On the Road to Babadag (16 page)

On the thoroughfare in Bender, a shambles: barracks, plywood, corrugated metal, crumbling concrete, makeshift structures, barriers. Dissolution and melancholy with an undercurrent of menace. First thing, they saw the camcorder, which roused in them the primal fear of those who have something to hide. They said we were filming the border crossing. Of course we were, but we insisted we weren't. They took our passports, and three or four went with them into the plywood hut. We were left out in the burning sun. A. was covered with sweat. He sat on the edge of an open car trunk and slowly, inconspicuously removed the cassette from the camcorder and put a new one in. No one noticed. Occasionally a guard emerged from the hut, glared at us, and retreated with a few stiff steps. No question but that we were the enemy, lurking to take their possessions. They kept our passports, which they couldn't even stamp, assuming they had a stamp, because no nation would recognize it.

Valerij finally went to the guards. After a while he came back and said that they knew we were filming, which was a serious matter and forbidden, but for a hundred lei we could move on. We gave them the money. They didn't want the cassette. We were the enemy, but we had paid. We received a scrap of paper, a kind of receipt. On the back was written, in pen: one car, four persons, and a camcorder. That was our Transnistrian visa.

Transnistria broke away from Moldova in 1992. It was a regular war; several thousand people died. Historically Transnistria had never really belonged to Moldova. When after World War II the Soviets took from Romania the lands between the Prut and the Dniester and turned them into yet another SSR, Stalin attached to the Moldovan SSR this narrow strip on the left bank of the Dniester. There was industrialization there, a power plant, an arms factory—and obviously the Russians, who kept their paws on it all. Across the river were farms, cornfields, vineyards, a village, cattle, and Moldovans speaking Romanian. It's not impossible that the Georgian ruler foresaw all this and planned accordingly, making sure that the collapse of his aborted empire would cause as much trouble as possible. He simply had no other idea about how to be remembered. And so in Transnistria there were too many weapons and too many Russians for an independent, green, and poor Moldova to do more than dream of acquiring Transnistria.

From the border to Tiraspol it may have been ten kilometers. There are landscapes and towns that are impossible to recall. You seem to see something, but it's all vague, dull, as if you were inside someone else's oppressive dream. There's nothing there. Two lanes, gray square houses, the gaunt red of Soviet slogans along the road, rusty Zhigulis with new license plates that pretend to be German license plates: the ground floor of the imagination. That's what the ride to the capital looked like. We stopped at a bazaar. I wanted to see what their money looked like. Right at the gate, the exchange booths. One simply went in and gave Moldovan lei to a person in the dim interior. I saw no face, only a hand with a gold bracelet. For one leu you got two Transnistrian rubles. A five-ruble bill measured five and a half centimeters by thirteen. On the front, naturally, was Suvorov; on the back, a four-story building in the style of the 1960s, at the bottom of which were the words
Kwint Factory,
the local producer of cognac (which actually wasn't bad). So on the front you had history, conquest, the Slaughter of Praga, the glory of the Russian military—a glory mainly abroad—and on the back you had booze (however you looked at it) as government accomplishment or national pride.

In any case, Valerij took a satchel and went shopping for groceries. Everything was supposed to be cheaper in Tiraspol than in Chişinău. He bought melons, watermelons, peaches. We drove to look for a place to have lunch but found nothing. In general, this was more outlying district than city. As if an attempt had been made to start something, but it petered out. At last we were shown the way to the center: a wide street lined with old trees. An occasional car came through—an antique Moskvich, humble Zhigulis, and among them, once in a while, a big SUV with tinted windows and usually black. Tiraspol was not a place where you would want to stay. Soldiers everywhere. They probably made up half the population of the city. We came to a huge bookstore that had practically no books. Instead, portraits of Lenin and blank certificates of honor with his picture on them. In one pub, bald men sat in tracksuits drinking beer. From time to time one of them would leave, but he soon came back, because in Tiraspol there was nowhere to go. These people were waiting for something to happen, waiting to be called, to be needed.

