Playing the Moldovans At Tennis (13 page)

It was a beautiful crisp autumn morning. Marcel had promised to pick me up from the house at nine o'clock. At ten o'clock I became a little concerned. At eleven o'clock I gave up on him. Unreliability, I had discovered, was another Moldovan trait. Twice Corina had arranged for a journalist from a newspaper to come and interview me about my business in Moldova but on both occasions no-one had shown up. They never rang to apologise, give an explanation or attempt to arrange another appointment. Seemingly there was nothing newsworthy in an English comedian coming to Moldova attempting to beat the national football team one by one at tennis. The mind boggled as to what you had to do before a Moldovan newspaper would deign to write a few words about you on an inside page. I had questioned Corina on this and she had replied that the press had been controlled for so long that it had not yet found its own true voice.

'You have to remember,' she'd said rather poetically, 'that for more than half a century we have been like caged birds. Now the cage is open we don't know how to fly.'

This one sentence helped me to understand so much of what I had been experiencing here.

'Can you get to Orheiul Vecchi by bus?' I asked Adrian, who was only too pleased to take a break from his Saturday morning chore of hoovering the house.

'I think it is possible, but I thought that Marcel had arranged a car.'

'He may have done, but he hasn't bothered to come here in it.'

This does not surprise me. I think that he is a strange guy,' commented Adrian, who had formed this opinion of Marcel as a result of speaking to him on the phone in the course of setting up this morning's non-event.

'Right, I may have been let down,' I announced proudly, 'but it is far too nice a day not to make something of it, so I am going to go to Orheiul Vecchi by bus.'

'I think that this will be difficult,' said the cautious Adrian.

'It may be so,' I said, adopting the statuesque posture and weighty tone of a great adventurer about to embark on his boldest journey yet. 'But you will see that I will succeed, for I do not know the meaning of the word "failure".'

Instead of eliciting the smile I had hoped for, this remark prompted a swift return to hoovering. Although Adrian had dispensed with his initial frostiness, he was still the only one in his family whom I hadn't really been able to make laugh. He was proving to be a tough nut to crack.

The first part of the journey was easy enough. I had become something of an old hand in the art of maxi-taxi travel, and so when I arrived at the bus station I felt confident enough. Why shouldn't I be? I'd been here twice before on my trips to Soroca and Transnistria, and not had any difficulties. Admittedly I had been with Iulian, but really how hard could it be to buy a ticket and take a bus somewhere? The ticket hall and waiting room were packed with people, the hurly-burly of Saturday morning travel being something I hadn't witnessed before. I joined the queue for tickets at kiosk number fourteen and after ten minutes I found myself at the front. However on each occasion when I was about to begin my transaction with the woman in the booth, a fellow traveller barged unceremoniously in front of me. This continued until there was no-one left to slide in front of me and I was finally able to address the woman who was seated behind the scratched piece of glass which separated us.

'Orheiul Vecchi, va rog'
I said in my best Romanian.

The woman shook her head. I repeated myself. She shook her head again. What was she saying? That Orheiul Vecchi didn't exist? That I had made it up? I had one more go.

'Orheiul Vecchi, va rog.'

This time she just pointed into the distance. This was no use. I didn't want directions, I wanted a ticket. I stood before her looking bemused until she said something in Romanian which I failed to understand. Seeing that I was a foreigner, she repeated it louder and faster. I nodded, turned round and wandered off having decided that this lady didn't like me much and that I might have more luck at kiosk fifteen.

I don't know whether the rules of queueing were entirely different in this country, but I certainly wasn't getting the best of them. I was being particularly badly served by the rule which stated that every time an Englishman reached the front, then provided you approached briskly from the right and pushed him rather impolitely with your left hand, you got served next.

During the ten minutes in which I was tantalisingly close to getting served, I observed the woman inside the kiosk and drew some comfort from the fact that however fed up I was becoming, I would never manage to look as pissed off as she did. Her ID photo, which was stuck to the window, made her look rather ugly, and to be fair, this was flattering. Her name was Lolita Levchenko.
Lolita –
that name which conjured up images of sensuous nubile beauty. Well, used to. This middle-aged and obese Lolita, bless her, waited until the very moment I was about to announce my intended destination before she decided to go off and make a phone call. A long one, and not to her agent regarding the modelling shoot in St Tropez, I'd wager.

