Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  The kids of Kino knew a few of the brand names that danced in heads all over the developing world: Coke, Kent, and Marlboro (cigarettes were scraps of the West that Albanians could aspire to owning; what was the point of knowing the names of American cars?). But in Kino these brand names had the same status value as the fake Western cigarettes such as Wenston (sic), Victory, Bond, Ronhill, Sher, and OK—which came from either Turkey or Iran. They were all ritzy goods because they were not Albanian. Beyond that it didn’t much matter what they were or where they’d come from.

  At the top of the road, the vegetable man sat in his cart amid the produce, which was usually just domate (tomatoes). Sometimes he had cherries and figs, but Jeta would never let me buy any: though they cost pennies, by local standards they were overpriced, and no one in Jeta’s charge was going to get ripped off.

  And there was Yolanda, the fat dark-brown woman who sat on a low wall by the post office, her calamine-colored stockings rolled down to the calf. She held a burlap sack of sunflower seeds between her knees, her palms flat on her thighs, fingers in, elbows up. When she got a customer, she would carefully measure out four wooden eggcupfuls and roll them into a newspaper cone. All over the neighborhood, people paused in their conversations to spit out the black husks, and children spat them at each other. Any place where queues formed—the bread line, say, or inside the post office—was marked by an ant trail of sunflower droppings. Yolanda’s counterpart was the stick figure of Mr. Cashku, who sat within courting distance of her corpulence. He wore a tweed suit all through the scorching summer; and he sold lighter fluid, refilling through a tiny tin funnel the cheap plastic lighters that everyone seemed to have. Matches were not often for sale and nothing in Albania was disposable. Nothing but time.

  Yolanda and Mr. Cashku had prime shop property: Kinostudio’s post office was always packed. It was a place to pick up gossip, and to make phone calls (there were few private lines in Albania, and none in Kino). Sometimes the phone queue spilled out onto the steps; inside, it jammed to fill the space, with people waving bits of paper, calling out “Italia!” and “Gjermania!” They were hoping to place their calls before they reached the front and their turn to shout, for all to hear, into the single, early-model Bakelite telephone on the counter. Everyone seemed to have a relative who was a refugee. And it was clear just from their faces as they left the post office that Albanian mothers were not convinced that Westerners were showing proper appreciation of their boys.

  So was it worse to be stuck in Albania or to be a refugee, stranded elsewhere? The consensus is clear. During more than a month in Albania, I didn’t meet a single person who didn’t want to leave. Their dreams of leaving were of different kinds, however. The Gypsies I met were anxious to take advantage of the new trade opportunities; they were impatient to bring back some of the outside world. The notion of severing oneself from the “family,” and its rich pool of future partners in work and marriage, held little appeal.

  Like many Gypsies, the Albanian gadje lived in disgust with their country; but they were also burdened by a sense of shame the Gypsies didn’t share. They wanted to leave, and to leave off being Albanians. They wanted to “become Europeans.” Unlike the Gypsies, whose allegiance was familial, and at the outer limit tribal but never national in the sense of aspiring to a territorial state, the Albanians I met were acutely aware of themselves as dud Europeans. Either way, everyone wanted out.

  “Will you be my sponsor?” “Please, please, guarantee me.” These are the things the sometimes menacing young men of Kino whispered if they ever managed to get me alone. These were not Albanian pickup lines. “Guarantee,” like “no problem” (ska problem in Albanian), was one bit of English that everyone knew. It signaled a plea for rescue. For increasingly a native’s only hope of escape was adoption: a foster Westerner had to be found who would be responsible for the Eastern ward, who would house and feed him, and post bail should he falter. This was a serious legal responsibility, and the vision of an apartment full of unemployed Albanian youths made it shamefully easy to say no.

  Getting away: that was the point; there was not much thought about where one might actually go. Nuzi, who with Nicu walked me down to the post office one day, chose America. “Because it is rich and free.” He laughed when I promised him that there were poor people in America. “And,” he added, pressing his disadvantage, because “maybe Americans haven’t heard of us.” (A year after my stay, I learned that Nuzi had made it to Germany, as a member of a Gypsy musical ensemble. This was particularly pleasing news. I was sure that he had no musical leanings.)

