Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  “Surely,” I said experimentally, “the Gypsies present a great challenge to a Christian leader.” Corin turned my English into Romanian, and Tibor relayed it in Hungarian.

  “They don’t come to us,” each responded in his turn. “While Hungarians come to church, the Gypsies drink. The entire village was here in my church the morning of the incident. Not one of them a Gypsy. It is not normal for people to live in fear of a minority. They had to be taught humility.”

  Less than 5 percent of Casin’s population was Roma. Why were they so frightening to the rest? Was it because they stole “Magyar corn” and potatoes? Or because they were uninterested in industrious peasant life and, worse, indifferent to its censure? Father Orban gave a clue: “We cannot help them. They are different. They are ineducable.” And, it didn’t need to be said, in this isolated hamlet, a tug-of-war between Bucharest and Budapest offered nothing like the primitive satisfaction of burning down the settlement of those with no capital at all.

  The son of an American Presbyterian minister told me how, in Indiana in the 1940s, his mother would say to him, “We don’t hate people, we hate what they do.” “What about Hitler?” the ten-year-old asked his mother. “Yes, even Hitler,” she replied. “We don’t hate him, we hate what he does.” Around here, especially in the countryside and in eternally contested Transylvania, what you were—a Hungarian, a Romanian, or a Gypsy—was the most important thing about you. Who you were was identical to what you did: being a Hungarian, being a Gypsy. And the Hungarians and the Romanians hated the Gypsies, whatever they did.

  We went last to see the few remaining Roma of Casin, and, after another day of measuring hate, I confess that I had run out of sympathy. The Gypsies were bound to be at least as bad as their accusers, I felt; chances were they deserved each other.

  A Kalderash girl from Sintesti, Romania, 1994. Her back-tied head scarf and gold coins show that she is married. (photo credits 4.5)

  A hundred yards up a climbing dirt path we came upon a small single-room house, a new log cabin, all alone on a gentle hill. Completely isolated, it spoke almost too eloquently for its beleaguered inhabitants. It was pathetic. Then the Gypsies appeared, ducking out from its low door, one at a time. One large family—seventeen people—had returned to Casin and had built this house, fully intending to remain on the site of their old settlement, where only a couple of months earlier sixteen houses had been torched.

  It wasn’t hard to see why the Czacky family wanted to stay where they were—where, they claimed, their family had lived for many generations. Though they themselves looked poor and ragged, the setting was spectacular. Dotted with ancient trees, the wide-open views of low, terraced hills gave over to golden swaths of sunflowers in the distance. Usefully, in the other direction, there was a lookout over the hostile town. Just below the house on the hill was a dense copse bordered by a bright stream. In the water was an outcrop of some kind. A large rock? No, a small island. Several Gypsy children played there, sitting in the middle and hugging their knees, or standing in the stream holding on to the patch of ground with both hands as the water washed over their legs. Looking down towards them I thought of an entry that I had come across in an archive in Bucharest, from the diary of M. A. Demidoff, a Russian tourist of the Romanian principalities in 1854. He described a sighting of some aurari, or gold-washers.

  The Czacky men, September, 1992, Casin, Transylvania: This was the only family that returned to the settlement, where all sixteen houses belonging to Roma had been torched a few months before. Along with their women—seventeen people in all—they lived in a single-room log cabin which they built themselves. (photo credits 4.3)

  … from the lonely places where such Gypsies lived, the ones that interested us most were the aurari, scattered all over isolated islands … washing without rest the sands of the Danube, looking for minuscule pieces of gold. We moved closer to look at these poor miseries, with no shelter but their hair, and we learned that they are doing this for all their lives and, our guide told us, that they are paid only 15 centimes a day.

