The Gypsy Woman

The scene

You know the scene even if you have not seen the picture in thirty years. Fog on the ground, a body under a blanket, and an old woman bending over it with the whole weight of some ancient authority sitting on her shoulders.

> The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own, but as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end. Your suffering is over, Bela my son. Now you will find peace.

Everything about that line says old. It is built like liturgy. It has the cadence of something copied out of a book that was copied out of an older book. Audiences have taken it for a genuine Romani death-prayer for eighty-five years, and it has been reprinted in Halloween anthologies as exactly that.

It is not. It was typed on a studio lot in Los Angeles in 1941, and so was the rest of it.

None of it is old

The Wolf Man was released on 9 December 1941 — two days after Pearl Harbor, into a country that had been at war for forty-eight hours. The screenplay was by Curt Siodmak, and the pieces of werewolf lore that everyone now assumes are medieval are his:

The rhyme. "Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night / can become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright." Siodmak wrote it. It scans like a nursery rhyme on purpose, because a thing that scans gets remembered, and a thing that gets remembered starts to feel inherited.

The pentagram. The five-pointed star that appears in the palm of the werewolf's next victim is not in the folklore. It is a screenwriter's solution to a staging problem — how do you show the audience a curse.

Silver as the only thing that will kill him. Older than the film in scattered form, and there are real accounts of silver used against witches and revenants, but the hard rule — silver, and nothing else — is the movie's.

Wolfsbane, at least, was already there. Aconite is a real plant with a real reputation and it turns up in the sources. Everything else in the fog is a 1941 invention wearing a costume.

"I am the Wolf Man"

Siodmak was born in Dresden in 1902 to a Jewish family. He heard Goebbels give an antisemitic speech, decided that was sufficient information, and left — first to England, then to the United States in 1937. Four years after that he wrote the werewolf picture that made his name.

He was direct about what it was.

> I am the Wolf Man. I was forced into a fate I didn't want: to be a Jew in Germany.

And, on the moon that triggers the change:

> The swastika represents the moon. When the moon comes up, the man doesn't want to murder, but he knows he cannot escape it, the Wolf Man destiny.

So the mark on the palm is a mark. A sign that appears on your body without your consent, that you did not earn, that announces what is going to be done to you, and that other people can read before you can. He invented an ancient curse because he was living inside a modern one, and it is the most convincing fake folklore ever written precisely because the feeling underneath it was real.

The woman playing her

Maleva is Maria Ouspenskaya, and her biography is stranger than the character's.

Born in Tula, Russia, in 1876. A founding member of the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, trained under Konstantin Stanislavski and Leopold Sulerzhitsky — which is to say she was present at the invention of modern acting. She came to New York on the Moscow Art Theatre's 1922 tour and simply stayed. She taught at the American Laboratory Theatre and in 1929 opened her own school in New York with Richard Boleslavsky. The technique that ran through those rooms is the technique that produced the American century of screen acting.

She was nominated for an Academy Award twice, for Dodsworth in 1936 and Love Affair in 1939.

Then she put on a shawl and told a man he was going to turn into a wolf, and that is the thing she is remembered for. She was four foot eleven, sixty-five years old, and she plays every one of those scenes as though the supernatural were a tedious administrative fact she has dealt with many times before — which is why she is the only person in the film you believe completely.

She was not Romani. She was a Russian modernist doing Stanislavski in a monster picture, and she is the most authentic thing in it.

She died in December 1949, of a stroke, after being badly burned in a fire started by a cigarette.

So who was Maleva supposed to be

Here the article has to stop being about a film.

The word on the poster comes from Egyptian. When Romani people first appeared in western Europe, some of the travelling companies carried letters of safe conduct describing them as pilgrims out of "Little Egypt," and Europe took the paperwork at face value and built a name on it. Gypsy is a five-hundred-year-old clerical error.

The other family of names is worse. Țigan, Zigeuner, tsigane — the standard derivation runs back to Byzantine Greek athinganoi, a term for a heretical sect, carrying a flavour of untouchable, of the people you do not make contact with. One name says they came from somewhere they did not come from. The other says do not touch them.

They are neither Egyptian nor untouchable. They are from India, and the proof was sitting in their mouths the entire time.

A student at Leiden

The story everybody tells goes like this.

In the 1750s or 1760s a Hungarian Calvinist student named István Vályi was at the University of Leiden, where he fell in with three students from Malabar, on the southwest coast of India. Listening to them, he began to hear words he already knew — because he knew them from the Romani spoken around Győr, at home. He wrote down a long list, took it back to Hungary, read it aloud to Romani speakers, and they understood it.

The account reached print in the Viennese press in 1775–76, second-hand, by way of a Captain Székely de Doba. Which is to say the founding anecdote of Romani studies is itself a story someone told someone, and scholars have been carefully hedging it for two centuries. It may have happened exactly that way. It is also exactly the shape a story takes on after it has been passed along a few times.

The real work came after. In 1782 Johann Christian Christoph Rüdiger published the first serious grammatical description of a Romani dialect, built by sitting down with a native speaker — a woman named Barbara Makelin — and working through it properly, then comparing the result to Hindustani. That is the paper that establishes the Indian origin of Romani on evidence rather than anecdote.

