Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  Sure enough, Aziz Cici (pronounced “cheechee”), whom we were to visit in Mbrostar, was not a brother but a cousin; Bexhet had used the term as a gesture of solidarity. That gesture, and even the tale of the sundered twins, became clear when the reason for our visit was revealed: Aziz Cici had murdered a gadjo and next week would be going on trial.

  What we’d already seen that day had the sadness to commit the most hardened social worker to silence; it was the anonymous misery of the whole impoverished world—a world which is always populated mainly by children. The tragedy at Mbrostar had a further, racial dimension: a crime had been distorted and deepened by the tension between the group and the surrounding, and larger, white community. It also showed the genuine inability of the Gypsies to avoid being, in gadjo terms, their own worst enemy.

  We crossed Albania’s biggest bridge, the suspension bridge whose image graces the ten-lek note. Not far off we found the house of Aziz Cici, a white three-room structure perched over a railroad track. It was empty. The sunny rooms were bare, with only a few broken chairs to suggest any human occupation. A few broken chairs and a mournful female voice: in a back room, facing an open window with her back to us, an elderly woman knelt swaying in a trancelike movement that was the bodily expression of her plangent, somehow disembodied, dirge. It was a song to the mulo, the spirit of the dead. Had we come too late?

  From next door a Romany family who knew Bexhet greeted us with relief and urged us inside. It was easy to overestimate the number of people crammed into that little house—with the usual gallery of children’s faces pressed against the window, and the awkward custom of our hosts, who shook hands outside the house and then again when we were inside the door. “God bless your legs,” the husband said to me, raising my hand as if to kiss it. I smiled weakly and stole a glance at Marcel; when we had sat down (all five of us in a row on a cot) Marcel expanded: “God bless your legs for bringing you here.”

  The dead man, Fatos Gremi, was a well-known thief and widely despised drunk; nevertheless, since the incident three months before, the once well-integrated community had irremediably split in two. The entire Rom population had been ostracized. No one could buy food at the local shop; they were afraid to go out after dark. The stifling roomful of the desperate Aziz’s friends, describing these events, all agreed so far. But this extended family of Mechkari didn’t need to be outcast in order to feel it: the immediate family of Aziz, and to a lesser extent the wider circle of family and close community, shared his shame. They too were considered mahrime. Aziz’s sister, for example, was in the village, but she did not join in this recapitulation and Bexhet didn’t think of going to see her; she was also his cousin but for the time being she was as contaminated as her brother.

  What actually happened on the day was the subject of the upcoming trial, and in that room a matter of confused and surprisingly indifferent debate. The drunken Gremi had supposedly tossed rocks at Aziz’s window late one night (one said 7 p.m., another insisted on midnight, a third suggested the hour before dawn). Terrified, Aziz had then rushed to the door (in that crowded room one friend obliged us with a sadly hampered pantomime) and fired a shot into the dark—perhaps not so uncommon in Albania these days. But the bullet struck and killed Fatos Gremi. Still more terrified, Aziz dragged the body into the house.

  Then he panicked. That night (the next morning / days later) he and his wife sewed Gremi into a burlap sack, lugged him to the car, drove to the ten-lek bridge, squeezed rocks in to fill the bag and rolled him off the edge. But the river was low and the next morning Fatos Gremi was an outcrop and Aziz Cici was an outlaw.

  None of those gathered there attempted to deny the crime in Aziz’s behalf, or to question the implications of his subsequent actions (he had immediately decamped to the town of Pluk). Instead, they offered competing versions of the timing and sequence, spiritedly interrupting and attempting to outdo each other as if to say, “Wait up, how about this?”

  They are all lying, I thought early on in our summit. And they’re doing it just for fun. Then I began to understand. They had no sense of time (and were unbothered by such details as the impossibility of stealing off in the dark at five o’clock on a summer evening). But above all they did not regard the reconstruction of events as a project of memory. Instead, they told the story as they felt it to be at the moment of the recounting. In front of our eyes, as if for the first time, they were immersing themselves in the drama, conjuring up afresh the feelings that would fit such a terrible deed. The truest version for them—the winning version—was merely the most convincing or the most vivid. The heroic present was where they lived.