  All Eastern Europeans enjoy doom, but none so wittily as the Albanian Gypsies, who will offer, with upturned palms, the word “Albania” as an explanation for the unpaved streets in the capital, for the traffic fines one routinely receives for no vaguely guessable reason, for anything bureaucratic, poorly made, time-consuming, or sad.

  But Nicu, the eldest son, wasn’t going to let anything get him down. The post office was in the worst corner of Kinostudio: a scratchy unturfed patch of crumbling ten-story concrete apartment blocks. These grim towers were built in 1965 for Hoxha’s police force; but even they had rejected them, and so construction was abandoned, plumbing was never installed, and eventually the overflow from Kinostudio piled in. It looked like a slum. But where I saw the Projects, Nicu saw the future. This is where he hoped to buy an apartment for his own family, Dritta and Djivan and Mario. And when I stood next to him, listening to his plans (to repour the concrete floors, to paint and stencil the walls with flowers as Gypsies everywhere loved to do), little by little it stopped looking like a slum and simply became the neighborhood. Those children playing didn’t look like doomy little criminals, once you knew their names. And there were no drugs. It was just poor, it was just Albania.

  Sure, Nicu would have liked to get out, but he only wanted to make some money, to establish some trading partners and then come home. Turkey was the one place that occasionally extended visas to Albanians (former subjects, after all), and these were used over and over, razored out of one red vinyl passport and sewn into the next. Nicu had already been to “Stanbuli”—an excursion from which he returned as a figure of impossible glamour; and the transformation made his sultry wife, Dritta, even more unbearable to her sisters-in-law, the junior boria. He had plans, he was going into “import-export” (the latter half for the time being remained “undisclosed”); so far this had yielded stacks of circular aluminum Turkish floor ovens that, not yet sold out, formed a wall of articulated metallic columns in the Duka family courtyard.

  Nicu had had a job in a textile factory. Boldly for someone from a neighborhood of near-total unemployment—there were 288 wholly unemployed families here—he quit. He wanted work, but like most Gypsies he had no use for regimented wage labor. The final blow came when they put him on night shift. He didn’t want Dritta to be alone after dark (or he didn’t want to be without her after dark). Above all, Nicu trusted that he could do better on his own—earn more money, have more freedom and more fun, and design a better future than he could in any job. And he was right.

  Gimi’s brother Arben, who was called Beno and was doing booming business in fabrics from Turkey, had invited Nicu into the firm. Or at least he had given him a corner of his truck. Once a month the truck would return from Stanbuli and the whole of Kinostudio would gather to finger and admire the new goods: bright bolts of cloth as tall as a man, elaborately flowery in accordance with Gypsy taste. All the houses and all the wives and daughters of Kino were upholstered in one or other of a couple of batches that had come off Beno’s truck, giving the otherwise built-onto, shanty-accretive aspect of the place the uniform look of a camp. Nicu paid for a space in Beno’s truck for his ovens, which had not as yet caught on: but Nicu was optimistic.

  Trade was not a traditional profession for the Mechkari as it was for so many Gypsy groups (it is unusual that the Mechkari even said they had been agricultural workers for centuries). But still they were n
atural entrepreneurs. In Kinostudio there were a few fancy houses going up—a turret here, a balcony there—and they looked odd because there were no sidewalks or paved roads, just these mansions in the dirt. They belonged to Gypsies who were doing well in imports. In Albania, and all through the region, Gypsies were among the few who were going to seize the new opportunities and build their new houses, while the rest of the population looked on, envious, inert, tiredly enraged, and complaining.

  Gypsies have no squeamishness about money: they talk about it freely, unboastfully displaying their wads. Jeta always had a bouquet of bills tacked under her bra strap (Gypsy women did not on the whole wear bras, and she seemed to sport hers mainly as a wallet). Nicu’s encouraging prospects were greeted with joy, as they would have been by any parents. But still, among Gypsies, there was ambivalence about savings. I never once met a Gypsy with a personal bank account—though of course the banks are gadjo institutions.

  Whatever his reasons, Nicu had hidden the money he’d saved to buy the new flat. And though everyone knew about it, it was not to be discussed.

