As a teenager, Marcel had been a medical student at a provincial French university. In the early seventies he got into trouble for organizing hunger strikes against government cuts, and, disillusioned at nineteen, he left for Vojvodina, where he found work as a grape-picker and labored among Romanies for the first time.
By then he was already a brilliant linguist: Marcel knew Samoan, Hiri Motu (of Papua New Guinea), Maori, Tahitian. He could get by in Ajie (New Caledonian), and, of course, he spoke all the “ordinary” languages—French, English, Spanish, German, and passable Russian and Japanese. Figuring he was never going to get to the Loyalty Islands, or anywhere else in the South Pacific, Marcel turned his sights on the Balkans. His love for the region—and his vocation as a linguist—was settled when he traveled with a piglet under his shirt and was received everywhere as a bringer of good news.
“I stayed for some months in a monastery in Slovenia. With no money at all, I had no way of thanking the monks who had been so kind to me. After much thought I decided to give them the piglet, who, after all, was already something of a pig. They were very pleased. The abbot held him in his arms like a baby. I shall never forget it: he could speak to it in its own language.” Even the memory left Marcel speechless with wonder and admiration.
When I asked him how he had ended up spending a decade in Albania, he explained without hesitation or irony: because he couldn’t get a job anywhere else. The difficulty of the Albanian language had presented an irresistible challenge to Marcel, and once he had mastered it for himself he found that he had also become indispensable to the country’s foreign embassies. Later, he was fired for smuggling out Gypsy refugees.
Marcel was one of a handful of specialists—linguists and social scientists—I met who devoted themselves to and completely identified with Gypsies. Some Gypsies called groupies puyuria—from the Romanian for “puppies” or “cubs” or “chicks”—if they were women (me, for instance). There were other, less affectionate terms, and a contempt sometimes showed itself, along with accusations that the gadje were profiting from Gypsy distress. Frustration came in part because Gypsies knew that they benefited from and sometimes depended on such relationships. It was an historic and strictly pragmatic arrangement: in exchange for practical help, the sympathetic gadjo, and his entire family, would be variously protected—no small service. The gadjo’s contribution would include letter-writing and document-reading and acting as an intermediary with prejudiced authorities (in Marcel’s case it was the Western ambassadors). In Tirana, Marcel was a star.
Marcel unambiguously identified himself as Rom. He spent his life going from Romany settlements to international conferences and, above all worked to promote the Romani language. Although he made a real contribution, in attempts to undermine his status within the movement other Gypsy activists occasionally “denounced” him as a gadjo. Denunciation was always the point; but what did it matter if the story of his Greek Gypsy ancestors wasn’t true? Though Marcel devoted himself to their emancipation as an ethnic nation, he also availed himself of the common view that what constituted a Gypsy was his style of life. Marcel lived that life, or lived in its shadow.
Six weeks after our Paris meeting we shared a taxi. A taxi from Bulgaria to Albania: twelve hot hours across the memory of Yugoslavia. Like all border posts, the frontier near Struga in Macedonia is chaotic and dull, littered with a ragged population of shufflers, pushers, and peddlers, indolent and insolent, waiting for rejection and a long-familiar journey in the wrong direction. Approaching the border we found a convoy of massive, eighteen-wheel rigs (Italian, Swiss, German, Hungarian), which had been kept waiting for five days. Michele, a haggard driver from Treviso, supplied me with warm Cokes. “What’s going on?” I asked him. Michele couldn’t find words—he just sputtered with fatigue and rage and anxiety, the sweat and dust flying from his wagging head. Like a good Italian, Michele was anxious about food: with an open palm he indicated his baking truck, whose cargo—thousands of homely tins of EEC “Stewed Steak” (“75% animal product”) and industrial drums of Italian sunflower oil—had been reheating for a week.
With ostentatious indifference to the queue, and to the customhouse’s throbbing Turkish disco music, a half-dozen officials leaned against the wall and gazed dreamily out on a semibucolic, iron-red vista salted with small unshepherded goats. As for the others, their postures—legs apart, arms akimbo—told anyone who cared to see that a price had not yet been negotiated. Humanitarian aid is the number-one import of Europe’s poorest nation. It is all donated gear, but nothing is free in Albania; everything coming in will be sold and resold several times, starting at the border.
