On the Road to Babadag (15 page)

We were in Baurci at dusk. Misha took his money and drove off. In Baurci there are only Gagauz. We looked for Elena. We had met her two days earlier on a bus to Cahul. She had red hair and a shy, beautiful smile. She said she worked in Istanbul but was coming home now to see her children. She invited us, so here we were, trying to locate her in a village of 10,000 situated on low hills in the middle of a treeless plateau. "That's the one who had two husbands, and the second was a Turk," the villagers told us. We finally found her house. It stood in a long row of similar houses. The entrance was through a small, shady courtyard covered with creeping vines. Elena smiled again. She was surrounded by children. Her father came out. We were all embarrassed. "This is how we live," she said a few times. She wanted to show us everything at once. We went to the garden, inspected the vegetables, the grapes, here's the cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, we repeating after her, because we had come from afar and might not know what these things were. We inspected a gaunt roan calf tethered by a short chain to a dunghill. Pigs sat somewhere in the dark: we could smell them. Everything compact, close together. "They didn't give us much land," Elena said.

We slept in the biggest room. It was filled with knickknacks, in glass, plastic, porcelain, metal; figurines, ornaments, souvenirs, weavings, innocent nonsense—pale ballerinas, cheap watches, crystal balls—art with no pretension, a museum of neat stuff, oriental splendor, an orgy of beauty, trinkets, and dreams, a vision made flesh. It reminded me of the rooms of my country aunts and grandmothers, but those could not compare with this room in Baurci.

In the morning we inspected the village. Everyone came along: Elena, her children, her father, sister, brother-in-law Ilya, who knew the world, having served in the army in East Germany and built houses in Moscow. On the facade of the House of Culture, a folk-socialist mosaic. On a two-meter pedestal, a concrete bust of Lenin. "The best man, he," Elena said in Russian, smiling her smile. I understood then that they had nothing else here, that the memory of Baurci began sixty, seventy years ago; before that there was a blank. A donkey pulled the wagon; a child held the reins. Inside the cavernous House of Culture, the rumble of spiritless music. We found the source: an eighteen-year-old, pasty girl making gestures learned from television. The music issued from a tape, and she sang in a mechanical voice, lost in her sad and restless dance. For breakfast that morning we had a local dish: cooked pig skin. "Someday a movie theater comes," Elena said. Under a tree sat an old woman dressed in black. Beside her was a sack of sunflower seeds, and on a branch hung a rusty scale. The woman sat quietly, hands folded in her lap. On the tin gates leading out were images of the Olympics in Moscow: a stylized skyscraper topped with a red star.

Baurci was the true end of the Revolution. That's what it looked like. Nothing remained that could be used or that had any value—seventy years not worth shit. A caricature monument to a criminal before an empty building in which rumbled a desperate imitation of music from the rotten West. Only the donkey's harness made sense, had substance. I'll be frank: I was at a loss. People, you would think, know what is good for them, and their longing hearts cannot lie. Something didn't fit here, was not in key. I felt I was an intruder, an imbecile in a world I couldn't parse.

There was only one new building in Baurci, but it was large, perhaps even larger than the House of Culture. Beige walls, huge windows, a red roof. Simplicity, functionality, and overall a kind of bright challenge to the weary village. One sees something like that brightness in American films, say, when a young couple gets married. "Protestants," Elena said. I asked about the size of the congregation, but she didn't know. She said only that the converts "did no work and got a lot of money from somewhere." Inside, gleaming pine pews, a pine altar, Ikea-like. Later I saw the house of one of the congregants; it didn't differ from the others, except for the Japanese off-road vehicle, a few years old, in the front. "He drives to Chişină u," Elena said, and it sounded like a reproach.

We too went to the capital that afternoon. It was ten kilometers to the bus stop. Ilya took us in his Zhiguli. Since morning we had been drinking beer and wine, alternating, but that was no problem for Ilya. Chişinău was no problem either, he said, if the bus didn't come. He was short, sinewy, and feared nothing, having seen both Dresden and Moscow. But the bus came, and we hugged each other tight on the dusty road to Congaz. We vowed that we would meet again. These were wonderful people. They said, "This is how we live," and showed us their life as naturally as others would give a tour of their house. Elena's sister had got up at four in the morning to kill a rabbit and a chicken for our breakfast. The mother of the two sisters, paralyzed, sat on a chair in the shade of a grapevine and watched, grinning, as we drank wine. The father shared with us his slivovitz colored with raspberry juice. Plates of melon and watermelon slices. Now we embraced Ilya on the dusty road to Congaz and vowed that we would meet again, though none of us believed it.

Chişinău, ah Chişinău! White apartment blocks on green hills. You saw them from the north, south, east, and west. Massed like high cliffs gleaming in the sun. A paean to geometry in the rolling, irregular landscape. There is nothing larger or taller in all Moldova. Giant tombstones stuck in the fertile, plump earth. Stone tablets of egalitarianism. Termite towers of universal progress. A New Jerusalem dying a technological death.

At the exits from the city stood trucks loaded with plastic kegs, jugs of wine, Weck jars, a thousand containers into which Moldova had stored its wealth to make it through the winter. Marinating, pickling, fermenting, pasteurizing, salting, canning the produce of its gardens and plots. Downtown, on the Boulevard of Stephen the Great and Holy, among stores selling Japanese electronics and Italian boots, people went burdened with jars. They carried ten, twenty cleverly packed, brand-new mason jars at a time. Or shiny galvanized pails. Or sacks bulging with cucumbers and tomatoes. Pickup trucks loaded with melons, cars pulling trailers loaded with melons. Old Chişinău was really more village than town. A little off the main walkway, you found one- and two-story homes wrapped in green, separated by wood fences, cats strolling, people sitting on front steps. That was downtown: twenty crisscrossing streets, and the last wafts of sleepy imperial province. If you took away the cars, everything would be as it was a hundred years ago.

So that was Chişinău. I spent many hours under an umbrella in Green Hills Nistru on the Boulevard of Stephen the Great and Holy, at the corner of Eminescu. In the pub sat a more international gathering, speaking in English and German. Probably office workers who had chosen to throw away their European and American money in this particular spot. Besides them was the growing Moldovan middle class, the men wearing gold, sporting sunglasses, in the common style that combines hood, pimp, and gigolo, the women like the women you see on television, practically all with cell phones on silver chains around their necks. I recalled something like that in Romania. I ordered my beer, coffee, and so on in Romanian, but the waiters pretended not to understand entirely; they answered in Russian. Of course they understood, but Russian was for them the mark of refinement, urbanity. It's possible they took me for a Bessarabian hick—or a spy who had been incompletely briefed.

A strange city. Frightened eighteen-year-old cops patrolling in threes; men in Land Cruisers who think they own the streets; shady types by the post office selling additional minutes for phone cards; people hauling utensils; bald juveniles in oversize pants, their meek eyes fixed on the ground, making a humble, Franciscan-monk kind of gang member; and young women with exposed bellies and unsteady on their stiletto heels as they strut the main street as if it were a beauty pageant runway, a Romanian-Slavic mix of loveliness and risqué makeup: peasant modesty in dance-hall gear. The general impression that everyone is playing at being something other, each according to a private notion of a world not here. For that reason we finally left Chişinău.

Kola said that for thirty euros we could ride all day. He had an old Renault van with a plastic outer-space ornament. In the Soviet time he taught the samba. A heavy, mustached, good-natured fellow. To Old Orhei, Orheiul Vechi? Sure. He'd never been, but no problem. We headed due north. At an exit, perhaps Ciorescu, not far from the road, in the shade of a tree, stood an old desk. An overweight cop sat and watched the younger cops in big round hats stop victim after victim and without a word take twenty lei. But we were going to Old Orhei. Someone told us we had to, and he was right. The Răut River had dug its way deep into the earth, as if to reach the other side. A thin spit of land risen several dozen meters. The Golden Horde built a city here once. They had good taste. The landscape was from before Creation. In the beginning, a sketch only, a rough idea of how the planet should look, an abstraction really, the most basic shapes: vertical cliff, valley flat as a table, and a slow river in search of its tectonic shift. No change in 100,000 years, except the water had sunk deeper into the earth and had a mud-gray color.

