Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  Three months after the attack, I climbed over the untouched rubble and poked around the ruins of Bolintin Deal, looking for clues about the people who had lived here. Children’s debris caught my eye: a doll with one arm off, a strangely pristine pink slipper. I could feel people watching me, usually surreptitiously, but one stood still and directly in my sight path, waiting to be noticed. He had a flat, bespectacled face, a defiant expression under a striped conductor’s hat, and he clutched a pitchfork. His gaze, steady, pale, unblinking, told me that as soon as I gave him my full attention he was going to sort me out about what had really happened here.

  For the past thirty-three years, Yuri Fucanu had been Bolintin’s lone mailman. He had moved here in 1956, the same year as Emilian’s parents and most of the other Gypsies who’d lost their houses. This was, I think, a way of saying that as a newcomer himself he had not started with the local prejudices against his neighbors. He elaborated: “We went to each other’s weddings.” And then, “After the revolution, they became more and more uppity.” He meant that the Gypsies had started to make money.

  “I have been working for fifty years and still I cannot afford a car. These people are not human. They have four cars. They tore their house down and built a new one, just like that, a big one in the same place in five weeks. You see? They have cars just to play with. They spend all their time taking cars apart.”

  Most of the Gypsies who had been chased out of Bolintin had indeed made money in car dealing, a natural outgrowth of their traditional horse-trading talents, and one which had become big business since the collapse of the Eastern bloc. As in Bulgaria, it was also the Gypsies who ran the first privately owned cafés in town, two proud and cheerful establishments: neither was much more than a square of poured concrete with a few outside tables and a separate serving shack, but both were lovingly decorated—and in a single color scheme, one lavender, one yellow, right down to the napkins and fake flowers that crowded the small tabletops. The cafés should have been welcomed in this town, with its one gloomy communist-era youth club, but instead they were boycotted. This kind of behavior provided a rich theme for many Romanian jokes about Romanians. In Bolintin, however, envy had been elevated to an inopportune principle; here the stealing that everyone everywhere associated with Gypsies was suddenly and unanimously associated with capitalism. “Property is theft,” as Proudhon said; and now, whenever I see a reference to the nineteenth-century French philosopher, I see a chinless Romanian postman with a pitchfork and a striped conductor’s hat.

  If private property, free enterprise, and café life were new in Bolintin, the concept of theft certainly wasn’t. “Under the communists, everyone stole,” Mircea Oleandru, the local chief of police, told me. “If we and the Party hadn’t permitted it [for the same policemen were still in charge here], there would have been an uprising. But in those days there were limits.” Oleandru was a big man with a thin crescent-shaped deputy called Dragusin. They were cartoonishly well matched. “Yes,” Deputy Dragusin piped in uncertainly, “when Romanians stole, it was only for food.” And so, the pair seemed to be saying, the crime of the local Gypsies was greed, ambition, ostentation.

  A Romanian woman whom we found picking plums along the road confirmed that everyone stole before the revolution. “Especially the police. And they stole mainly from the Gypsies. They accepted goods for favors, such as passports. Officials wouldn’t accept bribes from a Romanian; they would be too afraid. But from a Gypsy? Who would believe a Gypsy if he reported it? I know this because I had a gold chain that my husband gave me on our wedding day. It was stolen, and I am absolutely sure it was stolen by a Gypsy woman who used to live right there.” She waved over her shoulder, down the road. “And sure enough, later I saw it around the neck of the chief of police’s wife.

  “The Gypsies are clever,” she conceded, with equal measures of contempt and admiration. “Even as outcasts they profit. We Romanians don’t have their guts. Here I am, picking plums for someone else. They pick these same plums to eat and the rest to sell for themselves. And who can stop them? The fire didn’t help. Many of the Gypsies have returned, and they are maybe worse than before.” Her hands were stained purple from the plums. As she spoke she rubbed her fingers steadily with a torn bit of rag, but the stain would not come off.

