This year everybody has made himself a fearsome scarecrow. As there have been countless starlings this year, folk have put up their most valuable possessions. Petecel’s lad came with a railway uniform, and the cap with the red band now gleams above the army of vine props like a keen-eyed general. Rădulea has hung a pair of straw-stuffed overalls from a tall stake. Grozea, who works in demolition, came with a coat stand swathed in coloured rags. Goștineanu has sacrificed his best sheepskin hat and coat, the ones he wore this winter at the funerals. And Leescu, whose godfather has a daughter-in-law who works as a cleaning woman at the puppet theatre, brought a genuine marionette in his cart, tying it to a walnut tree with twine. Among these agents of public order, people have placed plastic bags of various colours on every third vine prop, and some have even fetched their dogs from their yards and moved them up into the vineyard.
None but mother Lina has done differently, because she had no other choice. Her best clothes – the embroidered blouses, homespun skirts, and spangled petticoats – are lying at the bottom of Maria Vadră’s coffer, a thievish and hideous neighbour. It has been a long time since anybody went to her looking for work. But it is none other than Lina’s soul that she holds in thrall. Lina made her the gift saying that it was funeral alms for when she would die, but in fact it was a means of avenging herself on her young ones, so that folk would say: “Look how badly off she is with them for her to end up in the clutches of Maria.” Then the young ones hid the rest of the clothes and promised her that they would bury her without a coffin, wrapped in newspaper. And now Lina stays in the vineyard to guard it in person. All she has left are the clothes on her back. She looks like a scarecrow herself, with those dangling rags, rags that scare nobody now that those elegant scarecrows have made their appearance.
From dawn to dusk Lina keeps watch, her sinewy, tiny body moving among the vine props. All she has to do is to be there, to let it be seen that she exists. At night she sleeps only the short sleep of the starlings. Before sunrise she awakes and goes into the vineyard to do her rounds once more, her head bowed. And now the starlings fly down, caw insolently and all but pluck at her threadbare shawl, at her nose so hooked that it almost touches her mouth, at the skirts of her black dress with the blue patches. She fends them off with her hands. She throws stones at them. She would throw stones a good deal more, were there any to be found, but in the vineyard there are no stones. The earth is beaten flat and hard. There is not a clod to be found. You can’t break the earth, even with a spade. And then, with moil and toil, she snaps a branch off the walnut tree and whirls it above her head. The starlings leave her in peace.
They move away in disgust. They hover above the vineyard for a while, undecided. But soon they settle like a livid, fluttering rug over the vines, a little way off. Lina runs after them to see what they are doing (they are stuffing themselves with grapes, clucking contentedly). She whirls the branch. She grazes a few of them, but all she manages to do is to drive them to yet other unplundered vines. She starts to shout, to threaten them. First she shoos them like hens, then like geese, then like her fellow villagers, cursing them like the devil, with heavier and heavier oaths, with unforgivable words, but all in vain. The starlings do not regard her as human. They have begun to think she is a scarecrow, and, what’s more, one of those old-fashioned scarecrows you don’t have to care about. They are ready to devour all that she has, to leave her without a single grape, all because she is alone and poor, because she has insulted them and underestimated them with her fluttering rags. Nowadays, if you want to be respected, even by starlings, you have to be nicely turned out. That’s the fashion.
There is nothing she can do. She tries to drive them away once more. She does not succeed. She sinks to the bare earth and weeps. Rather tardy a watering for that vine, whose astonished roots receive the salty stream of anguish. Lina, too, is astonished by her tears, tears she had almost forgotten, the same as she has forgotten her youth, her husband, kisses, caresses and beatings. The tears ease her, and this gives her strength. She breaks a pale from Petecel’s fence. She slips one leg through the gap and pulls her slight frame after the leg. She runs straight to the railway worker’s cap and places it on her head. Then she puts on the baggy uniform, which all at once swallows up her body and her rags. She hastens back to the plundered vineyard.
Now, like in the ballad, a swain is coming down the path, desirous to fill his sack with grapes, but catching sight of that strange train conductor he takes fright. Truth to tell, the starlings also flee. But the young man quickly goes to the village and can hardly wait to spread the news that Lina has lost her mind. Public opinion is alarmed. They take a stand, they condemn her, and off their representatives go to see the usurping old woman. She greets them serenely and reckons that they are the ones who are mad, given that they have not grasped the meaning of her gesture, even when offered to them on a plate.
English version Alistair Ian Blyt