  This impression was confirmed when Marcel attempted to explain to them what an appeal was, and how it might be possible to have sympathetic international observers at the trial (which was only a week away). In the middle of his unusually lucid explication, a chicken appeared in the narrow strip between our toes and those of the relatives in the chairs opposite. All of the Gypsies wriggled and giggled like children, as if someone had farted during a particularly portentous church sermon. And then with great and loud seriousness they all started talking about the chicken: where had it come from, who was its owner, whether they shouldn’t just stick it in the pot before someone claimed it, whether those spots on its beak weren’t evidence of a disease whose ravages someone began now flamboyantly to describe, another explaining with the flat precision of a tour guide that “the chicken plague” had been visiting various towns and villages in the region before making its way to Mbrostar. The conversation never returned to poor Aziz.

  Fractured communication and a spontaneously theatrical approach to indisputably grave stuff was the norm among Gypsies everywhere: it was the spirit that made them attractive, but it was also what made them difficult neighbors. Marcel said they were incapable of establishing priorities. In fact their priorities were simply different priorities: value was assigned to all events equally but serially; what was going on at the moment—Aziz’s trial, a stray chicken—had top billing. Neither event would have a lasting hold on them. Special fondness was attached to those incidents and persons with the greatest dramatic possibilities—that is, with a continuing, endlessly repeatable and improvable life in the imagination: memory of a kind.

  Exhausted and anxious to be gone, we were nevertheless persuaded that it was too late to drive through the black countryside and the unlit, unfenced mountain roads to Tirana. And so we stayed, had a delicious chicken dinner, and passed a fitful night on mats laid out in the house of the condemned man. Bexhet, though, slept outside, so unwilling was he to linger in that unlucky place. It turned out that his anxiety was not to do with Aziz Cici but with the old woman, Aziz’s mother, whom we had first seen, from behind, as she intoned her wailing dirge. The oldest woman in the family and in the Mbrostar Roma community, she had a great deal of power. In matters of death and spirits she had more authority than her even more ancient husband.

  The Mbrostar Gypsies, like most Gypsies, believe in and fear the mule. Though men appear to have all the authority, and do indeed wield it in secular life (deciding punishments for wayward members of the group, or dealing with gadjo officials), it is the women who possess the darkest and most forbidding powers. Their legitimacy resides in knowledge of spirits and medicinal cures, and ultimately in their ability to pollute men. Death, the final authority, is a man (Anne Sutherland noted), but only a woman can frighten him off.

  It is not just the spirits who need worry, however. A woman can “pollute” a man just by throwing her skirts over his head, or even by threatening to do so—and thereby make him ritually unclean and in need of purification before other Gypsies can again associate with him. The woman has the power because she herself is innately mahrime—if she is married, which is to say sexually active. She must take elaborate precautions not to expose others to her “uncleanness.” These well-defined codes of purity and contamination are the real universal language of Gypsies, understood if not always rigorously uphel
d in every district and dialect.

  Old women have perhaps the best deal in Gypsy society. As women, they are invested with mystical powers. But because they are old women their sexuality is not a threat, and they cease having to observe many of the cleanliness rituals, eating and smoking as they do with the men. In direct contrast to Western women, who may feel great depression during menopause as their biological allure looks like waning, Gypsy women of a certain age gain status. By becoming physically more like men, they overcome the social inferiority of their sex. Old people are generally revered among Gypsies, and, for their deeper knowledge and experience, old Gypsy women, from Albania to the Americas, often have a lot of say in secular affairs as well.

  It was unclear to me why Aziz’s mother was singing these songs for the dead (she sure as hell wasn’t singing for Fatos Gremi). Perhaps it was because of a fear among Gypsies that people who were deprived of the respect that comes only with old age—either by death or by disgrace such as Aziz’s—were likely to become malevolent spirits. Perhaps, as mothers will, she was trying to make a deal for her son. Bexhet, in any case, was staying well clear of the puri daj, the old mother of Aziz.

