Stephen Henighan - Lost Province

ALSO BY STEPHEN HENIGHAN

Other Americas (novel)
Nights in the Yungas (short stories)
The Places Where Names Vanish (novel)
North of Tourism (short stories)
Assuming the Light: The Parisian Literary Apprenticeship
of Miguel Angel Asturias (criticism)
When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing (essays)

LOST PROVINCE

Adventures in a Moldovan Family

STEPHEN HENIGHAN

Copyright 2002 by Stephen Henighan

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), Toronto, Ontario.

This book is published by Beach Holme Publishing, 2262040 West 12th Avenue, Vancouver, B.C. V6J 2G2. www.beachholme.bc.ca. This is a Prospect Book.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and of the British Columbia Arts Council. The publisher also acknowledges the financial assistance received from the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its publishing activities.

Editor: Michael Carroll
Design and Production: Jen Hamilton
Cover Art: Paul Schutzer/ALPHA-PRESSE
Author Photograph: Martin Schwalbe

Printed and bound in Canada by Kromar Printing Ltd.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Henighan, Stephen, 1960-

Lost province: adventures in a Moldovan family/Stephen Henighan.

A prospect book.

ISBN 0-88878-432-5

1. Henighan, Stephen, 1960- JourneysMoldova. 2. MoldovaSocial life and customs. 3. MoldovaDescription and travel.
4. MoldovaLanguages. 5. Moldavian dialect. 6. English teachersMoldovaBiography. I. Tide.
DK509.29.H46 2002 947.6086 C20029110882

CONTENTS

1
JOURNEY INTO DIFFERENCE

I n early 1989 a few months after the election that sealed the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I made a long trip through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. The prospect of free trade depressed me. I brooded about the survival of the peculiarities of habit, language, architecture, outlook, and attitude, nurtured by local and national cultures, which furnished the world with much of the multiplicity and fascination that made living worthwhile. In Central Europe I thought I glimpsed the revival of the thriving diversity of Mitteleuropathe return of an older, more complicated Europe. Time would prove this resuscitation of heterodoxy to be a mirage, but in 1989 felt I had received a great gift, stumbling upon a treasure trove of multiplicity in an era when differences were being irreducibly flattened. I promised myself I would return to the far side of Europe.

I went back to Canada and lived for two and a half years in Montreal, writing fiction and journalism and supporting myself with odd jobs. When, in 1992, I decided to give up my freelancers life to write a doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford, part of my motivation for studying in England stemmed from a longing to be close to the Europe that had intrigued me. On gloomy Oxford days I dreamed of escaping to Mitteleuropa. My next journey east, though, was not to be to the former realm of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but to the Balkans.

In 1989 I had not visited the Balkans: my knowledge of the region derived from literature. One image that made a strong impression on me, having travelled through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland with Olivia Mannings The Balkan Trilogy in my backpack, was the annexation of Bessarabia. Essentially a portrait of a marriage, Mannings novels are set against the background of Romanias entry into World War II. Stalins annexation of Bessarabia in 1940, though it takes place offstage, contributes powerfully to the suffocation of hope that eventually drives the central characters to flee Bucharest. The Romanian characters, of course, stay behind in Romania. Bessarabians, too, stayed behindno longer citizens of Romania, but of the Soviet Union.

The image had dimmed by the time I applied for a summer teaching job in Romania in 1994. A year and a half earlier, during a period of boredom with my doctoral thesis, I had started studying Romanian. After taking four hours of introductory lessons with a postdoctoral student who knew the language well, I invested in a grammar book, discovered a cache of tapes, and happily devoted my idle hours to memorizing the unpredictable plural forms of Romanian nouns. By the summer I was aching to practise the language. I had spent the year as president of my Oxford colleges graduate-student associationa wearing responsibility that had added thirty or more hours of commitments every week to my already-packed schedule, binding me to the mandates of a community both demanding and insular. A lingering romantic confusion had pulled the narrow borders of this world a notch tighter. I needed to get away.

Little did I suspect how far away I was going.

Three weeks before I was due to leave for Romania I received a letter informing me that I had been transferred to Chiinu in the Republic of Moldova, in the former Soviet Union. Here, too, the letter assured me, I would be able to speak Romanian. A phone call established that my sponsor organization had been expelled from Romania (rumour claimed its employees had been caught forging Romanian work permits). I did some research, discovered Moldova was Bessarabia, called back, and said I would agree to the transfer on the condition that I was lodged with a Romanian, rather than a Russian-speaking, family. I was told this would be arranged. The voice on the phone mentioned that I would be travelling from London overland to Chiinu (pronounced Kee-she-now). They knew I would enjoy the trip.

I boarded the yellow London-Lvov Liner (the name was painted on the buss side) at Victoria Station. The passengers were divided between young volunteers travelling to Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova, and elderly British Ukrainians returning to visit relatives. The English teachers bulging luggage blocked the ventilation system, and everyone sweated. We crossed the English Channel at midnight and awoke in the morning on a highway that insulated us from difference. Belgium slipped into Holland and then into Germany with scarcely a wrinkle of recognition. Only in eastern Germany did evidence of a transition appear: stretches of older, rougher highway, drab stucco farmhouses, the occasional Skoda or Lada tagging behind faster-moving traffic. At the Polish border the immigration post was flying the blue-and-gold European Union flag optimistically alongside the red-and-white of Poland. Viewed from the highway, Poland appeared emptier than I remembered: the forests dark, the fields untended. Jazzy roadside gas bars erupted in the mid-distance, their restaurants equalling any installation along a U.S. interstate for utter featurelessness. Only the possibility of ordering sausages and pierogies, in addition to hamburgers, french fries, and Cokes, offered a reminder that this was not Kansas. The British teachers, not having encountered Polish food before, looked on with discomfort moderating into fascination as I savoured a culinary favourite I remembered from my Canadian childhood, slurping up a plate of delicious pierogies swimming in spiced cream. Gazing into my colleagues disconsolate faces (their french fries were stale), I thought: