Gypsy Life Worsens With Fall of Communism as Prejudice Revives : Romania: For centuries they have lived on the fringe of society as an underclass of fortunetellers, musicians and beggars.

Maria Baruta, 18 years old and six months pregnant, is gleefully expecting her first baby after seven years of marriage to a Gypsy chicken farmer.

In about 10 years, their child likely will be married off, as Maria was, ending an academic career unlikely to exceed three years and commencing the next generation.

“Maybe arranged marriages and no education are bad,” the young woman said as her wrinkled, 34-year-old mother-in-law struggled to listen above the wailings of a nearby drunk. “But that is our tradition, and it is all I have ever known.”

Gypsies in Romania and throughout Eastern Europe always have lived on the fringes of society. They are said to descend from a band of musicians who left India about the 11th Century, migrating first to Persia, then to Europe in the 14th or 15th Century. They were enslaved in Romania until the 19th Century. In this century, Adolf Hitler exterminated a half-million of them. In later years, the estimated 50,000 Romanian Gypsies seeking asylum in Germany were a frequent target of neo-Nazi attacks.

The end of Communist rule has revived old attitudes. Even if Baruta dreamed of something better, traditional prejudice against what many Romanians view as a permanent underclass of criminals and layabouts would make it unlikely.

But tiny, pretty Baruta, wearing a brown maternity outfit with her traditional multicolored head shawl covering a 2-foot braid, appears typical. Like most of the 200 or so residents of Transylvania’s Porumbacu de Jos, she seems content with a life of domestic drudgery and premature old age.

Her home, one room of a four-room clay house shared with three other families, is tidy. But outside, an open sewer runs along the one unpaved road.

The two dozen families of Porumbacu de Jos have intermarried for generations. They make their living raising livestock and occasionally working at nearby farms. On a recent afternoon, many of the men were drinking. Several old women were wailing and talking nonsense to themselves.

For many Romanians, such a scene strikes fears of being gradually overtaken by primitives, who by some estimates number more than 2 million--more than 10% of the population of Romania.

The Romanians’ loathing of Gypsies is reinforced by violent Gypsy gangs that dominate prostitution and theft in the capital city of Bucharest. Ubiquitous Gypsy beggars thrust sickly, rag-covered babies at passersby and display often-fake deformities for effect.

But there is also growing awareness of the need to help the Gypsies.

A recent Bucharest University study painted an abysmal portrait of a community on the edge of disaster. Among its findings:

* About two-thirds of the Gypsies are married by 17, and the average family has 4.75 children, more than double the national average; 62% of the women use no birth control, and 27% cite abortion as their only means of family planning.

* More than one-fourth are illiterate, and only 4% complete high school.

* Only 20% of Gypsy households have a refrigerator and 29% a radio.

* Fifty-eight percent of the men and 87% of the women have no professional training. Half the adults are unemployed.

The study warned of “a tendency toward heightened tensions that could explode in conflict.”

The government, pressed with trying to right the disastrous economy left behind by former Communist boss Nicolae Ceausescu, largely has looked the other way. Ceausescu’s policies were equally repressive for all, and intolerant of attacks on Gypsies. Officials more often used their authority to force Gypsy children to attend school.

Sociology professor Elena Zamfir, who directed the survey, said the most pressing need is to enforce mandatory education.

Chronic poverty encourages parents to take children out of school to beg, which leads to more poverty and criminality, she said.

“Romanians’ prejudice comes from the fact that the Gypsies often violate rules of society, but this behavior is in turn encouraged by the prejudice,” she said.

Prejudice in some cases spills over into ugly racism.

“I would massacre them all so they stop making children,” said Elena Nistor, a 40-year-old saleswoman in the central Romanian city of Sibiu, home to a large Gypsy community. “They’re totally uncivilized, refusing to work and engaging in only crimes, assaults and rapes. . . . All I can do is fear them.”

