Attila drove us back to Tuzla, since Esma wanted to stop to buy small things for the children in Lijce.
“They are so desperately poor,” she said, “and it will also make the gadje more welcome.”
In the meantime, Attila walked me a few blocks to a steel bridge over the highway to point out Lake Pannonica, a local curiosity. Late in the twentieth century, the hundreds of years of extracting the briny water beneath Tuzla in order to produce salt took its toll and the downtown area began to sink. Salt production ceased, but after the war, the former pools, where the subterranean waters had been stored, were turned into a recreational facility, becoming a network of saltwater lakes, an inland sea with graveled shores that were thronged in the summers.
When we returned to the main square, Esma was waiting with two bulging plastic bags. We drove from town, passing the immense site of Tuzla Elektrik, with smokestacks in the sky like the arms of a cheering crowd, and hourglass-shaped vents, stories high, wafting steam.
Soon we were ascending again. It was a lovely country of green mountains. Haystacks, with the silage spun around a pole, lay in some of the fields looking like huge tops. Esma, far shorter than I, had volunteered for the backseat. She leaned forward to hear Attila, supporting herself when we sped through the switchbacks by applying her strong hand to my shoulder.
“Salt mine,” Attila said, pointing right, where large white storage tanks loomed on a hilltop. Two narrow pipelines, yellow and green, ran parallel to the road.
In another twenty minutes, we turned down a yellow dirt path to enter the Roma town of Lijce. We had barely reached the first house when a little boy recognized Esma, whose prior largesse obviously had made an impression. He let loose a joyful shout, which brought more than a dozen kids running our way, preventing Attila from driving farther. The children were waifish, dusty from playing in the street and dressed in ill-matched faded old clothes, but seemed nourished and happy, leaving aside one boy who had an open sore on his face, rimmed in green. The boys wore shorts and a variety of footwear, mostly open plastic sandals or Velcroed running shoes, none with socks.
Esma exited, laughing as the kids jumped around her. She questioned each child about her or his family, and then distributed gifts based on her estimate of needs. Attila rolled down the window, chatting with the kids in Bosnian.
“What are they saying?” I asked.
“What would you expect? ‘Give us money.’ They’re bargaining. Just one keim,” she said, naming the Bosnian currency. It was officially half a Euro, meaning the kids were asking for about fifty cents. Attila handed out all the change she had. The boy with the sore insisted that he would accept a bill.
It was Thursday now, a little after noon, and once Esma was back in the car, I said, “Why aren’t these children in school?”
She smiled. “Ask. See if you get the same answer twice. Some barely speak Bosnian, though. Throughout Europe, people lament that the Roma won’t send their children to school, but in very few places have the local authorities tried to teach in our own language, or with respect for our customs. After puberty, Rom beliefs require students to separate by gender, which the gadje will not indulge. Because of that, even the children who get some education won’t go much beyond the first form.” Age eleven or twelve.
Once Attila was parked, I stepped out to view the town. The road ran through two rises on which sat no more than thirty houses, almost all with yards that had become dumping grounds. Hillocks of refuse, including most frequently the rusted pieces of old cars, were piled beside silted-up garbage, old shoes without laces, discarded appliances, bedsprings, used pots, pieces of building material—a remarkable goulash of items, seemingly preserved because they might have some future use. As for the houses, a few looked quite substantial, with stucco or cinder-block bases and frame exteriors, although in those cases the siding was unfinished, as if the wood had been slapped up before anyone arrived to take it back. Beside the bigger places, late-model cars were sometimes parked, and on three or four houses I saw satellite dishes mounted at the rooflines. But most of the dwellings in Lijce were tiny, built of stone or concrete blocks and roofed in overlapping pieces of salvaged corrugated steel.
After a few minutes, several people ventured a few steps from their houses, staring darkly at us. Finally, one voice rang out, singing, “Ays-Ma,” and with no more, the residents began surging forward. In a matter of seconds, there was a circle surrounding us, all women, usually heavyset with long skirts and colorful head scarves that framed scraps of black hair and coppery faces. They were clearly intrigued by Esma and, given their prior acquaintance, touched her garments with no hesitation, especially the wooly, fringed lavender scarf around her throat. Esma took this well, laughing and thanking the women for their compliments, before turning to me.
“Gypsy women,” she said. “They want to know how many children I have, as if the answer might have changed since I was last here a couple of years ago. Also, they wish to know why you have come.”
“Please tell them,” I said, “that I am here to learn about the Roma who lived in the town of Barupra.”