  I continued my polling of the citizens of Bolintin. A young woman was leaning on a car in the diamond-shaped town square where the teenagers had loitered that fatal Easter. Twirling a lock of hair around one finger, she stuck with the more popular view: only the Gypsies stole. According to this girl, who wore an ersatz-Chanel T-shirt, they were so keen on stealing that they stole the same things twice. “From right off my clothesline they stole a pair of stolen jeans that I had bought from them.”

  Before long, the slanders became fantastic. As professional cheats, it was always the Gypsies who supposedly worked to prepare a public appearance or photo opportunity for the Ceausescus, unfurling rolls of instant lawn over acrid ground and potting flowers in an inch of dirt before yanking them out and bagging them for the next stop on the tour. Of course it is hardly imaginable that Gypsies would have formed any part of the leader’s retinue, but Romanians now whispered that Nicolae Ceausescu himself was a Gypsy—the ultimate defamation.

  The despised Gypsies of Bolintin Deal were referred to as Ursari, or bear-trainers, although it is unlikely that their ancestors had ever carried on that traditional Gypsy profession. I met a man from the other, older community, which had been allowed to remain on the outskirts of Bolintin, and asked him how the term Ursari had become an insult applied to the troublemakers. “It’s a way of saying that these rich Gypsies were in thick with Ceausescu. You see, in Romania, all the bears belonged to Ceausescu.” He laughed as he said this; it was a reference to the dictator’s legendary pretensions as a great hunter.

  In Bolintin, the Gypsies under siege were all relatively rich; stealing was not a consideration here. Those Romanians who despised them now did so because they were themselves unable to adjust to the new world of opportunity and risk. Most people had been too afraid to attempt such innovations during or after the communist period, and they had offered no resistance of any kind—to the Ceausescus or to the corruption that survived their passing. If the violent attacks now occurred mostly in the remote countryside, it was perhaps in part because those people had had no chance to participate in any of the cathartic (if ultimately thwarted) uprisings in Brasov, Timisoara, or Bucharest. The Sacred Fire had not gone out.

  A Social Problem

  MIERCUREA-CIUC IS THE capital of Harghita County, Transylvania, the scene in August 1992 of a remote, rural purge and murder. It looks like any socialist-era town: run-down modern, with featureless public buildings and blank squares, and no trace of the fine fifteenth-century Gothic that may still be found in the old Transylvanian capital of Cluj (or, to a Magyar, Kolozsvár). There is no old-world Hotel Excelsior in Miercurea-Ciuc, no Grand or Europa, with a cathedral-size café. And yet here the new seems dated. And you feel that it has always seemed dated.

  We were early for our meeting with the county’s public prosecutor, Andrei Gabriel Burjan. Corin, my young Romanian translator, and I waited in his office: a bare room with a bare desk, a wooden filing cabinet, a large yellowing map of Harghita County, and a calendar with a plump pinup in a denim-theme bikini (red stitching, patch pockets). The same few girlie posters—always blondes—seem to feature in all public offices in Romania.

  Maria Rusu, the stout, dark-haired colleague of the public prosecutor, asked why I was interested in Gypsies. “Can’t you pick a better subject?” she snorted. “Why don’t you write about us—about their victims?” I promised that I would.

  Prosecutor Burjan was ruddy and alert and fortyish; he was nearly handsome, and well built, though oddly bottom-heavy. Perched comfortably on his desk, the prosecutor was concerned first of all to assure us that the recent attack on a small Gypsy community in his district had been a “personal conflict, a sort of p
ub fight that had got out of hand, not an ethnic conflict at all.” The incident, he said, had been triggered by a bunch of Gypsies who demanded to be served at the local bar before some “majority Magyars.” No one mentioned the more serious attack a year before in nearby Plaiesii de Sus, in which two men died and twenty-seven houses were destroyed. That also had been described as a “personal conflict.”

  “Such provocations are like pouring benzene on the tensions here,” the prosecutor said, undermining his insistence that this “pub fight” had no racial dimension. The publican, a Magyar like most of his customers, had turfed the Gypsies out. And, “instead of behaving,” they had responded by entering the plots of the Magyars, formerly collective land, and stealing everything. I interrupted him to inquire if the Gypsies in Casin, the troubled village in his district, had received any plots of their own since 1989.

