"Charles de Lint - Mulengro" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

flickered across his dark skin, highlighting the strong features set in their mask of indifference. He was
oblivious to the growing crowd of thrill-seekers who jostled for position against the hastily-erected
barricades that the police had set up. He watched the home he’d known for three years burning and
remembered other fires. Not the cook and camp fires of his childhood, nor the pleasant crack and spit of
seasoned wood burning in a stone hearth. Instead his mind thrust up memories of a man set afire and the
crowd around him, jeering and laying wagers as to how long he would live. Of the wagons of his parents
and grandparents and others of their kumpania burning in the night. Of the men who wore the four-
armed symbol of the swastika and set countries alight with the same single-minded purpose with which
they burned Gypsy wagons.

But there were no swastikas here. It was another symbol that had erased the expression from Janfri’s
features. He had seen it on the wall of his home before the flames and smoke took it from his sight—a
scrawl of black paint that was meaningless to the Gaje, the non-Gypsies, but that he understood with a
bleak emptiness. It meant marhime. Ceremonially defiled. Unclean. It was a message from another Rom
to him that there was no welcome among the Gypsies for a Rom who had become too Gaje. And yet,
though he understood, he could not believe that one of his people could have done such a thing. Such a
display of violence was not the way of the Rom. One who was marhime was not tolerated in the
company ophral, the true Rom. He was ostracized from every facet of Rom society, but he was not
treated with violence. Or fire.

And yet… He had seen the symbol, the black paint with the excess liquid dripping from its lines like
drops of blood; and who else but a Rom knew that he was one of their own? Who else but a Rom would
know the secret patrin and defile the wall of his home with it?

“Jesus, John,” a voice said in hushed tones at his side. “You’ve lost everything.”

Janfri’s companion knew him as John Owczarek—one of Janfri’s Gaje names. Like all Gypsies, Janfri
used and discarded names as a Gajo might a suit of clothes. Only the other Rom of his kumpania knew
him as Janfri la Yayal—Janfri son of Yayal—and they were most likely to call him by his nickname, o
Boshbaro, “the Big Fiddle,” for his skill on the instrument that was at this moment tucked under his arm,
forgotten. To Rom who didn’t know him as well he was simply Boshengro, “the fellow who plays the
fiddle.”

“I sure as hell hope you’ve got enough insurance to cover it,” Tom Shaw added. He glanced at Janfri’s
face, puzzled by his friend’s lack of emotion. It had to be shock, he decided, because the stiff lack of
response he saw in Janfri’s features simply didn’t jibe with the man Tom knew him to be. The John
Owczarek that Tom knew was expansive in his moods, apt to gigantic joys and sorrows.

Tom stood a half head taller than his friend. He was a burly six-two, barrel-chested and meaty. Amongst


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the Gypsies, his size would label him as an important man, for they judged importance by size as well as
other attributes. He was forty-seven this summer, which made him Janfri’s elder by two years.

“John…” he tried again, touching his friend’s arm. The wiry muscles were stiff under the light cloth of
Janfri’s coat.