The Danube (22 page)

Mesere
is the Roma word for justice, and some Bulgarian Roma still maintain the Roma court system, overseen by the elders of the community, just as they do in Romania. He describes it as a way open to Roma families to solve conflicts between them, without resorting to the state justice system. Divorce is one area in point, in a community where the young usually marry very young. Aged forty-four he has three children of his own, five grandchildren and one great grand-daughter. Another use of traditional justice is in disputes over property. When one family starts building on land which another claims, they can turn to the
mesere
. Theft can also be dealt with – there have been cases when a father was held responsible, and fined, for the burglaries of his son. The whole point of it is not to ‘do justice’, but to restore peace within the Roma community.
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As the rain eases, we talk about weddings. Better-off Roma like himself are expected to contribute to other Roma weddings, though some money comes back when his own children or grandchildren marry. Weddings function as a bank within the community. Those who contribute to the wedding of your children expect your contribution when their turn comes round.

I find Pastor Iliya leaning on the fence in front of his church, a little balder, a little thinner in the face than when I first met him, here in the Humata suburb of Lom four years earlier. He has a fine moustache, a freshly ironed pin-striped shirt which he wears outside his black trousers, and a tiredness, almost a desperation, in his eyes that was not there before.

Lom is, or was, a success story for Bulgaria's half a million Roma, a town where few Roma pupils drop out of school, where nearly half the Roma children win a place at university, and where top officials in the town administration – the deputy mayor, the director of social services, and a good number of doctors, police officers and engineers – are Roma. The skills of local Roma community leaders in raising funds for the town, combined with a protestant work-ethic that men like Pastor Iliya have instilled into the community, helped the fourteen thousand Roma in this town of twenty-eight thousand pick themselves up by their own bootlaces.
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Then the 2008 economic crisis hit and settled in for the duration.
North-west Bulgaria is the poorest region in the poorest country in the European Union. Central funding was cut for Lom's many social and educational programmes on which the Roma had built their progress. As an EU member from 2007, the community also found it much harder to tap EU funds than when the country was a candidate, knocking at the gate. ‘When you were last here, we were feeding twenty-six children every day,’ Iliya reminds me. They were mainly children whose mothers were working abroad, or whose fathers were in prison. The soup-kitchen was staffed by volunteers from the community and funded by donations from the congregation of his Pentecostalist church – all Roma. But, as more and more adults came begging at the church door, the pastor took the hard decision to stop feeding the children. There were too few coins in the box to feed very many.

He's especially weighed down with the problems of the world, because he is just back from a gathering of all the Roma pastors of Bulgaria, where unemployment, homelessness and poverty were the main themes. And debt. ‘My people know no boundaries!’ he laughs, bitterly. ‘They find it very hard to resist something which catches their eye. Like a plasma TV. So they borrow money. Then when they cannot pay the money back, the lender comes and takes their house.’ The problem is all the more entrenched, because these are cases of Roma exploiting Roma. Usury is illegal, but victims are reluctant to report their follow Roma to the police, however cruelly they are treated by them, partly from loyalty, partly out of fear. Interest rates are 100 per cent a month. Some Roma get rich by exploiting the weakness and poverty of their fellow Roma, who lose even the little they had in the process. And the sight of Roma fighting Roma is the subject of mockery from the wider, non-Roma, society – the salt rubbed into the wound. ‘I tell my congregation – do not borrow money if you cannot pay it back! Stay away from those who charge you such interest rates. If you need money, go out and work for it in an honest way!’ But there never was much work here, even in the boom years in Bulgaria, let alone now in the depression.

So Father Iliya is going to restart the free meals for children – the congregation will be encouraged to bring a little rice, or flour or oil, or vegetables – anything they have to spare except money. He has also set up a room with computers, next to the church, where users must pay a
pittance, except between two and four each afternoon, the hours reserved for those children who cannot afford even the lowest denomination coins. The upstairs of the church – built by his own congregation – is lined with mattresses for the homeless. All of this is taking its toll on Iliya. He has a kind of flu, speaks thickly though his nose, his eyes have lost some, but not all, their sparkle. I say goodbye to him on the porch of his yellow church. There are flowers in all the windows. As I drive away I look back to see him supporting himself between two black gate-posts.

