Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  In truth, Nicolae had been mourning those humane, internationalist values for a long time, well before the Securitate swooped. In the seventies he was a well-assimilated member of the Romanian Communist Party; he had changed, and then everything around him changed. After Ceausescu’s famous denunciation of the 1968 Russian tank roll into Prague, Romania moved farther and farther from Moscow and into something known as Socialist Nationalism: the Party became a baldly nationalist organ. Nicolae felt betrayed. The Romanian writer Norman Manea—deported as a (five-year-old) Jew by Antonescu, and an exile from Ceausescu’s regime—puts his finger on it: “The question of the stranger in a society which estranges everybody from it—while forcing everybody to assimilate their own alienation—takes cover under dubious and sinister masks.” And so it was only as a sociologist, taking testimony from desperate Gypsy survivors of the war deportations, that Gheorghe recognized in them his own history, and possibly his future.

  Now I was in Bucharest to meet Nicolae. I tried to telephone him, without success. As late as I dared, I dialed again. A woman picked up on the first ring.

  “Da?”

  “Hello, is Nicolae there?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Uh, well. My name is … Could you please ask him to ring me when he gets in?” Silence.

  “No, I’m not sure I can do that.”

  Oh dear. It was after 11 p.m. “The thing is,” I explained, afraid she’d got the wrong impression, “we have a plane to catch first thing in the morning—to go to a village that has been attacked. I was hoping to make a plan.…”

  “I’m not expecting Nicolae home tonight.”

  Now what? I paused, hoping she would offer some clue. I was about to give up when finally she spoke.

  “Nicolae has been kidnapped.”

  Her name was Ina. And she was terrified. Like most Romanians she was a skilled dissimulator, but her fright could be measured by the fact that within a few hours she had amassed two American human-rights lawyers, a commentator from French television, a Romanian journalist, and a wire reporter. Outside attention, she believed, might help to galvanize the police. Ina was convinced that Nicolae had been kidnapped by rival Rom leaders Octavian Stoica and the blue-haired Nicolae Bobu. In the course of the night this was confirmed: he had been forced into a car by two men, and the witness, also Rom, recognized the kidnappers.

  Early the next morning, Ina heard a rumor that Nicolae had been taken north, to Sibiu, in Transylvania, where Ion Cioaba, the Kalderash racketeer and now self-proclaimed King of the Romanian Gypsies, had his headquarters. By ten o’clock, it emerged that Nicolae had been removed to a small town near Rîmnicu Vîlcea, about four hours northwest of Bucharest, near the monastery where the annual Kalderash festival had been held a month or so before. (This is also Cioaba country. Was he somehow involved?) It seemed likely that Nicolae had been snatched in order to face a kris, a Gypsy trial. If true, this was a serious business. A kris is outside Romanian law. There is no appeal.

  By the time I arrived with the Romanian journalist—the remains of our original squad—at the remote village hall, the trial was in full swing. The defendant, the accusers, and possibly neutral luminaries were seated on the raised stage. There was Cioaba. There were Bobu and Stoica and Cioaba’s notorious daughter, Luminitsa. In the gallery were three hundred of the scruffiest and most disorderly Gypsies I had ever seen gathered in one room, all of them jeering. Loyal to her father, Luminitsa later described this meeting to me as a kris, but it looked like a kangaroo court. A kris would be announced well in advance; it would be public, as this one was, but the accuser and the accused would each be allowed to select a judge. (That judge would in turn select a third, and possibly others, depending on the gravity of the crime.)

  First, Nicolae was accused of stealing funds donated to his organization by the World Council of Churches. Over and over he invited anyone at all to examine the books of his Ethnic Federation of Roma, but they talked over him; the accusation itself was the vital thing. Nicolae had no right of reply. Anyway, he would not have been heard through the din. The room was crowded, hot, and angry. It was clear that these Gypsies were mainly Kalderash—among the most traditional, least assimilated Gypsies, who numbered some two hundred thousand in Romania alone. Although Ion Cioaba claimed to be their leader, they didn’t appear to recognize any authority. In fact the meeting seemed about to erupt. One rough-looking woman interrupted the proceedings to complain hoarsely that she could not feed her ten children. But it was her face that was evidence of the severity of Gypsy law: the left nostril had been slashed through—traditional punishment inflicted by her husband for adultery.

