Lost Province. Stephen Henighan

business was the answer, that an answer existed—a solution to the dead end in which he was trapped. The Soviet Union had rewarded acquiescence with total security. Andrei remained convinced that this new social organization, which he understood to be based around business, would provide him with a similar degree of security in much greater opulence, if only he could master the system. The notion that the essence of this new system lay in the withdrawal of security had not penetrated his mind. In this, I suspected, he was far from alone. What would happen when the Andreis of the planet realized that “business” wasn’t a more lavish method of organizing society, but an order under whose sway society, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, did not exist? My responses, in any event, were too Western for him: “You never have complete security. You always have to change and adapt.”

       This was unacceptable. “Steve, I’ve been working on a plan for three years that will make everybody so rich we’ll never have to work again. Before you leave Moldova I’ll make you a very interesting business proposition!”

       He had been alluding to this plan since my arrival, vowing to share the details with me. He could barely contain himself.

       As we walked around the development, young men would detach themselves from loitering groups and come over to speak to us. Andrei and I shook hands with each young man in turn. Most of the youths wore the baggy blue track suits with red, white, and green stripes running down the side that were the uniform of the young male in Chiinu. On their feet they wore rubber sandals. Sports shoes, I had learned, were a luxury item and a rarity; my brief sally onto tefan Cel Mare Boulevard had alerted me to the intrigued stares aroused by my Reeboks. Once the greetings were complete, Andrei’s conversations with the youths would lapse into Russian. After the first of these conversations, Andrei apologized for speaking in a language I didn’t understand. “Rusete e mai binepentru business.”

       Andrei and his friends, I was discovering, were not alone in this belief. All over Moldova, Russian seemed to be regarded as “better for business.” In less than four years the language had achieved a remarkable metamorphosis. From the bearer of socialist ideology, Russian had transformed itself into the symbol of mass-market modernity, second only to English—a language spoken by virtually no one in Moldova—as the associate of glorious consumerism. The riddle of how to attain the consumerist paradise enjoyed by Westerners and successful members of the Russian Mafia stymied young Moldovans. Andrei’s dilemma turned out to be typical, not unique. With the exception of a couple of part-time teachers, I would meet no one in Moldova under the age of thirty-five who could be described as gainfully employed. Like Andrei, most of his contemporaries spent the day marvelling at the riches paraded on MTV, their dreamy boredom punctuated by occasional bouts of buying and selling and carrying goods from one place to another. These sorties propped up personal dignity, but no one got rich on them; the meagre profits realized by, say, buying cheap textiles in Ukraine and sellingthem at a higher price in Romania were usually sucked away by the cost of train tickets, accommodation, food, and bribes paid to border guards.

       Constrained by a fearsome austerity under which jobs and many consumer goods—nearly any merchandise, in fact, other than vodka or bread—had vanished, Andrei nevertheless assigned the blame for the lousy economy to inflation. The subject came up via the back door. I was asking him about language; I had mentioned that his little brother, Serge, attended a Romanian-language school. Andrei scoffed. “Romanian school! That’s a thing of the 1990s. It won’t last. Steve, you have to understand there used to be a great empire that included Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. But that fell apart and now we all have inflation.”

       Moldova, in fact, did not suffer from severe inflation: the leu remained rock-steady at four to the U.S. dollar. The country’s problem was stagnation, not overstimulation; economic activity had ground to a standstill. Andrei’s adoption of careering Russian and Ukrainian inflation as his own had been absorbed from Russian television. His colonization was so deep he couldn’t see the reality around him. Andrei’s bamboozlement reminded me of Canadians sedated by U.S. television who slapped U.S. names onto Canadian institutions. Not wanting to challenge him too overtly, I murmured, “Is inflation a very big problem in Moldova?”

       “Not with a good business!” he said, again driving the English word through his Romanian sentence. “Steve, I’m going to tell you my plan. Listen carefully. I’ve spent three years working on this idea.”

       We had emerged onto a patch of sunken concrete; the high rises around us stood on bald, pitted hillocks. Andrei was walking in a posture of hunched determination, emphasizing the shortness and heaviness of his body. He peered forward from beneath his profuse black brows, concentrating with rapt attention on the future he hoped to summon from the shadows.

       Speaking very quickly, Andrei said, “There is a fight in a family. A horrible fight. We show this onstage. Then the damage is healed. And the Jackson family comes and makes it better by giving a huge concert. I mean, a concert here in Chiinu by the whole Jackson family—Michael, Jermaine…”

       “But, Andrei—”

       “No, Steve, I’ve spent three years working on this idea. I know people in the music business. I know there’s a market for this. That’s why I was happy when Papi said we were getting an English teacher to stay with us. You can use your English to talk to the Jacksons and get them to come.”

       “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 Chiinu.withhis whole family!”

       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 Chiinu this remained the scandal that dared not speak its name. I finally said, “His reputation is not good now.”

       “I don’t care about that, Steve. I just want the Jacksons to come to Chiinu. The whole family…”

       “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