Читать книгу Lost Province - Stephen Henighan - Страница 8
Оглавление2 THE FAMILY THAT DID NOT KNOW IT SPOKE ROMANIAN
The block letters projecting above the roof of the train station read CHIINU. At first glance the city had a hard-baked Mediterranean quality The teachers were marshalled on the platform, our names were read out, and families stepped forward to claim us. I was claimed by Andrei, a dark, stocky twenty-year-old with a military haircut who hustled me toward the taxi stand with a gruff haste I soon realized was born of discomfort. The taxi climbed the hill away from the train station and proceeded down the stately boulevard—lined with imposing early-twentieth-century buildings—that I would come to know as tefan Cel Mare (Stephen the Great) Boulevard. Kiosks and crowds thronged the broad sidewalks. We passed parks, a smaller replica of the Arc de Triomphe, people idling in leafy shade. I was dazzled. After ramshackle Lvov, set on its smoggy plain, the Frenchified elegance of some of Chiinu’s public buildings, the generosity of the city’s layout, and the Latinate street life delighted me. I stared hungrily out the window, eager to get rid of my luggage and dive into this pulse of colour and movement.
I was brought back to reality by the sound of Andrei talking to the taxi driver in Russian. The choice of language surprised me. Andrei,seeming flustered, turned around in the front seat and addressed me with an ungraspable phrase that ended with “pa russki?”
I realized he was asking me if I spoke Russian. “Nu,” I replied. “Vorbesc românete.”
The taxi driver looked startled. Andrei tried again. “You don’t speak Russian?”
“No, but I speak Romanian.”
Andrei and the driver looked at each other, concurring with apparent surprise that I was speaking Moldavski. Andrei switched from Russian to a thick, overinflected Romanian. I strained to understand. The taxi climbed a long slope into the district of Buiucani. A row of nine-story high rises stretched along the crest of the hill like a flat-featured palisade. The taxi threaded between two of the high-rise blocks, then trundled over a street running behind the buildings. Across the street lay the bare brown earth of a yard where residents sat on benches beneath sparse shade; barefoot boys in shorts, their torsos burned brown, pelted through the dust. We got out. I removed my luggage, thanking the driver affably in Romanian; in return I received a stony stare. A heavyset woman with a broad, pleasant face got up from one of the benches and walked over to us. She held out her hand.
“Good afternoon,” I said in Romanian as we shook hands. “How are you?”
“He speaks moldoveanu, Mama,” Andrei said in Romanian.
It took me weeks to untangle the linguistic skein into which I had stumbld. At the time of Moldovan independence in 1991, sixty-five percent of the republic’s 4.3 million people identified themselves as ethnically Romanian. The remaining thirty-five percent of the population broke down into fourteen percent Ukrainian, thirteen percent Russian, and about eight percent other ethnicities, most notably the Turkic Gagauz people, Bulgarians, and Jews (who were Russian-speaking). These figures, though, were complicated by the dynamics of power. After fifty years of Soviet rule, the language all these groups had in common was Russian; most Romanians spoke Russian, but very few ethnic Russians spoke Romanian. And, as I discovered in the company of my family, many Romanians did not believe they spoke Romanian, either. For fifty years they had been taught to call their language “Moldovan.” Soviet doctrine dictated that the language of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was a backward regional dialect only distantly related to Romanian. Soviet linguists churned out tracts “proving” that the two jurisdictions spoke mutually incomprehensible languages. It is true that the Moldavian version of Romanian has a distinct accent and a more Slavic-influenced lexicon than the Romanian of Bucharest, but to a certain extent these traits are shared by all of historical Moldavia—the part that remained within Romania as well as the present-day Republic of Moldova and Romanian speakers in the portions of the country annexed to Ukraine (where, oddly, Soviet documents continued to refer to the language as Romanian).
Fifty years of Soviet occupation and Russian schooling had made an impact on the vocabulary and accent of the Romanian speakers of Moldova, but their language was instantly recognizable as Romanian—the same Romanian spoken in Romania. It was not even a “dialect” of Romanian (as a recent edition of the Lonely Planet guide Romania & Moldova erroneously claims). Professional linguists recognize three dialects of Romanian, which are spoken by Romanian minorities in former Yugoslavia and Albania. But, within the terms of formal linguistics, the language of Romania and the language of Moldova are the same.