  Stoica, a fiery-tongued evangelical type, accused Nicolae of “anti-Romanian activity.” This sounded familiar. Already on the morning of Nicolae’s trial a smear article about him had appeared in the violently nationalist (and robustly anti-Semitic and anti-Gypsy) România Mare, or Greater Romania. Enough Gypsy leaders were themselves sufficiently “Balkan”—or shortsighted, cynical, and politically perverse—to sacrifice one of their own in favor of a nation that condones attacks on their people. And some, like Stoica, were fanatic patriots, pathetically raging against the stereotype that a Gypsy is by definition disloyal (and probably a spy). But with the support of outsiders Nicolae’s Gypsy enemies could do more than beat him up in the woods; they could supply the “proof” that would make it difficult for him to leave Romania, and thereby curtail his alleged efforts to besmirch the reputation of the Romanian nation abroad.

  Nicolae was threatened, roughed up, warned, and then released. Still, the so-called kris was significant: a dramatic manifestation of the fundamentalist forces that threaten not only individuals but the whole Romany movement.

  Much later, when I asked Nicolae what had happened during the night of his kidnap, he coolly replied, “They complained that whenever they spoke to me I looked at my watch. I guess they were trying to get my attention.” If Nicolae was cool it was because he had been through versions of this before—many times, since the 1970s, when he’d done his field work and had first properly recognized himself as a Rom. After that experience Nicolae, a confused, thirty-year-old doctoral candidate, sought induction into the “authentic” world of Gypsies, and it was Cioaba he found.

  Ion Cioaba never learned to read and write, and in the seventies he took Nicolae on as a kind of secretary. Nicolae wrote hundreds of letters on his patron’s behalf, many of them in the cause of recovering confiscated Kalderash gold. When Nicolae told me that as a child he had felt himself to be “lower caste,” I had assumed he meant inferior to the white world all around him. But as he talked about his early days with Cioaba, I realized that it was other, “realer” Gypsies whom he had secretly or half-consciously envied. I asked him what someone like Cioaba represented to him. “They are,” he said, “what you might call aristocrats.”

  I first met Cioaba in 1992, at his office in Sibiu, in Transylvania. He was squashed into a swivel chair behind his desk and on his head was perched a tall black astrakhan hat, the very model favored by the late dictator. On the wall was a color election poster of himself as “Senator Cioaba Ion,” slightly younger and no slimmer: he is about five feet two and nearly as wide. (Powerful Gypsies tend to be very fat. Heft is suggestive of authority and wealth, as it once was among rich Western Europeans; among Gypsies, a large head is itself regarded as an auspicious feature in any man.) Behind him was the framed desktop diploma of “Doctor Ian Cioaba,” from “Texas America University.” The only other decor was his jewelry: a solid gold watch and, crammed onto each finger, a chunky gold ring. One of them (which had been sawn off by the time I next saw him) was a signet ring with his initials, I.C., fashioned into a hammer and sickle. All of his front teeth were capped with gold. Normally Cioaba charged journalists for interviews, but this time he waived his fee. He was enjoying himself. “If you were a woman,” he said, giving me an illustration of Kalderash life, “you would not be allowed to cross in front of my desk. You
walk behind.”

  His was indeed a traditional household. Across the road from his shopfront office the Cioaba mansion loomed, yet his children were the first of his family to grow up under a roof (and even in cold weather the old women seemed always to be hanging around outside). His diminutive stepmother stood at the gates, with coin-plaited waist-length gray hair and long red skirts, smoking a pipe and fingering a worn deck of cards. As we passed, she tugged at my sleeve and mumbled, attempting to get my business, only to be immediately silenced by the imperious stepson she had raised.

  Throughout the Ceausescu period, Cioaba traveled abroad, which could only mean advanced connections with the security forces. The Cioabas were the first in Sibiu to own a car, then the first to own a Western car (a Mercedes), and they had the first television. Interestingly, these gadgets had made no impact on even their visible culture, and Cioaba’s daughter, Luminitsa, showed no sign of the twisted identity that such swift upward mobility normally entrains. She cheerfully recounts the time her pipe-smoking grandmother ran away shrieking from the television. A Western was on; she thought the horses were real. Among the Kalderash conspicuous wealth guaranteed Cioaba’s status. For Nicolae, it was the reverse: he admired the extent to which Cioaba had become a successful settled businessman without relinquishing a single aspect of traditional life. It was those traditions that had kept the family independent.

  Kalderash Rom with silver buttons and copper pots, Poland, circa 1865 (photo credits 8.1)

  The Kalderash were metalworkers but like many Gypsies they were also traders. As a child Ion Cioaba had spent two years in the deportation camps in Transdnistria. Even there his father had managed to trade gold. Fifty years on, the Cioabas still made kazans, the distillers for home brewing that once were standard items in East European households. Out in a muddy lot behind the house I glimpsed an ancient scene: a brother and several nephews with long, tangled hair lifting heavy hammers and pounding copper on an anvil. But now Cioaba also had an industrial-scale boilermaking concern in town, and, whenever the chance arose, he bought gold. (Did I have any gold I’d like to sell? he asked within minutes—for hard currency of course.)

  Cioaba presided over the annual autumn festival of the Kalderash, at the monastery of Bistrita. To the untrained eye this two-day jamboree looked like a giant car-mart. Hundreds of Mercedes and BMWs were parked any which way, and groups of girls in shiny dresses danced together between the fenders. Families unfurled their elaborate picnics, each one-upping the next with turkeys, lamb, goats, and pigs, spit-roasted right there in the parking lot. Finally it dawned on me: Love k-o vast, bori k-o grast, as the saying goes—Money in hand, bride on horse. This was a bride market. Kalderash of course did not marry out, but neither could they wed too close, and so they came from all over, displaying their wealth of motors and daughters and gold, ready to buy and sell.

  Although the great majority of (even Kalderash) Gypsies clearly didn’t have the resources to attend such an event, this sumptuous display fueled the fantasies of Romanians who insisted that all Gypsies were filthy rich—black-market rich. But they didn’t care; they answered only to themselves, and they could afford to be contemptuous of the majority.

  To be a senator, elected or invented, wasn’t much. A “doctorate” was hardly grand. And so, in 1992, Ion Cioaba pronounced himself King of the Romanian Gypsies. He had a gold crown made and rented Sibiu’s Orthodox church for an elaborate coronation. But there was competition. Cioaba’s cousin Iulian Radulescu (with whom he was also xanamiki, or a co-parent-in-law), had returned from a brief but glamorous stint in Queens, New York. Not to be outdone, Radulescu countered with a claim to be Emperor of All Gypsies Everywhere. The two have been bickering and issuing royal—or imperial—denunciations of each other ever since.

  Ion Cioaba, self-proclaimed King of the Romanian Gypsies, with his wife (right) and daughter, Luminitsa, enjoying a turkey at the annual festival of the Kalderash at the monastery of Bistrita, at Costesti, September 1991. This was the first time for several years that they were allowed to hold the jamboree (which had been banned under Ceausescu), where Kalderasha from across the country come to exchange news, do business, and find brides. (photo credits 8.2)

  Many Gypsy leaders were infuriated by these antics, which were attracting the wrong kind of interest. Nicolae also disapproved of the two Pretenders, but as a sociologist he recognized their shrewdness. Romania has never been a democratic country; and it has seldom been so unstable. Into the vacuum of authority, these two stepped up with their maces, cynically hoping to fill a gap for the country’s large Gypsy population. Mainly, though, they had struck on a commercial hit for export; Gypsy kings after all were the invention of the gadjo imagination. Like many instant kings before them, they knew that royalty had an appeal that secretaries general and co-chairpersons did not.

  The wedding of the Cioabas’ thirteen-year-old granddaughter, with her father (in the hat), an aunt, her mother (far right), and, in front, Ion Cioaba’s stepmother, 1990 (photo credits 8.3)

  And sure enough, quality Western papers ran their spreads on the royal cousins, in features sections but also in the news pages. If every article appropriately quoted Nicolae Gheorghe, none could resist a giggling reference to those wacky Gypsy monarchs. And they were good copy, specializing in insults. While deportation survivor Cioaba leapt to pay tribute to the wartime fascist dictator, Iulian the First made headlines with his “regretful” agreement with the incendiary taunt thrown out by the extremist Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky: Romania was an artificial state, populated exclusively by Italian Gypsies.

  Gypsies themselves have never recognized kings. Local, brokering leaders—the bulibasha, the vojvoda, the shero rom, and the baro rom (literally “big man”)—were the most any group needed or tolerated, and these men were really judges rather than rulers. Such leaders lasted only so long as they were respected. But the earliest Gypsy visitors to Western Europe had also called themselves royals, and captains and counts; the Romanian “monarchs” of the 1990s were merely recovering an old adaptation, a cherished costume, that had been in storage during the communist period.

  Preparing the wedding feast are the young bride’s mother (second from right), all her aunts, and in the center her grandmother, Cioaba’s wife, 1990. (photo credits 8.4)

  The Kalderash seemed to have a particular talent for the job. They had attempted to establish a dynasty once before, in the late 1920s, in Poland. Those Kalderash, in particular a family called Kwiek, were in their turn recovering a lost role. In the mid-seventeenth century Gypsy kings were appointed by the Polish Royal Chancery to represent (and to tax) all Gypsies in the territories. They had no traditional or innate authority; they were simply well-dressed bullies with their own police force. And within a single generation these fiefdoms had been subsumed by the Polish gentry. In the 1860s, following the end of slavery, a wave of Gypsies entered the former Polish Commonwealth, and some of them would reclaim the title. These were the aristocrats—Kalderash and Lovara, another dynamic tribe—much resented by the mostly settled Polish Gypsies, who had no comparable form of independent income or self-government, and no such finery (the male visitors wore fur coats and colored waistcoats with egg-size silver buttons). The newcomers managed to establish domination over the long-resident Gypsies. Their fabulous wealth and bravado—and, mainly, their self-belief—were important elements, as they are today. The Kalderash kings also established themselves by making deals with government bodies, thereby securing privileges over the Polish Gypsies, for whom such behavior was unthinkably treacherous. The Kwieks were a family of exceptional ambition, and several members of their vitsa, or clan, applied directly to the police, offering services in exchange for recognition as the highest Gypsy authority. Thousands of people, including many foreign diplomats, went in 1937 to watch as Janusz Kwiek in an ermine-trimmed robe (rented from the Warsaw Opera) was crowned by the archbishop.

  In the traditional society of even the present-day Kalder
ash, Luminitsa, the eldest daughter, was an anomalously independent woman, quite unprepared to “walk behind.” She had married in her early teens, as Kalderash girls do, but had somehow managed to break away with impunity, even to avoid having children. She was also highly literate. And she had traveled alone—to America, where she rapidly learned English, and sold Gypsy costumes on the street outside the UN in New York’s Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. When she returned to Sibiu, she moved into a studio above her father’s office and from there she edited and published a full-color magazine—really a fanzine—with articles, horoscopes, short stories, chapters from a novel, poems, and letters to the editor, mostly about Luminitsa and all written by Luminitsa under various names, published alongside pictures of Luminitsa—in a hat, with a horse, lying on a rug with a carnation between her teeth. Luminitsa, in addition, was always trying transparently to fleece someone—me, for instance (her performance was so enjoyable, say, in telling my fortune, that whatever she came up with it was worth the price and the indignity of the con). Here too there was an echo of the Kalderash past. For the last Kwiek to retain power was Katarzyna Kwiek-Zambila, the sister of King Janusz; until her death in 1961, she commanded the respect and position normally reserved for men, including, as it had for Luminitsa, the privilege of taking part in a trial—the kris.

  Luminitsa was a proper princess: she was haughty and ruthless and more than at ease with her own person (which she crop-sprayed with perfumed French talc)—in contrast to such privileged Gypsy women as Antoinette in Bulgaria, who had attended the French Lycée, or even compared to Nicolae, with all his educated, questing intelligence and celebrity. Luminitsa’s privilege had not come at the price of deracination—she had sold Gypsy costumes, not Romipen, her Gypsiness. In the end it wasn’t surprising that Nicolae had attached himself to the Cioaba family. They traded languages. From them Nicolae learned Romani, and in return he taught them the language of gadjo politics, of bureaucracy, of the Party. And then, in 1984, Cioaba traded Nicolae: it was Cioaba who denounced his protégé to the authorities as the author of the article in the French journal.