Niki Kirilov is also much less optimistic than when I last met him. We sit at a table outside a restaurant overlooking the main street in Lom, with his friend Svetlin Raykov. I eat catfish from the river, and drink excellent beer from the Almus brewery in Lom – Almus being the old name of the town. My hosts sip soft drinks. There's a graduation ball going on, and the streets are thronged with girls in mini-skirts and boys with ties thrown loosely round their necks. Each bar and restaurant pumps music into the early summer evening. ‘Listen – the
gadzos
(Roma slang for non-Roma) have even stolen our music!’ Niki jokes, but it is the only joke of the evening. ‘There's a fundamental difference between being poor in a poor country, and poor in a rich country,’ he says. Many Roma have gone abroad to work, to Italy and Spain in particular. There's even a joke in Bulgaria that there are only two ways to leave the country – Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 at Sofia airport. ‘As a Roma you are marginal, without rights here or there … but at least those who come back have learnt to put rubbish in the bin! … For years I've been pushing young Roma to study. To go to university, even when their families can't support them. Now they finish university and there are no jobs for them. And they come back to Lom and say to me, “You lied to us. You cheated us. You said it would be better if we had an education, and its not.” What this means is that we are losing the tools to change the Roma, to help them.’

Niki is one of the leading Roma intellectuals of Bulgaria. His sister is at the Sorbonne in Paris. His voice is respected in Roma and non-Roma circles. ‘Fifteen years ago we had a dream. I don't want to imitate Martin Luther King, but they have taken that dream away from us.’ What had impressed me most about him at our first meeting was his total lack of self-pity or complaint. His was not a litany of words such as ‘discrimination’ and ‘prejudice’ – words ‘devalued by over-use’ he had told
me then – but rather a list of individual and collective successes. But this time he is worried by the growing desperation of the Roma, and the increasing hostility between them and the majority, white population. ‘The gap between the Roma and non-Roma is getting bigger and bigger, and if that process is not stopped, sooner or later there will be clashes, ethnic clashes here.’ He also worries about the retreat of the state from the Roma ghettoes in Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second largest city, where teachers no longer bother to teach Roma kids, and where what he sees as the ‘Islamisation’ of young Muslim Roma is going from strength to strength.

The Ministry of Education in Sofia has cut funding for one of his programmes in Lom because he included non-Roma children in it, although the money was for a Roma project. He wrings his hands – ‘but the whole point of it was to integrate the Roma with the non-Roma!’ His voice lifts, almost shouting over the roar of a car that is backing precariously towards our table. ‘So what can you do?’ I shout back. The car's engine is switched off. We can talk normally again. ‘We fight, of course, but we have fewer and fewer tools …’ Niki Kirilov expresses both admiration and frustration about Livia Jaróka, a Hungarian member of the European Parliament, and the most prominent Roma in the whole of Europe.
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She told me recently that she had spent her first five years in Brussels learning the system – of political influence, and access to funds, and how she feels that she is in the European capital for all Roma, not just for her own centre-right Hungarian party, Fidesz. He agrees that you have to know the system; that has been the key to his own success and that of Lom in Bulgaria. But, he adds, ‘if she wants to represent us, she should tour the Roma communities of eastern Europe, listening to our problems, and telling us what she is doing on our behalf – then she would have a real mandate to speak for us in the corridors of power!’ Otherwise, she is in danger of being ‘a lone Roma monkey,’ he says. ‘Because everyone likes to laugh at Roma monkeys! They add colour …’

