The Witch of Portobello Page 0,37

would. The important thing is to allow fate to intervene in our lives and to decide what is best for everyone.

Vosho 'Bushalo', 65, restaurant owner

These Europeans come here thinking they know everything, thinking they deserve the very best treatment, that they have the right to bombard us with questions which we're obliged to answer. On the other hand, they think that by giving us some tricksy name, like 'travellers' or 'Roma', they can put right the many wrongs they've done us in the past.

Why can't they just call us gipsies and put an end to all the stories that make us look as if we were cursed in the eyes of the world? They accuse us of being the fruit of the illicit union between a woman and the Devil himself. They say that one of us forged the nails that fixed Christ to the cross, that mothers should be careful when our caravans come near, because we steal children and enslave them.

And because of this there have been frequent massacres throughout history; in the Middle Ages we were hunted as witches; for centuries our testimony wasn't even accepted in the German courts. I was born before the Nazi wind swept through Europe and I saw my father marched off to a concentration camp in Poland, with a humiliating black triangle sewn to his clothes. Of the 500,000 gipsies sent for slave labour, only 5,000 survived to tell the tale.

And no one, absolutely no one, wants to hear about this.

Right up until last year, our culture, religion and language were banned in this godforsaken part of the world, where most of the tribes decided to settle. If you asked anyone in the city what they thought of gipsies, their immediate response would be: 'They're all thieves.' However hard we try to lead normal lives by ceasing our eternal wanderings and living in places where we're easily identifiable, the racism continues. Our children are forced to sit at the back of the class and not a week goes by without someone insulting them.

Then people complain that we don't give straight answers, that we try to disguise ourselves, that we never openly admit our origins. Why would we do that? Everyone knows what a gipsy looks like, and everyone knows how to 'protect' themselves from our 'curses'.

When a stuck-up, intellectual young woman appears, smiling and claiming to be part of our culture and our race, I'm immediately on my guard. She might have been sent by the Securitate, the secret police who work for that mad dictator the Conducator, the Genius of the Carpathians, the Leader. They say he was put on trial and shot, but I don't believe it. His son may have disappeared from the scene for the moment, but he's still a powerful figure in these parts.

The young woman insists; she smiles, as if she were saying something highly amusing, and tells me that her mother is a gipsy and that she'd like to find her. She knows her full name. How could she obtain such information without the help of the Securitate?

It's best not to get on the wrong side of people who have government contacts. I tell her that I know nothing, that I'm just a gipsy who's decided to lead an honest life, but she won't listen: she wants to find her mother. I know who her mother is, and I know, too, that more than twenty years ago, she had a child she gave up to an orphanage and never heard from again. We had to take her mother in because a blacksmith who thought he was the master of the universe insisted on it. But who can guarantee that this intellectual young woman standing before me really is Liliana's daughter? Before trying to find out who her mother is, she should at least respect some of our customs and not turn up dressed in red, if it's not her wedding day. She ought to wear longer skirts as well, so as not to arouse men's lust. And she should be more respectful.

If I speak of her now in the present tense, it's because for those who travel, time does not exist, only space. We came from far away, some say from India, others from Egypt, but the fact is that we carry the past with us as if it had all just happened. And the persecutions continue.

The young woman is trying to be nice and to show that she knows about our culture, when