one bloc east

The other afternoon I took a trip into Chisinau. As I’ve mentioned previously, the highway between Chisinau and Odessa runs within a few hundred yards of my house, and instead of walking down into the valley to the bus station to take the massive bus that stops at every stop between here and the capital, I thought I would try to flag down a faster routiera on the side of the highway. Taking the smaller routiera has the advantage of potentially saving me about forty minutes on the trip. The disadvantage is that it’s less comfortable; it’s more like being in a cattle car than on a bus.

I waited for about twenty minutes and had no luck.  While I waited, a herd of goats came down the hill in the distance to the west, moving like the shadow of a cloud across the open field.  Right when I was about to give up — two buses from Ukraine had passed me without stopping — a routiera from the nearby district center of Causeni skidded to a halt in the gravel in front of me. I’m lucky it stopped, because there was one “seat” remaining — a stool in the middle of the aisle — and on the longer distance routieras you must be seated (unlike the van from Costesti; I was rarely sitting on that ride except for on the dashboard).  Unfortunately, a young mother had laid her infant on that stool, and so I was either going to have to make her hold her baby or bear the wrath of the driver.  Thankfully she saw that I was going to have to sit somewhere and picked up the baby without me saying anything.  I was still mortified, though, because you don’t mess with babies and their young mothers (in general, and also in this country), so I offered to split the tiny stool with her.  She looked at me like I was crazy, a look I’m getting used to.

It was hot inside the bus.  It had been a sticky afternoon already, and the routieras are usually hot during the summer because there’s no air conditioning and often the windows are closed.  And a summertime routiera that has a baby on it is always going to be hot, because none of the windows will be open to let fresh air in.  The reason for this is the “current.”

The current is what some Moldovans call an indoor breeze, or perhaps more precisely, “air circulation.”  Current happens when you roll down the windows of a car, or when you have two windows in different rooms open in your house with no closed doors between them.  It’s common knowledge, of course, that the current will make you sick.  How this happens is unclear.  And it’s completely unpredictable which Moldovans will make a fuss about the current and which won’t.  My host parents in Costesti did not fear it but my 17 year-old host brother did.  But those who don’t make a fuss about it are a silent lot; they don’t argue if someone voices a concern about the current.  And, of course, babies are especially susceptible to the current, so opening a window on a routiera that has a baby passenger is strictly verboten.  I was stuck with the heat.

As we went from my district into the municipality of the capital, we passed a traffic checkpoint.  The checkpoint is a small hut, outside of which is a small sign giving statistics about the number of accidents in the area.  A guard stands in the road who will (theoretically) at random stop passing cars to inspect the drivers’ and passengers’ documents, though I’ve never been in a car that was stopped.  The guard will also check that routiera passengers all have tickets — which we don’t have because you don’t pay until you get off the bus — so before a checkpoint sometimes drivers will pass a stack of tickets to the back so everyone can take one; this was not one of those days.

As we passed through the checkpoint, the driver of this routiera buckled his seat belt, then unbuckled it again after we were out of visual range of the checkpoint guard.  This is fairly common, despite the posted accident statistics at the checkpoint as well as the wrecked cars elevated on metal columns along the side of the highway.

Traffic was miserable once we got close to the middle of town so I persuaded the driver to let me off while we were stuck in traffic.  I had to go to the piata to pick up a few things, and it wasn’t much further.  The piata is a lot like a bazaar or a flea market; it covers maybe four blocks in the middle of the capital and most of it is outdoors.  It’s also right next to the central bus station, which was poorly thought out, because the lumbering buses have to fight with pedestrians and vendors just to get in and out of the station.

You can buy anything you need at the piata: vegetables, fruit, meat, cheese, lingerie, chainsaws, toilet paper (single ply, of course), CDs, kittens, bed linens that say “Merry Christmas,” fake gold watches, mesh t-shirts.  You won’t find art or trinkets there, or at least I haven’t seen anything for sale that is not practical or useful in some way.  Most vendors have kiosks.  The kiosks are organized into miniature blocks with narrow walkways in between that lead to the wider north-south and east-west thoroughfares that meet in the center of the piata.  Some vendors simply stand in the middle of the paths with their wares hung on their bodies. The piata is walled in by buildings where there are booths for clothes; the meats and cheeses are in a building that has refrigerators that don’t look very cold.  Fruits and vegetables are sold in a covered pavilion area near the center.  Kiosk after kiosk appears to sell the same merchandise, and then suddenly you will see an abrupt change in the goods, from tea to power tools or from school supplies to whiskey.

