I lost the argument and remained stuck in the apartment, writing in my journal and studying Romanian grammar. Defying Senya and Dora’s interdiction would destroy my relationship with the family. Moldovan family structure was inflexible. If I wished to obtain a margin of freedom, I would have to secure it in the same way Moldovans acquired the rare pockets of pleasure, privilege, or indulgence in their lives: through patience and stealth; by blending collaboration with deception rather than by rebelling.
I could leave the apartment only if Andrei consented to accompany me. Andrei wasn’t much given to walks. Employed as a television salesman, he preferred to sit in his room where his wares, encased in cardboard boxes, were piled against the walls. He watched MTV in English from Amsterdam, or Hollywood movies in which the dialogue had been muted and overlaid with a monotone Russian explanation of the characters’ words and actions. When the telephone rang, Andrei jumped. “Dobrý dien” he would growl into the receiver, hoping one of the advertisements he placed in commercial papers had yielded a buyer. Most of the phone calls, though, seemed to be from Dora’s friends or Senya’s clients. On a few occasions I heard Andrei eagerly announcing the television’s brand name and—I assumed—its other features in loud Russian, but during my first week in the family, no client came to the door.
The Lencuas’ refusal to allow me to go out stemmed in part from their utilitarian approach to life. Why did I need to go out? Leaving the apartment meantspending money on transportation, being squashed by the sweating crowds in the trolley bus, wrangling with shopkeepers over scarce goods. Never having been able to travel, they couldn’t understand the idea of wandering around a city for pleasure. What did I want to do downtown? My failure to provide a satisfactory reply to this question provoked confusion and even suspicion. Perhaps I wished to slip away and do something unspeakable? I finally decided I needed to buy postcards and a map. Andrei stoutly told me that city maps did not exist. Faced with my chafing eagerness to escape, Dora finally ordered Andrei to take me downtown for an hour.
Andrei and I rode the trolley bus down the long slope into the centre, then up the hill along tefan Cel Mare Boulevard, past the Parliament, the spaceship-like former Communist Party headquarters, the elegant parks, the Arc de Triomphe, the sturdy shops. The sun was shining and crowds of people filled the streets. Men selling ice cream that gurgled out of silvery metal vats at the press of a button were fending off customers all along the boulevard. I felt exhilarated, but Andrei soon grew irate. What was I looking for? He didn’t understand the Romanian word for postcard, offering in response a Russian word I didn’t know. “What do you want to do?” he asked as I ambled from shop to shop, fascinated by the long counters, the teams of saleswomen who handed goods to customers for examination, the rattling abacuses on which checkout women calculated change at bewildering speed. Before I could locate a city map or postcards, Andrei put his foot down. “Steve, we have to go home.”
We went home. A few days later Dora and Serge accompanied me downtown for the introductory meeting of the teachers, where we were to be briefed on Moldovan culture and given our teaching assignments. Our supervisor, a stern, elderly woman, addressed us in correct, stilted English. “Here in Moldova we are between Europe and Asia. For many years we were trying to build socialism. Now we have stopped building socialism and we do not know what we are trying to build.” She went on to warn us against drunkenness and licentiousness. Moldovans were very conservative people; we must respect their morality. Besides, Chiinu was a dangerous city: if you walked around drunk, you could get beaten up and robbed. She verified our credentials; having more teaching experience than my colleagues, I was handed the job of teaching secondary school and college teachers of English. My job was very prestigious, the supervisor explained, but also potentially difficult. “You must be very strict with them,” she said. “Each one is used to being a little dictator.”
Dora and Serge waited for me outside the classroom. “Have you finished, Steve?” Dora asked. “Now we will cross the street and take the trolley bus home.”
We had stepped out of the school where the meeting had taken place into a gleaming park. “I would like to take a walk downtown,” I said.
The supervisor, walking near us, intervened in Romanian. “Did you understand what Doamna Dora said, Steve? You are going home now.”
“Da, am ineles.” I had understood but continued to console myself with dreams of how I would range around the city in freedom once I had begun teaching and gained the liberty to spend the day away from Buiucani. At a stroke I had grasped why writers from Prague eastward, whether Slavic, Jewish, Magyar, or Romanian, whether living under Habsburgs, tsars, commissars, or post-Communist successor states, had sustained such a consistently rich vein of fantastic writing. Regardless of ideology, these societies’ authoritarian ethics, filtering down into family life, thwarted personal fulfillment at such a basic level that the flight into fantasy became a vital recourse for maintaining mental equilibrium. The more autocratic the oppression, the more extravagant the fantasy required to compensate for it.
This insight dovetailed with a mental technique I had begun to evolve over the past few days to make up for the absence of private space. Once I had folded up my bed in the morning, there was no spot in the apartment defined as mine—no place I could be alone. By my third day with the Lencuas, I found I could summon up a whirling cordon of privacy within my head, warding off the intrusive voices, movements, and presences of other people by submerging myself in a hoop of inner space whose boundaries I could press outward around me like a magnetic field. When I sat at the living-room table writing in my travel journal, no one else existed. The phenomenon, though essential to my mental and emotional well-being, disconcerted me. I had always paid close attention to the world around me. Growing up on a farm where space abounded, I could hide away when I wished to read or write or brood. Once I returned from hiding, I expected to engage with humanity. The habit of periodically shutting out all others, though in Moldovan society as necessary to any sensitive person as dreams were to sleep, struck me alternately as callous and irresponsible. Scrutinizing passengers on the jammed trolley buses, where sweating bodies squeezed against me from all sides, I thought I saw others switching on their mental cordons as I was learning to activate mine.
Like most fantasies, mine remained unrealized. The beginning of my job failed to release me into freedom. I was teaching at the Technical University in the Botanic district at the opposite end of Chiinu from Buiucani. An early-morning commuter express bus carried me the length of the city. I taught from nine to twelve, then rode a local bus back to tefan Cel Mare Boulevard, where I could soak up urban life, shop (I soon found both a city map and postcards), change money, or idle with other English teachers who spent afternoons sitting on benches behind the statue of Stephen the Great at the entrance to tefan Cel Mare Park. Whatever I did, I had to do it quickly because Dora expected me home for lunch. Senya didn’t come home for lunch, but Andrei did. At one or one-thirty Andrei, Dora, and I would squeeze around the kitchen table and eat. If I got delayed, Dora would become angry. If the delay were prolonged, she would be furious. One day I returned
I lost the argument and remained stuck in the apartment, writing in my journal and studying Romanian grammar. Defying Senya and Dora’s interdiction would destroy my relationship with the family. Moldovan family structure was inflexible. If I wished to obtain a margin of freedom, I would have to secure it in the same way Moldovans acquired the rare pockets of pleasure, privilege, or indulgence in their lives: through patience and stealth; by blending collaboration with deception rather than by rebelling.
