Lost Province. Stephen Henighan

from childhood until his mid-forties when he married Dora. Senya was a sly, intelligent, surprisingly assertive man who suffered from bouts of peevish ill temper; in despair he could become melodramatic. As a lawyer, he earned a good salary: one hundred and thirty lei a month. (At this time there were four Moldovan lei to the U.S. dollar.) His work as a public defender frustrated and embittered him, forcing him to spend his days in the company of muggers, prostitutes, and recidivist drunks. Gratingly articulate and fascinated by politics, Senya might have parlayed his legal training into more active political involvement had he been of ordinary stature. He read Romanian fluently and seemed to be equally at home in the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. I was not what he had expected when he agreed to take an English teacher into his home—too old, too knowing, too intrusive in my probing—but like Dora, Andrei, and Serge, he welcomed me with impeccable hospitality. Later, speaking to other English teachers, I realized that the language barrier had caved open a gulf between them and their host families. Communicating mainly through sign language, they had gleaned little of family dynamics, jobs, financial worries, political tensions. I was lucky Conversation hastened familiarity. After a week, I felt as if I were becoming a Moldovan.

       Not all aspects of family life made for easy adaptation. I had less space and privacy than I was used to. In fact, the Lencua family had little conception of personal privacy in the sense that middle-class Westerners understood the term. Their confined living quarters didn’t permit such caprices. Andrei’s bedroom was also the lounge and sewing room. On a couple of afternoons I saw Dora and her friends go into the room to chat and sew, apparently oblivious to the fact that Andrei, having worked overnight on some passing odd job, lay asleep and undressed on his unfolded sofa bed. Likewise, at five-thirty or six in the morning, I would be awoken by members of the family, in varying states of near-nakedness, trailing nonchalantly into the living room to retrieve some item of clothing from the wall unit.

       The apartment’s interior doors were fitted with full-length panels of translucent glass embossed with light, leaf-patterned whorls. A single lamp turned on anywhere in the apartment infiltrated all rooms; someone standing in front of your door could see your every movement. The first morning that I rolled out of bed to dress only to realize Dora and Serge were standing in the hall before my door, I hesitated. I soon learned to ignore such presences: unflustered themselves by the notion of dressing in front of others, the Lencuas would not have understood my reserve.

       This casualness, though, was emphatically limited to a well-defined family sphere. Moldova was conspicuously innocent of such Western decadences as nude sunbathing, Penthouse-style magazines, or pornographic—or even mildly sexy—films. In questions of sexual morality, Chiinu was the most puritanical city I had visited. Andrei, at twenty, was forbidden to invite individual female friends into the apartment even when his parents were present.

       Exhausted by my trip, I slept heavily my first nights in Chiinu, waking late to a busy apartment. At five-thirty in the morning, no matter how scrupulously I had closed the balcony door, the mosquitoes massing outside would buzz into the room, deviously picking out the most painful and persistently itchy places to bite: elbows, knuckles, shins. Slapping and scratching, I would finally doze off again. One of the first words I added to my rapidly growing Romanian vocabulary was ânar. The dictionary translation was gnat, but no gnats ever bit like the early-morning mosquitoes of Chiinu. Another English teacher, who was sleeping on her family’s enclosed balcony, later developed such a severe reaction to her ânar bites that she had to be treated with what we called “the dreaded green stuff”—a verdantly luminous, almost indelible disinfectant in which all cuts were promptly lathered. The shamrock blotches lingered on children’s arms and legs—as on my colleague’s limbs—for weeks after other evidence of cuts, scratches, or bites had disappeared.

       I began to feel trapped. The taxi ride from the train station had tantalized me with glimpses of a glittering southern city. It was days before I was permitted another visit to the centre; I had to wait nearly a week until I had the opportunity to explore on my own. I felt isolated and restless. For the first few days Dora and Senya refused to let me leave the apartment unescorted. Chiinu, they maintained, was a big city (the population was about seven hundred thousand)—too big for foreigners to amble about on their own. I replied that I wasn’t planning to rove around at night. I simply wanted to see the centre of the city, take the occasional walk around the neighbourhood. They shook their heads. I tried to explain that I was an experienced traveller: I had lived in Bogotá, Colombia; I had explored on my own from Morocco to Rio de Janeiro; I had survived a Shining Path liberated zone in Peru and visited northern Nicaragua during the contra war. None of this made any impression on them. I reached for cities nearer at hand. Warsaw, for example. I had walked around Warsaw at night, so why not Chiinu in the daytime? Senya and Dora closed ranks. Warsaw was a much more civilized city. It had never been part of the Soviet Union; people weren’t as crooked and desperate as they were in Chiinu.

       I lost the argument and remained stuck in the apartment, writing in my journal and studying Romanian grammar. Defying Senya and Dora’s interdiction would destroy my relationship with the family. Moldovan family structure was inflexible. If I wished to obtain a margin of freedom, I would have to secure it in the same way Moldovans acquired the rare pockets of pleasure, privilege, or indulgence in their lives: through patience and stealth; by blending collaboration with deception rather than by rebelling.

       I could leave the apartment only if Andrei consented to accompany me. Andrei wasn’t much given to walks. Employed as a television salesman, he preferred to sit in his room where his wares, encased in cardboard boxes, were piled against the walls. He watched MTV in English from Amsterdam, or Hollywood movies in which the dialogue had been muted and overlaid with a monotone Russian explanation of the characters’ words and actions. When the telephone rang, Andrei jumped. “Dobrý dien” he would growl into the receiver, hoping one of the advertisements he placed in commercial papers had yielded a buyer. Most of the phone calls, though, seemed to be from Dora’s friends or Senya’s clients. On a few occasions I heard Andrei eagerly announcing the television’s brand name and—I assumed—its other features in loud Russian, but during my first week in the family, no client came to the door.

       The Lencuas’ refusal to allow me to go out stemmed in part from their utilitarian approach to life. Why did I need to go out? Leaving the apartment meantspending money on transportation, being squashed by the sweating crowds in the trolley bus, wrangling with shopkeepers over scarce goods. Never having been able to travel, they couldn’t understand the idea of wandering around a city for pleasure. What did I want to do downtown? My failure to provide a satisfactory reply to this question provoked confusion and even suspicion. Perhaps I wished to slip away