Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  But no one has ever thought to ask the Gypsies themselves. And accordingly all attempts at assimilation have failed. Ficowski, unlike policymakers less close to the source, did “refer” to the Gypsies he had come to know: above all to Papusza. And within two months of the appearance of her poems in Problemy, a pack of Gypsy “envoys” visited Papusza, and threatened her.

  Papusza was soon identified among Gypsies as a culprit in the campaign to cancel their traditional way of life. Her stature as a poet and singer, and the love for her people expressed in decades of work, meant nothing. Papusza had done something unforgivable: she had collaborated with a gadjo.

  No one understands me,

  Only the forest and the river.

  That of which I speak

  Has all, all passed away,

  Everything has gone with it—

  And those years of youth.

  Papusza had indeed been misunderstood—and used—by both sides. She tried desperately to reclaim the authorship of her own ideas, her songs. She rushed from her home in southern Silesia to the Polish Writers Union in Warsaw, begging for someone to intervene. She was refused. She went to Ossolineum, the publishing house that was preparing Ficowski’s book, including her poems, for imminent publication. No one could understand her. Was she unhappy about the translations? Were there final revisions to be made? Papusza returned home and burned all her work—some three hundred poems—which, with Ficowski’s enthusiastic encouragement, she had begun to commit to paper. Then she wrote him a letter, begging him to stop publication, though even the letter showed her resignation, the essential fatalism of Gypsy song. If you print these songs I shall be skinned alive, she wrote, my people shall be naked against the elements. But who knows, maybe I will grow another skin, maybe one more beautiful.

  After the publication of the poems Papusza was put on trial. She was called before the highest authority among the Polish Roma, the Baro Shero, Big Head, or elder. After little deliberation, she was proclaimed mahrime (or magherdi among Polish Roma), unclean: the punishment was irreversible exclusion from the group. She spent eight months in a Silesian psychiatric hospital; then, for the next thirty-four years until her death in 1987, she lived alone and in isolation (perhaps wishing to avoid further harm, even Ficowski broke contact with her). She was shunned by her own generation and unknown to the next. She became her name: a doll, mute and discarded. Except for a brief spell in the late 1960s, when she burst out with a few of her best poems, Papusza never sang again.

  In a revised edition of his great book The Gypsies in Poland, published in 1984, Ficowski reviews the results of the Big Halt campaign. “Gypsies no longer lead a nomadic life, and the number of illiterates has considerably fallen.” But even these gains were limited because Gypsy girls marry at the age of twelve or thirteen, and because “in the very few cases where individuals are properly educated, they usually tend to leave the Gypsy community.” The results were disastrous: “Opposition to the traveling of the Gypsy craftsmen, who had taken their tinsmithing or blacksmithing into the uttermost corners of the country, began gradually to bring about the disappearance of … most of the traditional Gypsy skills.” And finally, “after the loss of opportunities to practice traditional professions, [for many Gypsies] the main source of livelihood became preying on the rest of society.” Now there really was something to be nostalgic about. Wisdom comes too late. The owl of Minerva flies at dusk.

  Papusza, 1949 (photo credits)

  That a crude demographic experiment ended in rootlessness and squalor is neither surprising nor disputed; the corralling of words, however, may have had the opposite result. The language (and increasingly the written language) is the cornerstone of modern Gypsy identity and emancipation.

  Poland, 1963 (photo credits)

  There are no words in Romani proper for “to write” or “to read.” Gypsies borrow from other languages to describe these activities. Or else, and more revealingly, they use other Romani words. Chin, or “cut” (as in carve), means “to write.” The verb “to read” is gin, which means “to count.” But the common expression is dav opre: dav opre means “I give upwards,” and so the phrase may be translated “I read aloud.” It does not describe reading to oneself; this is not something Gypsies generally do. Similarly, drabarav, a version of “I read” used by Macedonian Gypsies, traditionally means to read in the specific sense of telling fortunes from the palm of the hand. And in Albania, Gypsies may say gilabav for “I read,” though it primarily means “I sing.”

  A gilabno is a singer or a reader; a drabarno (or more often a female drabarni) is a reader and a fortune-teller but also a herb-dealer, which is to say a healer. These are recent innovations; they show what the written language means to an historically illiterate people. And it is to Ficowski’s Papusza that all these singer-readers must look first.

  Ficowski’s efforts, like Papusza’s, have not been repaid with gratitude. Sophisticated Polish Gypsies, such as the ethnographer Andrzej Mirga (who has revived Papusza since her death in a film and in a series of concerts, including performances by the New York Metropolitan Opera), recognize the importance of Ficowski’s scholarly work, but still regard him as a traitor.

  The Gypsies’ rejection of the government proposals—and of Papusza herself—did not stem from any primeval “will to freedom.” So soon after the war, many Gypsies had vivid memories of interviews with gadje. The Nazis were the most thorough of ethnographers. They collected more than thirty thousand Gypsy genealogies. They measured skulls, collected blood samples, and charted eye colors.

  Today, the great majority of Gypsies know little or nothing of the elaborate and malicious documentation of a sizable group of their ancestors who happened to live in German territory; but this legacy nevertheless informs the living memory of Gypsies everywhere. The passionately held view of most Gypsies is still that gadje are dangerous, not to be trusted, and, in the interest of the survival of the group, they are to be avoided except for dealings in business. Indeed, in the most general sense, gadje are considered to be mahrime: polluted. To develop unnecessary relations with them is to risk contamination.

  To be sure, in Poland, as elsewhere, more and more Gypsies and gadje are intermarrying but, as Andrzej Mirga—who is married to a gadji—pointed out, “our mothers are not happy about this trend.” They needn’t worry: instead of contributing to the disintegration of the group or to their assimilation into the world of the gadjo, intermarriage merely enlarges the stock. The children of such unions, like mulattos and mestizos everywhere, are considered by everyone to be Gypsies, just as they would have been classified by the Nazis.

  The response of some regrettably powerful Gypsies to the Papusza/Ficowski collaboration perhaps reveals more about Gypsy life than the mass of data he diligently recorded. It unveils the most fundamental Gypsy value: that of “us against the world.” Although the belief that they should remain a separate people is not based on a theological precept, this worldview, codified in hundreds of unwritten laws and superstitions enforcing symbolic purification, is not unlike that set forth in the Talmud: “Be deliberate in judging and raise up many disciples, and make a hedge for the Torah.” Ever more pressed, Gypsies seek only to build up their hedge.

  “You will never learn our language,” a Gypsy activist—and teacher of Romani—proudly told me on a bus in Bucharest. He didn’t mean that I had a wooden ear. “For every word you record in your little notebook, we have another one—a synonym, which we use and which you can never know. Oh, you might learn these; but you won’t get how to use them, or what nuances they carry. We don’t want you to know. You should’ve been born a Romany chey [girl].”

  This teacher, one of the most prominent Romany nationalists, devotes fantastic energy to exposing and fighting anti-Gypsy racism. Still, on the bus he was reinforcing one of the oldest slanders: that Romani is not a proper language, but thieves’ cant. The contradiction highlights a peculiar difficulty of the present-day Gypsy emancipation movement: clearl
y, and understandably, exoticism itself has been part of the hedge. (And so has humor: as in the Talmud, the layers of laws themselves constitute the hedge; among Gypsies, people who have participated in illicit sex, and so dipped themselves in lasting shame, are said to have “gone behind the hedge.”)

  But mimicry—or adaptation—has always existed alongside exoticism. Since 1989, the first Gypsy political parties have emerged, along with their first representatives: Members of Parliament, delegates to the UN. Gypsy poets now publish their work in Romani and in other languages. In Romania and in Macedonia there are Romany television programs produced by Roma; there is a first generation of Gypsy editors of newspapers and magazines (one of the best, edited by a Kosovan Rom out of Slovakia, is called Patrin—the old word for the signposts traveling Gypsies left for their traveling fellows). All of this is new; and the excitement is palpable. But one may also say, without disparagement, that beneath the surface things haven’t changed. The arrival of democracy in no way signals a reordering of Gypsy traditions. The secret society continues. Its tangled underbrush of prohibitions—the Gypsy hedge—is intact.

