The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (12 page)

We went through five, six, seven cycles of “Nyet. Bad. Listen. Repeat. Again.” Eventually she would pause after another of my stammered attempts, then grunt a grudging approval: Da. The key was surrendered, and I signed my name in a huge ledger along with thousands upon thousands of other signatures (many of them mine) to acknowledge receipt of the key and acceptance of dire penalties should the key not return. Finally—finally!—I could climb the four flights of stairs (the elevator was always malfunctioning) where my hundred or so students awaited me in the hallway. We opened the door and entered the forlorn lecture hall—a concrete room equipped with broken desks, a cracked chalkboard, and ill-fitting windowpanes that allowed the wind to whistle through. There was no heat. Outside, flurries eddied about, and sparks showered down from trolley wires. With chalk I had bought myself on a weekend trip to neighboring Romania (a relative consumer paradise compared with Moldova), I wrote an American poem on the chalkboard. The students copied it down in their notebooks—most of them managing to memorize it in the process (a skill developed during years of forced memorization in school)—and the lecture began.

This was my Fulbright year, the fulfillment of a longstanding desire. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, I was eager to revisit Eastern Europe to see what had changed in the years since I had been a university student on a study-abroad tour of the Soviet bloc at the height of the Cold War. I was thinking I would go to Poland, the Czech Republic, or maybe Hungary. But when my chance came, a chance to teach as a Fulbright Scholar, the assignment was not for Prague or Bratislava or Budapest or Vilnius. The call came not from Kiev or Sofia or Bucharest or Warsaw. It came instead from tiny, remote, unknown Moldova and its capital city with two names: Kishinev in Russian, Chišinau in Romanian. I was initially ambivalent, but when I learned more about Moldova—such as where to locate it on a map—I wholeheartedly embraced the opportunity to live in such an isolated place still relatively unaffected by the rapid Westernization that had transformed other countries of the former Soviet bloc.

Moldova became an independent country in 1991 following the collapse of the USSR. Until then, the area now called Moldova had never before been truly independent. From 1944 to 1991, it was a republic of the Soviet Union. Before that, between 1918 and 1944, it had been a province of Greater Romania. Czarist Russia controlled the territory from 1812 to 1918. And once upon a time, Moldova had languished as a tributary outpost of the Ottoman Empire, ruled fitfully for several hundred years by the Turks. A tiny wedge of steppe land between the Prut and Dniester Rivers, known for much of its history as Bessarabia, Moldova had been traded back and forth in the various treaties that temporarily resolved disputes and wars among the regional powers. For centuries, Moldova had never been more than a pawn in the diplomatic chess match—maybe not even a pawn, but merely a square on the board waiting to be occupied. Yet after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moldova had suddenly become an independent country left to its own devices and struggling for survival and identity.

In the years following independence, attempts to dismantle the Soviet system had been chaotic and inconsistent. Yes, democratic elections had occurred in Moldova. Yes, the invisible hand of capitalism had tinkered, or rather fumbled, with the economy. But by the late 1990s, the economic, political, and cultural transformations were still incomplete. Important structural reforms had not yet taken place, and the IMF and the World Bank were pressuring the Moldovan government for more drastic changes. The economy and the government were still largely in the hands of Soviet-era apparatchiks who had simply adopted new titles in the transition. Many were now linked to the emerging Russian mafia.

As the first decade of independence drew to an end, income distribution in Moldova was widening considerably, with a very few getting rich—primarily through corrupt capitalist ventures—while the vast majority grew poorer and poorer. In some cases desperately poor: according to reports, large numbers of Moldovan women were being enticed to work as prostitutes in Western Europe, where many of them had disappeared into the netherworld of sex slavery. There were rumors that traffickers in human organs were buying Moldovan kidneys to sell on the black market. Before my year in the country was over, Moldova would officially become the poorest of the former Soviet republics and the poorest country in Europe, dropping below even woebegone Albania. This was the gist of the situation in Moldova when I arrived.

When I wasn't at the university, I spent much of the day walking in parks and along city streets. Kishinev reveled in its parks, and the parks were without question Kishinev's best feature. There was the Park of the Cathedral, with its flower stalls and diminutive copy of the Arc de Triomphe (not big enough for a street, it straddled a sidewalk). Across the city's main boulevard was a park dedicated to Stefan the Great. A huge statue of Moldova's national hero—sword in one hand, cross in the other—guarded the entrance to the park. In the fifteenth century, Stefan took on the ruling Turkish lords and managed to establish Orthodox Christian hegemony over the region. The brief sovereignty, however, didn't last beyond Stefan's lifetime. Upon his death, the Turks returned with a vengeance, and for the next 300 years Moldova languished on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire.

Near the middle of Stefan the Great's park stood a column dedicated to Alexander Pushkin. It was to Kishinev in 1820 that the Russian poet was banished for his liberal proclivities. Young and unknown, Pushkin spent three long years in the isolated town. At the time, Kishinev was little more than a village of peasants in the far southwestern corner of Russia, a place of unsophisticated culture and few amenities. Fittingly, Kishinev's most celebrated resident lived there involuntarily and spent his three years in the town pining to leave. He referred to the place as “accursed Kishinev.” Another city park surrounded an artificial lake dug by the Communist Youth in the 1950s. In a remote corner of this park stood the formerly prominent statues of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe similar statues had been destroyed. But the Moldovans had not been so drastic in their treatment of fallen heroes. Removed from their positions of prominence and banished to a copse on the far side of an isolated lake, the trinity watched over the transition to capitalism from afar. The busts of Marx and Engels brooded ineffectually, while Lenin stood full of ferocious energy, one leg forward, as though he were ready to mount a countercharge against the forces that had exiled him.

The city's infrastructure provided further evidence of Moldova's struggles. Walking around, you saw the decaying apartment blocks of the Soviet era, some buildings eroding before your eyes as the wind wore away mortar and sent pellets of concrete eddying down to the sidewalks. One abandoned shopping center had a postapocalyptic look to it: disintegrated stairways, collapsed storefronts, exposed rebar, corroded girders. So it was wherever you looked: decaying buildings, choppy roads, crumbling sidewalks. And unfinished buildings, too: scores of construction projects that had been abandoned in 1991 when Moscow's largesse had dissipated along with the quotas and five-year plans that had put the projects into motion. As a consequence, abandoned projects were everywhere, untouched for years.

My walks also took me past a place that I mistook at first for a nature preserve. From the street, all I could see was a tangle of growth—an unkempt forest—behind a high wall. Eventually I learned that this was the old Jewish cemetery, long abandoned now that there were almost no Jews left in Moldova. Other than being the locale of Pushkin's exile, Kishinev had secured its small place in history as the scene of gruesome pogroms. At the beginning of the twentieth century, nearly half of the city's population was Jewish. Kishinev was under Russian jurisdiction at the time, and Russia in 1900 was a virulently anti-Semitic state. Jews were loathed and feared. The czar's authorities considered them revolutionaries. The peasants envied Jewish business successes. Folk stories of ritual murders—Jews killing Christians for their blood—circulated, and the authorities did little to squelch them. Profit-driven newspapers worked rumors into fully realized reports of atrocities. The tabloids printed accounts of Russian boys and girls falling into the clutches of butcher Jews who were diabolically collecting Christian blood for their Passover feasts. Such a story surfaced in Kishinev just before Easter 1903. Over the Easter weekend, the city's good Christians went on a rampage, exacting their revenge on the Jews by burning and looting Kishinev's ghetto. Hundreds of Jews were seized from their homes, clubbed, and mauled. Some 43 Jews died. The twentieth century had just begun, and remote Kishinev was foreshadowing its major motifs. Indeed, the 1903 pogrom was only a prelude to what was to come in Moldova. When Romania (to which Moldova then belonged) aligned itself with Nazi Germany, 400,000 Bessarabian Jews and 40,000 Gypsies were sent to nearby concentration camps. Many were eventually deported to Auschwitz.

