Lost Province. Stephen Henighan

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“Yes, of course, I understand everything. We speak the same language.”

       This observation, self-evident to any foreigner who had worked his way through a Romanian grammar book and practised with a few language cassettes, was revolutionary in the climate of post-Soviet Moldova. When, gasping for a word, I seized a book with the title Romanian-English Dictionary printed on the cover, Andrei’s mother dealt me a dismissive wave. I wouldn’t find Moldovan words there! But I did. When the procedure worked the next time, and the next, Dora’s heavy face settled into a perplexed expression. The year before she had gone to visit a friend who had moved to Romania, and had made herself understood without effort. But she still couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge that the language she spoke was Romanian. She was forty-one years old, and such a recognition would overturn the foundations of her life, her intimate, if troubled, sense of herself as a Moldovan.

       The section of the Buiucani district where Andrei’s family lived occupied the crown of a hill on the outskirts of Chiinu. The city’s last row of high-rise blocks lay less than ten minutes’ walk away; beyond stretched fields of sunflowers and corn. In the opposite direction,looking back over the centre, hills studded with apartment blocks and softened by the cushions of massed treetops, punctured by the occasional glimmering oval of a small lake, tumbled away toward the lower, flatter downtown portion of tefan Cel Mare Boulevard. From my family’s apartment I could stare out at the lined-up dominoes of identical high-rise blocks. The development contained between twenty and thirty such buildings, nearly all of them nine stories high. Files of buildings met at right angles, dividing the spaces between them into common areas containing dusty playgrounds, concrete walkways, half-buried tractor tires, stray benches arrayed beneath scarce trees, rudimentary swing sets, and a parking lot. Around the fringes of some of the common areas, and out on the street in front of the development, kiosks that stayed open late sold booze to armies of nocturnal drinkers.

       Each building contained apartments of different sizes. Lower-middle-class people lived in two-room apartments, middle-class people in three-room apartments, and wealthy people in four-room apartments. (This calculation omitted kitchens, which were usually tiny.) Andrei’s parents, the Lencuas, were middle-class. Senya Lencua was a lawyer, and Dora had worked at shop counters. As I entered their apartment, there were three doors on the right and one, at the back of the flat, on the left. The first door on the right opened onto the living room, the second onto the narrow slot of the kitchen, and the third onto a small TV room, which at night became Andrei’s bedroom. The door on the left led into the master bedroom, which was roughly the same size as the modest living room. Andrei shared this apartment with his parents and his blond nine-year-old brother, Sergiu, known as Serge. Four people in three rooms was a luxurious allotment of space by Moldovan standards; the Lencuas had decided they had plenty of extra room to take in an English teacher.

       I was going to be sleeping in the living room. Long couches, meeting in an L, lined two walls of the room. The wall opposite the larger couch was blocked from sight by a huge wall unit concealing a multitude of shelves and cupboards behind glossy imitation-wood doors. The wall opposite the smaller couch was a French window leading to a tin-roofed balcony with a sweeping seventh-floor view of rows of high rises hinged at right angles, dusty yard space and, discernible in the gaps between the buildings, the blurred green horizons of faraway hills. The living room was dominated by a very large black television sitting asquat a high table in front of the French window at an angle making the screen watchable from both couches. The larger couch, its cushions and armrests a startling purple velvet, unfolded into the bed where I was to sleep. Searching for a space where I could keep my clothes and books, Dora flipped up a section of the couch hooding a small compartment. Her shoulders stiffened against the fabric of her voluminous blue-patterned summer dress. It was obvious the space, filled with immaculately folded sheets, wasn’t big enough for my belongings. But what had brought her up short, lying on top of the sheets, was a framed colour photograph.

       The photograph showed three smiling, close-set faces—woman, man, child. The fierce, low-browed man was Andrei. Then I realized it couldn’t be Andrei because the black-haired, pugnacious child was patently a near-infant Andrei. The woman was lean, angular, Slavic-looking, her blond hair thick; only the curl of her smile allowed me to grasp that this was how Dora had looked at twenty-five. The man, bearing such an eerie resemblance to Andrei, could only be…

       Dora and Andrei stood in hunched silence. Andrei, staring straight down at the oversize curlicues of the pattern in the carpet, seemed distraught. Dora met my eyes with an ashamed expression. “Domnul Steve,” she said, “I had another family before this family. But there were problems in this family. Later I married Senya, who is a good papi… Andrei’s little brother has a different father from Andrei.”

       Dora looked mortified. Andrei’s robust body had deflated, his shoulders sagging.

       “I understand,” I said. “For us this is normal. My brother and I have different mothers.”

       “It happens in your countries, as well?” Dora asked. “I thought you didn’t have these problems.”

       “It happens everywhere. Some marriages don’t work.”

       The atmosphere was transformed. Dora smiled and cleared two shelves in the wall unit for me with exuberant sweeps of her arms. I unpacked my clothes and books, while Andrei watched to see what treasures I would disgorge. Dora picked out those of my shirts appropriate for teaching and took them away to wash and iron. Later that summer Dora made guarded allusions to her first husband’s heavy drinking and “bad behaviour,” which I took to mean either infidelity or domestic violence. The family dynamics helped explain Andrei’s attachment to Russian culture. Dora had been born into a large Romanian-speaking family in ClCrai, a town about halfway between Chiinu and the Romanian border whose inhabitants had a reputation for toughness and obstinacy She had moved to Chiinu as a young woman after completing high school. In Chiinu Dora had met and married Andrei’s father, a Ukrainian named Kaminskiy. During Andrei’s infancy, the family lived in Ukraine. After her divorce, Dora moved back to Moldova with her son. I couldn’t help but see Andrei’s cultivation of Slavic values, his worshipful allegiance to Soviet institutions, as his ways of conserving his link with his vanished father.

       I met Andrei’s stepfather that evening. Simion Lencu

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