The “Moldovan” language was an invention. The notion had been created by Stalin’s advisers to erect a mental barricade between the new Soviet republic and Romania. Soviet education policy deepened the gulf by rewriting Romanian in Cyrillic characters. This denied Romanian-speaking graduates of Moldovan schools access to their own literary and historical tradition by keeping most of them in ignorance of the Latin alphabet in which Romanian is written.Cultural destitution, in turn, strengthened the argument that speakers of “Moldovan” had been ignorant savages until Russian culture was bestowed upon them. Soviet leaders from Joseph Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev pursued this policy out of a fear of uprisings in favour of reunification with Romania.
The imperative to drum into Moldovans that they spoke a degenerate local patois grew more pressing during the final years of Soviet rule. From the early 1970s onward the maverick Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceauescu, his ideological credibility exhausted, relied on nationalism to legitimize his rule. One strain of his ideology, claiming that the richly heterogeneous territory of Transylvania had been Romanian since the beginning of time, inspired the destruction of Transylvanian Hungarian towns and villages, the dispersal of Transylvania’s German population, and blatant tampering with archaeological sites that produced evidence incompatible with Ceauescu’s boast that the Romanians were the direct descendants of the Roman Empire and the natural inheritors of its grandeur.
As early as the mid-1960s, Ceauescu’s speeches launched poison darts at the Soviet propagand a version of Moldovan history and identity. Ceauescu toned down his rhetoric during a period of rapprochement with the Soviets in the 1970s, but by the late 1980s, struggling for his own survival, he played the nationalist card with renewed vigour. Little doubt remains that Gorbachev assisted in Ceauescu’s overthrow in December 1989. Already spooked by other nationalist genies emerging from a variety of bottles and shaken by monstrous demonstrations in Chiinu in 1989 in support of the Latin alphabet and the Romanian flag, Gorbachev was eager to squelch the possibility of rampaging Romanian nationalism on his southwestern flank.
The largely passive recipients of these geopolitical pressures were people like Andrei and his family. They had suffered through the Leonid Brezhnev era when you could be arrested for speaking Romanian on a trolley bus or in a market. They had been told since birth that the language they spoke was called “Moldovan,” was written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and was a backward dialect. They had been taught that Russian was the key to a cosmopolitan humanity, to fulfilling culture, sophistication, personal success, and power. They had been told Romanian was a foreign language they could not understand spoken by a culture that was inherently fascist. Little wonder they were confused.
At first I was puzzled by the penchant of Romanian-language publications in Moldova to print interviews with visiting personalities from Romania that invariably began with an exchange that went as follows.
“When you visit Moldova, can you understand what people say to you?”
“Yes, of course, I understand everything. We speak the same language.”
This observation, self-evident to any foreigner who had worked his way through a Romanian grammar book and practised with a few language cassettes, was revolutionary in the climate of post-Soviet Moldova. When, gasping for a word, I seized a book with the title Romanian-English Dictionary printed on the cover, Andrei’s mother dealt me a dismissive wave. I wouldn’t find Moldovan words there! But I did. When the procedure worked the next time, and the next, Dora’s heavy face settled into a perplexed expression. The year before she had gone to visit a friend who had moved to Romania, and had made herself understood without effort. But she still couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge that the language she spoke was Romanian. She was forty-one years old, and such a recognition would overturn the foundations of her life, her intimate, if troubled, sense of herself as a Moldovan.
The section of the Buiucani district where Andrei’s family lived occupied the crown of a hill on the outskirts of Chiinu. The city’s last row of high-rise blocks lay less than ten minutes’ walk away; beyond stretched fields of sunflowers and corn. In the opposite direction,looking back over the centre, hills studded with apartment blocks and softened by the cushions of massed treetops, punctured by the occasional glimmering oval of a small lake, tumbled away toward the lower, flatter downtown portion of tefan Cel Mare Boulevard. From my family’s apartment I could stare out at the lined-up dominoes of identical high-rise blocks. The development contained between twenty and thirty such buildings, nearly all of them nine stories high. Files of buildings met at right angles, dividing the spaces between them into common areas containing dusty playgrounds, concrete walkways, half-buried tractor tires, stray benches arrayed beneath scarce trees, rudimentary swing sets, and a parking lot. Around the fringes of some of the common areas, and out on the street in front of the development, kiosks that stayed open late sold booze to armies of nocturnal drinkers.
