Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  In the tent, I mentioned the self-proclaimed “King of the Romanian Gypsies,” Ion Cioaba, a rich Kalderash from Transylvania, who had talked a lot to the press about the restitution of Kalderash gold. They seemed amused at the idea of it; no one could convince them that they would ever see their Franz Josef coins again. It seemed pointless to mention war reparations.

  Members of Luciano’s family listen to the Orthodox priest’s words for the dead boy. Afterwards he was buried, outside the graveyard, at Balteni, Romania, 1992. (photo credits 7.1)

  Lina, another of the fierce women, “remembered” the days before the war (she couldn’t have been forty), when they still traveled all the time, how they’d have to “dig the children out of the snow,” and how even through those long winters in camp none of them ever got sick. “Our children could not make it now,” she said, perhaps remembering Luciano. It was such simply uttered truths—suggesting the unrelenting hail of occurrence, most of it sad—that made me understand their lack of apparent interest in their eventful and tragic past.

  The dead boy’s father was still quietly inconsolable, but his mother and aunts spoke of Luciano with passion, particularly about their long search for medical treatment. They had traveled from hospital to hospital in Bucharest, and, though the child was never properly examined, each time they were sent away with a different horror diagnosis—first meningitis, then AIDS (which in Romania is mainly a children’s disease)—and an ever-sicker little boy. The Radus would have been more convinced if doctors just came out with it and called their disease “roma”: a degenerative condition and, to judge by the way people reacted, a disfiguring and contagious one as well. Igor confirmed the prejudice among the “white coats” (as the Radus referred to all medicos). He’d first met the family when they flagged him down for a lift; they were trying to get Luciano to the hospital, for the fifth time. (“Can you imagine having to hitchhike to a hospital with a frail child?” Igor said. And with all your relatives?) He offered to accompany them, hoping to shame his complacent countrymen. A doctor did finally see the boy. Guessing that he was suffering from malnutrition and other consequences of neglect, he returned him to Igor with a shrug and the comment that “these people are ineducable.”

  At the next stop, Bucharest’s Hospital #9, the staff insisted that Luciano be kept in the hospital, against the family’s wishes. Among Gypsies a stay in the hospital for any reason other than giving birth could only mean death. But somehow Igor persuaded the Radus that it was necessary, and they reluctantly installed themselves in the waiting room, and then outside on the hospital grounds, for the next three days. Later, Igor gleefully described to me the multiplying numbers of relatives and friends who gathered in this vigil, and the growing alarm of the hospital staff, who were palpably relieved to return the boy and end this unscheduled hadj. A few months earlier, some two thousand Gypsies from all over Britain, Europe, and the U.S. had flocked to England’s Derbyshire Royal Infirmary to pay their last respects to Patrick Connor, a much-respected figure in the British Traveler community. Like the Radus they occupied the cafeteria and the toilets until they were evicted, and then for two weeks they camped outside. People gathered to say goodbye, but also to make amends and to appease the departing spirit, who could cause serious trouble from the other side. All of this had to be done before the death.

  With a seven-year-old boy, there was no question of amends to be made, yet Luciano’s family may well have expected that his spirit would be as miserable as they were—aggrieved that he was not to get his full share of life. And one could guess that for Gypsies, as for everyone, the death of a child is especially hard to bear, and perhaps understandable only as the work of evil forces.

  Gypsies everywhere went to unusual extremes to prevent death. Not just the death of loved ones, but of any known ones. It went beyond compassion into the more exigent realm of the superstitious. The vigilant would attempt to scare death away, perhaps literally by screaming at it, or by raising their skirts and flashing at it. They might try to trick death by changing the name of a sick person to that of someone they hated—a known thief, or a policeman—with the idea that no one, not even death, could want to inhabit that soul. Others would try to fob the bad luck off onto some other creature. In Britain in the 1940s, Brian Vesey-FitzGerald recorded how Gypsies suffering from pulmonary disease attempted a symbolic transference by breathing three times into the mouth of a live fish, and then throwing it back into the stream from which it had been fetched. The hope was that, confused, death would go for the fish.

