Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

Inside a staff room, he was happy to tell me how things worked here, and what impact the new agreement between the German and Romanian governments to ease the deportation of Gypsies was likely to make.

  “Up until last summer [1992] anyone caught at the border, or more usually anyone who asked for Asyl [pronounced “azool”], was brought here, given food and a bed. They filled in a declaration regarding their status, they were given an ID card.” He produced a small yellow example. “Eventually they were sent to another camp—sometimes for more than a year—while their case was processed at the Bundesamt, at Nuremberg.”

  “Nuremberg?” The place where fates were decided was the city that saw not only the Nazi war-crimes trials but also the passage of the 1935 race laws—the ones that determined who was a Jew, who was a Gypsy. Then, too, Nuremberg had been the place where fates were decided.

  In the previous year alone five hundred thousand people applied for asylum in Germany, favored for its liberal asylum laws and its location.

  “In the end, about 4 percent get in,” said Olaf. “Among the Gypsies, though, it is only .02 percent.”

  “What happens to the rest?”

  “Deported. The problem in the past was that there was no place to deport them to. Gypsies were often refused re-entry to their own countries—Romania especially. Now their government must accept them.”

  Romania was paid thirty million deutschemarks to take back its own citizens, in effect from November 1, 1992. Similar deals were in the works between Germany and Bulgaria and Germany and Poland—all of them specifically designed to tackle “the Gypsy problem.”

  But where was Vesh?

  As it turned out, six months later I would go to Bucharest to see what effect the agreement was having. It was immediately clear that none of the deported were to see a single pfennig of the legendary thirty million deutschemarks that had been explicitly linked to their return by Rudolf Seiters, then the minister of the interior and architect of the deal. In fact the linkage was downright cynical; that money had long since been committed for use in three retraining centers—in Arat, Sibiu, and Timisoara—expressly for the benefit of unemployed ethnic Germans.

  The agreement stipulated that transport to the “home” country should be paid for by the German government. But before the removals even began, Lufthansa issued a statement saying that they would not transport handcuffed passengers. This snag was not a problem of transport (there was always Tarom, the Romanian airline, which when I first flew it had limited rations of seat belts); this was a problem of credibility. Lufthansa’s sensible safety regulation, emerging just when it did, revealed the general assumption that these Romanian asylum-seekers were criminals.

  And indeed in handcuffs they went. (Some returnees claim to have been handcuffed to radiators for nights before flying out.) Within the first six months, about twelve thousand had been deported under the agreement. And most of them paid for the trip on their own national airline with what they imagined was their own money. Any cash left over—sometimes as much as two thousand deutschemarks (twelve hundred dollars)—was confiscated. “They took all my money,” an incredulous old Rom told me in Bucharest’s Otopeni Airport, “and they said it would be given to charity.”

  It was being assumed by the German officials handling the send-offs that all the money in the Gypsies’ pockets was wrongfully acquired—by sponging off the German social services, by working illegally. In fact many Romanian Gypsies who had made the trip had sold up to pay for the trip over, or in any case had brought all their savings with them, as anyone hoping to start a new life would. And so they were returning poorer than when they had left, and many of them homeless as well. It is a common sight at Otopeni to see bewildered returnees, most of them obviously Gypsies, who had flown in at night with no money for even the bus fare home.

  Was there any kind of program, I asked an airport immigration official, to help resettle the refuseniks? The place, despite recent renovations, was itself looking a bit like a refugee camp, with people sleeping everywhere. “If they can get all the way to Germany,” he replied, with some reason and some of the nostril-flaring contempt that was usual in discussions about the returnees, “I think they can find their way home.”

  The resettlement problems were compounded by the fact that these confirmed rejects were met with special contempt by Romanians who had stayed behind in the village. Those who could claim even limited success in their trip to Germany (you could make money and keep it if you left before being deported, as those who came back from second or third trips knew) were the object of intense jealousy. The tension was building nicely: that has been the primary result of the Bonn-Bucharest Agreement, which on the Romanian side is baldly known as “the Gypsy Protocol.” By joint policy, the Romanian Gypsies had become political rather than economic refugees. But you didn’t need to look at international agreements to know that there was nothing “optional” about the travel plans of the Bardus. You just had to look at their slippers. And their eyes. The Rom to whom I had first spoken in the camp, the man I had taken for Vesh, was clearly silenced by fear.

