Bury Me Standing Read online

Looking through the pictures, Emilia was transported. Using Elena and me as stand-ins for bridesmaids, she conducted a demonstration. Led by Emilia, we moved solemnly around the kitchen table, one careful foot after the other, in a procession of the graces (who in the real thing would of course have been three virgins). Emilia had been too tactful to ask me herself, but later she had grilled Elena about my own marital and maternal status. Though infinitely more sophisticated than the women of Albania’s Kinostudio, she too, Elena reported, assumed that I was barren.

  Returning to the photo album, Emilia pointed to herself on the last day of her wedding week: this time she was turned out as the bride of the Western imagination, in a store-bought, star-bright lace confection. She was carrying her shoes. Seeing my puzzlement, Elena again explained: “After all the dancing, the girls collect.” Those dainty slippers—yes, there was a snapshot—would soon be stuffed with new lev notes.

  The next picture showed the child bride sitting in a painted wagon crammed with wedding presents and drawn by two horses, with a file of men walking behind. As I pored over the album, Emilia narrated: “We were then driven to Plamen’s parents’ house, where we would have to live.” In the next shot, Emilia is stepping through a doorway—walking over her own threshold, I guessed—but instead of being carried she was herself carrying a small child in her arms, a traditional plea, according to Elena, for fecundity. Later, Elena would add what the photo didn’t reveal. Emilia’s prayers had already been answered: the perfect bride, she also carried a child in her belly.… The last wedding pictures showed Emilia at her final banquet. She is almost completely obscured by money—by the bills that well-wishing guests had pinned to the bride’s dress.

  There were no more pictures, but Emilia went on with her account of what sounded like one long wedding. “The next day my mother-in-law washed me and gave me a small glass of rakia.” (“To toast her virginity,” Elena professionally filled in.) Emilia remembered every detail of her wedding and described the events with fondness and pride—perhaps because, so soon after, things were to go badly wrong.

  A week later, sixteen-year-old Plamen entered the army to begin his military service. In those two years they saw each other four times. And then, within six months of returning home in 1980, Plamen was sent away again; caught stealing a record player from a Polish tourist in a department-store cafeteria, he was slung in jail to begin a two-year sentence.

  At this point in her story Emilia became animated in a new way (no more shaking laughter). “It was a long wait, and though I had Rumen”—her son by Plamen, who was now fourteen, with chipmunk cheeks, huge eyes, and dimpled chin, just like his mother—“it was not a happy time. Plamen’s mother was a witch. I worked day and night, doing all the washing for the whole family, even while I was nursing. Finally I went back to my mother’s, which caused a terrible scene. Plamen’s father tried to get back the money he had spent on the wedding.”

  There are few taboos more strongly upheld among Gypsies than that against betraying a man while he is in prison. Plamen had no criminal record when he was sent down for two years; there was no doubt that being Gypsy affected the justice they were dealt, even though theirs were generally the pettiest of crimes. A resigned attitude is reflected in the multitude of Gypsy songs about prison life, and in the numerous prohibitions for those waiting on the outside. At fifteen, Emilia hadn’t run off with another man—not yet. But leaving her mother-in-law was unseemly, and if her parents protected her it was partly because they felt that she had married beneath her.

  When Plamen came home on parole, about six months into his sentence, he was unrecognizable. “He was blue,” Emilia said. “From head to toe: he was covered in tattoos. He even had …” She could not say the words and so Elena, who knew the whole story, finished for her, “A rat tattooed on his penis.”

  A Gypsy man may ditch his wife, leaving her with only the stigma of having been left—and therefore with her stock drastically devalued. For even if the “divorcée” is still a teenager, she is now likely to land only a divorced man or a widower. Though it was she who would do the leaving, Emilia at fifteen was used goods. And she knew the score. After we had got to the tattoo episode, Emilia understandably lost her enthusiasm for the conversation, and it was left to Elena to tell me how it all turned out. With Emilia we talked about other things for a while, and then went back to Elena’s apartment, where I was now staying. She was pleased that I was gripped by this tale, as she had been so many years before.