On Saturday morning I go with Niki's friend Milenko to Lom market. The first of the local spring vegetables are for sale, spring onions and leafy vegetables from the greenhouses. The Roma don't have land, so I'm more interested in the stalls on the edge of the market where they are selling their wares. Spasska sits behind a pile of small, white haricot beans, and is introduced to me as a fortune teller. She's a grandmother figure of
indeterminate age, who speaks in a great stream of Bulgarian intermingled with words from the Romani tongue. I go round the back of her stall for her to read my fate in her beans. First she takes my hand, places it over the big pile of beans, places her hand over mine, and asks my name. Then she starts dividing the beans swiftly into nine piles, with between one and four beans in each. It all happens so fast, and she keeps talking throughout, I do not notice the moment that she shifts from exchanging pleasantries with Milenko to the incantation with which she begins to read my destiny. Milenko stumbles over his simultaneous translation, such is the speed of her delivery. I will have a very good exit, she says – does she mean death? I ask him – ‘I don't know! She used the word for “exit”’ he mumbles. ‘You have a big fight with the woman you love. You are desperate, in ill health,’ Spasska continues, her hands racing between the beans, adding and subtracting all the time, the piles rising and falling. ‘You want to start a new job in a new place – that would be good for you. Everything will be all right if you go to your new job.’ She pauses, looking at me to say ‘this is your pile, and this is your woman's … you have thoughts to live with or without her, but she is ready for you, you call her, she is ready to live with you … if you call her, everything will be all right, and your exit will be excellent.’ She stops in mid flow, and it is all over. ‘I think this is the moment when you should give her some money,’ Milenko suggests. I ask her how much it should be. ‘There is no fixed price,’ she says. ‘Pay what you want. I have no food. Give from your heart.’ I give her a ten leva note – five Euros – and she seems content, if not very impressed. ‘How did she learn to read the beans?’ I ask. ‘A priest taught me,’ she says, rather surprisingly. ‘I had no money to buy nappies for my grandchildren, so I was begging outside a church. The man came up to me and offered me a whole bag of money. I looked into it and took out a ten leva note. That is all I need I told him, though I could have taken it all. “Did you go into the church?” the priest asked me. “When the shepherd loses just one sheep, he leaves all the others to go and find the one that is lost,” he said. “From now on, that will be your role in life.”’

We thank her and stand up to go, turning down a chance to buy some holy water. Milenko walks me through Lom and points out shops which are owned by the better-off Roma families. One selling fancy clothes for special occasions, another selling children's toys and bicycles – one family
alone owns six or seven shops in the centre, and employs twenty people. We're on our way to a café with a Roma waitress, to meet Mladenka, a twenty-three-year-old Roma girl who is studying at medical university in Sofia. She's sitting there already when we arrive, a mass of lush, dark hair framing a pretty face, with black earrings, and deep brown eyes. She's wearing a Snob Cat T-shirt, and is a little bleary from the previous evening's revelry – a night dancing with her friends and relatives, celebrating her younger sister Pavlinka's graduation. She only finished school herself aged twenty, because the whole family went to the Czech Republic for several years to work in an air-conditioning factory. There she saved enough money to pay for her first year at university in Sofia. For the second year, she won a scholarship for students of Roma origin, from the Roma Education Fund in Budapest. She wants to come back to Lom when she finishes her course, to work in the hospital – to help her people, she says. Most of all, she would love to become a doctor, but does not know if she will be good enough, or will be able to find the money and time to study. Her words suggest that it is high time she started contributing to the family coffers. Her parents were aghast when she first mentioned she had won a place at university, but have slowly come round to the idea. She has never had a problem at school or university because of her ethnicity and is proud of her Roma identity. She does not hide it as many do when they start to make progress away from the ghetto. All her classmates from high school are already married with children, but her younger sister is following in her footsteps – sort of. She wants to study bakery and cake-making at the University of Plovdiv. Her older sister is in Lom, aged twenty-seven and married with two children. As for Mladenka, she will have her hands full with local health problems. There is something known as ‘Lom disease’, a kind of muscular dystrophy of the arms and legs, caused by a missing chromosome that affects the Roma in particular.
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‘And the Danube?’ I ask. ‘I can't swim!’ she confesses, though she likes to walk beside it with her friends when she comes home from her long sojourns in the capital.