The old couple with a pair of great-grandchildren in front of the remains of their house in Mihail Kogalniceanu, which was destroyed by a mob in October 1990. They continued to live in it for three years until new houses for some of the victims finally were built. (photo credits 4.6)
To me this reconstruction, however limited, still looked like hope—the only sign of it I had seen in dozens of similarly afflicted villages. To Bill Duna, a Gypsy from Minneapolis, it looked like a slum, and you could watch the emotion as it traversed and variously contorted his face, which resembled that of a distressed child. He was absorbing the degradation in which some of his fellow Gypsies lived. No doubt the site was all the more disappointing for being the great pilot project of cooperation between the Romanian government and the first independent Gypsy groups who were, at last, organizing the fight for their rights.
To the neighbors, the Turkish Gypsies across the lumpy field, these new houses represented an affront of a different kind. Those whose houses had been only partially destroyed got nothing, and so they continued as they were. Far from solving the community’s problems, the new buildings had mainly created enormous tension and envy. And some things had not changed. Near the bus the little girl whose lower body had been badly burned was once again being stripped for the visitors; a concerned lady from Washington crouched to take a picture of the wound.
But the building had stopped. Apparently local government had control over the dispersal of the funds, even though the project had been approved by Bucharest. According to Nicolae, who had been negotiating on all sides, the authorities had made it clear that they would continue construction only if the Gypsies abandoned their case in the courts. It was, as Nicolae put it, a choice between peace and justice. To the local Gypsies it was a different choice and a clear one—between justice and new houses. A few individuals or families from the settlement had already dropped their own names from the group led by a local Gypsy leader, Petre Anghel, which had filed charges. Anghel and Nicolae feared that the whole case had been scuppered by their action, and moreover that it was unlikely that those who had negotiated their separate deals would even get their new houses.
By 1994—more than four years after the attack—all activity in the road and in the courts had ceased.
Back in Bucharest I bumped into Emilian, the serious young man and chronicler of the razed village of Bolintin Deal. We had lost touch, and I’d heard that he had got out of Romania. But here he was, waiting for someone in the mirrored lobby of the Art Deco hotel, the Lido, a dark and pleasantly seedy place favored by journalists. It turned out that he was acting as a translator for a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer. A translator? Emilian had spoken no English when I met him.
He had just returned from nearly a year in the United States, where he had worked in an amusement arcade in Wildwood, New Jersey, owned by an American Gypsy. The experience had changed him. It wasn’t just the preppy Oxford-cloth shirt and khakis, or the easy smile and light manner that were so unlike the dour Emilian I had known. It was his gait. Emilian had a new shoe: his legs were the same length now and he no longer lurched from side to side when he walked.
Emilian cheerfully told me that his job at the funfair had been to make “kherndoze,” corndogs. He said he was happy to be back and anxious to get on with his recording of Gypsy stories. From his spiffy new blazer pocket he pulled out the tape recorder I had given him for the purpose, two years before. Why did you leave the States? I asked him, bracing myself for a terrible deportation story. And then Emilian hugged me and laughed and laughed. When he finally recovered his raspy voice, he told me that he had lost his job at the amusement park after it was devastated by a fire.
FIVE
The Other Side
THERE ARE POLES in Poland who spend four hundred dollars on a pair of slacks at stores such as Snobissimo in Warsaw’s fashionable Nowy Swiat (New World) Boulevard. Not just one or two: there’s a whole new class of rich Poles. Their first-time furs and glitzy cars seem garish against the backdrop of grimy, twilit tramways, of sooty early dusk, of unending blue-gray avenues and the standard unmuffled Skodas (a Czech car in the shape of a baby boot whose name in Polish means “pity,” as in the French dommage).
In Warsaw there is also an abundance of new shops that sell only tarty lingerie, and others exclusively stocking luxury comestibles: whisky and caviar, but no milk. Who goes there? Who lives here? It all looks fake—people and places variously gussied up. But then it is fake. Fifty years ago, German soldiers rubbed the city and two-thirds of its inhabitants off the map. Only a few gaunt prewar façades now remain, preserved, perhaps, as a reminder (many of the old buildings are riddled with bullet holes). Poles are obsessed by their history but in the capital they live in a city with no patina. Nothing is old here; and things are often not what they pretend to be.