  Finally, the last doctor told Igor—not the parents—that Luciano was suffering from a massive brain tumor. Whatever he had, it was clear to everyone but his family that he was going to die soon. As Igor stood for a moment, trying to think how to deliver this news to the crowd outside, the nurse asked him why he had bothered to get involved. For their part, the Radus were unwilling to accept the diagnosis. The child was frail, fading, in pain—but for his family, long after the battle had been lost, this was war. Observing the Radus’ rage against death, even after it had come, offered an insight, I thought, into the general reluctance of Gypsies to face squarely an episode in their history of sustained and violent death on a massive scale.

  The Radus’ difficulties did not end with Luciano’s death. When I first turned up behind the wheel of Igor’s Dacia station wagon, he had been dead for four days. The customary three days was pushing it in the summer heat, and he really had to go now. The coffin was placed in the entrance of a specially erected boy-size tent, in front of which a circle of wailing women sat on the ground, their skirts spread around them like saucers. Farther removed, the men enumerated to Igor their difficulties in securing a priest and a proper church service for Luciano. I stood before the little pine box, framed by the open flaps of the tent, looking down at a very small dead boy in a panama hat.

  Luciano was wearing a clean brown sweater and a pair of brand-new jeans. His pockets were stuffed: blue wads of lei notes in one, and a comb, a small mirror, and a sewing kit in the other—provisions for the road. On his feet he had factory-fresh plastic slippers, dark brown and molded to look like tie-up shoes, including the stitching and laces, two neat bows in lacquered relief. He had one hand over his heart, and though the nails were very long, as if they were still growing, the stiff claw formation of his fingers was unmistakable. His hat hung at a gangster’s jaunty angle and obscured most of his face; only his small mouth, with cracked lips slightly open, was clearly visible. Deep in the coffin beside his head rested a plywood model boat.

  At noon we were sent back to Bucharest, with four members of Luciano’s family, to buy food for his pomana, or funeral feast. Washing, or brushing one’s hair, was also forbidden during the first period of mourning; our disheveled group made quite an impression. They never once stopped shouting in the battle to get served before other people and to get a lower price. This was what people did in busy markets, it’s what markets were for. But the glass-fronted bakery seemed to require another etiquette. There, tired Romanians queued quietly, pushing their heavy bundles forward bit by bit, like long-distance passengers at an airport waiting for passport control. Wild with heat and grief and pressed for time, our friends marched to the head of the line and threw their money at the terrified girl in her paper bonnet, demanding bread, all of it. They didn’t get everything they asked for, but while a few women in the queue hissed and cursed them, and even spat at them, they did get served. It was the quickest way of getting them out of there.

  Chattering away on the ride back to Balteni, they had already forgotten these routine humiliations, and they were oblivious of Igor and me in the front seat. They looked up only when someone tapped at the window. We were stuck in a traffic jam at Bucharest Nord train terminal when a middle-aged woman with one tooth and blood running down the insides of her legs made her unsteady way over to greet us. She’d been dancing a drunken jig for the idling drivers, and was naked except for a sarong made from a Romanian flag, with a
hole in the middle where the hammer and sickle had been cut out. Her eyes were half closed and she was laughing a terrible laugh. Even unshockable Igor was expressionless and still. But our passengers were chortling: they seemed really to find it funny—or maybe, after the bakery, their pleasure derived from the spectacle of someone so incontestably more damned and crowd-confounding than themselves.

