In the course of an interview about the telling of stories, the narrator asks his best friend if he knows that he was once in jail. He starts to report: As a young boy he is arrested one morning and accused by a couple of having murdered a woman. In a rage, he attacks the slanderer and injures him. The young girl accompanying the slanderer is seized with panic and confesses that the Rom is not the murderer of the woman. However, he is imprisoned for six months for causing bodily harm.

After being released, he sets out on the long journey home by foot. In the evening, he asks at a house for overnight accommodation. The master of the house presents him with a large pot of porridge and, threatening him, makes him eat up the huge amount of food. The latter stuffs the porridge under his coat, which is held together by a belt. When the master of the house, threatening him once again, demands that he must dance, the young man begins to dance, looses his belt and the porridge runs down his legs to the floor. The master of the house attacks him. The young man flees and climbs on top of a haystack to get some sleep. But a pair of lovers are amusing themselves in the haystack, which consequently tips over. The two lovers flee and the narrator finds a picnic basket full to the brim, which his grandfather, whom he visits, is very happy to receive as a present.

In a community of speakers with a marked tradition of storytelling, not only fairy tales were told but also the history of the family or group was handed down orally for the generations to come: the life stories of relatives, own experiences, remarkable happenings in the past. Children often heard the same stories from different storytellers and thus from various angles. They absorbed them as the historical legacy of their group.

As the narrator Dragan Jevremović remarks in a conversation with his friend, the borderline between truth and untruth was often unclear, depending on the storyteller and the angle. At the same time, it was a great art to dupe a well-informed adult listener with a ‘realistic’ story that had been perfectly invented (‘Jeg xoxaimaski paramič’ – ‘A Yarn’). The telling of yarns in the Kalderaš group of Dragan Jevremović was a perfect occasion for misleading a visitor from elsewhere. The narrator succeeds with one of his best friends, who has known him for 40 years and is very familiar with his life story.

The storyteller reports about an alleged six months spent in detention when he was young; this event is not known to the surprised listeners, which is hardly astonishing since it never happened. The yarn is absolutely credible as to the crime and the circumstances of his arrest, but it is garnished with droll happenings following his release from prison that, if one listens more carefully, go beyond the bounds of the absurd. However, these events fit so well into the discussion of the narrative art that the listeners do not recognise the purely fictional nature of the story until almost at the end. The narrator intentionally uses clichés about the life of the young Rom, in the context of which the droll stories, many of which are clearly borrowed from the traditional repertory of tales (the porridge episode), do not seem absurd.

Literature

Fennesz-Juhasz, Christiane; Cech, Petra; Heinschink, Mozes F.; Halwachs, Dieter W. (ed.). 2012. Lang ist der Tag, kurz die Nacht. Märchen und Erzählungen der Kalderaš / Baro o djes, cîni e rjat. Paramiča le Kaldêrašengê. Klagenfurt: Drava Verlag (transcript and German translation: pp. 404–23).