Andrei and I rode the trolley bus down the long slope into the centre, then up the hill along
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, Chi
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 Lencu
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
I sat and ate. Two hours later I sat again and ate supper. After that I never returned to Buiucani any later than two in the afternoon. Contact with my colleagues dwindled. I was becoming part of a Moldovan family.
The Friday evening before my course began Andrei took me for a walk around the development. We crossed the dusty rectangular lots where daytime social life unfolded. In the dark I could make out concrete walkways, upright tractor tires half buried in the earth, rudimentary swing sets, stray benches and picnic tables, and large iron-tube frames over which women draped rugs in order to beat them clean. Groups of men supplied with vodka from the kiosks around the fringes of the development sat playing cards at the picnic tables listing into the night’s deep shadows. Only the solitary parking lot was lighted. Andrei told me the neighbourhood was safe at night for groups or pairs of men, though not for single people; during the day, it was safe for more or less anyone, a fact of which he and his friends were proud.
Andrei asked me about “business.” Speaking no English, he would nonetheless spit out this word in a semblance of its English pronunciation, spiking it with trappings of machismo, streetwise knowledge, manly self-possession. Andrei had attended Russian-language schools, graduating from a technical high school with an auto mechanic’s diploma. He had worked only briefly in this field (jobs soon dried up) and, for someone twenty years of age, had notched up a bewildering variety of work experience: housepainting, construction work in Moscow, harvest-time labour in Romania, unspecified tasks in Ukraine, dozens of attempts to do “business” in Chi