  I often slept in Nicu and Dritta’s two-room “wing,” on a Polish folding couch with Mario or Djivan or both. One morning before dawn, Nicu crashed around among a few of the Stanbuli stoves that he hadn’t managed to fit into the courtyard. It was dark, but what I couldn’t see I could hear. One by one he lifted off the circular ovens and restacked them. When he got to the bottom drum, he suddenly went gentle, and quietly settled it on the painted table in the middle of the room. He pulled off the lid and placed it on the chair. Only now did Nicu push up the sleeves of the tapered man’s shirt that he’d slept in—the bright white of the shirt caught what light there was. He reached into the low vat and delicately unloaded something rectangular and heavier than bread—it might have been a brick. One, two, three bricks, neatly squared on the table each time. Four, five, six.

  It was money. Bundles of money, each tied with a string; the money for the flat.

  Dritta appeared with the laundry bag, now emptied, and held it open at Nicu’s side. Like a thief with his newly acquired ingots, in the dark he deftly lowered all six loaves into it, three on the bottom, three on top. And the bag went behind the couch opposite mine, on which Marcel still snored. Dritta further camouflaged the loot with one of her many Day-Glo plastic fruit trees, and began her usual round of chores: water to boil for coffee, cups, tubs, and soap retrieved from their night spaces. Without a word passing between them, Nicu downed the shot of strong sweet coffee that Dritta handed him, exchanged the thimble-size cup for the money bag, and slipped into the courtyard and out the front gate.

  That evening he returned with the deed for the flat, which also served as the only evidence of his having paid over his fortune, nearly one thousand dollars. Breathlessly he pushed it across the table towards Marcel, who sat phlegmatically behind his long beard like a pawnbroker. Nicu couldn’t read the piece of paper: he literally didn’t know what he had. The deklerat was handwritten in pencil on a piece of brown paper—the kind of paper that used to serve (extravagantly, it now seemed) as wrapping for bread—in an elaborately looped cursive script with extra loops at the tails of letters. In a rendition of a generic official document, there was even a circular seal drawn in a lower corner; the artist understood that those stamps were there for atmosphere. There was no mention of the sum, and no date.

  A certain law of hospitality still held among Albanian Gypsies—though it had, inevitably, fallen from fashion elsewhere. This was the obligation of any Gypsy to offer welcome and material help to any other—ideally but not necessarily from the same group—who asked for it. Gypsies still depended on this when they traveled abroad. One evening in Kinostudio, Dilaver, a wiry, pockmarked brother of Gimi’s recently returned from an expedition to Greece (even from Albania they managed somehow to move across borders), spoke in shocked tones for hours of the closed doors he had encountered. There was a time limit on how long you could prey on the hospitality of an unknown family in the group: some said three days, others told me seven. But within a Gypsy family, as in any family, obligations could be elastic, even unlimited. Not only was your enemy’s enemy likely to be a relative, but your brother’s crime was your own. During my weeks in Kino the law made a rare appearance. They arrested a Kabudji man for assault and robbery. He would be sentenced to a year in prison. However, as he had the only job in his extended family, and four children of his own, the family consulted itself and offered up a younger brother in his stead.

  This happens among Gypsies all over the Balkans (though I had heard similar stories in Britain too), where collective punishment is not only directed towards Gypsies, but where responsibility, or shame, may be felt by them as a group. The practice proves the degree to which, for the authorities, Gypsies are all alike: any one of them will do. And the younger brother, did he mind? Not really. In many places imprisonment was a terrible fate, not for fear of stabbing or sodomy but because one was separated from the group and forced to live and eat among gadje, thereby risking all manner of contamination. Within the family, though, this sacrifice conferred honor, and among your peers time inside would be the equivalent of doing battle abroad. All the young men who had been in, and among Gypsies a sad many had, proudly displayed their blurry, blue razor-blade tattoos like war medals.

  The rule of hospitality was a beautiful and thriving principle, but it could also be exploited. (When money came in, according to Michael Stewart, a Briton who lived with some Hungarian Gypsies, a common tactic was to spend it immediately on illiquid assets—heavy furniture.) Such communitarian codes had kept the Gypsies together for centuries, and had kept them poor.

  It is certainly not the case that Gypsies attach no importance to possessions. Bexhet took extravagant care of his bicycle, and Nuzi dreamed like all young men of a fast car, of any car. Marriage came so early, for many before adolescence, that it seemed not to interfere with the usual yearnings and growth pains, which here might be perceived more as a midlife crisis. (The average Gypsy male in eastern Slovakia died before the age of forty.)