Each building contained apartments of different sizes. Lower-middle-class people lived in two-room apartments, middle-class people in three-room apartments, and wealthy people in four-room apartments. (This calculation omitted kitchens, which were usually tiny.) Andrei’s parents, the Lencuas, were middle-class. Senya Lencua was a lawyer, and Dora had worked at shop counters. As I entered their apartment, there were three doors on the right and one, at the back of the flat, on the left. The first door on the right opened onto the living room, the second onto the narrow slot of the kitchen, and the third onto a small TV room, which at night became Andrei’s bedroom. The door on the left led into the master bedroom, which was roughly the same size as the modest living room. Andrei shared this apartment with his parents and his blond nine-year-old brother, Sergiu, known as Serge. Four people in three rooms was a luxurious allotment of space by Moldovan standards; the Lencuas had decided they had plenty of extra room to take in an English teacher.
I was going to be sleeping in the living room. Long couches, meeting in an L, lined two walls of the room. The wall opposite the larger couch was blocked from sight by a huge wall unit concealing a multitude of shelves and cupboards behind glossy imitation-wood doors. The wall opposite the smaller couch was a French window leading to a tin-roofed balcony with a sweeping seventh-floor view of rows of high rises hinged at right angles, dusty yard space and, discernible in the gaps between the buildings, the blurred green horizons of faraway hills. The living room was dominated by a very large black television sitting asquat a high table in front of the French window at an angle making the screen watchable from both couches. The larger couch, its cushions and armrests a startling purple velvet, unfolded into the bed where I was to sleep. Searching for a space where I could keep my clothes and books, Dora flipped up a section of the couch hooding a small compartment. Her shoulders stiffened against the fabric of her voluminous blue-patterned summer dress. It was obvious the space, filled with immaculately folded sheets, wasn’t big enough for my belongings. But what had brought her up short, lying on top of the sheets, was a framed colour photograph.
The photograph showed three smiling, close-set faces—woman, man, child. The fierce, low-browed man was Andrei. Then I realized it couldn’t be Andrei because the black-haired, pugnacious child was patently a near-infant Andrei. The woman was lean, angular, Slavic-looking, her blond hair thick; only the curl of her smile allowed me to grasp that this was how Dora had looked at twenty-five. The man, bearing such an eerie resemblance to Andrei, could only be…
Dora and Andrei stood in hunched silence. Andrei, staring straight down at the oversize curlicues of the pattern in the carpet, seemed distraught. Dora met my eyes with an ashamed expression. “Domnul Steve,” she said, “I had another family before this family. But there were problems in this family. Later I married Senya, who is a good papi… Andrei’s little brother has a different father from Andrei.”
Dora looked mortified. Andrei’s robust body had deflated, his shoulders sagging.
“I understand,” I said. “For us this is normal. My brother and I have different mothers.”
“It happens in your countries, as well?” Dora asked. “I thought you didn’t have these problems.”
“It happens everywhere. Some marriages don’t work.”
The atmosphere was transformed. Dora smiled and cleared two shelves in the wall unit for me with exuberant sweeps of her arms. I unpacked my clothes and books, while Andrei watched to see what treasures I would disgorge. Dora picked out those of my shirts appropriate for teaching and took them away to wash and iron. Later that summer Dora made guarded allusions to her first husband’s heavy drinking and “bad behaviour,” which I took to mean either infidelity or domestic violence. The family dynamics helped explain Andrei’s attachment to Russian culture. Dora had been born into a large Romanian-speaking family in ClCrai, a town about halfway between Chiinu and the Romanian border whose inhabitants had a reputation for toughness and obstinacy She had moved to Chiinu as a young woman after completing high school. In Chiinu Dora had met and married Andrei’s father, a Ukrainian named Kaminskiy. During Andrei’s infancy, the family lived in Ukraine. After her divorce, Dora moved back to Moldova with her son. I couldn’t help but see Andrei’s cultivation of Slavic values, his worshipful allegiance to Soviet institutions, as his ways of conserving his link with his vanished father.