'Orheiul Vecchi, va rog,'
I said when she eventually returned and had finished dealing with the bloke who'd just shoved his way in front of me.

'Casa patruzece,'
she said, gesturing off into the middle distance.

Ah. This I understood. It meant I had to go to kiosk number forty. Quite why, I was unable to establish, but from the vigorous pointing she was doing with one of her stubby little fingers, it seemed that kiosk forty appeared to be in another building entirely.

I followed the direction of her finger but all this did was lead me outside and into the busy marketplace where people were busy wandering around with chickens and other livestock tucked underneath their arms, or stuffed in bags. Guessing that this wasn't kiosk forty I went back inside. However, after four circuits of the building I'd still had no luck, so I went outside again where a man tried to sell me a live turkey. I declined the invitation to purchase, partly because what I really wanted was a bus ticket to Orheiul Vecchi, and partly because only a fool buys the first turkey he sees. (The really wise buyer will browse through
What Turkey
magazine before he sets foot anywhere near the market.)

This market place was brimming over with people, and for a moment I was carried along by the forward momentum of those around me. Everything appeared to be on sale here. Clothes, electronic goods, tools, kitchen implements, live animals, fish, and even a stall selling drugs and medication. Iulian had told me a few days earlier that most of the drugs on these stalls had been donated to the government by foreign aid agencies but had found their way on to the streets as a result of this country's institutionalised corruption. The poor folk swarming around me now were having to pay for what had been a gift to their country, and as a result some were having to sell their turkeys to keep the family healthy.

The momentum of the eager shoppers dumped me in front of a single storey pre-fab building and I looked up to see the numbers 40-44 written above four glass windows. Aha! Kiosk number forty was here. In their wisdom, the relevant authorities had evidently decided that selling tickets at random locations would make life far more interesting for the traveller than if they housed them all somewhere as obvious as the bus station.

I joined a queue, now resigned to the inevitable lack of respect that the locals would show for it, and in a mere twenty minutes I found myself dealing with a woman who didn't immediately send me somewhere else at the mention of Orheiul Vecchi. She even spoke a little English and drew a little map for me, explaining that I needed to get two buses, one towards Orhei and another at the point where the road branched off to Ivancea. Provided I got off at the right place, this second bus would eventually deliver me to my desired destination. It sounded tricky, but surely not beyond the orienteering skills of someone who'd already successfully located kiosk forty.

I showed the kiosk lady's map to the driver and he made lots of positive sounds which seemed to be consistent with this being the correct bus. The girl who was getting on behind me also nodded in confirmation. Good. I was on my way, and it had only taken a little more than an hour and a half. All the seats were full so I made my way to the back of the bus where there was adequate standing room. I leant on a little ledge above the spare tyre which was below the rear window, and readied myself for the view of the city as we left it behind. The girl who'd got on behind me stood close by and she gave me a sweet little smile, revealing some badly neglected teeth. She was probably a little surprised to see the likes of me travelling alone on a bus. The few Westerners who did visit this country tended not to avail themselves of public transport, having been warned that the dilapidated buses were nearly always overcrowded, especially on a Saturday morning. This one wasn't too bad though – I may not have had a seat, but there was a little room to move about and I'd experienced worse.

Twenty minutes later we were still in the bus station but with twice as many people on the bus. The driver had crammed an insane number of people on to his vehicle, the weight of whom were now pressing me against the rear window. Had I wanted to turn around it would have been physically impossible for me to do so. I was trapped. I wanted to get off but I couldn't. My crotch was being rammed into the spare tyre with such vigour that it probably suggested to onlookers that I had developed an immense physical attraction for it, and was not being shy about making this known. The girl with the unkempt teeth was now being crushed alongside me, but this didn't prevent her from offering another attempt at a sweet smile. I'm afraid I just couldn't return it with one of my own. I didn't feel relaxed enough. It felt too much like I was having sexual intercourse with a tyre. And a bald one at that.

