Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  The renowned linguistic aptitude of Gypsies the world over was not always apparent in Kinostudio. For an unlucky start, my name presented a difficulty. The problem was that i in Romani is the feminine article, as in i daj, “the mother,” and it is much used, even with proper nouns, as is the masculine (O Kako). “Isabel” thus sounded to them like “the zabel,” and so I became Zabella, Zabade, then Zabe, and finally just Za.

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  The days and weeks seemed to roll into one another—perhaps because I was never told words for the days of the week or for the months; and any inquiries I made were regarded as trick questions. If pressed, the children, and even the boria, had a lot of trouble, especially with the months. Seasons were easy. There were only two: summer and winter, the hot and the cold. No day was different from any other (and not because it was summer: only ten-year-old Djivan would be going back to school). None of the children knew how to tell the time; no one wore a watch (no one except Nuzi, who wore mine and took an unusual interest in time, which he was biding). The older adults did not know how to read, and the younger ones mouthed each syllable like children; nobody wrote with any confidence.

  I received a letter from the Dukas a year after I had been to stay with them. It was a piece of card covered with their autographs, which were elderly and tremulous, or else childishly deliberate. Below, there were a few lines which were not in any language at all, but which gave the graphic sense of a letter, and that was the point.

  There were no newspapers, no radio, and of course no books; the television was usually on, but was hardly ever watched; images flickered by like scenery out of a car window. And appropriately so; in outer Tirana you could only get lurid dramas from Sicily and crassly proselytizing soap operas sponsored by American church groups. Unlike most of the Albanians among whom they lived, the Gypsies knew nothing about what was going on in the world, and (again with the exception of Nuzi) showed no curiosity.

  Sometimes, though, their restraint was due not to lack of curiosity but to tact. They were interested in family life: they asked after my brothers and sisters and parents and cousins as if they had actually met them. When there were no men around, we talked about childbearing and wifing … I turned thirty while I was with the Dukas. I had not been looking forward to that especially; but what for me amounted to a single sigh was for them a seriously sad, even a grave matter. When (on my first day) they discovered that at the age of twenty-nine I still hadn’t had even one, the puri daj—herself a mother of ten—patted my wrist sympathetically: clearly I was barren. This explained why I had no husband either and, worst of all, why I was condemned to wander the world, to go to Albania, for Christ’s sake, far from family and friends, to stay with complete strangers. It was hard to tell which part, from their point of view, was the greater trial. My presence among them could have no other explanation, it seemed, for everywhere Gypsies I met assumed this version of events and, not wishing to put me through a painful experience, gave me no chance to elaborate or explain. My life was a tragedy, they saw that, but it was one they could warm to, and they let me know it: after all, hadn’t they in their past been “condemned” to wander the world? Hadn’t they too been condemned to Albania? (Their weary objectivity about Albania was impressive, given that they had lived there all their lives. Not Albanians in their own minds, they were refreshingly free from the regional disease of ethnic patriotism.)

  Beno’s truck returns from “Stanbuli.” Kinostudio, Tirana, 1992 (photo credits 1.4)

  Dritta had no time for such reflections. She had other, more pressing concerns. Dritta was also the most difficult member of the family to communicate with, because her Kabudji dialect was more corrupted with Turkish words. And yet, with her unrivaled determination, she prevailed as a teacher. It was from her that I learned the language of trampa, or barter. The store of vocabulary included the words for blouse, skirt, comb, brush, lipstick, mascara, shoes, scarf, sponge, soap, ribbons, pins, hairband, and, learned up in self-defense, the words for ring, bracelet, earrings.… Dritta claimed she wanted to learn English; this was trampa after all, an exchange. And so I began: “What is your name? My name is Zabe,” and so on. She just laughed and made mushy underwater word-noises. She sounded like my fourteen-month-old nephew mimicking adult speech into the telephone, which he used as a kind of mike.

  Our lessons were difficult not only because we had no common linguistic ground but because so much about me was plain alien to her: if you can’t understand actions, the chances are you won’t understand speech. I was continually shocked by the isolation my strangeness implied, and touched by the protective gestures it inspired. Once, I crouched at a boiling kettle, poised to pour water over a teabag. Dritta lunged for it, yanking the rectangular pouch out by its tail. “It will get wet!” she scolded, patting the bag dry in the folds of her skirt. She had never seen a teabag and had kindly been trying to rescue something that she imagined was—what?—perhaps a perfuming sachet or bouquet garni (though it is hard to imagine such fragrant ephemera making their way to inner Albania). In a similar incident, O Babo, riding in the front seat of Gimi’s car, complained that it was horribly squalid and that Gimi really should tidy it up. “What are all these ropes?” he asked irritably, attempting to tug the seatbelts from their sockets. Such safety devices were a novelty in Albania—like private cars themselves.

  Nothing, however, produced so much bemused interest as the twice-daily ritual of Zabade brushing her teeth. This they found obsessive and weird, and before they were smacked away by their mothers the boys would gingerly finger my toothbrush, touching the special baby tool with the tentativeness they might have stroked a fledgling that had dropped out of its nest.

  The toilet was a hole in a cupboard with a swinging door on crazy hinges; it banged but didn’t shut. For a basin they had a depressed drain at ground level, and on a ledge at waist height a can of water, constantly topped up by Liliana. And so the brushing of teeth was a public event. One of my nicknames was Dandi, from dand, tooth. When the need made itself felt (about once a week), they brushed theirs with a finger, generously coated with thick salt, or Ion. And they all had beautiful strong white teeth, as Gypsies, in sparkling contrast to the rest of the local population, very often do—when, that is, they are not obscured by decorative gold or silver or even two-tone caps.

  O Babo’s toilette was more popular still. Every morning Bexhet stretched out his shaving ritual for as long as he could, as if hoping each day to add a few seconds, perhaps even a minute, to his personal best. For the children it was a great show. For O Babo it was a way of filling the prodigious leisure in which Albania was incomparably rich. All the jobless men had to do it, and they did it with greater or lesser degrees of panache.

  One by one, he would produce the implements from his locked trunk: a shaving brush, a shaving bowl with the soap stuck in it, the folding razor. Wearing his morning suit—striped pajama bottoms and a khaki military shirt—he would make three trips in and out of the house for these tools, holding each with a ten-fingered delicacy you might reserve for the handling of a small but perfectly preserved Minoan pot. After all the implements had been arranged along the courtyard ledge, which became barber’s corner for a good part of each morning, Bexhet would make a final trip in for the pièce de résistance, his special cracked shaving mirror. Not wishing to lose any of the broken slivers, he moved in the comically stealthy steps of a cartoon thief, carrying the glass flat and out in front of him on an open palm, like a fresh-baked pie.

  Bexhet’s toilet set was spread in and around a sad little antler-shaped branch of the neighbor’s tree. Though dead, the branch remained erect, a prisoner of the cement through which it had pushed in its sun-searching youth. In the antler’s crook, Bexhet nestled his mirror with utmost concentration. He coaxed and jiggled it and tested his talent by letting go, two fingers at a time. He whispered soft, loving encouragement to his own shattered reflection: “Now don’t you go and fall, little face.…” Fall it did though, two or
three times a morning, and Bexhet caught it each time, when he was feeling frisky, with a clever backhand and a little victory cry, “Eppah!” or sometimes “Oppah!” before returning it to its V to try again.

  Into Town

  JETA WAS BITTER about her marriage which, she once explained, came about only because her grandfather was dying. “I want to see my granddaughters married before I go,” he’d said. Bexhet was available, if not ideal (having got through three wives by the age of twenty-one), and that was that. Jeta was seldom sullen and never self-pitying—she didn’t have time to be—but she had a strong and richly comic image of herself as one of the wronged. Still, Jeta believed in arranging the marriages of her own children: that wasn’t the problem. The problem, she would tell you in loud whispers, was Bexhet. The real trouble, though, was that Jeta was far too intelligent for the life she ended up with, and smart enough to see it.

