Bury Me Standing Read online

  The German public and press, though, have been focusing not on the mercenaries but on their controversial cargo. The term “Gypsies,” in its various formulations, is deployed as a buzz word: on the right, it signals the whole impoverished, noxious mess encroaching from the east; in the liberal imagination, “Roma & Sinti” become a synonym for “victim” or “refugee” (ludicrous in the case of the Sinti, as German Gypsies are known, for they have been settled and well integrated for hundreds of years).

  In five days of loitering in and around stations I didn’t find a single family poised to make the crossing. If anything, the traffic was moving east: the returning trickle of people repelled by German authorities. And the Schleppers weren’t handing out calling cards on street corners.

  The track shacks were intended for more permanent use than their appearance suggested. Home for these Gypsies was wherever they wore their hats. For the moment, they weren’t going anywhere. The very word “station” suggested as much, and “terminal” even more extremely (as in illness, or boredom); it was the end. Still, the hope of departure was important, and perhaps it was this, as much as the toilets and traffic, that drew once and future Traveler Gypsies to stations all over Eastern Europe. Wschodnia, however, was not even a point of departure but a shelter: trains no longer left from here (the place was used as a bus depot and bus cemetery).

  Russian soldiers, Poles, Gypsies—here, all were represented in their most reduced forms: respectively, hated outsiders, humiliatingly costumed for a job that didn’t exist; wretched drunks and kooks giving credence to new annual statistics claiming a 30-percent rise in the suicide rate among Polish men; bewildered aliens, maimed or somehow shrunken, whining and begging or just nervously ticking over. Perhaps because I was a token Jew at a Polish train station, to me these diminished people—and the empty tracks, and the human shit, and the mud and cold and atmosphere of detention and destiny about the place—instantly evoked that other last-stop station in Poland, at Auschwitz. In those five days, the eastern terminal came to seem an emblem of the arrested aspirations of the Gypsies, a once gloriously mobile people.

  Such weighing impressions could be alleviated by the fantasy that even this bit of Warsaw might one day be rebuilt and memorialized. A well-informed, if nationally biased, tour guide would, for example, conduct busloads of bored Polish schoolchildren through the reconstructed shacks (now labeled “Migrants’ Dwellings”), along the restored tracks, and down the uniformly dank station corridors, past a small white ski cap among the children’s clothes moldering in a glass display-case. The old cafeteria would now be a new cafeteria.

  Somewhere, of course, people were crossing; perhaps operations had moved closer to the border.

  ···

  Poland is a flat, featureless plain, not improved by its thinning clusters of polluted ever-brown pines. That, anyway, is the view from the Moscow-Berlin express: a blurred tundra marked by pale copses of needleless firs—more spear than tree—and scarecrow birches; a few roofless farmhouses. When you look out the window, it is easy to see why Poland has been continuously overrun, or run through, by its neighbors. There is nothing to stop anyone. There is no place to hide.

  Not even behind one’s book. Prompted, I suppose, by my copy of Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust, the pale, rosy-lipped young Pole in my compartment leaned towards me: “You are a Jewess, isn’t it?” Krzysztof Suchocki had never met an “actual” Jew, he confided—almost apologetically, as if this was a character flaw. Furthermore, he confessed, he was no longer sure of his own faith. Catholicism here used to mean opposition to communism, but now it promised only a different loss of freedom. Krzysztof was referring to the abortion debate recently faxed to the motherland from Rome. To him, everything had the same value. As he commuted across the entire country, away from his hometown of Suwalki, in the remote northeast near the Lithuanian border, where he lived with his parents and grandparents and wife and small son, and where he would return the next day, everything weighed on him as a threat to personal freedom. Even, obscurely, the Jews, who he imagined were all successful businessmen having a wonderful time elsewhere, now that they didn’t live in Poland anymore. Like all Poles, at some level of consciousness he lived uncomfortably among the ghosts of the three million Polish Jews and of all the foreign ones who were brought here to die.