  Any relief at our safe—and well-stocked—return was extremely short-lived. It next fell to me and Igor to secure the services of the local Orthodox priest, a bearded old fraud who, having already refused to don his robes for a dead Gypsy boy, posed with elaborate benignity for a photograph he begged me to take. They never came to church, he complained, they didn’t even marry in the church. It was true: Gypsies didn’t marry in churches or in registry offices; they had their own ceremonies and parties and then they got on with having their families, and when people died, that was when they needed, or wanted, the church. Death was a uniquely fearful business for them, and the use of the church and its gadjo keeper was an extra precaution. The priest warmed a bit when he learned that I was American, and he was ours when I pressed a wad of near-worthless blue lei notes into his dry palm.

  Luciano’s funeral was under way, and the Radus and their friends moved barefoot over rocky dirt roads to the church. There were two cars. I drove the first one (a multicolored, vaguely souped-up Yugo belonging to one of the young men), with the priest at my side. Igor followed in his Dacia station wagon, with Luciano wedged in the back. I had the musical horn, which the proud owner kept urging me to honk continuously, despite the already deafening accompaniment of shrieking zurlas and clanging lids on stewpots on either side of the car, and the wailing women bringing up the rear. I doubt if I could have made that car go fast, but neither could I keep it rolling at the mourners’ pace, and it stalled every few minutes. In between, I was signaled to stop so that children could scatter corn kernels against evil spirits at intersections (all cross formations inspired such preventive measures); and I was stopped whenever Igor stalled, with the usual result that his back door would fly open and the coffin would slide halfway out. Above the banging of pots and blowing of all horns, the priest shrieked chat: he’d never been to America but he had traveled in an airplane; had I seen much of their Romanian countryside?

  The Radu family—some of Luciano’s sisters and brothers and his uncle—in their camp at Balteni, Romania, 1992 (photo credits 7.2)

  Inside the small whitewashed church, it was cool and dark, and quiet at last. Luciano’s many sisters and cousins stood all around him holding slim, lit candles, along with his father, whose great gut heaved with quiet sobbing. Not one minute of their mourning was free from hassle, though; this moving scene was soon ruined by the crashing around of some drunken churchwarden up by the altar.

  Back out in the hot day, the wailing expanded to include violent breast-beating and the tearing out of hair. One woman fell against me and collapsed in a fit with jerking convulsions and eyes rolled to white, after which the others, not to be outdone, stormed the gravesite, just beyond the church graveyard. They were not allowed to bury their dead within its boundaries, alongside the non-Gypsy residents of Balteni. And perhaps this suited them, for they were fearful of cemeteries. After the priest had sprinkled red wine, from a regular labeled bottle, over the boy’s body and the lid had been nailed down, Luciano’s coffin was slid into a front-loading sepulcher. It looked like a large doghouse. Some of the mourners, still in their fancy suits, then sealed him in with shovelfuls of wet cement. It was at the pomana afterwards that I met Drina, Luciano’s grandmother, who had survived the wartime deportations. It was there, fifty yards from Luciano’s grave, that she told me about paper boats on the Dniester.

  In the 1960s, Bert Lloyd, the British musicologist, wrote that many Gypsies he met in the course of collecting their songs “could not distinguish the war period.” He referred to those who had remained comparatively free in wartime Romania as well as to those who had experienced the deportations. Drina was among the latter. And perhaps her vagueness or lack of engagement was not so very surprising. These were people who, fifty years on, could not get a doctor or a priest and who could barely do their shopping without starting a riot.

  At fifteen, Karoly Lendvai lost everyone. From his town of Szengai, seventy-five miles southwest of Budapest, he and his family were rounded up by Hungarian police and forced to walk forty miles north to Komárom, to the notorious Csillag internment camp which was run by the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian fascists. Fifty years on, Karoly Lendvai’s memory was undimmed.

  “As we were marched through, others joined our group, more Gypsies and more gendarmes,” he told a Reuters reporter in the summer of ’94. “Some babies died along the way, and some would-be escapees were shot, left by the roadside. No one knows who they were.… We were in the camp about two weeks with hardly any food.… More people died as typhus broke out, and others were killed. The dead were thrown into a huge pit, covered with quicklime. There were layers upon layers of dead. I do not know when the pit was finally filled because one day we were herded into cattle cars to be taken who knows where.”