But in Tiraspol, it seemed that everyone was expendable, a fifth wheel to affairs that were foreign, major, and murky. These people were auxiliary—auxiliary to the troops, to the arsenal, to the Russian Fourteenth Army stationed here, to the black SUVs, and to the omnipresent firm of Sheriff which belonged to Smirnov, the shadow president of a shadow nation. If there was anything new in Transnistria, anything not wrecked, it bore the name Sheriff. All the gas stations in Tiraspol were Sheriff, and the supermarket too. The yellow star of the Wild West gleaming with absurd brightness in this post-Soviet diorama. Anything was possible here. An old apparatchik dressed as an American lawman won the hand, raked in the chips, in this land of unpleasant miracles.

We drove north along the Ukrainian border. Corn grew everywhere, and in that corn, across paths in fields, stood red-and-white barriers and sentry boxes. It all looked a bit surreal but on the other hand, it held a sad beauty. The guards were protecting space, a vacuum, borders that were merely an idea. On the map it looked completely awkward, angular, drawn with a ruler, soundless, lacking the fluid grace characteristic of territories in which history merges with geography, with human presence, and with ancient clutter. The proportions of this frontier on the map brought to mind African borders drawn across the Sahara. "They mark the borders of the former
sovkhozy
and
kolkhozy,
” I was later told by an acquaintance who knew a little about Moldova. Now the barriers divided sandy lanes on which cattle went, horses, swine, wagons on rubber tires, boys to visit girls at night, women to exchange gossip, drunkards to get drunk, thieves to thieve, relatives to see one another, people to meet people. We drove down an empty highway, and the men in uniform in the sea of corn resembled scarecrows. Most likely they were armed and had orders, but in that agrarian expanse, what could they do? They could make the birds overhead veer, search peasants who carried bundles of twigs, turn back carts piled with hay, and return lost animals.

There was no one, nothing on the road. Far off the beaten track, we passed the ruins of gas stations. In places this country looked like the set of a film. Between Mălăieşti and Butor, for instance, someone had built a wide highway that had not a single car on it, and someone had built gas stations that were reverting to the earth. Everything seemed cast away, thrown aside, of no use or value. People sat in their homes and were completely isolated. You stepped from your door, opened your gate, and wasteland began, a no- man's-land. Perhaps that was why Valerij took us to his family, to a normal house with a garden in Grigoriopol. He wanted to show us ordinary life.

We passed a high wall and entered the cool shade of grapevines. We were greeted by Misha, enormous, big-bellied, and naked to the waist. He talked continually, or rather orated, delivering florid, ceremonious speeches. He took us into the garden, presented to us the patches and beds, and praised self-sufficiency and the fertility of the Moldovan soil. The garden was in fact as green and lush as the tropics. The vegetation towered, trailed, twined, spilled over, so that you had no place to put your foot and the ground was invisible beneath the profusion. But Misha pranced like a ballerina among the cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, paprikas, melons, moved like a thickset Moldovan Pomona. He explained to us the various uses of cucumbers, and it was a bit like being among the Gagauz: once again we were barbarians who came from a land that had no vegetables.

Then an obligatory visit to the cellar, which was roomy, with a high ceiling, and cold. Everything that grew in the garden lay here in jars, vats, jugs, bottles. Over and over, Misha poured red wine into glasses and talked, talked, talked. Still half naked but completely comfortable. Surrounded by his cellar abundance, he spoke of how in earlier, less happy times, the eighties, he visited Warsaw with a Moldovan-Soviet song-and-dance troupe. Having plenty of rubles, he drank champagne and cognac, took taxis everywhere, and was a king in that haggard city. He was accompanied by a Polish friend, a Party secretary as poor as a churchmouse. Refilling our glasses, Misha asked us to find his buddy and convey his hugs and greetings. I drank what he gave me and promised to locate the former secretary in the city of two million.

All this was preliminary to the real hospitality. We went to the house. Misha's father was celebrating his patron saint's day. On the table were wine, cognac, and grape moonshine. We ate and drank continually, not wanting to offend our host. Before long, I was both drunk and stuffed. Our hosts were Russified Ukrainians. On the walls hung their youthful portraits, the celebrant and his wife in Soviet military uniforms. New dishes kept arriving. A Moldovan Eden: a garden, a feast, toasts made among family and friends. Misha recalled the time he served as a prison guard. His mother recalled her days teaching Romanian. Valerij insisted that there was no such thing as a Romanian people. Everyone agreed that life was better before. Even I began to agree, but resisted and hoped Valerij would soon give us a sign that it was time to go.

