| For no apparent reason, the train stopped and soldiers began checking compartments. It was 8 a.m., August 1994. Gabriella, a Moldovan-born English professor, had joined me for two weeks vacation in Moscow and Saint Petersburg to celebrate my 34th birthday and my first train ride out of Moldova in a year. We taught at the State University Alec Russo in Balti, an industrial city of 250,000 known for its cognac factories. Feeling exhausted but gratified, we’d boarded the train in Saint Petersburg, destination Chisinau, Moldova’s capital. This required three days of travel, with border crossings through Byelorussia, the Ukraine, and into Moldova. We’d weathered delays, track changes, long lines, and were running nearly a day behind schedule. Not bad by Soviet meltdown standards.
Perhaps the Ukrainian soldier sensed that Gabriella and I were in love because a look of anguish reddened his features. A willowy blond with watery gray-blue eyes, he studied my passport with such curiosity that I had to assume he’d never faced an American. I’d bribed, danced the hora, and polluted myself with vodka and wine in consort with apparatchiks, ex-KGB operatives, train conductors, gypsies, cops, retired Ministry officials, students, teachers and soldiers alike. Though armed and in uniform, this boy reeked of virginity. He told me I’d have to get off the train because my three-day Ukrainian transit visa had expired during the night.
Gabriella protested that no one had said a word at the borders of Russia and Byelorussia. She explained that we were colleagues, and I worked through a program called Peace Corps, new to the former USSR, funded by the U.S. government. As a volunteer, I received no pay for teaching. By mid-August, we both had to return to work.
Earnest, solemn, perhaps a little drunk on power, the soldier insisted nothing could be done.
In Byelorussia, I’d bribed a conductor $15 bucks so Gabriella and I could have a bunk where we’d made love as the stars rolled past our window. I considered bribing this soldier when another one appeared, just as young. After a year of greasing palms, I’d learned it was impossible to do so once a second authority figure appeared. Gabriella began to cry, begging them to reconsider.
As she pleaded our case, both soldiers appeared to respect her fine Russian diction (she’d been raised on military bases in Siberia). This didn’t stop them, however, from shoving me down the aisle and out the train’s open door.
Cellphones, at that time, along with laptops and Internet connections existed in rare quantities, even among Moscow’s elite. I’d asked Gabriella to contact the Peace Corps office in Chisinau if she didn’t hear from me during the next two days. I had no idea how I’d get in touch with her, but I’d worry about that later.
Watching the train roll out of sight, I heard the echo of her tears in all their sincerity. I felt paralyzed and dizzy with anger. Not about my fate, but hers. How could those boys have done that to a woman so lovely and one of their own? It was another example of the cruelty I’d seen Soviet citizens inflict on each other, and I assumed it came out of frustration.
I inventoried what I had: some Moldovan coupons, my passport, a plastic sack that held short pants and a T-shirt, and $60 dollars worth of crisp new greenbacks. Nobody accepted bills that were creased, torn, stained, or more than five years old.
Making my way to a small square building where a dog slept out front next to a bench, I gauged the horizon, saw no trees, and wished I’d brought a hat. I dawdled near hollyhocks that stood as tall as the building and scented the air. No breezes stirred. Behind the building, I found an adjoining room made of limestone blocks. Its two window openings without glass, its door squeaking, I entered and addressed two uniformed soldiers. One remained seated, indifferent, a cigarette glued to his lower lip as he played a hand-held computer game that sounded little blips. The oldest one, fair-skinned with a mustache and an orangeade tint to his short hair, faced me across a desk and asked for my passport. Not thinking, I handed it over.
He tried to speak English, blanching when I told him in Russian (Gabriella had been my teacher, and that’s how we’d met) that I spoke his language.
He asked my nationality. I told him American.
“No.” He scowled at me. This was his game, not mine. “Your nationality.”
I held my ground and repeated myself.
Sounding angry, he insisted that American was a form of citizenship, a system, not a nationality. I disagreed but kept my lips sealed as I watched him take a form out of his desk, instructing I read and sign it. It stated I had no translator and lacked a correct transit visa. I could have my passport if I signed. I did so. He didn’t return my passport.
A new pair of soldiers arrived, and the old pair left. The new supervisor could have doubled for the old one, except he wore no mustache. A crystalline glint hardened his hazel eyes. His wing-man didn’t play computer games; he held a Kalashnikov in two hands and kept it pointed at me.
Grabbing a fly swatter off the desk, slapping it against his thigh, the supervisor circled me as I sat and pickled in my own juices. He asked if I wanted to hear a joke. Why not? He shared it in a vivid style, rife with details, and I was careful to laugh even when I didn’t grasp the humor. I kept a wary eye on the Kalashnikov. Twice in my life I’d had a gun pointed at me. I relied on a trick I’d used in both cases. Biting my lower lip, I breathed through my nose and imagined a smooth lake at sunrise.
He filed my passport into his shirt pocket. Trains to Kiev would pass through, but he couldn’t say when, probably late at night. Nobody knew anything anymore. Only God knew. He leered at me and suggested I relax in front of the building. Eventually, I could get to Kiev and buy a transit visa there. Trying not to sulk, I told him I lacked enough money to pay for a night in Kiev, a transit visa, and a train ticket to Chisinau.
He shrugged and ordered me out of his building.
I wandered down the railroad tracks for a while, found a bottle and smashed the anger out of my system. I looked around. The horizon made me feel puny. The tracks angled off into a haze of heat ripples. Much of the land had been tilled, stretching like sun-scorched rhino hide and motionless in every direction.
While I hiked back to the building, I decided to ask for permission to board a train to Odessa rather than Kiev. I’d be closer to Chisinau, about three hours away. The ticket would be cheaper, perhaps leaving me enough to afford a visa.
With the sun at its noon peak, the building an oven (nothing was air conditioned or refrigerated in this part of the world), the supervisor’s face gleamed with sweat. He seemed impressed as he smoked a cigarette, pondering my suggestion. I asked if Odessa had an airport. Could I buy a transit visa there? He said maybe. I should wait out front. He’d make a call. His man with the Kalashnikov led me out.
I had the sun to measure time by. About an hour later, the Kalashnikov poking my ribs, I was ushered back and granted permission to ride to Odessa, but had to wait until 5 p.m. He asked if I’d exchange five American dollars for 150,000 Ukrainian coupons. I said I had no idea if that was a fair rate. Toying with me, he joked that as an American I surely missed toilet paper, and wouldn’t all those coupons come in handy? This brought sniveling laughter from his sidekick. Then he chased me out.
At the front of the building, under a sign that read KACCA, my spirits rose when I saw through the ticket window a woman seated behind her desk. She wore the customary Soviet blue smock. I tried to get her attention, but she ignored me.
A railroad man appeared. Paunchy, with the bulbous nose of a drinker, he wore a bright orange vest. I asked if I could buy a ticket to Odessa. He shrugged and walked away, mumbling, “It’s your problem, not mine.”
The dog still lay asleep. My forehead baked. I sat on the bench and napped, hour by hour more thirsty. As five o’clock neared, the sun began to cool, and there arrived two skinny boys with primitive fishing gear, followed by an old man with a girl, perhaps his granddaughter. They stood in line at the window as if this were proper etiquette. The old man got the woman’s attention. She shouted, “Go away.”
More villagers had gathered, true peasants, looking as if they’d emerged hunched over from long hibernation in the earth, their faces wretched with road grime and sweat, their backs bent, many no doubt having walked a great distance to meet their train. Two stout women in wool skirts and beat-up slippers, their opaque nylons and long-sleeved sweaters over legs and arms like thick beams, each gripped in red hands one corner of a burlap sack of potatoes and onions, lugging it between them one slow step at a time. They wore bright yellow and orange kerchiefs on their heads, their faces seared a dusty crimson, their eyes a bit mean. Over their shoulders hung gym bags, and as they put them down I saw they were packed full of loaves of bread, jars of homemade sour cream and tubes of kielbasa. They dropped the big burlap sack on the platform and sat on it, their backs to each other, hands on their knees, scars and scabs in plain view as they sighed and lolled about on their heavy bottoms. They ripped hunks from one loaf of bread, using a knife to carve kielbasa and onion, looking annoyed by heat, flies and mosquitoes as they chewed ever so pensively with their black teeth, and they sweated, drinking now and then from an unlabeled bottle that experience assured me was full of moonshine the Ukrainians called gorilka, the Russians called samagon, and the Moldovans called rachiu. I’d been treated to them all, distilled from ingredients that ranged from rotten apricots to apple cores, lengths of wood and strips of leather. In the words of poet Andrei Codrescu: “Drinking is a Russian religion with a complex metaphysic.”