A whim of the river formed a steep, long peninsula. The monastery was carved into a wall of rock. A few tiny windows looked out on the primeval scene, on beauty still not sure what shape to take. You reached the cells only from the cliff, by a chain ladder. When the friars pulled the chain up, there was nothing but solitude and empty space. As in the Egyptian Sketis, where the Desert Fathers challenged demons to battle. I saw other monasteries later, but they seemed imported. They actually were imported, because the Russians built them, in the grand imperial style. Orhei, however, was nothing but holes bored into rock, an attempt to escape the curse of time and live in eternity. In the cells—so low you could only lie down or kneel—were seashell outlines, round crustacean ornaments, traces of the first days, when the deep was separated from the dry land, the darkness from the light. I tried to picture monks crawling in the dimness, like animals in caves, on all fours, how in a way unimaginable to us they left behind their corporeal forms, their humanity. Abandoned their stinking, lice-infested bodies, because the visible and the palpable exist only to keep us from the truth.

But that was long ago. Now the few brethren lived in a village at the base of the cliff. We found one monk in a small chapel dug out of the earth. He was gaunt, bearded, voluble, and evidently conversant with the world, because he took us for Slovaks. He gave us a summary of the history of the monastery, showed us the clean-swept cells without windows in which you had to bend, then turned to three officers from the Russian, Moldovan, and Ukrainian armies, respectively. They looked out of place in their uniforms, holding cameras instead of rifles. The Russian, in an aviator hat, was the oldest and seemed to have the highest rank. The Ukrainian, the youngest, handsome, and wearing mirror sunglasses, looked like a Hollywood actor playing a soldier. They were quite odd in this timeless landscape, with this monk in the role of guide. Later we saw them having their picture taken with the cliff and the twisting Răut behind them. They handed the camera around and stood taut, as if facing not a barren waste but a battalion at least. These were peacekeepers patrolling the border of a nonexistent country, patrolling Transnistria, Trans-Dniester. They were probably on leave here.

Transnistria is not recognized by any government. It has a length of about two hundred kilometers but is narrow, a kind of European Chile. Thirty kilometers, maybe, at its widest point. We were a little nervous about going there. They told us that if anything happened, it wouldn't be clear who to talk to. In a phantom state, the etiquette is phantom too. We went anyway. Valerij drove us in a ten-year-old Vectra. Valerij feared nothing: yesterday Kiev, tomorrow Moscow, Vienna the day after that, and Transnistria—sure, why not? The Communist time, when he worked as an agrotech engineer, was better, but you could manage now too, you just had to make the effort. Valerij was all right and took everything in stride. We wanted to see the nonexistent country at its most out-of-the-way, going through RăscăeieŢi, because the Dniester divided there, its branches meandering, weaving, a blue ribbon thrown at random across the map. First, a long, empty bridge and not a single vehicle, only two kids on bicycles from the Transnistrian side. In their baskets they carried tied bundles of twigs. Then cornfields began, and in the midst of them stood a sentry box with a solitary Moldovan customs officer in a black uniform. Moldova obviously does not accept the secession of this would-be state, according it only the status of an autonomous region. Since the border also is unrecognized, we didn't need to show passports. But Moldova keeps its customs officers on duty just in case. After all, it's in Transnistria, at Cobasna, that you have one of the largest ammunition depots in Europe. From there, from Tiraspol, the Soviets planned to launch their liberation of the Balkans, Greece, and so on.

The customs officer didn't want anything from us. He didn't even put on his cap as he consulted the road map with us—all the river's bends and turns, marshes and lakes, the stream occasionally looping back—spread out on the hood of the car. He tapped a finger and said that this place was the best, but our Vectra probably couldn't make it there. Not a blink from him at our camera or camcorder; the man was in his early twenties, and the spy obsession had not yet poisoned his mind. He waved as we left. When we came to another Transnistrian sentry box, the situation changed: the same kind of makeshift hut but containing four guards. These men were disheveled, in uniform but as if just pulled out of bed and half asleep. Their shoelaces (the shoes entirely civilian) dragging in the dust, their post-Soviet shirts and trousers crumpled, their solemnity quickly assumed. The moment they took our passports, we felt that we were enemies. They wouldn't look us in the eye, looked up instead, at the sky, to the limitless horizon of an all-union republic gone forever. Could this really be the first time they set eyes on a foreigner? In the next dozen minutes, a wagon with hay went by, a woman with a hoe. The wagon and woman passed without questions asked and were gone among the rows of corn. At last the guards told us to go back, to the town of Bender, where the headquarters were, and people who would know what to do with us.