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the old man carried, a bell-shaped violin, seven strings, balanced across the knees and plucked with one hand while the other strummed. The music he played was beautiful, flowing and melodic, and through and amongst the small encampments they would pass, and there find rugged wildeyed people, as much animals as Jozef had been as a child. These people would grow calm and listen, and feed the minstrels, at night lighting fires and dancing, singing their songs – ancestral voices rolling down the years – while Jozef Kolzac, now in his teens, now a strange and oddly featured youth, played as if the Devil possessed his fingers and God his soul.
    The proclamation of independence for Poland in 1918, the Treaty of Versailles which redrew Poland’s borders and led to the war with Russia in 1920, brought the nineteen-year-old Kolzac back to the real world. The same year saw Poland advancing as far as Wilno, the capital of Lithuania, and then onwards far into the Ukraine. Armed Russian soldiers rolled their heaving tonnage of cannons and horses across the barren landscape of this country, sweeping through and killing these people, these wild-eyed gypsies, until the Treaty of Riga gave Poland a new frontier a hundred miles further east.
    The old man, teacher, his apprentice ever following him, fled again to the Carpathians. They left behind them a land ravaged and desolate with war, its people starving, its aristocrats clinging desperately to their estates and refusing to share or divide their concerns. Foreigners came – Ukrainians, Ruthenians, Germans – and in 1926 Marshal Pilsudski – a man who had refused to contest the presidential election in 1922, a man who had led Polish forces to victory in the 1920–1921 Polish-Soviet war – took his army, overthrew the government, and declared a dictatorship.
    Jozef Kolzac and his master stayed in the south, the heart of the Carpathians, for close to ten years. The old man died, was mourned, a pyre built, his body burned, and his ashes scattered across virgin snow by the young man who had followed him. And then that same young man returned to civilization as the dictator Pilsudski was succeeded by a military junta following his death. Kolzac journeyed west, out along the Czechoslovakian border, north again to Krakow, and finally to Lodz in central Poland.
    Kolzac was there in 1936, and here the pattern of his life changed. Here he played for people who had never seen such a man, who had never heard such music, who stood and stared as the tousle-haired, wild-eyed gypsy cavorted and danced and struck such chords upon this instrument. They fed him, they threw him coins, these people who believed that Chopin and Paderewski were the true geniuses of their homeland, and yetfound themselves enraptured and breathless as this errant mongrel Paganini serenaded them through their streets and squares.
    Kolzac, never having witnessed such wealth, such seeming extravagance, believed that here he would find what he had been looking for: a patronage, a sufficiently generous person to support him. He was thirty-five years old, ageless and indefinable, and he believed he would never travel nor hunger again.
    It was in the winter of that year, three years before Germany, citing maltreatment of its own nationals within Poland, rolled her tanks and troops across the borders and started World War Two, that Jozef Kolzac saw Elena Kruszwica, a sixteen-year-old Polish Jewess. She stood in the doorway of a butcher’s store, holding her provisions, and watched as this crazed Rasputin figure, his eyes brighter than any jewels, his hair wilder than the mane of any lion, flipped his body through gambols and cartwheels, his stringed instrument dancing such fine melodies, performing with such panache and abandon for the townsfolk, that she was enchanted, mystified, excited. She returned to watch him time and again, and he felt her presence each time she appeared, sometimes so bold as to dance towards her, to watch