Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  We traveled together around Bulgaria, and inevitably we went to Sliven, a town of one hundred thousand, which was widely recognized as “the Gypsy capital” (more than half of its citizens were Gypsies). The night before we set off, another Bulgarian friend said unthinkingly, “Watch out in Sliven. There are a lot of Gypsies.” Elena was uncommonly lacking in routine prejudice.

  Bulgaria’s urban Gypsies are among the most deracinated in Eastern Europe. These boys, like most of the street children, are addicted to glue, and they survive by begging and stealing. A few of them, including, in 1991, a nine-year-old girl, are also prostitutes. Not all of them are orphans but they mostly live in train stations, with intermittent periods in children’s homes. Sofia, 1993 (photo credits 3.1)

  On the long train ride we covered the Balkan Range and crossed almost the length of Bulgaria. The grass crops of different greens and the yellow squares of sunflowers intermittently gave way to strips of orchard: low, closely pruned fruit trees, apricot, plum, and cherry. This bright and busy view was very far from the parched swaths of roadside Albania. The most striking difference, though, was not in the landscape itself but in the revealed determination of its inhabitants. Bulgaria is a quilt, intensively cultivated; and Bulgarians on the train are rewarded with this full-color pastoral picture out of a children’s book—between the vast chemical plants with their equally colorful fumes. These excepted, Bulgaria seems like an Eden: rivers and mountains and ancient, painted monasteries; vineyards and soft fruits and seaside resorts, all in a Southern European climate. But to Gypsies such pamphlet-filling variety and resources meant little. They couldn’t care less. Truly the sense of place for them had everything to do with the human landscape, and in respect of its large Gypsy population, Bulgaria was barren—a tundra of human intolerance.

  Elena described how she had become involved with Gypsies. It started when she was a Pioneer—“you know, one of those very happy little communists with a red bandana.” Elena had been in charge of a bunch of Gypsy children on an excursion to the Black Sea. (The groups were segregated, and no one had wanted to take the Gypsies, but Elena was the youngest and so she was “volunteered.”) Towards the end of the holiday, a bracelet belonging to one of the other Pioneers had gone missing. Elena’s group was blamed (it had to be a Gypsy), and would she please, asked the director, produce the culprit? Elena replied that none of her kids could have stolen the bracelet, because they had spent the day in the resort town of Varna. (“None of the Gypsies could swim,” Elena said, explaining the day trips away from the waterfront campsite. “The seaside wasn’t so much fun for them. It just showed how different they were.”)

  The director continued to insist. Elena narrowed her eyes in imitation of him as he repeated his demand for a culprit, “or else.” “I stuck to the truth,” she went on, “because I couldn’t think of what else to say. The Gypsy children were afraid because of the bracelet. Or maybe they were always afraid. They had only one set of clothes each, they were very careful of their things, washing their dresses without being told, even the littlest ones. Seven and eight years old. Much tidier than the Bulgarian children.”

  “So what happened to them?”

  “I never knew. Nothing maybe. As for me, I was kicked out of the Komsomol [the Communist Youth club]. This was, in 1975, a serious matter. I understood that now I wouldn’t be able to go to university. It hadn’t been a problem that neither of my parents were Party members, but now this was being raised by authorities as evidence of our general subversiveness. It was a nervous time. Still, that experience changed me. And you can’t imagine—I had been so proud when I got my red bandana!”

  Little Emilia had been one of the girls in Elena’s group; her parents invited Elena to their house when they heard about the bracelet incident. “Her family lives in one of the oldest, worst Gypsy quarters in Sofia, a place I would never have gone before. It was supposed to be so dangerous.” But despite the protests of her own family Elena started hanging out there at age seventeen. This was dangerous, at the time, not because of the Gypsies so much as the authorities. The family mail started to be monitored (they had no telephone); men in long, gray coats turned up at the house to question Elena and her parents about her activities.

  “But it was always slightly comical,” she said. With hindsight, I thought. “No, really, it was ridiculous. The police would come and make noises. They would talk about everything except what they were there to find out about. They never asked any direct questions. They couldn’t ask about the Gypsies, because, officially speaking, the Gypsies didn’t exist!” And this was true: although there was by now a highly visible population of as many as eight hundred thousand Gypsies in the country (nearly 10 percent of all Bulgarians), they had never been mentioned in the census—except in those of the Ministry of the Interior: the police.

