THE ASSIMILATION OF THE GYPSIES / Larry Levis In the background, a few shacks & overturned carts And a gray sky holding the singular pallor of Lent. And here the crowd of onlookers, though a few of them Must be intimate with the victim, Have been advised to keep their distance. The young man walking alone in handcuffs that join Each wrist in something that is not prayer, although It is as urgent, wears A brown tweed coat flecked with white, a white shirt Open at the collar. And beside him, the broad, curving tracks of a bus that Passed earlier through the thawing mud . . . they seem To lead him out of the photograph & toward What I imagine is The firing squad: a few distant cousins & neighbors Assembled by order of the State—beside The wall of a closed schoolhouse. Two of the men uneasily holding rifles, a barber And an unemployed postal clerk, Are thinking of nothing except perhaps the first snowfall Last year in the village, how it covered & simplified Everything—the ruts in the road & the distant Stubble in the fields—& of how they cannot be, Now, any part of that. Still, They understand well enough why The man murdered the girl's uncle with an axe, Just as they know why his language, Because it was not official & had to be translated Into Czech at the trial, failed to convince Anyone of its passion. And if The red-faced uncle kept threatening the girl Until she at last succumbed under a browning hedge, & if The young man had to use three strokes with the axe To finish the job—well, they shrug, AU he had, that day, was an axe. And besides, the barber & the clerk suspect that this boy, Whom they have known for half their lives, Had really intended to kill the girl that evening— Never the uncle. 260 · The Missouri Review In a lost culture of fortune tellers, unemployable Horse traders, & a frank beauty the world Will not allow, It was the time of such things, it was late summer, And it is time now, the two executioners agree, That all of this ended. This is Jarabina. 1963. And if Koudelka tells us nothing else about this scene, I think he is right, if only because The young man walks outside time now, & is not So much a murderer as he is, simply, a man About to be executed by his neighbors . . . And so it is important to all of them that he behave With a certain tact & dignity as he walks Of his own accord but with shoulders hunched, Up to the wall of the empty schoolhouse; And, turning his head First to one side, then to the other, He lets them slip the blindfold over his eyes And secure it with an old gentleness They have shared Since birth. And perhaps at this moment AU three of them remember slipping light scarves, Fashioned into halters, Over the muzzles of horses, & the quickness of horses. And if the boy has forgiven them in advance By such a slight gesture, this turning of his head, It is because he knows, as they do, too, Not only that terror is a state Of complete understanding, but also that In a few years, this whole village, with its cockeyed Shacks, tea leaves, promiscuity between cousins, Idle horse thieves, & pale lilacs used To cure the insane, Will be gone—bulldozed away so that the land Will lie black & fallow & without history. And nothing will be planted there, or buried, As the same flocks of sparrows Will go on gathering, each spring, in the high dark Of these trees. Still, it is impossible not to see That the young man has washed & combed his hair For this last day on earth; it is impossible Larry Levis THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 262 Not to see how one of the policemen has turned back To the crowd as if to prevent Any mother or sister from rushing forward— Although neither one, if she is here, seems About to move. And in the background, You can see that a few of the houses are entirely white, Like a snowfall persisting into spring, Or into oblivion, though this May be the fault of...