With the driver finally satisfied that the bus was full, now that he was the only one on board still afforded the luxury of movement, we set off. It was not a comfortable ride. (Tyres rarely are.) After half an hour, just when extreme discomfort was giving way to pain, and when the friction of body against tyre was threatening to melt rubber, we stopped at a small village called Drasliceni, where a good number of passengers alighted. I could breathe freely again and now there was enough space around me to see just how profusely I'd been sweating. It was the beginning of November. How did the locals suffer these journeys in the height of summer?

As we continued on our bumpy way, largely through drab and unremarkable countryside, I made a firm decision to abandon my original plan. There was no way I was going to leave this bus and then immediately get on to another. I would not willingly submit myself to any more of this torture. This bus was going to Orhei, not Orheiul Vecchi, but as far as I was concerned that was a good enough destination for a day's outing. On the map it looked like a good sized town and there must be something of interest there. I'd have a wander, a late lunch, a beer and then leave. The only other bus I was going to catch today would be the one that took me home.

A further hot and not altogether pleasant hour of travel passed, during which I was on the receiving end of more smiles from my female travelling companion. She seemed to have a soft spot for me, in spite of having seen how intimate I'd been with that tyre. Obviously not the jealous type. She had a nice face and was quite pretty, at least until she smiled, when the inadequacies of Moldovan dentistry became only too apparent. It was somewhat disappointing for me, a man who had always put a 'nice smile' right up there in what he looks for in a woman, to find myself in a country where observing one was such a rarity. True, the less shallow individual would have been able to recognise the real beauty within – to see
beyond
the teeth, but I'd been successfully brainwashed by the gleaming beaming glistening grins of the Western TV ad, and I was having trouble finding merit in what I saw as a mouth full of flaws. This was something I needed to get better at; like being tidy and getting Moldovan footballers to agree to play me at tennis.

The bus stuttered to a halt and the girl tapped me on the shoulder.

You – you go here,' she said, a little sheepishly.

Go here? I looked around me. Surely too many people around to take a leak here, I joked feebly to myself.

You go here,' she repeated, 'Now. Here.'

I realised what was happening. Not knowing about my change of plan the girl was drawing my attention to the fact that we'd arrived at the fork in the road where I should change buses.

'No thank you.' I said, 'I have decided to stay on the bus and go to Orhei for the day.'

She didn't understand, and repeated her instruction with a little more urgency. Never mind, the bus would move on in a second and this little moment of awkwardness would be over. Just as I was about to have another go at explaining my revised itinerary, I heard a commotion at the front of the bus and looked down the crowded aisle to see that the driver was on his feet, having switched off the engine and climbed out of his compartment. He was shouting at someone and waving his arms about. What had happened? Had some kind of family feud erupted?

The minor fracas nudged its way towards becoming something of an incident when the passengers around the driver began to join in with the shouting and gesticulating. The object of their attentions seemed to be someone near me but I couldn't make out who. The impatient driver started to force his way down the bus, still calling out at volume. The passengers who had initially remained outside the dispute were now becoming frustrated that their journey was being held up, and they began to vocalise their displeasure, the overall result being something best described as a din. Still it was not clear who was the object of all this clamour, but whoever it was, the noise levels and unanimity of feeling were such that this person would soon need to present a very persuasive argument in their defence.

Then something quite terrible happened. Stupefyingly shocking. I realised that it was
me. I
was the one who everyone was shouting at. I was the one who was holding up the bus. I shivered. For those of you who haven't experienced a bus full of Moldovans shouting at you, I assure you that this is how you respond, regardless of outside temperature. As I looked down the bus, all I could see were animated faces and a frenzy of waving arms, accompanied by a soundtrack of baffling foreign sounds. It was overwhelming. What was happening? What had I done? I had no answers. My mind was only able to produce one thought, and it seemed to stamp itself like a newspaper headline over this vision of turmoil before me.