Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  There are no horses roaming about the cement blocks of Sliven but their image is all over Gypsy households. And they were all over this café, on the wall hangings, on the plates—a wink at a lost life. Like the equine images of horsy English and American girls, these tended to be dark brown. In fact, what is known in the trade as “a Gypsy horse” is piebald: black-and-white, motley. Among Gypsies these creatures, ambiguous if not camouflaged, have always been the most prized.

  When Stefan moved to fetch our coffees, another man known to Antoinette came over and, to her immense irritation, sat himself down. Mitko Tonchev had a long, unlined dark face, a wild intensity, and a need to talk. He had come to Sliven because he knew how to weld; there were supposed to be jobs “in industry” here. He was desperate rather than bitter in the knowledge that, as a Gypsy, he would be at the end of the job queue. “It didn’t use to be like this. We didn’t use to know we were Gypsies. Everyone had jobs. Now we are not free in ourselves.”

  Antoinette was annoyed by this remark and only reluctantly translated it for me, adding that Mitko Tonchev was “neither smart nor intelligent.” She showed her contempt for him and his views by peering into her compact the entire time he spoke, and by compulsively opening and shutting the handbag she carried everywhere, with “Paris Elégance” printed in loopy script on the side.

  Later, after we’d lost Stefan, Antoinette said she thought it was the wedding party that had put her brother off. “Pauvre Stefan, he cannot find a Gypsy wife because he is so intelligent.” And he couldn’t marry a Bulgarian because he was so black.

  The streets of the uptown mahala—a Gypsy settlement for more than a hundred years—were packed on this Saturday afternoon in May. A flow of people, mainly young women gyrating in long, hip-hugging skirts, moved towards us down the main street. A few of the girls led a band of zurla players, who pointed the wooden, fluted ends of their instruments straight up, sending a reedy Lambada into the sky. Some of the zurlas were stuffed with money, accounting for the kazoo tone, and possibly for the angle of play. The crowd was not coming from a wedding but from a ceiz (pronounced “chayeez”): a girl’s dowry and its display in her parents’ house for a couple of days before the wedding feast.

  Antoinette took my hand and led me into the ceiz house. “Amerikanka, Amerikanka,” people murmured as we passed. So I had been announced. It seemed that I was a kind of walking Eiffel Tower, a proof of the worldliness of Antoinette.

  Inside, it looked like sale day at a discount department store. The walls and floors of all three rooms of the low-ceilinged semidetached house were covered with shiny new “Persian” carpets, towels, bath mats, runners, and rugs, depicting Biblical scenes, peacocks, and voluptuous odalisques reclining in a harem setting. They were hung like oil paintings—a good space around each and with spotlighting on choice mats. Pinned to these were the feature of any bridal shower: lacy underwear and nighties, tacked at jaunty angles, their corners saucily skewed up as if blown by a sudden wind.

  A 1976 invitation to a Bulgarian Gypsy wedding, featuring the betrothed couple (photo credits 3.5)

  Another room was a crockery shrine: apricot lusterware, gilt-lipped wineglasses, pink tea sets with romantic pastoral scenes, thimble-size demitasse cups—all piled up in a fragile ziggurat on a fuzzy peach-colored altar. There were slippers everywhere: slippers for her, slippers for him, tartan ones, embroidered satiny ones, felt ones, all suggesting low-key domesticity. After marriage, it seemed, shoes were no longer required.

  In the next room was the satin-covered bed, strewn with plastic roses and more nighties. On the pillow a large plastic doll sat upright in an all-lace confirmation dress. This doll was an ex voto, for the health of (many) children, and it would ride on the hood of a honking car when all the week’s worth of marriage ceremonies were through. The couple would never have a church ceremony or registry-office wedding—there would be no official document of any kind. They were already married in Gypsy custom, and the ceiz (in place of a bride-price, which was no longer paid among Sliven’s long-settled Gypsies) was the proof. There was so much stuff on the bed that the teenage bride and groom, on display along with their booty, were hardly visible. They sat arm-in-arm, in matching ruffled white shirts both buttoned to the throat. She was sweet and shy-looking and seemed embarrassed by the filmy purple bikinis pinned to the wall above her head. The pair held their smiles as if someone was taking their picture, and occasionally someone did.

