Lost Province by Stephen Henighan

Author:Stephen Henighan [Henighan, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Travel, Former Soviet Republics, General
ISBN: 9781770707252
Google: 7BrK3qKTVNwC
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2002-11-15T04:18:03+00:00

10

THE LOOK OF A STRANGER

“Sntei român?”

People in Chiinu didn’t know how to place me. In any crowd I stood out. My beard was a rarity. My hair, though short, was layered and parted on one side, in contrast to the crew-cut scalpings flaunted by younger Moldovan men. My pressed white shirts hung on a frame still gaunt from the marathon, meal-skipping eighty-hour weeks I had put in for the past year as president of my college’s graduate-student association. My hiking boots and Reeboks came from another planet. I was a stranger and I didn’t speak Russian. Could I be a Romanian? Was this what Romanians—those demonized neighbours from whom Moldovans had been shielded for five decades—looked like? I was asked the question incessantly. After having been the object of so many presumptions of Romanianness, I decided there was no alternative: I had to go to Romania.

I requested two and a half weeks’ vacation. When I inquired at the office—embroiled, as always, in bureaucratic crisis as the officials typed and phoned to keep one teacher or another in the country—I was advised to buy my ticket to Bucharest at the Intourist office in the immense concrete tombstone of the Hotel Naional. It was safer than lining up for hours at the train station amid hordes of dubious characters, and the reservations were more reliable. I walked out to tefan Cel Mare Boulevard and caught a crowded number 22 trolley bus. As I squeezed in the back door and gripped the overhead railing, I spotted a tall, dark-complexioned young man staring at me. A badly stitched-up circular scar veered out from his left eye. “Sntei român?” But, though he kept staring at me, the question didn’t come. I twisted my neck, trying to judge where I should get off.

A minority of passengers stamped their tickets on the trolley buses. Most people stamped once in a while to ward off bad luck; passengers stamped when they were riding a significant distance. Sometimes the kiosks that sold tickets would run out, and no one had tickets. As I was travelling only four or five stops, I didn’t bother to stamp. The bus rolled past the narrow, tree-lined section of tefan Cel Mare near the theatres and the fortresslike former KGB xheadquarters, perpetually crowded with shoppers and vendors of ice cream and fizzy, sweetened water. The boulevard opened up when it reached the city’s one full-fledged department store, a spectacularly hideous concrete monument to Soviet architectural tastelessness. Many of the passengers got off, opening up a generous allowance of space among myself, the tall young man with the scar, and the four or five other people standing in the back of the bus. I assumed that one more stop remained before the Hotel Naional.

I was wrong. The trolley bus rolled past the hotel and funnelled into the long, winding, downhill slide leading to the train station. My miscalculation exasperated me. I was going to have to slog all the way back up the hill in the midday heat.

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