Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  Twenty miles away, tiny Mihail Kogalniceanu was far from glamorous but it was cosmopolitan in its way: Romanians, Turks, Tartars, nomadic and settled Gypsies, Germans, Macedonians, Moldavians, and Bulgarian-speaking Muslims—called the Gaga’ouz—all lived there. Even the settled Roma community was broken into two distinct groups, one known as the Turks, which meant that they were Muslims (or just that they wore baggy trousers), and the others identifying themselves, mainly by contrast, as Christians. Needless to say in the Balkans, this was no melting pot.

  In 1991, nearly a year after the events in which twenty-seven houses were razed and five more destroyed, continuing controversy over the fate of the dispossessed Roma of Kogalniceanu had brought the tension back with a vengeance. My group—Ted Zang, a young American human-rights lawyer; Ina Bardan, a Romanian human-rights worker; and Corin, the translator—entered the village with a trepidation which seemed justified after we stopped to ask directions from a woman (a Tartar, to judge by the squat body and the boxy, notably Oriental face). “What are you doing here?” she barked from behind her garden fence. “Bringing them aid I suppose? Why don’t you just take them a lit match?” It soon became clear that she spoke for the whole constituency: it was the only thing they had in common. We decided to go to see the Gypsies first.

  A dirt road, each blister of rock scoring the belly of our Dacia sedan, eventually led us to a series of crumbling houses—or what used to be houses. Nothing had been touched since the day the buildings were destroyed; it looked like a city gutted by war. Weeds grew high inside the houses, many of which had retained a couple of feet of plastered, handmade brick. One expected to find archeologists sifting and digging around the site. Life for the Roma who had been burned out and who had since returned went on more or less as usual. Dinners simmered on stoves placed here and there around the yard; laundry sagged in the new spaces between walls; children played their toyless games, indifferent to the wreckage.

  It seemed extraordinary that people could continue their lives surrounded by the scorched and smashed remnants of the past. But they were defiant rather than stoical. One had to imagine that they were sticking it out and determinedly not moving a single charred brick, as if the only hope of compensation lay in what was so powerfully represented in all that rubble. They were doing what came naturally: carrying on, adjusting, surviving. These Gypsies had neither the money nor the materials nor, most important, the confidence to rebuild. But they weren’t timid in telling their story. As in other devastated settlements, I found that the Gypsies, abandoned here after a brief breeze of media interest, would talk, and most often complain, for as long as anyone would listen. It was as if no one had ever asked them anything; they had a heaving backlog of documented injuries and denigrations to disgorge, complete with unrelated but nevertheless urgent suggestions, requests, and demands.

  Within minutes of leaving the car, the four of us were surrounded. There were perhaps fifty people: dirty, shiny-eyed children and their mothers and aunts and grandmothers, some of them holding babies or great protruding bellies or both, perhaps half of them shouting our way, in tones alternately pleading and hostile. There was just one elderly couple. The man, elegant in his frayed but neat brown waistcoat, kept a fob watch in one pocket as well as three fingers in both. The woman, clearly a life’s companion, rested a light hand on his arm, the only silent member of the group, her long, smooth face prettily framed in a faded flower kerchief.

  The absence of the elderly here had everything to do with the difficulty of Gypsy life: there just weren’t that many old Gypsies anywhere—their life expectancy was twelve or fifteen years below the norm (low enough, hereabouts). And there were very few men of any age. The reasons for their absence were more variable. The happiest excuse might be that they were at work, or were looking for work; the more common explanation was that they were in prison. In places as tense as Kogalniceanu, men sometimes kept out of sight for safety’s sake, or so they told us; everyone agreed that women and children, even Gypsy women and children, were less likely to be attacked if they were alone.

