The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (13 page)

That was Moldova at the end of a sad century: a land of poverty, a land of frustration, a land of cynicism, a land of despair, and sometimes a land of depravity. And yet there was always wine—the one thing for which Moldova had won renown—and as long as there was wine, the Moldovans themselves weren't going to go down without a toast. Perhaps because there was so little to celebrate, Moldovans celebrated anything and everything with enthusiasm and aggression. Weddings and religious feasts could last for days. A
sashlik
, or picnic barbecue in the woods, could turn into a bacchanalian marathon lasting the entire weekend. Invitations were easy to come by, as foreigners were prized and honored guests. I received several invites from people I met at the university. The presence of a foreign guest intensified the affair, the toasts coming with furious frequency, the food foisted to the point of nausea. Expats in Moldova referred to it as “terrorist hospitality.” Once a celebration began, you simply could not escape. You were held hostage, plied with food and drink, forced into toast after toast, no objection or excuse tolerated.

In my several experiences, terrorist hospitality began at ten in the morning with a quick shot of Moldovan champagne. It was obligatory to drain the glass at once. From champagne you progressed to various homemade wines poured from repurposed plastic soda bottles. Plates of food were brought forth—herring, sausages, cheeses, radishes, pickles, cucumbers, tomatoes. Bottles were lined up on the table: brandy, wine, and vodka. You raised glasses for the first toasts, which were generally microcosmic in theme: to your health, to your mother, to the success of all your endeavors. Then came mamaliga—a cornmeal mush—and then came noodles, then a beet and walnut salad, then spaghetti. At last the main dish appeared, a steaming lamb joint that cost perhaps a month's salary. But first another round of toasts, now advancing to more macrocosmic themes: to America, to Moldova, to world peace, to space exploration.

At this point, you might try a few ploys to stem your intake. You could explain that you had to curtail your drinking because of some ongoing stomach complaint. Or that you were taking medicine that forbade interaction with alcohol. Or that your religion imposed moderation if not teetotalism (a word even the best English-speaking Moldovans could not understand). But no begging off was allowed. Every possible excuse was parried, and a new bottle produced to meet the objection. Stomach complaints? Try this special cognac, known to settle stomachs and cure digestive ills. And try this white wine, too, known to enhance the properties of any prescription drug. As for religion, what could be more spiritual than wine? One by one, the bottles appeared and continued to appear. This one for arthritis. This one for asthma. This one for fever or flu or headache. At several households, the hosts told me with great solemnity that the bottle of wine now proffered could prevent and cure radiation sickness. You had no choice but to acquiesce. All right, you would say, but this is the last round. “Or next to last,” your host responded, draining the glass in a gulp and urging you to do the same.

Then it was time for dessert: cheese blintzes, fruit blintzes, cakes, and cookies. All manner of flummery washed down with more champagne and more sickly-sweet wine. The pressure to consume more kept intensifying: Oh, but you must try this. And this. And some of these, too, the host declared. Surely we will have more, for life is short and poor. Toasts now ventured into the realm of the inane. To road repair. To Monica and Hillary. Success to the McDonald's corporation's opening in Moldova. It was impossible to leave. Afternoon became evening, evening became night, and you could scarcely get permission to leave your chair. Any attempt to excuse yourself was preempted when someone in the host family brought out something to show and tell: photos of a trip to Bulgaria, a CD collection of American pop, old internal passports and other mementos of communism.

And in truth it was this sharing that made the visits worthwhile. It took an enormous effort to focus away the haze and the spinning in your head, to shut out the din of music and joke-telling and political argument that turned the room into a whirling Chagall canvas. Some of the stories were incredibly moving; every family seemed to have a
Zhivago
-esque epic somewhere in its recent history. Stalin was a constant presence on these occasions, a ghost haunting the fetes of a people still not free of his legacy. Hushed voices told a tortured history, sometimes barely audible as though afraid the ghost still listened. Everyone in Moldova had at least one relative sent to Siberia after the war. Most of the exiled never returned, and their ghosts, too, lingered in the room alongside that of their persecutor, as samples of their handicrafts or their writings or their photos were brought to you for examination. A university professor told me about finding a pair of wooden boots in the family attic when she was a child. When she asked about them, her mother told her to forget she had ever seen them, to say nothing about them to anyone. The boots were never seen again. Only years later, after the fall of communism, did she learn the truth about those boots: After the war, her father and uncle were sent to a labor camp in Siberia. Eventually they escaped and managed to walk back to Moldova, 3,000 harrowing miles, wearing the wooden boots. Her uncle died of tuberculosis shortly after returning home; her father never told the children the story, fearing that knowledge of it would put them all in danger.

The table talk always included as well reminiscences of the early days of independence, a brief, hopeful interlude in lives long on hardship. Moldovans wistfully recalled the energy and excitement that accompanied the events of 1989–1992, as an inchoate Moldovan nationalism asserted itself and then suddenly the Soviet Union fell apart, leaving Moldova independent and on its own. A carnival atmosphere had presided in those days—rallies, parades, citywide parties late into the night. Everyone was eager to experience this newfound freedom, to know democracy, to taste capitalism.

And it turned out that freedom had a particular taste to it: the taste of bananas. Several Moldovans told me that in Soviet times bananas were unknown, seen perhaps in pictures but never in real life. Bananas had the status of being a forbidden fruit, even if no policy specifically forbade them. They were simply unattainable. Then came independence and suddenly bananas from Iran appeared, expensive but not prohibitively so. People were so curious they stood in long lines to buy bananas from street vendors. Bananas became part of everyone's conversation: Have you tried one? What did you think? They discussed the flavor of bananas like they discussed wines—describing the taste sensations, the sweetness, the texture. The fruit came to symbolize freedom, and Moldovans thronged to consume it.

Then the ruble collapsed. Everyone's money turned worthless almost overnight. Five thousand rubles, enough to buy a car one month, couldn't buy groceries the next. The banana queues dwindled. Few people could afford to indulge. They had to be content with seeing the bananas displayed on sidewalk tables, but buying them? Tasting them? No. Impossible. As one of my Moldovan hosts put it, “What was once unavailable is now merely impossible to attain.” For Moldovans, the unattainable banana had transformed from a symbol of freedom to a symbol of discontent and frustration.

During my time in Moldova, I heard that frustration voiced by nearly everyone, young and old alike. For the young in particular hope was wanting. The students in my classes felt vulnerable and uncertain in the new Moldova, and they wanted to leave their homeland as soon as possible. Their future was constricted, they said, with no careers to go into, no opportunities available to them. They badly wanted out, but the possibilities were few. Hoping to win a scholarship to study abroad, they diligently practiced English, French, and German. But even in their studies they were frustrated, for the Moldovan educational system reflected many of the problems in society at large. It was an antiquated system that still followed Soviet procedures in everything from administration to pedagogy. The only textbooks available were out-of-date leftovers from the Soviet era. Rote memorization was still the principal means of instruction. Upon enrollment, students were assigned to a group. They remained part of that group throughout their years of study, and they were never allowed to choose their own classes or schedule. They and their group went where they were told and studied what was chosen for them. Worse, it was a corrupt system with bribery the norm. Gaining entrance into the university might involve greasing the palms of administrators. Teachers often expected payment before permitting a student to sit for an exam. The students I spoke with were clearly disgusted with the status quo, but they were resigned to it and saw little hope for reform. This despair led them to dream of leaving Moldova. And if they had the good fortune to win a scholarship abroad, they had no intention of ever returning to help in building a new Moldova. What for? What “new Moldova”? They were certain that the metastasizing ills were too virulent. Moldova was a terminal country on life support. They were smart, eager, capable students, full of promise. And yet they viewed the future with despair. They were young, but already they believed that their lives were doomed to be wasted. Their eyes pleaded with me:
Do something
. Yet there was no heat to their pleas. They did not believe I could help them. They knew I would not stay long in Moldova. Like shades in the Inferno, they stared as I passed through, hopelessly hoping that someone might rescue them.

