Patron Saint's Day in Moldova

From Lenin's Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 193-195:

Riscani’s town birthday, a day festival called hram, fell on a Tuesday.

Only a handful of students had come to school; none of the kids higher than sixth grade or any of the village classes showed up that day. I was thankful that my older kids had taken the day off. They would have certainly arrived to class intoxicated. Instead, they wandered the streets with cans of beer, toasting anyone they recognized.

My fifth grade girls asked if I’d be celebrating in the town center. I assured them I wouldn’t be drunk.

“Why not?” asked Olia. “It is hram.”

“Do you realize that drinking so much can damage your health?”

“You are not little,” the class explained. “You can drink without problems.”

After school, I called my friends. I wouldn’t be going out into the hram without backup. Michael was in the capital, so he couldn’t help. With such short notice, Colin was the only one who could make it there in time. He was in Riscani an hour after I called, ready to take on the best the Russians could offer.

Colin was in the apartment for ten minutes before I realized he’d arrived. Dima had met him at the door and taken him to the kitchen for a shot of vodka in honor of Riscani. I walked into the kitchen and found Dima talking to Colin in broken Romanian. Dima pushed out a chair for me, explaining that he and Colin had started while I finished my nap. “Dude,” said Colin, his cheeks flushed. “I really like your father.”

Dima poured three more shots of vodka. We drank. Then Dima reached down to the cabinet below the sink and produced five different bottles: apple garilka, Moldovan samagon [самогон, self-distilled, i.e., homemade moonshine], cognac, high-class vodka, and red wine. We took a shot from each bottle. Then Dima took a bottle of cold beer from the ice box and we drank that. Colin had been a bartender in Virginia before joining the Peace Corps. Now he offered his professional commentary: “Dude, we just drank ten shots of alcohol in twenty minutes.”

“Go enjoy yourselves in the street,” said Dima. “It’s a party.”

...

Colin was already something of a celebrity in Riscani. The town folk who’d met him on his first visit recalled meeting the tallest man in the world. Those who hadn’t seen him carried in their minds an image akin to Big Foot.

From my front door we followed the techno music to its source at the Lenin statue. A crowd of a thousand cheered when we arrived. People hugged me and shook Colin’s hand, took pictures of us with their cell phones. In Russian, Colin said, “Good evening, Riscani,” and the crowd lost it. Students appeared holding beers for us to drink. I refused and told Colin not to accept anything from a minor—even former students like Edgar. Soon enough adults gave us drinks. The Riscanians gyrated to the techno music in disorganized, Russian-head-bobbing, non-circle dancing. Dariya appeared, only the second time I’d seen her since she went off to college. She’d dyed her hair black and wore even tighter clothes than she’d worn in high school. She kissed me on the cheek without her previous childhood awkwardness, whispered she’d see us back at the apartment, and then disappeared into the crowd.

...

Soon after hram, a well-known student from the Moldovan lyceum passed away from illness. My ninth graders had played with him as kids and weren’t in the mood to study, so I let class out early. With a handful of sunflower seeds, I walked down the main street. Live music carried through the air, trumpets and drums. I said hello to Katya at the bazaar and ate one of her sugar rolls. Outside the bazaar, I stepped into a tractor-trailer that had been converted into a shooting range, and I paid five lei to shoot twenty bee-bees at paper targets. I only hit one. Back on the main street, I decided to have a beer. As I walked toward the lake, the live music grew louder. The drumming vibrated my stomach. Then the funeral procession for the dead boy turned a corner into my view. Pedestrians stopped walking and removed their hats; I did the same. The casket was carried on the back of a flat-bed truck. His body was open to the air and slightly blue. Some type of jelly made his face look shiny. The priest walked directly behind; he made eye contact with me and smiled, placed his hand over his heart and bowed his head. I mirrored him, placing my hand on my heart and bowing my head. Several of my students were in the procession following the casket and the priest. They waved to me. Everyone looked sad, but no one cried. I continued on to the lake. The sounds of the trumpets and drums diminished until I only heard them in memory. At the bar they only had liters in the fridge, so that’s what I drank.

