Bury Me Standing Read online

  Nuzi and Viollca’s picture hung over the doorway of the tiny built-on room they shared with their son, Walther. Viollca at thirteen looked like Viollca now, at eighteen: huge green eyes that were more cross than quizzical, hard-set into the middle of her square face; her painted lips seemed thin and black in the photograph. Nuzi was captured in a moment of swollen adolescent beauty that was now fairly well decompressed. The mouth was full and pouty; the raised right eyebrow was there but not yet fully or archly hoisted. A pretty-boy, a pinup: except for his vanity, in that portrait there was little of Nuzi now—Nuzi, the anxious dreamer.

  All summer he wore the same pair of perfectly faded jeans—whitening evenly over the thighs and bleached at the crotch—and he rotated his shirts, careful always to fold back the cuffs to the same tan-line on the forearm. Nuzi looked athletic, but in fact he never lifted a finger except to bring a cigarette to his sulking lips. He smoked and he hardly ate—not, one sensed, for lack of appetite, but because he was watching that perfect blue-jean fit. And he walked. Nuzi walked every day, for hours and hours, into town and around it, up and down and all through the sloping neglect of Hoxha Park. This wasn’t for exercise either; it was for survival.

  Dritta with her favorite plastic orange tree and one of her dolls. In the background are Lili, Viollca, and Lela. Kinostudio, Tirana, 1992 (photo credits 1.5)

  Alone among the Dukas, he was permanently restless. Nuzi was my great escape from the courtyard at Kinostudio; with him I covered the town. He wanted to make sure I understood him; he had a lot to get across. And so we developed a system. Shnet pach! is the Albanian equivalent of “Bless you!” said after a sneeze. “Shnet?” Nuzi would inquire, and, if I had understood, I’d reply with a triumphant “Pach!”

  On a day of constant drizzle, we walked away from Tirana’s Skanderbeg Square along the Boulevard of Martyrs and up towards Hoxha Park (which all the Dukas affectionately called Enver Park). Along the way we passed one of the capital’s two hotels, the Dajti, with its out-of-scale columns looming in the best Stalinist style. Outside the hotel, on either side of the broad steps, two Gypsy boys in matching Michael Jackson T-shirts were voguing atop two vast white plinths, which had supported a bronze Lenin and a bronze Stalin until they were evicted the year before. Such blank spaces—great marble question marks—exist in every town square in Albania. Only one rider still rears above his pedestal. He is Albania’s national hero, on Albania’s national hero’s horse: it is Gjergji Kastrioti, known to all as Skanderbeg. In the fifteenth century Skanderbeg briefly liberated parts of his homeland from Ottoman control. His small victories have earned him the lasting reverence of an unlucky populace, though they were succeeded by a further 450 years of the Turk.

  Certain heroes from Latin America turn up in unlikely places, distributed abroad by their small countries’ governments at a rate of about one statue for every ten citizens (the smaller the country, it seems, the more eager the gift). Bolivar, of course, but also Uruguay’s Artigas, both of whom can be found, for example, in puny Emil Markov Park on the outskirts of Sofia, in Bulgaria. In Albania there is no such competition, no national-hero theme park. One has the impression that every Albanian cooperative, or block association (if there were such things), is the proud possessor of a Skanderbeg. In this avenue, the Boulevard of Martyrs, replicas of the rearing hero appear so frequently that they give the illusion of a military parade or gymkhana. There is only one martyr. And now more than ever his statues seem an appropriate symbol of his nation’s paralyzed aspirations: mid-gallop, raring to go, forever riveted to the plinth.

  The rain was coming down hard. Perhaps it was the combined talk of Skanderbeg and his horse that imbued Nuzi with the self-sacrificing determination to show me the Tirana zoo.

  “Zoooo,” said Nuzi. “Shnet?”