We had all seen the pictures of Albanians festooning boats bound for Italy. Marcel even knew some of them. But no one in the queue, except Marcel, knew what to expect inside this country that no one was allowed to leave. So far, all we were confident of was that it was as hard for outsiders to get into Albania as it was for natives to get out.
At the very moment we were finally waved through, a small and toothless middle-aged Gypsy sidled up to me and tugged at my sleeve. She was bursting with some great joke. Suddenly serious, she shouted in Romani before disappearing: “Te djivel o Tito, te djiven e Jugosloviage manusha!”—“Long live Comrade Tito and long live the Yugoslav people!” Her comment was the only opinion offered by the locals—certainly by the local Gypsies—about the disintegrating country that we were stepping out of. The war was so close as to have become far: it was unmentionable.
Inside Albania, keeping a lookout for our ride, we walked for a while along the shore of the vast turquoise Lake Ohrid. There are no plastic spoons, no Coke cans, no scraps, no billboards, no beckonings of any kind. But immediately one felt that Albania was more than a tourist-free oasis between the ex-paradises of Greece and southern Italy. Or less. What you can’t imagine before you get there is the emptiness. The land is so bad that even the trees come on one at a time, surrounded by more space than their spindliness can support. The particular beauty of Albania seems always to depend on isolation … A car came to a noisy halt under a cloud of dust: our lift. Out came the most disheveled pair of Gypsies I had ever seen. “This is Gimi” (pronounced “gimme”). A relieved Marcel indicated the rather shy-looking lank-haired driver in worryingly low-slung blue jeans: “And this is Nicu.” Chubby, grinning, bare-chested Nicu was all hair, from the smoke track curling up the belly and bifurcating into ram’s-horn flourishes about the breasts, to the whole of his matted cupid’s head. I had never before seen facial cowlicks. Nicu’s real name was Besnik, but the nickname which we hit on, and which he good-naturedly embraced, had more to do with the hair: Veshengo—literally, “Man of the Forest.” Or Tarzan.
On the road, Vesh offered me my first Albanian cigarette. It was a Victory. On the brown packet, under a “V” and in the place where it usually says “Smoking causes fatal diseases,” was written: “Keep Spirit High.”
Kinostudio
THAT SUMMER I lived with Nicu’s family, the Dukas, on the edge of Tirana, in the quarter known as Kinostudio, or Movieland. The Gypsies in Albania have been so isolated that they are only dimly aware of their millions of Romany brethren living in diaspora throughout the world. Still, the Roma of Kinostudio had more in common with those far-flung Gypsies than with their fellow Albanians, among whom they have lived for nearly six hundred years. They got along with their neighbors but they remained apart.
Ethnic strife was negligible here, because of the isolation and the long, hard years of repression and shortage which wore everyone out. But the healthy self-esteem of Gypsies was also due to tremendous solidarity; as in Macedonia but nowhere else, Albanian Gypsies were not the sediment at the bottom of the bottle. There were gradations of status among the four tribes of Gypsies; and, more important, there was another group in Albania which was worse off, namely the Jevgs—a small dark people, often to be seen begging in Tirana’s squares.
The Dukas were one of the first families in the quarter, and
they were Mechkari Gypsies, members of the largest of the four groups. Like all Albanian Gypsies the Dukas were notionally Muslim. They shared Kinostudio with their numberless hospitable cousins and cotribals, a few Gypsy families from another group—the Kabudji—and a handful of Albanians, a tiny minority, who were invisible rather than vilified. The patter of Kino was definitely Romani.
We arrived too late to meet the family: only Nicu’s mother, Jeta (Albanian for “life,” and pronounced “Yeta”), and Dritta, his broad-faced, sultry young wife, had waited up. Jeta was plump but compact and energetic. Though she looked much older than her forty-four years, her movements were springy and youthful. While her daughter-in-law yawned prettily, Jeta’s whole body was turned to our weary needs. She swiftly produced a hot meal and drink, then scraped the crinkly gray hair back off her healthy nut-brown face, smoothed her skirt, and sat down. Face in hands, alert as morning, Jeta focused her small, bright brown eyes on me and waited, wondering who or what had mysteriously been brought to her.