I met Andrei’s stepfather that evening. Simion Lencua, who shortened his name to the Russian diminutive Senya, strutted in the door in a pale blue short-sleeved shirt, carrying a black leather purse in his hand. Senya was nearly a dwarf. Less than a metre and a half tall, he barely reached to his wife’s armpits. The hard, beetle-shell curve of his belly, starting nearly at his throat, had sucked the vitality out of the rest of his body. His arms, though not misshapen, looked feeble; his legs appeared as brittle as fossils. He was fifty-four years old, his lightly greying hair was parted on one side like that of a politician, and his features were handsome and regular. Dora suggested that he sit down and chat with me. He asked me my age. I told hi I was thirty-four. “In Moldova,” he said, “a man your age would look older.”
My age had taken the family by surprise: they had been expecting a student. I explained I had recently returned to being a student after having worked for a number of years. “Sometimes in our society it’s necessary for adults to get new qualifications,” I said. “Anyway, we all get old.”
“Da.” Senya echoed my words: “Toi imbâtrinesc.” His ironic smile barely nudged a face that had dulled and stiffened. Life had not been easy for Senya. He had been born the youngest of five children in a small town near Bli, Moldova’s second-largest city, in the north of the country. His mother had died when he was an infant, in 1942 or 1943, a casualty of World War II. Senya had grown up deformed. In the sweltering Moldovan summer, where nearly all men went shirtless at home, Senya was never dressed in less than a T-shirt, not even when toiling over the stove in the tiny, steaming kitchen. He was an excellent cook. I asked him about this one day and he replied that he had cooked for himself from childhood until his mid-forties when he married Dora. Senya was a sly, intelligent, surprisingly assertive man who suffered from bouts of peevish ill temper; in despair he could become melodramatic. As a lawyer, he earned a good salary: one hundred and thirty lei a month. (At this time there were four Moldovan lei to the U.S. dollar.) His work as a public defender frustrated and embittered him, forcing him to spend his days in the company of muggers, prostitutes, and recidivist drunks. Gratingly articulate and fascinated by politics, Senya might have parlayed his legal training into more active political involvement had he been of ordinary stature. He read Romanian fluently and seemed to be equally at home in the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. I was not what he had expected when he agreed to take an English teacher into his home—too old, too knowing, too intrusive in my probing—but like Dora, Andrei, and Serge, he welcomed me with impeccable hospitality. Later, speaking to other English teachers, I realized that the language barrier had caved open a gulf between them and their host families. Communicating mainly through sign language, they had gleaned little of family dynamics, jobs, financial worries, political tensions. I was lucky Conversation hastened familiarity. After a week, I felt as if I were becoming a Moldovan.
Not all aspects of family life made for easy adaptation. I had less space and privacy than I was used to. In fact, the Lencua family had little conception of personal privacy in the sense that middle-class Westerners understood the term. Their confined living quarters didn’t permit such caprices. Andrei’s bedroom was also the lounge and sewing room. On a couple of afternoons I saw Dora and her friends go into the room to chat and sew, apparently oblivious to the fact that Andrei, having worked overnight on some passing odd job, lay asleep and undressed on his unfolded sofa bed. Likewise, at five-thirty or six in the morning, I would be awoken by members of the family, in varying states of near-nakedness, trailing nonchalantly into the living room to retrieve some item of clothing from the wall unit.
The apartment’s interior doors were fitted with full-length panels of translucent glass embossed with light, leaf-patterned whorls. A single lamp turned on anywhere in the apartment infiltrated all rooms; someone standing in front of your door could see your every movement. The first morning that I rolled out of bed to dress only to realize Dora and Serge were standing in the hall before my door, I hesitated. I soon learned to ignore such presences: unflustered themselves by the notion of dressing in front of others, the Lencuas would not have understood my reserve.
This casualness, though, was emphatically limited to a well-defined family sphere. Moldova was conspicuously innocent of such Western decadences as nude sunbathing, Penthouse-style magazines, or pornographic—or even mildly sexy—films. In questions of sexual morality, Chiinu was the most puritanical city I had visited. Andrei, at twenty, was forbidden to invite individual female friends into the apartment even when his parents were present.