  Jeta had hardly ever been away from Kinostudio so long, and was anxious to make an early start. It was still dark when we left, and the journey was a dream of chalky mountains and vertiginous passes better left unobserved. I slept, and then feigned sleep, for the privacy it offered. The tarmac of the main road out of Tirana comes to an end at the entrance to Kinostudio; the familiar bumpy trail beneath the car told me we were home. As the car fell forward, lurching in and out of potholes like a wagon, all five of us inside bounced joylessly on the sticky seats. Then suddenly we stopped, the car’s nose rubbing in the dust. We were stuck at a thirty-degree angle, in hundred-degree heat and a traffic jam.

  As the dust settled, a pharaonic scene came into focus: a dozen bare-chested men, heaving the arm-thick twisted cable of a great pulley. Hanging from the inverted question mark of the cast-iron hook was the carcass of a dead horse, slung over a wide leather swing. The horse slid down, its legs still hooked over the leather strap, fetlocks frozen in a ghastly pose of prayer. And then it fell to the ground, its cataract-clouded, fishy blue eyes still open, heavier and more earthbound than it could ever have been in life.

  The horse still glistened from sweat not yet dried; patches of fur stood up dully against the silky coat like back-brushed velvet. Hundreds of flies buzzed and tentatively dipped. There was a dark patch of ground and a shallow pit, dug by the horse, I guessed, in its last struggle for life.

  Some of the men stood aside, cooling their cable-burned palms. A new shift had arranged itself on either side of the unwieldy animal; half of them pushed its bony haunches, while the other half pulled the stiff, spidery legs. Though I saw no wound, their hands and chests were smeared with black blood. Children ran up the dirt track from the neighborhood, dragging or pushing a range of other tools—planks and shovels and a wheelbarrow. Finally the pulley was winched and cranked and hoisted up as high as it could go, and the great fly-spattered beast was dumped into a waiting cart. From where I stood I couldn’t see the men in the cart, just a row of clenched fists dug into the matted mane from the other side, tugging.

  That evening and in the days that followed, the horse was never mentioned. In a protective gesture of unspoken but unmistakable admonition, Jeta silenced my inquiry—not, I inferred, because the animal had died gruesomely, but because of residual respect for an honored beast.

  A few days before I left the Dukas and Albania, Nicu and Dritta and their boys moved out of Jeta’s courtyard; their new apartment was ready. Over an afternoon a buoyant Dritta directed all the children and brothers back and forth in a two-way convoy, unpacking boxes in transit if they grew too heavy for the little body struggling beneath. Nicu and Nuzi shouldered the Polish couches. Liliana carried the painted table. Dritta beamed for onlookers. A place of their own: this was the biggest event of their lives. And of course Dritta was no longer a bori—she had properly become a romni, a wife. Normally this would come only when she had a bori of her own—that is, in a few years, when Djivan married the little girl from Berat. But Dritta had seized her chance; it was time to go.

  Back home, the remaining boria feigned indifference and quietly got on with their chores. Dritta was gone, and Viollca and Nuzi, next in line, would soon move into their considerably bigger quarters. But even they were subdued: the courtyard was going to be a much quieter place. Bexhet was withdrawn as well, polishing his sparkling bicycle. And Jeta, unable to settle into her usual routine, set off on various invented errands. It wasn’t her job to fetch water from the communal well, but that is where I saw her, perched on its ledge, a hand over one eye and the other tracking Dritta and Nicu as they made their last trip around that familiar corner, carrying between them a Stanbuli oven with Dritta’s prized Day-Glo plastic orange tree potted in it. Jeta returned home with wet eyes and an empty bucket, yelling nash!—git!—at one of the hens that loitered in the courtyard gate.

