Playing the Moldovans At Tennis (6 page)

I thanked the woman with a grace intended to provoke a modicum of shame (it didn't) and left her to punch the air in celebration at having turned two more people away.

Huge houses, some as big as palaces, dominated the skyline at the top of the hill.

'Quite something isn't it?' said Anita.

'It certainly is,' I replied, shaking my head in wonder. They must be so rich – they're the opposite of gypsies everywhere else in the world.'

I clung on tight to my video camera remembering what Anita had been told by the villagers about it not being safe but I did not feel worried. I felt that this was probably a paranoid fear which had been nurtured over centuries of prejudice against the Romani peoples of the world. Theirs has not been a happy history. Persecution mostly. Their social organisation probably hasn't helped them much in acquiring a general acceptance wherever they end up, since gypsies are largely encouraged not to socialise with non-Romani, whom they call
gadje.
Keeping yourself separate in this way is always going to result in your being pretty high in the International Scapegoat chart. But with wealth comes power and here in Moldova, in an extraordinary twist on our expectations, the gypsies had it better than everyone else.

'Do gypsies build houses like this in England?' asked a gypsy man as he proudly stood outside his palace. Of course, he already knew the answer.

We had asked him if he knew where King Arthur lived and he promised that he would tell us, but not until he and his wife had taken us on a guided tour of their house. It was built on a lavish scale with an oriental and Moorish design and with an extraordinarily shiny metal roof. Inside it was commodious and ostentatious with exotic chandeliers and frescos of biblical scenes covering the walls. The husband who appeared to be in his late fifties explained that he had built the house with the money that he had earned from working in Russia for one year. It was fairly apparent to all of us that in a year you simply couldn't make that amount of money legally. He must have been involved in drug smuggling or some such illicit activity. It was odd to be accepting the hospitality of someone who we were sure was a criminal. Quite possibly this whole community was built on criminal activity. Theirs was a lopsided culture in which breaking the law was the norm, and boy did it pay. For them it was not indecent, and it wasn't wrong. Those who followed the rule of law were mugs. Like the Moldovans struggling down in the village.

I felt nervous as Iulian listened to the directions to King Arthur's place. As expected, a long period of aimless wandering followed. At almost every turn we stumbled on a house which was fit for a king, but sadly not King Arthur's. Iulian looked decidedly pissed off. Since I was filming with my video camera it had fallen upon him to lug the Do It All round table and he was not enjoying the experience.

Eventually, by taking the opposite direction to the one proposed by Iulian, we met a little old lady in a black headscarf who was sitting on a seat in front of some big, black wrought-iron gates. She told us we were standing directly outside King Arthur's house. We asked if she was sure and she replied that she was, and we felt confident of this when she went on to explain that she was his mother. She told us that King Arthur had gone to Chisinau and wouldn't be back until tomorrow.

Great, I thought. He was in exactly the place from which I'd just spent three and a half hours travelling on an uncomfortable bus. However, once the mother learned that I had travelled all the way from England with a gift for her son, she immediately invited us inside and gave us the now standard tour of the property.

It was capacious and gaudy with frescos of the family on all the walls. Justifiable I suppose since they were a royal family. The gypsies governed themselves according to an intricate pattern of family relationships with a group of related families forming the
vista
(clan) which was headed by a leader called the
baro
(king). King Arthur's mother, Anushka, babbled in a mixture of Russian and the gypsy language
Roma
which Iulian struggled to translate. She had been recently widowed when her husband Mircea, the former King, had died. She may have all these riches, she said pointing around her, but she was nothing without a husband and so she no longer went out. Anita let out a little yelp. These were hardly the feminist views which she had learnt on America's West Coast.

'Is it true,' I asked, 'that according to gypsy tradition, the belongings of the deceased are buried along with them?'

I had read about this and thought it a rather noble custom since it encouraged people to distribute wealth while they were still alive rather than hoard it and then pass it on to some spoilt child for subsequent squandering. It seemed that Mircea's death may have been rather sudden and precluded a satisfactory distribution of his assets, since according to Anushka he had been buried along with a computer laptop and a mobile phone. The spiritualists and psychics in the gypsy community must have felt under threat. No need for a seance to contact the dead any more. Just ring the mobile. (Assuming that Mircea had gone to heaven of course – one of the major drawbacks of hell is that you can't get a signal down there.)

After we had toured the huge bedroom which was almost like a dancehall, Anushka showed us a smaller room which contained some of Mircea's other possessions which for some reason had not been buried. One was a gun. A large rifle.

What did he use it for?' I asked.

'Shooting at night – just shooting at night,' came Iulian's translation.

'Shooting at what?'

Anushka spoke for some time.

'Anything – he'd just go out and shoot,' was Iulian's abridgement.