  “I like Jews,” Krzysztof barked, sitting up, buoyant again and searching his pack for his bottle of home-brewed bison-grass vodka, a speciality of his region, the present specimen a speciality of Grampa Suchocki. “Bye-bye, gone is gone, let live and live.” He meant to be nice and kept making it worse.

  “Here!” He passed the zubrówka. “I’ve seen Fiddler on the Roof!”

  Though such encounters are routine, it is a cliché to say that Poles are anti-Semitic; and what, anyway, does it mean, to be “anti” something you don’t know and cannot very accurately imagine? It means, for example, that in 1995 only 8 percent of Poles (among a few thousand surveyed on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz) recognized that the vast majority of victims were Jews. To be sure, Poles were pained that their own wartime sufferings had been eclipsed by the Jewish Holocaust. But also it seemed that here paranoia was bound up with nostalgia: less than a century ago, 75 percent of European Jews lived in Polish territory. You don’t have to have met an “actual” one to sense that there is something missing here. But there didn’t seem much point in asking Krzysztof how he felt about Gypsies.

  By contrast, Gypsies, everywhere in sight, are the focus of a more robust hatred—made fresh by the new openness of democracy, which in the Eastern bloc, in comical contrast to the American variety, still means never having to say you’re sorry. Walls across Eastern and Central Europe are sprayed with Death-to-Gypsies slogans, too many to be the work or sentiment of a small group. But in Poland, Gypsy-bashing gained local legitimacy because here the strangers really were foreigners—they were refugees. Despite the fact that perhaps half a million of them also perished during the war, including many thousands of Polish Gypsies, Carmen has no place in the Polish imagination.

  We didn’t speak again, and only nodded when he finally got off at the stop before me. It was as if the rollicking journey in this train coach, mine and Krzysztof’s temporary mobile home, was a compressed version of a doomed love affair, played out in fast forward: cozy at dawn, with the tiny cabin lights keeping out the dark sky; mental note of full lips and fine skin (his); a shy introduction; curiosity; offerings of food; jokes; booze; confessions; solemnity; recognition of the other as an alien; contempt; and, finally, indifference.

  As you get closer to Germany, you see more and more watchtowers along the tracks, miniature Abe Lincoln log cabins on stilts, from which the Polish border guards, with their binoculars, power torches, and guns, keep a lookout for refugees. But the viewing was poor that day. I joined this train at Warsaw in a blue dawn. Seven hours later, the dim day had barely bothered to begin, and, at 2 p.m., it was darkening fast. As we pulled into Rzepin, the last stop in Poland and the site of prolonged passport control, the only thing I could see looked like two Gypsy men on a bench, across the tracks and lit up in a cone of lamplight under the station portico. They were eating—so fast, so professionally, that they had no talk and no sandwiches, just alternate two-fisted shoveling: salami, bread, salami, bread.

  “Me mangav te jav ando granitza tumensa,” I rehearsed to the now empty train car in Romani, conscientiously intoning its heavy, Indic, back-of-the-throat aspirates, wondering what the Gypsies would make of it—“I want to go to the border with you.” “Isi ma xarica love; so hramosorav andi gazeta; a-ko isi pomoshinav tumen”—“I have a little money; I am a journalist; maybe I can help you.”

  Help? I felt uneasy with my First World guilt. In the former Eastern bloc it is great to be a visiting American. My nation’s generosity, or simply its bountiful image, was everywhere repaid to me personally. Here you yourself (as well as what you did or didn’t own) were what many people thoug
ht they wanted to be. Among Gypsies “USA” tattoos were especially popular. It was only high- and low-minded curiosity that had brought me here in the first place, and now everywhere I felt myself to be a parody of what the Gypsies perhaps all along were only rumored to be: unfreighted, freewheeling. Was I begging or choosing? Who was subsidizing whom?