  As we walked home Antoinette described her own ceiz. “There were so many gifts that the whole family had to move out and sleep in the car! And mind you, it was a big house. I received important things,” she said, reassuring me that a Lycée girl was not going to be fobbed off with a batch of fancy knickers. “For example, my bibliothèque,” said Antoinette—by which she meant the glass-fronted bookcase where she now kept her own lustrous tea sets and porcelain figurines.

  “I didn’t want anyone to come, I was mortified of course.” The ceiz is a Gypsy tradition, and none of her friends from the Lycée would mark their own engagements in this way. “But my parents insisted, and in the end it was okay because many intelligent people turned out.” She meant, as she went on to elaborate, that many gadje had come to admire her haul.

  It was wedding season. The next day we went to another feast, in a subterranean restaurant. Although Antoinette was clearly an honored guest among these festive Gypsies, she immediately regretted having come. On top of our table a pink-sequined, over-made-up wild woman was strutting her stuff; for Antoinette, though, this was not the worst. The bride was hugely pregnant and, worse still, it was a mixed marriage. Antoinette was proud of her Bulgarian friends, but they were not the kind who would marry Gypsies, whom she clearly regarded as white trash. It was all very confusing.

  On my last night in Sliven, Antoinette and Gyorgy and friends dined at a restaurant outside of town, in what was once a hunting lodge belonging to Todor Zhivkov. It looked like a rustic ski resort, with little boulders for stools around a rude rock fireplace, and antler chandeliers. I hadn’t seen much of Gyorgy this trip. Apparently he was preoccupied with business (the nature of which never emerged). That night he turned up and sat at the head of the table between Antoinette—the lacquered crests of her yellow hair swept up and piled like ribbon candy in a flattened stack of figure-eights—and his secretary, Yuliana.

  Yuliana was a young Bulgarian woman who had traded in schoolteaching for a job with Gyorgy—and for a new look: red leather miniskirt and matching stilettos, black leather bustier, and dark lipstick, with thick black liquid-liner drawn around the whole of each eye. To Sliveners this didn’t look whorish: it was fashion. And however she looked, as a Bulgarian, Yuliana was a real catch, and not just in her role as girlfriend, which she apparently was, but also as a secretary: hire the gadji today, and the business would soon follow. Antoinette seemed to accept the situation.

  Near the end of dinner Gyorgy leaned towards me and asked, half-leering, half-hostile, very drunk: “Do you believe in a Gypsy aristocracy?” He didn’t mean, one could be sure, the old Noble Savage, but rather a nobility based on character and not on caste. Above all, Gyorgy “le paysan” wanted respect. His query was part of an undercurrent of insecurity and accusation which came up, always out of the blue, in questions such as “Would you ever marry a Gypsy?”

  The next morning, Antoinette and Gyorgy and Yuliana, impressively and incredibly, could not be dissuaded from seeing me off at the station, all three turned out (changed again) in their very smartest evening clothes at 5 a.m. Antoinette waved until I was out of sight, her Paris Elégance bag clutched to her breast.

  Back on the train, Elena, who had been at the farewell dinner, was not surprised that I had found this friendly, intelligent woman so unconvincing, so lost-seeming. “They’d be better off in Sofia,” she said. Or Paris. In Bulgaria, she said by way of explanation, measures for the “containment,” or assimilation, of minorities had been especially severe, and from the mid-1980s increasingly
so. And these measures had affected Elena as well.

