LOST PROVINCE
ALSO BY STEPHEN HENIGHAN
Other Americas (novel) Nights in the Yungas (short stories) The Places Where Names Vanish (novel) North of Tourism (short stories) Assuming the Light: The Parisian Literary Apprenticeshipof Miguel Angel Asturias (criticism) When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing (essays)
LOST PROVINCE
Adventures in a Moldovan Family
STEPHEN HENIGHAN
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen Henighan
First Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), Toronto, Ontario.
This book is published by Beach Holme Publishing, 226–2040 West 12th Avenue, Vancouver, B.C. V6J 2G2. www.beachholme.bc.ca. This is a Prospect Book.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and of the British Columbia Arts Council. The publisher also acknowledges the financial assistance received from the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its publishing activities.
Editor: Michael Carroll
Design and Production: Jen Hamilton
Cover Art: © Paul Schutzer/ALPHA-PRESSE
Author Photograph: Martin Schwalbe
Printed and bound in Canada by Kromar Printing Ltd.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Henighan, Stephen, 1960-
Lost province: adventures in a Moldovan family/Stephen Henighan.
“A prospect book.”
ISBN 0-88878-432-5
1. Henighan, Stephen, 1960- —Journeys—Moldova. 2. Moldova—Social life and customs. 3. Moldova—Description and travel.
4. Moldova—Languages. 5. Moldavian dialect. 6. English teachers—Moldova—Biography. I. Tide.
DK509.29.H46 2002 947.608’6 C2002–911088–2
CONTENTS
2 The Family That Did Not Know It Spoke Romanian
5 Town, Countryside, and Caverns
6 Divide and Conquer
7 Chi
8 Lebed’s Kingdom
9 A Long Drunk
10 The Look of a Stranger
11 The Western Border
12 Irreconcilable Opposites
13 A Divided Departure
Epilogue: 2001
Acknowledgements
In early 1989 a few months after the election that sealed the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I made a long trip through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. The prospect of free trade depressed me. I brooded about the survival of the peculiarities of habit, language, architecture, outlook, and attitude, nurtured by local and national cultures, which furnished the world with much of the multiplicity and fascination that made living worthwhile. In Central Europe I thought I glimpsed the revival of the thriving diversity of Mitteleuropa—the return of an older, more complicated Europe. Time would prove this resuscitation of heterodoxy to be a mirage, but in 1989 felt I had received a great gift, stumbling upon a treasure trove of multiplicity in an era when differences were being irreducibly flattened. I promised myself I would return to the far side of Europe.
I went back to Canada and lived for two and a half years in Montreal, writing fiction and journalism and supporting myself with odd jobs. When, in 1992, I decided to give up my freelancer’s life to write a doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford, part of my motivation for studying in England stemmed from a longing to be close to the Europe that had intrigued me. On gloomy Oxford days I dreamed of escaping to Mitteleuropa. My next journey east, though, was not to be to the former realm of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but to the Balkans.
In 1989 I had not visited the Balkans: my knowledge of the region derived from literature. One image that made a strong impression on me, having travelled through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland with Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy in my backpack, was the annexation of Bessarabia. Essentially a portrait of a marriage, Manning’s novels are set against the background of Romania’s entry into World War II. Stalin’s annexation of Bessarabia in 1940, though it takes place offstage, contributes powerfully to the suffocation of hope that eventually drives the central characters to flee Bucharest. The Romanian characters, of course, stay behind in Romania. Bessarabians, too, stayed behind—no longer citizens of Romania, but of the Soviet Union.
The image had dimmed by the time I applied for a summer teaching job in Romania in 1994. A year and a half earlier, during a period of boredom with my doctoral thesis, I had started studying Romanian. After taking four hours of introductory lessons with a postdoctoral student who knew the language well, I invested in a grammar book, discovered a cache of tapes, and happily devoted my idle hours to memorizing the unpredictable plural forms of Romanian nouns. By the summer I was aching to practise the language. I had spent the year as president of my Oxford college’s graduate-student association—a wearing responsibility that had added thirty or more hours of commitments every week to my already-packed schedule, binding me to the mandates of a community both demanding and insular. A lingering romantic confusion had pulled the narrow borders of this world a notch tighter. I needed to get away.
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