The sidewalks outside the piata, in and around the bus station, are lined by those vendors who don’t have kiosks inside the piata.  Packs of desperate-looking dogs trot up and down the street and dodge buses.  One odd stretch of sidewalk is made of some kind of malleable tar instead of cement, and you can feel it compressing under your feet as you walk; it has the consistency of gum that’s been stuck underneath a school desk for some time.

Near the bus station there’s usually a line of milk and cheese sellers squatting over their wares; they don’t have chairs and it’s a no-no to sit on any form of concrete.  Concrete is like the current: it is widely believed to make you sick.  How sick that will make you is not settled, some believe you will catch a cold, while others seem to think that if a girl sits on concrete that her ovaries will freeze and she won’t be able to have children.  There may or may not be a similar effect on men; I’ve sat on a lot of concrete myself over the years, and, indeed, I have not fathered any children.  But the general consensus is that the concrete is “cold” and somehow this is bad for you.  In a similar vein, drinking cold liquids will also make you sick; whistling indoors makes your money disappear.

Between the dangers posed by the current, concrete, cold liquids, and whistling, I encourage you to be vigilant about your health and safety.  A seat belt certainly won’t protect you.

Friday I accompanied one of my partner teachers, Petru, to a ceremony for the opening of a new monument in town commemorating those from my town who lost their lives in battle. I arrived before Petru, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

In the plaza just off the roundabout that marks the center of town, I found about twenty men milling about in Soviet military uniforms. More arrived by the minute. Some were ancient, others were maybe in their forties or fifties. I recognized one man, whose name I’m embarrassed to say I can’t recall, from my first full day in town. He was dressed head-to-toe in camouflage, and underneath his tunic he wore one of those blue-and-white striped Soviet army undershirts. The white was discolored with age.

He is not a forgettable man, but is not really a conspicuous one either. He is short and stocky, the stockiness presumably coming from drink. He wears a thin mustache and oval glasses, behind which his eyes squint when he smiles. That smile is memorable, because it always is genuine and because his teeth are improbably and widely spaced. One sees it frequently because he always speaks with enthusiasm. I was introduced to him on Wednesday at a magazin near the centru, where he sat at 10:30 a.m. with four of his comrades around some beers, cucumbers, and placinta. Petru told me that all of these men were former police officers, and they now have an insurance agency, the office for which is nearby. He added that the table where they were seated was more like their de facto office. We sat with them for about an hour. They asked me about America, they joked with one another and with me. When we excused ourselves that day, I felt like I was in good with the semi-retired cop community in town, at least.

As I was waiting, awkwardly, for Petru in the plaza, this man came up to me and shook my hand.

“I didn’t know you were in the army,” I said.

“You didn’t ask! I served in Afghanistan.”

“Wow, that must have been tough.” The word Moldovans use to say something is tough has a stronger meaning — almost “unbearable” and sounds a lot less stupid in this context. “I’ve heard there were a lot of boys from around here sent to Afghanistan, is that true?” I had not, in fact, heard this, but it was true about Costesti, and so I figured it would be true about my town.

“There weren’t so many,” he said, with an air of disappointment. Then he perked up: ”But I was the first!”

“The first what?”

“I was the first person here to go into Afghanistan!”

I paused. It was taking me a moment to think of something original to say, other than, that must have been difficult, because it was war and obviously it was difficult. But then he added:

“Yep. I was there. On December 27th, 1979.”

Then I understood what he was so proud of. When he said that he had been the first from this town to go into Afghanistan, I had no idea that he meant he was part of the initial invasion.

On December 27th, 1979, eighty thousand Soviet troops began an invasion of Afghanistan, ostensibly at the behest of the government of Afghanistan. Many Moldovans were among that invading force. The invasion meant the beginning of thirty years of war in Afghanistan; the Soviets, at least, would not leave until 1989. And this man was part of the first wave.

At the moment of my epiphany Petru arrived along with some other veterans, notably a former Soviet general and a naval aviator. The general was friendly and smiled; the naval aviator was severe and wore an intimidating marine dagger at his hip. The veterans left together to prepare for the ceremony, leaving me with Petru. The ceremony itself was rather long and uneventful, and consisted mostly of the local priests chanting and tossing holy water over the new monument and the veterans.

The following Monday Petru and the mayor of the town took me to a nearby village, on the bank of the Dniester River. We rode on a bus full of veterans from the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan; Petru and I were the only ones not wearing camouflage and not drinking. The mayor certainly is the most mayoral-looking man I’ve seen in town, even when he’s a camouflage suit as opposed to his regular charcoal silk one. His most prominent feature is his mustache, and I can’t quite decide whether it’s closer to that of Henry Stanley, George Custer, or the Monopoly Man.  He sat at the front of the bus, passing out tiny cups for beer, and dictating who drank when.