  The Black Sea bracelet scandal had not, in the event, kept Elena out of university. But when she sought to specialize she learned that Gypsies were not considered a suitable subject, even in the Department of Ethnography; Elena had to go to Czechoslovakia for her Ph.D. When she returned to Sofia, she somewhat mysteriously joined the National Ethnographic Institute. “I don’t know why they let me in.” (Her thesis had been dismissed as romantic fiction.) “Maybe to keep an eye on me. In the beginning, for about two years, things were calm. And then, from 1985, the director started to threaten me. What was different from the past was how openly it was done. There was no sense in which it was wrong to threaten people. He simply told me that a directive had come from the Central Committee which stated that I must cease all agitation in the Gypsy underground”—Elena laughed, not even having to spell out the fact that, by law, there was no Gypsy “overground.” “If I failed to cooperate immediately I would be banned from the Institute, and of course from any teaching position.… I tried to see it in a good light: if I was made to be a street-sweeper, I would at least, finally, be among the Gypsies.” All street-sweepers in the Eastern bloc did indeed seem to be Gypsies.

  The train whizzed past a vast and muddy chicken farm. I tried to explain to Elena what chicken batteries in the West were like. She was somewhat baffled by concern for animal rights, especially, for some reason, chickens’ rights, and even more puzzled that anyone might object to chickens who had been specially fattened-up.

  “You have clearly never seen a naked Bulgarian chicken,” she said, sleuthing. And then she told me how, during the previous winter’s unusually desperate food shortage, she had combed the Gypsy districts of Sofia and bought a chicken from someone she knew and triumphantly brought it home for dinner.

  “I had to kill it in the bathtub. Vesselin [her husband] couldn’t face all the blood. But I couldn’t look either, and I kept missing and it kept not dying. You know it is not that easy to kill a chicken, even a skinny Bulgarian chicken. But as it happened my father dropped by and he finished the job, telling us that we might’ve flattened it with one of our heavy, unpublished manuscripts. One thing was sure—that I would never be allowed to publish my research. It is funny, isn’t it, that what before was merely forbidden is now utterly impossible.…” She trailed off, and went to smoke a cigarette in the corridor.

  Elena was referring to the usual and inescapable problem, evident all over the former Eastern bloc: economic restrictions had neatly replaced political ones. There was no money for publishing, no paper, and no market for the obscure “scientific” tomes that used to be turned out by every institute and academy. (Everyone under the old regime, whether a literary critic or a gym teacher, was called a “scientist.”) Elena reckoned that it would take ten years to get a book published in Bulgaria, after it had been accepted by a publisher. An article could wait three years, and if you withdrew the piece temporarily, even for the purpose of updating it, you lost your place in the queue.

  The bulk of Elena’s research was then still unpublished, though she had managed to get an article into one ethnographic magazine called Kontakti. This was a new journal, run by the same people who used to reject her stuff in the old journal. Back then it was called Rodno-Lyubie, or Love for Your Clan.

  I reminded Elena of her promise to introduce me to Emilia, her friend from the Varna excursion nearly twenty years earlier. In the time that it took us to find her, Elena brought me up-to-date on the girl’s troubles, which were entirely to do with the hierarchies inside the Gypsy community—structures far sturdier than any government scheme to sweep them aside. After a few tries, we found Emilia at home: a flat in a run-down modern block in Sofia. Unlike Antoinette, she was relaxed and resigned and very frank. Elena told her I wanted to hear her story, and with a shrug she obliged. She spoke in Bulgarian. Elena translated.

  “It was the only night I ever spent alone with my husband,” Emilia said of her elopement. In 1978, at the age of thirteen, she had run off with Plamen—all the way to his grandmother’s house, two kilometers down the road in another Gypsy quarter in Sofia.

  “When my grandmother eloped, my grandfather came and fetched her on a horse.” From Emilia’s point of view, things had definitely improved: “Plamen hired a cab. It was a Western car.”

  Elopement wasn’t scandalous in itself. It was a common event among Gypsies, particularly among settled groups such as Emilia’s; they had lived for many generations in the same cramped neighborhood of Sofia (which when I saw it still had no running water, only a row of troughs with taps). The old system of bride-buying had become too expensive, and it tended to serve rigid, even dynastic aspirations not much shared by young people. As the only way to avoid an arranged marriage, elopement had never been more popular. In effect it was a euphemism for sexual intercourse, and this in turn was tantamount to marriage. However, the system could work out miserably, at least for the girls. More and more young men were resorting to the simple method of kidnapping; with or without the complicity of the girl, this constituted betrothal—unless something went wrong. At the top of the list of things that could go wrong was the question of virginity. Maybe the girl wasn’t a virgin—or maybe she couldn’t prove it.