  “Unfortunately they have not,” Burjan conceded. “But this too is their own fault. The law provides that anyone who worked on a cooperative for at least three years is entitled to a share. The Gypsies never apply. They have hundreds of children all the time and none of them, adults either, are ever registered with the town authorities, as they are required to do by law.” Casin was home to fewer than five hundred people. The Gypsies there were long-settled, not seasonally hired hands. In such a small town, of course everyone would know exactly who had worked in the local cooperative. But this was not the point. “They never have the documentation,” the prosecutor explained. “They have no proofs.

  “After the Gypsies filled their carts with Magyar corn and flagrantly drove through the town of Casin, the townspeople were moved to respond. And so you see this was not an ethnic conflict.” Around 160 people had become homeless in the ensuing attack. “Do you mean,” I asked, “that all the Gypsies whose houses were burned down were stealing corn that day?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the prosecutor explained. “Every one of them has committed crimes in the past. You see, the Gypsies have a consensus on crime. They live by theft. You may say that this does not justify the attack and I would agree, but I would also say that the villagers had no choice.

  “I have evidence that Romanians are the least obedient people in the world,” Burjan continued, changing tack. “The Dacian people are fighters, and what happened here was the work of plotters.” The conflict at hand had been willfully recast as its opposite: an incidence of the wrongs committed against the beleaguered majority—who, according to some, notably the late dictator Ceausescu, were descendants of a proud indigenous race called the Dacians. Resurrected by Ceausescu because they had resisted the invasion of the Emperor Trajan in 101 A.D., the Dacians were nevertheless an odd choice to boost nationalism. For it was precisely their Romanness that for centuries has been a principal source of pride to a people whose language is basically the vernacular Latin of the Roman legion, and who live surrounded by Slavs and Turks.

  Corin, though himself a tireless patriot given to expansionist reveries on the theme of Greater Romania, was growing reluctant to translate. “We are promised help and receive only insults,” the prosecutor spluttered on, sparked by a fresh jolt of bitterness. In this he was right: both the indifference of the West, which had so recently cheered on these bravely won democracies, and the unbearable self-pity of the Eastern bloc were growing, and they were feeding off each other.

  We left as soon as we had extracted from the prosecutor a promise to show us the official files on the Casin case, early the next morning. Falling into the darkening square outside, we walked in a gloomy silence across the plaza. Dead earnest, ever anxious to improve his English, Corin searched (to judge from his profile) for the perfect expression for pomposity: “This prosecutor, he is what you would call a ‘puffy ass,’ isn’t it?”

  Back in the hotel, the pleasure of the first cold beer was wrecked by the fact that a subsequent, identical bottle cost twice as much, and the one that I bought for Corin half as much again. It wasn’t the seemingly arbitrary price hikes that were galling: it was the shamelessness of the bartender who boredly overcharged us. It could hardly be good business, but cynicism, or fatalism, was stronger here than common sense, and everyone seemed to cheat.

  In Sibiu, where Corin came from, the place where Gypsies did their black-market dealing was known as Tsiggy-Diggy Street. (The tigani, or Gypsy, traders of Sibiu specialized in digital watches, hence “Tsiggy-Diggy.”) Tigan was used as a verb which meant, among other things, “to rip off,” just as its equivalent is used in the American slang “to get gypped.”

  But in truth swindling was so common in Romania that it was remarkable that the Gypsies, or anyone else, had managed to gain a reputation for dishonesty. The little kerchiefed bunicuta, or granny, who stood in front of the hotel selling green bottles of “kiwi juice” out of a basket, was really and knowingly selling bottles of murky river water, complete with hairy river wildlife. Her Johnnie Walker was tea and corn syrup, and when you went to complain she was gone. But most people didn’t feel pressed to cover up or disappear. The woman at the front desk asks for four to six hours to place your long-distance call, and then, when you check up on it four hours later, you watch as she tries for the first time and connects you right away. It’s your own fault, though, because you hadn’t thought to pay double or in hard currency, because you hadn’t established a claim—that is, because you “had no proofs.”