We pulled off of the main road, and ahead I could see a white tower, perhaps six stories tall. It was in the form of a narrow arch, perhaps fifteen yards wide its entire height. Near the top was a crossbar from which hung a giant bell, and on top of the arch was a large cross. The arch was placed near the bluff overlooking the Dneister river, and in the attic of the arch on the side facing Moldova was the inscription:

Eroilor Razboiului – Glorie!

Or, “To the heros of war, glory!”  On the other side, facing the Dneister, was the same inscription, but in Russian.  The monument specifically is dedicated to the memory of the Soviet troops who died wresting Moldova from German control in 1944.  At this spot, in 1944, Soviet troops crossed the Dniester and scaled the bluff to regain a foothold in Moldova.  On August 24th of that year, the Soviets would take the rest of the country and re-annex it as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.  This celebration was scheduled to commemorate the 65th anniversary of that “liberation.”

There was a ceremony, during which a number of prominent figures gave speeches, including the acting president and prime minister. Afterwards, the politicians and veterans placed flowers on a small memorial plaque near the arch before the veterans withdrew to drink and tell war stories. There was a kiosk selling overpriced drinks; from it I saw one particularly grizzled man – he had nothing but silver teeth and the largest, most gnarled hands I’ve ever seen – buy a tomato, a single piece of chocolate candy, and a clear plastic container with a foil lid that was exactly the same size and shape of the pudding cups I would take in my lunch during middle school. The contents of the pudding cup were clear, however, and clearly not pudding.  I soon realized that this was vodka. It was a single serving of two shots. He opened it, drank it at once, shuddered, ate the tomato, and last, the chocolate.  His hands shook.

Petru saw me staring at him and said, “Perhaps we should go, and leave the Afghans to their business.”

I hitched a ride home with a friend of his who is a driving instructor.  One of his students drove us home.  Perhaps I might have been safer with the Afghans.

The other day I was in my room finishing up a book and considering taking a nap when my new host dad came up the stairs at his usual snail’s pace and encouraged me to come outside with him.  My new familia gazda is much older than my older family in Costesti: they are both in their sixties, and they have one son who is forty and who lives in Canada with his own family.   Because of their age relative to mine, we had to awkwardly decide together how I would call them.  My new host dad asked me to call him “bunelo,” which roughly means “gramps”; my new host mom did not want to be called grandma so she asked me to call her “Doamna Ana,” which is what her students called her back when she taught French at the local school.

Bunelo looks like Carrodo “Junior” Soprano but moves and acts more like the old, fragile painter who lived next door to Amelie.  He’s had a stroke or some other malady and cannot precisely control his right arm or hand.  He walks with difficulty but not with apparent pain; he marches forward with very small steps, almost as if he were sleepwalking, always with his gaze set straight ahead.  If he wants to look at me and talk to me while we are walking, he stops to talk.  In his own day he was a music teacher and apparently quite the accordion player, which makes his condition doubly sad.  Now he spends his days napping and watching Russian National Geographic TV, with six or seven cigarette breaks spread throughout.

I think both Doamna Ana and bunelo are happy to have the extra company around, especially since they don’t spend very much time with one another.  Doamna Ana works at the district educational ministry during the day, and after the two have had dinner in the evenings they go to their separate rooms and watch TV.  It’s not that they don’t get along, but they maybe spend an hour or two together every day.  Bunelo/Junior Soprano especially has been excited to have me around, I think, because he’s unable to leave the neighborhood since his range on foot is so limited and my new host family doesn’t have a car.  He waits for me to get up to have his breakfast, waits for me to get home to have his lunch, and around 6 in the evening has me walk around the corner to the neighborhood magazin (it’s like a convenience store) to have a beer with him on the magazin’s patio and watch the traffic on the Chisinau-Odessa highway.  I don’t think he’s allowed by Doamna Ana to have the beer, because if it’s time for said beer and she’s home, he comes up the stairs and points at his watch, ushers me downstairs, and tells me to be quiet about it.  (He points at his watch because he got a kick out of my Romanian version of “It’s beer-thirty” and now uses it himself.)

