The programme about the Romani had annoyed Gabriel. The billowing shirt, the artfully unkempt hair, the quasi-Latin gaze – the whole gypsy-scholar routine was ridiculous. ‘It really was,’ Naomi assures her sister. It should be remembered, she says, that the title of Gabriel’s aborted thesis was: ‘A people without writing’: the representation and self-representation of the British Romani. ‘You’d want to read that one, right?’ she says. Before abandoning the thesis, Gabriel had published an article derived from it; a couple of sentences from Paskin’s script, he said, had been taken verbatim from that article. Gabriel had also despised Paskin’s first book, on cannibalism; it was nothing more than a cut and paste job, of course.
Naomi accompanied Gabriel to the bookshop event, to keep his spirits up and the resentment down. ‘I tried to talk him out of it, but he said it had to be done,’ she tells Kate, as she scans the ceiling, smiling at what she’s remembering. Then she laughs – a quick dry cackle, which provokes a sequence of small coughs. ‘It was even worse than expected,’ she says, almost gleefully.
David/Daffyd Paskin read two brief sections from his book, then talked for twenty minutes about the experience of making his TV programme. Questions were taken from the audience; there were many questions, and they were answered with some wit. It appeared that he had reconciled himself to contact lenses, but the armour-piercing gaze was still in use: he trained the squint frequently on three young women in the front row. There was a preponderance of women in the audience, as Gabriel remarked. Gabriel was considering an intervention: he had a question about George Borrow, because he was sure that Paskin was not as familiar with the work of George Borrow as he made out to be. But before he could speak, someone sitting behind them wanted to know if Mr Paskin was aware of the church in Birmingham that was offering its congregation classes in the Romani language. The question was put in the manner of a benign examiner, and the voice was ‘gorgeous’, says Naomi: a grainy bass, extremely precise in its enunciation, as if English were not the speaker’s first language, though there was no accent that Naomi could hear. Naomi turned to see the speaker. His appearance did not disappoint: dark and deep-set eyes behind expensive-looking horn-rimmed spectacles, broad cheekbones, aquiline nose, a grey-and-charcoal beard, and thick greying hair, finger-combed back from his brow. He put Naomi in mind of pictures of Brahms in later life; a slightly less paunchy version of Brahms.
When the questions were done, the author signed copies of his book. Though he had not bought a copy, and had no intention of ever buying one, Gabriel joined the queue; he wanted to introduce himself. The man with the gorgeous voice was two or three places behind them. Naomi heard the voice murmuring, and a female voice, possibly Polish, whispering in reply. The woman was magnificent: considerably taller than the man, slender, with hair that had the colour and gloss of crude oil; her skin was as pale as writing paper, with invisible pores. She was young enough to be the man’s daughter, but she was not his daughter – in fact, nothing in her expression or stance suggested any intimacy. Becoming aware of Naomi’s attention, she returned it; her eyes were as cold as cameras. The bearded man nodded at Naomi, like a fame-weary actor or politician.
Arriving at the author’s table, Gabriel told him that he had enjoyed the talk, and the book; he had a particular interest in the subject, he explained, as he had once worked in local government as a gypsy and traveller liaison officer. A brief conversation ensued; David/Daffyd glanced two or three times at the queue; he took note of the magnificent woman. More than two decades had passed since Gabriel and David Paskin had last been in a room together, and in the interim Gabriel had deteriorated to a greater extent than had the younger man. The contours of the face had slumped; the girth had slackened. Back in the days of his thesis, he had been clean-shaven; now he was not. His hair was considerably sparser. Nevertheless, it surprised him that there was not the slightest glimmer of recognition in Paskin’s face. It crossed his mind that Paskin knew who he was, but thought it necessary, for whatever reason, not to show that he did. It was possible that he had disliked Gabriel as much as Gabriel had disliked him. But this explanation was weak: Paskin could not be so accomplished an actor. He was perfectly at ease, and he was talking to a stranger. It was hard to believe, but it must be true: he had entirely forgotten Gabriel. They shook hands. ‘A pleasure to meet you,’ said Gabriel. ‘Likewise,’ said Daffyd Paskin. ‘Hope it sells,’ said Gabriel.
