I found myself thinking about my godfather yesterday, a thin, slight bitter-looking man who scared me when I was a kid. He always seemed to be mad about something: the noise we kids were making, the steaks he famously charred to a crisp every time we ate at their house, whatever else had contributed to the anarchy of our visits.
He and my godmother had three kids, and with Peasant Brother and I visiting, that made five of us--five unruly kids who really needed to go outside, but instead were stuck inside a cold, dark, damp basement whose only redeeming feature was an entire wall lit up with a fake, cascading waterfall--a very 70s accoutrement to the Chicago burb where they lived.
Godfather--or Kum (pronounced Koom) in Peasant Talk--was always herding us with one of his two favorite commands, both of which were accompanied with the same gesture: forefinger raised to the sky in anger. The first was "Tisina!," a loud cry of distress that translated into "Silence!" Tisina (pronounced Tishina) was first and foremost a battle cry, and for a moment, we kids stood in shock while the word wrapped itself and reverberated the very air around us:
Ti-shi-na!
When, five minutes later, Godfather realized that his summon to silence hadn't worked, he followed it up with his second favorite command: "Shutz!"
Or:
Shuuuuuuuuuuuuuutzzzzzzzzzzzz!
This, as far as we could tell, meant nothing. Or, rather, it meant so much that it couldn't be translated into words. Shutz was one man's angst, one man's rally against the hordes, the masses, the brethren that had taken over his home. It was his plea for freedom--a final prayer to the gods above.
And it never, ever worked.