The Rebel Angels tct-1

by Robertson Davies

  “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!)

  Iate 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?”

  “Articles in learned journals; perhaps even a book.”

  “A book about the bomari?”

  “No, no, not just about the bomari, but about all sorts of things like it that wise people like you have preserved for the modern world.”

  This was Gypsy flattery on my part, because Mamusia is convinced that she is uncommonly wise. She has proof of it; when she was born the ages of her father and mother, added together, amounted to more than a hundred years. This is an indisputable sign.

  “He must be a strange teacher if he wants to teach about the bomari to all those flat-faced loafers at the University. They wouldn’t know how to manage it even if they were told about it.”

  “Mamusia, he doesn’t want to teach about it. He wants to write about it for a few very learned men like himself who are interested in the persistence of old wisdom and old belief in this modern world, which so terribly lacks that sort of wisdom. He wants to do honour to people like you who have suffered and kept silent in order to guard the ancient secrets.”

  “He’s going to write down my name?”

  “Never, if you ask him not to; he will say he learned so-and-so from a very wise woman he was so lucky as to meet under circumstances he has vowed not to reveal.”

  “Ah, like that?”

  “Yes, like that. You know better than anyone that even if gadje knew about the bomari they could never make it work properly, because they haven’t had your experience and great inherited wisdom.”

  “Well, little poshrat, you have started this and I suppose I must end it. I do it for you because you are Tadeusz’s daughter. Nothing less than that would persuade me. Bring your wise man.”

  2

  Bring my wise man. But that was only the beginning; I must manage the encounter between Mamusia and my wise man so that neither of them was turned forever against me. What a fool I had been to start all this! What a gadji fool! Would I get out of it with my skin, not to speak of the admiration and gratitude and perhaps the love I hoped to win from Hollier by what I had done? If only I had not wanted to add something to his research on the Filth Therapy! But I was in the predicament of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice; I had started something I could not stop, and perhaps in the end the Sorcerer would punish me.

  I had plenty of time to reflect on my trouble, for I had a whole evening with Mamusia, lying on my sofa and changing my poultice every half-hour or so, as she played her fiddle and occasionally sang.

  She knew, in her cunning fashion, how irritating this was to me. I am an enthusiast for music, and I like it at its most sophisticated and intellectual; it is one of the few assurances of order in my confused world. But Mamusia’s music was the true Magyar Gypsy strain, lamenting, mourning, yowling, and suddenly modulating into frenzied high spirits, the ringers sliding up the fingerboard in glissandi that seemed to be primitive screams of some sort of ecstasy that was never real to me. The Gypsy scale—minor third, augmented fourth, minor sixth, and major seventh—fretted my nerves; had not the diatonic scale sufficed for the noble ecstasy of J. S. Bach? I had to fight this music; its primitivism and sentimentality grated on everything the University meant to me; yet I knew it for an aspect of my inheritance that I could never root out, deny it though I might. Oh, I knew what was wrong with me, right enough; I wanted to be an intellectual, to escape from everything Mamusia and the generations of Kalderash behind her meant, and I knew I could do it only by the uttermost violence to myself. Even my agonizing concern with Hollier, I sometimes suspected, was chiefly a wish to escape from my world into his. Is that love, or isn’t it?

  Mamusia now turned to a kind of music that was deeply personal to herself; not the kind of thing she would ever, as a girl, have played in an officers’ mess, or to the diners in a fashionable restaurant. She called it the Bear Chant; it was the music Gypsy bear-leaders played or sang to their animals, but I think it was something older than that; to those Gypsies so long ago the bear was not only a valuable possession and money-spinner, but a companion and perhaps an object of reverence. Is it unbelievable? Notice how some people talk to their dogs and cats nowadays; the talk is usually the sentimentality they think appropriate to a not very dangerous animal. But how would one talk to a bear which could kill? How would one ask it for friendship? How would one invite its wisdom, which is so unlike the wisdom of a man, but not impenetrable by a man? This was what the Bear Chant seemed to be—music that moved slowly, with long interrogative pauses, and unusual demands on that low, guttural voice of the fiddle, which is so rarely heard in the kind of music I understand and enjoy. Croak—croak; tell me, Brother Martin, how is it with you? What do you see? What do you hear? And then: Grunt—grunt, Brother Martin (for all Gypsy bears are c
alled Martin) says his profound say. Would she ever play that for Hollier? And—I knew nothing of his sensitivity to such things—would Hollier make anything of it?