Fair enough. A man needs hobbies.

Back in the living room we met two new old ladies; one was Anushka's mother, Dunea, and the other a cousin named Natasha. I announced that I wanted to make a formal presentation of my gift. On learning this, Anushka scuttled off to bring drinks. I don't know what kind of gift she felt that I had brought for her son, but the impressive array of champagnes and cognacs which were laid before us suggested that she was expecting it to be rather better than a Do It All round table. I became a little nervous as to what response its eventual offering might elicit.

We were asked if we wanted Moldovan brandy with champagne chasers and we said Yes, thank you'. Well, it would have been rude not to. Dunea and Natasha didn't put up much of a fight either. An easy half an hour passed with regular replenishment of all of our glasses and I marvelled at how quickly we had gone from being strangers outside the gates to being treated like old family friends. These people either prided themselves on being excellent hosts or would settle for any old excuse to sit around and get pissed.

Then the moment arrived. I stood up on slightly wobbly feet and made a slurred speech to three old gypsy ladies in a remote outpost of northern Moldova explaining the historical significance of King Arthur and his round table. (An inevitable event in my life – in fact I couldn't understand why it had taken so long to come about.) My now drunk translator did his best, but frankly I don't think he had a clue what I was rambling on about.

I made a formal presentation of the table to Anushka and she accepted it with good grace. She showed neither pleasure nor disenchantment. She had every right to be insulted, it was after all a shabby present, but she remained unmoved, her years as a royal probably having required her to develop an expression which disclosed no emotion, even in the light of disappointing furniture. She left the room and I felt a tad nervous that she might have been fetching her late husband's gun with a view to demonstrating how it was still in full working order, but she returned bearing gifts. She proudly presented Iulian and Anita with a pair of socks each, and I was given some underpants with 'Made in Romania' stamped on them. A fair exchange. A plastic round table for a slightly dodgy pair of pants. (I only wished I'd suggested a similar barter in Do It All instead of parting with cash.)

I enquired whether my new lady friends knew of anyone who could read my fortune, and Natasha was quick to put herself forward as something of an expert in reading the cards. I was whisked into another room where I was promptly asked to part with 50 lei (around ten dollars). I began bargaining, believing that not to do so would be an insult. I waved twenty lei back at Natasha and she shook her head dismissively. I was just about to produce another ten when I heard Anushka's voice and turned around to see her at the door sternly castigating her cousin. Natasha meekly nodded to her, took my twenty lei and began the reading. My, Anushka really must have been taken with that table.

I had never been to any kind of fortune-teller before, my thinking being that doing so puts you in a no-win situation. If they're right then you know what is going to happen and the fun goes out of finding out
(Yeah, yeah, I knew I was going to get that promotion)
and if they're wrong you might not find out till you'd already followed their advice and gone out and made yourself a Lloyds Name. However on this occasion I decided that it was entirely the right thing to do, a decision in no small way linked to the amount of brandy and champagne chasers I had drunk.

Natasha set three cards down before her and launched into the usual clichés.

You will have a trip,' she declared, via the patient Iulian.

Not a difficult prediction to make since I was in Moldova and she knew I didn't live here. It was a fair assumption that getting home without making a trip would be tricky. I wasn't impressed. It was a bit like beginning a fortune-telling with the words, You will go to the toilet soon.' We all know that. We want something more specific like, 'You will go to the toilet some time in March.'

She continued.

Watch out during the night – there is some danger.'

What danger? Which night? But before I could ask she had placed more cards down on the table and was offering further divinations.

'You are planning some work and you will manage it.'

Excellent, did this mean that I would beat the entire Moldovan national football team at tennis? Or did it simply mean that one day I would successfully creosote the shed in my back garden? Natasha needed to be more precise.

'Can you ask her,' I whispered to Iulian, 'if she can tell me what's going to happen to me in the next three weeks?'

'She says she will get to that,' said Iulian.

First I had to sit through more excruciating nonsense.

There are two women in your future,' she went on. 'A dark one and a blonde one. Pick the dark one.'

I see, it was as simple as that Pick the dark one. That might not be such an easy decision if I found myself involved in a love triangle with Denise Van Outen and Anne Widdecombe. 'Sorry, Denise, but you've got the wrong colour hair.'

There was more drivel to follow including the extraordinary information that there would be 'some white man in my fate'. Who would have thought that living as I did in a country with a population in the region of 25 million white men, there would be one who would manage to become involved in my fate? I should certainly be keeping a close eye on all the white men in my life from here on in.

