The Witch of Portobello

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 has 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 that doesn't matter at all. After all, she should know about our traditions.

"In town I was told that you're a Rom Baro, a tribal leader. Before I came here, I learned a lot about our history--"

"Not 'our,' please. It's my history, the history of my wife, my children, my tribe. You're a European. You were never stoned in the street as I was when I was five years old."

"I think the situation is getting better."

"The situation is always getting better, then it immediately gets worse."

But she keeps smiling. She orders a whiskey. One of our women would never do that.

If she'd come in here just to have a drink or look for company, I'd treat her like any other customer. I've learned to be friendly, attentive, discreet, because my business depends on that. When my customers want to know more about the gypsies, I offer them a few curious facts, tell them to listen to the group who'll be playing later on, make a few remarks about our culture, and then they leave with the impression that they know everything about us.

But this young woman isn't just another tourist: she says she belongs to our race.

She again shows me the certificate she got from the government. I can believe that the government kills, steals, and lies, but it wouldn't risk handing out false certificates, and so she really must be Liliana's daughter, because the certificate gives her full name and address. I learned from the television that the Genius of the Carpathians, the Father of the People, our Conducator, the one who left us to starve while he exported all our food, the one who lived in palaces and used gold-plated cutlery while the people were dying of starvation, that same man and his wretched wife used to get the Securitate to trawl the orphanages, selecting babies to be trained as state assassins.

They only ever took boys, though, never girls. Perhaps she really is Liliana's daughter.

I look at the certificate once more and wonder whether or not I should tell her where her mother is. Liliana deserves to meet this intellectual, claiming to be "one of us." Liliana deserves to look this woman in the eye. I think she suffered enough when she betrayed her people, slept with a gadje [Editor's note: foreigner], and shamed her parents. Perhaps the moment has come to end her hell, for her to see that her daughter survived, got rich, and might even be able to help her out of the poverty she lives in.

Perhaps this young woman will pay me for this information; perhaps it'll be of some advantage to our tribe, because we're living in confusing times. Everyone's saying that the Genius of the Carpathians is dead, and they even show photos of his execution, but who knows, he could come back tomorrow, and it'll all turn out to have been a clever trick on his part to find out who really was on his side and who was prepared to betray him.

The musicians will start playing soon, so I'd better talk business.

"I know where you can find this woman. I can take you to her." I adopt a friendlier tone of voice. "But I think that information is worth something."

"I was prepared for that," she says, holding out a much larger sum of money than I was going to ask for.

"That's not even enough for the taxi fare."

"I'll pay you the same amount again when I reach my destination."

And I sense that, for the first time, she feels uncertain. She suddenly seems afraid of what she's about to do. I grab the money she's placed on the counter.

"I'll take you to see Liliana tomorrow."

Her hands are trembling. She orders another whiskey, but suddenly a man comes into the bar, sees her, blushes scarlet, and comes straight over to her. I gather that they only met yesterday, and yet here they are, talking as if they were old friends. His eyes are full of desire. She's perfectly aware of this and encourages him. The man orders a bottle of wine, and the two sit down at a table, and it's as if she's forgotten all about her mother.

However, I want the other half of that money. When I serve them their drinks, I tell her I'll be at her hotel at ten o'clock in the morning.

HERON RYAN, JOURNALIST

Immediately after the first glass of wine, she told me, unprompted, that she had a boyfriend who worked for Scotland Yard. It was a lie, of course. She must have read the look in my eyes, and this was her way of keeping me at a distance.

I told her that I had a girlfriend, which made us even.

Ten minutes after the music had started, she stood up. We had said very little--she asked no questions about my research into vampires, and we exchanged only generalities: our impressions of the city, complaints about the state of the roads. But what I saw next--or, rather, what everyone in the restaurant saw--was a goddess revealing herself in all her glory, a priestess invoking angels and demons.

Her eyes were closed, and she seemed no longer to be conscious of who she was or where she was or why she was there; it was as if she were floating and simultaneously summoning up her past, revealing her present, and predicting the future. She mingled eroticism with chastity, pornography with revelation, worship of God and nature, all at the same time.

People stopped eating and started watching what was happening. She was no longer following the music, the musicians were trying to keep up with her steps, and that restaurant in the basement of an old building in the city of Sibiu was transformed into an Egyptian temple, where the worshippers of Isis used to gather for their fertility rites. The smell of roast meat and wine was transmuted into an incense that drew us all into the same trancelike state, into the same experience of leaving this world and entering an unknown dimension.

The string and wind instruments had given up, only the percussion played on. Athena was dancing as if she were no longer there, with sweat running down her face, her bare feet beating on the wooden floor. A woman got up and very gently tied a scarf around her neck and breasts, because her blouse kept threatening to slip off her shoulders. Athena, however, appeared not to notice; she was inhabiting other spheres, experiencing the frontiers of worlds that almost touch ours but never reveal themselves.

The other people in the restaurant started clapping in time to the music, and Athena was dancing ever faster, feeding on that energy, spinning round and round, balancing in the void, snatching up everything that we, poor mortals, wanted to offer to the supreme divinity.