  Lendvai was saved by an air raid. In the confusion of sirens and bombings he escaped into the woods “for about a year… [and] I never saw the others again.” Lendvai hadn’t heard of the word Holocaust and, at sixty-five, he still could not quite believe that all of this happened simply because Gypsies were Gypsies; but he knew that his family had all been murdered. Prisoners of the Csillag internment camp were transported to Auschwitz.

  “Rot you Jew-Gypsy!” Lendvai remembered an Arrow Guard screaming at him as he was being pushed onto a train. The curse still troubled him: “Why,” he interrupted himself to ask the journalist, “why did he call me a Jew?”

  Estimates of the number of wartime deaths of Gypsies range in Hungary alone from eighty thousand down to ten thousand, and most recently the vagueness has allowed “revisionist historians” such as László Karsai to claim, absurdly, that no more than a few hundred Gypsies “vanished.” The fate of many Czech Gypsies is still mysterious, though in 1994 Paul Polansky, an amateur historian from Spillville, Iowa, discovered documentation of the murder of at least eight thousand Gypsies, half of them killed on Czech soil. Poland had a much smaller prewar Roma population; out of around fifty thousand, more than one in five died. But even there, in the land where most of the killing took place, amnesia is endemic. Writing not long after the war, Jerzy Ficowski noted:

  With the exception of two songs from Auschwitz, sung very rarely, I have not noticed any trace of the War years in the present life of the Polish Gypsies. They rarely mention their martyrdom and do not like to dwell on that subject.… Their way of life has not changed at all. The ovens of the extermination camps have been forgotten. Their fertility is very great and the natural increase of population very high. The vitality of the Gypsies has conquered death.

  The Romani word for the (Gypsy) Holocaust is porraimos, the devouring. In addition to a haunting evocation of the events themselves, “the devouring” usefully describes the continuing suppression or denial of the Gypsy case. (Appropriately, porraimos is a term even less well known among Gypsies than “Holocausto.”)

  Visits to the famous scenes of the Nazi crimes do little to evoke the experience of those who lived and died there. Some groups of victims are invisible—for instance, homosexuals—because they have been actively excluded. But even where atrocities are fully and graphically illustrated, the unspeakable tends also to be unimaginable. Writers have begun to say what most visitors to death camps have kept as a guilty secret: that they felt very little here, in Auschwitz, for example; that their strongest feeling may be ambivalence about their own visit to such a terrible and sacred site now somehow a museum and a tourist destination, littered with children and Coke cans. In Kraków, bright posters and brochures offer day trips to holidaymakers: to the Tatra mountains, to a salt mine, to Auschwitz. On my last trip to the camp, the postmodern “Auschwitz
experience” was complete when the taxi driver, Szczepan Kekus, boasted that he had been Steven Spielberg’s driver during the filming of Schindler’s List, and pressed the photographic evidence into my hand. There was Szczepan and Liam; there was Steven and Szczepan. “You can call me Steve,” Szczepan said, as I stepped out at the main camp gate.

  Compared with the vivid photo library of Nazi imagery that we helplessly house in our heads, the live tour mainly obfuscates (inside the camp there is a tourist hostel and a cafeteria, racked with ham-and-cheese sandwiches). In the case of the Gypsies, this sense of distance has a further dimension: one could easily imagine that these particular people had not been here at all. The Polish guide, whose batch of Swedish tourists I tagged along with, never once mentioned the Gypsies (and in her version the story of the Jews at Auschwitz emerged only after a stoic account of the Polish victims). When, following the tour, the Swedes had repaired to the cafeteria, I asked her about the Gypsies. “Even here in Oswiecim the Gypsies didn’t work.” That was all she had to say about the twenty-one thousand Gypsies murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau.