Читать книгу Lost Province - Stephen Henighan - Страница 9

3 THE JACKSONS ARE COMING!

The Friday evening before my course began Andrei took me for a walk around the development. We crossed the dusty rectangular lots where daytime social life unfolded. In the dark I could make out concrete walkways, upright tractor tires half buried in the earth, rudimentary swing sets, stray benches and picnic tables, and large iron-tube frames over which women draped rugs in order to beat them clean. Groups of men supplied with vodka from the kiosks around the fringes of the development sat playing cards at the picnic tables listing into the night’s deep shadows. Only the solitary parking lot was lighted. Andrei told me the neighbourhood was safe at night for groups or pairs of men, though not for single people; during the day, it was safe for more or less anyone, a fact of which he and his friends were proud.

Andrei asked me about “business.” Speaking no English, he would nonetheless spit out this word in a semblance of its English pronunciation, spiking it with trappings of machismo, streetwise knowledge, manly self-possession. Andrei had attended Russian-language schools, graduating from a technical high school with an auto mechanic’s diploma. He had worked only briefly in this field (jobs soon dried up) and, for someone twenty years of age, had notched up a bewildering variety of work experience: housepainting, construction work in Moscow, harvest-time labour in Romania, unspecified tasks in Ukraine, dozens of attempts to do “business” in Chiinu and Tiraspol by buying, selling, and transporting different types of merchandise. Business, he was convinced, would be his salvation. “You set up a good business, Steve, and…no more problems!”

He desperately wanted me to confirm that business was the answer, that an answer existed—a solution to the dead end in which he was trapped. The Soviet Union had rewarded acquiescence with total security. Andrei remained convinced that this new social organization, which he understood to be based around business, would provide him with a similar degree of security in much greater opulence, if only he could master the system. The notion that the essence of this new system lay in the withdrawal of security had not penetrated his mind. In this, I suspected, he was far from alone. What would happen when the Andreis of the planet realized that “business” wasn’t a more lavish method of organizing society, but an order under whose sway society, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, did not exist? My responses, in any event, were too Western for him: “You never have complete security. You always have to change and adapt.”

This was unacceptable. “Steve, I’ve been working on a plan for three years that will make everybody so rich we’ll never have to work again. Before you leave Moldova I’ll make you a very interesting business proposition!”

He had been alluding to this plan since my arrival, vowing to share the details with me. He could barely contain himself.

As we walked around the development, young men would detach themselves from loitering groups and come over to speak to us. Andrei and I shook hands with each young man in turn. Most of the youths wore the baggy blue track suits with red, white, and green stripes running down the side that were the uniform of the young male in Chiinu. On their feet they wore rubber sandals. Sports shoes, I had learned, were a luxury item and a rarity; my brief sally onto tefan Cel Mare Boulevard had alerted me to the intrigued stares aroused by my Reeboks. Once the greetings were complete, Andrei’s conversations with the youths would lapse into Russian. After the first of these conversations, Andrei apologized for speaking in a language I didn’t understand. “Rusete e mai binepentru business.”

Andrei and his friends, I was discovering, were not alone in this belief. All over Moldova, Russian seemed to be regarded as “better for business.” In less than four years the language had achieved a remarkable metamorphosis. From the bearer of socialist ideology, Russian had transformed itself into the symbol of mass-market modernity, second only to English—a language spoken by virtually no one in Moldova—as the associate of glorious consumerism. The riddle of how to attain the consumerist paradise enjoyed by Westerners and successful members of the Russian Mafia stymied young Moldovans. Andrei’s dilemma turned out to be typical, not unique. With the exception of a couple of part-time teachers, I would meet no one in Moldova under the age of thirty-five who could be described as gainfully employed. Like Andrei, most of his contemporaries spent the day marvelling at the riches paraded on MTV, their dreamy boredom punctuated by occasional bouts of buying and selling and carrying goods from one place to another. These sorties propped up personal dignity, but no one got rich on them; the meagre profits realized by, say, buying cheap textiles in Ukraine and sellingthem at a higher price in Romania were usually sucked away by the cost of train tickets, accommodation, food, and bribes paid to border guards.