  Elena gave me the background of what had become her life’s obsession. In the 1947 Constitution, Gypsies had the status of a national minority, allowing them at least to use their own language—a status which was scrapped in the revised Constitution of 1971. Now everyone, like it or not, was “made equal.” To be equally Bulgarian meant that difference would not be tolerated. At the same time, from 1978 onwards, a law that was unwritten but well understood prohibited interaction between “ethnic Bulgarians” and Gypsies, including even the mention of them in the national press or on television. (Hence euphemisms such as “our dark brothers,” still favored by the “liberated” press.) Soon the Gypsies, like the Turks, were all required to Bulgarianize their names; so Ali became Ilia and Timaz became Todor. They were no longer allowed to speak Romani, to play music, to wear “folkloric” clothes. Along with this, Elena the ethnographer repeatedly pointed out, many Gypsies had lost their traditional professions—as basketmakers, spoon- and brush-makers, herb-gatherers, musicians, smiths, and so on. These elements of identity, Elena and I agreed, were obviously more important for a group without land or written records. Now many Bulgarian Gypsies had no idea what kind of work their ancestors had done, and often didn’t know what their family name had been only a few generations before.

  In Sliven, Elena and I split up (not wanting to overburden any one family), and would meet again in a few days, on the train back to Sofia. An English friend had introduced me to Antoinette and Gyorgy, and they had invited me to visit.

  This basket weaver, who lives near Plovdiv, still makes his living by the profession that his family has practiced for centuries. In rural areas, where often there is no work (and no social services), economic crisis has sparked a revival of traditional skills. Bulgaria, 1992 (photo credits 3.2)

  Antoinette took the rose I had brought her between two fingers and dropped it, still wrapped in its station-kiosk cellophane and bow, into a tall fluted vase. This she arranged on top of the television, making room between two Eiffel Towers: one brass with a thermometer attachment, the other a porcelain objet.

  “Eh, oui,” she sighed, tilting her head and clasping her hands at the bosom. Antoinette collected greeting cards with pictures of women in just such feminine poses. We spoke French, which she had learned at Bulgaria’s Frenskata Gimnazia, or French Lycée. She was pleased to have a visitor. She had no one to talk to in French and, it seemed, no one to talk to in Bulgarian. We talked about Paris, which she had visited once and which was, she said, her spiritual home.

  “Georges et moi, nous y sommes allés, il y a cinque ans.”

  “C’est vrai?” I dully replied, instigating a full, on-the-rug session with the family photo album: Antoinette in front of the Eiffel Tower, Gyorgy in front of the Eiffel Tower; Antoinette and Gyorgy in front of the Eiffel Tower.…

  The Gypsies of Sliven were long-settled, and divided between the better-off Christian Gypsies, mostly former ironworkers, and the Xoraxane, the “Turkish” or Muslim Gypsies, never identified with a particular craft; they lived miserably and literally on the other side of the train tracks, behind a high wall erected in the sixties to keep them out of sight, in mini-
ghettos with names like “Bangladesh” and “Like-it-or-not.” Antoinette and Gyorgy did not live in either settlement; they had a flat in a large cement block which hardly seemed attached to the town and whose tenants were a mix of Gypsy and gadjo.

  I have tried to avoid stereotyping; and so did Antoinette. Sitting beside me on the patchwork rug, legs daintily tucked under to one side, Antoinette didn’t look or move like any Gypsy woman I knew or had seen: she was tall, pale, and blonde, and she was exceptionally—exaggeratedly—prim and girlish. She might have stepped from the pages of a 1950s issue of Good Housekeeping. Her red-and-yellow flowered dress fanned about her, the frilly apron tightly fastened in a large bow at the back to emphasize her good waist. She’d teased up her bright hair into meringue-stiff peaks; a yellow pelmet curled over her forehead. She had lovely large sad brown eyes. She wasn’t pretty, but no imperfection escaped remedy, and there was something affecting about all the trouble she took, always smiling.

  I asked Antoinette why they didn’t live in the uptown Christian Gypsy mahala, or quarter.

  “I don’t care to live all crowded in, ‘à l’italienne.’ ” Whenever possible she employed a continental phrase, distancing herself from the world of Gypsies (who, after all, live more hugger-mugger than do any Italians).

  She told me of her early days with “Georges.”

  “Donka, my grandmother, she was against him. She would say: ‘Mais ma petite fille, il est un peu paysan’ ”—to which Antoinette added by way of explanation, “It’s true, he is very dark.” Antoinette lowered her eyes and placed a light palm over her clavicle. “But oh, how that man can dance!”

  Gyorgy and Antoinette, Sliven, 1992 (photo credits 3.3)

  That first evening, in a local restaurant, I saw for myself. Gyorgy’s three younger brothers had an excellent band, much in demand for weddings. Though he didn’t play—he was a European homme d’affaires—Gyorgy danced a lot with Antoinette, and they made a spectacular pair on the floor. Occasionally Gyorgy also sang, something from “Engelbert” or Tom Jones. He did an especially good “Release Me.” “Pleeeeease release me, let me gooooh.… You don’t love me anymore.…” and Antoinette teared up when he sang it.

  “My family was disappointed, you see. I had gone to the Lycée; I was the only gitane there, and nobody knew.”

  The few foreign-language schools in Bulgaria were considered to be the best, and they were generally attended only by the children of high-level apparatchiks. Antoinette was unusual all around. With her brassy hive and modern dress—most Sliven Gypsy women still at least wore long (if not particularly traditional) skirts—she reminded me of an American girl I knew who had been given a new nose for her sweet sixteen: the parts didn’t quite match, yet the more dramatic change had been in her expression (always this secret to keep). Some Party connection was necessary to explain the transmogrification of Antoinette; but that she pointlessly denied. It was as if I had asked her if she was a natural blonde.

  Denial, self-misrepresentation: this was the significant experience of many Gypsies, particularly in Bulgaria. Here they could pass for members of the even larger Turkish population, which had, especially under Ottoman rule, proved useful. (Identification with Turks among many Bulgarian Roma was not always opportunistic, though; it also represents a rare instance of genuine Gypsy assimilation.) In the former Eastern bloc, however, everyone was accustomed to routine and blatant lying, and to ritualized official lying. The Bulgarians, like other whites, were at least frank about their hatred of Gypsies. But this was more predictable than the reaction of Bulgarian Gypsies. At a time when all over the world ethnicity was replacing class or cash as the salient socializing factor, among the Gypsies here the dream was of racial anonymity.

  In Sofia, Elena had introduced me to Gospodin Kolev, the only Rom member of the former Central Committee of the Communist Party (Propaganda and Agitation section). Though there were once over three thousand Gypsy members of the Bulgarian Communist Party, they had invariably joined the rank and file. Only later did I learn that the high-ranking Kolev was Antoinette’s uncle.

  Gospodin (which means “Mister”) Kolev was particularly proud of his early advocacy of special boarding schools for Roma, where “they would be taught to be civilized like Bulgarians”—as well as to cook and lay tables. I visited an all-Gypsy “technical” school in Sliven. The kids were supposed to be taught job skills, and so they were, in a sweatshop setting. (Ten- and eleven-year-olds installed the ballbearings in swivel desk chairs which would eventually be sold mainly, I was told, to Hungarian businesses.) These schools still exist all over Bulgaria; more like orphanages or reformatories, they didn’t much resemble the Lycée.

  A Muslim Rom baby’s first rite, at Stoliponovo, a large, mainly Gypsy housing estate outside Plovdiv, Bulgaria. At six months old, the male child receives his first haircut—for which the entire neighborhood turns out, cheering—and then is dressed up as a sultan and carried at shoulder height around the settlement. A preliminary to circumcision, this custom is called the sunet biaf—“circumcision wedding,” 1992. (photo credits 3.4)

  I asked Kolev about the Bulgarian Communist Party’s ban, imposed in 1984 and lifted at the fall of Todor Zhivkov in 1989, on Gypsy language and music.

  “Bulgarians didn’t want Gypsy songs because, at that time, Serbian and Bulgarian music was more popular.”

  “And the name-changing?”

  “As Gypsies in all countries adopt the local religion, so they take local names. They always had Bulgarian names. As for those with Turkish names, they were first changed in 1940, under the monarchy. It is true that we took up this campaign in 1962, starting with the Gypsies, so that they might truly become Bulgarians.”