  Bring my wise man; what would he make of the house in which I lived?

  It was a big house and a handsome house, in the heavy banker-like style that prevails in the most secure, most splendidly tree-lined streets of the Rosedale district of Toronto. One Hundred and Twenty Walnut Street was not the handsomest, nor yet the simplest, of the houses to be found there. Solid brick, white-painted woodwork, impressively quoined at the corners; a few fine trees, well attended by professional tree-pruners and patchers; a good lawn, obviously planted by an expert, of fine grass without a weed to be seen. The very house, indeed, for a Polish engineer who had done well in the New World and wished to take the place in that world his money and ability and obvious respectability required. How proud Tadeusz had been of it, and how he had laughed gently when Mamusia said it was too big for a couple with one child, even with a housekeeper who lived in a flat all her own on the third floor. A good house, furnished with good things, and kept in the best of condition by contract cleaners and gardeners. And so it looked still to the passer-by.

  Inside, however, there had been catastrophic changes. When Tadeusz died Mamusia had talked distractedly of selling it and looking for some hovel congruous with her widowed and financially fallen state. But her brother Yerko had told her not to be a fool; she was sitting on a fortune. It was Yerko who remembered that when Tadeusz bought the house, it had possessed a rating at City Hall as an apartment and rooming-house; this had been granted because of some temporary necessity, during the war years, and had never been revoked, even though Tadeusz had required the whole thing for his own occupancy. The thing to do, said Yerko, was to restore the place to its former condition as an apartment and rooming-house, and make money from it. The gadje always wanted nice places to live.

  I do not know what its former condition had been, but after Mamusia and Yerko had finished with it One Hundred and Twenty Walnut Street was surely one of the queerest warrens in a city noted for queer warrens. To save money, Yerko did much of the work himself; he could turn his hand to anything, and with a labourer to help him he turned Tadeusz’s beautiful, proud home into ten dwellings: the best apartment, consisting of a living-room, kitchen, and bedroom, and a sun porch, was Mamusia’s own. On the ground floor there were, in addition, two bachelor apartments of kennel-like darkness and inconvenience, one of which had no less than seven corners, after the cupboard-like kitchen facility and the doll’s bathroom had been created. These were rented to young men, Mr. Kolbenheyer and Mr. Vitrac; Kolbenheyer was skeletonic, and never spoke above a whisper; about Vitrac I had perpetual misgivings, because he looked like a man bent on suicide and his apartment would have been a perfect setting for a miserable departure.

  On the middle floor, where once the bedrooms of Tadeusz and Mamusia and I had been, there was a one-bedroom apartment with its own bath, and a tiny kitchen, and a sitting-room which shared its only window with the kitchen, by an architectural twist of Yerko’s that split a window down the middle. The queen of our lodgers, Mrs. Faiko, lived here, with her three cats. There were also on this floor three bed-sitters, which shared a kitchen and a bathroom; these were for Miss Gretser, Mrs. Nowaczynski, and Mrs. Schreyvogl, all old, who possessed among them four poodles and two cats. They had agreed among themselves that as they did not use the shower much (danger of being trapped in scalding water) they should keep the lower part of the shower booth filled with torn-up newspaper as a litter-box for the animals. They were supposed to clear it out now and then, but they were feeble and forgetful, so it was usually my job to attend to this. Miss Gretser, after all, was over eighty-seven and so far as anyone knew had not been out of the house in three years; Mrs. Nowaczynski kindly did her small shopping for her.

  On the top floor were two single-room apartments, sharing a bathroom. These were occupied by Mr. Kostich, who was said to be associated somehow with a dry-cleaner’s business, and Mr. Home, who was a male nurse. Whenever Mamusia had occasion to mention this in his presence he would shout, “Well, I sure’s hell ain’t a female nurse,” and this made him the wit of the establishment.

  In the basement was a very extensive five-room apartment, where my Uncle Yerko lived, and maintained his still, and Mamusia did some of her most important and secret work.

  The decoration of all these flats and rooms had been undertaken by Yerko, who had cleverly picked up a job-lot of paint and wallpaper that nobody wanted to buy. The paper was blue, with large roses in a darker blue, a truly dreadful background for the array of family photographs and wedding pictures with which the old ladies ornamented their rooms. The paint, on the other hand, was pink. Not a faint pink or a shade of pink but pink. As Yerko worked on the decoration he had frequent recourse to the plum brandy of his own manufacture with which he supported his energies, and consequently none of the paper was quite straight on the wall, and there were large spatterings of paint on the floor. It was a drunken, debauched, raped house when this Gypsy pair finally began to accept lodgers, with a preference for those not too rich in gadjo cunning. The house stank; a stench all its own pervaded every corner. It was a threnody in the key of Cat minor, with a ground-bass of Old Dog, and modulations of old people, waning lives, and relinquished hopes.

