Testimony

by Scott Turow

  I’d never heard that one, and Attila grinned about the notion.

  “Nobody hears word-fucking-one in eleven years? Even with cell phones? All them here, they’re oxygen thieves,” said Attila. “None of them have a clue really. They’re Gypsies. They answer because they enjoy telling stories.”

  I expected Esma to take offense but instead she laughed with Attila. In the meantime, the oldest lady, stout and bent but with an evident strength that might have been sheer durability, made a noise and waved her hand as she wandered away.

  “Where are the men, by the way?” I asked Attila and Esma. “Working?”

  “Some,” said Attila. “I’ve hired a couple, sent them to Saudi, if I recall. Always been a large gray market in Bosnia, smuggled goods bartered and sold, which the Gypsies are good at. Some are in town running scams. Most are out picking iron.”

  “A few also are in prison,” said Esma, didactic as ever. “The Roma are the most imprisoned men in Europe.”

  I focused on Attila. “What do you mean ‘picking iron’?”

  “Gathering scrap metal,” she said. “Steel. Aluminum. They sell it to dealers. Anything will do. Old bedsprings, cans, any junk. That’s what most of the men in Barupra did.”

  A few minutes later, a man, short and wide, burst through the circle of females to introduce himself to me. He spoke some English.

  “Am mayor here. Tobar.” Missing three upper front teeth, Tobar was about five foot four with a broad white belt that circled his enormous belly. His hairdo, with greasy strands spilling down from his bald crown, looked like someone had dropped a bowl of soup on his head. There were three large gold rings on his fingers when he extended his hand to shake. But when he caught sight of Esma, I lost his attention. He gasped and bowed from the waist and actually kissed her hand.

  “The beautiful lady!”

  Esma laughed out loud.

  “Gypsy men are always on the make,” she told me.

  Even Esma lost some of Tobar’s interest when Attila returned, having wandered off to take a call. She and Tobar greeted each other heartily in Bosnian, amid rounds of shoulder slapping.

  “Tobar used to work at Camp Comanche,” Attila told us. “He ran the laundry.”

  I explained to Tobar that we were here to ask about the Roma at Barupra. He took a step back, while he wrinkled up his face as if there were a bad smell.

  “No good baxt.” Esma said that word referred to luck or good fortune.

  “Why?”

  “They are ghosts now,” Esma translated, once Tobar switched to Romany. “It is bad to disturb them.”

  I asked what had happened, but Tobar waved his palms as if it was all too complicated for understanding. Instead, he insisted on giving us a tour of the town. As it was no more than two blocks long, there seemed no reason to decline. The first stop was his house, which he pointed out from the road.

  “Very big,” he said, and it was surely the largest here, with two satellite dishes. Tobar, who’d been impressed into the Bosnian Army during the war, had received a grant from the government afterward to help with the construction. The second floor was demarcated by a white wooden balustrade, knobbed in the classical style, atop which Tobar had affixed a line of plastic swans, the kind you might have seen on lawns in Florida in the 1950s. In addition, perhaps for safekeeping, the front half of the body of a twenty-year-old Impala was perched on the second floor, not far from the birds.

  From there, Tobar took us down to the river, a beautiful fast-running stream. This was the source of fresh water for the town, which had no plumbing. Eventually, we returned to Tobar’s house, where he offered us coffee. Esma nodded to indicate that we should accept, and we sat outside in the chill at a picnic table. Mrs. Tobar emerged with a steaming plastic pitcher of tar-black liquid, while Esma showed me how to drink Roma-fashion, without letting the cup touch my lips.

  Eventually, I directed the conversation back to Barupra.

  “Are the Roma who lived there dead?” I asked Tobar.

  “What else?”

  “Why? With what excuse?”

  “They are Roma.” He was repeating himself in both Bosnian and Romany, and Esma and Attila were taking turns converting what he said to English, with Tobar adding a word or two now and then. “When have the gadje needed an excuse to kill Roma? But it is a bad business. When sad things happen, one must not dwell on them.” Tobar nodded weightily at his own wisdom.

  I said, “One of the women we spoke to when we arrived believed that the Americans thought the Roma in Barupra had helped Kajevic.”

  Tobar shook his strange hairdo around, then hunkered down and lowered his voice.

  “Never,” Tobar said. “The Roma all despise Kajevic. When the Serbs captured several Muslims, they would look next for one or two Roma. The Serbians would force the Gypsies at gunpoint to dig two holes, one large, one small. Then the Serbs shot them all, the Roma included.”

  “Why two holes?” I asked.

  “Because the Roma were not good enough to bury in the first hole,” Tobar said. Esma shot me a look to make sure I had fully registered the prejudice.

  I told Tobar that I had heard speculation that the Roma in Barupra were killed by gangsters because the Roma were in competition with them, stealing cars.

  “Well, yes,” said Tobar, levering his head back and forth. “They were iron pickers, and you know an auto is mostly steel. I have heard that a few in Barupra stole cars. But the mobs would never bother killing these Roma. They would just send the police to arrest them. They own the police.” Tobar smoothed his index finger under his thumb.

  Attila’s cell phone was buzzing every couple of minutes, and while she walked off to handle another call, I took advantage of her absence to ask if Tobar knew Ferko, whom I wouldn’t name in Attila’s presence.

  “Oh yes,” said Tobar, “but we met only once. This man was here, who remembers why? Business of some kind. I am the mayor and said hello. He told us he was from Barupra, the only one to live after the Chetniks. The next year this fine lady comes, asking many questions about Barupra. I told her it is a bad business, but she wanted this fellow’s mobile number. A man cannot decline the request of a woman so beautiful, no?”

  Esma pointed to Tobar, instructing me to take heed. All three of us were laughing.

  Awaiting Attila, we spent another ten minutes or so with Tobar, who told us about recent troubles in his business, selling telephones.

  As we were strolling back to the car, I caught sight of the old woman who had turned away from the circle of women earlier. She was outside, working over an old wooden barrel with a long stick, and I asked Esma to help me speak with her.

  The old lady looked a little like an American Indian. Her gray hair under her babushka was braided and both front teeth were broken. Her long patterned skirt brushed the ground but her feet, so callused they appeared gray, were in flip-flops despite the cold.

  I had a letter from the Bosnian government introducing me and I removed it from the pocket of my jacket, but the old lady smacked it away.

  “She can’t read,” said Esma quietly. “You’ll find that very few of the women can.”

  Esma did her best to explain about the Court, but the woman, who had never been far from Lijce, did not seem interested. She was one of those naturally quarrelsome old ladies, and as soon as Attila rejoined us, the old lady directed a remark to her, while pointing at Esma. Attila chuckled but was initially reluctant to translate.

  “She says she prefers to speak Bosnian with me,” Attila finally explained. “‘That one—it hurts my ears to listen to how she speaks Romany.’”

  Esma took the complaint with good humor.

  “Romany has a million dialects,” she said. “And of course, all Roma believe only theirs is correct.”

  What the old lady had been doing, it turned out, was laundry for herself and her unmarried adult grandson, a swirling stew of clothing amid the mist rising from the barrel. Esma said that the wash would take t
his woman most of the day, between going to the stream, hauling then heating the water, and washing twice, inasmuch as it was again bad baxt if women’s clothes and men’s ever touched.

  The old lady continued working over the steaming tub as Attila translated her ramblings. The house behind her, where she lived with her grandson, was no more than fifteen feet by fifteen and made of mud and sticks.

  I asked why the old woman had seemed provoked by what her neighbors were saying about Barupra.

  “They talk to hear themselves. No one in this village knows anything. Sinfi there, her sister married a Barupra man. Ask her. She should know, but she knows nothing either.” With her knobby arthritic hand, the old lady pointed next door, where a skinny young woman was also washing with her back to us, a baby on her hip.

  We started in that direction, but the old woman called us back. After disparaging her neighbors for speaking from ignorance, it turned out the old lady had a theory of her own.

  “They will return, those people. It is our way.”

  When I asked who had told her that, she banged her stick against the inside of the barrel, although it seemed clear she would have preferred using it on me.

  Attila said, “She says no one needs to inform her. She is an old woman and knows things.”

  I looked at Esma. “Gypsy women?”

  “Very powerful,” she answered. “I have told you.”

  “Ask, please,” I said to Attila, “where the Barupra people are now while they wait to return.”

  Attila again laughed heartily before relaying her answer.

  “She says she has heard that lawyers are smart, but that must not include you, if you expect an old woman to know more than you do.”

  The three of us moved next door to the house of the young woman, Sinfi. She had disappeared but came to her doorway as we approached, smiling shyly. She still toted her baby as she stood barefoot on the threshold. I had noticed at Tobar’s that shoes were not worn indoors. The room I could see behind Sinfi was spotless, furnished with a beaten cupboard and an old rug on the wall, although the ceiling was bowed and showed spots of water damage that might soon lead to its collapse. Sinfi was dressed in a pair of leopard-print trousers and a sweatshirt lettered with a saying in German I didn’t understand, aside from the word ‘Gesundheit.’ Her black hair strayed around her face, in which her eyes, in something of a rarity, were an arresting bright green. She was bone thin and very pretty, except when she smiled, disclosing a deplorable greenish muddle in her mouth. The baby, a little girl of about nine months, watched all of us avidly, and reached to grasp our fingers when we offered them.

  I once more withdrew the letter from my jacket. Sinfi smiled but did not bother with the pretense of looking. As had happened next door, she preferred that Attila be the translator.

  Sinfi said her sister had married a Roma boy from Barupra. Sinfi had visited there twice with her parents, before her mother and father left Lijce after Sinfi’s paternal grandmother died.

  “Did any other people from Lijce marry those in Barupra?”

  “Only my sister. Others would not.”

  “Because they were Orthodox?”

  My question amused her. “Because they were so poor. They had nothing.”

  Esma interjected to explain that in traditional communities, Roma adopted gadje religions largely as protective coloration, so priests or imams would assist with burials and births. Their true faith, as Esma described it, sounded like some kind of spiritualism, often involving the ghosts of ancestors.

  “My sister’s right arm was bad,” said Sinfi, “shriveled up. My parents were happy she married. Prako had a lip with the cleft, so they were a good match.” She smiled in muted irony. Among the fifty or so souls I’d seen here, the consequences of the inevitable inbreeding had been clear: wall eyes, hare lips, but also, especially among the children, instances of startling beauty, before it was diluted over time by poor diet and other hardships.

  “And where is your sister now?” I said.

  “They are gone from Barupra. All.”

  “And where did they go?”

  “People say they were murdered.”

  “Do you think that?”

  “I want not to,” she said, but shook her head to indicate that her hope was faint. “If God wills,” she added.

  She explained that after her marriage, her sister called her parents or her every few months on a borrowed cell phone. In another of the customs of India, which the Romany people still maintained a millennium after their exodus, a new wife became part of her husband’s family, subordinate to her mother-in-law and somewhat detached from her family of origin.

  “At first,” Sinfi said, “when we did not hear from her, we tried the number of her friend who had a phone, but there was no answer. After the entire winter passed with no word, my father said we should go to see her. We borrowed a car. But they were not there. No one was. The village was gone. My father went to the police in Vica Donja. They acted like he was crazy to think there had ever been people in Barupra.” Sinfi stopped speaking for a second and looked at the ground to retain her composure. “That made my father sure that Kajevic had killed them all.”

  “Why Kajevic?”

  “The last I talked to my sister, that spring, she said a soldier had been there to warn them that Kajevic was going to kill some of the men who lived in Barupra.”

  “One man? Many men?”

  “Many.”

  “And why?”

  “He thought they had talked to the Americans. But my sister said Prako was not worried. It was not his business. He’d had nothing to do with that.”

  “Did your sister say who in town had talked to the Americans? Or what they had said? Anything like that?”

  Sinfi knew no more. Yet this was the first thing I’d heard in Lijce that bore some resemblance to evidence. It was hearsay of several magnitudes, but Sinfi had recounted a concrete event, which, if it actually occurred, would offer a strong suggestion about who’d engineered the massacre.

  I asked Sinfi if I could take out my phone to record her, but she said her husband would be angry if he knew she had spoken about Kajevic.

  “But you and your parents believe Kajevic’s troops killed them all in Barupra?” I asked.

  “Me? I think so. My father, too. My mother, no. She had a dream a few years ago that my sister called her. So she hopes.” Sinfi’s eyes now were pooling.

  Before we left, Esma removed her purple scarf, the object of such lavish admiration here, and wrapped it around the baby. As we said good-bye, Sinfi took a step over her threshold to squint at me in the strong sun that had just emerged from the clouds.

  “You are going to find who murdered them?” she asked.

  “I will try.”

  “They should be punished,” she said to me. “Even Roma should not be treated like that.”

  12.

  Still a Gypsy

  So you guys hungry or what?” Attila asked, as we departed from Lijce. “Kind of a cool place, a couple miles on.”

  It was past four and none of us had eaten since breakfast. Attila stopped at a huge roadside inn erected on a hillside, a series of rustic buildings that could have passed as a dude ranch, enlarged A-frames with shake roofs and cedar sides decorated with old wagon wheels. To enhance the inn’s appeal to tourists, the lowest level featured reconstructions of Bosnian life one hundred years ago. In one stall, a wax dummy in vest and fez sorted through a sack of seeds.

  On the second floor, we entered an open-air pine dining room, noticeably upscale. Waiters in formal vests and bow ties showed us to a windowside table overlooking another lovely mountain stream one hundred feet below, from which a romantic, rushing burble arose.

  Attila, unsurprisingly, was a grand host. She ordered a white wine from Slovenia, although it turned out she didn’t drink. Her focus was on a huge appetizer plate of mild Bosnian cheeses and dried meats, a local delicacy, all accompanied by an unusual brown bread assembled from dozen
s of layers of thin leaves, a little like the crust of a strudel. While we relaxed, Attila smoked cigarettes without apology and Esma mooched a couple, explaining that she indulged only on the Continent while she drank.

  Attila had just ordered the entrée when Esma excused herself for a moment. As soon as she was gone, Attila hunched forward confidentially. She was such a large personality that I was already accustomed to ignoring her odd look, with that big ball of kinky brownish hair, her uneven freckly complexion, her slight shoulders strangely squared, and her pale skinny arms poking from the same short-sleeved button-down shirt she was wearing when she picked me up at the airport yesterday.

  “So whatta you think, Boom?” Attila asked. “Looks like Kajevic, right?”

  “Maybe. I’m a long way from conclusions, Attila.”

  “You ask me,” said Attila, “a guy sends a messenger boy to say he’s gonna kill a whole bunch of you fuckers and they’re all dead a week or two later, I got a prime suspect. No?”

  “Sure. But it’s not the only possibility. What did you make of the lady who thought the Bosnians killed the Roma because they wanted the base back?”

  “I thought she was as full of shit as the rest of them—everybody but the last gal. The US had withdrawn. That camp went back to government ownership. If the Bosnians wanted the Roma out, all they had to do was move in with bulldozers. No cause for a massacre.”

  I sipped my wine, thinking how I wanted to approach the next subject. I had been meaning all day to get a second alone with Attila.

  “And I’m not ready to declare the US Army above suspicion either.”

  As I expected, Attila made a face. “And how do you get to that?”

  “Well, Tobar confirmed something that I’ve heard for weeks now, that a few guys in Barupra were car thieves. As a matter of fact, you told me yesterday that you fired your Roma drivers when they disappeared with some of your trucks. Do I remember correctly?”

  “Too true.” Attila nodded with her whole upper body.

  Last night, I had awoken around 3 a.m., not unusual for me when I was contending with jet lag. I found my heart constricted by some dreamtime reconstruction of my encounter in the corridor with Esma. I had remembered the red nails as her hand rested on my arm, but the dream culminated in agitation and regret, although, as happens so often, once I was up I couldn’t recall the events I was sorry for. Eventually, when I settled myself and began to doze, my mind went to our case. It was then, halfway back to sleep, that I made a connection that had been nagging at me since I sat with Goos in the bar.