By the end of the twentieth century, very few Jews lived in Kishinev (less than 1 percent of the population), and almost no one I met had heard of this history. A small, unassuming stone slab in a park on the edge of the city was dedicated to the victims of the 1903 pogrom, but the history museum ignored the matter altogether. Most people I spoke to were puzzled by mention of the pogrom. Such a thing had never happened in Kishinev, they were sure. Nor did they believe that the city had once been nearly half Jewish. During their lifetime, the city's Jewish background had been all but obliterated. For example, the official city map did not indicate the location of the Jewish cemetery. To passersby, it was just a large, abandoned tract of land hidden behind deteriorated walls. When I finally learned what was behind the walls, I made several visits and found thousands of uprooted and overturned gravestones entangled in a dense thicket of vines and briars. But according to the maps, the cemetery did not officially exist. Nor was the location of the erstwhile concentration camps marked or memorialized in any way. My Moldovan acquaintances professed surprise that such places had ever existed and questioned my sources of information.

My status as a Fulbright Scholar and my consequent connection to the American Embassy put me in close contact with the expatriate community in Moldova. This community included personnel at the Western embassies and aid workers representing various NGOs. Some of the expatriates had formed a “diners' club,” which met once a month at local restaurants, where we were often the only patrons except for perhaps a handful of government officials and Russian mafia functionaries huddled in a corner. Many Moldovans I knew had not been to a restaurant in years; none had been to the fancier establishments (probably mafia-owned) that the diners' club favored.

On a typical outing, 25 or 30 of us were seated at a long table. Musicians played loud Gypsy-style versions of movie and show standards—the themes from
Dr. Zhivago
,
Titanic
, and James Bond were in heavy rotation—meant to entertain us during the long, inexplicable waits between courses. When a break in the music permitted conversation, the expats returned to their favorite themes: the rapid disintegration of the country and their intense desire to get out. Many expressed anxiety about being trapped in Moldova. True, some claimed that “Moldova could get in your blood” and professed to truly love the place, its people, its culture. These were the foreigners who had married Moldovans or who had some ongoing research project, something that tied them to the place. But for most of the foreign community, Moldova was a temporary post in a disagreeable backwater. They spoke longingly of previous assignments or speculated and dreamed about where they would go next, once they had “put in time” in Moldova.

The anxiety that these expats felt led them to carp about the country and its citizens. A long list of complaints was drawn up and reiterated at each gathering. Almost anything could be the subject of complaint—the mud, the cold, the bread, the milk, the hard water, the baffling pattern of one-way streets, the Moldovan custom of hanging rugs on walls. The emblem for their irritation was the typical Moldovan lift, whether in a tenement, a government building, or a store. The grumbling, lurching elevators inspired fear and loathing in expats. “I just won't do it,” someone would grouse. “I won't take one of those things. I'd rather walk up ten flights, thank you.” Who got stuck in a lift, when, where, and for how long was one of the favorite news items amongst the foreign community.

Despite its incessant disgruntlement, the expat community proved to be a valuable source of information. It was during expat meet-ups that I heard confirmation of the many rumors now circulating about the dark side of Moldova's economic decline. Peace Corps officials, USAID personnel, and staff at some NGOs—people with inside information—confirmed that what we had heard was true: Moldova had become one of the principal countries of origin for the trafficking of women. Criminal gangs had lured or kidnapped thousands of young women and sent them into sex slavery abroad. An official of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe called Moldova the “largest supplier state” of sex slaves in Europe. Members of medical missions told us that the black-market organ stories were true as well. Moldovans were being taken by bus across the Turkish border—sometimes with false promises of a job—where they were pressured into selling a kidney for a few thousand dollars. But what could be done? Most Moldovans earned well under $1,000 a year. When someone showed up offering “jobs” that paid $2,000, of course desperation would lead people to take a chance. And once they found themselves across the border in a hospital room with all their documents taken from them, they probably felt that they had little choice but to go through with it.