The following year Heinrich Grellmann published a book on the same subject that became the standard European reference for a century. Grellmann's book is substantially lifted, error for error, from sources including Rüdiger. The man who did the work is a footnote. The man who copied him got the century.

The map is inside the language

Romani is a Modern Indo-Aryan language. Not related to Indian languages — one of them, a sister to Hindi and Punjabi and Gujarati, with a Central Indo-Aryan core and Northwestern features layered over it.

And because languages pick things up as they travel, the vocabulary is a route map.

There is a Persian and Kurdish layer, from a long stay in the Iranian world. There is a very thin Armenian layer — thin means passing through, not settling. And then there is Greek, which is not a layer at all but a foundation: Greek supplies the largest body of vocabulary common to every Romani dialect on earth, and, more tellingly, Romani took grammatical machinery out of Greek. You do not borrow grammar from a language you met briefly. You borrow grammar from a language you lived inside for generations.

So: out of India, most likely somewhere between the eighth and tenth centuries. West through Persia. Quickly across Armenia. And then a long, long residence in the Byzantine world, which is where the Romani language became recognisably itself.

The documents catch up eventually. Byzantine tax records of the 1280s list Egyptani. In 1381 an Italian traveller, Leonardo Frescobaldi, notes seeing them near Methoni in the Peloponnese. By then they had been in Greek territory for centuries.

What was actually happening

In 1385, the Wallachian prince Dan I confirmed a grant of forty sălașe of ațigani to Tismana monastery. That is the earliest surviving mention of them in the Romanian record, and read it again — the Roma are not parties to it. They are the thing being granted.

For the next four hundred and seventy years, Roma in Wallachia and Moldavia were slaves. Not serfs. Not a persecuted underclass. Chattel, under a legal institution called robie, in the three standard classes of ownership: princely, monastery, and boyar. Status was heritable through the mother. People were given as dowry, used to settle debts, and sold at auction. The monastery holdings were among the largest.

Estimates at the end run to two hundred thousand and upward — somewhere around seven to ten percent of the population of the two principalities.

Abolition came in stages, and slowly: state-owned in Wallachia in 1843, church and state in Moldavia in 1844, the church holdings in Wallachia in 1847. Full emancipation reached Moldavia in December 1855, under Prince Grigore Alexandru Ghica, with the law drafted by Mihail Kogălniceanu and Petre Mavrogheni. Wallachia followed in February 1856.

And then the part that should be said out loud: compensation was paid. Ten galbeni a head in Wallachia, in instalments. Paid to the owners.

Slavery in the Romanian principalities ended by 1856, nine years before it ended in the United States, and almost nobody in the English-speaking world knows it happened at all.

The charge was fortune-telling

Meanwhile, in England.

The Egyptians Act of 1530 gave "Egyptians" already in the realm sixteen days to leave and barred any more from entering, on penalty of forfeiting everything they owned. The statute takes the trouble to specify what these people are guilty of: crafty and subtle devices, robbery, and telling fortunes. Mary I's Act of 1554 tightened it, with a way out for anyone who abandoned travelling and settled to an approved life.

Sit with the sequence. In 1530 an English statute names fortune-telling as the characteristic crime of a people it is expelling. In 1941 a Hollywood studio hands the same people a crystal ball and a wagon and makes fortune-telling their characteristic charm.

The costume Universal put on Bela and Maleva is a sixteenth-century criminal charge with the sentence cut off the end.

December 1941, again

Curt Siodmak's werewolf reached American theatres in December 1941. He had escaped. Others had not.

On 26 February 1943 the first transport of Roma and Sinti arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, into a dedicated sector, BIIe, that the SS called the Zigeunerlager. Roughly twenty-three thousand people were registered there. On the night of 2 August 1944 the sector was liquidated and more than four thousand three hundred men, women and children were murdered in the gas chambers. Across Europe, historians estimate up to half a million Roma and Sinti killed. In Romani it is called the Porrajmos — the Devouring.

In March 1943 — three weeks after that first transport — Maria Ouspenskaya appeared as Maleva again, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. She is the only character who carries over from the first picture. She still knows more than anyone else on screen. She still cannot save the man she is trying to save.

Nobody involved in that production could have known. That is not the point. The point is that while a backlot fog machine ran over a painted Romani camp for the second time, the actual people were being loaded onto actual trains, and the audience that wept at the old woman's prayer would not learn about it for another forty years.

The answer

So — who was that gypsy crone?

She was a Russian actress of the Moscow Art Theatre, sixty-five years old, delivering invented scripture written by a refugee about his own life, in the costume of a people who had been enslaved for four hundred and seventy years, expelled by statute, renamed twice by mistake, and were at that moment being murdered in Europe, playing the one character in the film who tells the truth and is not believed.

Which is, when you set it down, a considerably better horror story than the one about the wolf.

It is one of those films you probably met as a painting on a box before you ever met it as a picture. Watch it again this October. It is a good film, and the fog is beautiful, and Ouspenskaya is magnificent. Just know that the oldest thing in it is not the curse.

---