My boyfriend disappeared one night
“I’m just going out to get juice,” he said
It was a happy afternoon. He cooked, we shared stories and jokes, we listened to music. By habit and by nature, he ended up with food for more than two people. Instead of shrugging it away with “All the better, we’ll have leftovers,” we called up some friends and invited them over for dinner.
“I’m just going out the get juice,” he said. We were both excited that people are on their way over. I was sitting on the couch, watching him put on his shoes. Then he leaned against the door frame, smiled widely, and said, “Take my picture!”
I took my phone and snapped a picture. The next moment, the door was already closing behind him.
One hour later, I was sitting by the kitchen window. It was dark outside by now and I was desperately looking at the black silhouettes of people, hoping one of them was him. He had left his phone on the table, something he’s prone to do if he goes out just for a quick errand. Soon I saw the seven friends we had invited. My hope had been that he had decided to wait for them at the bus stop because only one of them had visited us before. But no, he was not among them.
I welcomed them at the door, food and music and drinks were waiting for them in the living room.
“Where’s my uncle?” one of them asked, my boyfriend’s nephew and very good friend as they’re close in age.
“He went out for juice an hour ago…” I said and they laughed. “Should I be worried?”
“No,” said the nephew, “Something must have come up, he’ll be back.”
Unphased, they sat down. We were chatting and I was struggling greatly to keep up with their good mood while all I could do was look at the front door and hope he’d walk in.
Another hour passed.
“Guys,” I said, “He’s been out for two hours now. I’m really getting worried.”
“Does he have his phone?” asked the nephew.
“No, he left it here.”
“His ID documents?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll be back. But you can call the local police station and ask if they have him.”
The piece that’s missing in this picture
To an objective outsider, there are some weird elements in this story. How I was deferring to my guests about whether I should worry. How they were completely calm about my boyfriend’s sudden disappearance.
My partner, Pepi, is of Roma ethnicity — more widely known in the West as Gypsy. Our guests were all of the Roma community and related to him — his nephew, called Little Pepi (as they share the same name and my boyfriend, Big Pepi, is a few years older), and a few other nieces, nephews, and cousins.
The Roma are historically the most despised, attacked, and disenfranchised minority in Europe. In my country, Bulgaria, it is still acceptable to openly hate and abuse them. In fact, I befriended this Roma community a year ago when I joined them in their fight against the municipality which was trying to leave them without housing and chase them away from a hostile neighborhood that wanted to become white.
One thing I learned in my friendship with the Roma is that mainstream “white” society has no clue about the realities of racism. Almost every aspect of “normal” life — interacting with pedestrians, interacting with officials, grocery shopping, catching a taxi — is different for a Roma person.
The night Pepi disappeared, our relationship had just recently begun. I already knew a lot about Roma life but it was still very little. So I deferred to his Roma family. “Should I be worried? Or is this normal?”
“It’s normal,” they said. “He’ll be back.”
The search
I called the local police station as Little Pepi suggested. I asked if my boyfriend is there and gave them his full info. “No, he’s not here,” they said.
I thought of something to buy from the grocery store and told my guests I’m going out for 10 minutes. In my increasing panic, I thought, “What if he fainted or something?” Or the more likely, “What if he was beaten up?”
A couple of weeks earlier, another friend from the Roma community who was staying with a friend nearby and would occasionally drop by and have coffee, said something that I couldn’t stop thinking about.
“This is a weird neighborhood,” he told Pepi. “I walk around just listening to music on my headphones, minding my own business, and groups of young men see me, start yelling slurs at me, or straight up shove me.”
The neighborhood is where I live and grew up — middle-class, predominately white. There’s no Roma community here. The neighborhood where Pepi and his family are from is known for poverty and petty crime. But from the Roma perspective, my neighborbood, the “better” neighborhood, is the dangerous one.
I went to the nearby grocery store, with one of the women by my side — in typical Roma fashion, you never go out alone if you can help it, so when I said I’m going out, several people jumped up to accompany me. As we were nearing the store and chatting casually I was scanning the surroundings, fearing to see Pepi lying unconscious somewhere. He’s very familiar with violence — since very early childhood actually. He knows how to fight, he knows how to protect himself, and he also knows how to navigate situations with diplomacy. But all I could think was “What does a lifetime of experience and all the street smarts in the world matter in a single individual against a whole group of dumb racists?”
There were no signs of Pepi around the store. We bought some soft drinks and came back.
Back on the couch among my Roma friends, being urged to eat at least a little bit of the food Pepi had cooked with such joy, I was melting with anxiety. I kept looking at the front door, hoping to hear the turn of keys. Every time I heard the elevator move, I hoped it would be him.
