Zoltán Tábori

Guns, Fire and Ditches

A Report from Tatárszentgyörgy on the Roma Killings

 

An old Gypsy woman forages in the meadow behind the birch trees. Her bicycle lies on the bank of a ditch. She could easily pedal off. Instead she waits for me to come over and shows me a handful of small white funnelshaped mushrooms in a plastic bag. “For soup,” she explains. “Sometimes there are lots, others when it’s hard to find any at all. This is enough for soup.”
“Do you too live at the edge of the village?” I ask. She nods. As we amble along the skies rumble: Tatárszentgyörgy, a short drive from the capital, adjoins the biggest military range in Hungary, and has done since pre-WWI Imperial days. Villagers haven’t flinched at the sound of gunshot for generations. Her home totters on the village outskirts, festooned with colourful clothes hung out to dry.
“Aren’t you afraid living here with the constant gunfire?”
“No, there’s nothing to be afraid of. They were caught; one from the next village, another here, and a third from Pest.”
She vanishes inside.
Hers was not the house torched on the night of 22 February 2009. That house stood at the other end of the village. Home to a man gunned down along with two of his small children as they fled its burning timbers, it proudly stood alongside four fenceless houses on a manmade road. Opposite, waist-high shrubs and acacia mount a swathe of sand. A sparse pine copse is a stone’s throw away.
The front door of the last house in the row opens directly onto the trees. It was spanking new, nicely plastered and painted, and it had double-glazing sturdy enough to even withstand a petrol bomb. An attacker would surely have sought out a filthy shanty with broken windows. After all there were plenty around. But this was the house they wanted.
Next door lives the father of the murdered 27-year-old man (the murdered five-year-old boy’s grandfather). His front window looks onto the burned-out wreckage—a daily reminder of what happened. He is a short 48-year-old with a head of thick grey hair and a small silver ring in his left ear. Two concrete steps lead up to the front door. He points towards the small room on the right. “That was where they were sleeping when they were attacked.”
I step up beside him and look in but I am outflanked by a little girl, who nips ahead and stops in the wreckage of what had been the largest room in the house, in the middle of the living room.
“It wasn’t there, but here!”
“Okay then it was there. The telly was probably on; they would lie down here. My son stuck by my grandson, come rain or shine.”
“Which of the three?”
“The one who departed this life, the one he always had slept with; he took him away with him.”
We go outside again. Inside the house is just one big pile of rubble.
“When was it built?”
“Three years ago. They had just started their life together; the state child subsidy payment went on it—there were three kids. My daughter-in-law has moved back in with her parents in the village and won’t to talk to me.”

He does not say so, but I get the feeling that his daughter-in-law pins the blame on him. Whatever the case, the family has broken apart, with one of the two surviving children here, the other there.
“What will happen to the house?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll take it over on behalf of my younger son.”
“How many children do you have?”
“Eight boys, one girl. Seven boys now.”
When he was young he used to work on a factory assembly line in Budapest. He later came back to the village where he works as a car repair man. Usually two or three cars stand in front of the house.
“A garage will charge twenty or thirty thousand forints; I’ll do it for four or five.”
“Was your son also a mechanic?”
“He was more into wheeling and dealing. He used to work on building sites in Budapest.” He falls silent before deciding that I am likely to be well-informed and therefore will know that his son was charged with stealing timber worth half a million forints. So he chooses to broach the subject himself: “It happened this winter. It’s all true, but everyone was filching—Gypsies and Hungarians alike.”
In the photograph the young man who was killed is showing off his muscles in a grey t-shirt, arms crossed. He is well-proportioned, and even if there is no hint of a smile, he looks serious rather than hard-faced.
“So, this is where they died, in the snow?”
“No, I picked my son up, took him into our place and put him on my bed.
That’s where he bled to death.”
“And the little boy? Shouldn’t he have been seen to first?”
“Nothing could be done to help him. His little head… at the back there was a big chunk missing. That was the exit wound. Eighteen fragments of shot were dug out of his body.”
The car mechanic’s house is a huge Kádár-era mud-brick house, at least twice as big as the one belonging to his son. The wall of countless small, brown mud bricks presents a bizarre sight. He sees that I am inspecting his house.
“I built it with my own hands. There must be twenty or twenty-five thousand mud bricks in it; every one I laid myself. We were always hard at work; we don’t have enough bread to eat, let alone to spend on guns. If I had the money, I’d buy one. But that’s not going to bring my son back, or my grandson.”
“What happened that night?”
“Around half-past midnight, my wife was woken up by a loud bang, a crackling of flames: our son’s house was on fire. I raced out but didn’t see anyone. I dashed into the blazing house, and no one was there either. It was only when I came out again that I saw them lying there in the snow at the edge of the acacia grove: my son and grandson. My son was still alive, groaning. I reckon he knew who his attackers were, but he couldn’t get it out. I carried him onto the couch inside and wrapped him up. He was cold all over. There were three holes in his back; the detective said a spiked beam probably fell onto him—that’s what did it…” His voice choked.
“The little girl was injured as well. Where was she? Where did you find her?” “There. Look, she’ll show you herself where.”
I look up. The dark-eyed six-year-old girl, raven hair, is crouching three feet up one of the acacia trees. She was probably as far away again from her father and younger brother lying in the snow as they were from the front door of the burning house. Not far—the blink of an eye if you’re running. Right now she is sitting in the tree just as she did then, but then she comes down and over to us.
“She was shot on her finger and also her back.”
The grandfather hauls up her dress and shows the wounds. I can see four angry red puncture scars that are within a matchbox length of each other. The scar on the finger is not so obvious.
“’Stop it!” the little girl says angrily, the first vocal sign she has given of her presence. She is the sole eyewitness. I might try asking but haven’t the heart to do so: she has been interrogated more than enough.

[...]

 

Zoltán Tábori
a sociographer and translator, is an editor on the staff of the monthly Mozgó Világ.