In the meantime, I looked through the other information she had supplied the Court to corroborate Ferko’s story. Using photographs and UN refugee reports, she’d established the presence of a Roma refugee camp of four hundred persons on the outskirts of Tuzla in April 2004. Their sudden disappearance was confirmed by affidavits from local police, provincial officials, and two nearby Orthodox priests, who baptized the children and buried the dead in Barupra. Photographs showed the changes to the landscape of the coal mine below the camp in April 2004, and she’d obtained reports from two different seismographic stations that recorded a ground disturbance late on April 27. Finally, several residents of the nearest town, Vica Donja, had described, under oath, a truck convoy racing away from the mine in the wake of the explosion. Although it had taken eleven years to get to this point, the need to investigate seemed unassailable.
While I was reading this material, Esma announced she was hungry. She called down to room service, then covered the extension long enough to ask what I’d like. I requested fish.
“You did an impressive job with all this,” I told Esma when she returned. Just as the greatness of many scientists lay in the design of their experiments, good lawyering required considerable inventiveness in assembling proof.
“You are kind to say so,” she replied. “Not that it helped gain much interest from anyone with the authority to investigate further.” She described a long journey of frustration. The Yugoslav Tribunal eventually concluded the case was outside the time limits on their jurisdiction. The prosecutors in Bosnia fiddled with the matter until 2013, but clearly feared antagonizing the US and worsening divisions in their fractured nation. Instead, the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina—BiH—referred the case to the ICC, empowering the Court to act with any legal authority BiH would have. Despite that, the file languished at the ICC until Esma threatened to stage demonstrations.
“But I cannot pretend to be surprised,” she said. “The truth, Bill, is that very few persons on this continent can be bothered with the Roma. The most literate, progressive, tolerant people will comment without self-consciousness about ‘the dirty Gypsies.’ You will see.”
I asked how she explained such deep-seated prejudice. The question energized her, and she swung upright.
“I will not tell you, Bill, that the Roma have done nothing to inspire those attitudes. ‘Roma’ means ‘the People.’ Accordingly, you”—she pointed a polished nail at me—“are a nonperson against whom misbehavior—theft, fraud, even violence—requires no apology within the group. I daresay that attitude is inexcusable.
“But,” she said, “we have been among you for more than a thousand years, since the Roma first migrated from India into Greece. And generation after generation, what has most infuriated Europeans about the ‘Gitanos’ or ‘Celo’ or ‘Tziganes,’ by whichever of a thousand names we are called, is our absolute stubborn insistence on living by our values, not yours. As a child, Bill, I was not taught to tell time. I never saw a Rom man wearing a watch. We go when all are ready. A small matter seemingly, but not if you wish to attend school or keep a job. Millions of us have assimilated to one degree or another, most notably in the US. But less so here in Europe.”
Her mention of American Gypsies suddenly summoned a childhood memory of the tinker who pushed his cart down the streets of Kewahnee, where I was raised, singing out unintelligible syllables in an alluring melody. He carried a grinding wheel operated with a pedal, and I sometimes stood nearby and watched the sparks fly as he sharpened my mother’s knives. In a rumpled tweed coat and a county cap, he was the color of tarnished brass, like a candlestick my mother once asked him to polish. But he knew his place. He did not even approach the doorways. The women of the neighborhood brought their cutlery or pans to him—and kept one hand on their children.
“And this commitment to remaining different has drawn from the gadje unrelenting persecution. Slavery. Floggings. Brandings. Organized arrests and executions. Towns we were forbidden to enter and settlements we were forbidden to leave. And a mythology of sins: That we are filthy, when the inside of a Rom house is spotless. That we steal children, when the hard truth is that Roma have often been forced to part with their offspring. That the women are whores, when in fact purity is prized.”
With a knock, the waiter in a long frog-buttoned coat arrived, pushing a dining cart. I gallantly pulled out my credit card to pay, but Esma waved it aside, at which I felt some relief, since my training at the ICC had not gotten as far as expense reports.
After extending the sides of the cart to form a table and uncovering the meal, the waiter pulled the cork on a bottle of Entre-Deux-Mers and poured each of us a glass before I had time to object. The sole Esma had ordered for me was delicious and I thanked her.
“Oh yes. This is a lovely place.” She buttered a roll and ate with relish. There was no delicacy in the way she attacked her food or waved her wine glass at me to refill it. “So tell me, Bill. What is your story?”
I started on my résumé, but she threw up the back of her hand.
“No, Bill. How does a successful American lawyer uproot himself and come to The Hague? Is it acceptable if I call you ‘Bill’?”
“‘Boom’ is better. I haven’t heard much of Bill since I was in junior high school.” The pals who’d started calling me Boom in sixth or seventh grade were practicing irony. I was a quiet kid. But Esma wrinkled her nose at my nickname.
“I shall stay with ‘Bill,’ if you don’t mind. And how was it that you decided to come here?”
I told her what I was only beginning to understand about myself, that I more or less started again at the age of fifty.
“The all-knowing Internet says you are divorced,” she said.
“Four years plus,” I answered.
“And was that bloody or mild?”
“Mild by the end.”
“She more or less agreed?”
“Not at first. But once she reconnected with her high school boyfriend, about six months after I moved out, the divorce decree couldn’t be entered soon enough.”
“So no Other Woman?”
There had not been. Just terminal ennui.
“And how long were you married?” Now that we had roamed to the personal, Esma’s black eyes were penetrating.
“Nearly twenty-five years when I left.”
“Was the approaching anniversary the reason?”
“Not consciously. My younger son was about to graduate college. We’d teamed up to create this family and done it pretty well, I thought, in large measure due to Ellen, but now there didn’t seem to be much to look forward to together.”
“And since, Bill?” she asked. She produced a slightly naughty smile. “Many romances?”
I shrugged.
“Do you mind that I’m asking?”
“It seems a little one-sided.”
“Yes, but my story is either an entire evening or a few words. No husbands, no children, a legion of lovers and none pending. Is that better?”
I shrugged about that, too.
“I’ve met a lot of nice people,” I said. “But no one who’s felt for very long that we could go the distance.”
“And is that what you want? To go the distance?”
“I seem to have had that in mind when my marriage ended: doing better with someone else. But it’s complicated. When you get to middle age, it turns out a lot of people are single for a reason. Including me, of course.”
“And me as well,” she said. “Although I think I’m rather quick to grow bored. And now the ladies are calling you, I wager?”
I lifted my shoulders one more time. “Being a successful middle-aged man who is suddenly single is a little like being the water boy for the football team who finds that a magic genie has turned him into prom king.”
Esma clearly knew a lot about American culture, because she enjoyed the joke. But I was being honest about my distrust of my sudden rise on the social scale. Admittedly, in the fifties looks mattered less, because everyone had been damaged by time. I still had my lank blondish hair and remained tall and fairly fit. But I had thick features, and in high school and college knew I was not up to the pretty girls. In my senior year at Easton College, I’d been stunned that Ellen, who was clearly far above me in the mating order—smarter, cute by all measures, and a varsity runner—had been willing to go out with me, let alone stick with it. I still believe she felt a small egotistical thrill that she’d made a discovery other girls had missed; namely, that despite my occasional reserve, I could be an amusing wise guy.
Esma finally seemed to accede to my discomfort at this turn in the conversation and went off to the bathroom for a minute. When she returned, she got no farther than her bed. She stopped and flopped down on it dramatically, her arms thrown wide.