  The difference was that these things—bikes and cars—were to be enjoyed, but also converted into profit. They were not just toys, and they were never regarded fetishistically; another bike or car would come along. Renewal and exchange were the only constants, reinforcing the belief among gadje that the possessions of Gypsies were all stolen goods. With regard to their rapid turnover of merchandise, Gypsies behaved more like rich Westerners than their poor counterparts in other countries. An aristocratic etiquette furthermore required that possessions be made to look easily acquired, in contrast to the non-Gypsy verities of hard work and frugality.

  And so, when Nicu’s fortune could no longer be concealed from neighbors, it was strenuously downplayed. Nicu falsely intimated that he had won it all in a crap game. And there was a certain prudence in this flourish of Gypsy style. What was abundant today would very likely be gone tomorrow.

  Everybody Sees Only His Own Dish

  FOOD. THOUGH THERE were no shortages in Albania during my visit, food—or meat—seemed to be the only subject of discussion, and the procuring and preparing of it busied three-quarters of the household for most of each day.

  Just opposite the house, there was Mish Mas, or Meat Meat, the butcher’s. (Mish is “meat” in Albanian; mas is “meat” in Romani.) Jeta didn’t shop here, though. The proprietor of Mish Mas would jokingly beckon to her, and she would shout back, “Xinav to mas!”—“I am going to shit on your meat!” Wearing her most unforgiving grimace, she pronounced Mish Mas meat bi-lacho, no good, and so every day, cursing the local butcher, she would exchange her slippers for her “city shoes,” the shiny black ones with heels, and walk three miles down to the covered market in town. There you could sniff and pinch the meat, and you could really haggle. Jeta knew how to haggle.

  Her method involved disgusted jabbing of the various cuts of meat spread over the bloodied white tiles. Each poke was followed by a hoot or a cluck o
r merely a disappointed sigh. Such scrutiny of the meat seemed pointless because, at least to my untrained eye, it was all the same. It was certainly all sheep parts: brains, balls, guts, gut linings, organs and glands, whole skinned heads, and spindly joints. You could also buy the sheepskins from the butcher and hooves for stew, or perhaps for glue. Greasy, stringy ewe or ram—that was the only mas you could get, and we got it every day.

  The same routine was played out over the vegetables, which Jeta didn’t count as real food anyway, and over the raw green coffee beans, which were eyeballed individually as if they were emeralds. But the real passion was reserved for the mutton, which, once back home, would be washed and oiled and dressed like a king’s feet—and certainly more assiduously than any of the children ever were. In such a poor country, putting meat on the table every day—more often than was now the practice in any developed country—was symbolically important. It could be a ploy for status, as living beyond one’s means always could be; but for Jeta it meant strength and survival.

  All over Central and Eastern Europe people had recent memories and occasional reminders of severe shortages (and for a while all the news from Albania seemed to be about food riots). In response to this continual threat, the gadje tended to hoard and the Gypsies to gorge. The daily meal at the house of an Albanian family I came to know was meager—bean soup, perhaps, with a piece of fat floating in each bowl for calories: perfectly adequate, but in Jeta’s eyes derisory. Still, she didn’t shop for the future; she trusted in her ability to scour and bargain and come up with the goods, and to get them fresh, every day, however slack the money bra.

  Marcel described the shopping practices of some Gypsies in other parts of the Balkans, and particularly of some Gypsy children. They would, he said, make the food unappealing to anyone else. Not only would they fondle everything, but simultaneously (and theatrically) they would scratch their own arms and scalps as if for lice, a routine that would stop the minute they had completed their purchase or had been sent on their way. Was this a racket? Marcel thought it as likely that these rapscallions were just having fun. They embodied the pragmatic Romany proverb Te den, xa, te maren, de-nash!: When you are given, eat, when you are beaten run away! For Jeta we could reserve the more philosophical saying Sako peskero charo dikhel: Everybody sees only his own dish. Jeta’s children never indulged in such mischievousness but if they did she would certainly have smacked them, perhaps with her favorite and redundant warning, that isi ili daba—here there are also smacks.