Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  We could tell we were in an Hungarian district, according to Corin, because there was so much green. Not just the verdant hills but the rounded felt hats; even the houses were painted green, with terra-cotta fish-scale roofs partially hidden behind high, filigreed green wooden gates at the road’s edge. It was easy to pick out the Hungarian Gypsies. The men wore their hair to the shoulder, and unbrushed. The older ones wore high black boots and belts four or five inches deep like weightlifters’ supports, fastened low over the hip; and their white shirtsleeves were billowing. In fact, everyone around here seemed to be out of a play about nineteenth-century rural life, and the belled horse-and-carts go clip-tinkle-clop, providing the corny soundtrack. In our lone car, we slowed down for a herd of donkeys in the road, a couple of them shaky-legged foals.

  “Ugh!” Corin snorted, an odd reaction to such a sight. “Bulgarian donkeys.”

  “How do you know they are Bulgarian?” I asked.

  “The donkey is a terrible, Oriental animal,” he explained. “Turkish, Bulgarian. In Romania we have horses.”

  This was as close as Corin would get to admitting that Transylvania was not altogether Romanian, but the nationality issue was never far away. He judged the status even of animals according to their perceived foreignness. Corin’s last name was Trandofir, or “rose” in Turkish, but to him the “foreign” still smelled foul, and, like most otherwise liberal Eastern Europeans, he had a blind spot about Gypsies.

  I asked Corin if he had ever been outside Romania (he spoke the weirdly perfect English learned exclusively from books). What, I wondered, could he really understand by the idea of the “foreign”? He said he had traveled abroad once, just after the revolution, to Strasbourg. What had impressed him most on his first foray into the West were the Romanian Gypsies he’d seen there, begging at the train station. Our car swerved under the force of his indignation when he recalled the spectacle: “And can you believe it, they had a little sign saying, ‘Please help us, we are Romanian.’ ”

  Of course many Gypsies also resent these beggars: they are the only Gypsies that most Europeans see, and are taken as repesentative of all Gypsies, who regard themselves as neither victims nor parasites. Equally, Corin considered it a horrifying notion that to the outside world Romanians were no better than a bunch of Gypsy panhandlers—or indeed than Gypsies of any description: no better, no different. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud famously pointed out that intolerance finds stronger expression in small differences than in fundamental ones. “The narcissism of minor differences”: this was Corin’s pain, and it was the humiliation of a beggar nation—a nation on the wrong side of Europe. Their revolution was a good show, the best in the region, and now it seemed to many disappointed Romanians that they were just passing around the hat.

  I told him that I often encountered Americans abroad whom I found objectionable but could still recognize as Americans. A pointless analogy. Like many Europeans, and like most Eastern Europeans, Corin defined nationality—that is, belonging—by tribe, by blood and culture, not by territory, and certainly not by citizenship. We drove on in silence, and Corin started to sing Romanian folk songs. But again it was his odd and earnest questioning that recovered our buoyant mood. “In your country, Kenny Rogers is considered a peasant, isn’t it?”

  As if the thickets of ill feeling weren’t already hard enough to penetrate, we found that we needed another translator—most people in this region spoke only Magyar. Luckily we soon tracked down Tibor Bodó, the sympathetic journalist who had covered the violence for the local paper, Harghita Népe (Harghita News). The three of us drove to Casin, along an excruciatingly bumpy and meandering road. But it was bright and clear and fresh, a high-summer day. On either side of us, rising up across open fields, were great golden totem poles, ten or fifteen feet high: Transylvanian haystacks.

  “You see it everywhere,” he said, referring to the prejudice—“for example in the army. When I was doing my military service, it was always the Gypsies who were pulled out for the worst jobs. They were especially badly treated by the lower-ranking officers. Under Ceausescu”—Tibor laughed—“only Gypsies and intellectuals were separated out. It was a revelation. Like most people I had never really met Gypsies before the military service. Mostly they were warm and funny, many fantastic musicians.”

