Russian diminutive Senya, strutted in the door in a pale blue short-sleeved shirt, carrying a black leather purse in his hand. Senya was nearly a dwarf. Less than a metre and a half tall, he barely reached to his wife’s armpits. The hard, beetle-shell curve of his belly, starting nearly at his throat, had sucked the vitality out of the rest of his body. His arms, though not misshapen, looked feeble; his legs appeared as brittle as fossils. He was fifty-four years old, his lightly greying hair was parted on one side like that of a politician, and his features were handsome and regular. Dora suggested that he sit down and chat with me. He asked me my age. I told hi I was thirty-four. “In Moldova,” he said, “a man your age would look older.”
My age had taken the family by surprise: they had been expecting a student. I explained I had recently returned to being a student after having worked for a number of years. “Sometimes in our society it’s necessary for adults to get new qualifications,” I said. “Anyway, we all get old.”
“Da.” Senya echoed my words: “Toi imbâtrinesc.” His ironic smile barely nudged a face that had dulled and stiffened. Life had not been easy for Senya. He had been born the youngest of five children in a small town near Bli, Moldova’s second-largest city, in the north of the country. His mother had died when he was an infant, in 1942 or 1943, a casualty of World War II. Senya had grown up deformed. In the sweltering Moldovan summer, where nearly all men went shirtless at home, Senya was never dressed in less than a T-shirt, not even when toiling over the stove in the tiny, steaming kitchen. He was an excellent cook. I asked him about this one day and he replied that he had cooked for himself from childhood until his mid-forties when he married Dora. Senya was a sly, intelligent, surprisingly assertive man who suffered from bouts of peevish ill temper; in despair he could become melodramatic. As a lawyer, he earned a good salary: one hundred and thirty lei a month. (At this time there were four Moldovan lei to the U.S. dollar.) His work as a public defender frustrated and embittered him, forcing him to spend his days in the company of muggers, prostitutes, and recidivist drunks. Gratingly articulate and fascinated by politics, Senya might have parlayed his legal training into more active political involvement had he been of ordinary stature. He read Romanian fluently and seemed to be equally at home in the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. I was not what he had expected when he agreed to take an English teacher into his home—too old, too knowing, too intrusive in my probing—but like Dora, Andrei, and Serge, he welcomed me with impeccable hospitality. Later, speaking to other English teachers, I realized that the language barrier had caved open a gulf between them and their host families. Communicating mainly through sign language, they had gleaned little of family dynamics, jobs, financial worries, political tensions. I was lucky Conversation hastened familiarity. After a week, I felt as if I were becoming a Moldovan.
Not all aspects of family life made for easy adaptation. I had less space and privacy than I was used to. In fact, the Lencua family had little conception of personal privacy in the sense that middle-class Westerners understood the term. Their confined living quarters didn’t permit such caprices. Andrei’s bedroom was also the lounge and sewing room. On a couple of afternoons I saw Dora and her friends go into the room to chat and sew, apparently oblivious to the fact that Andrei, having worked overnight on some passing odd job, lay asleep and undressed on his unfolded sofa bed. Likewise, at five-thirty or six in the morning, I would be awoken by members of the family, in varying states of near-nakedness, trailing nonchalantly into the living room to retrieve some item of clothing from the wall unit.
The apartment’s interior doors were fitted with full-length panels of translucent glass embossed with light, leaf-patterned whorls. A single lamp turned on anywhere in the apartment infiltrated all rooms; someone standing in front of your door could see your every movement. The first morning that I rolled out of bed to dress only to realize Dora and Serge were standing in the hall before my door, I hesitated. I soon learned to ignore such presences: unflustered themselves by the notion of dressing in front of others, the Lencuas would not have understood my reserve.
This casualness, though, was emphatically limited to a well-defined family sphere. Moldova was conspicuously innocent of such Western decadences as nude sunbathing, Penthouse-style magazines, or pornographic—or even mildly sexy—films. In questions of sexual morality, Chiinu was the most puritanical city I had visited. Andrei, at twenty, was forbidden to invite individual female friends into the apartment even when his parents were present.
Exhausted by my trip, I slept heavily my first nights in Chiinu, waking late to a busy apartment. At five-thirty in the morning, no matter how scrupulously I had closed the balcony door, the mosquitoes massing outside would buzz into the room, deviously picking out the most painful and persistently itchy places to bite: elbows, knuckles, shins. Slapping and scratching, I would finally doze off again. One of the first words I added to my rapidly growing Romanian vocabulary was ânar. The dictionary translation was gnat, but no gnats ever bit like the early-morning mosquitoes of Chiinu. Another English teacher, who was sleeping on her family’s enclosed balcony, later developed such a severe reaction to her ânar bites that she had to be treated with what we called “the dreaded green stuff”—a verdantly luminous, almost indelible disinfectant in which all cuts were promptly lathered. The shamrock blotches lingered on children’s arms and legs—as on my colleague’s limbs—for weeks after other evidence of cuts, scratches, or bites had disappeared.
I began to feel trapped. The taxi ride from the train station had tantalized me with glimpses of a glittering southern city. It was days before I was permitted another visit to the centre; I had to wait nearly a week until I had the opportunity to explore on my own. I felt isolated and restless. For the first few days Dora and Senya refused to let me leave the apartment unescorted. Chiinu, they maintained, was a big city (the population was about seven hundred thousand)—too big for foreigners to amble about on their own. I replied that I wasn’t planning to rove around at night. I simply wanted to see the centre of the city, take the occasional walk around the neighbourhood. They shook their heads. I tried to explain that I was an experienced traveller: I had lived in Bogotá, Colombia; I had explored on my own from Morocco to Rio de Janeiro; I had survived a Shining Path liberated zone in Peru and visited northern Nicaragua during the contra war. None of this made any impression on them. I reached for cities nearer at hand. Warsaw, for example. I had walked around Warsaw at night, so why not Chiinu in the daytime? Senya and Dora closed ranks. Warsaw was a much more civilized city. It had never been part of the Soviet Union; people weren’t as crooked and desperate as they were in Chiin
Russian diminutive Senya, strutted in the door in a pale blue short-sleeved shirt, carrying a black leather purse in his hand. Senya was nearly a dwarf. Less than a metre and a half tall, he barely reached to his wife’s armpits. The hard, beetle-shell curve of his belly, starting nearly at his throat, had sucked the vitality out of the rest of his body. His arms, though not misshapen, looked feeble; his legs appeared as brittle as fossils. He was fifty-four years old, his lightly greying hair was parted on one side like that of a politician, and his features were handsome and regular. Dora suggested that he sit down and chat with me. He asked me my age. I told hi I was thirty-four. “In Moldova,” he said, “a man your age would look older.”