  “So,” Ina Bardan began, “what happened?” In the hours that followed there were many replies and refinements of replies to this absurdly broad question. “In the afternoon of the evening before it happened,” a young Rom began, “Macedonians came and warned us.” And then, unfurling like a fugue (or indeed like the heterophonous variations of many Rom musical ensembles), every statement of fact was followed on its heels by some denial or abrogation in a different voice: “No, the burning happened in the morning”; “They weren’t Macedonians who warned us, they were Turks”; “Nobody warned us”; “They told us it would come the next week.” …

  I pressed on, beaming in on the first young man who’d spoken and ruthlessly shutting out the supplications of all others: “The evening before the night it happened, some Macedonians came and warned you. Then what?” The story that emerged contained many common Gypsy themes, contradictions, and complaints.

  “But we didn’t believe him.” “There was no reason to believe.” “We’ve been threatened before.” “Before it was better.” “We have lived here since 1947 and nica problema.” “Until this year we had no trouble.” “Life was better before the revolution.” “When Ceausescu died the problems began.” “This is what democracy means for us.” “George Bush should come over and see our democracy.” “Why doesn’t the U.S.A. help us?”

  A young man rolled up a sleeve to reveal a wrist tattoo which read, between commando wings, “U-S-A.” “Are there Gypsies in America?”

  “Yes,” I said, and then, interrupting myself, “but what happened on the night of October 9?”

  “There was a fight in the bar.” “They gathered in the bar.” “They gathered in the German church.” “The Germans in the bar told the priest.” “The church bells called everyone together.” “Drinks were offered.” “The priest is a drunk.”

  Ina Bardan tried to push the conversation forward. “How many people came?”

  “Thirty-five.” “Three hundred.” “They came with benzene.” “And tractors and cars.” “And steel poles.”

  “Did you know them? Were they young people?”

  “I knew every one of them.” “We knew them from school; we asked them why they were doing this.” “We weren’t doing anything.” “None of us were here, we were in the woods.” “We were afraid in the woods.” “There are wild animals in the woods.” “There were no people here, only animals.” “They stole our horses and pigs and chickens.” “All this happened in one night.” “When we returned the next morning, everything was burned.” “We stayed away for three days, and when we came back the houses were still smoking.” “There were dead animals in our wells.” “And furniture.”

  Followed by the entire crowd, with the smaller children tugging at our shirts and asking for gum, we walked across a lumpy field to inspect some of the other houses that had been torched, those belonging to the Turkish Gypsies. The town was crumbling but still viable, with hand-carved drains the only remains of disused, grown-over roads. Still, it was not a ghost town. We stopped at a house and a woman emerged, not approaching but standing guard in the frame of her doorway. There was something she wanted to ask us. Could we help, with her daughter? She retreated and re-emerged with a child in her arms—a stiff, folded little girl whose polio-afflicted limbs and paralyzed, expressionless face gave her the look of a wooden doll. Her fingers were frozen into tiny claws and her whole Z-shaped body looked petrified in a moment of action, like the human fossils of Pompeii. Ina took some details from the woman and spoke to her about children’s-aid groups and special hospitals in Bucharest, and another mother pushed forward with her own unfortunate child—a different kind of victim.

  This little girl had been badly injured when her family returned to inspect their burnt-out house. A still-smoldering beam had fallen on her. Without any apparent concern for the girl’s feelings, her mother lifted her dress and yanked down her leggings to sho
w the visitors her shockingly melted vagina and thighs. “She can never marry now,” the woman said. The insensitivity of the mother only underscored the fact that here, as in most wars, it was mainly children who were the victims.

  We learned that four (or fourteen) policemen eventually did come—after the mob had gone, after the houses had gone—bearing a message for the Gypsies: “You must leave the village, because they will come back and kill you.” “But we stay here,” one woman explained, “because we have no place to go.” “We want to stay here,” another added, “because we were born here.”