  Tibor lit up, suddenly remembering a Rom metalworker who had been attached to the army. “He would say, ‘When I am working the iron, I am dancing—a czardas, or a German march. Copper is more of a French drill.’ And when two people were needed to handle a big job—a cauldron, say—it was a waltz. And he would tap the rhythm on metal: you needed a beat to work to. It wasn’t just the metal, but the object as well; a horseshoe was always a czardas”—that hysterically jaunty, quintessentially Hungarian rhythm. I knew that metalworkers from many cultures—not just Gypsy Cains—were regarded with suspicion, as hated outsiders. In the car, I told the others that Gypsies had commonly been called not only spies but incendiaries. I told them the story of the glowing, red-hot nail. But whatever their ancient occult connection with fire, it was no longer the Gypsies at the bellows.

  Before becoming a journalist, Bodó had taught history and literature to high-school students. The Gypsies, he told us, would only come if free food or clothes were being given out. “There is the real problem. It is nothing to do with ethnicity, it is a matter of education. They don’t go to school, and so from the beginning they are outsiders. They never worked in the cooperative, but outside it—for example, trading horses or making metal tools for those who did work the land.…” He trailed off. “Everyone was more patient before the revolution.”

  Tibor was right; but in these parts education itself was an ethnic problem. What language would Gypsies be taught in? Magyar in Transylvania and Romanian everywhere else? What about Romani? Gypsies dropped out of school for the same reason that most people drop out of school. They failed at it. And they failed because the language used in school was not the language most of them spoke at home. No special language provisions were made for them (as they were for the Hungarian and German minorities). So they lost their language, or their chances, or, more usually, they lost both. Although it is slowly changing, this was the case all over Central and Eastern Europe, with the result that in many places (most notably in Bulgaria and in the former Czechoslovakia) Gypsy children from the first grades were automatically stuck into special schools for the mentally handicapped. They weren’t retarded, but they were handicapped: they didn’t speak the language, and the deficiency had become a widespread excuse for segregation and indeed incarceration—one not likely to be fought by illiterate parents, themselves accustomed to such frank dispossession.

  Casin was a row of houses on either side of a dirt road. A general store stocked a few tins of food and coffee beans and tobacco. There was a solid, low-built church; no sign of the famous pub (which was farther along). Five old men in hats sat on the town bench, watching the road. We stopped outside the last house, the home of a woman that Tibor had interviewed for his story in Harghita Népe. She had worked in the bar where the fight had ignited on the evening of the attack.

  Tibor banged hard on the green wooden gate and soon the lookout window—a doll’s-house door in the middle of that solid gate—flew open. Peering down through this junior door I made out the flared socket of a large snout, and then the albino eyes of a very large sow. Mrs. Horváth opened up and, leaning her whole weight against this extraordinary animal to prevent her escaping, invited us in.

  Mrs. Horváth settled us around the small kitchen table; she laid out four white porcelain thimbles and set to making some strong coffee to put in them. The ceiling was sweetly stenciled in a geometric pattern of red, white, and green, the colors of the Hungarian flag. In one corner stood a tall white-tiled stove. Painted figurines of minstrels in traditional Magyar costume were on display, evenly spaced along a shelf over a series of red-and-white embroidered linen handkerchiefs that were draped over the ledge like
a row of football-team pennants. Mrs. Horváth was a widow, but it was easy enough to imagine that she had always lived alone, so complete did she seem in her cozy parlor, passing out cups of treacly coffee.

  “They are vermin,” she concluded at the end of a vigorous deconstruction of the Gypsy character. “They cannot live among decent, civilized people. They cannot feed their horses and their huge families, and so they steal. For years we gave them food, regularly, and we accepted this as a kind of tax. In the past, people didn’t even report the crimes of Gypsies. They were too scared. But now we have a choice. This is a democracy, and we will not receive them back in our village.” Mrs. Horváth had not herself thrown fire on the houses, but she had looked on, along with the rest of the village. “They are far too uppity; it had to be done.” She admitted, though, that the problem had not been solved. The Gypsies would return, these or others, and they wouldn’t change, but the other townspeople felt better for having acted; there had been catharsis.