At quarter to five, the ticket window opened, a line formed and I waited my turn. I explained everything to the woman. She refused to help me without my passport, so I ran back to the soldiers, interrupting their session with a bottle of vodka, a loaf of bread and a raw onion. The supervisor looked annoyed. He said no ticket, no passport.
I ran back to the window. A sleek long-distance train had arrived from Russia, olive green with lots of cars and sleeper compartments and a red star fixed to the locomotive’s nose. “No,” said the woman. “Get your passport.”
Hurrying back to the soldiers, desperate now, I begged for my passport. They scowled at me as if despising any show of weakness. Teeth clenched, I waited, watching them each down 100 grams of vodka from the same glass.
At last, bleary-eyed and looking bored the supervisor flung my passport out a window, laughing as I chased after it. I ran to the ticket woman, who took my money. All other passengers had already boarded. The train had slowed but hadn’t really stopped. The woman shoved the money back at me, crying, “Go, go, go.”
I was too late. Doors had closed, the train rolled and I ran alongside, yelling “Stop” until sweat stung my eyes and I gave up. My ribs heaved as I tried to catch my breath. Muttering, cursing like a lunatic, kicking loose gravel, I stumbled over railroad ties, blind with rage. As I moved further away from the building, I reminded myself that I had my passport back and could now do as I pleased.
Spotting a linden tree, I crossed what seemed an endless plowed field and crashed in its shade. I rested a while, the echo of Gabriella’s weeping still fresh. I thought about her family, and how they and so many other Moldovans had given the best of what they had to help me. I’d been treated like a prince in village homes with dirt floors, in homemade saunas, in sparely furnished block apartments without heat or running water. I’d listened to peasants and intellectuals alike explain how they’d woken up one day to learn that thousands of rubles they’d squirreled away had been devalued and rendered worthless. The Marxist dream they’d studied and sworn allegiance to, no longer existed. No new money, only coupons. No rule of law to help those in cities like Balti where unemployment hovered at 90 percent and packs of wild dogs and drunken men assaulted the innocent by night.
How they waited in line all day to hoard whatever they could find, to learn again no bread or milk had arrived, and it seemed no worker would ever get paid, no pensions would come, nor would there ever again be gas or electricity. The old lived on memories and nostalgia. Hadn’t it been a golden time? The young dreamed of what might be if only they could get out. Anywhere but here. One day a vigorous leader would rise up, and a new economic system would replace this decaying outmoded engine. Who was a peasant to trust? Old kopeks and ruble bank notes spoke of a nightmare of loss: Stalin’s trains, gulags, nearly 20-million dead in World War II, pogroms, the overnight disappearance of family members, many of whom had fought Nazis in defense of a new bold nation that in theory would never resort to fascism.
My face to the sun, fists clenched, I screamed until my vocal chords hurt, and I felt better. I walked railroad tracks until my feet grew blisters inside sneakers that turned black from pumice and creosote. The sun like a lozenge stewed in its dim orange glow.
Vast angling fields of wheat began to shrink into a quilt of smaller garden plots. In the distance, people tilled crops by hand, their bodies tiny in silhouette against a spreading wash of crimson. A slender dirt road with dried wagon ruts emerged from between two plots and ran parallel to the tracks. I took it. Walking became easier and I felt safer, at ease, in a different phase of what I thought of as my boss visa adventure. Who would believe it?