  Pomacks, or Bulgarian Muslims, were the next group to be renamed, in the 1970s; last, in the 1980s, it was the turn of the Turks. Some three hundred thousand of them were sent on a one-way “excursion” to Turkey—an episode that caused an international outcry which helped to oust the region’s longest-running dictator.

  “Anyway, the Gypsies did not resist. Why? Because the Turkish names they had were not typically Turkish. A Gypsy Suliman would be called Sulio: they had already distanced themselves from the Turks, you see, and so you see they wanted to become Bulgarians. All over the world Gypsies avoid showing that they are Gypsies.”

  He was right about that, although in Bulgaria they mainly did so by claiming to be Turks.… Two of the three Gypsies who became MPs after 1989 declined to embrace or even admit to their ethnicity.

  In the late 1950s, Antoinette’s uncle had joined a Communist Party committee charged with solving “the Gypsy problem.” They began, in 1958, with the outlawing of nomadism. Thirty-five years later, Kolev had not changed his views at all. “In a technological industrial society the wandering Gypsy is finished.” Here Kolev could be proud: there are no “wandering” Gypsies in Bulgaria. “What is there to preserve?” he went on. “What are the supposed Gypsy professions? Copper has been replaced by plastic. Gypsies were being given the chance to become Bulgarians: differences could not be permitted.” Kolev seemed triumphantly unaware that, since the end of his party’s rule, those differences had violently deepened. He was sticking with the version of his glory days, and his idiom was Central Committee perfect: “Assimilation is an objective historical process.”

  But not, apparently, an ineluctable one. “Even now, Gypsies who live among Bulgarians retain their backward habits. They are unclean. They must learn how to live from their Bulgarian neighbors. The Gypsy ghetto is as black as India.”

  Good-looking and unsmiling, Antoinette’s brother Stefan, a visitor at her apartment one lunchtime, had the steady manner of the doctor he was; and he was as black as an Indian. Skin tone was Antoinette’s standard way of describing people, but she hadn’t mentioned her brother’s. Presently we sat down to a snack of salami rolls stuffed with creamed cucumber cheese. Garnished with colored toothpicks, arranged in a star pattern on a red paper plate, trimmed with paprika
-dusted deviled eggs, this pretty, genteel offering was strikingly unlike the plain and plentiful meals I had eaten in many Gypsy households; rather, it looked like another inspiration from Good Housekeeping. Antoinette kept a close watch on me. I felt her searching my face for prejudice.

  Stefan began to talk about a polio epidemic in Sliven, which had struck especially hard in the poorer Gypsy neighborhood across the tracks. He was one of six Gypsy doctors in Sliven, and the majority of his Bulgarian colleagues, he said, “won’t go near the downtown mahala. They do the absolute minimum. In that community”—by which he meant the Gypsy community—“the infant mortality rate is twenty-three per thousand. And now this epidemic. Of course it is a problem even for the doctors who are willing. The Gypsies are refusing vaccinations because they have got the idea that the inoculation will sterilize their babies.”

  I told him a similar story from The Book of Boswell, by the English Gypsy Gordon Boswell. “I will not be poisoned,” Boswell had told an army nurse attempting to inoculate him. The fear was one of ritual—and perhaps also of physical—pollution incurred by allowing the inner body to make contact with unclean gadjo equipment and culture. Antoinette had her own explanation for Sliven’s polio epidemic: “The Turkish Gypsies are dirtier than our Christian Gypsies.” She was right. Still, it was unclear what kind of dirt she was talking about: grime, or lack of culture.

  I wanted to go to the troubled mahala, and later I would, but not with Antoinette: neither she nor her doctor brother would go there, at least not with me. Instead, Antoinette offered a tour of the nicer Gypsy neighborhood: “They’re not all barbarians, you know!” she said. For Antoinette, the Gypsies were always “they.”

  Before Stefan went his own way that afternoon, we stopped in a small, family-run café on a corner at the edge of the mahala. Antoinette hoped to persuade him to spend the evening with us: she promised music, a wedding feast. It backfired. He was gloomy all right, though not just because of the epidemic and the injustices it revealed. Like his pale sister, Stefan was uncomfortable in his skin.