  Mrs. Horváth described how the church bells had rung out, calling all the villagers together at sundown, as planned. The local priest said a prayer before they all set out to the Gypsy settlement. “It was the obvious meeting place,” she pointed out, “because the Gypsies never go to church.” We knew that the police had not intervened, and clearly no one worried about reprisals. “The police here walk with their hands deep in their pockets,” Mrs. Horváth said, rising to clear our cups. And where did she think the Gypsies should go if they had to leave? To hell. “Where their ancestors are waiting for them.”

  This vehemence was alarming only because it came from an elderly widow in a red-and-white embroidered apron. Her broad and powerful calves, however, visible as she whipped her sow into its slop garage, also looked like they belonged to another body. “The Gypsies are not human,” she remarked with some authority.

  ···

  László Gergecy was one of the four policemen responsible for Casin as well as three other hamlets in the valley. “It is a very sad situation,” he said, leaning against the wall behind his desk. “But we cannot make them go to school. We fine them and they don’t pay; no one has any money. They are isolated and without organization or friends here. But what could we four policemen do?”

  He didn’t mention the posters, nailed to trees, rallying all villagers to “defend Casin,” or the church meetings in which arson attacks were discussed like bake sales. The failure here wasn’t so much an absence of manpower as a lack of will and a fatalistic sense that this purge was inevitable.

  “Punishment would not be effective here,” Officer Gergecy concluded. “You see, we did arrest three people, one suspected of beating to death the young Gypsy [in Casinul Nou]. The whole town camped out here, outside this office, for three days, until they were released.” Public Prosecutor Burjan hadn’t even mentioned this murder in his rundown of the “pub fight” in his district. The television accounts spoke only of Gypsy thieving, not a word about the death of a young man. And though no one in the town denied that “someone” had died, everyone we spoke to brushed it off, as if he had had his own reasons for getting killed, and it was no concern of theirs.

  In Valea Lapusului, or Valley of the Wolves, in the north of the country, another Gypsy community—nineteen houses—had been burned out in retaliation for a horrible crime by one of its occasional members, a man called Oaste Moldovan, who had raped a young woman in her ninth month of pregnancy. Moldovan had a previous conviction, and had been doing time before he returned to the village in 1988. He was released on January 26 of that year on a whim of the late dictator, who had chosen to celebrate his birthday with the randomly magnanimous gesture of pardoning thousands of convicts. The crime of the local Gypsies was to have been slow in turning the rapist over to the family of the raped girl—and, accompanied by the police, they in turn led the mob to the Gypsy quarter. But in Casin, where the crime seemed to be lack of deference to the peasants, as well as extensive small-time pilfering, the punishment was no less severe: the whole group—mainly children—had to go.

  Still, you had to feel a little sorry for the slim policeman, alone in his roadside lean-to. He had no car, no telephone, and no partner. In fact, he had nothing except his badge, which in this new era, and in this desolate valley, had no heft.

  As we walked down the road to the church, people stopped and stared at us: stout toothless women with crossed arms and kerchiefs knotted at the chin; men with tools plucked from a museum of medieval agriculture.

  What is wrong with your Gypsies? we probed, asking for trouble. “Even people who work all day don’t have horses like theirs”; “Even the smallest Gypsy children are thieving monkeys”; “They are all millionaires”; “They beat us when we tell them to get off our land”; “They should go back where they come from”; “Why are you foreigners so interested in those worthless Gypsies?”; “They are not human”; “Killing Gypsies is charity, not murder.” … As we walked away, one woman shouted after us, apparently thinking that last remark a bit rich. “We accept that they are human, but their behavior is not.”

