Little did I suspect how far away I was going.
Three weeks before I was due to leave for Romania I received a letter informing me that I had been transferred to Chi
I boarded the yellow London-Lvov Liner (the name was painted on the bus’s side) at Victoria Station. The passengers were divided between young volunteers travelling to Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova, and elderly British Ukrainians returning to visit relatives. The English teachers’ bulging luggage blocked the ventilation system, and everyone sweated. We crossed the English Channel at midnight and awoke in the morning on a highway that insulated us from difference. Belgium slipped into Holland and then into Germany with scarcely a wrinkle of recognition. Only in eastern Germany did evidence of a transition appear: stretches of older, rougher highway, drab stucco farmhouses, the occasional Skoda or Lada tagging behind faster-moving traffic. At the Polish border the immigration post was flying the blue-and-gold European Union flag optimistically alongside the red-and-white of Poland. Viewed from the highway, Poland appeared emptier than I remembered: the forests dark, the fields untended. Jazzy roadside gas bars erupted in the mid-distance, their restaurants equalling any installation along a U.S. interstate for utter featurelessness. Only the possibility of ordering sausages and pierogies, in addition to hamburgers, french fries, and Cokes, offered a reminder that this was not Kansas. The British teachers, not having encountered Polish food before, looked on with discomfort moderating into fascination as I savoured a culinary favourite I remembered from my Canadian childhood, slurping up a plate of delicious pierogies swimming in spiced cream. Gazing into my colleagues’ disconsolate faces (their french fries were stale), I thought: Another testament to the advantages of multicultural societies!
Multiculturalism, which often boiled down to the doomed exercise of trying to preserve a culture in the absence of the language in which the culture was inscribed, presented both an example and a warning. Riding the bus over the Polish plains, I listened on my Walkman to a trans-European rock music station whose disc jockeys spoke blaring U.S. English: “Whether you’re in St. Petersburg, Russia, or Venice, Italy, we mean rock!” Voices would call in from Athens or Dresden or Zagreb or Madrid and request rock songs in accented English. In this context national European cultures commanded no more authority or integrity than the culture of a Portuguese community in Toronto or an Italian neighbourhood in Montreal. Critics of Canadian multiculturalism argued that it trivialized cultures, shrinking them to picturesque folklore; the same danger, on a vastly larger scale, underlay cultural globalization. All of Italy risked becoming little more than the “Italian neighbourhood” of a culturally homogenized planet incapable of expressing or sanctioning assumptions, attitudes, or emotional, spiritual, or cultural allegiances not comfortably contained within the forms of the rock video or the talk-show confession. The day when all of the world’s business and entertainment would take place in English, demoting national languages and cultures to the property of peasant grandmothers and the poorly educated, did not seem far off as, rumbling through the Polish night, I listened to an American DJ in Amsterdam shout across Europe: “Heinrich in Vienna is just dying to hear Tina Turner!”
I was travelling east in search of differences that had endured. I was destined to be disillusioned and enlightened in a variety of ways. I was looking forward to discovering in Moldova a plucky little republic, wedged between Ukraine and Romania, valiantly recovering its cultural specificity after more than fifty years of Soviet occupation. But this was not what I found.
The first warning shot across my bow struck at the Polish-Ukrainian border. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, supposedly dead and buried three years earlier, was proceeding at roughly the pace at which rust creeps into metal. Border formalities to enter Ukraine consumed three and a half hours. (Having spent two consecutive nights on the Liner, most of us responded badly to this harassment.) Immigration procedures were hamstrung by archaic forms and formalities. We were handed scrappy grey pieces of paper to fill in; all spoke not of Ukraine, but of the Soviet Union. A record of every dollar, deutschmark, zloty, or pound we were carrying had to be crammed into narrow spaces in small, striped boxes. The justification for completing these forms had disappeared: Ukraine was officially a market economy, free of currency controls and the mandatory daily exchanges that had characterized the old Eastern Europe. Yet Soviet norms continued to be enforced. We even had to sign an absurd pledge to present for inspection to the authorities of the Soviet Union all “printed matter, manuscripts, films, sound recordings, postage stamps, graphics, etc.”
Then we were herded single-file from one end of a cavernous room to the other. Our declarations were examined and our transit visas stamped. As we were about to return to the Liner, the officer in charge announced he wanted to “verify our declarations.” He would search every passenger, counting the money each of us was carrying to check that it corresponded to our declarations.
The passengers groaned, too exhausted to retaliate. Our team of three drivers went berserk. They began screaming at the officer, waving their arms and backing him into a corner until guards stepped up on either side to protect him. The drivers, all the while, were surreptitiously motioning us onto the Liner. We took the hint and fled. By the time the drivers had completed their harangue, every passenger was seated. The drivers scrambled onboard, gunned the engine, and pulled away from the border post. A customs official stepped out onto the blacktop and shouted at the driver. But it was too late: we had fled.
Soviet forms and procedures remained in force, but not Soviet power. We couldn’t have made this escape three years earlier.
The transition from Poland to Ukraine was dramatic. We had barely crossed the border when the first silver onion dome soared into sight. The poorly maintained road wound between tiny farmhouses, walled off behind low stone walls. In the yards stood scarved old women, children without shirts or shoes, dust sifting upward around them. The abundant Orthodox churches provided the only glimmer of elegance in this degraded landscape. The fields were smaller and scrubbier than those in Poland, and there were no forests. Half an hour beyond the border a stinking, whitish smog descended, swathing everything in an unhealthy glow that escorted us most of the way to the hideous high-rise blocks on the outskirts of Lvov. Europe’s border had advanced since 1989. Poland might not join the European Union for years to come, yet culturally it had leaped over the East European wall.
Unlike Poland, the former Soviet republics retained their cultural eccentricities, their obedience to Soviet bureaucratic norms that Moscow was no longer in a position to enforce, and their poverty. Their cultural reference points consisted of an unlikely conflation of a lingering belief in the centrality of Moscow, and exposure to global mass culture through television; in contrast to the mood in Prague, Budapest, or Warsaw, a yearning to “return to Europe” did not enter the equation. Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus lay on the wrong side of an imaginary perimeter beyond which Europe did not penetrate.
The trait that distinguished Moldova from the other republics was its historical tie to Romania. Moldova was not Russian and, initially, it had not been part of the Soviet Empire. At various points in its history, most recently from 1944 until 1991, it had been kidnapped. The country