  The Polish controller sat right down and immersed himself in my overqualified navy-blue passport like a boy bent over a stamp collection. He ran a moist finger back and forth over the deep-purple stamp of Malaysia, the oversize invitation to Tanzania, the faint remains of a trip to Mexico, as if trying to unstick some of their national essence. (Uniquely unintriguing to him was the stamp for Albania, or “E Republikes Popullore Socialiste te Shquiperise,” with the “Popullore” and “Socialiste” touchingly crossed through by hand.) People believe that Gypsies are dangerous because they have nothing to lose. And here I sat, impatient, even indignant, as this pale guard felt up my passport. Swollen with extra pages, that little accordion and its inky scores of distant anthems was the proof that I was the only one who had nothing to lose. I could just leave.

  Hurtling towards the other side—towards Germany, its streets paved with deutschemarks and the attacks on foreigners only a killjoy rumor, as the Gypsies on this side believe—I kept repeating it to myself like a mantra: “A-ko isi pomoshinav tumen”—“Maybe I can help you.” At Rzepin Station I would be given the chance. I was to tell a story, and then I was to trade it, as a Gypsy would, for another.

  Flipping a mental coin, I stood for a time at the streaked train window, peering at the spotlit salami-eaters. Perhaps catching the glint of that coin, one of them paused and looked over to me. He raised his shoulders in a friendly shrug and indicated their stash with an open palm—an invitation to help myself. The border controller’s fascination with my documents gave way to welcome disdain; I pulled my rucksack down off the overhead rack and jumped off the train.

  Mihai and Ion Bardu were brothers. They were small and slight and dark. They stroked their matching mustaches; each kept the nail of his right little finger long and sharp. Over many other garments which did nothing to obscure their thinness, they wore cheap suits, one brown, one gray, all four flared trouser legs frayed at the floor-grazing, mud-caked cuffs. The Bardu boys were Gypsies from Brasov, the old German town of Kronstadt, in Romania. Lucky for me: I was able to say that I knew the place quite well, and this, along with my much-rehearsed Romani, produced bewildered laughter, together with a private view of many gold teeth and an invitation to meet the rest of their group. The two men had made a trip into town to buy provisions, and were returning with the goods after this sampling session on the station platform—just to make sure that everything was shukar, or fine.

  The brothers’ wives were themselves sisters, and with their seven children, including some younger siblings and two babies, they sat around in their layered skirts and their spent felt slippers, waiting tiredly behind a parking-lot fence by a great heap of rusted rails and scrap metal. They were fairly settled in: a few small flames rouged the ashen bed of an old fire. One rag-doll girl of around five lay crying, limply inconsolable and anyway ignored over an older girl’s lap. The rest were amused by my arrival, or maybe just by my accent, and their cheerfully indifferent responses to my kaj, so, kana, kon, soske—my where, what, when, who, why—gradually warmed and sharpened. The women, who laughed the hardest, and whose approbation one naturally most sought, never spoke to me directly but always through the men. The Bardus had been camping behind the scrap heap for nearly a week. With two babies they had crossed three borders and more than a thousand miles from Brasov to Rzepin, in slippers. Now they were waiting for a sign—a sign from Vesh.

  Vesh was the third brother. Earlier in the week he had taken his family and one of Ion’s sons and crossed into Germany. It was no big deal, wading over the silvery Oder, even up here where the water was higher than it was farther down the thirteen-hundred-kilometer border (at the point where the Oder becomes the Neisse). There are low spots everywhere, and there are fewer than a hundred guards for every three hundred kilometers. But there were also deep patches, and currents, and fear among poor swimmers, and poor swimmers with children. Colonel Adamczyk Wieslaw, chief of the Polish border patrol, told me how he himself had seen a young Gypsy woman from Romania attempting to cross with two children—holding one in each hand, as he demonstrated with both elbows hoisted to shoulder height. She lost both of them. Officially, fourteen people had drowned; rumor converted the number to 140, or 1,400. There were tales of bodies chewed up by great back-churning diesel trawlers.

  The Bardus had come this far on their own, and they were mighty scornful of the many more timorous Gypsies who had forked out five hundred deutschemarks per family to a Schlepper. The Bardus got the irony of the professional person-herder telling a Gypsy how to move and travel, and they didn’t find it funny. But for this family, as for so many others, when they were thinking of the other side, of the West, pride in traveling know-how gave way to the sensible fear that they would likely be deported or—perhaps preferable to them—jailed. And so the Bardus had booked themselves in for the second stage of a deluxe package Schlep, which featured a chaperone component: they were to be met on the western bank and shown which roads, camps, and towns to avoid, and which services could be safely milked and how to do the milking.