There is, for a conspicuous start, the Palace of Culture—a neo-Byzantine wedding cake, a gift from Stalin to the Polish people (hard to refuse, and a symbol of how put-upon the Poles have been). Opposite is the Szanghaj, a Chinese restaurant that doesn’t serve Chinese food. Nearby, the “Old Town” is a cobblestoned reconstruction of Ye Olde Warsawe, an impeccable Baroque theme park completed in the 1970s. The sense of a stage set, perhaps again to be struck by terrible historical forces: this is the flavor of the unease one feels here, where the names of streets are still changing, and where, in the Ghetto, the foundations of buildings are cracking open. The rubble of the past is actually pressing through, and you stand there staring, as if waiting for a pair of trembling hands to emerge from a crevasse. Perhaps those who rebuilt the area, razed after the Uprising, didn’t want to bury or sweep away the past. (Though not much fuss is made over survivor sensitivities: for example, Orbis, the state-owned travel agency, chose as its headquarters the very spot where the buses left the Ghetto for Treblinka.)
If places and buildings leave one in doubt about their age or their hidden histories, faces don’t lie, in particular those of peasants. (The term “peasant” may sound archaic and condescending, but it is precisely their physical stoicism, many hundreds of years in the making, that mocks the youthful culture of euphemism.) Faces are about the only prewar survivors here—ancient, beet-red flat ones, like that of the bundled womanbulk I saw one subzero morning outside Warszawa Centralna Station, standing guard over a folded blanket which had as its proud centerpiece a single giant root, apparently alone worth the trip in from the provinces—kohlrabi, rutabaga, some dirt-encrusted tuber, a Polish truffle bigger than a human head. Warszawa Centralna, a concrete hangar in the shadow of the Palace of Culture, is the station where you catch trains for the outside world: Koln and Jstanbul and Piotersberg; the place names are written by hand, as printing lags well behind the identity crises of Eastern capitals. The station was also home to the first wave of Gypsies migrating west after the revolutions of 1989, mainly from Romania.
Thousands of Gypsies occupied the station that winter and into the summer of 1990; the waiting room was still a waiting room—one with laundry-festooned radiators. (In recent years, Warsaw has only ever been a stopover on the journey west. You are still likely to see washing in any public toilet—tiny tights and long, graying tube socks: whole families pegged on a movable line.) And still they keep coming in their hundreds. It is usual to have women and children as delicate and dark as Delhians petting your coat and murmuring plaintively as you push your way down a crowded street. They are asking for money.
That, anyway, is what you defensively infer. In fact it isn’t at all clear what they want. You could convince yourself that this petting thing has no object, that it is just what they do. Whether in Rome or in Warsaw, Gypsies are just not very good at begging. For most, shame wouldn’t be the difficulty. Begging, after all, is an ancient profession; alms-giving confirms the virtue and pietas of even the poor, and some beggars, such as India’s mendicant sadhus, are honored as holy men. Andrzej Mirga, a Polish Gypsy and an ethnographer, confirmed something of this. “For Rom
a, the concept of begging, of seeking alms, just does not exist. There is no word in Romani for begging. Instead you might say te phirav pa-o gov, ‘to go about the village,’ and our women went mainly to collect debts for work done by their men, for fixing something, or perhaps playing at a wedding.”
The station sleeve-petters, mostly young women of the Balkans roaming cities not their own and found in every East (and many a West) European capital, looked to be suffering from compassion-stimulation fatigue. Though they maintain the plangent tone, in disastrous mimicry of their targets they look through or past the potential donor. People don’t want to part with their zlotys. Instead these Gypsies whine at no one in particular and face the coming crowd, boredly scanning for a better class of coat. But then, if they have no debts to collect, they do have reason to feel defeat.
