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PARTISAN REVIEW
decadent class, but never relaxing my vigilance, I struggle to ed–
ucate him. Yet I am in a great sorrow that you are offended and
traumatized-"
"Skahseh, vreh!
Shut up!" Pano Rigas said. "Let us have
the people's democratic revolution tomorrow, if you wish. I am a
peasant. I do not care. But now we conduct a serious linguistic
discussion concerned with the derivation of a language and its
struggle to survive." Shifting to hands and knees, he stood up
quickly and brushed the bread crumbs off his trousers . "Romany
is the language of the
gyfti
and a descendant of the Sanskrit,
which I had it this information, but that it can be written, I did
not know."
Athos, together with Moscow, was now trying to prop up
the table. "The most borrowings," he explained, gingerly fitting
a leg into its joint, "seem to be from the Greek-"
"Exactly as I thought! " Pano shouted triumphantly. "Did
you heard it, Maude?" (Athos realized that Pano Rigas had his
own problems with linguistic survival.) "Now if my daughter,
who has always her nose in a book, should show an interest, as
we say it, in etymology and becomes train-ed in Greek, which it
will not be difficult considering her heritage, she can become a
scholar and pursue it her Ph.D. in linguistic studies with em–
phasis upon Romany and its relation to Greek-"
"Yes, dear," Maude said. For the past five minutes she had
been crouching in the aisle, gathering together little piles of
shattered crockery and scattered silverware, and she was hardly
listening to the men. Her Greek was not yet good enough to un–
derstand more than the general drift of most conversations, and
she did
wish
Pano wouldn't shout so.
The child stared soberly at the whole turbulent scene. She
was beginning to go through a noneating stage in which she
found both the sight and the odors of food faintly nauseating,
and all that spilled soup and flying bread, smooth black olives
rolling about the carpet in puddles of olive oil and vinegar from
the broken cruets, celery and carrot sticks tossed around like
straws: the whole mess was disgusting to her though she
couldn't have found the words yet to say so. Worse still, she knew
that soon she would be pressured, because of "the starving Rus–
sian children," to eat her lamb and the okra which she hated,
though what lamb and okra had to do with starving Russian