  Vesh was to telephone his brothers in three days’ time, here, at Rzepin Station, where they had paid off a rail employee to take the call. Five days later, no word. Mihai and Ion were convinced that the Stationmaster had taken their money and ignored the call. And so they sat by the phone—or rather lurked near it, taking turns blocking the grilled ticket window, peering threateningly at the clerk.

  They feared the worst. Had Vesh been nabbed? They didn’t know much about their Schlepper and, perhaps embarrassed and angry that they’d ever hired one, they were vague about what arrangements—or promises—had been made. Mihai and Ion debated, whinnying with exasperation, over whether to follow Vesh or to hang around, or even (they didn’t like to say it in front of the women) to turn back. The day before I arrived it had snowed for the first time. Something had to be decided.

  The brothers were skeptical but they didn’t have much choice. It was obvious. I would go and try to find out what had happened to Vesh. Flushed with a sense of mission, I overpaid a man with a car to drive me to the point at which he had to turn back, and from there I walked.

  It was dark on the bridge over the Oder, except for the lights of the trucks parked all along it. Their Polish and Russian drivers had been waiting for days for permission from German officials to take their Western cargoes east; meanwhile, they had set up camps of their own between the great chrome grilles. Just inside Germany there was a Burger King, with a we’re-in-the-West poster promising a “Whopper Orgie!” Russian soldiers, cinched into their padded coats, drank German beer at high counters, untroubled by the amputated wieners and the pools of thin mustard that ran off a limp deck of paper plates.

  No sign of a slight, dark, mustachioed man in a cheap flared suit. Onwards, by milk train, to Eisenhüttenstadt, home of Germany’s largest refugee reception and sorting camp. If Vesh and family hadn’t simply vanished into the fatherland they might just be here, where they would be lodged until the bureaucracy decided their fate.

  The camp was easy to find: just follow the refugees—the Africans, the Vietnamese, and the sprinkling of badly dressed white folk, namely the Eastern Europeans (though the Gypsies constitute more than a third of the eight-hundred-plus population at the camp, they keep to themselves and you don’t see them on the trains and buses). The camp at Eisenhüttenstadt is enormous: barbed-wire fences (designed more to keep violence out than to keep inmates in), and great three-storied barracks separated by prefab aluminum storage canisters, recently and hastily erected to meet the flow.

  Standing in the cold outside the camp office, in a throng of refugees clutching thin pieces of paper etched in a langu
age they couldn’t understand, I got a glimpse of the life of the seeker. At the front, with one foot inside the office, Kofi, from Ghana, was jutting chin-to-chin with an irritated camp counselor and insisting that the photograph stapled to his application was a photograph of the wrong African. The counselor insisted that the photograph was a photograph of Kofi. Kofi said no way. This went on for ten long minutes, the upshot being that because he could not recognize himself, Kofi would have to reapply for the same papers and the same picture, which would eventually indicate where among Germany’s many refugee camps and halfway housing in cheap hotels he would be processed on to. It would take an additional four to six weeks. Next!

  Inside I was given a guided tour. Olaf, my young guide, mumbled that I mustn’t speak to the inmates. He seemed embarrassed to have to say it. This, along with the unexpected intifada kit—a fringed black-and-white cotton check scarf, army fatigues, and a ponytail halfway down his back—gave hope. Soon I was speaking to a Romany family from Romania. “Do you know Veshengo Bardu?” I asked the man and obvious head of his hovering family. He flinched, I was sure he flinched, but he said nothing. He certainly looked like the Bardus, I thought with some shame, remembering Kofi and his brothers from all-Africa. With nearly three hundred transient Gypsies milling about the place, the identification seemed far-fetched. I spoke to other men in the barracks until Olaf began to paw the ground with one steel-reinforced toecap, indicating that I was pushing my luck.