Outside, fifty yards down the road from the shop, Gabriel hesitated at the door of a pub. ‘I’m such a fucking toady,’ he moaned, then out of the bookshop came Paskin, with the bearded man and the amazing pale-skinned woman. The trio walked off in the opposite direction; Paskin laughed, as loud as a trumpet; the young woman walked two paces behind the men, head lowered, swiping her phone.
‘That’s where it began,’ says Naomi, getting up from the table. ‘More later. I need a lie down,’ she says faintly, pressing the back of a hand to her brow, in a self-parodic mime of exhaustion.
6.
Instead of working, Kate watches Daffyd Paskin’s programme online.
The presenter sits on a stone wall. A light breeze tickles the hair, which has been tended with great care to look as if no trouble has been taken with it. The shirt, striped blue and white, is soft, capacious, untucked; the jeans are mildly distressed. He is easy on the eye; the darkness of hair and eye do make an impact, Kate allows. An adjustment of the camera angle reveals, over his shoulder, the quivering sea, gilded by the setting sun. The camera moves to the front and pulls back; a book is open on Daffyd’s knee. The set-up is contrived, but this is what the genre requires. He reads:
Coin si deya, coin se dado?
Pukker mande drey Romanes,
Ta mande pukkeravava tute.
He lifts his face and addresses us: ‘These three lines, dating back to the time of the first Queen Elizabeth, and perhaps beyond, are the oldest recorded specimen of the gypsy language of Britain.’ He translates:
‘Who’s your mother, who’s your father?
Do thou answer me in Romany,
And I will answer thee.’
The Romani people of our island, he tells us, are our most misunderstood and maligned community. ‘Or rather, communities,’ he corrects himself. After imparting a little history, he conducts us to a rank of caravans; we follow him to a door; it opens, and a weather-beaten woman – her name is Judith – welcomes her guest with an awkward pretence of spontaneity. Two men and a woman are seated by the far window, talking incomprehensibly. They are Kalè: Welsh gypsies, originally from Spain and France. The Romani dialect of the Kalè – a stew of Sanskrit, Arabic, English, French, Greek, Welsh, German, Romanian and other ingredients – survived into the 1950s, Daffyd informs us. Today they speak a species of Angloromani, which is English in grammar and syntax, but heavily spiced with Romani words. Room is found for Daffyd on the window seat. ‘We breed ponies and run them on the beaches,’ says one of the men, then he says it again, in his own language. Daffyd wants to know if they use this language only at home.
‘No,’ answers Judith. ‘We use it when we don’t want gadjos to understand.’
‘What are gadjos?’ Daffyd enquires.
‘You’re a gadjo,’ Judith teases, to general laughter. They seem to like him; he is likeable. After a lesson on the subject of Romani hygiene and the exalted status of the horse, Daffyd drives to Southend for a chat with an aged lady called Lillian, who has colourful memories of travelling to Kent in the spring to train the hop vines, and of returning in the autumn for the harvest. Her son is a boxer; she shows Daffyd a small sign – gold lettering on black plastic – that her son stole from a London pub: No Blacks, No Dogs, No Gypsies. In a vox pop interlude, selected members of the public duly play their pig-ignorant part. ‘Don’t believe in work, do they?’ responds a fearsome London matron in a supermarket car park. A rheumy-eyed old bloke declares that gypsies should be put in camps, ‘with a barbed wire and all’.
For the final segment we
return north, to a dismal housing estate somewhere by the north Yorkshire coast. We see an end-of-terrace house, its side wall stained with imperfectly erased graffiti. Daffyd stands in front of the wall to tell us that in addition to the Romanichals, who have been his subject hitherto, Britain is home to a sizeable community of Romani who have arrived since the last war, chiefly from central and eastern Europe. These people are not travellers; the family who live in this house have been here since 1970. At the door his hand is shaken meatily by a black-haired and handsome man, forty-ish, with eyes as dark as obsidian. This is Budek, who leads us to the living room, where the head of the household, also Budek, awaits, enthroned in a leather armchair. The cameras film the entrance of Daffyd; he affects the delight of a discoverer; it’s a routine piece of play-acting. A cimbalom has been set up in the room and the younger Budek proceeds to play for the visitor: the music is of extraordinary delicacy and complexity, and his hands fly back and forth across the strings like feeding swallows. He grins as he watches his hands at play, as though they were no part of him. The old man’s smile, almost toothless, is tinged with what we are invited to perceive as the melancholy of exile. Younger Budek’s wife – a buxom nut-brown woman with arms like bowling pins – declaims a song, unaccompanied; it sounds like a lament, but we are not told what she’s singing about. The last shot of Daffyd shows him agog, as well he might be.