  TWO

  Hindupen

  TELL ME,” HE asked. “Where do Roma come from?” On a scrap of Slovakian newspaper I made a pirate’s map and sketched out the route of the exodus of the Gypsies from India a thousand years ago. “And we are here.” I drew an X on my map, just left of center. X was Geza Kampuš’s one-room house, halfway down the nameless main street of the Gypsy quarter of Krompachy, a town in eastern Slovakia, south of Poland, just west of the Ukrainian border, close to Romanian Transylvania and, until only a few generations ago, still a part of Hungary. We were sitting smack in the heart of Mitteleuropa—a place where people (Robert Maxwell, many American Gypsies, Andy Warhol’s parents, my grandmother) tend to come from rather than go to. Krompachy, which used to have a functioning copper plant, where Geza used to work, isn’t in any of the guidebooks. And though I had been there for a fortnight, I hesitated before staking my X. The frequent revision of borders hereabouts has meant, oddly, that only bodies of water appear as solid forms in the geographic imagination. Countries and capitals don’t correspond to the map of the political imagination (Poland is the size of Germany; Prague is west of Vienna). I drew the borders of Central Europe as they are today; the rest of the map, the migration route, I left in the amorphous shapes of landmasses of the distant past.

  The Gypsy migration has been likened to a fishbone spread over the map of Europe. If one included every group, or every imagined group, that peeled off in its own direction, perhaps that is how it would look. But I tried to keep it simple, with two main lines indicating the human trek: India to Persia to Armenia—and then a fork, to Syria and what would become Iraq in one direction, and in the other Byzantine Greece, the Balkans and on into Western Europe and the New World. Holding the X down with one finger, I turned the map towards Geza. He studied it, looked up, and smiled, apologetic but firm.

  (photo credits 2.1)

  “It just doesn’t fit,” he said, leaning back and showing a half-octave of perfect ivories. “I’m sorry, but that just can’t be right.”

  You might have guessed Geza’s Indian origins. If you saw him on a Bombay bus or the London Underground, you wouldn’t think twice: dark-skinned, well proportioned and delicate, with straight black hair and jet almond eyes, he was an Indian archetype. Even if he hadn’t heard of India, and I guessed that he hadn’t, Geza would have noticed that he was unlike his tall, white, round-shouldered Slovak neighbors, with their gray eyes and yellow teeth and tobacco mustaches. But it was a refreshing indication of how easy he was in his own skin that Geza didn’t instinctively think that this land was their land.

  “Well, what do you think?” I asked him, folding the map over. “Where do you think the Roma come from?”

  Geza turned his palms up, opened his eyes wide, and pulled down the corners of his mouth—thoughtful again. After a while his smile flipped back up.

  “Krompachy?” He raised his shoulders. “I don’t know. I think we come from Krompachy.”
“And where are you from?” asked one of his daughters, who had been following our conversation. “America,” I said, and she replied, “Oh, I’ve been there.” “You have?” I asked. “Yes, that’s just by Michalovce,” she said, referring to a town about forty kilometers from Krompachy.

  Perhaps Geza had asked me about the origins of his people to make small talk. I didn’t meet many Gypsies who were interested in such matters; ancient history, for most, consisted of the earliest memory of the oldest living person among them. But I thought of Geza often in my travels, and I met him again and again. Over four years I visited dozens of Roma communities in the former Eastern bloc—in Albania, but also in Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Moldova, and Germany. Whether or not Gypsies spoke of national or ethnic identity, in Eastern Europe they were surrounded by people who seemed to talk of nothing else. And this not-knowing distinguished them, even if they were hardly conscious of it. It was, I came to believe, a defining attribute of Gypsy identity. If you couldn’t say where you came from, you were nobody, and anyone could say anything about you.

  But Geza’s answer was a good one: home could be anywhere, and everywhere was home. Maybe beginnings didn’t matter much. With their almost mythical presence, these were people who had always been around but had always had to begin again, wherever they found themselves. And getting there had always been a long, hard journey.

  The Indian origin of the Gypsies has been known to scholars since the eighteenth century, when a few European linguists became aware of people in their midst who spoke an Oriental language. Istvan Vali, a Hungarian pastor, made the link in 1753, during a year at the University of Leiden. Vali had there met and interviewed three students from Malabar, on the southwestern coast of India. From them he compiled a lexicon of a thousand words (no record of this list remains), and when he returned to Hungary he found that the local Rom population understood them.