  They were unusually tall and thin, the Czackys, and the deep-creased brown skin of the older members gave them a proper connection with the surrounding landscape of old trees. The women wore their black hair long. All the men wore hats, and mustaches as soon as they were able. One shyly smiling boy, with matted cupid locks and only a dirty fuzz on the upper lip, wore a fancy French shirt of dark blue with a flower pattern—a woman’s designer shirt, with seventies droopy lapels, but a smart thing all the same. Though only a Westerner could instantly recognize the label status of the blouse, the impact of such finery on the villagers must have been considerable. I had heard that a French Catholic charity had sent duffels of old clothes here just after the attack. Indeed there were still a few French Jesus pamphlets fluttering in the shrubs. This foreign aid was brought expressly for the Gypsies, or for the few who remained, and the smoldering peasants could only look on in disbelief: they were misunderstood; the outside world, it must have seemed, had taken the wrong side. It was hard to believe that anyone could envy or even particularly resent these destitute Gypsies, but there it was, splashed over that flowery French cotton shirt.

  Leaning or perching on a wooden cart, rangy figures peered suspiciously out at us as we approached, though they were quick to take in our friendly sign language. They didn’t want to talk about the violence. “Before,” a thoughtful older man, perhaps the head of the family, told us, “the cooperative belonged to everybody, and there was enough for all. Now they tell us we have nothing. But this is where we live.” They belonged to this vast open space; the villagers kept within the confines of their fenced lots, all along the town road.

  Our conversation was soon over. Even with two translators, it was extremely difficult to communicate. Tibor struggled to get their meaning. This, it suddenly became clear, was the salient feature of their separateness: they spoke no Romanian, only a poor dialect of Magyar, and no Romani. They were cut off from their Hungarian neighbors, from their countrymen, and from all their fellow Gypsies, whose burgeoning organizations in distant Bucharest were completely unknown to them. Without language they were as other as animals, and that is how people saw them—the pig lady, the priest, the policeman, the peasants in the road.

  As we walked away, back down the track to the main road, one of their women came jogging after us, panting and repeating something over and over: leenda, she seemed to be saying, leenda, leenda. Yes, she wanted to know if I knew “Linda”—I was American, wasn’t I? It emerged that, a couple of years before, this young woman had sold her baby to an American woman named Linda—or at least she thought she had. She had been promised a thousand dollars by a man who had come to her when she was pregnant for the sixth time. She was in tears now. What about? About the baby, about the money that never came, about her powerlessness here in this world? The illegal baby market was still going strong in 1990; it was entirely possible that some desperate American couple had paid tens of thousands of dollars in cash for this Czacky baby.

  You used to see these trusting twosomes in the lobby of the Intercontinental in Bucharest, just off the plane, waiting to be relieved of their dollars by some smooth-talking baby-dealer. Sometimes they even got their baby, presumably from one of Romania’s many orphanages (desperate places, overwhelmingly populated by Gypsy children—a fact that has been ignored by the flock of reporters who have filmed and filed reports of the large population of unwanted children created by Ceausescu’s mandate for population growth). I had never even heard about the mothers; they didn’t seem to figure in the story. I hoped there was a grateful American woman named Linda, for suddenly it seemed that no place on earth could be worse than this beautiful valley. Linda, she kept insisting in a terrible, rising voice; Linda was supposed to send her a picture of the house where her baby son now lived. Surely I knew her. I told her I was sorry but I didn’t, and finally we tore ourselves away.

  Slavery

  I SPENT MORE THAN
a week in Sibiu, a typically Central European, German-founded town in Transylvania, while Corina, my new translator, was being tormented back in Bucharest by armloads of photocopied documents about Gypsies in the Romanian territories over the past five hundred years. Between visits to devastated communities I searched the local library and municipal archive, looking for precedents for these troubling events. Taking time out for lunch, or after closing time, I’d stroll through Sibiu’s lively market. One fat Gypsy lady squatted on a small stool that disappeared completely beneath her folds; she was selling elaborately carved wooden spoons, made by her husband out of the palest pine and left unstained and so soft that you could add your own markings with the lightest press of a fingernail. At the other end of the market, a cluster of formidable women—Kalderash Gypsies, to judge by their traditional long, flowered skirts and headscarves—sold packets of contraceptive pills and bought hard currency. You didn’t go to their comer for browsing.