Runnels of sweat snaked down my back as I moved on inspired by the sight of a factory smokestack on the horizon. Goats munched grasses along the road. I cursed myself for leaving my knife and matches with Gabriella. I smiled at the sight of a motorcycle with a sidecar, its headlight on, idling in a field. A man and a woman unearthed lengths of what appeared to be asparagus, stuffing them into the sidecar. Only a sliver of scarlet lit the horizon. The sidecar full, the woman rode behind her man, both hands around his waist as they bounced out of sight.
I kept a dogged, sputtering pace. Passing a woman with a young girl, my voice brittle and cracking, I asked if Moldova was far and whether a town was nearby. Startled by my accent, she pulled the girl close to her skirt. I asked about a bus or train, but she refused to answer.
Slapping at mosquitoes, walking on, soothed by the amber twilight that settled over the earth, dank evening air cooling my face, I turned right at an intersection and headed down a tree-lined dirt road fragrant with fat green leaves. Passing limestone block walls, the rusting metal and paint of the hammer and sickle insignia at the center of an arch that ran high over a gated entrance chained up for the night, I heard dogs barking, my pace brisk as I kept to the road. I reached a sign for Mardarovka, 10 Kilometers. Chickens clucked in matted chicory and fragrant onion grass. Houses appeared, with high steel fences painted green and blue, trimmed in white, their gates shut, each a self-contained compound with fruit-bearing trees, a corn crib and a pungent barnyard aroma.
A trio of teenaged boys, each in sandals, T-shirt and polyester sweatpants, sized me up. I hurried past them. One I would talk to, but not three. As I neared a limestone block building, a dog chased me out of the dark. I sprinted away until nearly running over a burly peasant woman. After dodging me, she picked up a rock and heaved it at the dog, nailing it on the snout. Then she shooed it off with a big stick. Winded, a bit stunned, I thanked her and asked if there was a train station nearby. She grinned with a whiff of malice tainted by alcohol, showing a full metal jacket of gold teeth, and raving in slangy Ukrainian that I didn’t understand.
Around midnight, I found a train station, and a startling amount of activity. I used a dollar to buy six bottles of water and some large confections of baked dough and white cheese that the Moldovans call placenta. What did the Ukrainians call them?
Bread and water had never tasted better. I drank three bottles, Arcasul brand, which was Moldovan and meant I was getting closer. I couldn’t find a public phone. I asked about busses and trains. There used to be a bus to Chisinau, but like everything else it couldn’t be relied on. Yes, I was still far from the Moldovan border. My best bet was a train coming from Moscow through to Odessa.
My spirits lifted, I sat in the grass in front of the station and listened to The Scorpions sing Winds Of Change, one of Gabriella’s favorites and an anthem for the Perestroika generation. It played from a kiosk where villagers could buy cigarettes, Snickers bars, vodka and homemade cassettes. Ace of Base was singing Happy Nation when the Odessa train arrived. I bribed a female conductor with a five dollar bill. She gasped in delight and led me to a berth I had to share with two older men who argued that it was their berth; they’d paid good money for it. The conductor ignored them. Neither man looked happy when they saw my filthy socks and bleeding feet. My sneakers off, I climbed up into a bunk and passed out.
I arrived at two a.m. to a bustling Odessa. Briny air, cleansed by an occasional breeze off the Black Sea, hugged my skin. I walked sidewalks heaved, sunken, pitted and dusty, a faint whiff of the sewer about them. In Lenin Square I found a park and under a row of plane trees slept on a bench until a flashlight beam awakened me and two uniformed cops asked for my passport, looked it over and explained I couldn’t sleep there but could join others in the train station where it was safer.
Leaving those cops, I felt grateful as I returned to the station and sat on its granite steps, joining many others, some waiting for rides, some loitering. I watched the streaming of traffic, most of it taxis circling a rotary that was home to an outdoor café called Arena, with sea-blue lights around a water fountain and a disco glitter ball that peppered nearby buildings, trees and dozens of white plastic café tables and chairs where young new Russians drank under Pepsi and Coke and Camel cigarette umbrellas. As the song Lady In Red filled the night sky, a woman approached and asked if I needed an apartment. Her eyes lit up as I explained my situation. She knew a place where for a hundred cash per night I could sleep on the floor.
