Untethered.
H.C. Klingman

I am dimly conscious, waking to a strange world. Blurred, masked faces look down at me, eyeglasses glinting between bright lights. Busy hands stretch out from green gowns. A voice says, “Give him a little more, let’s keep him comfortable.” Strangely, I feel no pain. My last moment of recall was the crashing blow that ended in a white flash, an instant that turned into darkness.
It seems like I was gone only a second, or was it a century? I try to remember. Wispy images come and go, in and out of a fog. With a vague sense of something beyond, I chase memory fragments, to find out who I am.

The commandment to migrate was strongest in my grandfather Miklos, and his father, Yul. I see their wagons, always on the move. They stop only briefly, the men of their family earning money along the way as tinkers, handymen repairing anything, or trading horses. They were the Roma, gypsies who shun the attachment of place, who wander because they die in confinement. I am one of them.
The old ones were always able to find a dog or pony to be trained and sold at the next stop. Their women told fortunes, or begged on wealthy street-corners. They knew omens and curses and could enter and leave stores invisibly.
When outsiders drank wine at our campfires, swarthy girls danced sinuously to guitars. Deft fingers caressed wallets and unsheathed knives settled arguments. Gone are the groans of old wagons, the creak of harness, or the pungent sweat of horses straining in slowly moving landscapes. Absent now, the makeshift bivouacs in open fields, that were broken up by an irate farmer or a sheriff.
They stayed miles ahead of vengeful townsmen, the “gadje” who thought we were villains, thieves and sorcerers. We, in turn, considered them marks, victims to be tricked or cheated. They knew nothing of real freedom, of souls unburdened by civilized baggage.

I focus hard on the present, against the anesthetic that lures me into darkness, and wonder how I got here; what happened.
I once knew, even before the honking geese, that winter was coming. Dunja, my treasure, my lovely daughter, knew it too. All of us of the blood feel the call to follow an uncertain life, to leave the places where hostile men’s laws have power over us.
Where is Dunja? What has happened to her?
What remains of the old days is a sense of the road beyond, traveled now in diesel sedans pulling small trailers. That is my life too. Between bouts of fitful sleep I reassemble events to find out how I got here.

We are packing our trailers to leave a park, when fast pounding hoof-beats announce a rider approaching swiftly. I see that it is a runaway horse fighting its bit. It is a stampeding, bucking menace, lathered white. The rider is a terrified girl, dark haired, like my Dunja, and she is screaming, tugging helplessly at the reins. This can only end in terrible injury to bones and flesh, or even death, I thought..
What was it that caused me, in that dangerous instant, to intervene? Was it a gypsy’s instincts for taming horseflesh, or a father saving a child? Or was it an urge to overcome the lengthening shadows of age? I make a lightning grab for the bridle and pain shoots up into my shoulder sockets. I am dragged several yards digging in my heels but finally manage to turn the large head of the stallion that this child has foolishly ridden. The headlong run is halted, but the horse snorts and stamps in protest.
I help the hysterical girl from the saddle, but the instinct of my fathers was absent as I carelessly let down my guard. The kick was swift, the iron hoof smashing into my face, turning off lights that came on again only in the operating theater.

I am now in a private room. There is a nurse and a doctor, and…and an angel with white skin. Dunja, my Dunja, but I cannot say it, unable to move my wired jaw or my head. My pains are now severe, and the nurse adjusts a morphine drip.
The doctor says, “You’ve been away for a long time. Don’t try to speak, you’re in good hands here and will slowly make a complete recovery. We will keep you in traction until your bones heal. Then, we will give you beautiful teeth, and you can regrow that big mustache we had to remove. The papers and TV have made you a local hero because you rescued the daughter of the mayor. Dunja can tell you everything. I’ll leave you with her.”
Dunja says, smiling through tears. “Bapo my poor dear Bapo, you are now out of danger. There is so much good news for us. You saved the girl’s life and her grateful father ordered you here at his expense. We have been given a rent-free apartment. There is also a fund drive, and more money than we have ever seen is coming in from all over. A job is promised for you in the Parks Department, and I have taken work at a travel agency.”
I wish to remark about her immodest skirt, and revealing sweater, but cannot. I am so confused about everything. How can I explain? I cannot speak or write. My questions are not about money or comfort. Like the stallion, I am desperate to avoid captivity. Like him, gypsies must resist fates forced upon them. From deep within me comes a sad cry to escape, to return to the true life, unbound by all except my family.
After this hospital, where is freedom? How can I ever live in that apartment, do gadjes work, follow their bidding? Oh, how long will it take until I can again be with gay Roma spirits that have circled the earth with music and laughter for a thousand years; phantoms that speak to me more loudly than the voices of these outsiders. Ah, dear child of my love, do you not see in my face the wounds of my soul? How far away from the true life have you gone in my absence?
I search for understanding, but her sorrow for me does not shield an expression of something different, a young mind with hopes I cannot share. This weighs upon me more heavily than the pains in my head. I am too helpless to save her.
Drugs pull me into retreat from the white sheets of my prison, back to images of a life as free as the wind on moors, or the sand of shifting deserts. There is a place for me around a large fire, where passionate melodies of suffering and love are plucked from strings of gypsy guitars. Castanets clap wild rhythms, and tambourines talk. The popping logs send plumes of sparks skyward, like gypsies, vanishing into the dark night.