  Konferença, kongresso, parliamento: these are some of the most recent additions to the Romani language. It is true that, until 1989, Gypsies in the former Eastern bloc had not had much chance to use them. And these concepts remain alien, even antithetical, to the internal organization of the Gypsy people.

  When they first appeared in Europe in the fourteenth century the Gypsies presented themselves as pilgrims and they told fortunes: two winning professions in a superstitious age. Their leaders called themselves Counts and Princes and Captains. These were not expressions of Gypsy values so much as further evidence of their (often underemployed) talent for adopting local moods and hierarchies in order to sustain their ever-precarious prestige. Us versus Them is a game which, for the time being, is still played in the language of the conquerors—or of the “host” society.

  “Never ask questions and don’t wear short skirts.” That was the best advice I got before I set out. It came from an anthropologist who had done research among the Gypsies of Madrid. “Asking,” he said, “is no way to get answers.”

  Fifteen years ago I traveled around Eastern Europe with my grandmother, who at age two had left her native Hungary in 1905. I remember stepping off the Orient Express in Budapest and wondering, “What are all these Indians doing here?” (That evening, and every other evening in Hungary, we recognized them as Gypsies, trios of Gypsies bowing their violins over our goulash.) During the revolutions of 1989 I wondered again about those “Indians.” Though they were never mentioned in the papers, I had the idea that they would show the watching world what kind of democracies upheaval would bring to Eastern Europe.

  Before I had actually met a Gypsy, I knew that there were twelve million of them living in diaspora all over the world, that perhaps eight million lived in Europe, mainly in Eastern Europe, and that they were the continent’s largest minority. In a region with static and negative birthrates the Gypsies, I knew, were reproducing in intimidatingly large numbers. Their population was expected to double within seventeen years. Already they were being seized as the handiest scapegoats for all the ills of creaky communist societies in slow transition. I knew that hundreds of thousands of Gypsies had died in the Holocaust. Now again there were pogroms in Eastern Europe. Aware of the escalating violence they faced, Václav Havel had said that “the Gypsies are a litmus test not of democracy but of a civil society.” It wasn’t hard to see that the energies of nationalism would be excited by the particular difficulties the Gypsies presented to each bankrupt state. Gypsies are mostly illiterate, mostly unemployed, and mostly without proper housing. Their lives are about a third shorter than those of their countrymen. (And Eastern Europeans aren’t the only vulnerable ones: 70 percent of Italian Gypsy families lose at least one child, while among Irish Travelers infant mortality is three times the national average.)

  I knew all this. But I didn’t know, for example, that Gypsies were offended by the sight of female knees. And I hadn’t imagined that they might not want to repudiate all the slanders and vicious stereotypes, that they might not want to tell their story at all. “Never ask questions.…”

  Gypsies lie. They lie a lot—more often and more inventively than other people. Not to each other, but to gadje. Still, malice is not intended. On the whole, lying is a cheerful affair. Embellishments are intended to give pleasure. People long to tell you what they imagine you want to hear. They want to amuse you; they want to amuse themselves; they want to show you a good time. This is beyond hospitality. This is art.

  The liar—or, without being euphemistic, we can say the fabulist—may also believe that the revised version is more true. And so it may be: more true in the sense of more vivid. But lies of course are also designed to deceive. Indeed deception, the gentler the better, is considered a duty. “We don’t want you to know,” the teacher of Romani had said. And what he was really talking about was survival.

  Relations between Gypsies and gadje have not always been as desperate as they are now. Some secrets have been common ones: there were many Gypsies in the Resistance during the Second World War. And before the advent of mixed marriage there were centuries of professional symbiosis—between, say, peasants and toolmakers. Yet their survival, over a millennium, has depended on secrecy: on disguise and misrepresentation, on keeping customs and ambitions hidden, on burying the past—on lying. The Gypsies have always been partisans.

