WAR AND NOT SO MUCH PEACE

When I was five, Dad had a run-in with a group of skinheads at a club. It all started when a man in the audience made a request for a well-known Nazi tune.

“Hey, Gypsy cock! ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ for me and my friends,” he shouted across the dance floor.

“Up yours,” my father said into the mike, and was promptly asked to step outside and have a smoke, which was code for “fight.”

There were two others waiting in the alleyway. One in a leather jacket was ready to leap at my father, who’d pulled out a knife he always carried at his waist.

“Stop this,” said a man my father hadn’t noticed yet. He was short and bald. Gently he pushed the other two guys out of the way. “Don’t need violence to solve this, do we, Gypsy?”

“I’m ready either way.”

Shorty swung his brass-knuckled fist up into my father’s jaw. The back door opened and a waiter came out carrying a bin to the Dumpster. Using that distraction, my father took off.

“They had a gun,” he said later that night on our way to the hospital. I’d stubbornly climbed into the ambulance, certain Dad would die without me. Rather than make a scene, Mom climbed in next to me and we were off. Dad looked furious as the nurse tried to assess his condition, and he kept explaining to Mom that he wanted to fight, really, but was outnumbered. Ditching a fight humiliated him more than being called a “Gypsy cock.” The nurse carefully tugged at his lower lip to find that his jaw had been cracked down the middle. The left side of his gum line was higher than the right, the teeth like bone stairs.

The doctors stapled Dad’s jaw together and packed it with medicine and gauze. He drank soup for days, but once he had healed he went back to that club with five of his largest cousins. The Roma and the skinheads trashed the club that night, and Dad lost his gig, but that was the way of things. On the surface, the Soviet Union was a picture of order, when in reality it was ruled by gangs. Some powerful, like the KGB mafia, others of the smalltime-crook variety. Their influence depended on the city they operated in and their financiers. The Roma were no different, because if you didn’t have “brothers” to watch your back, you were asking for everyone else to stab it.

The men in our band went around with daggers and guns. They knew firsthand that order could be as delicate as ice on a lake: rock-solid under your feet until a hairline flaw sent you plunging into the waters. Ironically, the gadjee weren’t the only ones to worry about.

Like the cultures of India, considered by many Romani to be our motherland, we are still divided into castes. There’s no peace between them, and many confrontations I remember were nothing more than reactions to centuries-old prejudices.

Grandpa Andrei, for example, wouldn’t accept Roma artists of Hungarian descent. Tzigane, or Russian Gypsies, called them Lovari. “Lovari make trouble,” he said. “Reading palms backstage after the shows.” (This wasn’t entirely fair, since anyone in the Soviet Union with the knowledge of divination read fortunes when short on cash, which was most of the time.)

In turn, most Lovari considered Tzigane to have sold their souls and their culture to the Soviet government. The majority of European Roma clans considered our dialect of the Rromanes language to have been watered down by Russian, a threadbare blanket with too many holes.

Russian Roma, which include many clans of their own, are very different from the rest of the European clans, some of whom remain nomadic to this day, often because the communities they are in force them to move. The last nomadic Russian Roma settled during the seventies, when Khrushchev had ordered the building of all those neat apartments. One thing we were known for, even within the clans, was our music.

The majority of the Roma I grew up with were performers. Not so glamorous, considering how even the most acclaimed artists made very little money—the average monthly salary of a top-paid actor in the eighties was about 300 rubles, or 480 U.S. dollars—but everywhere they went, people shook their hands as if they were national heroes. They performed because they couldn’t imagine doing anything else, knowing full well they’d never come close to the superstardom of Western celebrities. More often than not, people with serious money worked for the government. My own grandparents, who held the title of National Artists of the USSR—an equivalent of the Lifetime Achievement Award in the States—fared better than most, but they also saved every kopeika.

To the European Roma, we were court jesters, doormats, quacks, but the mainstream society still considered us feral despite our polite handshakes. At the first sign of trouble the old stereotypes reappeared.

I recall one particularly explosive brawl between the band members and a group of taxi drivers in front of a Moscow train station. (Soviet taxisty had the look and the punch of your best mixed martial arts fighters, and they were also one of the biggest mafias around.) When I asked my father what had started the fight, he claimed, “One of the assholes called Stepan a shit-eating Gypsy invalid. I couldn’t stand by and do nothing.”

Dad and Stepan knew each other from the postwar streets of Kiev, back when they ran with a gang of Ukrainian kids, searching for food like the rest of the half-starved population. Once, Stepan dug up a can of food that turned out to be a grenade, which exploded, blowing away half his hand. Despite the injury, he became a virtuoso guitar player.

All I remember of that evening, besides the Russian fur hats called ushanka flying in the air and men rolling in mud-smeared snow, is Mom sneaking hundred-ruble bills to the militzia, the Russian police, to keep the Roma boys out of jail.

When my parents’ tour bus crashed into a bulldozer parked illegally on a country road one winter night, Dad spent four days in jail for thrashing the bulldozer driver, who’d decided to take a booze break in the shrubbery and had forgotten to turn on the emergency lights. The bus driver had died upon impact, and Grandma Ksenia had broken both legs. The next day, the Roma were urged by the town’s administration to either take the stage or not get paid. When they did, looking like war casualties, arms in slings, faces lacerated by broken glass, the audience started to laugh. “Look! The Gypsies were fighting again!”

My mother said into the mike, “We had a terrible accident last night and lost a friend. This first song is dedicated to his memory.” The subdued audience behaved for the rest of the show, and later several locals brought food and drink to the hotel where the Gypsies were staying. A peace offering at a time when food began to disappear from markets and restaurants due to one of the worst recessions the Soviets ever experienced. This act of generosity from people who might not have had a full meal in months made Mom teary-eyed, while Dad rallied the band and the unlikely guests for an all-night vecherinka (party).

God knows Dad needed constant supervision, otherwise he’d spend more time in jail or intensive care than onstage. And Mom was all too happy to keep rescuing him and his spirited brood, as if she thrived on pandemonium. Her flair for diplomatic magic staggered the Roma, who by nature trusted no one and whose tempers put wildfires to shame. My mother never ran out of occasions to exercise her skills.