A crew of sidewalk sweepers appeared, most of them humorless old women in kerchiefs and blue smocks, some barefoot, some in slippers, each stooped over short-handled brooms that looked like thorn bushes. They kicked up enough dirt to scare the mob, about thirty strong, off those steps and around the station to a side entrance.
Like many Soviet public buildings the train station was massive, but old enough to evoke Odessa’s international past with its mix of Italian and French architecture, four polished marble staircases, and a domed cupola roof. From the top of the centrally located staircase, a monolithic statue of Lenin gazed down upon those who entered. In this case, a wee-hour army of drunks, homeless beggars, cripples, and seasoned drifters carrying sheets of cardboard to sleep on. I watched them quickly turn the station into a dormitory as they occupied each sliver of floor space. I had to step around their bodies, some of them already snoring, until I found a spot at the base of the Lenin statue.
I slept that first night shivering through vile dreams, both hands on my passport. In the morning, I stumbled into the white gold of sunrise, and it occurred to me that no one on the planet knew my whereabouts. I could stay here, create a new identity and start my life over. It was a Sunday. Winsome, fearless -- what did I have to lose? -- I wandered in awe of Odessa’s diverse architecture, her lanes and boulevards and views of the Black Sea. I walked mile after mile, at times disturbed by the number and condition of beggars and amputees. I changed dollars into coupons, keeping my money hidden at all times. I learned there was no train to the airport, only one bus. A cab would cost me $100,000 coupons. For one coupon, I bought a loaf of bread and two-dozen plums, toting them in my sack. When I bought water I downed the whole bottle, leaving the empty for a beggar.
Blisters throbbed, bleeding through my socks, yet I liked the aimless drift in sunshine, energized by throngs of beachgoers. I worried about not having enough cash to pay for a visa, and tried not to dwell on it as I slummed through outdoor markets and rode crowded busses and trolleys. I learned from a cabbie whose taxi was a converted ambulance that I could find an international phone at the airport. It was noon when I took a bus there, a two hour wait for a half-hour ride. I’d need to wait two days before the visa issuing office opened. I phoned Gabriella. Our connection lasted about a minute before getting cut. I’d had to shout, but at least she knew I was safe. After walking back to the train station, a three-hour hike, I decided to bathe in the Black Sea.
Though I found the beach surprisingly litter free and ascribed it to a culture that had yet to adopt ridiculous amounts of packaging, it was too crowded for my thoroughly American need for personal space. Naked boys and girls peed at water’s edge. Far too many dogs paddled to masters, some of them quite plump for their Speedos. I swam in my underwear, scouring off the road without guilt, and no one even bothered to take a second glance. Then I napped blissfully on hot grayish sand, relieved that none of my belongings had been stolen.
On my way to the train station, I found a length of cardboard to my liking. While sleeping a second night, a cop kicked me in the ribs and asked what the hell I was doing there. Taking my cue from the other drifters, I didn’t tell him. I got up and walked away. He didn’t care. He just kicked another set of ribs and asked the same question.
On Tuesday, the visa office was supposed to open at 11, and so I showed up around ten expecting a wait. I sat with two Syrian men, both of them striking in handsome suits. I began speaking to them in Russian, and they looked stunned when they learned where I was from. Neither had ever met an American. I chatted and they listened politely. They didn’t smile, but seemed genuinely entertained as I told them my story. Three hours later, a cherubic officer in uniform arrived with a brown-bag lunch and a bottle of vodka. He happily took my $15 dollars and stamped my passport.
The next morning, I clawed my way on board a local diesel bound for Chisinau. Out of the mob of passengers, some of whom crawled through windows to get in, I was likely the only one who’d bothered to buy a ticket for this short-distance turtle with wooden benches. When my passport was asked for, I thought twice before handing it over. It was returned without comment. I stood most of the way, squeezed between other passengers, all of us sweat-soaked, smelly and miserable. I didn’t care. I amused myself by thinking of different ways to tell this story. I’d use hyperbole, an audacious style, starting with: There I was, alone in the middle of nowhere, Gabriella’s tears weighing on my heart….
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