It was now over 3 hours since he went out.
My sole hope was that, somehow, he came across some lucrative gig. After he finishes his day job in the early afternoon, he often goes out to hustle. He walks up to chain market stores and starts helping with stocking. Usually, the workers there welcome his help and pay him. He also scans for people who seem in need of help with moving or renovating. Most accept his help and pay — sometimes with cigarettes, sometimes with small or big amounts of money. The Roma, mostly described as lazy and irresponsible by outsiders, are actually the most hard-working hustlers I know. They are never “too proud” for any kind of work but take great pride in working hard and doing their best. It’s a very different kind of life from what I know and grew up with. No two days are alike. If one day things don’t work out, there’s always tomorrow. There’s an unrelenting sense of hope and will to fight. Never any fatigue, depression, or neurosis. Some days Pepi would return and press several notes into my hands and say, “This is for the water bill,” or “This is for the electricity bill,” or “This is for cat food.” Other days he returns with some appliances or electronics that people ask him to discard because they’re not working anymore. He puts on some music, repairs them so they are good as new, and then re-sells them. And other days, he returns empty-handed and tired, lays down on the couch, and lights up a cigarette with a huge smile on his face, already looking forward to tomorrow.
“Let’s see what God has prepared for us today,” is something Pepi says in the mornings or before he goes out.
The night he disappeared I was hoping he came across some major renovation in the neighborhood and decided it was too good to pass up. It was not very likely, though. Even though he left his phone, he would have found a way to call me from someone else’s phone. He knows my number by heart and even if his phone dies or he can’t use it for some reason, he’s always been able to find a way to call.
“Ah, I’m out of cigarettes,” one of my guests said. “Where’s the nearby store?”
“I’ll get them!” I said. I wanted to go to Pepi’s favorite chain market store in the neighborhood and see if he is somehow caught up working there. With another one of my guests by my side, we took the 30-minute walk there and back. We didn’t find him.
Back home, I used Pepi’s phone to call one of the security guards at the store and ask if at least he had been there earlier. The guy said he wasn’t on shift that day so he didn’t know.
“Maybe he decided to visit someone in our home neighborhood?” offered one of the guests. It was a long stretch but she was seeing how increasingly worried I was getting and was trying, for my sake, to think up scenarios. “He wouldn’t just go there to visit someone when we were expecting you guys to come over,” I said but, liking this idea more than the image of him lying in blood somewhere, I called a few of his sisters and nephews. Nobody had seen him. “Let me know when he turns up,” they all asked.
Almost five hours since Pepi went out, I was sitting on the couch beside myself with worry. Half of the guests had left, giving me hugs, urging me not to worry and to call them when he’s back. The other half were there by my side on the couch, skipping through TV channels. I was grateful that they refused to leave me by myself.
Not knowing what else to do, I called the national emergency number and was connected with the police. “My boyfriend went to the store five hours ago and hasn’t been back.” The ensuing conversation made me more worried. “Is he on medication?” “Is he ill?” “Does he have any disability?” No, no, and no. He’s alert, he’s adequate, he’s healthy, none of this makes any sense. I told them I had called the local police station and he wasn’t there. They asked me for a description — height, weight, hair. Clothes. I remembered the picture he asked me to take just before he went out. Did he have some kind of intuition? I put the operator on speaker, opened the picture on my phone, and, holding back tears as I was looking at his sunny smile, I started listing out, “Light-blue winter jacket, grey jeans, black shirt…”
“We will tell all patrol cars in the neighborhood to keep an eye out for him,” the operator said. “If he’s not back by the morning, you are welcome to come to the local police station and file a missing person’s report.”
Completely overcome by helplessness and worry, I went out again. This time I insisted that nobody joins me because I had no rational idea in mind. “I’ll just scan the neighborhood for 10 minutes and I’ll be back, don’t worry,” I told my guests.
I started walking the streets I’ve known since I was born. My childhood neighborhood now seemed ominous, hostile, and bigger — like a jungle. If Pepi was beaten up somewhere, if he was lying wounded or unconscious somewhere, where would that be? How long would it take me to check every little street and corner? How many people would have passed him by because — since he’s very clearly of Roma ethnicity — they would have thought he’s a drunk, a homeless man, unworthy of attention?
20 minutes later, fully aware of how futile my efforts are but not knowing what else to do, I was circling one of the smaller blocks when I saw a familiar silhouette walking down the main street, towards my home.
“Pepi!” I yelled out. He stopped in his tracks and turned in my direction in utter confusion.