On the border bridge in Vadul lui Vodă stood armored transporters. No one stopped us, and in a few minutes we saw the apartment blocks of Chişinău.

We drove to the city of Soroca with W., who had business there. Soroca lies to the north of the Dniester, and beyond it is Ukraine. As you head north, the vineyards are gradually replaced by corn, which becomes omnipresent. We went to Soroca to meet Gypsies, who had a mini country of their own there.

Even from a distance, from the boulevard along the river, you could see it: on the hill above the city and down the steep bank to the Dniester, the Gypsy district. You could see that it was unlike anything else in Moldova. Tin roofs agleam in the sun like fish scales, looking like a Baroque-Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampment—good words, these. Roofs piled high, roofs bellied like wind-filled sails, roofs budding one from the other like living tissue. This from afar. Closer, it was a roller-coaster ride through centuries and continents. Victorian mansions, Mauritanian residences, Chinese pagodas, classic Greek facades, the Romanian Renaissance, and a reduced replica of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow with three plastic steeds on top. Before a pavilion with twenty front windows, amid a green garden tangle, rose a six-meter fountain of white stone in an austere rococo style. At its base rested a crocodile, life-size and of the same material. Two Moldovans were finishing the monument, smoothing the last sharp edges, as Gypsy women watched, smoking cigarettes with holders of gold. I asked Robert who designed all this. Robert had a black-and-gold business card, owned a bakery, was building a mansion, had a BMW 700 with Slovak tags in his backyard, and was a kind of gray eminence in Soroca. "We did," he answered. "It's all from the imagination."

Robert also owned a pub. That is, it was jointly owned, but he was the main entrepreneur. We took seats on the veranda. In the center were tables, the bar, and ten computers. Kids sat at the computers—mostly Gypsies, with a couple of Moldovans. The dads could comfortably chat, drink, and keep an eye on their Internet-marauding progeny. We sipped cognac and ate watermelon. Robert said that times had changed and now one had to keep one's children off the street. But things were good otherwise: the borders were open, you could travel, do business, all you needed were a passport, ideas, and connections. You could go to the Chukchi, if you wanted, and sell them Chinese linens. No one would forbid you. It wasn't that bad before, but there were fewer possibilities then. That's what Robert said, over a cognac.

Artur arrived, and Robert invited him to join us. Artur was a king—or baron. His business card read, in English: "Gypsy Baron of Moldova." He had a gray beard down to his belt, braided gray earlocks, and resembled a holy man of distant India. He was fully aware of that heredity and told us that the Nazis had collected the blood of their Gypsy victims, which held exceptional value for them because it was the purest Aryan blood. He said this without expression, entirely confident of our belief in what he said. He made marks on a card, deriving the Russian alphabet from the Sanskrit, and mentioned in passing that women ethnography students from Poland had visited him that summer. Yes, Artur was an important figure. In the courtyard of his palace he had a collection of Soviet samovars and two dusty limousines on flat tires. In the windshield of one limousine was a bullet hole. After he concluded his lecture on the Aryans and Sanskrit, Artur said goodbye, rose, got into a green BMW X5 driven by his son, and took off to attend to his royal duties.

Others slowly gathered, but this was not Moldovan hospitality; it was simple courtesy. They drank two bottles of cognac with us, ate three watermelons, spent three hours of their time, revealed as much of their life as they considered proper, until we went our separate ways, each to his own world.

We returned, according to the itinerary, by minibus. I sat next to the driver. He did some kind of hocus-pocus with the tickets, selling them and collecting them or yelling at passengers to hold them up. I couldn't figure it out. In the middle of an empty field, a woman got on. She cut her leg stepping on a sharp piece of metal and bled. The driver yelled at her for not being careful. He was lean, low-class, neurotic, and drove furiously. After thirty kilometers we were stopped by a patrol. A cop waved a black-and-white-striped stick, and we pulled over. The driver took a twenty-lei bill from a box, got out, walked over to the policeman, and gave him the money. The policeman, wearing a sort of aviator cap, waved us on. It was 150 kilometers to Chişinău, and we were stopped three more times. The same performance each time, this submission to power, acted silently and in full view. The cops' faces stony and dull, the driver's face resigned and resentful. I asked him if it was always this way on this road. "Always," he said. "Ever since the end of the Soviet Union."