  “There is another, important side to the story,” Elena continued, without pause, as we sat on the floor, smoking BTs and eating stewed cherries out of a jar. “You see, Emilia has an older sister, Nadja. I never met her, but she was always referred to as ‘the ugly one.’ Now she was married years before, around the time that Emilia came with me on the trip to Varna. And then Boiko—Nadja’s husband—dumped her.” Soon it became clear that Elena, always an ethnographer first, was making an interesting point about traditional Gypsy mores. “And why was Nadja pushed out? Because she had failed to produce a child within a year. According to their custom, this was normal—Boiko was acting within his rights as a man.” And while Elena talked and I took my notes, Vesselin did the dishes and got the children ready for bed.

  “Nadja, kicked out with nowhere to turn, had no choice but to leave Sofia. She took the bus for Varna, and when this became known around the quarter the girls’ father forbade even the mention of her name! On pain of pollution, you see.” Although there were not so very many Gypsy prostitutes, Varna, the resort town of Elena’s initiation, was famously the place they went. “But Emilia was not intimidated by her sister’s example. As soon as Plamen was back behind bars, she revealed to her parents her love for Branko, a tall nineteen-year-old from Kostenbrau”—a village outside Sofia. And Branko was from another tribe, the Grastari, or Lovara.

  Stanka at home in Kostenbrau, 1992 (photo credits 3.7)

  Elena was in her element: “The Lovara are [or were] horse-traders. They were the most recently nomadic among our Bulgarian Gypsies, and, at least seasonally, they still are. They keep away from other Gypsies and sell cars and whatever—trade of any kind, gold, and goods for the black market. Some of them are incredibly rich. They regard themselves as the aristocracy and other Gypsy groups seem to agree. Emilia’s new connection was a great excitement for her ambitious parents, and even though they knew the dangers, they put baby Rumen into the back room, and pushed Emilia out the front door.”

  Branko brought Emilia out to Kostenbrau to meet the family. Maybe if they could see her, Elena said, reconstructing the boy’s reasoning, they would forgive her humble origins (“they weren’t bad—Emilia’s ancestors were brushmakers”; but they weren’t great). “She was not received in the main house but instead waited with her flowered suitcase in the dirt drive, outside.”

  It was not difficult to persuade Elena to escort me to Kostenbrau, where this fancy family still lived. We took the half-hour bus ride out to see Stanka, Branko’s grandmother, ostensibly to have my fortune done (Stanka was a famous fortune-teller). Willowy and dark, she had the appealing sallowness of an American Indian and wore her black braids tucked into her apron. I learned little about myself on this visit. But Elena managed to get Stanka to say something of the ill-fated “marriage” of Emilia and Branko. “The girl herself wasn’t the problem,” the older woman said. “It was how she was raised.” Throughout our visit, Stanka’s own daughters-in-law or granddaughters-in-law walked up and down the lot, laden with laundry and busily indifferent to us. These were people who used five bowls for washing, two more than the statutory trio, thus dividing not only men’s clothes from women’s but those worn above the waist from those worn below, and underclothes (in batches of men’s and women’s, washed separately). This group was strictly against marrying out—excluding not only gadje, but all other Gypsies.

  “How do you know she will be clean?” Stanka put to us. “What does she know about it? Her people live in the city,
in flats. They are settled.” Though she didn’t seem to recognize it, Stanka’s own people were also settled. Travel featured largely in their lore, even if they hadn’t budged in ages. This family ran the only restaurant in Kostenbrau—the first privately run place for many miles around. And they kept a large, brightly painted house in the town. It was the biggest on the main street. But they didn’t live in it. We found Stanka where they actually stayed, round the back, half out-of-doors, the whole clan of more than a dozen people piled into two small trailer-type structures and surrounded by cars in various states of dissolution: picked over, reassembled, painted up, junked.

  This scene, though only suggestive of the peripatetic life, gave a clue to why nomadic Gypsies have irritated governments and sedentary folk everywhere and for all time. Unlike settled Gypsies, whose livelihood depended on a steady relationship with the gadje among whom they lived, these took what they needed and moved on. (It was only among transients that swindling was a viable career.) In Kostenbrau, cars were being done up for a quick sale, as Stanka proudly confirmed. In the past, the defects of horses were disguised—oiled or touched up with a tar brush (the equivalent of fiddling with the odometer)—a practice documented not just by Gypsy folklorists but by Rom ethnographers.