The programme is a performance, as all such programmes are, and Daffyd Paskin’s performance is very professional, thinks Kate; he patronises neither his audience nor his subjects; he is personable; perhaps rather vain, but not without reason.
7.
Mid-afternoon, in the kitchen, Kate asks: ‘And how is Gabriel?’
‘He’s all right,’ says Naomi.
‘But you’re no longer—?’
‘No, we’re not,’ says Naomi.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ says Kate.
‘All good things come to an end,’ says Naomi, with a quick and overbright smile. ‘Anyway, how goes the writing? Anything you could share?’
‘Not yet,’ Kate apologises.
‘So shall I resume?’ asks Naomi, as if assuming responsibility.
A couple of months after the bookshop event, Naomi tells her sister, she and Gabriel went to a concert, a recital of piano music by Ravel and Debussy. The pianist, a young and glamorous French woman, was dazzling; for Gabriel’s taste, however, Ravel and Debussy were still too sweet. He was not in the best of moods that evening. In recent months they had often been in less than perfect accord, Naomi tells her sister. He was frequently morose. Gabriel, as Kate knows, is a man who has no interest in fashioning a career for himself, but life as a shop-floor drone was beginning to oppress him. ‘Humility has its limits,’ says Naomi. On the way to the concert Gabriel had been particularly irascible, she recalls. He had been determined to have no pleasure, and no pleasure was duly had. When the applause was finished, Gabriel took his time fastening every button of his raincoat, as if he were about to step out into a storm, though the evening was dry and mild.
Naomi was standing in the aisle, waiting for him, when her attention was caught by a piece of gorgeous colour – a broad and bright red beret, an authentic Basque boina, which was being settled on a thick crop of silver hair. The silver-haired woman must have been in her seventies, says Naomi, but she was immensely stylish: she wore a full-skirted black coat and a dark grey high-necked top, probably cashmere, with a necklace of garnet-coloured beads that were the size of peach stones. So impressive was this woman that Naomi did not immediately notice that her companion, still seated one place from the end of the row, was the Brahms-like man. He stood up, and the woman took his arm; from the quality of the gaze she directed at him, and vice versa, it appeared that she was his mother. Naomi looked towards Gabriel, but he was facing the wrong way, adjusting his collar and glaring at the piano as if he blamed it for his ill humour. By the time he joined her, the elegant woman and her son had left. Naomi told Gabriel that she had just seen the man who had been at Paskin’s reading. Gabriel was not in the slightest bit interested.
Many apparent coincidences are in fact nothing of the sort, Naomi believes. At all times, she is inclined to see significance where others – nearly all others – would see none. Three yellow cars bumper to bumper in a queue; the discovery that a likeable stranger’s name is Naomi; the sighting of two pairs of identical twins in the same day; the sudden appearance, on the radio, of a piece of music that had been in her mind only an hour before – such occurrences are not messages, necessarily, but signs that something beyond our understanding is at work. That the second sighting of Brahms’s double was a meaningful event rather than an unremarkable example of the workings of chance was proven to Naomi two months later, when she saw him for the third time.
This decisive encounter also took place in a concert hall, at another piano recital. This time, the main item consisted of a single ninety-minute piece by Morton Feldman – ninety minutes of slow repetitions and gradually shifting chords, ‘never louder than pianissimo, with no melodies, no expression’, reports Naomi, as if such a thing were marvellous. It was, she says, ‘a transcendental experience’. Gabriel would have made a run for it after ten minutes, had it been possible to remove himself inconspicuously.
The intriguing man was there. In the foyer, after the concert, he glanced over the shoulder of a man who was talking to him and recognised Gabriel and Naomi, a split second after Naomi had spotted him. It was as though he had heard her call his name, she says. He went outside, and waited.
‘It was incredible,’ says Naomi. ‘What are the odds?’
The odds against two Londoners with an interest in twentieth-century classical music attending the same two concerts of twentieth-century classical music in London would probably not be terribly long, it seems to Kate, but she feigns a befitting astonishment.