Two weeks before the end of the term and the end of my sojourn in Moldova, I approached the Matron of the Keys to ask for the classroom key as usual. She assumed her habitual scowl as I approached. For at least the hundredth time, I attempted to request the key, fully anticipating her draconian reproach. She stared hard at me, and I prepared to try again, re-forming the Russian phonemes in my head.

But this time she merely grunted and said, “Horocho.” Good.

“Horocho?” I repeated with astonishment.

“Da. Horocho.”

Finally! At long last I had succeeded in winning her approval on the first try. I felt an unexpected joy at this accomplishment. I beamed at her, waiting for the issuance of the grail-key. But she continued to stare at me, now rapping her knuckles on the desk.

“And the key?” I asked tentatively. As usual, I stumbled over the Russian words. In response, she launched into an emphatic, stern-voiced disquisition of some sort—knuckles rapping more vehemently as she spoke—leaving me baffled and cowed, the joy of my triumph now completely drained. Fortunately, one of my students came along just then and listened impassively to an exact repetition of her diatribe.

“Ah,” my student said. “It appears this room is no longer operational.”

“Not operational?”

“Yes, we are to move to different room. Number six hundred eighty-four.”

He said the number in Russian for me. I tried to repeat it for the matron, but, flustered, I botched it. I looked imploringly at my student, but he could not help me now. He was not authorized to request the key. And in fact he, too, was scowling at my bad pronunciation. I tried again.

“Nyet,” the matron said. “Bad. Listen. Repeat. Again.”

BENJAMIN BUSCH

FROM
Harper's Magazine

What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling . . . From up here, nothing of Argia can be seen; some say, “It's down below there,” and we can only believe them . . . At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam.

—Italo Calvino,
Invisible Cities

I
T HAD BEEN
10 years since I had invaded Iraq, armed and dressed to look like dirt. I pulled out my new map of the country as a visitor this time. No targets, no units, no routes given code names as women or beer. I'd spend 10 days working my way from Baghdad through Wasit Province to Jassan, a town near the Iranian border. I had served as its provisional military mayor in 2003 but hadn't seen a single report on it since I left. My hope was to return without revealing that I'd been there before, to travel under my first name, concealed by a beard, to the place I was known only as Major Busch.

On December 9, I boarded a small plane and made the jump from Amman, Jordan, across the angry Sunni provinces and into Baghdad. As we glided into the city's variegated glow, I looked for red tracers, bullets fired into the sky. I looked for the war. But we didn't dive like military transport planes avoiding rockets; we just shuddered onto the surface as a voice welcomed us to Iraq. It was a few months yet before fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) would threaten the capital.

At passport control, there were two signs, in Arabic and in English:
IRAQIS
and
OTHERS
. I stood under my label. We had spent nine years trying to determine which Iraqis we had come to free and which to fight, and we had never really learned the difference.

No traffic from the city is allowed within miles of the terminal, so shuttle vans take arrivals to a meeting area at the far edge of the security perimeter. I sat in the back next to two Syrians and behind four Jordanians, one of whom spoke in a hush while our Iraqi driver examined the currencies and worked the exchange values in his head. He held my $10 bill up to a light before sliding it into a stack of Turkish lira, Iranian rial, and Syrian pounds. I didn't say a word, my cover already blown by Alexander Hamilton.

The road was empty as we drove, fountains lit in the median with colored lights. Everything was in good order there in no man's land, an immense empty space meant to keep the runways out of rocket range. My interpreter, whom I'll call Khalil, was waiting in the sequestered lot at the airport's entrance. He had a cough but, like most Iraqis, continued to smoke. He was dry about it. “If it doesn't kill me, it would have been something.” He offered me a cigarette, but I declined. “See. Americans get everyone to smoke . . . and then you all quit.”