  One of the reasons Gypsies wind up with no place to go is that they destroy their passports or identity cards, making it easy for governments to disown them. They know that their identity—self-ascribed or presumed—is not written on those cards. Justifiably enough, they declare themselves homeless, and hope that the German authorities (for it is mainly they) won’t be able to return them to a place that doesn’t exist. Or they hope, at least, that before they are sorted out and put back on that eastbound bus they will have some months in the “West” (a brand name for cigarettes and jeans, and a catchall word for status, cash, and freedom, which has only gained force since the end of the Cold War).

  Before 1989, Eastern-bloc credentials guaranteed asylum for anyone who made it out. The current deal means that even unidentified refuseniks can be deported immediately. But one problem remains: how to tell where they come from? A press release from the minister of the interior outlines the procedure: by language, by confession, and, most ominously, “by the opinion of experts and witnesses.” There were already cases, Olaf told me, of zip-lipped asylum-seekers’ being sent to Romania willy-nilly. Though they were not registered according to their ethnicity in immigration statistics, they were lumped together in a practice which weirdly acknowledged their homelessness: they were Gypsies, and were therefore to be dispatched to the Black Sea.

  Authorities have always nursed fantasies about distant Gypsy reservations—in Madagascar, Somaliland, Guyana, an “island in the South Pacific”—and many places have been seriously proposed. In the sixteenth century, Portugal became the first country to deport Gypsies to its colonies in Africa, and later to Brazil and to India. Though less systematically than Portugal, a hundred years later France was sending Gypsies to Martinique and Louisiana; England and Scotland sent shipments to the West Indies. The historian Angus Fraser points out that this novel method of expulsion was considered acceptable, and useful for the slave labor it provided (cargoes of Gypsies preceded African captives), because the Gypsies were transported only within the empire, and so were not, strictly speaking, deported.

  “The problem is,” Olaf said softly, “this is not political persecution.”

  I pointed out that there had been serious attacks in the Czech Republic, in Hungary, and in Poland; that only Poland had held a trial over an attack on a Gypsy community (in Mlawa), and that the case was later dropped. I mentioned that there hadn’t been any prosecutions anywhere, and that in Romania the government actively condoned the attacks.

  “Condoned is not the same as ordered, or organized, or paid for. Not in our constitution, anyway.” We paused to consider the niceties. “You have to understand,” he went on, redirecting the conversation to what he saw as the real problem, “many of our neighbors come here just to collect social benefits. By giving them coupons instead of cash, we hope to discourage this kind of visitor.”

  Some of the Gypsy visitors were
indeed imitating their governments: they spoke the imported language of human rights and expected to be paid, or subsidized, for it. Often they were. And though Romania welcomed millions of tons of humanitarian aid in the form of food and clothes (the great majority of which was immediately sold off and never reached the poor and largely Roma settlements and orphanages), some enterprising Gypsies took their cue and went to Germany to collect personally their individual aid packages. In Olaf’s office, the most culpable seekers these days seemed to be the Eastern Europeans—which was to say, more often than not, the Gypsies. Germans may resent them more than they resent Africans (also arriving in their tens of thousands), because the Europeans are not only poor but are also neighbors, relations by previous marriages of state—and their predicament may thus imply German responsibility.

  At Eisenhüttenstadt, itself part of the East until German reunification, such tender consciousness was acute. Here the line between us and them, between West and East, was being demarcated every day.

  “ ‘An element of insecurity,’ ” I said to Olaf, who tugged on his ponytail, waiting for amplification. “ ‘Gypsies are an element of insecurity and thus a danger to society.…’ ”

  “Yes!” he said, relieved that I seemed to be catching on. “What we are dealing with here is an invasion.”