  When I returned from a month in Bulgaria or a summer in Albania, people at home would ask me if I had been accepted by the Gypsies among whom I’d stayed. I could say yes. I have been welcomed with bankrupting generosity. My honor has been defended by my Gypsy brothers, even when I didn’t know it had been besmirched. I have felt completely safe among Gypsies. I have been called chey, or daughter, by my Gypsy mother. But I was never allowed to prepare food, to work, to contribute as a daughter would. In one community I wasn’t even allowed to wash myself: that duty was delegated to the young women of the household. Most often I ate with the men, not with the women and children, who would pick over whatever we had left untouched. I knew that I would always remain a gadji, outside their history.

  Secrets of course can only be kept by consensus and allegiance. For real or imagined collusion with the gadje, Papusza was condemned to a living death. The harsh law of the Gypsies—so cruelly at variance with the romantic stereotype of the Romany free spirit—prohibits emancipation of individuals in favor of preserving the group. And as so often a disastrous element of mimicry was at work: Papusza was called a nark, just as Gypsies have been dubbed agents and spies throughout their history in the West. In fact, “nark,” British slang for stool pigeon, derives from the Romani word nak, or nose. The casting out of Papusza is an instance of the very demands for conformity more usually associated with gadje.

  The miracle is that the Gypsies as a whole have resisted an assimilation which has always meant surrender. Papusza was herself sacrificed, but Papusza also survives—thanks to the gadjo Ficowski. Perhaps Papusza was already doomed, before she met him—doomed by childlessness, and by the very things that have come to seem liberating to a growing corps of Roma: by singing in her own voice and not just for the group; by writing things down.

  ONE

  The Dukas of Albania

  USUALLY ON MY journeys in Eastern Europe I traveled alone and made friends along the way. But Albania was different. Albania was as remote and unknowable as Tibet, and I wanted a guide. I had to find “Marcel.”

  I had heard his name for years, but all I had been told about him was that he was a non-Gypsy who spoke Romani; that he had lived for many years in Albania; that he wore a long beard; and that he had no fixed address. Finally I caught up with him at a conference near Bratislava, though it might have been anywhere in the Balkans, where he lived at large. During a lunch break between sessions I approached the bearded delegate and asked him if he would go with me to Albania. Yes, that
’d be all right, he said unsmilingly, barely glancing up from his schnitzel; we’d work out the details later. But later came and Marcel had gone.

  A month passed before I found him again, in Paris. At his request we met on the Right Bank, outside the offices of LOT, the Polish airline. As soon as I spotted him, struggling with the zipper of his gray windcheater, I understood something of what the Roma world meant to him. Dressed all in gray, Marcel almost disappeared into the façade of the building. But the camouflage was incomplete: he looked poor, provincial, wrong. Up close, he looked permanently alarmed. His green eyes bulged in an even perimeter of white.

  I took Marcel to lunch. I asked him to pick any place he liked. With all Paris before him, Marcel chose the dim upstairs cafeteria at Monoprix, the French equivalent of Woolworth’s. Watching him wolf down the plate of boiled potatoes and the darkening mayonnaise salad that he’d selected, I saw that he felt at home here. It was very East European. In fact Marcel was French; but in Eastern Europe, he wouldn’t cut the shambolic figure I met near the Paris Opéra. Among the Roma, he was a personage; you could guess that there he swapped feeling like an outsider for actually being one, and strangeness made sense.

  Though in general he preferred to talk about language, at the Monoprix Marcel told me about himself and his life among Gypsies; he began, as he began every conversation, with a raised finger and a correction. Marcel was not, as I had supposed, French at all, but Occitanian. The language, Occitan, of which he offered a sample, is a variety of Provençal and sounds like Catalan—the strident provincialism was certainly Catalonian in spirit. But Marcel was a pedant, and a rather cosmopolitan one.

  His grandfather, he said, was from a traveling family—part of a group called the “Gringos”—signifying, here, not unwanted Americans but Greek-speaking Gypsies in Spain. Marcel sounded like a Frenchman, or rather he sounded like Peter Sellers, with his piquant, zestily accented English. “The family traveled and stopped at fairs to sell and repair sewing machines, while I stayed behind with my grandmother in the Massif Central.” He told me that his father had been an organist, but that he had stopped playing when they settled and the old man had gone to work as a porter at the Clermont railway station.