  Early in the morning after their night away, Emilia and Plamen returned to their quarter, this time by tram, with the bloody sheet folded into a plastic bag. “The tram was full of half-asleep people going to work. I remember that we were the only people who were really awake. We were so happy.” The dawn ride across Sofia was the last moment of calm for the newlyweds: overnight, Emilia and Plamen had entered a thicket of taboos: the potential transgressions that form the landscape of adult Gypsy life—a landscape designed to “contain” women. It wasn’t marriage per se that did women in: it was the onset of menstruation (though the two usually coincided), from which point on, women had the power to pollute men. But if women were the targets of most taboos and customary laws, they were also (of course) charged with their enforcement.

  Once they were back in the neighborhood the first stop was the house of Plamen’s parents. The teenagers handed the plastic bag over to his mother, who would perform the necessary forensic tests. Blood alone was not enough to establish young Emilia’s virtue; once Plamen and all the other men were shooed out of the house, the bloodstained sheet was laid out on the kitchen table and sprinkled with rakia, or plum brandy, the local firewater. The women gathered round and waited.

  “It was the most terrifying half-hour of my life,” Emilia recalled. For only if the rakia moved the blood into the shape of a flower would all be well. “Pig’s blood doesn’t bloom right,” she explained, suggesting how a desperate couple might proceed in trying to cover for lost virginity—or, more likely under such pressure, to cover for the boy’s inadmissible failure to perform.

  “After the rakia test, I went home to my parents, and the next day Plamen came over and asked my mother for my hand. I wasn’t allowed to see him until it was sorted out—which was fine with me!” When I met Emilia she was twenty-seven and looked ten years older, except when she laughed.

  It fell to babas and dajs, grandmothers and mothers, to attempt to arrange all marriages, and so when Plamen came to ask, Emilia’s mother refused the boy. Of course it would be all right in the end. They weren’t crazy about Plamen, but Emilia had gone off with him, and once she’d passed the test the girl would have to go. “Baba was furious with me.”

  Though the couple had already eloped, Emilia’s family was not going to let such a treasure—with her enormous green eyes, thick black hair, and ample young body—go for nothing. Plamen was made to come back several times and ask again, which was a message to his family to beef up their “appreciation” of Emilia. When Emilia left the table to fetch her photo album, Elena elaborated: “The delay gave his family time ‘to go rabbit hunting’—that is, to get together the presents, namely gold, for her ceiz.”

  Like Antoinette, Emilia lit up at
talk of her ceiz. “I sat there with all my new things for the whole day, right there in the middle of the bed.” It was easy to imagine Emilia as a homecoming queen on her float (the bed in her current flat was a draped, four-poster barge of diaphanous lilac fluff). From her wedding album Emilia gave me a picture of herself in all her finery, fronting her game-show haul of brightly colored, alternately furry and lustrous gifts. She wore a white dress and stiff, matching hat that resembled an upended bowl, with flowered tassels hanging down from it like stringed popcorn.

  “What is that on your hands?” I asked, doubtful that the leathery, taloned fingers in the photograph could be those of a thirteen-year-old. It was henna—which was used intermittently to “clean” the bride during the week-long ritual of dances and naps and switches of clothes and, finally, an all-girl “baptism” down at the municipal baths.

  “The longer the henna stays on your hands the longer your man will love you.” Emilia shrugged. “That’s what they say.” The stained hands were echoes of the bloodstained sheet, which had already been made into a flag and waved through the quarter by a younger sister of Plamen, proud owner of one certified virgin-bride. The bloody flag seemed at odds with Gypsy timidity about sex. I believed the old man from Emilia’s neighborhood who told me that he had never once seen his wife—and mother of their five children—naked. This same man had a tattoo covering the whole of his paunch: a tattoo of a voluptuous naked female. To the delight of a gathering of neighborhood kids, he could move his chubby torso and activate his tattoo muse, now a true belly dancer.

  Emilia at age thirteen, in 1978, sitting with her ceiz (dowry) (photo credits 3.6)