THALIA SELZ
389
Virgin," he bellowed to no one in particular. "Will you behold
this which it has been done to me?"
"Kyrie!"
Moscow was crying, flapping around him with
towels. "I am in despair. Grant me pardon!"
" Why should you be given words of justification?" Pano
declaimed from the floor, plucking a fork from his tie and trying
to wipe the soup off his trousers with a corner of the tablecloth.
"Is this how you treat the troubled of the earth, seating them
upon sticks and serving them upon rubber tables? Are they not
crucified enough, being without work and having
to
come here
for handouts? One who has skills and can translate, as you tell
me, even from the Sanskrit? Tell me," he said in suddenly quite
level tones to Athos, while taking an olive from his vest pocket
and emptying the salt from his trouser cuffs, "has Romany ever
been written down?"
At last someone was coming to
him
to learn. "Well,"
drawled Athos in English, for the question had been asked in
English, "that depends which dialect you mean. Now there's a
book that came out seven years ago on the dialect of the Welsh
gypsies that 's very good, and several older ones by the Germans
and the French on the Armenian and Slovak and so forth gypsy
dialects, but if you want the Greek-"
He was about
to
cite the work of a scholar who lived in the
Epirus but whose as yet unpublished Greek-Romany dictionary
he had learned of by means of a footnote in a review of S.C.].
Popp's recent
Les Tsiganes, histoire, ethnographie, linguis–
tique, grammaire, dictionnaire,
when he became aware that
Moscow was almost in tears. He had his hands under Pano
Rigas ' armpits and was trying
to
heave him up from the floor ,
where Pano was however, so engrossed in listening
to
Athos that
he was actually trying to push Moscow away, an act which Mos–
cow apparently interpreted as one of the sheerest antagonism, for
suddenly releasing Pano Rigas, he dropped upon one knee be–
side him, as though protocol required that he be upon the same
level as his patron.
" Kyrie,
I seek that you do me a favor. Pray, do
not refuse me. This gentleman is my friend. Constantly we con–
duct serious discussions concerned with the class struggle and
the future of the world revolution. To my sadness, my dear friend
clings obstinately
to
the reactionary principles of a backward,
