Maybe I wasn’t the most reserved child in the world. I wouldn’t like to blame even my parents or grandparents, but who threatens his children with „if you don’t behave well I will give you to gypsies”, should think about the impact which they create.
I was only a blond little girl, curious, rooted by the fears and reticence of the grandparents. My first experience in a gypsy community was after the model „Overcome fear!” On the pasture land in front of my grandparents’ yard every year a gypsy camp arrived. With their arrival, my contact with the outside world was finished. My family was afraid that their fair girl would get dirty or even become ill. „How could you know what a gypsy might think?’’, my grandmother always repeated when I complained that I want myself to play with the children recently arrived. This thing happened up to a day when more in fear, more reluctantly, I succeeded in being unobserved by the eagle’s eyes which supervised me and the first stop was in the middle of the children. The gypsy women treated me as if I was one of their daughters. They braided my hair in tresses and they let me eat their food. After that I slept in Rosa’s tent, the wife of the gypsy leader Boboc. However, I passed over years and I cannot say that this experience did not mark me.
After more than 10 years, I found them on the same pasture land. Now the elderly people who knew how to work the iron and they used to make cauldrons are not there anymore, or they are too old in order to walk in the summer camps anymore. They stay at home and they raise pigs and hens in order to pass the winter with less expenses. On the pasture land from Balteni village, the county of Vaslui, seven patched tents and beaten by the sun stay tied up near a willow. On one side, the children build up sand walls, and on the other, a woman whose skirts caress the dried grass mixes in the big billy like a fast day, as if ready to feed an entire squad. The community is, so, also fed and defended. The tarpaulins of the tents tethered in a hurry are stained and blackened by the sun. Old car batteries, pieces of polenta, burnt wood, empty bottles and checked shirts which are hung out decorate the area. A sheep bleats giddily towards a pile of cornstalks, a sign that the grass which is brick-coloured does not develop it a big enough appetite.
Boboc’s gipsy tribe, which camped out for 2 days in Bălteni, is among the groups of gypsies from the country which has modernized. They took a car and they wander the surroundings in order to make money for the winter.
The gypsies from his gipsy tribe are a tribe of copper-smiths, they made cauldrons years in, years out; they made plum brandy cauldrons, pans, buckets, grills, which they sold in all Vaslui. They went through the markets or even from gate to gate. They were staying for a few weeks in every & more well-off village, they took orders and they did not leave until they did not fill their households with plum brandy cauldrons and buckets made of aluminium or copper or until they did not fix those made in the last years. Now they only buy scrap iron which they sell further. The earned money is barely enough for them for food.
„In the old times, this road was buzzing by the rattling of the hammers. Each of them was staying in front of the tent, with a cauldron at which he was hammering. Now, we go more after scrap iron”, says the leader of the gypsy tribe.
The pots and cauldrons are not sold well for entire years. They did not forget the trade, but there isn’t any market for the products which they produce manually.
„To whom can we sell? The people don’t want pots and pans anymore, they buy them from the market”, says Boboc. In order to reinforce his words, Mândra, a woman who walks fast and who speaks fast, mother of 5 children, pulls from the tent an old cauldron of plum brandy. „This cauldron is made for a long time, I didn’t not sell it because I didn’t have a customer”, says the leader of the gipsy tribe. Now they carry it after them everywhere they go, a recollection of the old and forgotten times.
„We sell only these”, says Mândra and she points to a set of brand – new pots, in cellophane wrap, bought from the shop.
The gypsies from Boboc gipsy tribe, gathered now in a circle in front of the tents, talk in a choir about the difficult life from the gipsy tribe, about the problems with the police which races them from the pasturelands or laugh at a young gypsy girl who blames for her difficult life on the „mayor” of the country, Traian Băsescu, everybody agrees with one thing: nomads are still only the poor gypsies, who didn’t start a business or didn’t go to Spain or Italy. Everybody says that the wanderer- the one satisfied only with one waggon, a tent and the sky above his head, is not what it was before.
„It is not connected with tradition, with freedom. If we had money, we could stay at home”, draws the line at the discussion Mândra.
Gogu, Boboc’s right hand, hurts more that the nomads do not sell cauldrons and buckets anymore when they go „on the field”, but collect scrap iron. „I go because I do not have money to live, I take from the owner some money, I collect scrap iron, I bring it here, and he sells it at Iasi or Vaslui. It remains to us 30 or 40 lei per day. I rarely take one million per day”, explains Gogu the route of the scrap iron, the new work of the ex-copper-smiths.
Boboc & Mândra have 5 children. After Găina, the elder son got married, they decided to be more restrictive. That’s why, a while, the father prohibited the younger ones to go to school. He couldn’t prohibit Melinte as well. He ran away from home and they found him at school. Also he, inherited the talent of his grandfather and is passionate about music. About the trumpet especially, about which he says naughty that he does not give it away not even on a thousand girls.
Ambitious character, tall with dark shortly cut hair, Melinte registered himself at trumpet courses without his family could know anything. Step by step, he learned that you can’t play. He formed new friendships and he says that the managed to see what he wants from life. „Playing the trumpet is my passion. Many times I was pushed aside and many told me that I am a gypsy. Maybe they are right, but in this way I feel good, by entertaining others with my music.”
Even now remembers his first wedding at which he played. „I didn’t have money to get dressed, so I took a tracksuit of my brother’s and I played for 2 hours for some Romanian people, not too stingy. „He does not see himself doing something else. He sees between the trumpet and him a strong connection and through music he manages to taste something else than sufferance: joy!
From Vaslui plain I hardly left. People share with you the last crumble of polenta and all life’s adventures. They dress you with the best clothes that they have and they are not afraid that you could give them fleas, or that your mind would be so sick in order to „spoil their children”. The crazy sheep that wasn’t patient arrived until evening in an improvised spit. These people with olive skin, but with the soul brighter than the sun show their appreciation towards those who try to get to know them.