And so I figured it was time for the afternoon stroll and beer.  When I went outside, though, I saw this younger man (whom I’ve seen before, helping around the garden) chopping wood outside.  A few days ago, bunelo had this man, whose name I believe is Ion, trim some branches off a tree next to the house because it was casting a shadow over the grapevines that grow over a trellis behind the house and the grapes were not receiving enough light.  He ended up cutting off all the branches, and for the last few days the branches had been strewn on the ground in the garden.  Now he was sawing the branches into foot-long pieces for later use during the winter in the soba, the wood stove used to heat the house during the winter.

At first I just gave him an acknowledgment nod since I figured we were leaving and also since every time I’ve asked to help with something like that in this country no one will let me do anything because everyone assumes the American is grossly incompetent.  But it became clear that bunelo just wanted me to come outside for some fresh air, so I asked Ion if I could help somehow.  He paused and just stared at me for about ten seconds, giving me a look that said, “Jesus.  Some help would be nice, but not from this fool.”  Bunelo told me to hop the short picket fence and join Ion in the garden, while Ion went into the shed presumably to grab me a hand saw that I would not likely be able to hurt myself with.

Much to my surprise he returned with one of those old-fashioned lumberjack two-man team saws and an iron sawhorse.  The saw was just a piece of rusty metal, and the loops at each end lacked handles.  Ion broke two small sticks down to appropriate lengths and hammered them into the loops to fashion handles, and then we lifted one big branch of about ten feet in length and two feet across onto the sawhorse before setting to work on sawing the log into manageable chunks for the soba.

After we had cut about four pieces off the branch, we took a break, and Ion asked bunelo in Russian whether I’d used such a saw before (either Ion only speaks Russian or he refuses to speak Romanian, I’m not sure which is the case).  I was able to tell what he was asking, and then I asked if it was so obvious that I hadn’t used one before.  Somehow I managed to bungle the question so I had to ask it differently:  “Credeti ca sunt papa-lapte?”  Or, “You think I’m some sort of mama’s boy?”

Both Bunelo and Ion thought that was hilarious; papa-lapte is a word that means “an indecisive or  cowardly person,” but is usually used to describe a mama’s boy (lapte means “milk,” and I think literally it has something to do with breastfeeding). Bunelo assured me that he did not think I was a papa-lapte, and told me that instead I was a papa-brinza, which is not a word in my dictionary but I assume is some sort of improvement over “breastfeeder” since brinza means cheese.

Over the next hour we sawed everything that had been on the ground into pieces, but the naked trunk of the tree remained, still standing about fifteen feet tall.  The tree had grown toward the house and toward the gas line that ran to the house (the gas lines here are yellow, iron pipes that run through fields, from town to town, and from house to house, about twelve feet off the ground), and it was going to be difficult to bring the rest of the tree down without it wanting to fall on the gas line, causing some sort of international incident.  I found a rope, and Ion climbed the tree’s skeleton, tied it to the top, and shimmied down, and then we set to work on the rest of the tree.  Bunelo was in charge of holding the rope so that he could tug on it and guide the tree away from the house, but he probably was not the best man for the job.  After about 20 minutes the narrow part of the trunk opposite our incision started to crack, but bunelo moved too slowly and failed to tug on the rope to guide it toward him.  But the tree bounced off the trellis for the grapevines and fell harmlessly to the ground beside him.

As the tree hit the ground I dropped the saw and said, “Si gata,” which means, “Done!”  Bunelo and Ion laughed, Ion shook my hand, and bunelo took my arm and led me down the street to the magazin for a beer.  Bunelo asked me what time it was, and I told him bere si jumatate, “it’s beer-thirty.”  He laughed, slapped me on the back, and called me papa-brinza.

The second-to-last night I would spend in Costesti the three families at the top of our hill who were hosting volunteers-to-be (we wouldn’t be formally sworn-in until Tuesday; for the duration of the summer we’ve technically been mere trainees) threw a joint masa for all of us.  I walked up to the neighbors’ with my host parents, and immediately when we came in the gate we were greeted by a thrown shoe; it struck the gate beside my mama-gazda’s head and fell harmlessly to the ground.  The would-be shoe assassin was a two-year old nephew of the family that lived at that particular house, and this kid was a mess.  He was born in Dublin to his Moldovan parents who had just come back from Ireland the week before.  Whatever communicative faculty the boy had at that age was manifest in a gibberish mixture of Irish-English and Romanian, and he was apparently taking his frustration at his inability to get his message through on the shoes piled in front of the front door; he had thrown his mother’s left sandal down the well and had chucked the right one at us.  One sympathizes.

