothing would have persuaded him to betray any secret of mine – or I to betray him. We were married."

"I'm sure Professor Hollier would swear an oath if you asked him."

"Not to breathe a word about the bomari?"

I saw that I had made a fool of myself. "Of course he'd want to write about it," I said, wondering whether the dreadful fight would begin again.

"Write what?"