At first, Poles gave generously to the shabby strangers, who were dark and lithe and shiny-eyed—all of which, before it (mysteriously) becomes frightening, is attractive. But Poles today tell you that at first they didn’t know the station Gypsies were Gypsies. They don’t mean that they had never heard of them. Rather they are saying that because the beggars are Gypsies the giving constitutes robbery; and so they see themselves as victims rather than small-time philanthropists. Gypsies lived in these parts before Warsaw was founded in the fourteenth century, but the local postwar population is invisibly small—only some twelve to fifteen thousand Gypsies live here permanently. Like the Polish Jews, Polish Gypsies hardly exist anymore, and those who remain are relatively prosperous and well integrated. Now their identity is being taken over by that of the invasive, threatening, and parasitic refugee.
To many Poles, the strangers were not just poor or parasitic; if they were Gypsies they were dangerously, deceitfully so, and probably diseased to boot. A more lackadaisical kind of beggar would be hard to conceive, and yet the newspapers stayed the charitable impulse of many citizens with assertions that these dark women weighted their skirts with wads of cash, that daily they collected sums five times the average Polish salary, that their suppurating children were spreading meningitis and TB—a campaign which ended in their removal from Warszawa Centralna. Since then they have settled for, and in, the eastern terminal, Wschodnia, out of sight, over the Wisla River.
Wschodnia Station, Warsaw, 1990: Hundreds of Roma, mostly from Romania but also from the former Yugoslavia, have camped out here. Some have stayed for years, in the hope of eventual arrival in Germany and the West. (photo credits 5.1)
Wschodnia Station is a dank split-level maze of concrete corridors and low-ceilinged waiting rooms with pungent dark patches, the pissed-in corners beyond the low-watt penumbra of Polish bulbs. Here the waiting room has been barricaded and everyone must stand in the halls. Drunks bounce off the dim walls, invisible to bored Soviet soldiers and to the stout, monobreasted Russian matrons in snowboots, waiting for Moskva-bound buses and minding their sacks of Polish loot. These women have sold their Soviet goods in the vast stadium which has become a Russian flea market, and are now returning with bags of zlotys plus plastic kitchen utensils, aluminum pans—items still scarce back home.
The station cafeteria, bright and scented with cigarette smoke and ammonia, is warmed by steaming vats of cabbage, gluey stew, and golonka—fried pigs’ feet. This is the station’s main draw, and men and women at rows of high narrow counters are bent in silence over their bowls, the feet of their stools disappearing in the tide of accumulated butts.
I went inside for a thaw and found two small Gypsy boys near the food counter handing trays to the shufflers in the food queue (they had figured out that begging is not tolerated in cafeterias). Though no one touched him, the littler one squirmed and squealed as if he was being tickled; finally, he pulled his white wool ski cap down over his face, spread his arms, and spun away from us. The older one, taking no notice of his hyperactive colleague, faced me with intent. Without saying a word, he raised his thin black eyebrows in a pity-me teepee and sawed his stomach with a flat upturned palm: hunger. The food was a gift, but seconds later they ran out through the swinging doors as if from a saloon shootout, two dwarf cowboys, a cooked chicken in each armpit.
Later in the day, I saw the boys again. They lived in a shack behind the station, one of thirty or so below the raised tracks, stretching out in a ragtag flotilla of driftwood and rubbish: lean-tos with sitting room only, constructed from cardboard, bits of chicken wire, carpet, and wood—like any shantytown in the world, only here it was wet, and cold enough to see your breath. I smelled the place before I saw it—the weatherproof stench of fear and poverty, human shit. Nobody can be bothered to dig a hole: things are that bad. These were my thoughts, and I was so focused on them, and on not stepping in a latrine, that instead I nearly stepped on a pair of bare-assed middle-aged men, squatting mid-dump. I leapt back, stupidly gasping eek like I’d come upon a large rat, but they just sat there, chatting quietly to each other, quite unperturbed by exposure to the cold or to me, or to anyone else who might have been watching. Later, when I replayed the scene—of my shock and their indifference, of my stiffness and their loose-limbed ease—I recognized them (again) as children of India. I thought of a description in one of V. S. Naipaul’s India books, of people “companionably” shitting along rivers, in streets, beside train tracks. Shitting could be sociable—why not? My association of open defecation with degradation may have been my problem alone. Certainly the shame was all mine (and, indeed, from the Gypsies’ point of view, so was the defilement, earned by exposing myself to the act). The two boys from the cafeteria, who were hiding, behind some trees, were wetting themselves with glee, and a rare pleasure it must have been, not to be on the receiving end (of some joke, some humiliation).