  We sat cross-legged on a mattress outside, and Stanka fussed with her pipe, finally abandoning it in favor of straight chewing tobacco. I’d come to have my cards read because I wanted to meet Stanka. I knew that Gypsy fortune-telling was pure theater—for sale exclusively to gullible gadje. No Gypsy would seek solutions through cartomancy or any other form of street corner or parlor divination. And so I hate to say that Stanka’s professional assessment of my situation was eerily accurate. Perhaps, if nothing else, she was a good reader of the human face. But she told me, for instance, in detail, about the illness of someone close to me. When she finished I paid her and she put her cards away. Along with her fee they were stashed under her skirt in the hidden pocket that hung there, loose like a nose bag, beneath the top layer. (The pouch is called a posoti. “Designed for stealing,” Elena said admiringly.)

  Beyond us there was a great flat field. Gazing out over it Stanka looked ever more like an American squaw. She was training her eye on some kind of folly. I asked if I could take a look and she shook her head yes (always confusing in Bulgaria, because their shake for “yes” is ours for “no”). I padded out over the soft ground towards a curious classical apparition. It was a small cement structure, a mini-Parthenon, with pediment, portico, and columns in bas-relief. A great chain lock marked the entrance. This was the tomb of Stanka’s husband. In the temple above his grave there was a pair of car seats, a stretch of deep-pile carpet, a selection of imported spirits and liqueurs, and a small TV. It hadn’t been touched since he himself had been interred two years before.

  Why didn’t they live in their town house? Stanka shrugged. “It is for guests.” That is, for prestige, like the fitted-out sepulcher which showed that they could afford to throw away furniture and a TV. “What matters is this view,” she continued, putting an end to my impertinent questioning. I asked her where she had traveled as a young woman. “Oh, through thousands of fields in every direction: the Carpathian Mountains, the sea, the ocean to the west”—the Adriatic. She never mentioned countries by name.

  Did she want to travel like that again, now that it is no longer forbidden? “Nah,” Stanka replied, spitting out a great wad of tobacco to make the point. “It is impossible now: the pollution is terrible. It would not be pleasant. Now when I travel I go by car.” Without turning her head she pointed her thumb in the direction of an old but still gleaming brown Mercedes in the drive, the most complete-looking motor on the lot.

  It was in the brown Mercedes that, only a year after she had arrived in Kostenbrau, Emilia and her flowered suitcase had been returned to the old quarter in Sofia. Stanka had indulged her grandson. She had given Branko permission to marry Emilia—but only in a registry office, which among the Lovara counted for even less than it did among other Gypsies. There was to be no wedding, and certainly no bride-price (which, East or West, is index-linked to the price of a new car).

  On the bus back into Sofia, Elena filled in once more. “Emilia became pregnant again, and she and Branko and then baby Rambo lived in the big house.” Now I understood: the house was “for guests.” “As soon as she had finished nursing, Emilia was sent back. Within six months, Branko of course married again—a big Gypsy wedding. And his family kept Rambo. Emilia tried to get him back. She went with her father and took him, and then, within a few days, the Grastari would come in the brown Mercedes and take him back again.”

  Emilia had fought for custody in the Bulgarian courts (which alone recognized her marriage to Branko), and won. “And Branko’s family would steal Rambo back again.” Against these Gypsies, Emilia couldn’t win, and she knew it. She still had Rumen, but she had lost Plamen and Branko and Rambo. “Even her parents hadn’t protested when she left home for the third time. There was nothing more that they could do for her.”

  For a while Emilia had stayed with Elena. Then she’d lived in Belgrade and got as far as Slovenia. Now, in the place where I had met her, Emilia and Rumen were living together; she had a gadjo boyfriend—a married man, I understood, who paid the rent and came and went. Like her older sister, Nadja, “the ugly one,” Emilia was beyond the pale.