Our Quick Visit to Moldova

The Far Outliers have just returned from a short visit to Moldova, flying from Warsaw to Chișinău for Poland's Corpus Christi school holidays. We had multiple reasons for the visit.

We had earlier considered doing another year abroad under the English Language Fellow program after our year in Poland. In fact, we had originally hoped to go to Romania, but there were no current openings. Moldova has an opening for next year, but my scary health problems during our deep winter in Poland made me fear I might not make it through a Moldovan winter, despite my advantage of arriving in Moldova still fairly fluent in Romanian. Public signage all over Chișinău was indeed almost fully in Romanian (not in Moldovan Cyrillic or Russian), and I enjoyed being able to converse much more readily in Romanian than I have been able to in Polish. (My ability to navigate written Polish is far ahead of my conversational ability.)

Our other reason for visiting Moldova was to make a pilgrimage to the village where Ms. Outlier's Bessarabian German grandfather was born, and from which his family emigrated via Odessa to Canada and the Dakotas in the 1890s. Their rural village was named Neudorf, like dozens of German villages around the world. (There is a Neudorf village in Saskatchewan, and a poorly documented Neudorf cemetery in Eureka, South Dakota, originally settled by Germans from Russia). All the remaining Germans were expelled from Bessarabia in the 1940s, and Neudorf was renamed Carmanova (in Russian, Карманово).

Carmanova now lies in Transnistria, so near to the Ukrainian border that T-Mobile sent us "Welcome to Ukraine!" text messages when our phones came within range of their Ukraine cell towers. To get us there (and back), Moldova Tours was able to arrange for a private driver fluent in Russian, Romanian, and English, who had prior experience driving groups into the Transnistrian capital, Tiraspol, on their Soviet-era culture tours. But he had never been to very rural Carmanova and was curious about it. We ended up getting turned back twice at Russian Army checkpoints that could not handle international passports, and we had to wait in a long, slow line at the Grigoriopol checkpoint that could process our passports. They gave us a temporary insert but did not stamp our passports.

The rolling green hills of the Transnistrian countryside are quite lovely in June, with vast acres of foot-high sunflower sprouts. Several forks in the road had signposts directing us to the German settlements, and the road into the village featured a roughly made tall welcome sign with the year 1809 (when Neudorf was founded), its name in Cyrillic, Нойдорф, the year 1944, and its new name Карманово (from Карман 'pocket'?). There was also a rock monument in the village inscribed to mark the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1809.

The village itself was very small and quiet. We were given a tour of the House of Culture by its cordial manager. It contained a curtained stage and auditorium, a disco hall, a barre-lined ballet studio, and several rooms for workshops of various kinds. We also visited the cemetery for Soviet soldiers who died there, billboards with the names and faces of local citizens who died between 1941 and 1945. We saw no sign of a former church. The little country store where we bought a bottle of Ukrainian water took only Transnistrian rubles, so our driver/translator handled the payment.

I've added a Moldova album to my Flickr site, Joel Abroad.

New Year, New Classes in Moldova

From Lenin's Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 182-184:

The first week at school passed without any major incidents. There weren’t any fires or drunk students or kids challenging me to fights. As they had the year before, the students hesitated to participate—even the pupils who’d been in my classes the year before. I might have felt stress if I were a new volunteer. In retrospect, my comfort level with craziness was the only difference between the beginnings of the first and second school years. This time nothing fazed me, not even when a boy went after his classmate with a belt.

Several parents and guardians had requested the school keep their sons and daughters under my tutelage. Natashka’s class—the class that had started the trash fire—were now sixth graders. Two boys I knew from basketball, Vova and Alexander, were now in my ninth grade class. And the rambunctious pupils belonging to Lyudmila Petrovna’s homeroom, a different class of sixth graders, also remained with me.

