“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.