  But it was an invasion, and perhaps it was unfair to quote a Nazi document at Olaf. He was himself in a curious kind of costume—part Palestinian, part American GI, part street kid from London or Berlin; and he had mixed-up views to match. Here his combat boots did not look cool; his were just the heavy feet of bureaucracy. Perhaps it is the occupational hazard of the camp-worker, but nevertheless the asylum-seekers had for him become faceless, and when he spoke in his own voice (“you have to understand …”) he clearly felt they were more degrading than degraded.

  “Is it working? What about the antiforeigner attacks, are those stemming the flow?”

  “Nothing has made any difference. Nothing except the weather. Germany has a friend in winter.”

  And Gypsies—in effect stateless—have a friend of a kind in borders. In this part of the world, someone will always remember a different map. The line is rarely fixed (look at maps of bulimic Poland between 1813 and 1945), and the shaded areas on either side are the eternally contested no-man’s-lands of aspiration and deprivation. Borders are the cordons beyond which the grass starts to get greener. And, so long as visits there are not compulsory, the other side is always a liberation. This is not-home; a no-count zone. Adventure is possible. To Gypsies borders are all these things, but they have also long been the other kind of cordon: a line of police, soldiers, guards; a cordon sanitaire, with themselves the supposedly infected minority. Gypsies—unflaggingly borderline people—have no borders cluttering the maps of their own collective imagination. But Gypsies are not spoiled, and these boundaries are to them also veins of opportunity.

  Everywhere the solution to “the Gypsy problem” has at some stage included expulsion. And again the punishment engendered the crime. Kicking them out—for being outsiders—confirmed the Gypsies as vagrants and vagabonds. But they adapted, often by living in abandoned and inaccessible forests and wastelands, the countries within countries, and the borderlands. They grew savvy about discrepancies in local jurisdictions and the erratic responsiveness of local authorities to handed-down decrees. They hopscotched along the frontiers, camping. Thus there are and always have been concentrations of Gypsies at the edges of countries and, similarly, within national boundaries, along county lines. Early records find them near the borders between the German states, between France and Spain, in the easternmost parts of the Dutch Republic, in the Scottish Borders. The borderland between Scotland and England, like all unclaimed or locally debated land, has been known in legend for its great populations of brigands and Gypsies. For the stateless inhabitants, such no-man’s-lands may be cells without walls, established by mapmaking—what might be called cartographic incarceration.

  Patrick Faa was a Border Gypsy, who, in 1715, along with seven others (six of them women), was deported to a Virginia plantation on a dubious conviction for arson. He left behind him both of his ears (part of his punishment), and his wife, the legendary Jean Gordon. Immortalized in fiction as Meg Merrilies in Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering, Gordon was herself banished from Scotland seventeen years later, on the grounds that she was a vagabond and an Egyptian—though she was already old and ill, and had lost not only her husband but all her nine sons (one murdered, the others hanged). Jean Gordon spent the rest of her days wandering around on the other side, in the English Borders, until she went down (shouting for Prince Charlie), ducked to death by a mob in 1746.

  I thanked Olaf and waved to him over my shoulder as he retreated into the warmth of the staff room. On the way out, a man down in the container barracks we’d visited was waving me over. He was the first Gypsy in the camp I had spoken to. Humming with adrenaline, I moved towards him. And then, in the shelter of one of the prefab bungalows, he spoke: “Me som Bardu”—I am Bardu.

  The good news was that they hadn’t been deported. Yet. On the advice of their Schlepper they had ditched their passports. Or rather they had handed them over to him, and now (as I myself had just learned), without these documents, they were slated for immediate and irreversible removal from the asylum process. But the Schlepper had promised to return their passports in exchange for a cut of their first social benefits—about four hundred deutschemarks for adults and a little over a hundred for each child. Regrettably, though, he didn’t accept coupons.

  Vesh looked like his name: both wild and soft, his alert, speedy black eyes boring out through great wrinkly pouches, as rage vied—his next move, only ever the very next thing—with deep longing for sleep. From his vest pocket he produced a pencil about an inch and a half long, and scratched a note on the white side of foil from a cigarette packet.

  I rushed to make the last train to the bridge, hoping to reach the Bardus as planned and give them news, along with the German chocolate and net sack of Jaffa oranges I’d picked up at the station. On the German side of the bridge I was stopped by a pair of Soviet soldiers. Perhaps it was only curiosity: I was wearing the same hat as they were—a tall square of fake fur with tied-up ears, the kind pressed on tourists at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate (minus the enameled hammer and sickle). With bruised suspicion they looked hard at me, this rude and female counterfeit; and I looked back, fearless as I realized that they represented no authority, despite their pistols and badges (their dinky hammers and sickles). They too were refugees.

  Many of the asylum-seekers’ camps are the former barracks of Russian soldiers, who have been evicted in favor even of no-hopers like Kofi and Vesh. And now the soldiers themselves, representing no country, were in the process of being returned, if anyone could figure out where to send them.

  I made it all the way back to Rzepin Station, panting in the dark. I climbed the rusted rails and looked down at the abandoned fire pit; I scanned the parking lot and rushed back to the station. As I regained my breath, I walked back and forth along the platform, finally stopping to ask the persecuted Polish ticketmaster (in hysterical sign-language) if he had seen those Gypsies. He shrugged, but I already knew they’d gone.

  As my train pulled away, I watched the pyramid of oranges until they vanished, my little monument glowing like a traffic cone on the bench where I first saw Ion and Mihai Bardu. Vesh’s note was tucked underneath.

  SIX

  Zigeuner Chips

  THERE IS NO room,” said the authorities at the eastern German port city of Rostock, when they were faced with housing two hundred Romanian Gypsy asylum-seekers in the summer of 1992. Thus they echoed the diluvial slogan of a right-wing political party, “The boat is full” (the phrase appears most often as a poster caption under a drawing of a boat, the ark of Germany). Authorities must house asylum-seekers before they are either deported or moved on but in Rostock they simply refused. And so the Gypsies made do outside th
e hostel, sleeping and eating there and, as the local press put it, “provoking” the people of Rostock into what would become an attack of landmark viciousness. The town cheered when the hostel was firebombed by some 150 skinheads. Room for the refugees was found immediately afterwards.

  What Germans had seen on their televisions was a police force with its arms crossed, standing back on a hill, out of the path of whistling homemade Molotov cocktails and stones. In the next month alone, 1,163 “xenophobic” crimes were reported in German cities and towns. Lothar Kupfer, the regional minister of the interior, gave the weekly Die Zeit the popular explanation for these events, with a new slant on the boat people:

  When 200 asylum seekers have to live together [with Germans] in a very tight space, this unleashes aggression in the German neighbors. Most of them have long forgotten how they stood in the harbor and looked longingly after the ferry: distant lands, wide oceans, dark-skinned women. When one day [these people] camp in front of an overfilled shelter, take care of personal needs behind the wild rose bushes, and throw their garbage on the rotting playground and then beg on top of it, the longing for foreign lands is over.

  Although in many German cities the number of foreigners had radically decreased, the most frequently proposed solution to the violence was a tightening of Article 16 of the Constitution: the liberal asylum clause that was installed after the war.

  Even as thousands of foreign guest-workers packed their bags, Germans found the issue a welcome distraction from the broader distress of the still-incomplete reunification of the two Germanys. A survey of three thousand people in Der Spiegel of October 1992 claimed that 96 percent of Germans were troubled by the “foreigner problem,” and endorsed (nonviolent) antiforeigner “measures.” …

  Who were all these foreigners and why were they so worrying? Unusually in a country given to precise taxonomies, Ausländer, or “foreigner,” is a term which encompasses a catalogue of foreign types; many east and west Germans I met understandably found it hard to say. While even skinheads embraced their international brethren (with their Union Jacks and U.S.-army fatigues), east Germans in particular, so recently refugee material themselves, felt threatened and offended by asylum-seekers. And yet a study by the Central Institute for Youth Research in Leipzig found that in the summer of 1990—that is, before a single asylum-seeker was sent to a temporary camp or assigned housing in east Germany—40 percent of the local youth found them to be “bothersome.” The Leipzig deputy chief of police was more precise: