Playing the Moldovans At Tennis (4 page)

Suddenly I noticed that all the tables in the cafes and bars were round and made of plastic. For some reason the expression 'Carrying coals to Newcastle' popped into my head. Everywhere I looked, there were plastic round tables. And thanks to me – and Do It All of course – now Moldova had one more. King Arthur wasn't going to be that impressed.

I needed to change the dollars which I had brought with me, and Iulian took me to one of the many roadside bureaux de change which dotted the main street. When I began my transaction the small kiosk was empty, but by the time I had completed it I turned round to see that a large queue of people had formed behind me.

'Where did they come from?' I asked Iulian.

'People must have noticed you come in.'

'What do you mean?'

Well, you don't look typically Moldovan. They realised that you must be changing foreign currency and people want to buy it.'

'Why?'

That is how they save. No-one trusts our currency – or the banks.'

With a pocket stuffed full of Moldovan money, I left behind the line of locals who were desperate to get their hands on the dollars which had been in my pocket only moments before. It seemed odd, but on an infinitesimally small scale these people were playing exactly the same game that George Soros played. Some would be winners and some would be losers. Welcome to capitalism, folks.

What have I got here?' I asked Iulian as I sifted through my wad of new notes.

'You have about 700 lei. Our currency is the
leu.
It means "lion".'

Lion, eh? Well, judging by the scene I had just left behind, the
leu
wasn't exactly a lion which was King of the World's Financial Jungle.

Our perambulatory and unintentional exploration of Chisinau's backstreets continued until finally we stood outside a building with 'Federatia Moldoveasca de Fotbal' emblazoned above its door. This was a good sign, literally, as it surely meant this was the Moldovan Football Federation, unlike the four previous buildings that we had been to. I could see that Iulian looked a little uncomfortable. The morning's failures on the phone had driven me to opt for this policy of just turning up, and it wasn't really Iulian's style, or given his sense of direction, his forte.

What shall I say?' he asked me as we hesitated on the steps outside.

'Not too much at first. Just say that I'm a journalist from England who would like to find some of the national footballers for an interview.'

'OK.'

Inside Iulian spoke rapidly to the man behind the desk who bore as little resemblance to a pretty receptionist as I could remember ever having noted. He shuffled off and returned with a delightfully gentle-looking young man who spoke excellent English. He politely introduced himself as Andrei, the team's translator.

'How may I help you?' he asked.

I explained. I gave him the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He laughed, especially at the bit about stripping naked and singing the Moldovan National Anthem.

'So how may I help you?' he said again.

'Er, well . . . here's a list of the players I have to play – it would be very helpful if you could tell me which clubs they play for, where they train, and offer any ideas on how best to contact them.'

Andrei looked a little taken aback and a little short on ideas. To be fair to him, an Englishman turning up wanting to play tennis against the footballers for whom he translated may not have been what he was expecting of his Monday afternoon. Nevertheless he promised to help and returned ten minutes later with all the relevant details nicely typed out for me in English. What a splendid fellow.

He went through it with me. Some of the news was good. Five of the players played for one club – Zimbru Chisinau, and two other players also played for clubs based in the capital. A further two, Stroenco and Rogaciov, played for clubs in Transnistria. This I knew could be a problem.

When Gorbachev began
perestroika
during the later 1980s there had been an upsurge in Moldovan nationalism which favoured the adoption of Romanian as the national language. However there was also much opposition to this from the Russians who formed the majority in the region east of the River Dniestr known as Transnistria. These Russians supported a political movement called
Yedinstvo
('Unity') and when Moldova became a republic in September 1991 they refused to recognise the new government and suspended application of Moldovan law in their jurisdiction. Unilaterally they gave themselves the snappy title The Transnistrian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic', and embarked on a full-scale civil war with the Moldovan government in Chisinau. All this had gone largely unnoticed by Western observers and particularly by me. I'd been too busy practising my serve.

The lingering problem was that although the fighting had ceased, none of the disputes had been resolved. The region had its own police force, currency and army, and it operated strict border controls even though it was not recognised by the International Community. 'Not being recognised' by the International Community meant that apart from the International Community walking straight past you without nodding, they didn't bother to invite you to enter the Eurovision Song Contest, or allow you to have a national football team which could compete on the international stage. And so it was that Stroenco and Rogaciov played for 'Moldova' even though they came from the 'Transnistrian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic', a territory described to me as bandit country and a place which I should consider unsafe to visit.

The other bit of bad news was that two recent transfers meant that Alexandru Curtianu was now playing his football for Zenit St Petersburg in Russia, and Marin Spynu was with a club in Israel.

This might take longer than I thought,' I said with a wry smile.

Yes,' said Andrei.

Iulian remained silent.

'Ill meet you tomorrow at ten at the Journalism Centre,' I said as we stood outside the bar, 'and the plan will be just to turn up at the headquarters of the football clubs.'

Iulian nodded obediently and headed off into the Chisinau evening, his first day over with his new boss. I wondered what he had made of it all. He didn't look in the least bewildered. Perhaps he was good at dissembling.

I couldn't really have chosen a more downmarket bar, but it was close by and it suited my purposes. I wanted to ruminate on the day's events over a beer before wandering back to the Journalism Centre where in an hour Corina and her husband Aurel would meet and drive me to the lodgings they'd arranged for me. The bar was grim and stark. Apart from two posters advertising Coke and Orbit chewing gum, there were no decorations anywhere. Totally incongruous House music blared from a radio which wasn't quite tuned in correctly. Behind the bar there was one shelf with a dozen or so bottles standing on it, a calendar and a big woman who would have struggled to meet the criteria for entry into Stringfellows.

I ordered an Arc beer using a combination of vague Romanian and accurate pointing, and went and sat down at one of the four empty tables. The other customer, an old man crouched over a vodka at the end of the bar, looked up and viewed me suspiciously. Then he gathered himself, threw back the vodka in one swift action and marched out of the bar without ever breaking eye contact with the floor just in front of his shoes. I looked up at the barmaid and smiled. She immediately averted her eyes and went back to washing up some glasses. I took a sip of my beer and sat back pensively.

A few minutes later another man ambled in. There was a short exchange at the bar and a vodka was poured. He took hold of the glass, threw the drink down his neck, turned around and walked straight out of the bar again. The whole transaction had taken no more than thirty seconds. Other imbibers followed at regular intervals. The fastest time was set by a big bloke in a leather jacket who managed to order, down his drink and be out of the bar in seventeen seconds flat I had been there fifteen minutes and was still only half way through my beer. No wonder I was getting funny looks. Theirs was not social drinking. There was no joy in this. People came into this bar to demolish drinks. No passing of the time of day, not even a nod which acknowledged the presence of anyone else; simply a quick fix and then out again. Nurse, give me something to deaden the pain.

Presently a man with a ruddy complexion which divulged the nature of his favourite pastime, staggered over to me and muttered something. I shrugged and gave him my apologetic Romanian for 'I am from England':

'Sunt din Anglia.'

Then he did something odd. He smiled.

'Sunt Moldovan,'
he said, before wobbling out into the night.

I looked up to see the barmaid smiling too. I felt good. Two smiles. As Corina had said that very morning, 'Nothing is impossible.'

Darkness had fallen during the period of revelry in the bar. I started to walk back to the Journalism Centre, confused by something. This was odd. It seemed that the darkness was darker here in Moldova. It was, it was definitely darker here. How could that be? I looked up and around me to discover I was enveloped by an inky blackness. I could see nothing except for the reason why this was so. No streetlights. Not a light on anywhere. Behind me I heard breathing and, startled, I stopped and turned, only to feel a body brush past me. In the murky dimness I could just make out a woman carrying a shopping bag. I fumbled around in search of the pavement, which I was only able to do by taking advantage of the occasional moments of illumination provided by cars' headlights. Nervously I negotiated the two blocks back to the centre.

'Is there a power cut?' I asked Corina from the back seat of the car, as we headed towards the home of the family where I was to stay.

'No, it has been like this for four years now,' came the reply. The government is trying to save power by having no lighting in the streets.'

Wow.'

Yes, I suppose that you are surprised. We are used to it now. The worst thing about it is the manholes.'

The manholes?'

Yes, they have no covers, they are made of metal so organised gangs steal them and melt them down for profit.'

'I see. Nice mix – pitch darkness and random holes in the ground.'

'Yes, we have many injuries.'

Corina registered my look of disbelief before continuing, You are lucky to be staying with Grigore and Dina, they have hot water – most of the flats in Chisinau don't have this or heating because of problems with the boilers and this power shortage.'

I had become used to power always being available at the flick of a switch. I was yet to discover that much of my journey was to be taken up with learning how to cope without it.

At once, I liked them both very much. Grigore was in his early forties, dark, plumpish and with a neatly trimmed wispy moustache. His wife Dina had an elegant beauty which I guessed would have made her quite a catch in years gone by. Kindness was in their faces. They greeted me warmly, and though evidently weary, their eyes shone with a sense of being alive which had been so absent from many of the faces I had seen throughout the day. These were my landlords. Two doctors – you will like them. Typical Moldovan,' Corina had said. Their children stood proudly at their sides; 17-year-old Adrian, and just the sweetest little 11-year-old girl Elena. This was to be my family while I was here. Good, I liked the idea of this.

Adrian and Elena went off to do their homework and I was left in the hallway with Dina, Grigore, and a huge communication problem. Grigore's linguistic skills covered Romanian, Russian and a little German while Dina spoke Romanian, Russian and knew a few French words. I spoke English and French. So, from our vast collective vocabularies we were reduced to scrabbling about in Dina's sparse lexicon of French in order to hobble towards any semblance of understanding.

Things moved discouragingly slowly. Grigore said something to me in rapid fire Romanian and looked at me expecting a response as if I had understood him completely. I shook my head. Dina repeated the same sentence more slowly and this time I shook my head in such a way as to suggest that I was getting closer to understanding, even though I plainly wasn't. Then I took a guess and picked up my bag, thinking that they wanted to show me to my room. They waved at me to put it down, saying
'Nu, nu, nu, nu.'
(From my extensive studies I knew that 'nu' meant 'no'.) Then Dina struggled with some French. It served no purpose other than making me feel very good about mine.

Eventually the miming began. I took to this with ease as I already felt like a man walking into the wind. Grigore made frantic gestures with his fingers near his mouth.

'Ah!' I gushed in excited realisation. 'Do I want to
eat?'

'Da da!'
exclaimed a relieved Grigore.

From my extensive studies I knew that Dada was either an early twentieth-century international movement in art and literature repudiating conventions and intended to shock, or Romanian for 'Yes, yes'. I took an intelligent guess that the latter had been intended, and offered my very own
'Da'
in authentic Romanian, adding in English,

'I
am
hungry.'

Grigore immediately responded at enormous speed in his native tongue. It was as if he felt that now we'd cleared the blockage caused by not knowing whether I was hungry or not, there was nothing to prevent a free-flowing dialogue from here on in. At the end of his long sentence I was too weary to try and communicate that I hadn't understood a bloody word of it, so I took a chance.

'Da,'
I said, in confident bluff.

Grigore and Dina said nothing; in fact they looked a little shocked. I decided to change tack.

'Nu,'
I said, correcting myself.

The two faces looked instantly relieved and Grigore laughed, picked up my bag, and lead me to my bedroom. To this day I do not know what he'd asked me. For all I know he could have said:

'Are you intending to introduce my children to Western pornography, sleep with my wife and steal vintage brandy from my collection beneath the stairs?'

'Nu'
was the right answer to this one every time, even if you didn't really mean it.

At dinner, for which Grigore opened a bottle of Moldovan white wine in honour of his new house guest, communication was a little easier because Elena was eating with us and she spoke incredibly good English for her age, picked up largely from watching American cartoons on television. The poor girl was under enormous pressure since all dialogue was relayed through her. The delay caused by waiting for the translations brought a weighty formality to proceedings. It was like we were delegates at a meeting of the United Nations. I suddenly became aware of the power of the interpreter, a power which could easily be abused. One had no choice but to trust that they were giving an accurate representation of your views. I wondered how many of the world's troubles had been caused by interpreters simply deciding to give their own spin on things:

The senator is saying that the US Government has decided to halt further food aid to Russia because Mr Primakov smells.'

'Well, that's interesting because Mr Primakov says he will not support sanctions against Iraq because your President has girly hair and his eyes are too close together.'

Adrian joined us at the table and ate with zeal, no doubt with a view to being back in his room as soon as possible. He looked more stern than the rest of his family and clearly had the potential to be a sulky incommunicative adolescent. His English was very good but he was a less effective translator than Elena simply because he really couldn't be bothered. On one occasion, in order to rest his increasingly tired young sister, I looked to Adrian for elucidation on something his father had said, but he just shook his head as if to say 'Honestly, that really wasn't worthy of translation.' Grigore shrugged and pulled a face which crossed language barriers. 'He's at
that
age.'

A few minutes later the inevitable question was asked.

'My farver wants to know,' said the bubbly and enchanting Elena, 'what you are doing here in Moldova.'

Ah yes, that little question. I suppose it had been bound to come up sooner or later. How I longed for a simple answer – 'I'm working at the UN' or 'I'm teaching English in a school.' Instead I had to explain, via an 11-year-old girl with an English vocabulary gleaned from animated cats and dogs, something which even fellow English speakers had struggled to comprehend. Elena did her best but was severely hampered by not knowing what the word 'bet' meant. This proved to be an insurmountable problem, and after blank looks and many a furrowed eyebrow, Adrian had the decency to step in and offer his services. In manageable chunks, I told him the nature of my task which he relayed to his expectant parents. With each piece of information their faces filled with bewilderment and by the end of the explanation Grigore's jaw was hanging open in disbelief.

'Tu es optimist,
said Dina in her best French.

'Yes. What I am doing is kind of like a scientific experiment to prove that optimism produces results.'

On receipt of this last sentiment the entire family regarded me as if I was some kind of circus freak. Grigore filled my wine glass, said something which got a big laugh, and proposed a toast. I was oblivious to its nature, it was probably something like:

To the nutcase we've let into our house. May we not live to regret it.'

I raised my glass.

'Prost!'
I said, not actually knowing if this was the Romanian for 'cheers' but guessing that
'prost'
was widely used everywhere east of Strasbourg.

A sudden silence descended over the table.

'We say
"Naroc",'
said Adrian coldly,
'Prost
means stupid.'

'Oh, right, sorry.'

I immediately logged this away as 'Useful Information', reckoning that not calling the host 'stupid' had to be a distinct social advantage in any country. Fortunately, the initial astonishment around the table softened into smiles and laughter.

The wine was good. Moldova's climate and soil provides excellent conditions for vine growing, and it used to be the biggest wine producer in the former Soviet Union. In fact, in its Cricova cellars which remain state-owned, it can still boast the largest wine cellar in the world, with 64 kilometres of underground tunnels storing about 3.5 million decalitres of wine at a depth of 60 metres. It seems that when the Soviets did things, they did things big. Moldova was
the
winery of the former communist state and Cricova was
the
wine cellar. Apparently, Yuri Gagarin, the legendary first man in space, wrote in the visitors book when he visited Cricova in 1966:

'It is easier to overcome the power of gravitation than the attraction of these wine cellars.'

Gagarin clearly meant what he said since he spent a full two days in the place before venturing back out into daylight. Well, if you liked a drink, as Yuri clearly did, then you could see his point of view.

It became apparent that Grigore liked drink, if not as much as Yuri Gagarin, then certainly as much as I did, since most of the bottle served to replenish our two glasses only. The rest of the family, the abstemious ones, retired to bed early and Grigore and I were left alone. He offered me a Moldovan cognac and I judged that it would have been rude to refuse. Besides, here was an opportunity to bond man to man with a nice easy chat. Grigore poured the brandy proudly and raised his glass.

'Naroc!'
I said, keeping my fingers crossed that my poor pronunciation hadn't meant that I'd just called him an arsehole.

'Naroc!'
he replied, beaming playfully.

Things had got off to a good start.

It was to be downhill from here. I was bombarded with another torrent of strange guttural sounds which meant that Grigore was asking me another question. His eyes twinkled expectantly awaiting my reply. You had to admire his complete refusal to accept that I had a vocabulary of only four words in his language. One of them,
'Prost',
was going to become relevant soon if he carried on like this. I smiled vacuously in recognition of not having recognised a word. Grigore took a sip from his brandy and it somehow gave him the inspiration to attempt some English.

'What iz you? Ears?'

What?'

'What iz you ears?'

'Ears?'

'Da
– ears.
Uno, doi, tre –
ears! What iz your ears?'

'I'm not sure I know what you mean.'

Yes I was. I was damn sure I didn't have a clue what he meant.

'Me,' continued Grigore bravely. 'Me –
patruzeci trei
ears.'

Ah, I recognised some numbers in there. I'd learned a bit of counting.

'Patruzeci –
that's forty.'

'Da.'

'And
trei
is three.'

'Da.'

'Right. So you're saying you have forty-three ears?'

'Da! Da!'
he cried with immense relief.

I looked at him in disbelief. He appeared to be exaggerating by forty-one.

'Oh!' I said, the penny finally dropping. You're saying you have forty-three
years.'

'Da. Da.
What
iz your
ears?'

'I'm thirty-eight.'

He looked blank. No surprise that he had failed to understand. Five minutes later after much laborious holding up of fingers he had a rough idea of how old I was, which would have been something he could have divined simply by looking at me. I took a sip of brandy. This male bonding thing was rather hard work. I wasn't looking forward to the part where we moved on to politics. However, by manufacturing three consecutive yawns I was able to signal that bedtime was upon us and thankfully our struggle was over. We exchanged goodnights and shook hands cordially. The little chat, though hardly a flowing one, had confirmed one thing at least. We liked each other.

As I lay on the single bed in my colourless, uncomplicated bedroom I felt strangely at home. The family had set me at ease. They'd brought to me a warmth. This was something I would come to rely on in the coming weeks. In Moldova you looked to relationships for warmth. The radiators were useless.

We were lost again, just as we had been the previous day.

'Is it a national characteristic of Moldovans not to number things correctly?' I asked Iulian cheekily.

'People do number their addresses correctly,' he replied, 'but I'm trying to convince the driver that he's not where he thinks he is.'

I would need less convincing. I already felt as if I was in some kind of suspended reality. I had spent the morning in the back of a Lada which was driving us around the drab suburbs of the city in a search for Zimbru Chisinau's training ground. At ten-minute intervals we had pulled over to the side of the road so that Iulian and the taxi driver Alexandra could argue over the map before setting off to a number of locations which had only one thing in common – that of not being Zimbru Chisinau's training ground.

At one point I had been hopeful. We were outside some gates with 'Zimbru Chisinau' written on them. For me, this was promising. Surely worth getting out and asking. But no, Iulian insisted that this was the wrong address and he instructed the driver to take us off in search of the right one.

An hour later we pulled up outside the same gates.

This is not it, but I will go and ask,' said Iulian without enthusiasm.

I watched from the back seat as he ambled up to two men who were sharing an animated conversation. He did not interrupt but stood patiently by for them to finish. Iulian was confident and self-assured but he certainly wasn't pushy. Ten minutes later, when the men had finished their conversation and exchanged protracted goodbyes Iulian seized his moment. The discussion which followed did not seem to be taking the form of Iulian receiving directions to another location. When he returned to the car I sought enlightenment.

Well?' I asked.

This is the place, the players are training in there,' he said without a hint of an apology.

'Good.'

Wait. It's not all good. That man was the club's president Nicolae Ciornii. I told him what you wanted to do and he said that they are operating a closed regime at the moment. No-one is allowed into the grounds. They are practising every day because they have a full programme with matches every other day. He says that right now they will not have any time to help you but they do have a short break between the 1st and 7th November when it might be possible.'

I sat numb in the back seat of the car. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. Closed regime? Players practising every day? I had expected the Moldovan footballers to be amateurs who I could meet at the factory gates after work and lead jovially off to the tennis courts. I wasn't at all happy with this revelation. The facts that Iulian had just related to me swirled in my head. Today was 20th October. The players might be able to help between the 1st and the 7th. But that was two weeks away. I looked up at Iulian with a wry smile.