“I can’t talk to the Jacksons just because I speak English. It’s like me asking you to use your Russian to talk to Boris Yeltsin.”
“You can do it, Steve! I’ll cut you in and you’ll be rich. You’ll never have to work again. Justthink—Michael Jackson will come to Chi
I realized that, on top of everything else, his wholesome vision of the Jacksons was sadly dated. “Andrei, Michael Jackson has had a lot of problems recently. Health problems…” I tried to think of a way of mentioning the allegations that Jackson had molested adolescent boys. But in Chi
“I don’t care about that, Steve. I just want the Jacksons to come to Chi
“I can’t help you do that, Andrei.”
My relationship with Andrei never fully recovered from this disappointment. We were back on good terms in a few days, but from that evening onward his exuberance alternated with a tone of corrosive bitterness. I had failed him. I wondered about the psychological implications of his fantasy, which struck me as embarrassingly transparent. The family quarrel that was to open the spectacle seemed to represent both his parents’ divorce and the splintering of the Soviet Union—the two events had grown nearly synonymous for Andrei—while the advent of the Jacksons, who were both a mass-media chimera and, crucially, a family, provided reassurance that the new globalized order would act to restore life to its former stability. The family unity—of the Soviet Union and of Andrei’s Romanian mother and Ukrainian father within that confederation—would be anointed by the blessing of an MTV deity. Again the message that global mass culture brought the dissolution of fixed values and identities had failed to get through. Andrei was trying to go back to the future where the endurance of the Soviet familyunit would be consecrated in the glare of halogen lamps, the puff of smoke bombs, and the whine of synthesizers. His need and desperation were tragic, but I didn’t think it was fair toallow his illusions to persist.
We returned to the apartment in forbidding silence. Andrei went out to drink with friends at a picnic table in the dark. The next evening he disappeared as soon as supper ended. On the weekend before my course began he made himself scarce, effectively marooning me in the apartment. I had failed to live up to the image of a Westerner as he had been taught to regard the species by MTV. Not only was I incapable of communicating with the Jacksons, but my knowledge of the dollar prices of different models of cars, different brands of televisions and VCRS and Walkmans, was pathetically deficient. Andrei and his friends revelled in discussions of the finer points of such gadgets. Although none of them owned Walkmans or VCRS (they all had televisions), they had memorized the differences between different makes and models. I had been expected to supply crucial dollar figures to amplify their discussions. But I proved hopeless at telling them how much each model of each gadget would cost in England/America, which was all one place—the land where MTV happened.
As a Westerner, I was an unnerving disenchantment.
Dora and Senya saved me from being stuck in the apartment all weekend by inviting me for a walk. They attributed Andrei’s disappointment with me to the difference in our ages. As we crossed the corner of the development leading toward open fields of corn and sunflowers, Dora and Senya took pains to treat me as an equal. Senya, with old-fashioned courtesy, addressed me as “Domnul Steve”—“Mr. Steve.” They spoke to me slowly and corrected the mistakes in my Romanian, apparently proud to be teaching me their language. As we walked, I realized the development was far larger than I had imagined; it contained two schools, a hotel, a post office, a restaurant and bar, and numerous sports facilities, though very little grocery shopping. That morning I had noticed that most of the newspapers sold by the kiosks along the edge of the road where people from the development caught their buses downtown to work were printed in the Cyrillic alphabet. I had bought a Latin-alphabet paper called Europa. On opening it up I discovered to my dismay that though the front page was in Latin letters, most of the articles inside, though written in the Romanian language, wereprinted in the Cyrillic alphabet. The linguistic situation grew more and more confusing. “Do most people here speak Romanian…Moldovan?” I asked Senya.
“Most people speak Moldovan and Russian. Moldovans speak Russian, but Russians don’t speak Moldovan. But I don’t want to push the Russians living here out of Moldova. Many of them are old and sick. They were given apartments here in the south because they were wounded in the war in Afghanistan, or they came here to retire. The real swine are the Germans. Deutschenschwein!”
His digression took me by surprise; he was shaking with rage. For an instant I thought the story of what had happened to his family during World War II was about to tumble out. But Dora laid her hand on his shoulder. She pointed to a large, flat-roofed, single-story building. “That’s Serge’s school, the Romanian gymnasium. Andrei went to the Russian school. He’s a little Russian. For him everything is in Russian and Ukrainian. He hardly uses Moldovan.” Dora presented their decision to send Serge to Romanian school as a considered response to this outcome.
The next day, when my supervisor phoned to give directions to the Technical University where I would teach, Andrei asked her to switch into Russian. Having written down the directions in Russian, he proved nearly incapable of translating them into Romanian. He had to ask Senya the words for avenue, architecture building, and engineering building. His transcription into the Latin alphabet mixed up b’s and d’s. Serge would never make these mistakes; Romanian history and literature would be his heritage.
On the way back to the apartment Senya and Dora asked me about my rent in Montreal. They told me an apartment such as theirs cost US$2,000 to buy. Dora pointed out a white apartment block from which the paint wasn’t peeling. I noticed large enclosed balconies that projected outward rather than being recessed into the building, as was common in Central and Eastern Europe. The lower levels of the building were overgrown with thick creepers. “Three bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen,” Dorasaid. “Those apartments cost $13,000.” A friend of Dora’s who had moved across the border to Romania, having decided that life was better there, was trying without success to unload one of these expensive apartments. Not many Moldovans had $13,000 to spend on real estate. “It would be very easy for you to buy an apartment here, Steve,” Dora said. “You could save money in your country, buy a couple of apartments in Chi
“That’s true,” I said. In strictly financial terms she was correct, though I suspected that Soviet laws banning foreigners from owning property were still on the books. Had Dora offered me the solution to my eternal dilemma of financing my need to write? I struggled to convey to her that what I would miss living in Moldova would be contact with my own culture, with my language, with Canadian political and literary debates. My explanations confused Dora and Senya. The pulverization of their culture had diminished the value they placed on the notion of belonging. As accustomed to trading in identities as they were to bartering old trolley-bus tickets,