The sheltered pedestrian underpass in the center of Warsaw is where many Roma spend their days. (photo credits 5.2)
Sliding down the soggy escarpment, I found in the doorway of one hutch a man on all fours. He was laying a new floor: a flattened cardboard box, former home to a Sanyo TV. One of the main professions of long-settled Gypsies in Poland is carpet dealing. They have big shops, in Kraków especially, chains of them; they sell in the markets; they sell door-to-door. This newcomer clearly wasn’t getting any of that, no carpet treatment of any kind. Polish Gypsies, understandably resentful of the bad image of their poor relations from farther east, kept clear of them. But they were not the only ones who distanced themselves from the poorest refugees; so did other foreign Gypsies, such as the score of traders from Bulgaria who also stayed at the station, in the comfort of their own converted school bus.
The Bulgarians were on a business trip. They were buying cheap sweaters—pink and yellow fluffy ones—in Poland and flogging them for a bit more over the Czech border in Bohemia and Moravia. After a few runs, they would return to Bulgaria. These Travelers were doing very well and had no desire to go west. Unlike the Romanian Gypsies along the tracks, the Bulgarian Gypsies in the bus were all fat, with nothing of the victim in their bearing. On the contrary, a chief pleasure among them was the corpulent perusal of the misfortunes of others. One of the paunchiest—some kind of paterfamilias, to judge by the way he interrupted everyone and no one minded, and by the gold rings he had corseting each sausage finger—warned me against speaking to “those dog-eaters,” indicating the shack-dwellers. He did the same to a pair of rich Polish ladies who had pulled up in a Mercedes full of old clothes: they’d brought them for the people in the shacks and were now not quite sure how to approach them. After vigorous admonition from the Bulgarian, they gave up and drove away, leaving their bundles in the road. Rich only in numbers, the Romanians had been here for months, regrouping after each bounce back from the German border and in no hurry to return to Romania or the former Yugoslavia.
I am not a train enthusiast. I went to the stations to make new friends. Convoys of westbound would-be refugees from farther east were supposedly being formed by professionals operating out of Warsaw—out of the station toilets, to be precise. (In keeping with the
false advertising all over town, the toilets were used for everything but.) These pros—Germans, Poles, Romanians, Turks, and some Gypsies—escort the refugees from Bucharest or from Warsaw to the border, where they show them the safest crossing, or pretend to, and disappear.
German officials, who blame them for the boom in illegal crossings all along their thirteen-hundred-kilometer eastern border, call the guides Schleppers, a name that contrasts with the more heroic Fluchthelfer, or flight-helper, that was given to those who smuggled Jews out of Germany. Contempt for such dealers isn’t new, or unique to Germans: Henry VIII’s act of 1530 ruled that anyone conveying Gypsies would be fined forty pounds (and the transported themselves would be hanged). But the German government now doesn’t think to look to Romania for clues about the Schlepper boom. It does not call the most recent migrants refugees, which would emphasize that they are leaving, indeed fleeing; instead it calls them Asylanten, asylum-seekers, emphasizing their arrival at the gates. Some—perhaps not many—of the Romanian Gypsies are fleeing government-approved mob attacks on their settlements. All feel unwelcome in their own country. And yet, the press release says, their arrival en masse is due to the efforts of travel agents.
According to border guards, the Schleppers are smugglers who have diversified. (And they should know: the guards live on, or off of, the same thin line; as in the children’s game, they see it, the border, the cracks, while the Schleppers eye the pavement, the safe open spaces on either side.) Freer trade has quashed a once-lucrative black market in just about everything, and now the Schleppers are reduced to dealing in Gypsies, the blackest market of all. The Schlepper elite, however, vies for those few travelers who can really pay. Before being caught on the third consignment, one Polish-Romanian outfit managed to transport twenty-four Pakistanis to Germany in a Ukrainian-army helicopter.
Bury Me Standing Page 23
