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.