They would come every year in their colorful horse-drawn wagons and set up camp on a large dusty square within easy reach of the workers’ main housing district. Was it in spring, in summer or fall? Gypsies did not wander in winter. Their sudden appearance would wake the little town up from its deep slumber, in which life flowed slowly and monotonously as if it were imitating the murky waters of the local brook. “Gypsies! The gypsies are coming!” people would warn one another, and instruct the children to always keep the house locked. Most of the people in this town worked at the local factory; after school the kids either remained in the care of their black-clad, limping and grumbling grandmothers, or just played outdoors, with their house key dangling on a shoelace from their skinny necks, and waited for the return of their parents.
Every afternoon at three o’clock, when the loud siren announced the end of the shift, a wide gray river of workers would start flowing through the rusty factory gate. A little further on, the river would divide into separate streams of people, heading in the direction of their meager dwellings in different parts of the town, and in nearby villages. The workers all looked alike: the men wore gray uniforms and caps, while the women were dressed in gray smocks and scarves. In winter they would all wear grayish or blackish shabby overcoats. The faces of the workers were also gray, either from malnutrition - this was only a few years after the Second World War - from fatigue or both, and looked as if they were covered in ash. The gray crowd would fill the narrow streets lined with gray plastered houses. Clouds of gray smoke from the factory chimneys hovered above the little town, which, with its sparse vegetation, seemed to be devoid of all color. This would change in the blink of an eye, with the arrival of the gypsies.
The gypsies were strange and frightening people: dark skinned, black-haired, black-eyed, and speaking an incomprehensible language. The women wore long, ruffled, flowery skirts, flowery shawls, and glittering jewelry; the children were dirty, uncombed, snotty, and barefoot; they had black curly hair and black shiny round eyes, which scanned the local kids with friendly curiosity. The blue or amber eyes of the local kids looked back at them with equal curiosity, but less friendly, distrustfully. Gypsies supposedly kidnapped Polish children, and the kids had been told to be watchful, and to keep away from them. But kids’ curiosity is usually stronger than their fear, and they would sneak up close to the gypsies’ encampment, lured by the noise they made, by the smoke from their fires, by their colorful vehicles adorned with little mirrors and pictures of flowers, and by the rugs and countless cushions piled up inside the wagons. The gypsy women were cooking meals at fires in the open, and doing laundry in washbasins with their kids dabbling their feet in the soapy puddles. It was a separate world within the world everyone else lived in.
The gypsies - fortune tellers and peddlers, and also, as it turned out, thieves - would steal money from houses, and horses from the surrounding villages to sell them at the next town’s market. They would stay in one place for a couple of weeks only. Soon their wagons would form a caravan and they would leave, much to the relief of the deceived and mugged locals and to the chagrin of the children, taking with them color and glitter, excitement and anxiety. The little town would utter a sigh of sadness and go back to its everyday grayness and sameness.
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