I was set at one head of the table with the two female trainees from our group who were my neighbors seated next to me.  Because I was at the head of the table, and because girls aren’t allowed to pour their own drinks lest they seem like floozies, I was put in charge of a bottle of vodka and a bottle of house wine.  I suppose it’s a testament to how much my host family and the other host families have faith in me now to not screw things up, because I can’t imagine being given even a minor responsibility such as this the first few weeks in  Costesti.  I’m surprised they didn’t give me a baby bottle with wine in it that first week.

For most of the meal the Moldovans talked to the Moldovans and the Americans talked to the Americans, excepting one notable instance when I was asked to resolve a dispute between mama-gazda and tata-gazda over who wears the pants in the household.  Some disputes really transcend boundaries, I guess.  On the one hand, the amount of work that your average female Moldovan villager has to do every day is mindblowing.  My mama-gazda is responsible for all of the cooking; for feeding, killing, and dressing the chickens; for tending the massive garden (I’m bad at eye-balling acreage, but I would suspect it’s at least an acre if not more); for preparing the family’s food stores for winter (pickling huge quantities of fruits and vegetables for storage in jars in the basement); for cleaning the house (which consists in part of taking all of the carpets outside, hanging them up on wires, and flogging them with a flyswatter; just watching it exhausts me); for doing the laundry (more time consuming, of course, since they don’t have a dryer); doing all the shopping (which usually requires a trip to the capital); in addition to managing the affairs of her convenience store on the other hill (which is a 40 minute walk away).  Even though I’ve listed most of her responsibilities here, the words I’ve written here still don’t really give her job justice, and she has it relatively easy compared to matriarchs from poorer families here.  I honestly don’t know how she fits it all into the day.  But knowing what all she has to do, it’s no longer a surprise to me when I see 75 year-old grandmas trudging up a hill with two full buckets of water that I could barely carry myself; they are just strong women and had to be strong their whole lives.  I simply can’t imagine any American girls I know hacking a chicken’s head off.

On the other hand, I can’t hold a candle to the work my tata-gazda does.  (In fact, I know maybe one person back home who could do everything my host dad does and would do it well, and I suspect after I give a rundown of his daily schedule friends from college who know this person will know who I’m talking about.)  Tata-gazda was in the Soviet Army during the 80’s, stationed in Hungary. He spent a few years working construction in Ireland, alone, away from his family, and in a strange country.  He tends his family’s vineyard, a responsibility he shares with his younger brother; the vineyard is about thirty rows of vines, each about fifty yards long.  There are a lot of grapes, and the family also has peach orchards that must be tended.  He is finishing work on a massive refrigerated warehouse on the edge of town for grapes, a warehouse which he designed and built himself.  He drives to the capital five  times a week with his big truck and buys bags of cement from “a guy he knows” then sells the cement out of the back of his truck to whomever will buy it.  He helps Condrat with his video business by operating a second camera at large events.  He makes his own wine.  He can slaughter a pig like a pro and grill it up with a flamethrower.  And most of the summer he did all this on no sleep because he had to stay up all night, three nights-a-week at his dying father’s bedside.

I have to say that I came down on the side of tata-gazda being the boss at home, not because he has more responsibility, but because he really is the boss.  There is a clear division of labor, even in my fairly liberal host family, and that division of labor dictates that the man has his way, right or wrong.  Messing with that division of labor is not something that’s taken lightly – you should have seen the expression on mama-gazda’s face when I grabbed the sponge and started washing my own dishes, or better still, when I asked if I could help kill the chickens.  As it turns out, part of her shocked look then may have been due to the fact that I used the wrong word for “to kill.”  Apparently, I asked if I could murder the chickens.

My last evening in Costesti was spent with mama- and tata-gazda.  They made mamaliga – Moldovan grits, eaten with goat cheese and sour cream – and some sort of delicious thing made of scrambled eggs and barbequed pork that didn’t have a name.  I suspect my host mom invented the dish because she knows that the barbequed pork and fried eggs are my favorite foods that she makes.  My host dad pulled out a couple of chilled bottles of red wine that came from mama’s family’s basement (we ran out of my own family’s wine at the house the previous week) and the three of us set to work.  We talked over the wine and the food about where I would be going next, what I want to do after Moldova, and what mama and tata want for their sons.  Condrat had been wanting to go to America with his girlfriend and drive trucks to make some money (a popular occupation for Moldovan men living in the States, apparently), but mama was strongly against that – he needs to go to university first, she said.  Somehow the subject of their soon-to-be twentieth wedding anniversary came up (they were married when they were right out of high school), and I asked them to tell me about their wedding.  Mama got up and pulled out from under the pantry a suitcase that was made of leather so dry and brittle it looked as if it had belonged to some Moldovan Willy Loman.  The suitcase was stuffed with old photographs.