Constrained by a fearsome austerity under which jobs and many consumer goods—nearly any merchandise, in fact, other than vodka or bread—had vanished, Andrei nevertheless assigned the blame for the lousy economy to inflation. The subject came up via the back door. I was asking him about language; I had mentioned that his little brother, Serge, attended a Romanian-language school. Andrei scoffed. “Romanian school! That’s a thing of the 1990s. It won’t last. Steve, you have to understand there used to be a great empire that included Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. But that fell apart and now we all have inflation.”

Moldova, in fact, did not suffer from severe inflation: the leu remained rock-steady at four to the U.S. dollar. The country’s problem was stagnation, not overstimulation; economic activity had ground to a standstill. Andrei’s adoption of careering Russian and Ukrainian inflation as his own had been absorbed from Russian television. His colonization was so deep he couldn’t see the reality around him. Andrei’s bamboozlement reminded me of Canadians sedated by U.S. television who slapped U.S. names onto Canadian institutions. Not wanting to challenge him too overtly, I murmured, “Is inflation a very big problem in Moldova?”

“Not with a good business!” he said, again driving the English word through his Romanian sentence. “Steve, I’m going to tell you my plan. Listen carefully. I’ve spent three years working on this idea.”

We had emerged onto a patch of sunken concrete; the high rises around us stood on bald, pitted hillocks. Andrei was walking in a posture of hunched determination, emphasizing the shortness and heaviness of his body. He peered forward from beneath his profuse black brows, concentrating with rapt attention on the future he hoped to summon from the shadows.

Speaking very quickly, Andrei said, “There is a fight in a family. A horrible fight. We show this onstage. Then the damage is healed. And the Jackson family comes and makes it better by giving a huge concert. I mean, a concert here in Chiinu by the whole Jackson family—Michael, Jermaine…”

“But, Andrei—”

“No, Steve, I’ve spent three years working on this idea. I know people in the music business. I know there’s a market for this. That’s why I was happy when Papi said we were getting an English teacher to stay with us. You can use your English to talk to the Jacksons and get them to come.”

“I can’t talk to the Jacksons just because I speak English. It’s like me asking you to use your Russian to talk to Boris Yeltsin.”

“You can do it, Steve! I’ll cut you in and you’ll be rich. You’ll never have to work again. Justthink—Michael Jackson will come to Chiinu.withhis whole family!”

I realized that, on top of everything else, his wholesome vision of the Jacksons was sadly dated. “Andrei, Michael Jackson has had a lot of problems recently. Health problems…” I tried to think of a way of mentioning the allegations that Jackson had molested adolescent boys. But in Chiinu this remained the scandal that dared not speak its name. I finally said, “His reputation is not good now.”

“I don’t care about that, Steve. I just want the Jacksons to come to Chiinu. The whole family…”

“I can’t help you do that, Andrei.”

My relationship with Andrei never fully recovered from this disappointment. We were back on good terms in a few days, but from that evening onward his exuberance alternated with a tone of corrosive bitterness. I had failed him. I wondered about the psychological implications of his fantasy, which struck me as embarrassingly transparent. The family quarrel that was to open the spectacle seemed to represent both his parents’ divorce and the splintering of the Soviet Union—the two events had grown nearly synonymous for Andrei—while the advent of the Jacksons, who were both a mass-media chimera and, crucially, a family, provided reassurance that the new globalized order would act to restore life to its former stability. The family unity—of the Soviet Union and of Andrei’s Romanian mother and Ukrainian father within that confederation—would be anointed by the blessing of an MTV deity. Again the message that global mass culture brought the dissolution of fixed values and identities had failed to get through. Andrei was trying to go back to the future where the endurance of the Soviet familyunit would be consecrated in the glare of halogen lamps, the puff of smoke bombs, and the whine of synthesizers. His need and desperation were tragic, but I didn’t think it was fair toallow his illusions to persist.