  Before I left Sofia, I begged Elena to take me to meet Emilia’s family, the people who had first taken in the disgraced Pioneer. She hadn’t seen them herself for many years. The mother hugged Elena for a long time and burst into tears at the mention of her “little” daughter. “It is impossible at the moment for us to see Emilia. I don’t even know where she is living.” This wasn’t true. Her mother did see her, but these visits were a shameful secret. Had Elena heard the good news, though? Emilia’s mother reached into her pocket and pulled out a color photograph, a color photograph of “the ugly one.” It was Nadja, Emilia’s “barren” and (as it happened) quite pretty older sister, on the Varna boardwalk with her new husband, his trombone, and, in matching bonnets, their brand-new baby twins.

  FOUR

  The Least Obedient People in the World

  ON SEPTEMBER 20, 1993, in the rural Transylvanian village of Hadareni, two Gypsy brothers, Rupa-Lucian Lacatus and Pardalian Lacatus, got into a fight with a young Romanian, Chetan Craciun, and his father, during which Chetan was fatally stabbed. In retaliation, other Romanians clubbed the Gypsy boys to death with pitchforks and shovels. A third Gypsy, Mircea Zoltan, was “carbonized at home” (as the English-language Romanian reports described it). A group of villagers then went on to torch fourteen Gypsy houses and to damage thirteen others, and that night the total of some 175 Gypsies, whose families had lived there for seventy years, were hounded out of town. Several policemen stood by throughout the evening’s events; firemen arrived towards midnight, hours after the blazes began. The fire trucks had been kept away, according to the banished Gypsies, by order of the deputy mayor of Hadareni, Gheorghe Bucur, who was himself a spectator at the burning. Some Gypsies tried to return to the village in the days that followed, making do in the bits of houses that remained; but within a few weeks they were again forced out. One woman who had tried to go home said she was spat on and jeered at, and was frightened for her life. “They ring the church bells whenever they see one of us,” she said, “and we know what that means.” A year later, most of the Gypsies were still in hiding, no one had been brought to trial, and the promise of an investigation was a dwindling memory.

  The most dramatic change for Central and East European Gypsies since the revolutions of 1989 has been the sharp escalation of hatred and violence directed at them. There have been more than thirty-five serious attacks on settlements in Romania alone, mainly in remote rural areas, and mostly in the form of burnings and beatings, although some Gypsies have been murdered and children have been maimed. Istvan Varga, for example, a three-year-old boy from Transylvania, was burned to death in a
haystack.

  Almost immediately after the revolution and the execution of the Ceausescus, the attacks began, and swiftly gained momentum; settlements fell in a distended domino effect, reaching to the outer edges of Romania. In January 1990, in Reghin, central Transylvania, three houses belonging to Gypsies were set on fire, for no apparent reason, by Hungarians and Romanians acting together. On February 11, 1990, in Lunga, in eastern Transylvania, six houses were destroyed and four Roma died in a fight with local Hungarians. In the same month, near Satu Mare, thirty-five Gypsy houses were destroyed by Hungarian inhabitants of the town of Turulung. In April, in Seica Mare and Clinic, Gypsy quarters were devastated; in neither case did the attackers claim a motive, or even a pretext.

  Map of Romania showing the locations of violent incidents against Roma

  In June, hundreds of coalminers from the Jiu Valley in southwestern Romania, armed with clubs, were brought to Bucharest by special train. They were responding to the urgent call of the new president, Ion Iliescu, to end the first major protest against his government. Although the “enemies of the state” (sometimes also called “the enemies of democracy”) were identified by officials as students, many singled out for attack were Gypsies, picked up miles away from the demonstrations. Roving bands of miners were escorted—by policemen, some victims would later report—directly from their trains into Gypsy neighborhoods. They beat them in the street and in their homes. The belongings of some Gypsies were stolen by the miners, who would claim that they were all stolen goods anyway. One pregnant Gypsy woman told a Romanian reporter that she had been raped by a miner, or by someone posing as one, in the back of a truck and in the presence of her little niece. An old Gypsy woman had a fatal heart attack after watching her children and grandchildren being dragged from their hiding places under beds and in cupboards and badly beaten. As a final indignity, many of those who had been attacked were then arrested and thrown into Bucharest’s Magurele military barracks, which was being used as a temporary prison.