We spent the next two hours going through those photos.  It’s one of my biggest regrets of the summer that I didn’t think to pull out my camera and take pictures of some of the pictures, because some of them were incredible.  Pictures of my host dad in Hungary when he was in the army, and pictures of my host family at various weddings that had taken place during the Andropov administration.  Then there were pictures of my host parents at secret barbeques by the lakeside with their friends – the barbeques were secret because their own parents forbade them to waste their time with such pursuits on the weekends.  There was one in particular, blank and white, of my host dad at about the age of seventeen, standing with four or five other male friends around a metal drum that had a fire in it.  They were barbequing something over the flame.  It must have been very cold, because you could see their breath in the air as well as the heat coming off the fire.  None of them looked at the camera, and all of them were laughing, oblivious to the cold weather and conditions they lived under at the time (the last days of the Brezhnev era, from what I gathered).

(The fact that none of them were looking at the camera and the fact that they were laughing is not a coincidence; generally, Moldovans don’t smile when they have their pictures taken.  In every one of my mama-gazda’s wedding photographs she is sporting quite the Blue Steel face.)

Once we finished going through the stack of photos and the bottles of wine, it was nearly bedtime for everyone.  I presented my them with gifts.  For my host dad, I had a small bottle of Jack Daniels, and I told him it was “Coca-Cola from Tennessee” because he calls his wine Coca-Cola Moldoveanasca (Moldovan Coca-Cola).  I gave my host mom a set of coffee mugs because she drinks her morning tea out of glasses and always burns her fingers.  I wasn’t expecting anything from them, because they had already given me a birthday present (a much-needed umbrella), but they pulled out two amazing gifts: first, a huge jar of their delicious honey; second, a metal flask with the emblem of the Soviet Army embossed on it.  Mama-gazda cried, and tata-gazda told me that I was welcome back anytime.  I think I’ll be back.

Friday marked the last day of practice school.  The first week-and-a-half, as I have written here, I taught 7th graders, by myself.  The last week-and-a-half, I’ve been teaching 11th graders with my future partner teacher, Iulia.

Iulia and I already make a good team, which is apparently something that most volunteers have trouble with in the beginning.  I can’t say that it’s my doing; she’s wonderful to work with and open to my ideas.  We were observed by a current volunteer mid-week who said it was one of the best lessons she saw.  I can’t take credit for that either though, because our students this week were so good and well-behaved.  We started with nine students the first day, including a couple of boys, but there had been some mix-up in the organization of practice school — I was teaching incoming 12th graders the first lessons from the 11th grade book — and most of them didn’t want to come the next day; we only had three students the second day.

We figured we would have a poor turnout the second day (once we realized the students would be bored with material they’ve already had) so Iulia and I tried to plan something more exciting for the ones who would come.  The grammar was about modal verbs, so we decided to have the students listen to “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” by The Clash. We had a few more students back on Monday (five girls in total), and they stayed through the rest of the week.

There were a three moments during the week that made me melt: after class on Wednesday, the girls in our class told my partner out in the hallway that the classes that day were the best English lectures they’ve ever had; one girl in the class wrote a three paragraph essay on part of the test Thursday, did not make a single grammatical mistake, and managed to correctly use the word “knavish”; after class Friday the girls gave both me and my partner gifts and asked to take pictures with both of us.  I don’t know when I’ve ever felt so appreciated.

I had pretty grand plans for the following Saturday.  Because our training obligations would be over at noon that day, because practice school was over, and because I was planning on playing baseball in Chisinau on Sunday, I wanted to take it easy for the rest of the day.  I’ve read about twelve pages in the eight books I lugged over here since I’ve arrived; I’ve been too busy, and when I’m not busy I’m too mentally exhausted, to do any reading.  So just as I started to settle in with The Quiet American by Graham Greene my younger host brother, Tudor, and his cousin, Andrei, come barging into my room.  The two of them are fine when they are separated, but when both are around me they try way too hard to impress me by doing things that 17 year-old boys think older guys will find impressive (viz., bragging about non-existent exploits with girls).  As the summer has dragged on they’ve become insufferable simply because they are always together.  Cue Tudor, as Andrei nosily rifles through the papers on my desk:

Tudor: “Hai Hai la bunica!”  Come on, we’re going to grandma’s!  Hurry up!

C: “Ce?  De ce?  De cît timp?”  What?  Why?  For how long?

T: “Masa pentru bunic.  Hai!”  A feast for [deceased] grampa.  Come on!

C: Didn’t we already have one of those?