We returned to the apartment in forbidding silence. Andrei went out to drink with friends at a picnic table in the dark. The next evening he disappeared as soon as supper ended. On the weekend before my course began he made himself scarce, effectively marooning me in the apartment. I had failed to live up to the image of a Westerner as he had been taught to regard the species by MTV. Not only was I incapable of communicating with the Jacksons, but my knowledge of the dollar prices of different models of cars, different brands of televisions and VCRS and Walkmans, was pathetically deficient. Andrei and his friends revelled in discussions of the finer points of such gadgets. Although none of them owned Walkmans or VCRS (they all had televisions), they had memorized the differences between different makes and models. I had been expected to supply crucial dollar figures to amplify their discussions. But I proved hopeless at telling them how much each model of each gadget would cost in England/America, which was all one place—the land where MTV happened.

As a Westerner, I was an unnerving disenchantment.

Dora and Senya saved me from being stuck in the apartment all weekend by inviting me for a walk. They attributed Andrei’s disappointment with me to the difference in our ages. As we crossed the corner of the development leading toward open fields of corn and sunflowers, Dora and Senya took pains to treat me as an equal. Senya, with old-fashioned courtesy, addressed me as “Domnul Steve”—“Mr. Steve.” They spoke to me slowly and corrected the mistakes in my Romanian, apparently proud to be teaching me their language. As we walked, I realized the development was far larger than I had imagined; it contained two schools, a hotel, a post office, a restaurant and bar, and numerous sports facilities, though very little grocery shopping. That morning I had noticed that most of the newspapers sold by the kiosks along the edge of the road where people from the development caught their buses downtown to work were printed in the Cyrillic alphabet. I had bought a Latin-alphabet paper called Europa. On opening it up I discovered to my dismay that though the front page was in Latin letters, most of the articles inside, though written in the Romanian language, wereprinted in the Cyrillic alphabet. The linguistic situation grew more and more confusing. “Do most people here speak Romanian…Moldovan?” I asked Senya.

“Most people speak Moldovan and Russian. Moldovans speak Russian, but Russians don’t speak Moldovan. But I don’t want to push the Russians living here out of Moldova. Many of them are old and sick. They were given apartments here in the south because they were wounded in the war in Afghanistan, or they came here to retire. The real swine are the Germans. Deutschenschwein!”

His digression took me by surprise; he was shaking with rage. For an instant I thought the story of what had happened to his family during World War II was about to tumble out. But Dora laid her hand on his shoulder. She pointed to a large, flat-roofed, single-story building. “That’s Serge’s school, the Romanian gymnasium. Andrei went to the Russian school. He’s a little Russian. For him everything is in Russian and Ukrainian. He hardly uses Moldovan.” Dora presented their decision to send Serge to Romanian school as a considered response to this outcome.

The next day, when my supervisor phoned to give directions to the Technical University where I would teach, Andrei asked her to switch into Russian. Having written down the directions in Russian, he proved nearly incapable of translating them into Romanian. He had to ask Senya the words for avenue, architecture building, and engineering building. His transcription into the Latin alphabet mixed up b’s and d’s. Serge would never make these mistakes; Romanian history and literature would be his heritage.

On the way back to the apartment Senya and Dora asked me about my rent in Montreal. They told me an apartment such as theirs cost US$2,000 to buy. Dora pointed out a white apartment block from which the paint wasn’t peeling. I noticed large enclosed balconies that projected outward rather than being recessed into the building, as was common in Central and Eastern Europe. The lower levels of the building were overgrown with thick creepers. “Three bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen,” Dorasaid. “Those apartments cost $13,000.” A friend of Dora’s who had moved across the border to Romania, having decided that life was better there, was trying without success to unload one of these expensive apartments. Not many Moldovans had $13,000 to spend on real estate. “It would be very easy for you to buy an apartment here, Steve,” Dora said. “You could save money in your country, buy a couple of apartments in Chiinu, rent one out, then live very easily here as an English teacher.”

“That’s true,” I said. In strictly financial terms she was correct, though I suspected that Soviet laws banning foreigners from owning property were still on the books. Had Dora offered me the solution to my eternal dilemma of financing my need to write? I struggled to convey to her that what I would miss living in Moldova would be contact with my own culture, with my language, with Canadian political and literary debates. My explanations confused Dora and Senya. The pulverization of their culture had diminished the value they placed on the notion of belonging. As accustomed to trading in identities as they were to bartering old trolley-bus tickets, they couldn’t imagine how anyone could miss his homeland when an easier life beckoned elsewhere.