  As we walked back to the car, a man came after us. He wanted to give us the names of all the families and all their children. We dutifully wrote them down, some of them common Romanian names—the Mihais and Mirceas and loans—but also some beautiful old-fashioned names that seem now mainly to belong to Gypsies. I thought of similar lists I had copied into my notebook from the archives in Bucharest:

  The four Gypsies Harman, Bera, Badu, and Coman, together with their families … a few Gypsies: Macicat, Caba, Coste, Babul, Bazdag, Carfin, and Nan, all seven together with their families … Luca son of Latco, Alexa, Hertea, Dinga and his brother Manciu, Stefan, Boldor and his brother Gavril … Pandrea, Radu, and Butcat … Baciul, Coica and his brother Ninga, and Gypsies by the name of Boia, Dadul, Gutinea, and Carfila … Talpa together with his children Toderica, Jamba, Molda, Oprea, and Piciman …

  And how are relations with the other residents of Kogalniceanu now? “Some of them have come to say they are sorry.” “They are afraid we will burn their houses.” “They brought us some blankets.” “They spit on us if we go into town.” “We are not allowed in the pub.”

  The Discobar, a lone gray rhomboid on a corner in town, is the place where the group gathered that night. It looks more like a factory than a pub. Unconvinced, we lingered before entering, gazing up at the tiny yellow half-lit neon “Discobar” sign, high on a side wall. Inside, it was dark and cool: red curtains kept out the afternoon sun. The place was empty. The waiter, a young man with a helmet of black hair and a clip-on bow tie over his white short-sleeved shirt, was leaning on the bar, smoking and talking to the bartender, a fat poached-faced man behind the counter. They were not pleased to see us.

  “Why do you want to talk about it after all this time?” the bartender asked.

  Ted Zang explained. “Because nothing has happened. There has been no case before the courts, not even a serious investigation. And still these people have no homes.”

  A shrug. The young waiter looked over at the bartender for guidance. Another shrug, as if to say, You can talk to them if you want to waste your time. The bartender turned away, and tended to the glasses in his sink. The young man dithered, sharpening the head of his cigarette in an ashtray. He picked at the pimples on his chin and glanced at his watch: time to kill. Finally, he turned towards the four of us, standing by in solemn expectation. He looked me over. I watched as a “why the hell not” grin rose over his face. He didn’t look at Ted, the only one among us who had spoken. Instead the waiter led me, followed by the others, to a table in the back. I may even enjoy this, I could feel him thinking as he guided me by two upturned fingers at the elbow.

  At the table, I shared a corner with the waiter, who was still, and determinedly, holding my elbow, resting the back of his hand on the table like a coaster. No one else was drinking, but I found myself ordering a cold Laziza (“The Famous Lebanese Beer”).

  Ina was at her most officious: “Where were you on the evening of October 9?”

  “I was on my way to visit the Gypsies,” the waiter told us cheerfully, tipping back on his chair and clasping his free hand behind the black helmet, impervious to our disapproval. It wasn’t that he was confident; he just didn’t notice. Clearly he had never encountered anyone who didn’t think exactly as he did—except Gypsies.

  Mihai, as he was called, didn’t need further encouragment. “I am Macedonian,” he wanted us to know first off. “What happened here was a war between the Gypsies and everyone else. All the other nationalities were together: Macedonians, Romanians, the Germans, and the rest.”

  “How did it start?” Ted asked, unfolding his notepad.

  “A Turk and a Macedonian were having a fight,” Mihai said, the united colors of Kogalniceanu dissolving even as we committed them to paper. Probably mistaking him as one of their own, “the Gypsies intervened on the side of the Turk. A Romanian was caught driving alone through the Gypsy quarter in his truck. He was beaten.”

  “This,” Corin explained, “was the drop that filled the glass.”

  “Did someone call the police?” I asked, perhaps rhetorically.

  “If we had asked the police, they would’ve done nothing. What can four policemen do?” Mihai had skipped ahead. “There were between three and four hundred of us. On the way to the Gypsy quarter, people joined the crowd. We brought petrol, to finish the job once and for all.” Mihai was calm. “There was no killing.”

  “And what did the policemen do?”

  “They watched. And now there are six policemen there.”

  I wondered if he would be offended if I removed my elbow from his palm. I wondered why I was wondering this. “And the firemen?” I said, smuggling my hands into my lap. “What about them?” We had been told by the Gypsies that the villagers had stopped the firemen from entering their neighborhood. Apparently there was no need to intervene.

  “We were there at 12:30 p.m., and the firemen turned up around three. We surrounded the Gypsy houses and set fire to everything. It was planned for two days later, but we thought they might stop us.”

  “But nobody was arrested afterwards,” I pointed out. “Did you really think you might be stopped?”

  “This was not a crime,” Mihai explained. “It was an uprising.” The waiter had earned another cigarette. His two smoking fingers now free, he extracted one from a blue packet—Manhattan 100s.

  “And how do you feel about it now?” I asked. Ina curled her lip in anticipation.

  “It was a very good idea. We should have done it long before. We have no more problems with them. They don’t feel so big and strong now. It was the only way. Everyone used to be afraid of them. Now everyone behaves. They have no more courage. I’ve seen the people from those houses since, of course. But I don’t speak to them. They’re more respectful now. They even greet you in the street from time to time.”

  “If the Gypsies are so well behaved now, why do you keep them out of the bar?” Corin asked.

  “They are not civilized. I wouldn’t serve a Gypsy.”

  Seething Ina could not resist (we were all pretty new to the neutral interview): “What does democracy mean to you?”

  “To be able to do what I want and nobody should interfere.”

  The bartender had been listening from his counter. Eventually he joined in, as the people of Kogalniceanu will. And he told us something new: the lone Romanian who was beaten in his truck had been transporting weapons—wooden dowels from the local mill—to a hiding place closer to the Gypsy quarter.

  “How did the Gypsies know?”

  “Well, they know things, don’t they?” he said irritably. His nose sharpened and all of his tiny features were trying to converge on it. “They have no place in this village. If they rebuild their houses we will burn them again. The people here don’t trust them. We don’t want Gypsies in Kogalniceanu.”

  There seemed little else to say, and we gathered our things. Mihai gallantly held open the door. Ina offered a proud profile as we filed past. Ted, troubled but naturally polite, managed a somber nod. Corin, not much touched by the deposition, skipped out. Flummoxed or just perverse, I smiled a toothy smile and held out my hand, which Mihai grabbed with both of his, and shaking it like dice, he asked a question that needed no translation: “Can I have your phone number?” I wriggled away and made a dive for the car.

  We drove off. I looked out the back window. The waiter was jogging after us. As he slowed and grew sm
aller, he waved and penned imaginary scribbles on his palm. He looked like a neglected diner signaling to the waiter for the bill. I was speechless, but Ina, at last, was laughing: “So now you see: everything in our country is backwards.”

  A year later, in 1992, I returned to Kogalniceanu with Nicolae Gheorghe and a busload of Americans, including a reporter from The New York Times, some observers from Capitol Hill, and a couple of American Gypsies. Thanks to the vigorous efforts of Gheorghe, a group of Sinti—German Gypsies—based in Heidelberg, had pledged 120,000 deutschemarks (and had given 40,000) for the reconstruction of the houses, on the condition that the Romanian government match the donation. The government had done so, and a criminal investigation had begun—the first and only investigation of an attack on Gypsies in the country. It sounded like a miracle, and at first sight from the bus, it looked like one.

  A row of new houses stood on the very site of the wreckage, though some ruins, perhaps deemed still usable, remained. The old couple (the man in the same brown vest, with three fingers in each pocket) stood in front of their new house, shading their eyes to see who was on this unlikely mission. I said hello to them. I didn’t think they recognized me from a year before, but I recognized an earlier version of them: past their front door, hanging high on the wall, was their wedding photograph—which had somehow survived the blaze—a formal sepia portrait, perhaps fifty years old.

  On closer inspection, things didn’t look quite so good: the houses were bare, with dirt floors. They were badly made from coarse unpainted cinder blocks. Some walls were stacked without mortar. There was no plumbing and no running water anywhere, just a long ditch filled with swamp water, dug about twelve feet in front of the houses and promising some kind of epidemic. The houses at the end of the row were only half built, and except for a few black scorch marks it was hard to distinguish the new houses from those that had been half destroyed in the attack.