T: We did, but it’s been forty days since the last one, and while his memory will never die, the mourning period is now over, and your presence has been specifically requested (approximate translation). “Hai!”

I really did not want to go.  I was exhausted, and the last funeral masa was incredibly awkward.  And to add to it, my host mom and dad had been out of town since Wednesday, and in awkward situations my host dad has been my savior because he uses words he knows I know to explain what other people are saying to me.  He also jumps in to explain that I’m not interested in marrying 15 year-old girls when host-grandma starts suggesting that I marry one of her grandkids.  His absence would be missed.

Of course, I was obliged to accept an invitation to such an important event and one at which my presence — that of the weird foreigner, that is –had been specifically requested.  Tudor and I got to the party early because he had to set up.  There were a few other old men milling about whom I didn’t recognize; one came up and shook my hand and introduced himself as Gheorghe.  I told him my name, and he said, roughly, “What the hell kind of name is that?  What are you, Italian?  German?”  I told him no, that I am American, and a grin shot across his face as he slapped my still open hand and clasped it for the beginning of the longest handshake I’ve ever been involved in.  He told me he’s never seen an American in person before in his life.  Then he hugged me, the first of what would be three times on the day.  He asked me to follow him to a shady spot in the courtyard so we could chat, so I followed.

First he asked me typical questions: if I like Moldova, how big are the houses in America, whether I like the food, whether I like the girls, and when I plan on getting married to one.  Then he started telling me about himself: he’s 57 years-old; he used to be in the Soviet Army; his battalion took part in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 following the Prague Spring that year; he shot seven people during that invasion who may or may not have died; he’s cried ever since then over having done it.  He later asked me to comment on what I thought, as an American, of the different peoples of the world, which was a question that was a bit too deep for my limited vocabulary. After stuttering for a few minutes, I managed to say, “I’m an American, you’re Moldovan, but we’re both just men.”  He laughed and said, “But it’s easy to be a bandit, or a thief, or a criminal; it’s hard to be a real man.”  I didn’t think I could take much more of the heavy conversation, so I wished him happiness and excused myself.

Once dinner started, the town priest showed up.  The town priest could not be any more perfect for his job.  He is possibly the friendliest man in town, and he simply looks the part.  He has a Hemingway-esque beard, and its white color matches the cream of his robes.   The cross around his neck doesn’t so much hang as it does rest on his paunch.  He speaks fluent Spanish, spent some time in Cuba, and has a son who lives in California.

The priest gave some sort of a blessing, and a specific type of bread called a colac was passed around the table.  The bread is in the shape of a ring, about a foot across, and has two intertwining parts that make it look like a rope.  When handed the bread, people kiss the bread and then stick a small candle in it before lighting the candle and laying the bread on the already crowded table.  The bread is not consumed at the meal but taken home afterward (a pity because it’s the best bread I’ve had here); the bread is a symbolic gift from the family of the bereaved to the memory of the deceased.

Earlier that same day I had been introduced to a cousin of my brothers’ whom I hadn’t yet met.  Her name is Mariana (or Maia for short), and she lives on the other hill in the same village.   Maia is seventeen and will be a 12th grader this year.  She had come over to our house to talk to my brother about something, and I had been upstairs doing a bit of work, when Condrat called me downstairs to meet her and so she could practice her (limited) English.  The three of us had watermelon and popcorn in the summer kitchen outside, and Maia was nervous about speaking in English.  We all had a few laughs, but then it started to rain and Condrat drove her home.  When Condrat returned, he asked me what I thought of her, and I simply said she was friendly.  I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I later started to suspect that the meeting had been orchestrated.

Maia was at the masa later that night.  She did not sit down for most of it but was helping to serve food and pour wine for the fifty-odd guests at the table.  Condrat left mid-meal to go take care of some business, and Tudor was otherwise occupied helping, and so I had been sitting by myself awkwardly for the last half of dinner: I didn’t want to be the weird American butting into conversations at an important family event like this.  So I noticed Maia had a free minute, and I ushered her to come sit with me.  Big mistake.

Maia revealed that she is a certified masseuse, which I was impressed with since she’s so young.  Joking, I asked her how much a massage cost, and she said that for me it would be free as long as I’d give her an English lesson.  I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that comment, so I laughed and said that since I was playing baseball tomorrow my shoulder would hurt and I might need one.  Little did I know that host-grandma had seen us talking, and decided to interrupt by saying something I didn’t fully understand to her.  Eventually I was able to pick out the word for “engaged” thrown in there, at which time Maia turned red and ran off.  I’m not sure what all that means, but I’m sure I’ll find out some time in the next two weeks since host-grandma assured me I would not leave town a bachelor.  If I had any idea what she will be throwing at me next I could prepare a polite refusal, but that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?

