‘Nah, busy day. Match at Chelsea.’ He put his surprisingly small hand on Milo’s shoulder. ‘Listen, Milo, you couldn’t lend me a hundred quid, could you?’
17. A Partial History of the Blocj Family. Imagine some ancient fragments of stone unearthed in the desert, eroded, windblasted, sunbleached, upon which can be discerned some cryptic, runic lettering in a forgotten alphabet. Upon such tablets of stone might have been incised the history of my family, for the effort of deciphering them, of reconstructing meaning, has proved almost impossible to attain. Some years ago I embarked on months of dogged questioning of my mother and grandmother which allowed the story to advance a little further, but it was hard work, the oral history of my family was recalcitrant, barely comprehensible, as if uttered with huge reluctance in a language barely understood, with many gaps, solecisms and demotic errors.
We should start, because I can go no further back, in World War II, in Romania, Adolf Hitler’s favourite ally. In 1941 the Romanian army annexes Bessarabia, on the northern shore of the Black Sea and renames the region Transnistria. It is used for the permanent resettlement of tens of thousands of Romania’s Gypsy population. Forced transportation begins almost immediately and amongst the first to be dispatched is a young Gypsy girl in her late teens called Rebeka Petru, my grandmother. ‘Yes, I am in train, in truck,’ my grandmother told me, ‘and I become Transnistrian. My papers say Transnistrian but in fact I am Gypsy, Tzigane, Rom.’ I have never been able to glean any information at all about the pre-Transnistrian phase of her life, it is as if consciousness only evolved, her personal history began, the moment she jumped out of the cattle-truck that day on the banks of the river Bug. In 1942 she gave birth to a daughter, Pirvana, my mother. ‘Who was her father, Gran?’ I ask and watch with alarm as the tears form in her eyes. ‘He’s a good man. He killed by soldiers.’ The only other fact I could learn about him was his name – Constantin. So Rebeka Petru and little Pirvana live out the war in routine terror and discomfort along with tens of thousands of other Transnistrian Gypsies. In order to survive they formed alliances of mutual help and support with other Rom families, prominent amongst whom were two orphaned brothers named Blocj. The youngest of the two brothers was called Bogdan. Their parents had died of typhus in the first transportations from Bucharest to Transnistria.
Then the war was finally over and the Gypsy diaspora was further dispersed in the massive, dispiriting migrations of populations in 1945 and ‘46 that occurred all over Europe. The Petrus and the Blocjs found themselves in Hungary, ending up in a small village south of Budapest, where the Blocj boys showed some elementary initiative as ‘merchants ‘, enabling the Rom in that corner of Hungary to survive, if not flourish. Ten years later, in 1956, Bogdan, now in his early twenties and an enthusiastic revolutionary, exploited the chaos of the Hungarian uprising to flee to the West with Rebeka and the fourteen-year-old Pirvana. ‘What about his brother?’ I questioned once. ‘Oh, he stay. He happy to stay In fact I think he go back to Transnistria,’ my grandmother said. ‘What was his name?’ I asked. ‘He was my uncle after all.’ I remember my grandmother and my mother looked sharply at each other. ‘Nicolai,’ said my grandmother. ‘Gheorgiu,’ said my mother simultaneously, then added disingenuously, ‘Nicolai-Gheorgiu. He was a bit… funny, Milo. Tour dad was the good brother.’
In 1957 Rebeka, Pirvana and Bogdan arrived in Fulham via Austria as part of a quota of refugees from the Hungarian revolution given a home by the British government. Bogdan wasted no time in resuming his entrepreneurial activities, establishing a small import-export business with the communist states of Eastern Europe called EastEx, trading in whatever meagre toing-and-froing of goods that was permitted – cleaning fluids, aspirins and laxatives, kitchen utensils, tinnedfood, vegetable oil, tools—a clapped-out reconditioned lorry making the difficult run to Budapest, initially, and then expanding modestly over the years to Bucharest, Belgrade, Sofia, Zagreb and Sarajevo.
It was inevitable that Bogdan should marry Pirvana after what they had been through together. And it was Pirvana who stood by his side in the early days of EastEx, wrapping cardboard boxes in brown paper, stacking them on pallets, loading the truck, labelling the cartons, supplying the Thermos