  “Uncivilized”: this was the most common charge against Gypsies. As proof, people would point to the apartments that Gypsies had been assigned and then destroyed. “They kept horses up there,” a man in Baia Mare, in the north of the country, had told me, indicating a third-floor flat with scorched windows, recently evacuated by a Gypsy family. I had seen a horse on the upper floors of a modern block in Bulgaria. It seemed incongruous but not unreasonable: where else could a horse be kept? As on council estates in the West, anything left outside would immediately be stolen. “They make their Gypsy fires right on the living-room floor. You see the marks.” Although I could think of other plausible reasons for the black streaks, it was true that Gypsy tenants often did break down walls (and rip out windows and window frames and doors …)—sometimes to accommodate their larger families, but also certainly because they felt nothing for these appointed places, these alien modern blocks—where they were slotted in among contemptuous neighbors. The flats were as depressing in their way as the cardboard box dwellings of some Gypsies, but they bore no resemblance to the neat and lovingly painted houses of most Gypsies everywhere, however poor.

  Gypsies were resented partly because many of their social betters believed that they had been privileged by the communist regimes. But the Gypsies had also been targets of Ceausescu’s program of social engineering, known as “systematization.” Romania was to be reorganized on principles of production. Zones (and their inhabitants) were outlined according to their potential for industry, agriculture, or grazing. Systematization called for the leveling of whole districts: the policy was haphazardly carried out, but in the event some seven thousand rural communities were eliminated and their populations removed to cities.

  Systematization reinforced earlier attempts to settle all Gypsies, which began almost immediately after the communists gained control in 1947. Most Gypsies were by then already settled; nevertheless, as in the rest of the world, they were perceived as wanderers, one and all, and the Romanian government moved to halt the last of the nomads by confiscating their horses and carts. These of course were not only a mode of transportation but a source of livelihood; the ideological mandate of the time, however, held that it was more important that Gypsies be stationary than gainfully and independently employed. Forced settlement failed to achieve assimilation; instead it created a new class of dependents on the state.

  Some Gypsies were put into houses vacated by ethnic Germans, who were gradually being “bought” back by the German government, as part of that country’s constitutional right of return for all of its ethnic members. The departing Germans were often more prosperous than other groups, and the fact that their houses were allotted to those on the bottom of the social heap added to, and in some places created, the enormous resentment that continues to grow.

  It might have looked like favoritism, but this wasn’t how the Gypsies saw it. Traditional settlements were destroyed
, along with ancient organic networks of families with their mutually sustaining professions. Though the assimilationist policymakers of that era did indeed seek to “normalize” Gypsies by placing them in jobs and accommodations and even political positions that they would not independently have either sought or achieved, at the same time they outlawed all traces of their “backward” culture.

  Nicolae Gheorghe, a Romanian Gypsy and a sociologist, recalls his first visit to the new communities. “When I first saw such areas, I was genuinely shocked by the misery there. So many people are concentrated in such a small amount of space. The blocks of flats were built in bad condition. Water is not running. Some Romanians live in these conditions as well, but mostly Gypsies. The result is the deterioration of social life.”

  And now, in the postcommunist period, Gypsies would not only be the last in the queue for jobs and position and schooling; the burnings seemed to suggest that they shouldn’t be allowed houses at all.

  “Even God is fed up with the Gypsies,” Father Menihert Orban announced, sitting at a table in the cool vicarage of Casin. “They are pagans, heathens.” This waxy, frail-looking priest was ethnically Hungarian, like more than 90 percent of the local residents, but he could speak Romanian, and clearly understood the conversation in Romanian between Tibor and Corin. However, the Father refused to speak to Corin directly, in the national language, also their only common language, and this enraged Corin. Here we were talking about “the Gypsy problem” while these two men, a clergyman and a law student, were locked in their own ethnic battle, unable even to look at each other, and speaking only through the fast-tiring Tibor. Father Orban pressed his flat, papery fingertips together, and kept an unblinking watch on our Hungarian.