The question, once translated, provoked an outcry of high-pitched laments and wide gestures, which Esma did her best to relay, along with Attila, since the answers were in both Romany and Bosnian. Soon the women of Lijce were quarreling among themselves.
“That woman says they are gone,” said Esma. “This lady agrees and says the army murdered them and dumped their bodies in the river.”
“Ask which army, please.”
“The Bosnian Army. With the Americans exiting, the Bosnians wanted the land from the camp back.”
An older woman appeared irritated by that theory.
“She says the Bosniaks wouldn’t kill the Roma because the Rom men fought for this country. But the other says that the people in Barupra were Orthodox and to the Muslims no different than the Serbs. And those two women”—Esma pointed—“are laughing at the rest and saying the Americans murdered the people in Barupra because they thought the Roma had helped Kajevic kill their soldiers.”
I tried to get specifics on what the Roma had done for Kajevic, but the women were mystified themselves.
I turned to Attila on the other side of the circle for further translation.
“Most,” Attila explained, “say it was Arkan Tigers sent by Kajevic, although that lady thinks the Barupra people just went back to Kosovo.”
I’d never heard that one, and Attila grinned about the notion.
“Nobody hears word-fucking-one in eleven years? Even with cell phones? All them here, they’re oxygen thieves,” said Attila. “None of them have a clue really. They’re Gypsies. They answer because they enjoy telling stories.”
I expected Esma to take offense but instead she laughed with Attila. In the meantime, the oldest lady, stout and bent but with an evident strength that might have been sheer durability, made a noise and waved her hand as she wandered away.
“Where are the men, by the way?” I asked Attila and Esma. “Working?”
“Some,” said Attila. “I’ve hired a couple, sent them to Saudi, if I recall. Always been a large gray market in Bosnia, smuggled goods bartered and sold, which the Gypsies are good at. Some are in town running scams. Most are out picking iron.”
“A few also are in prison,” said Esma, didactic as ever. “The Roma are the most imprisoned men in Europe.”
I focused on Attila. “What do you mean ‘picking iron’?”
“Gathering scrap metal,” she said. “Steel. Aluminum. They sell it to dealers. Anything will do. Old bedsprings, cans, any junk. That’s what most of the men in Barupra did.”
A few minutes later, a man, short and wide, burst through the circle of females to introduce himself to me. He spoke some English.
“Am mayor here. Tobar.” Missing three upper front teeth, Tobar was about five foot four with a broad white belt that circled his enormous belly. His hairdo, with greasy strands spilling down from his bald crown, looked like someone had dropped a bowl of soup on his head. There were three large gold rings on his fingers when he extended his hand to shake. But when he caught sight of Esma, I lost his attention. He gasped and bowed from the waist and actually kissed her hand.
“The beautiful lady!”
Esma laughed out loud.
“Gypsy men are always on the make,” she told me.
Even Esma lost some of Tobar’s interest when Attila returned, having wandered off to take a call. She and Tobar greeted each other heartily in Bosnian, amid rounds of shoulder slapping.
“Tobar used to work at Camp Comanche,” Attila told us. “He ran the laundry.”
I explained to Tobar that we were here to ask about the Roma at Barupra. He took a step back, while he wrinkled up his face as if there were a bad smell.
“No good baxt.” Esma said that word referred to luck or good fortune.
“Why?”
“They are ghosts now,” Esma translated, once Tobar switched to Romany. “It is bad to disturb them.”
I asked what had happened, but Tobar waved his palms as if it was all too complicated for understanding. Instead, he insisted on giving us a tour of the town. As it was no more than two blocks long, there seemed no reason to decline. The first stop was his house, which he pointed out from the road.
“Very big,” he said, and it was surely the largest here, with two satellite dishes. Tobar, who’d been impressed into the Bosnian Army during the war, had received a grant from the government afterward to help with the construction. The second floor was demarcated by a white wooden balustrade, knobbed in the classical style, atop which Tobar had affixed a line of plastic swans, the kind you might have seen on lawns in Florida in the 1950s. In addition, perhaps for safekeeping, the front half of the body of a twenty-year-old Impala was perched on the second floor, not far from the birds.
From there, Tobar took us down to the river, a beautiful fast-running stream. This was the source of fresh water for the town, which had no plumbing. Eventually, we returned to Tobar’s house, where he offered us coffee. Esma nodded to indicate that we should accept, and we sat outside in the chill at a picnic table. Mrs. Tobar emerged with a steaming plastic pitcher of tar-black liquid, while Esma showed me how to drink Roma-fashion, without letting the cup touch my lips.
Eventually, I directed the conversation back to Barupra.
“Are the Roma who lived there dead?” I asked Tobar.
“What else?”
“Why? With what excuse?”
“They are Roma.” He was repeating himself in both Bosnian and Romany, and Esma and Attila were taking turns converting what he said to English, with Tobar adding a word or two now and then. “When have the gadje needed an excuse to kill Roma? But it is a bad business. When sad things happen, one must not dwell on them.” Tobar nodded weightily at his own wisdom.
I said, “One of the women we spoke to when we arrived believed that the Americans thought the Roma in Barupra had helped Kajevic.”
Tobar shook his strange hairdo around, then hunkered down and lowered his voice.
“Never,” Tobar said. “The Roma all despise Kajevic. When the Serbs captured several Muslims, they would look next for one or two Roma. The Serbians would force the Gypsies at gunpoint to dig two holes, one large, one small. Then the Serbs shot them all, the Roma included.”
“Why two holes?” I asked.
“Because the Roma were not good enough to bury in the first hole,” Tobar said. Esma shot me a look to make sure I had fully registered the prejudice.
I told Tobar that I had heard speculation that the Roma in Barupra were killed by gangsters because the Roma were in competition with them, stealing cars.
“Well, yes,” said Tobar, levering his head back and forth. “They were iron pickers, and you know an auto is mostly steel. I have heard that a few in Barupra stole cars. But the mobs would never bother killing these Roma. They would just send the police to arrest them. They own the police.” Tobar smoothed his index finger under his thumb.
Attila’s cell phone was buzzing every couple of minutes, and while she walked off to handle another call, I took advantage of her absence to ask if Tobar knew Ferko, whom I wouldn’t name in Attila’s presence.
“Oh yes,” said Tobar, “but we met only once. This man was here, who remembers why? Business of some kind. I am the mayor and said hello. He told us he was from Barupra, the only one to live after the Chetniks. The next year this fine lady comes, asking many questions about Barupra. I told her it is a bad business, but she wanted this fellow’s mobile number. A man cannot decline the request of a woman so beautiful, no?”
Esma pointed to Tobar, instructing me to take heed. All three of us were laughing.
Awaiting Attila, we spent another ten minutes or so with Tobar, who told us about recent troubles in his business, selling telephones.
As we were strolling back to the car, I caught sight of the old woman who had turned away from the circle of women earlier. She was outside, working over an old wooden barrel with a long stick, and I asked Esma to help me speak with her.
The old lady looked a little like an American Indian. Her gray hair under her babushka was braided and both front teeth were broken. Her long patterned skirt brushed the ground but her feet, so callused they appeared gray, were in flip-flops despite the cold.
I had a letter from the Bosnian government introducing me and I removed it from the pocket of my jacket, but the old lady smacked it away.
“She can’t read,” said Esma quietly. “You’ll find that very few of the women can.”
Esma did her best to explain about the Court, but the woman, who had never been far from Lijce, did not seem interested. She was one of those naturally quarrelsome old ladies, and as soon as Attila rejoined us, the old lady directed a remark to her, while pointing at Esma. Attila chuckled but was initially reluctant to translate.
“She says she prefers to speak Bosnian with me,” Attila finally explained. “‘That one—it hurts my ears to listen to how she speaks Romany.’”
Esma took the complaint with good humor.
“Romany has a million dialects,” she said. “And of course, all Roma believe only theirs is correct.”
What the old lady had been doing, it turned out, was laundry for herself and her unmarried adult grandson, a swirling stew of clothing amid the mist rising from the barrel. Esma said that the wash would take this woman most of the day, between going to the stream, hauling then heating the water, and washing twice, inasmuch as it was again bad baxt if women’s clothes and men’s ever touched.
The old lady continued working over the steaming tub as Attila translated her ramblings. The house behind her, where she lived with her grandson, was no more than fifteen feet by fifteen and made of mud and sticks.
I asked why the old woman had seemed provoked by what her neighbors were saying about Barupra.
“They talk to hear themselves. No one in this village knows anything. Sinfi there, her sister married a Barupra man. Ask her. She should know, but she knows nothing either.” With her knobby arthritic hand, the old lady pointed next door, where a skinny young woman was also washing with her back to us, a baby on her hip.
We started in that direction, but the old woman called us back. After disparaging her neighbors for speaking from ignorance, it turned out the old lady had a theory of her own.
“They will return, those people. It is our way.”
When I asked who had told her that, she banged her stick against the inside of the barrel, although it seemed clear she would have preferred using it on me.
Attila said, “She says no one needs to inform her. She is an old woman and knows things.”
I looked at Esma. “Gypsy women?”
“Very powerful,” she answered. “I have told you.”
“Ask, please,” I said to Attila, “where the Barupra people are now while they wait to return.”
Attila again laughed heartily before relaying her answer.
“She says she has heard that lawyers are smart, but that must not include you, if you expect an old woman to know more than you do.”
The three of us moved next door to the house of the young woman, Sinfi. She had disappeared but came to her doorway as we approached, smiling shyly. She still toted her baby as she stood barefoot on the threshold. I had noticed at Tobar’s that shoes were not worn indoors. The room I could see behind Sinfi was spotless, furnished with a beaten cupboard and an old rug on the wall, although the ceiling was bowed and showed spots of water damage that might soon lead to its collapse. Sinfi was dressed in a pair of leopard-print trousers and a sweatshirt lettered with a saying in German I didn’t understand, aside from the word ‘Gesundheit.’ Her black hair strayed around her face, in which her eyes, in something of a rarity, were an arresting bright green. She was bone thin and very pretty, except when she smiled, disclosing a deplorable greenish muddle in her mouth. The baby, a little girl of about nine months, watched all of us avidly, and reached to grasp our fingers when we offered them.
I once more withdrew the letter from my jacket. Sinfi smiled but did not bother with the pretense of looking. As had happened next door, she preferred that Attila be the translator.
Sinfi said her sister had married a Roma boy from Barupra. Sinfi had visited there twice with her parents, before her mother and father left Lijce after Sinfi’s paternal grandmother died.
“Did any other people from Lijce marry those in Barupra?”
“Only my sister. Others would not.”
“Because they were Orthodox?”
My question amused her. “Because they were so poor. They had nothing.”
Esma interjected to explain that in traditional communities, Roma adopted gadje religions largely as protective coloration, so priests or imams would assist with burials and births. Their true faith, as Esma described it, sounded like some kind of spiritualism, often involving the ghosts of ancestors.
“My sister’s right arm was bad,” said Sinfi, “shriveled up. My parents were happy she married. Prako had a lip with the cleft, so they were a good match.” She smiled in muted irony. Among the fifty or so souls I’d seen here, the consequences of the inevitable inbreeding had been clear: wall eyes, hare lips, but also, especially among the children, instances of startling beauty, before it was diluted over time by poor diet and other hardships.
“And where is your sister now?” I said.
“They are gone from Barupra. All.”
“And where did they go?”
“People say they were murdered.”
“Do you think that?”
“I want not to,” she said, but shook her head to indicate that her hope was faint. “If God wills,” she added.
She explained that after her marriage, her sister called her parents or her every few months on a borrowed cell phone. In another of the customs of India, which the Romany people still maintained a millennium after their exodus, a new wife became part of her husband’s family, subordinate to her mother-in-law and somewhat detached from her family of origin.
“At first,” Sinfi said, “when we did not hear from her, we tried the number of her friend who had a phone, but there was no answer. After the entire winter passed with no word, my father said we should go to see her. We borrowed a car. But they were not there. No one was. The village was gone. My father went to the police in Vica Donja. They acted like he was crazy to think there had ever been people in Barupra.” Sinfi stopped speaking for a second and looked at the ground to retain her composure. “That made my father sure that Kajevic had killed them all.”
“Why Kajevic?”
“The last I talked to my sister, that spring, she said a soldier had been there to warn them that Kajevic was going to kill some of the men who lived in Barupra.”
“One man? Many men?”
“Many.”
“And why?”
“He thought they had talked to the Americans. But my sister said Prako was not worried. It was not his business. He’d had nothing to do with that.”
“Did your sister say who in town had talked to the Americans? Or what they had said? Anything like that?”
Sinfi knew no more. Yet this was the first thing I’d heard in Lijce that bore some resemblance to evidence. It was hearsay of several magnitudes, but Sinfi had recounted a concrete event, which, if it actually occurred, would offer a strong suggestion about who’d engineered the massacre.
I asked Sinfi if I could take out my phone to record her, but she said her husband would be angry if he knew she had spoken about Kajevic.
“But you and your parents believe Kajevic’s troops killed them all in Barupra?” I asked.
“Me? I think so. My father, too. My mother, no. She had a dream a few years ago that my sister called her. So she hopes.” Sinfi’s eyes now were pooling.
Before we left, Esma removed her purple scarf, the object of such lavish admiration here, and wrapped it around the baby. As we said good-bye, Sinfi took a step over her threshold to squint at me in the strong sun that had just emerged from the clouds.
“You are going to find who murdered them?” she asked.
“I will try.”
“They should be punished,” she said to me. “Even Roma should not be treated like that.”