The next day I met the rest—brothers and wives and babies. The women filed in one by one, inspecting me in bed, where I still lay at seven o’clock, in what locally constituted a lie-in. First came Liliana, the limping spinster sister, who hid her Cubist face (eyes on different planes, variously energetic facial muscles, the suspicion of a harelip) under shiny pelts of thick black Indian hair. Then came the boria, the daughters-in-law, as the three young wives of the Duka boys were called. Viollca and Mirella shyly advanced behind their own small sons, whom they pushed forward with a hand on each shoulder. The boys could only be their fathers’ sons: chubby, pouty Mario was a miniature of Nicu, without the hair. Five-year-old Walther, with a bowl haircut, was all beauty, rubbery-limbed health, and bright eyes—like his father, Nuzi, the restless, high-voiced James Dean of Kinostudio, who got away with his endless primping and flexing through winsome self-mockery (such as the articulate use of eyebrows as a smoking aid). The last child was weepy Krenar, the undersized boy of Mirella and Artani, whose snotty terry-cloth romper hung low, the crotch grazing the floor and the trampled sock-feet trailing behind him. When he reached the bed, he burst into tears; and he was to remain damp and disgruntled pretty much for the rest of the summer. Krenar was known to all as Spiuni, short for spiuni gjerman, or German spy, on account of his blue eyes and blond hair. The Dukas had unconsciously appropriated, and inverted, two common myths about Gypsies: that all fair children among them are in fact abducted “Christian” children, and that Gypsies themselves were spies—supposedly for the Turks, and other enemies of Christendom.
After the little ones had touched my hair or some thread of my raiment, and the girls had put the burning question of Gypsy women everywhere—How many children do you have?—they filed out to get on with their chores: washing and carrying and cooking for the boria; smoking and cards and TV for the boys, whom I would meet later. It was unseemly for married men to be in a room with a woman in bed, even an outsider, to whom other rules didn’t apply.
Artani, the only Duka with a job, went to work before first light. He collected the garbage of the capital, for which he was paid eight hundred leks, or eight dollars, a month. Artani didn’t say he was paid eight hundred leks. He described his wage in terms of what it could buy that day: “I earn five kilos of meat a month.” He went mainly for something to do, to walk into town in the cool dawn, to get away from Kinostudio.
Nicu slept in, and Nuzi sat moodily on the porch step, chewing an unlit Victory and patting his shoulder-length hair, waiting for Liliana to make his coffee. That was her job, and—ever since he lost his post at the Ministry of Vegetation—waiting for it was his. While Nicu didn’t engage much with either younger brother, Nuzi found work in making fun of Artani. He ridiculed his terrible dress sense. And even these justifiable taunts—those oversized, top-stitched sponge-nylon flares were terrible—only showed the poverty of Nuzi. For to care about fashion in Albania, where you couldn’t buy anything, was to plunge yourself into an unending torpor of deprivation and shame. Nuzi feigned disgust with Artani for selling his time for so little money; but the truth was that it was time that so burdened Nuzi. His old job, which had involved discouraging the ivy on innumerable Enver Hoxha statues, planting shrubs, mowing public grass, and generally keeping up appearances, was a properly civic expression of his natural primping proclivities; they had been a source of pride and health to Nuzi. Jeta, as any mother would be in a country of near-total unemployment, was more cut up about Nuzi’s being sacked (gambling was mentioned) than even he was. The thing about Artani’s job was not that he liked it, or earned a living at it, but that he had it.
Absent that first day were Bexhet (pronounced “Beh-jet”), Jeta’s husband and the father of all, and Djivan, the ten-year-old son of Nicu and Dritta. Until suppertime, grandfather and grandson were away in the city of Berat, south of the Shkumbi River, visiting a couple and their nine-year-old daughter: the little girl to whom Djivan had just become engaged. Seeing my surprise, Jeta reassured me: “They won’t be getting married for three or four years. What did you think? They’re only kids.”