  It was rare to find a modern malaise in a Gypsy woman; experience was generally too circumscribed. But Jeta was exceptionally bright. Unlike the cluckingly complacent Bexhet, she had been stirred, under Marcel’s influence, to new considerations of the Roma struggle. Alone among her large family, she had inklings, and they imperiled her equilibrium, and her tolerance for life in Albania, let alone in Bexhet’s courtyard.

  One morning, when even I thought Bexhet’s shaving routine was wearing a little thin, I took her off to go ando foro, into town. With no shopping mission, we walked and walked and she spoke about her life with a rare reflectiveness. For thirty years Jeta had carried out her daily chores with that same courtyard as her headquarters; she’d raised and married off her children. Even the marriages—normally a mother and grandmother’s domain—had proved a disappointment and humiliation for Jeta; one son after another foiled her elaborate and expensive arrangements with a suitable girl’s parents by eloping with or impregnating the bride of his own choice. She had never taken a vacation; she had never been away from Kinostudio for more than a day or two, and then only in service of her children—on a (futile) trip to the south, for instance, to audition a prospective wife.

  We paused in front of a shop called floket. What’s a floket? I asked, unable to guess from the bare storefront, through which one could see a leatherette dentist’s chair and an old stuffed armchair raised on cinder blocks and facing the same wall. On the counter stood a rusted appliance, perhaps from the 1940s. It looked like an early-model blender: chrome and bullet-shaped and standing at about a foot and a half in height. But the odd machine sprouted a headful of cracked rubber-tube tentacles, each with a clip attachment at the end. A beauty parlor!

  I dragged Jeta inside. Two tidy beauticians in white smocks stood beside their deep sink, their hands demurely crossed in front of them. They shrugged their shoulders apologetically. A handwritten sign on the wall advertised a twalet complet—manicure, pedicure, and makeover, for the equivalent of thirty cents—but unfortunately they had no tools: no nail files, no makeup. Sorry. The old appliance on the counter that we had spied through the window turned out to be a steam-powered curler-heating device, as confirmed by the few lead curlers with wire fasteners that lay around like spent ammunition. It hadn’t worked in years. They did have a bit of shampoo, though, or some green detergent in an unmarked plastic bottle, and so I went in for a wash. I had been hoping to pamper Jeta at the floket. It wasn’t much, but I was thrilled when she consented to have her hair washed—by a gadji, no less. Jeta was more relaxed than I had ever seen her, sitting in the dentist’s chair and humming to herself, flicking disdainfully through Soviet beauty magazines from the early 1980s, while the two young beauticians rubbed our wet heads. Dinner would be late because of our escapade, and Jeta would have a screaming match with Bexhet, but she didn’t care. I still have a lead hair-grip from the floket. It is oxidized and encrusted with mineral accretions as if it had been at the bottom of the sea for a hundred years; you can hardly guess its function.

  Refreshed, we began to make our way home. We passed dozens of caved-in, burnt-out, ransacked, and abandoned ex-shops, right in the middle of Tirana. And then we arrived at the state maternity hospital. Jeta paused outside the gloomy, totalitarian-era edifice, and then took my hand and pulled me inside: never mind that we were late; this, clearly, was something I had to see. She charged past the desk and no one stopped to ask questions: Jeta moved like she owned the place. We walked down the long, dimly lit halls in silence.

  The yellow-tiled walls, the ancient steel-tube beds, the unmuffled moans and vintage stench: this place had the feel of a nineteenth-century mental institution, with women wandering around in shredded, browning gowns, waiting in the halls, squatting on the floor. There were not enough beds. Only people about to give or actually giving birth or undergoing some kind of operation were in bed—six in a row, twelve to a room. Births, abortions, every screaming thing, happened just behind a screen from the other patients, and just yards away from the terrified women waiting their turn in the hall. At least the wards were not segregated, as they were in Slovakia: one room for Gypsy women, another for gadja.

  We spoke to the resident obstetrician. Sometimes there was penicillin, sometimes not. There hadn’t been any anesthestic for several months. Sonographs were unknown here, and there were only two incubators left—a third had been stolen the week before, along with all the hospital’s refrigerators and the drugs they contained. The Ministry of Health itself had been gutted: they even took the staircase.