  Their faces reminded me of another Gypsy—Panch, a boy of seven or eight, whom I had met back in Sofia’s main train terminal. Panch’s name means five in Romani: he was, simply, his mother’s fifth child. But he lived far from home now, together with a dozen other Gypsy children—glue-sniffers and prostitutes—in the dripping subterranean labyrinth of the station’s cellarage. Panch was known to all the kiosk keepers on ground level, who regularly gave him cigarettes and buns and candy from their stock. Before showing me the lower quarters he scanned me for detachable parts, returning always to the Swatch fastened to my belt loop. Continually scratching himself and winking with ticks, he seemed incapable of any recognizable emotional response; he was a child but his eyes were divested of innocence. He was other.

  The Gypsy women in the Sibiu market were more expressive than Panch—more menacing and more fearful, with their hard mouths and timorous eyes—but all their faces, I thought, reflected centuries of unrelieved hate, the expression of the Roma’s deep “enemy-memory” (as one historian has called it, in reference to the experience of American blacks). This look is so much the norm that, to most other Central and Eastern Europeans, such a demeanor gives the definition of what it is to be a Gypsy—the black black-marketeer—a stereotype of the Gypsy “other” no less pervasive here than the flamenco dancer or fancy caravan-dweller is in the West.

  On the day I finished photocopying the last rosters of Gypsies owned or exchanged or sold by this or that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century boyar, or landowner, another attack on Gypsies took place here in Transylvania: the terrible lynching of the two Lacatus brothers, together with the burning to death of another young Rom in the village of Hadareni.

  As usual, the most jarring aspect of the pogrom was the proud candor of the villagers and town officials: “Not human”; “a social problem.” One cannot help but think in this context of Nazi dogma—of “lives unworthy of life” (an ideology enthusiastically taken up by the fascist wartime leader Marshal Ion Antonescu). But the systematic, broad-scale dehumanization of the Gypsies in these parts goes back at least to the fifteenth century, to Prince Vlad II—Dracul, father of the Impaler.

  In September 1445 Prince Vlad Dracul (Vlad the Devil) captured from Bulgaria some twelve thousand persons “who looked like Egyptians” and took them home to Wallachia, “without luggage or animals”; thus he became the first wholesale importer of Gypsies as slaves. The next recorded batch of Gypsies was the booty of Stefan the Great, dubbed “Athlete of Christ” by Pope Sixtus IV for his crusades against the Turks. In 1471, after a great victory over his Wallachian neighbors, the Prince transported more than seventeen thousand Gypsies back to Moldavia.

  Stefan preceded his cousin Dracula in the use of his favorite torture: following this same battle, he had twenty-three hundred of his prisoners impaled through the navel. If Gypsies on the whole were spared this gruesome end, it may have been because they were retained to forge the spears. The time of Dracula (1431–76) preceded full-blown slavery in the Romanian principalities; but the groundwork had been done. There were certainly models for the legions of Gypsy slaves in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (digging and packing the Transylvanian soil that will keep the Count “alive” on his travels). Furthermore, the historical Dracula, Vlad Tepes, seems to have believed that the Gypsies were a particularly fearless (or foolhardy) class of warrior. In the epic poem Tiganiada, by Ion Budai-Deleanu (1760–1820), it is recorded that Dracula led an army of Gypsies, distinguishable by their mottled cowhide uniforms, in battle against the ever-encroaching Turks. Here, the Impaler is not at all the archvillain of Germanic and Slavic (and eventually universal) lore, but rather a national hero, described in the language of the Romanian peasants, whose image of him this was, and serving the cause of an independent Romanian state. (Tiganiada is acknowledged as the first poem written in Romanian.) Gypsies were in the army all right; in this fantasy, they fought alongside angels.

  Kalderash women in the market of Sibiu, Transylvania, 1993 (photo credits 4.4)

  Sitting in the Sibiu market café, watching the Gypsy women expertly count their money, I found it hard to believe: Gypsies as slaves—the notion goes against every West European and New World stereotype. The Gypsies are catalogued in the imagination as a kind of definition of rootlessness and freedom. Had this ignominious episode in Gypsy history become better known, then perhaps that pervasive free-spirit fantasy might have failed to establish itself in the first place.