Someone pointed out to me the other day that we had just passed fifty-five days in country, and it seems like a lot longer.  Although I continue to be amazed by some of the most inane occurrences and sights here, maybe it’s more telling of how used to Moldovan life I am that I have ceased to be surprised when something happens that I would find unbelievable at home.

Last night I had to go out to the veceu (outhouse).  It was dark, and although my family has a “light” in the general area of the outhouse, if you go out there after dark without a flashlight you’ll be doing your business in the dark.  I’ve been out there enough that I can manage in the dark, so I didn’t bother to go fetch my flashlight.  As I was in the veceu, doing what one does there, I felt something crawling on my leg.  I assumed it was a fly, because there are always plenty of them in there, and moved to brush it off.

Before I go on, I want to back up and say that in general the novelty of the veceu has worn off to the point where I don’t know what I would do if I had a toilet.  I don’t think I’ve heard a toilet flush since I came to my village.  But what’s yet to become quotidian about the trips to the outhouse is that the chicken coop shares a wall with the veceu, and the roosts for the chickens are propped up against the outside wall.  During the day this isn’t a problem because the chickens are milling about, but at night, they are actually on the perches, less than two feet from your spot in the veceu.  The roosters snore.  And the worst part: the chickens who are awake are really interested in what’s going on in the veceu.  They put their eyes up to the slots between the planks and peek in.  When you have a flashlight in there, and happen to turn it to the wall, and you see six or seven yellow bird eyes watching you, it’s a little off-putting.

The back wall of the veceu is also the same as the side wall of one of the rabbit pens.  The big mama rabbit flips out whenever she hears the door to the veceu open, and starts ramming herself against the shared wall.  So at the time I felt something crawling on my leg, I was worrying more about the sets of bird-eyes on me and mama rabbit flipping out than whatever I was about to brush off of me.

Back to the critter on my leg: a bee, as it turned out, was up past its bedtime and lingering in the veceu.  I really don’t understand what would be of interest to a bee in an outhouse; it certainly does not seem like a logical apiary.  I’ve seen them in there before, but they nonetheless usually ignore me, and I’ve learned to accept their presence despite the smallness of the enclosure and the sensitive nature of the happenings therein.  This bee, not content to crawl on my leg, stung me on the hand.  The sting surprised me; it felt like a dog had bit my finger off.

It’s amazing in retrospect that the spasm of jumping and hollering that happened immediately thereafter didn’t end with me actually falling in the hole.  I jumped backwards, through the door, and yelled some things that aren’t printable here.  Thankfully it was dark and I was home alone, so there were no witnesses to me doing a rain dance in the yard with my pants around my ankles.

It didn’t occur to me right away that getting stung by bees and watched by chickens while using the bathroom might be out of the ordinary.  But when I was walking home from school today I tripped over a baby turkey in the road, and as I dusted myself off I realized how ridiculous it is to be tripping over turkeys while walking home from school, and how weird it is to deal with peeping-tom chickens, impudent bees, and deranged rabbits while using the bathroom, which, while we are on the subject, is a hole in the ground.

But then the most everyday occurrences make me do a double-take.  Moldova is, by some measures, the poorest country in Europe.  There are three paved roads in my town of 13,000.  Nearly a quarter of the students at my future school have parents living outside the country for work.  But the students — the ones in my classes this summer, at least — are the happiest kids I’ve ever seen.  Before I came to Moldova, I don’t think I could have imagined walking into a room full of smiling, friendly teenagers, because that’s certainly not how I was at 17.  Another example: my partner teacher got her seven year old son a bike for his birthday last week, but the only color the bike shop had was pink.  She’s embarrassed that her son has to ride around on a pink bike, but he is apparently elated and told his mom he loved it.  These people could complain about so much, but I hear none.

Yesterday my host family took me to their vineyard for the first time.  It is a few miles away, at the top of a hill that’s blanketed by corn fields, other vineyards, fields of wilting sunflowers, apricot and cherry orchards, and some fields lying fallow.  I was helping them hunt for grapes that were ripe enough to eat (the majority of the grapes will not be ready for a few more weeks, but they pick and eat the ones that are ahead of schedule).  At the top of the hill I looked up, and in every direction there was nothing but more gentle hills covered with vineyards.  Such a simple sight; one that I’ve seen every day for fifty-five days; and yet it’s still a sight that amazes me more than bees in the veceu ever will.