The group of ninth graders from the previous year had moved on; there weren’t enough left to justify a space in my schedule. Edgar and the other boys who’d preferred drinking to English lessons had “graduated” to the work force or technical school to learn tractor mechanics. Nadezhda had absorbed the remaining girls into her own tenth grade class. In exchange she’d given me a new group of fifth graders—all girls. They listened to me, they conjugated, they played nice, they thanked me when class ended, never asked about grades and surrounded me in an awkward group hug when the bell rang.

The final class on my schedule, a village class, would prove to be my greatest challenge during this second year.

After watching me teach for a year, the school director had decided I was tough enough to handle a village class. A third class of sixth graders came into my room and began throwing playful punches while they waited for the bell to ring. I screamed for them to respect the classroom and they grew silent; this was the only time all year they’d respond to my yelling. They arrived in Riscani each morning on a bus from Novi Balan, a nearby village without a school. Their clothes were plainer than the town kids, with muted colors. Most had brown finger nails. The boys shaved their heads to keep dirt away, and the girls appeared to eat no more than once a day. Two of the boys called themselves gypsies, Artem and Maxim, of the Roma ethnicity. I soon learned that because of these two boys, Nadezhda had talked the school director into passing this class on to me.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s learn English.”

“As soon as you kick Artem and Maxim into the hallway,” said one of the girls. “Then we’ll begin.”

The class laughed.

Maxim calmly nodded his head to Artem, pushed his chair out, stood up, took off his belt and lunged after the girl. Two Russian boys promptly tackled him. The girl smacked Maxim over the head while the two boys held him down.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess that’s enough.”

I pulled the two boys off Maxim and got everyone back to their seats. The kids watched me silently, waiting for me to dispense punishment. Instead of yelling at Maxim, I directed my anger toward the girl. “Listen, little missy,” I said. “In English class I’m the only one allowed to hit people!” The class laughed. I tapped the girl on her forehead with her own text book.

I switched into English.

“Who wants to talk first?”

The room remained silent.

“What is your name?” I asked a girl.

Silence. “Who speaks English?” I asked. “Any words at all.”

Continued silence. Artem took out a cell, which I confiscated immediately.

“Give it!” he yelled in Russian.

“Ask me in English!” I said.

Artem laughed. The class laughed. This was a sixth grade class, so they’d studied English for three years.

I pointed at a girl, indicating it was her turn to speak.

“Not a word,” she said. “We usually draw in English class.”

“I know a word,” interrupted Maxim. “Motherfucker.”

The class laughed.

“Who has a textbook?” I asked. “Raise your hands.”

Only one girl in the class of fifteen raised her hand.

“Only you?” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Aaron. Don’t you remember hitting me over the head with it?”

Ecology Speech Olympiad in Moldova

From Lenin's Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 104-105:

Each year every school in the country competed in contests of Language Arts, Science and Mathematics to determine Moldova’s top scholars. Teachers of winning pupils were also rewarded. The Russian School of Riscani, known regionally for subpar students, perennially lost to the rival Moldovan Lyceum up the hill. But this year the odds were in the Russians’ favor, as I—Mr. Aaron, the town’s foreign expert—would be the guest Olympiad judge.

Today’s contest was in ecology, a subject of which I knew nothing. Regardless, the presentations would be in English and I was therefore the authority. The entire event transpired over a hectic two-hour period.

We arrived at the Moldovan Lyceum, a castle with narrow windows that had once been the residence of the town’s founder. A legend stated the fortress had withstood an assault by raiding Turks. Once inside, I was introduced to the Moldovan half of the judging panel: a biology teacher from the Moldovan Lyceum and a Romanian language teacher from Mihaileni, one of the competing lyceums from a village within the district. Nadezhda and I were the other two panel members. The two Moldovan teachers knew Nadezhda and hated her. I did not know where this animosity came from, but I witnessed it in the side-whisper conversations and the politely sterile manner in which they greeted her by her full name, Nadezhda Ivanovna.

The competition began; presentations would precede a multiple-choice test.