  It remained a conjecture, but there was, I thought, a subtle difference between Gypsy rip-offs and Romanian ones. As was not the case for the cheating Romanian barman or telephone operator, shortsightedness and dishonesty needn’t be a source of moral degeneration for the Rom. Not all Gypsies were engaged in trade. Some still repaired objects or made baskets or brushes or wooden spoons (and sent their wives to sell them in the market). Some were proud specialists who provided particular services, and, like the publican or the telephone operator, the scope of their jobs didn’t change. But the job of the Rom traders was to make money—not baskets or brushes or copper distillers. And so they made any deal and sold any product. In the past it was horses; now it was cars, or digital watches. On some days, if he had nothing to sell, the trader might have to beg (or rather send his wife and children out to beg). This is not a source of shame; it is just another option, another way to do his job, which is making money.

  Upstairs in the hotel, off the long corridor lit by a couple of naked bulbs, I have a room that I know well; it is like many other rooms in the decrepitly modern hotels of Eastern Europe. The narrow single bed is covered with a rectangle of two-inch-high orange fur and one square pillow the size of a linoleum tile. The blanket reaches just to the edge of the bed, so you have to make yourself small underneath it to stay covered. There’s the shaky plastic night-table and the incongruous square-dance lamp with its flounced gingham shade. In the lamplight, the toy telephone. (This one is frankly ornamental, without a cord or a jack in sight.) There is a basin in the room and the tap drips. But there is no end of hot water, which makes up for everything. The square sections of false ceilings are so low you can punch them in without even standing on your toes. I kept dreaming that I was sleeping under a blanket of fire, and that as long as I stayed covered I would not get burned.

  After the usual hotel breakfast of cucumber, cheese, salami, and boiled coffee, we went back to the public prosecutor’s office and found only his stout dark-haired colleague, Maria Rusu. “Domnul Prosecutor has gone on vacation,” she informed us impassively. No apology, no explanation, no nothing. “File? He left no instructions about any file. I am not aware of any file.”

  We had another appointment that morning with the county chief of police, and we went to headquarters to wait. In a thin corridor with facing rows of welded-together chairs, we sat opposite an elderly Gypsy man and two younger men, obviously a father and his sons. The matted look of the younger men suggested a long wait, confirmed by the debris all around them, a dozen cigarette butts on the floor, scraps of food and crumpled wrappings, empty soda cans. A young
police officer emerged from a closed door. The father immediately rose to his feet, removed his hat, and smoothed his mustache with a long-nailed thumb. He stood and waited with his feet together and his hands crossed in front of him in the humble position that many people adopt in the presence of officials. The policeman took his time to acknowledge the old man, making his slow way towards him, with a stopover at the receptionist’s desk and an ostentatious riffling of a few papers and a pause at the water fountain. It seemed extravagantly offhand. He did not ask the old Gypsy into his office but spoke to him there in the waiting room. He didn’t seem even to see the sons. I couldn’t understand what the policeman was saying, but his whole body was rigid with refusal. The old man, still holding his hands in front of him like a sharecropper, nodded and looked down at the shoes of the young policeman and said over and over: “Da, Dom Capitan, da”—“Yes, Sir Captain, yes sir …”

  I had made my appointment with this man’s superior the week before, from Bucharest; and he canceled it himself just after the disappointed Gypsy trio had shuffled out (leaving a disgusted bottle-blonde secretary in a tight skirt and spike-heeled evening shoes to pick up their garbage). “I cannot discuss these events with you,” he said, even as he fingered my press card, because “a private person does not have a right to know.” There was nothing to be done.

  Corin said that the false ceilings in the hotels were hung low to make enough room for the lumbering flunkies who recorded conversations. I myself had heard the boys from the Romanian Information Service—a milder reincarnation, everyone supposed, of the dreaded Securitate, or secret police. Through the phone tap they could be heard chatting and unwrapping their sandwiches, lending a train-station din to a call I’d made out of the Bucharest apartment of a journalist friend. Romanians are paranoid, but they are also still having their mail opened for them. The low-tech element made the bugging a bit of a joke, but after several months in Romania I certainly stopped making fun of conspiracy theorists. The whole town seemed to have shut down on us, and it didn’t feel like a coincidence.