I ran to him, saw he was seemingly not wounded, and hugged him, finally allowing tears to flow down.
“What are you doing out?” he asked, perplexed, hugging me back.
“You were gone for five hours!”
“I was arrested, don’t worry. Let’s go home.”
What actually happened
Pepi decided to buy the juice from the big chain market store nearby. As he leaned against its wall to finish his cigarette, some person from a nearby building saw him from their window. They called the police and said someone is about to rob the store. Why? No reason in Pepi’s demeanor or behavior or actions. The only possible reason is his darker skin.
A police patrol car was there so quickly, that Pepi never had the chance to go into the store. Two policemen got out, itching to distribute justice. It didn’t matter that the security guy from the store told them he knows Pepi and Pepi works there. They shoved him, called him some racist slurs, and took him to the local police station with threats that they’ll keep him there as long as they please.
When I called that same police station, they said Pepi wasn’t there because he officially wasn’t. He was never booked in or formally arrested. In other words, there was no paper trail— something very common when the police decide to hold people without any clear wrongdoing.
Some time ago, another friend of the Roma community was picked up by police. He spent the night in the police station and was beaten very badly with a metal pipe — with one hand tied to a handrail above his head and the other hand tied down, so he can’t even coil his body under the hits. Then he was handcuffed next to an open door for the remainder of the night in the middle of winter. Since he hadn’t done anything wrong, he was released the following morning, again with no formal arrest or paperwork. He returned home with pneumonia.
In December, two children from the Roma community were run over by a car. I was there when the news reached them, and for a good hour, we all thought one of the kids had been killed. Several people rushed to the place where the accident happened. Little Pepi was among them, with his 18-year-old son and a cousin. They were met by police and immediately beaten up. Presumably, the police thought that this Roma gang was about to attack someone so they acted proactively. Little Pepi, his son, and the cousin spent the night in the police station, under heavy beatings — for daring to fight back when the police attacked them.
Pepi himself has been beaten up by police countless times. One time, he was the one to call the police when he witnessed a street fight going out of hand. They arrived, beat Pepi to a pulp, and put him in jail for the night.
He wasn’t beaten up when the police took him by the grocery store. He was insulted, threatened, shoved around — but he knows, and I know, and the police know it could have been much worse. They had full intention to keep him there overnight. They saw in his ID documents that his address registration is from “a dangerous neighborhood” and laughed him off when he said he was here staying with his girlfriend. We suspect that when the operator alerted all patrol cars with Pepi’s name and description, this is what prompted them to release him early.
“He’ll be back.”
We came home. Our remaining Roma guests were pleased but not surprised to see him return. I called Little Pepi and all the sisters and nephews I had called earlier. The conversations were all brief and nearly identical. “He’s back.” — “What happened?” — “He was arrested.” — “Ah,” they would say, as in this gives them all the information necessary.
Our guests left. Pepi barely ate some of the food he had prepared. He felt nauseous. When we went to bed, he was shaking as he was falling asleep. “I’ve seen Nazis,” he said, “but one of these two policemen was something special.”
Yet, we knew he was let off “easy.” He was lucky, in fact.
All this was nothing. It was nothing. Pepi barely mentions the experience, and when he does tell the story, his focus is not even on the police but on how cute and endearing it was that I went out looking for him.
The following day, he was already past it. I was watching him singing to himself and painting a door and I remembered when Little Pepi was held by the police that night in December. The police station was right next to the building where most of the Roma are staying. Little Pepi’s wife was there, outside, under the window. She knew her husband and eldest son were being beaten inside, in a room on the second floor, and was just silently looking up. “I will reach inside his chest and rip his heart out,” a police officer had told her about her son, as he was being dragged inside the police station.
“Come with us,” Pepi told her. “I’ll cook something, you’ll eat, you’ll sleep. They’ll be out tomorrow, they’ll be back.”
But she only nodded “no” and didn’t move.
They were back tomorrow. Both swollen and with black eyes, but they were back.
Sometimes they’re back with scars. Sometimes with pneumonia. Sometimes with no visible injuries. But they’re usually back.
I was thinking about how I descended into full-on panic the previous night, and Little Pepi was right all along. And as I was enjoying my sunny, strong boyfriend painting a door at home and singing a song, I thought how since I’ve connected my heart with a Roma man I need to adopt some of the Roma wisdom I had witnessed the previous night. Enjoy the happy times together. And if and when he vanishes, stay calm, stay together with the community, run a mental checklist — does he have his phone? does he have his ID documents? does he have money?— and trust that, one way or another, he’ll come back.
Originally published by Martina Petkova on Medium.com in May 2022