Ana Popescu, a retired secretary, suggested “rounding them all up forcibly and sending them to a place far away, where they can be supervised so they won’t escape.”

In the town’s beautifully preserved Gothic square, police chase away giggling Gypsy women in traditional costumes “so we won’t disturb the tourists,” said Mindra Gabor, a 22-year-old woman with a lengthy braid who wore flowing red and green robes and a white shawl.

Outside the Roman Emperor Hotel, grizzled Gypsy women beg foreigners for five Romanian lei , worth less than one U.S. cent.

The town, once the seat of Romania’s ethnic German minority, is home to the two claimants to Gypsy royalty, “King” Ion Cioaba and “Emperor” Iulian Radulescu.

Radulescu anointed himself in a ceremony last year attended by several thousand devotees.

He and Cioaba are descendants of traditional heads of the country’s major Gypsy clans--known as “bulibashi.”

In February, Radulescu made a pilgrimage to India, where the first Gypsies are believed to have come from. The name “Gypsy” apparently derived from a mistaken belief that they originally came from Egypt.

“It was a sort of homecoming,” Radulescu said. “I found I understood Sanskrit. . . . I am an Indian.”

Otherwise, Radulescu exhibited a tenuous grasp of history and geography. He assigned Romania to Asia and declared that united Germany has a population of 800 million--10 times too many.

Although in recent centuries most Gypsies took names typical of the countries where they lived, few adopted European ways. Easily identifiable by their darker skin, they were frequently the target of racism.

Even after emancipation in mid-19th-Century Romania, most continued living in nomadic clans.

Romania has the largest Gypsy population in Europe, but there are also large communities in the former Yugoslavia, Hungary and neighboring nations. There are smaller communities in the West.

Everywhere they have gone, the perception of Gypsies as beggars has led to prejudice and persecution.

Costel Vasile, head of the Young Generation Society of Gypsies in Bucharest, cited several cases of Romanian bands’ burning down Gypsy homes. Dozens of Gypsies were expelled from the village of Bolontin near the capital two years ago.

Vasile says Gypsies are disadvantaged in the new market economy because private companies refuse to hire them, and in the countryside they have not benefited from agricultural reforms because they were not landowners in the past.

“Too little has been done to help the Gypsies,” Vasile said. “There should be a special program . . . orienting them toward jobs such as jewelers, florists . . . and even garbage men.”

Many Gypsies say they actually preferred life under Ceausescu, when jobs and a salary were guaranteed for all. The dictator and his wife were executed when his government fell.

“Ceausescu was the father of the poor,” Radulescu said. “I wouldn’t have killed him. I would have given him a medal.”

Vasile bemoans Gypsy criminality and the often garish behavior of Cioaba and Radulescu, whom he says “compromise” his people “with the encouragement of the Romanian authorities.”

In a decrepit Sibiu slum, the rotund, 54-year-old Radulescu is building what he calls a palace with volunteer labor and funds “earned in our various businesses.”

When pressed about the nature of his business, Radulescu furiously left the room, returning five minutes later with large bundles of money in small bills.

“That is a million lei ($1,700),” he declared, flinging the bills on the table. “Now do you understand who I am?”

Radulescu said he is engaged in highly profitable and legitimate commerce, mostly selling imported goods such as alcohol, cigarettes and sunglasses in shops and stands operated by Gypsies throughout the Sibiu area.

“But the police turn us into criminals by constantly tormenting us with absurd regulations used only against the Gypsies, like exactly how we must arrange our goods on the shelf,” he said.

He is fighting back.

Radulescu currently is waging a campaign for the return of 180 tons of gold he says was stolen from Gypsies by Romanian governments over the years--first by the monarchy in the 1940s and 20 years later by the Communists.

He has given up, he said, on compensation for the million horses and 600,000 carriages he contends were also confiscated.

“Romanians have always been jealous because we are good merchants and know how to make money, while they are lazy,” he said. “In a few years we’ll be rich, but the Romanians will always be poor.”