The Moldovan team presented first, speaking about the need to use conservationist principles when building houses. I thought the presentation very fair. The two girls presenting were polite when they addressed the panel, spoke clearly, and despite repeating each sentence for effect, made some decent points about man’s impact on nature.

The Russian team went next, speaking about the need to clean apartments regularly unless one wanted to kill his family with the poisons that the human body produced every day and shed into the environment. I left the presentation unconvinced of the scientific rigor of the team’s investigations, but they’d presented with loud voices and had clearly convinced Nadezhda of their superior ecological intellect. She poked me in the ribs and nodded as though to say, winners.

The village team from Mihaileni went last, presenting about the need to protect well water. Their presentation was exceptionally well researched; however, I felt they’d relied too heavily on the bilingual dictionary. I audibly groaned when a young girl used the phrases “excrement cocktail” and “repeated, daily consumption” in the same sentence. Nadezhda—an English teacher herself—found no objection in that usage. And though I’d expected as much, I then knew for certain that the other Moldovan panelists did not speak English, and were merely grading these presentations on the volume and emotional conviction of the speakers.

The judging panel stepped outside during the multiple-choice test. The biology teacher from the Moldovan Lyceum tried to speak to me in Romanian so that Nadezhda wouldn’t understand the conversation. “He only speaks Russian,” said Nadezhda. “He speaks only modern languages.”

Christmas in Moldova

From Lenin's Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 81-82:

Orthodox Christmas came in January. Dima and Katya lay prostrate on the unfolded divan, still wearing the Barcelona sweatshirts I’d given them three days before. Dariya wore her new sweatshirt also—red and yellow like Spain’s flag with the number 7 thrown across the back. She read quietly in the chair after Dima had complained the TV volume was too much to handle. Both Dima and Katya had worked twenty-hour days for the past week in preparation for the strains Christmas brought to the baking world; Christmas Day itself was for bakers to relax.

I woke and joined them in the living room, slipping into the chair next to Dariya. I wore the bright red Soviet propaganda t-shirt the family had given me: CCCP—Always Forward! Everyone wished me a Merry Christmas; I spit the Russian words back at them and all seemed pleased. And then, suddenly, everyone in the room (except me) discussed my religion; I wasn’t orthodox, they knew, so therefore a Baptist or a Catholic, like John F. Kennedy. I explained, as best I could, that my father’s family descended from Hungarian Jews and my mother’s from French Catholics. Dima and Katya repeated old stories of hard working Jews that had lived in Riscani years ago before emigrating to Israel; they talked of President John F. Kennedy, a man they seemed to associate with religion even more than the Pope.

“But can Aaron go with me?” asked Dariya.

“It should be fine,” said Dima. “Just don’t let him touch anything.”

“Go where?” I asked.

“Yes, don’t let him touch anything,” agreed Katya. “And take his hat off at the right time.”

“Go where?” I repeated.

“To Church,” said Dariya. “Go put on better clothes.”

* * *

What had changed in Riscani since the fall of the Soviet Union? A history text would mention the collapse of the farming collective, the breakdown of local government that led to widespread corruption, perhaps the cutting of the trade pathways that provided markets for the locally manufactured goods—cheese, wine and perfumes. In Moldova, I observed the effects of Soviet collapse every day, but only understood the fragments of disrupted life as they affected my new family. Dima spoke frequently over vodka shots of longer workdays and fewer vacations; a decade had passed since he’d relaxed by the sea in Odessa. Katya complained about the value of the family’s bread decreasing slowly every year; soon the people would expect bakers to give it away for free. And Dariya worried, with reason, that her education was far inferior to the quality of the common village schools her parents had passed through decades earlier.

But gloom did not permeate everything; the collapse had destroyed the compulsion to worship the state. Riscani now had a proper church—a gray, sloping, Orthodox Church—situated on the path leading to the bar on the lake. This church had been constructed before WWII. It had survived that conflict, only to be stripped of its icons, murals, priest, and renamed “The Museum of Atheism” during its time in the hands of the Soviet Union. Now the church had taken back its name.