  Why was this dreadful rookery never condemned by the city’s inspectors of such places? Yerko knew what to do. You cannot bribe an inspector; everybody knows that. But inspectors are not well paid, or they think they aren’t, and they and their wives all want things like dish-washers, or power-mowers, or air-conditioners which Yerko was able to secure for them at wholesale prices; he had connections with the manufacturing world from his days with Tadeusz. He was obliging to the inspectors, and not only did he see that the goods were delivered direct from the factory, he somehow arranged that no bill, even for the wholesale price, was ever rendered. And as everybody knows, a little friendliness goes a long way in the world of the gadje.

  Where did I fit into this? Yerko and Mamusia agreed that it would be folly to keep a whole room for a girl who was away all day at the University, and I could easily sleep on Mamusia’s sofa. I was a young woman of substantial independent means and there was nothing in the world to prevent me from taking an apartment of my own, answerable to nobody but myself, far from the stink of senile dogs and unwashed old people, and out of earshot of the distressing cries that came through the wall when Mr. Vitrac had a bad dream. Nothing in the world but love and loyalty. Because, agonizing though it often was to live with Mamusia, and tedious as I found the company of Yerko, who was rarely sober, I loved them both and if I deserted them, I thought, what might not happen to them?

  3

  The visit of my wise man was soon arranged; he could come on the third day from my asking him. My Mother says will you come to tea, I said, prompted by I cannot say what madness. Did this expression conjure up in his mind some fragrant old soul in a Rosedale house, pouring delicate China tea into thin, rare cups? But in this, as in all social dealings with Hollier, I seemed to lose my head. About academic things I could talk to him sensibly enough but on anything suggesting a personal relationship, however ordinary, I was a fool.

  For both of us, the transformation in Parlabane was astonishing. Gone was the monk’s robe, and with it had gone the theatrically monkish demeanour. He looked almost smart, in a good grey suit. It seemed to have been made for a somewhat taller and stouter man; there was not quite enough room in the shoulders, and there was more than he needed in the waistcoat; to keep the trousers from dragging at his heels he wore them braced up to the last possible inch. But his sober tie and clean shirt, the white handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket, were all that could be asked of any tidy academic.

  Best of all, he had stopped grumbling about the poor pay he got for teaching in Extension. I asked him if he had found some way of increasing his income.

  “I’m looking into one
or two things,” he said, “and I’ve found avenues around the University that may lead to something that will tide me over until I get an advance on my novel.”

  Novel? This was unexpected.

  “It’s rather a big thing,” he said, “and needs some touching up. But it’s in a condition to be seen. When I’ve done a little more work on it I’m going to ask Clem to take a look at it, and advise me about publishing.”

  This was the first I had heard about Hollier as an authority on novels. Surprise must have shown in my face.

  “Clem will understand it better than most people. It’s not just a best-seller sort of thing, you see. It’s the real roman philosophique, and I want some informed people to give me their opinion before I hand it over to the publisher.”

  “Oh, you have a publisher?” I said.

  “No, not yet; that’s one of the things I want advice about. Which publisher should it be? I don’t want it to get into the wrong hands, and have the wrong sort of promotion.”

  This was a new Parlabane, an innocent, hopeful Parlabane. Women are supposed, from time to time, to see the men they know as little boys. I think that is unjust, but certainly as Parlabane cocked his head at me and talked of his novel, I had a sudden perception of a little boy in that battered, blurred face.

  4

  Since I first met him at McVarish’s cocktail party, Arthur Cornish had asked me to have dinner with him three times, and I had gone twice. He was a change from the men I met at the University, who were either married, or of that group called “not the marrying kind”, or young academics who wanted a listener as they talked about themselves and their careers. The first time Arthur talked about food, and politics, and travel, and seemed not to have any personal revelations that couldn’t wait. Nor did he seem to think that feeding me put me in his debt in any way at all. He was almost impersonal, but nice, and liked me to talk at least half the time; so I talked about food, and politics, and travel, without really knowing much about any of them. But he had the gift of creating an easy evening, and that was a novelty.