Lost Province. Stephen Henighan

“Mary lives in Manchester. She suffers from the cyclical nature of capitalism. Her father is unemployed…” The assessment didn’t seem that unrealistic. The book’s language, on the other hand, was stiff, outdated, and sometimes wrong. Accustomed to drilling the book’s patterns into students’ heads, the teachers reacted fiercely and in unison to transgressions. Occasionally my pronunciation of a word—nephew was one such catalyst—would provoke a shouted correction from the entire class: “Nev-view!” The authoritarian habit turned them all against one another; if one teacher made a mistake, the others would bombard her with corrections. I had to intervene forcefully to establish that in this class I would do the correcting. Once I had asserted my dictatorial authority the tyrannical ladies became eager to learn. They were all painfully aware that the English they spoke was fast becoming outdated, and had to cope with students addicted to MTV who spouted slang expressions gleaned from rock videos. The experience was undermining their authority—the last shred of dignity left to them in a society that couldn’t afford to pay their salaries.

       Until my arrival the teachers’ course had been taught by Theresa, a retired Irish schoolteacher. Each day we would decide, according to the number of students present, whether to split the class or teach together. My first morning I watched Theresa teach for an hour. Her manner combined an antiquated, more-English-than-the-English quality bred, she informed me, at Trinity College, Dublin, with a well-meaning, earth-grandmother warmth. Her grey hair was cut short but floppy; her baggy skirt eeled with bright colours. “Men sweat,” she told the students, commenting on the staggering early-morning heat. “Ladies perspire.” She went on to describe the ritual of “a boy asking a girl’s father for her hand” as though such behaviour had fallen from fashion only last year. Perhaps in Ireland it had.

       I wasn’t certain that this sort of vocabulary enrichment would enable the teachers to decipher MTV, but there was no gainsaying Theresa’s professionalism. Having set out into the world “to make myself stop moping after my husband died,” she retained a charming vagueness about where she had ended up. Tiring of the history of how Stalin and Molotov had sliced out the Republic of Moldova from the Romanian region of Moldavia, she had settled on a personal compromise, referring to the country as “Moldava.”

       When I began to teach, the students let me speak for ten minutes, murmuring avidly among themselves to agree on Russian translations of the new words I was using. Then they interrupted. “Stephen,” one of them said, apparently at the others’ behest, “we want you to know how happy we are that you are here. You cannot imagine how wonderful it is for us that you have come to work with us.”

       “We have been waiting for this moment for fifteen years,” another woman said. Her neighbours chorused agreement.

       “Thank you very much,” I said. “I’m very happy to be in Chiinu. I’m looking forward to working with you.”

       Their gratitude couldn’t be stifled. The large, dusty classrooms were sweltering. My short-sleeved white shirt, which Dora had ironed to military crispness, was soon sodden with sweat. (Men sweat, indeed!) The soapy chalk broke in my hand, its dust settling along the inside of my throat. I grew hoarse and dehydrated. During the next few days, I searched in vain for a reliable source of liquid refreshment. Bottled water and clear soft drinks were unknown; repulsive Coca-Cola and Pepsi, like juice, were intermittently available in a few specialty shops at very high prices; only vodka was omnipresent. I could find no relief. My voice rasped, my head throbbed. My students saved me with their astonishingly bountiful generosity. They hadn’t been paid in weeks, their husbands were marginally employed, their children clamoured for necessities they couldn’t afford, yet every day they brought me a thermos of lemon tea to preserve my voice, bags of fruit to offset my dehydration, and homecooked Moldovan delicacies to nibble during the morning break.

       Introducing me on my first morning, the course supervisor had mentioned I spoke Romanian. This scrap of information intrigued the Romanian-speaking teachers. At the end of the first class I was waylaid en route to the bus stop by an assertive teacher named Natasha. In a commanding voice that brooked no dissent, she told me we were going to ride downtown together.

       Natasha was the most culturally Romanian of my students. She was a sturdy woman in her early forties. Her long, thick black hair was flecked with grey, and the set of her eyes betrayed a slight Asiatic tilt. Her family came from a village across the river from the ugly industrial city of Galai, Romania; had they been living five kilometres farther west, they would have escaped Soviet rule. Five kilometres farther and Natasha wouldn’t have been named Natasha. By the time she was born in the early 1950s, assimilation was well under way, and few parents were willing to convert their children into targets of oppression by giving them Romanian names. The combination of Natasha’s Slavic first name and Latinate Romanian surname might sound incongruous to an outsider, but in Moldova it was normal. A man I met later in the summer told me that in his village’s primary school all the Romanian boys in his year were named Vladic because word had gotten around among local Romanian parents that this was a name looked upon with favour by the Soviet authorities.

       Natasha, alone among the five children in her family, had escaped the countryside and gone to university. Only the youngest of my students had grown up in Chiinu: among those over thirty, the Romanian speakers had come from the countryside and the Russian speakers had come from elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. (Nelly, unusually, had grown up in Tiraspol.) The pattern rehearsed the history of the deportation of the Romanian middle class and its replacement with a middle class drawn from the Slavic heartland. As we loitered in the dusty, shaded patches where trees grew in gaps in the sidewalk paving, waiting for the arrival of a bus offering enough free space for us to squeeze onboard, Natasha said, “That’s one of our biggest problems. We have no leadership. All our potential leaders died in Siberia and their children grew up as Russian-speaking Siberians.”

       “Did you learn Russian in your village?”

       “I learned Russian when I was twelve.” Learning Russian had been a crucial stage, the essential qualification for attending university and entering the urban world. Without fluent Russian she would have remained a peasant, condemned to back-breaking labour in a remote village. “It was very difficult for me to learn a Slavic language. I had to work very, very hard. But this has made my life more interesting. I’ve been able to read the literature. The Russians have the greatest literature in the world. You’ll never know what you’re missing unless you learn this language…”

       Once we had clambered up the steps of a low-slung, fume-spewing bus, shouldering a niche for ourselves out of the cushion of sweating bodies, Natasha’s mood darkened. Her full-volume bitterness unnerved me. Could we safely assume no one on the bus understood English?

       “I have Russian friends here. Very nice Russians, but if you tell them about the Romanian language, about Romanian literature, they don’t want to hear about it. They don’t want to admit that you speak this language and they will never learn the language themselves. How can people be like that? How can you go to live somewhere and not learn the language? They say Romanian is an irrelevant language. Well, my parents went to live in the south, among the Gagauz people, and they learned to communicate in Gagauz. Gagauz is a very small language, maybe two hundred thousand people speak this language, but if you go to live with those people, you should learn their language!”

       The blast of English staked bodies rigid, raised resentful stares. The theme trembling behind Natasha’s last statement was the political tension surrounding the upcoming revision of Moldova’s language law. This was an explosive issue, and I was relieved when Natasha waited until we had gotten off the bus on a busy side street near §tefan Cel Mare Boulevard before bringing it up.