Everywhere in the Balkans life felt unstable. But among the Roma one felt as they did: utterly safe, as in a family. For one thing, there was no intermarriage between Albanians and Gypsies in Kinostudio. Far from suggesting a demoralized culture, endogamy here seemed the mark of a buoyantly confident group, settled in their skin and not needing outsiders.
Kinostudio was a family—practically the whole neighborhood was related. Gimi, for example, was married to Mimi, one of Jeta’s seven sisters. Within a day, the whole neighborhood knew I was there and that I was with the Dukas. I was chaperoned everywhere, partly because I was a woman and I was their ward. Before I gave up, I tried occasionally to slip out for a quick solitary stroll. No dice. Within minutes Nicu, Nuzi, or Artani, or a set of boria, would appear at my side.
Even at home I was never allowed to be alone: not ever (and not even to use the bathroom, but that was because there wasn’t one). The Dukas did not share gadjo notions of or need for privacy. Or for quiet. The more and the noisier the better was their creed—one that I found to be universal among Roma. Their conception of a lone person was invariably a Rom who for some infraction had been recognized as mahrime, unclean, and had been excluded from the group. There was something wrong with you, some shame, if you had to be alone. The Gypsies have endured unimaginable hardships, but one could be sure that loneliness wasn’t one of them.
Privacy of a kind was claimed in the way that all the Duka women might, as if by previous arrangement, just ignore all the Duka men for a period—and vice versa. Similarly, nobody spoke to a man in the morning before he had washed his face (the women had always been up for hours). They seemed really not to see someone who was not yet ready to be seen. Privacy came in the form of imaginary walls. (These walls didn’t do it for me though. I became intransigently constipated, and remained that way for a month of mounting congestion and alarm.)
Kinostudio was built on and beyond the city garbage heap in the 1950s. The first Romanies who came to live here had previously occupied the cellars of houses in town. Ten families were evicted and moved to Kinostudio “temporarily.” They built their own houses on empty promises of ownership from the town hall.
The Dukas lived in one of the first houses in the quarter, on the sloping dirt track that led up to the tarmacked road to town. The whole settlement (like much of the capital) was unpaved, and in winter it became a river of mud. Like all the early houses of Kinostudio, it was a single-story, lime-slaked house, with a covered porch and a cement courtyard. Three barnacle rooms patched together from different materials (tin, board, cement) had been added on as one brother after another brought home his bride.
Jeta and Bexhet Duka in the courtyard, Kinostudio, Tirana, 1992 (photo credits 1.1)
In the middle of the road was the communal well, and, beyond that, the bread place. It wasn’t a bakery, but a queue. After a long and sociable wait—the br
ead line offered the neighborhood boria a rare chance to put down their pails and to gossip—you arrived at an unmarked hole in the wall. Sticking out from this paneless window were two arms: one took in the rumpled, filthy lek notes while the other (possibly it belonged to a different body) doled out the long, tall, still-warm loaves of bread: beige, or the more expensive white.
There were no shops in Kinostudio. Indeed, in all of Tirana there were hardly any stores you could walk into. There was the covered market for food, and the uncovered one for cheap rugs, plastic lamps, and cooking utensils down in the abandoned half-dug hole of a building site. In this gadget graveyard, Jeta inspected items which she wanted but considered inessential—a meat-grinder, an apron, Bulgarian face cream—and the next day I would return with one of the brothers and try to find and buy them. (An offer of rent had been indignantly refused; and so this subterfuge.)
Instead of stores, capitalism had so far brought only kiosks: movable prefab selling shacks where the customer had to rise on his toes to pay. Some of these specialized—like Shag, a booth we would pass on our way home from town, which sold religious paraphernalia, glass “evil eyes,” and so on, but mainly crosses: wearable pendants, wall-hangers, plastic bedside stand-up Jesuses. Inside Kinostudio, shopping arrangements were more obviously impermanent, though more conducive to browsing and—because the vendors were Gypsies—to bargaining. A card table unfolded at a corner, a man squatting beside an overturned crate: these stalls were set up when and if there was anything to sell; and, as with similar stalls across the Balkans, anything might be on offer—batteries, toys, plastic shoes, socks, a paper fan, EC or UN canned food, single cigarettes, string.
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