  From a medical point of view, things were worse than they had ever been before, according to Dr. Viollca Tarc, who had been working these halls for eighteen years. Still, she was optimistic. Under Hoxha (whose pride was Albania’s health care), contraceptives were illegal, and so were abortions; women therefore routinely performed their own, and then sought medical treatment. One in 978 died this way, at least of those who actually made it to the hospital. The majority had permanent pains and recurring infections, and many had such mangled works that they would never again be able to conceive.

  Now doctors were allowed to perform the operation. However, as with nearly all the new freedoms of Eastern Europe (publishing, for example), what had once been prohibited by law was now rendered impossible through lack of equipment or supplies. So contraceptives were allowed but there weren’t any; and though hospital abortions certainly were now safer, they weren’t much less distressing.

  On our way out we poked our heads into the laundry. In a tall vaulted room, lit only by the rays filtered through high, small-paned industrial windows, five women were bent in a row over low sinks, scrubbing sheets on washboards, just like the boria back home. In the middle of the room was an enormous cauldron over a ring of blue gas flames. They were cooking sheets. After a good scrub, a woman would hold the sheet up with both hands for inspection, and then she’d toss it back into the pot; with a rosy wooden pole she’d catch and pull up another one. There was blood everywhere. Not just the splashed-on bright blood of wounds and cuts, but female blood: dark, gelatinous, clotted. Those gouts of maroon were not going to wash out. Only a week before, there had been a shipment of new linen, a gift from the Swiss government, but it had been stolen within hours of its arrival.

  Walking home, Jeta told me that she had had twenty-eight abortions (she used the third person: “Jeta had twenty-eight abortions”). She’d performed them herself with a boiled and doubled length of washline cable, followed most times by a “mop-up” at the state maternity hospital. I wondered where in the Duka household she might have done this; there wasn’t even a tub big enough to hold a grown woman. Jeta was the kind of person you could ask, but I didn’t.

  Such horror stories are common enough in Eastern Europe, and, listening to Jeta, I began to reevaluate earlier accounts. The experiences of a Romanian friend, for instance, seemed comparatively breezy. In the Bucharest of Ceausescu she had undergone two illegal abortions on her kitchen table, while her boyfriend guarded the door. But she had had a doctor—or anyway a nameless person in a stocking mask with holes cut for
the eyes who was willing to perform the operation. She never had any proof that he was a doctor, but the jobs were done—the first for a bottle of whisky, the second for a carton of Kents.

  The Zoo

  THE FRAMED WEDDING portrait is a feature of almost every East or Central European household—rich or poor, Gypsy or gadje. The faces of the newly joined, just smaller than life-size, stare straight and solemnly out of the frame. The black-and-white busts (they are just heads and chests, never bodies) are usually rouged and browned by hand, and they seem always to be hung strangely high up, a foot below the ceiling and leaning out from the wall, as if the couple is not there to be seen but rather to observe, as if the only guardian over a couple, now a family, is its hopeful first idea of itself.

  Jeta kept her wedding portrait on the wall, but she covered it over completely with snapshots of her children, of their children, of animals, and even just nature shots—trees, a river view. It was him she couldn’t bear to see, handsome Bexhet, lording it over her.

  Because modern photographic technology has not yet reached the East, these wedding portraits all look like turn-of-the-century frontier pictures (and in the case of many Gypsy portraits, like turn-of-the-century American Indians). You can see evidence of the long sitting in the stiff necks. There is nothing of the disposable Western snapshot—nothing “candid.” But maybe the formal slow shot reveals more than the snap. Anyway it was impossible to take candid photographs of the Duka family—whenever they saw the black snout of my camera they immediately dropped what they were doing, held their arms stiffly at their sides and froze in unsmiling wedding-portrait poses. Like Gypsy children everywhere, the little Dukas and their friends would rush to form a short-lived lineup, which collapsed into a scrum of pushy starlets, each shoving and trampling over the littlest kids to get into the picture. Even if they looked through the viewfinder, they could not grasp that the camera’s view was wider than the actual two inches of its “eye.”