Exhausted by my trip, I slept heavily my first nights in Chiinu, waking late to a busy apartment. At five-thirty in the morning, no matter how scrupulously I had closed the balcony door, the mosquitoes massing outside would buzz into the room, deviously picking out the most painful and persistently itchy places to bite: elbows, knuckles, shins. Slapping and scratching, I would finally doze off again. One of the first words I added to my rapidly growing Romanian vocabulary was ânar. The dictionary translation was gnat, but no gnats ever bit like the early-morning mosquitoes of Chiinu. Another English teacher, who was sleeping on her family’s enclosed balcony, later developed such a severe reaction to her ânar bites that she had to be treated with what we called “the dreaded green stuff”—a verdantly luminous, almost indelible disinfectant in which all cuts were promptly lathered. The shamrock blotches lingered on children’s arms and legs—as on my colleague’s limbs—for weeks after other evidence of cuts, scratches, or bites had disappeared.
I began to feel trapped. The taxi ride from the train station had tantalized me with glimpses of a glittering southern city. It was days before I was permitted another visit to the centre; I had to wait nearly a week until I had the opportunity to explore on my own. I felt isolated and restless. For the first few days Dora and Senya refused to let me leave the apartment unescorted. Chiinu, they maintained, was a big city (the population was about seven hundred thousand)—too big for foreigners to amble about on their own. I replied that I wasn’t planning to rove around at night. I simply wanted to see the centre of the city, take the occasional walk around the neighbourhood. They shook their heads. I tried to explain that I was an experienced traveller: I had lived in Bogotá, Colombia; I had explored on my own from Morocco to Rio de Janeiro; I had survived a Shining Path liberated zone in Peru and visited northern Nicaragua during the contra war. None of this made any impression on them. I reached for cities nearer at hand. Warsaw, for example. I had walked around Warsaw at night, so why not Chiinu in the daytime? Senya and Dora closed ranks. Warsaw was a much more civilized city. It had never been part of the Soviet Union; people weren’t as crooked and desperate as they were in Chiinu.
I lost the argument and remained stuck in the apartment, writing in my journal and studying Romanian grammar. Defying Senya and Dora’s interdiction would destroy my relationship with the family. Moldovan family structure was inflexible. If I wished to obtain a margin of freedom, I would have to secure it in the same way Moldovans acquired the rare pockets of pleasure, privilege, or indulgence in their lives: through patience and stealth; by blending collaboration with deception rather than by rebelling.
I could leave the apartment only if Andrei consented to accompany me. Andrei wasn’t much given to walks. Employed as a television salesman, he preferred to sit in his room where his wares, encased in cardboard boxes, were piled against the walls. He watched MTV in English from Amsterdam, or Hollywood movies in which the dialogue had been muted and overlaid with a monotone Russian explanation of the characters’ words and actions. When the telephone rang, Andrei jumped. “Dobrý dien” he would growl into the receiver, hoping one of the advertisements he placed in commercial papers had yielded a buyer. Most of the phone calls, though, seemed to be from Dora’s friends or Senya’s clients. On a few occasions I heard Andrei eagerly announcing the television’s brand name and—I assumed—its other features in loud Russian, but during my first week in the family, no client came to the door.
The Lencuas’ refusal to allow me to go out stemmed in part from their utilitarian approach to life. Why did I need to go out? Leaving the apartment meantspending money on transportation, being squashed by the sweating crowds in the trolley bus, wrangling with shopkeepers over scarce goods. Never having been able to travel, they couldn’t understand the idea of wandering around a city for pleasure. What did I want to do downtown? My failure to provide a satisfactory reply to this question provoked confusion and even suspicion. Perhaps I wished to slip away and do something unspeakable? I finally decided I needed to buy postcards and a map. Andrei stoutly told me that city maps did not exist. Faced with my chafing eagerness to escape, Dora finally ordered Andrei to take me downtown for an hour.
Andrei and I rode the trolley bus down the long slope into the centre, then up the hill along tefan Cel Mare Boulevard, past the Parliament, the spaceship-like former Communist Party headquarters, the elegant parks, the Arc de Triomphe, the sturdy shops. The sun was shining and crowds of people filled the streets. Men selling ice cream that gurgled out of silvery metal vats at the press of a button were fending off customers all along the boulevard. I felt exhilarated, but Andrei soon grew irate. What was I looking for? He didn’t understand the Romanian word for postcard, offering in response a Russian word I didn’t know. “What do you want to do?” he asked as I ambled from shop to shop, fascinated by the long counters, the teams of saleswomen who handed goods to customers for examination, the rattling abacuses on which checkout women calculated change at bewildering speed. Before I could locate a city map or postcards, Andrei put his foot down. “Steve, we have to go home.”
We went home. A few days later Dora and Serge accompanied me downtown for the introductory meeting of the teachers, where we were to be briefed on Moldovan culture and given our teaching assignments. Our supervisor, a stern, elderly woman, addressed us in correct, stilted English. “Here in Moldova we are between Europe and Asia. For many years we were trying to build socialism. Now we have stopped building socialism and we do not know what we are trying to build.” She went on to warn us against drunkenness and licentiousness. Moldovans were very conservative people; we must respect their morality. Besides, Chiinu was a dangerous city: if you walked around drunk, you could get beaten up and robbed. She verified our credentials; having more teaching experience than my colleagues, I was handed the job of teaching secondary school and college teachers of English. My job was very prestigious, the supervisor explained, but also potentially difficult. “You must be very strict with them,” she said. “Each one is used to being a little dictator.”
Dora and Serge waited for me outside the classroom. “Have you finished, Steve?” Dora asked. “Now we will cross the street and take the trolley bus home.”
We had stepped out of the school where the meeting had taken place into a gleaming park. “I would like to take a walk downtown,” I said.
The supervisor, walking near us, intervened in Romanian. “Did you understand what Doamna Dora said, Steve? You are going home now.”
“Da, am ineles.” I had understood but continued to console myself with dreams of how I would range around the city in freedom once I had begun teaching and gained the liberty to spend the day away from Buiucani. At a stroke I had grasped why writers from Prague eastward, whether Slavic, Jewish, Magyar, or Romanian, whether living under Habsburgs, tsars, commissars, or post-Communist successor states, had sustained such a consistently rich vein of fantastic writing. Regardless of ideology, these societies’ authoritarian ethics, filtering down into family life, thwarted personal fulfillment at such a basic level that the flight into fantasy became a vital recourse for maintaining mental equilibrium. The more autocratic the oppression, the more extravagant the fantasy required to compensate for it.
This insight dovetailed with a mental technique I had begun to evolve over the past few days to make up for the absence of private space. Once I had folded up my bed in the morning, there was no spot in the apartment defined as mine—no place I could be alone. By my third day with the Lencuas, I found I could summon up a whirling cordon of privacy within my head, warding off the intrusive voices, movements, and presences of other people by submerging myself in a hoop of inner space whose boundaries I could press outward around me like a magnetic field. When I sat at the living-room table writing in my travel journal, no one else existed. The phenomenon, though essential to my mental and emotional well-being, disconcerted me. I had always paid close attention to the world around me. Growing up on a farm where space abounded, I could hide away when I wished to read or write or brood. Once I returned from hiding, I expected to engage with humanity. The habit of periodically shutting out all others, though in Moldovan society as necessary to any sensitive person as dreams were to sleep, struck me alternately as callous and irresponsible. Scrutinizing passengers on the jammed trolley buses, where sweating bodies squeezed against me from all sides, I thought I saw others switching on their mental cordons as I was learning to activate mine.
Like most fantasies, mine remained unrealized. The beginning of my job failed to release me into freedom. I was teaching at the Technical University in the Botanic district at the opposite end of Chiinu from Buiucani. An early-morning commuter express bus carried me the length of the city. I taught from nine to twelve, then rode a local bus back to tefan Cel Mare Boulevard, where I could soak up urban life, shop (I soon found both a city map and postcards), change money, or idle with other English teachers who spent afternoons sitting on benches behind the statue of Stephen the Great at the entrance to tefan Cel Mare Park. Whatever I did, I had to do it quickly because Dora expected me home for lunch. Senya didn’t come home for lunch, but Andrei did. At one or one-thirty Andrei, Dora, and I would squeeze around the kitchen table and eat. If I got delayed, Dora would become angry. If the delay were prolonged, she would be furious. One day I returned at five-thirty to be met by Dora stepping into the hall to present me with a plate of food. “Your lunch!” she said. “Steve, la masa! To the table!”
I sat and ate. Two hours later I sat again and ate supper. After that I never returned to Buiucani any later than two in the afternoon. Contact with my colleagues dwindled. I was becoming part of a Moldovan family.