  “Pach: zoo,” I replied, and we pulled up our jackets into tents over our wet heads and climbed the nettled path in Hoxha Park. Like all parks this one had benches and, despite the rain, these benches were occupied by variously bedraggled or determinedly ponchoed couples who had come to the zoo grounds for petting. Nuzi remarked adamantly that I would find no Roma among these neckers. Like Artani on an earlier walk, he was continually generalizing about and defending Romany practices, mainly by way of favorable comparison with “Albanians.” Artani had pointed scornfully to a “disko,” as the sign said over the door of a sail-shaped sixties building that once housed the Hoxha Museum. “You would find not one Rom there,” he sneered. “Why not?” I asked, thinking it might be fun to go with the brothers to Albania’s first-ever discotheque. “A disco is for developed people,” he said with finality, using some of the little Italian we shared to make sure I understood. I think he meant overdeveloped people—that is, rotten, jaded, and loose. So, no disco.

  If the disco represented some circle of hell for the Duka boys, to my eye (and to my nostrils) the zoo was its molten heart. The disgraceful pavilion was death row for wildlife. Standing before it, collar firmly over nose, one could only wonder why all the animals hadn’t been killed, as all Albanian laboratory animals had been by now, one researcher told me, for lack of food. He hadn’t meant food to feed the rats and rabbits: the pink-eyed specimens had all been stolen and sold as food. The newspapers printed warnings about the rare cancers and viruses that these black-market Rodentia carried. Luckily Jeta stuck with the sheep.

  Still, stunned curiosity impelled us forward. There was a bear-dog, and a lion-dog, with enough remaining fur-patches between them to quilt a chihuahua. The smallest hairless animals—and it was unclear what they were, or had once been—looked like large baby hamsters: pink tubes. A pair of eczema-stricken piglets were probably pumas when they first arrived in Hoxha Park. An X-ray tiger lay head-down and ill in one cage; next along was an ex-chimp, morosely bathing in a manky puddle below his little section of tree. There was a dead tortoise and something that looked like a hunk of pressed peat: was it an iguana? No, it was another dead tortoise, a naked one. Perhaps the keeper had made off with its valuable shell.

  The birds didn’t look as though they could fly, or walk, or even step out of the congealing egg-drop soup they all stood in and tried to pull loose from—the liquid was like chewing gum on your shoe sole. In contrast to their neighbors, the birds at least resembled some lightweight version of themselves. In the last cage there was an eagle, its Turkish trousers now several sizes too big, and the beak bunched and rippled into accordion ridges from some kind of beaky osteoporosis, so that it looked as though it had been punched, hard.

  “The eagle,” Nuzi told me, with unnecessary irony, “is our national bird.”

  On the way back to town, we ducked out of the now sluicing rain into the vast park café. All over Central Europe enormous eateries with uniformly slow and surly service are a reminder of the old regimes’ grand contempt for overheads and profits.… It was empty except for me and Nuzi, a soaked pair of defeated petters, and a cluster of unchaperoned Gypsy children bobbing about a distant table. They had been dashing in and out of the rain through a broken plate-glass window, as a dare, it seemed: who could go through and not get cut? Though barely dressed, they seemed indifferent to the cold rain which streamed down their legs.

  “They are not Roma,” Nuzi asserted, pre-empting any insolent suggestion from me. Well then, who, or what, were these water babies?

  “They are Jevgs,” Nuzi explained in his most professorial tone, “and we call them sir.” Sir is Romani for garlic. And no, in no way were the Jevgs related to the Roma—shnet? he added, displeased with my skeptical expression.

  The Jevgs were originally Egyptian slaves in the Turkish army, I read later, with special responsibility for the care of horses—a detail which suggests they might indeed have been Gypsies. As for the Egyptian tag, this seemed a standard way of disowning other tribes, for hadn’t the Gypsies themselves been called Egyptians (thereby gaining the name Gypsy)? Some Jevgs were now keen to promote the Egyptian theory, just as Europe’s earliest Gypsy visitors ha
d found it useful to do. In 1990, a group of Jevgs in Macedonia consecrated a mosque of their own on Lake Ohrid: they invited the Egyptian ambassador and (to his embarrassed bewilderment) publicly proclaimed themselves a lost tribe of Egypt.

  From the Dukas’ point of view, all that mattered was that these guttersnipes—and they seemed mainly to be children, though even the adults one sometimes saw were small enough to qualify—were not Roma. The “proof” of this was that they did not speak Romani; and speaking Romani was the kernel of Gypsy identity.

  Marcel, who was very knowledgeable not just about Balkan languages but about its ethnographies, later confirmed that the Jevgs probably were Gypsies, belonging to a group thought to have appeared in the region long before the Dukas’ ancestors. Like other groups (the Ashkali and Mango in Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia), they were Gypsies who had lost their language. Lack of documents about such fringe folk makes them vulnerable to anyone’s version of history; and so while Gypsy activists may wish to recuperate these deracinated elements to bulk up the tribe, or as proof of the assimilationist crimes against their people, those who live on the same patch of ground are free to disown them. Like half-breeds, such groups are sometimes rejected with more hostility than are gadje, the primary “other” in the Rom imagination. All sentimentality among the Gypsies is reserved for song.

  To Mbrostar

  A WHOLE WEEK had passed since I visited the maternity hospital and the floket with Jeta, but O Babo’s anger over our lateness still smoldered. He had forbidden her from accompanying Marcel, Gimi, and me on a day trip to visit some rural Gypsy communities, and relented only on the condition that he come along and that we “stop off” in the town of Mbrostar, hours away from where we were going, to pay a visit to his brother.

  We set off with a packed lunch early the next morning and made a long climb through the calcite-white Dajti Mountains, passing under Skanderbeg’s crumbling castle before arriving in Fushë-Krujë, where the poorest Gypsies I had ever seen were living in mud huts and twig shacks, some no bigger than appliance cartons. One or two houses at the front of the settlement were more substantial: lime-slaked, thick-walled, adobe-style structures, with the lumpy appearance of hand-molded clay. At the farthest end of the camp from the road there were families living in plastic bags. (Gypsy settlements often evolve in this way: the most presentable parlors make an impression at the front and conceal the real slums—subsections, with names like No-man’s-land—at the rear.) Most of the people living in Fushë-Krujë had been laborers on a nearby farm. We could just make out the skeleton of its blown-out buildings—roofbeams against a cloudless sky.

  Within a few minutes the whole population, some three hundred people, were pressing in around us, small children filling in the spaces between grown-ups’ legs and under their arms. Just as there were always ravaged, beaten-down older people, and a couple of kids with minor disabilities like crossed eyes, there always seemed to be one outrageous beauty an angel who would have been forced into indentured topmodeldom had she been found on a Paris bus; or a wavy-lipped, chisel-chinned, almond-eyed boy-warrior out of the Iliad, as beautiful as humans come.

  The crowd quickly became oppressive. In rural settlements when the whole joint pressed up against you, you could become truly claustrophobic, trapped and crouching in the airless center. “Ov yilo isi?” Marcel asked, meaning “Is it okay?” (literally, “Is there heart here?”). An ancient toothless man in a grimy felt fez crawled out of his hutch—a twig cocoon with an artfully woven roof—to say that, yes, there was, except in winter when they had to “feed the rats.” He laughed heartily at his joke, his Adam’s apple bobbing hysterically and twanging the thick cords of his turkey neck. The oldest person on the site (though he had no idea how old), he told us that before they had come to work at the farm some thirty years before, his people had been traveling basket-weavers. And certainly a trace of the craft could be seen in his pitiful house, even though it was not tall enough for him to stand in or deep enough to lie down in without his feet sticking out. When he’d had enough of us he inched inside on the backs of his fists and we said goodbye to his feet.

  Gimi—Palumb Furtuna—was normally tolerant and sensitive, but he had refused to enter the settlement, as had O Babo. From his car seat he told me that these Gypsies were in fact much richer than those in Kinostudio, but that they “didn’t know how to live.” It was a common—and in this case obviously false—view, but one normally held by struggling gadje who believed that all Gypsies hid sacks of gold coins in the folds of their filthy skirts.