  I had found almost nothing on the subject of chattelage in all the writings about Gypsies published over the past century in the West. There was a polemic of 1837, written in French by the Romanian statesman Mihail Kogalniceanu, with very little in the way of concrete information. And there was a 1939 book by the Romanian historian George Potra, the only full-length account on slavery—written in Romanian, untranslated, and the sole source for every subsequent account. It was out of print but I knew of one copy, at the Nicolae Jorga Institute, on a tree-lined avenue of suburban Bucharest. After two failed visits to the Institute, I appealed to an American friend who’d lived in Bucharest for a decade and who had done research there, and he got me an appointment with the resident historian. This septuagenarian medievalist, who wore thick, round tortoiseshell spectacles, received me in his dark-paneled resident historian’s rooms, and questioned me, in French. Halfway through this interview we were served strong black coffee in demitasse cups by the librarian who had twice rebuffed me. Things were definitely improving; nevertheless, I surmised, Gypsies would not be a popular topic here, even from an historian’s point of view. Our chat not only severely tested my French but exhausted the complete stock of my knowledge and then my bluff about the fifteenth-century spread of Magyar latifundia and the domination of Saxon rentiers, about the miserable Romanian serfs and the rise of Romanian nationalism as even noblemen were reduced to a life of subsistence tilling.… But after forty minutes an earlier demand—for a notarized and posted request for the book, written on the letterhead of my own “institute”—was waived. When the still-suspicious librarian finally did produce the book she also gave me one hour and kept my coat as collateral, so that I might have it photocopied in the downtown office of a friend.

  The entire book was then translated by Corina. While she struggled to transcribe Potra’s antiquated prose, Corina also experienced a (tentative) revelation about the Gypsies, whom she had previously seen only as inexplicably hostile lurkers at her door. Her reaction to the material was evidence of how, astonishingly, the history of Gypsy enslavement, which spanned four centuries, remained unknown even among educated Romanians.

  Before 1989, no scholars would have had easy access to documents in the territories. And then, during the revolution, the magnificent library of Bucharest University was badly burned. Apparently too, many important records relating to Gypsies in the Danubian territories were lost. But still, in the archives and other historical institutes of Bucharest, Sibiu, and Brasov, the proofs are there—dusty, faded, and reluctantly served up by doddering librarians or guards who don’t even kn
ow what they’re begrudging you. Lists were what I mainly found—the very sources Potra had given shape to. A picture emerged.

  ···

  For more than four hundred years, until 1856, Gypsies were slaves in Wallachia and Moldavia, the feudal principalities that with Transylvania now make up modern Romania. Some Transylvanians also owned Gypsies, but only in these principalities was slavery an institution, at first guided by the “custom of the land” and eventually enshrined in a complete legal framework.

  Standing as the last outpost of Christendom in the midst of the Ottoman offensive—long after the greater part of the Serbian Kingdom, Bulgaria, Albania, and most of the Balkan Peninsula had fallen—Wallachia and Moldavia flourished. Once the Crusades had opened the major trade routes along the Danube that linked Byzantium to the West, the princes of the territories that would become Romania made great fortunes by war, and by supplying food to Constantinople. But from the early sixteenth century when the sultans finally occupied the Black Sea ports, the strength of the principalities was increasingly maintained by slave labor.

  The Latin-speaking Vlachs who lived in Wallachia-Moldavia (and whose descendants inhabit modern Romania) soon recognized the economic value of the Gypsies. Indeed, though an earlier record of Gypsies in the Balkans documents Vlachus and Vitanus, two “Egyptians,” as placing an order with a Dubrovnik goldsmith in 1362, the first mention of Gypsies in the Romanian archives looks like a reference to cattle. In 1385, the lord of all Wallachia, Prince Dan I, reaffirmed a gift of forty Gypsy families made fifteen years earlier by his uncle to the monasteries at Vodita and Tismana. In 1388, the next Wallachian Prince, Mircea the Old, donated three hundred families to the Cozia monastery. In Moldavia in 1428, Alexandru the Good handed over “31 tigani tents” to the monastery of Bistrita—the same monastery, with its shaded streams and rising fields, where Kalderash Gypsies today hold their annual festival, robustly ignorant of the taint on this sylvan setting.