It surprised Naomi that the man evidently remembered them. His first words to her were equally surprising. He asked simply, with no preamble: ‘What did you think?’ It was as though they were already well acquainted; more than that – it was as though she were a friend whose opinion was of value to him. She made an observation that was inane, she says, but he agreed with what she said, and with such genuineness that her self-consciousness evaporated in an instant. He introduced himself; she misheard his name as Bernard, so he repeated it.
‘Naomi,’ she responded.
Shaking her hand, he said: ‘My delight.’
She did not know what to say to this; it was pronounced with a smile, as if it were some form of courtly greeting.
‘Naomi – my delight,’ he repeated. ‘That’s what it means.’ He had known a Naomi many years ago, he explained; another coincidence.
It was established that they were walking to the same Tube station. Bernát seemed to intuit that this had been Gabriel’s first exposure to the music of Morton Feldman. ‘A tough introduction,’ he sympathised. Gabriel, self-deprecating, remarked that he felt more at home in eighteenth-century London or Paris than in twentieth-century New York; ninety minutes of murmuring piano were an ordeal, but four hours of Handel were quite the opposite; he could listen to da capo arias until the cows came home. Bernát understood: whenever he listened to Handel, or to Bach or Vivaldi or any of a dozen others, he felt a ‘terrible nostalgia’, he said. In the space of two minutes it became evident that this was not verbiage, says Naomi. Bernát was a man of profound sensibility and knowledge. God, he quipped, was Bach’s right-hand man; the joke amused Naomi rather more than it did Gabriel.
The conversation turned to the music to which they had just been listening, and what followed, Naomi tells her sister, was remarkable. She found that she was strangely at ease; her thoughts were not entirely articulate, but she was not ashamed to expose them. The tone was serious; it was as though she and Bernát were ‘scientists engaged in the same problems’; Bernát, of course, was the senior figure; Gabriel said very little. Gabriel has many fine qualities, says Naomi;
he is an intelligent man, but she cannot recall ever having had a conversation with Gabriel that was like this one with Bernát. She could never have talked to Gabriel about music in the way that Bernát made possible. Bernát, she says, had a ‘philosophical mind’. Duration, in the ninety-minute piano piece, was a means of focusing attention, Bernát proposed. In a piece of such extraordinary length, one perceives not form but scale, he said. The absence of melodic incident has the effect of eliminating the action of memory; and because, in the absence of memorable patterns, we do not – cannot – remember precisely what has come before, we do not anticipate what is to come; we experience time as a perpetually self-renewing moment. A saturation of time was what this music gave us, said Bernát, Naomi tells Kate. She is aware that this might sound pretentious; Gabriel used that adjective, later in the evening. But if Kate were to hear the music she would understand what Bernát was saying. She has it on CD. ‘You’re welcome to borrow it,’ Naomi offers.
Kate is prepared to take on trust her sister’s assurance that Bernát’s comments on the incident-free ninety minutes of piano music were acute and illuminating.
They were standing on the kerb, waiting for the traffic lights to change, when Bernát remarked that he had seen Naomi and Gabriel in May, at a concert. It could only have been the concert at which she had seen him with the woman she had assumed to be his mother, but she did not reveal that she had seen him too. ‘Oh really?’ was all she said. He had been sitting five or six rows behind them, he told her, and from his smile it was clear that he had observed that there had been some tension in the situation. At the station they halted, prior to taking separate lines. From inside his jacket Bernát produced a notebook; from the opposite pocket he took not a pen but a propelling pencil – antique, tortoiseshell. He told Gabriel about a CD of Handel cantatas that he had bought a few days earlier; he thought Gabriel would like it, he said, and he wrote down the details. Underneath, he wrote an address. Once a month, on the third Thursday, his house was open to anyone who cared to visit; around a dozen people usually dropped by, ‘to listen to music, to talk’; it was ‘a kind of salon, if you like,’ he said, with some self-mockery, but his eyes were expressive of seriousness. The next gathering was a fortnight away; a friend of his, a violinist, would be playing sonatas by Geminiani and Giardini, he told Gabriel – plus some Bartók, he added for Naomi. ‘You would be most welcome. Both of you,’ he said, and he shook hands, with Gabriel first. He gave Naomi a smile of intense cordiality, as if their meeting had been a planned event, and had been even more fruitful than he had expected.
The river is the river Page 2