  We stopped at another village—Yzberish—which was poor but markedly less desolate. Here the Gypsies, who belonged to a group called the Chergari, carefully (and untypically) maintained fences of tethered branches; unlike most Roma, who greet intruders with deep suspicion or open hostility, they were friendly and relaxed, and they did not press in on us with complaints that they hoped we might pass on to “the government.” Exceptionally elegant people, these Chergari were tall and dark as bitter chocolate, with long, thin faces and features and straight hair. And as in Fushë-Krujë they had no idea of the wider world of Gypsies, even of other groups in Albania (they were stunned when short, butterscotch-brown Jeta spoke to them in Romani. And she in turn was astonished that they understood). The Chergari had equally little grasp of their own history, about which they could tell us nothing (their name means “tent-dwellers,” though they were tent-dwellers no longer). As for the present, there was little to be said: there was no work, and they lived on the eggs of their ducks and their chickens, supplemented by the sunflowers and apricots that grew everywhere around.

  As we left Yzberish, an old woman, so thin that her cheekbones seemed to be pointing out of her face, hung on to my sleeve. She wanted to show me something. She reached into her apron pocket and produced a fuzzy scrap of white paper, no bigger than a gum wrapper, folded down to the size of a thumbnail. The others were already in the car, but I waited while she shakily unwrapped it. She held it up close to my eyes, and I saw nothing—maybe a slight smudge of dirt. I took it from her, and checked the other side. Nothing. Apart from the grubby crease marks it was blank. Disappointed, she retrieved and quickly refolded the slip and smuggled it back into her deep front pocket.

  What had I failed to see? Written on that piece of paper, she claimed, was the telephone number of her son, a refugee in Italy. It probably had been once, written in pencil that had long since worn away. If she was illiterate, which seemed likely, and had never been able to read the characters, what she had seen there was already an abstraction. Anyway, I am sure that she did see and continued to see that telephone number. “Te xav ka to biav,” the old woman called after me as I climbed into the car: May I eat at your wedding.

  I felt close to tears as we left and wished we could go back to Tirana. But we drove on, making our long way to Mbrostar. The land was empty. In the middle of nowhere we passed a new sign written in an old tongue. “Democracy is a struggle for progress,” it read, “not a force of destabilization and destruction.”

  Albanians live with the abandoned: abandoned farms, forgotten fields, sagging sheds with blank windows; ghost towns. Miles on miles of sunflowers wilt and weep while everyone rushes to the city to buy the Italian government’s sunflower oil that has ended up on Tirana’s black market. In the open country there were goats but no people, as if the whole place had been evacuated—a notion given eerie plausibility by the spread of bunkers across the land.

  Since the end of communism it is not just the repatriation of would-be refugees that confirms Albanians in their belief that the outside world is essentially inimical. The cluttering thousands of concrete domes that decorate the entire Albanian landscape serve as ungainly reminders. These curious igloos, found not only along the coast and on main roads but also, inexplicably, in remote fields, were the idea of Enver Hoxha. Hoxha distracted Albanians from tribal hatreds by uniting them in hatred of foreigners: all of them potential invaders. The bunkers certainly l
ook ridiculous, but the slaughter of Muslims in nearby Bosnia (which Albanians, who are predominantly Muslim, showed little interest in) give them a certain point. By typical Albanian jest, however, the domes are so tiny that only toy—or boy—soldiers could use them for shelter. The bunkers in towns were used as toilets; here under the midsummer sun perhaps they supplied humanitarian shade.

  Bexhet’s urgent desire to see this “brother” was puzzling. In my first few days with the Dukas, O Babo had told me how he had had a brother who died—a story that he had repeated many times. Baby Bexhet had been persistently ill while his binak, or twin, had flourished and fattened and grown. One day his mother had to go into town and, not wanting to leave either one, took both babies with her. On the road she encountered a peasant woman who had no children. Seeing that his mother had two, the peasant woman demanded one, the healthy one. His mother of course told her to go to hell and so the peasant woman “gave the eye” to his baby twin. Two days later he was dead.

  But to remind Bexhet of this tale now was to reduce him to histrionic tears for the continuing curse on his family. Although he told it weepily as a kind of fable, Bexhet seemed really to believe it. What gave the story its force was a truth about the way his people regarded their peasant neighbors. The story duplicated the typical gadjo myth about Gypsies and curses, and in both versions the iron proof of evil was the desire of the other to steal one’s children.