Reading Russian Authors in Moldova

From Lenin's Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 61-62:

On the night before I left for Spain, Dariya knocked and entered my room with her teaching notebook. She’d settled in comfortably as my language instructor. That night we continued our discussion of motion verbs: the differences between going one way to a destination or there and back; of general “wander-going” without destination; of moving between locations by foot or by motorized conveyance; of which word to use when any type of “hovering” was involved. Russian contained enough variations of the word “go” to fill the lessons of several days.

Dariya rummaged through the contents of my desk while she waited for me to conjugate the verb, “to go one way by ground conveyance.” She scanned several Peace Corps documents for passages she understood. Discouraged, she flipped over the novel I was reading. Her lips fluttered as she sounded out the letters of the title. Her eyes grew wide. She slapped at my shoulder to stop my writing and said, “I’ve read this!”

“What have you read?” screamed Dima from the living room. He entered quickly.

Dariya showed him the book. He nodded his head. “I approve of Pasternak.”

He took the chair from Dariya (she moved to the bed) and asked me what other Russian writers I knew. We listed names for the next few moments. Dima wanted to know which authors the typical American would know.

Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy.

“Of course,” said Dima. “The basis of modern intelli-gence.”

Pasternak. Gogol. Chekov.

“Brilliant men,” said Dima. “Poets.” Nabokov.

“I hear he is good,” said Dima.

Solzhenitsyn.

Dima shook his head. “No. We never read him.”

The family possessed a collection of antique books that they kept behind glass next to the fine china. But I’d never seen them read, even when the television was broken.

Student Evaluation Day in Moldova

From Lenin's Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 26-27:

Our language instructor gave us directions to a landmark in the center of town, and we soon realized the directions had been intentionally complicated so that we’d have to ask questions of locals. Away from headquarters, we passed a yellow, onion-top church and were then sucked into the central bazaar, an outdoor black hole of discount merchandise. Anyone dealing any type of transaction came at us with booming Slavic accents, as if their words need only enter our physical space to stun us and take control of our wallets. I considered buying cheese, batteries, soap packets, tin cups for drinking, but managed to pass through without losing money.

Vendors conversed with their friends in shouts from stall to stall. Flip-flops, light machinery, dried fish, bulk tea, clothing, duplicates of keys, endless buckets of salted cheese, olives, rice, cucumbers, tomatoes, liters of wine in reused soda bottles. These vendors were the types who’d ridden with me on the bus in the morning—old babushkas selling whatever they had too much of at home. Grandchildren ran wild in the corridors of the bazaar, dashing in between, behind, and under the vendor stalls with their rubber toy guns.

It seemed everyone in the capital spoke only Russian. Romanian might have been spoken at home among family members, but Russian was the language of money, spoken openly at shops and on the streets. And though I understood the majority of volunteers sent to Moldova would learn Romanian in order to serve the poorest communities, I didn’t envy them. Unlike other colleagues, Jesse and I would never complain about policemen and bazaar women refusing (or unable) to speak Romanian, checks from all restaurants presented in the Cyrillic alphabet, and host families only speaking an angry-sounding foreign language to them at home, expecting them to respond to the sharp sounds as though they were dogs.

The din of commerce activity decreased once we left the maze of the bazaar. We hadn’t yet asked directions, still waiting for someone who appeared within our age range to approach. A girl walked fast and picked up speed as we addressed her, perhaps to shorten our opportunity to harass her. But she stopped shortly after passing us, having responded to the softness and insecurity in our accents. She pointed toward a busy intersection a block away and seemed disappointed that we ended our conversation by wishing her health and happiness. I think she wanted to tell us her name. At the intersection a woman selling popcorn perked up when she heard our accents and pointed across the street to a sidewalk art sale. At the art bazaar a man selling Russian stacking dolls said we were on the right track and asked where we were from, and recommended dolls to match any personality. He thought our accents sounded Polish. A block farther we stopped another girl and she pointed across the street to our destination.

McDonald’s.