Gypsy

Saturday, September 24 (After Chapter 15 of Triptych)

GYPSY: You're new at this, aren't you?

aroslav: Me? I do this...

GYPSY: Relax.

aroslav: I was going to ask you...

GYPSY: Your questions will be answered. Cut the cards.

aroslav: Okay. I wasn't intending to have a reading.

GYPSY: Yet you shuffled for five minutes. Are you afraid I stacked the deck?

aroslav: Can you do that?

GYPSY: Card.

[A card is turned]

Five of hearts. Proof positive that I can't stack the deck. It has nothing at all to do with your question.

aroslav: Except to prove your point. What would the card say under other circumstances?

GYPSY: If I were reading you? Why that you crave multiple relationships and believe you could keep them all in perfect balance. But, of course, you would have to stand on your head to do it.

aroslav:???

GYPSY: The card is upside down.

aroslav: Let's get to the first question.

GYPSY: Third.

aroslav: Name, age, and birthday?

GYPSY: Nine of diamonds. Have you noticed that the index in the bottom right corner is upside down? It looks like a six.

aroslav: Is that significant?

GYPSY: One question at a time. Reading from left to right, it would say 9/6, but read the other direction, it's my birthday—6/9. Age 37. My name is Vadoma Tshilaba Holsinger, nee Dzugi.

aroslav: Vadoma, tell me...

GYPSY: Call me Gypsy. You can't really pronounce my name correctly.

aroslav: You are more difficult than your daughter. I just wanted to know if there was a meaning to your names. They are Romani, are they not?

GYPSY: Eight of spades. You know a spade is a type of shovel? I dig. I dig for knowledge. Vadoma means to know and Tshilaba is a word meaning seeker of knowledge. I both know and seek further knowledge. Dzugi is an old Indian caste name for holy beggars or yogas. Many Romani surnames are from ancient Indian castes. In some traditions, those castes are jealously preserved.

aroslav: We've heard that you ran away from home when you were young and made your way to America. Let's start with why?

GYPSY: Three of diamonds. Personal questions often show me as a diamond. I'm sad to say it is often in the rough. When I was twelve, I was contracted for marriage to a man as old as my father. We were to be married two weeks after my first blood. I, of course, was already in love with a fair-haired boy of the Bodi caste. Hence the three. The day my first bleeding began, I left our encampment, lightly telling my mother I would gather flowers on the hillsides and be home for dinner. I went from the hillside to the valley to the mountain and by the time I was in the Czech Republic, there was a war that kept my clan pinned down where they were. I never looked back.

aroslav: But making your way all the way to America when you were ... was it twelve or thirteen?

GYPSY: Thirteen.

aroslav: ... when you were thirteen, alone, and without an adult seems amazing. How?

GYPSY: King of hearts. My lovely, precious king of hearts—though really, it was the whole family. Papa Aaron, Mama Peace, and their children, Davis and Darling. They were really David and Darlene, but I misunderstood the names with my limited English and their total lack of Romani. We communicated mostly through sign language and charades. I learned English as I traveled with them through Europe.

aroslav: They simply took you—an unaccompanied adolescent—with them as they toured Europe?

GYPSY: Nine of spades. We dig deeper and uncover little. They were latter-day hippies. They believed in ultimate freedom and the right of all people to live as they saw fit. They saw no difference between me at thirteen and their twelve-year-old son and fourteen-year-old daughter. They let us travel where we wished and we returned to their caravan at night. I was used to sleeping in a room full of people and traveling in a caravan. And while Aaron and Peace were liberal in their permissiveness, they were rigid in the division of generations. They would have let the three of us experiment with each other in any sexual activity we desired—though, truthfully, none of the three of us were that adventurous then—but they would never approach any of us sexually or allow another adult to approach us. I felt safe with them.

aroslav: How did they get you to America?

GYPSY: Ah. The deuce of clubs. I suppose that was what it took. Papa Aaron made phone calls from Paris. A friend—I never knew who it was—went to work for us. In two weeks, I had a genuine American passport and joined them on the return trip. The name on the passport was not mine, but the picture was. It was never used again after that trip.

aroslav: How did you find the commune and settle in Oregon?

GYPSY: Eight of diamonds. That was where Papa Aaron and Mama Peace lived with Davis and Darling when they weren't out traveling to see the world. That is where I met Papa Ken and Mama Iolana. Those people became the support structure that surrounded me. Six diamonds around me.

aroslav: I thought you were the diamond.

GYPSY: The center two. Me and that delightful, gawky boy Oke who stayed by my side but didn't say more than half a dozen words in the first two years I was there. By that time, Aaron, Peace, Davis, and Darling had taken off again. India I think. So I moved in with Ken and Iolana and Oke. From the moment I met him, there was never a doubt in my mind that I would marry Oke one day. That day was his eighteenth birthday. I was a few months older, but before he was nineteen, we had our little Katarina.

aroslav: Tell me about Kate.

GYPSY: Ace of hearts. That just about says it all. My firstborn. The instructor that showed me what real love was all about. Oh, of course Oke and I know real love. But there is nothing quite the same as the love a mother experiences with her child. She came out of my body. Do you know what a miracle that is? I held her to my breast and she took nourishment that I made inside myself. Not food that I grew and processed and cooked. I made it inside me! I imagined as she suckled at my breast that she was taking the food right from my heart into her little mouth. Little did I know that before she was more than toddling around the house I would be growing two more little ones inside me. They are special in themselves, but Katarina Mirela, my Lyubitshka, was my first.