4 LITTLE DICTATORS
Botanic
The little dictators were all women. Men refused to teach in Moldova because the salary was too low: eighty lei a month. (Due to the country’s near-bankruptcy, teachers hadn’t been paid for the past four months.) The English spoken by my students, most of whom were between twenty-five and forty-five years old, was highly proficient. They taught the language at well-regarded specialist institutions and good Russian-language high schools. The younger ones were all teaching part-time. They seemed to be roughly equally divided between native speakers of Russian and Romanian—the group’s composition fluctuated over the summer—though none of them taught at Romanian-language schools. A policy persisting from Soviet days, when official doctrine had decreed that the “structures of the Moldovan brain” made Romanian speakers poorly equipped to learn English, determined that English was taught primarily in Russian-language schools. Students at Romanian-language schools studied French. These policies were starting to change, but in many schools the Soviet patterns persisted.
Despite their extensive experience studying and teaching English, none of my students—with the exception of a woman named Nelly, whose late husband had been an important Communist Party official—had ever set foot in an English-speaking country. Before 1991 they had not been allowed to travel; now they could not afford to do so. Until signing up for this course, many of them had never conversed with a native speaker. They had learned their English from the same Soviet textbook, printed in 1950, which they continued to use in their own classes.
Later in the summer I asked to see a copy of this famous book. It was a small, dowdy, durable hardcover volume. I opened it to a comprehension passage and read: “Mary lives in Manchester. She suffers from the cyclical nature of capitalism. Her father is unemployed…” The assessment didn’t seem that unrealistic. The book’s language, on the other hand, was stiff, outdated, and sometimes wrong. Accustomed to drilling the book’s patterns into students’ heads, the teachers reacted fiercely and in unison to transgressions. Occasionally my pronunciation of a word—nephew was one such catalyst—would provoke a shouted correction from the entire class: “Nev-view!” The authoritarian habit turned them all against one another; if one teacher made a mistake, the others would bombard her with corrections. I had to intervene forcefully to establish that in this class I would do the correcting. Once I had asserted my dictatorial authority the tyrannical ladies became eager to learn. They were all painfully aware that the English they spoke was fast becoming outdated, and had to cope with students addicted to MTV who spouted slang expressions gleaned from rock videos. The experience was undermining their authority—the last shred of dignity left to them in a society that couldn’t afford to pay their salaries.
Until my arrival the teachers’ course had been taught by Theresa, a retired Irish schoolteacher. Each day we would decide, according to the number of students present, whether to split the class or teach together. My first morning I watched Theresa teach for an hour. Her manner combined an antiquated, more-English-than-the-English quality bred, she informed me, at Trinity College, Dublin, with a well-meaning, earth-grandmother warmth. Her grey hair was cut short but floppy; her baggy skirt eeled with bright colours. “Men sweat,” she told the students, commenting on the staggering early-morning heat. “Ladies perspire.” She went on to describe the ritual of “a boy asking a girl’s father for her hand” as though such behaviour had fallen from fashion only last year. Perhaps in Ireland it had.
I wasn’t certain that this sort of vocabulary enrichment would enable the teachers to decipher MTV, but there was no gainsaying Theresa’s professionalism. Having set out into the world “to make myself stop moping after my husband died,” she retained a charming vagueness about where she had ended up. Tiring of the history of how Stalin and Molotov had sliced out the Republic of Moldova from the Romanian region of Moldavia, she had settled on a personal compromise, referring to the country as “Moldava.”
When I began to teach, the students let me speak for ten minutes, murmuring avidly among themselves to agree on Russian translations of the new words I was using. Then they interrupted. “Stephen,” one of them said, apparently at the others’ behest, “we want you to know how happy we are that you are here. You cannot imagine how wonderful it is for us that you have come to work with us.”
“We have been waiting for this moment for fifteen years,” another woman said. Her neighbours chorused agreement.
“Thank you very much,” I said. “I’m very happy to be in Chi
Their gratitude couldn’t be stifled. The large, dusty classrooms were sweltering. My short-sleeved white shirt, which Dora had ironed to military crispness, was soon sodden with sweat. (Men sweat, indeed!) The soapy chalk broke in my hand, its dust settling along the inside of my throat. I grew hoarse and dehydrated. During the next few days, I searched in vain for a reliable source of liquid refreshment. Bottled water and clear soft drinks were unknown; repulsive Coca-Cola and Pepsi, like juice, were intermittently available in a few specialty shops at very high prices; only vodka was omnipresent. I could find no relief. My voice rasped, my head throbbed. My students saved me with their astonishingly bountiful generosity. They hadn’t been paid in weeks, their husbands were marginally employed, their children clamoured for necessities they couldn’t afford, yet every day they brought me a thermos of lemon tea to preserve my voice, bags of fruit to offset my dehydration, and homecooked Moldovan delicacies to nibble during the morning break.
Introducing me on my first morning, the course supervisor had mentioned I spoke Romanian. This scrap of information intrigued the Romanian-speaking teachers. At the end of the first class I was waylaid en route to the bus stop by an assertive teacher named Natasha. In a commanding voice that brooked no dissent, she told me we were going to ride downtown together.
Natasha was the most culturally Romanian of my students. She was a sturdy woman in her early forties. Her long, thick black hair was flecked with grey, and the set of her eyes betrayed a slight Asiatic tilt. Her family came from a village across the river from the ugly industrial city of Gala