Finally growing tired, I lent over with my notebook and showed her the names of the footballers and asked her to tell me which ones I should play first and which ones were going to be good at tennis. Something in her expression told me that this was a question she hadn't been asked before. This did not fall within her usual domain. Normally for twenty lei she didn't actually tell you anything that might be of use to you but on this occasion she had Anushka standing over her, and Anushka loved me because I'd given her son a plastic round table.

Natasha took my notebook and looked at the names for some time before turning to Iulian and declaring that she couldn't read. I wondered what had caused the delay. She should have been party to that information immediately. It was almost as if she had looked at the notebook in the hope that she
could
read and then discovered that for some reason today it just wasn't happening. 'I'm sorry but I can't read today. Sore throat.'

Iulian read the footballers names to her and instead of telling me in which order to challenge them she told me which ones I should play and which ones should be avoided. Romanenco and Fistican met her approval but the moment she heard the name Spynu, she shook her head forcefully and uttered disapprovingly,

'Don't play Spynu!'

She went on to damn Culibaba, Sishkin and Miterev with the same dismissive air. These four, she said, should be avoided at all costs, and I should not play them. Furthermore she maintained that I should not drink with these characters as they would try to poison me.

This was dramatic stuff and not at all what I had been expecting. I had thought that maybe one or two of the footballers might be unwilling to play me but I had never imagined that any of them would harbour any desire to have me poisoned. Surely they didn't take their tennis that seriously?

I thanked Natasha but decided to ignore her advice, for two reasons. First, because to have followed it would have meant that the bet was lost, and secondly because she was clearly talking complete bollocks.

That night, as I lay awake cursing the hardness of Anita's floor I imagined the exchange which might have taken place between King Arthur and his mother when he arrived back later that evening.

'Mother, I don't believe it – you're pissed again.'

'Only a little.'

'And what's this crappy table?'

Well, apparently there were these English knights who all sat—'

'And where are my new socks and boxer shorts?'

'Ah.
Yours
were they?'

I was ready to break out on my own.

'Are you sure you'll be all right?' enquired Iulian like an over-protective parent.

'I'll be fine,' I replied like an over-confident teenager.

It was Thursday afternoon and we were at Chisinau bus station having left Anita, Soroca and my three gypsy girlfriends three and a half hours behind us. Up until this point I had always been chaperoned around the capital but now I felt I had acquired enough basic Romanian and city experience to be able to get home alone. Iulian had given incredibly detailed instructions, right down to the last lamp post. I couldn't blow it.

The maxi taxis, as they were called, seemed to be a very good idea and the city swarmed with them. These were minibuses which could be flagged down at any point and would drop you anywhere on demand, and they were my favoured travel option. The city trams looked no fun at all, jam packed as they were with contorted passengers, but always willing to stop for the indecorous stuffing of yet one more human inside, just like one might try and force a shirt into an already overflowing linen basket There was no such thing as a '
TRAM FULL
' sign in this town.

With the directions memorised down to the last detail I hauled myself on to the maxi taxi. I attempted to offer money to the driver, but he was having none of it and waved me away impatiently. This was strange. I thought these things were privately run – surely they couldn't be free? I sat down near a window and began looking for the landmarks by which I would chart my course and felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see a woman handing me a one lei note. Stranger still. It appeared I was being
paid
to travel on the capital's transport system. No wonder the economy was in trouble – these Moldovans really hadn't grasped this free-market business at all. I smiled at the woman and declined her kind offer, but she frowned, muttered something and forced it upon me. Baffled, I sat holding the note in front of me like an infected needle until she pointed to the man in front and urged me to give it to him. Ah, she must have owed it to him, I thought, so I timidly tapped him on the shoulder and passed it on, happy to have fulfilled my intermediary debt-collecting role. Instead of thanking me, the man simply took the money and gave it to the woman in front of him. Crikey, how many passengers owed other people money on this bus? It wasn't until the money had arrived at the driver and he had turned and shouted something angrily at me that I finally understood the system. You get on, sit down and pass one lei forward to the driver. In a slight panic I apologised, quite possibly in Italian instead of Romanian, and passed my money forward while my fellow passengers demonstrated their well-rehearsed dirty looks. This hurdle over, the rest of the journey should be fine, I thought.

I hadn't reckoned on the diversion. Just around the corner from the bus station the road was blocked and the police waved their batons frantically re-directing us on to a route devoid of any hospital, basilica, or roundabout mentioned by Iulian. Within a mere five minutes of leaving him I had become completely lost in a strange city with a hostile crowd and a suspicious driver for company. Twice before I had been driven from the Journalism Centre to my lodgings; but on both occasions it had been pitch dark and I'd learnt nothing from the journeys of an orienteering nature which could be useful to me now. All I knew was what Grigore had shown me on my first night when he'd led me out of his back door, walked me through his garden and shown me a shop called 'Avida' which was in the main road where all the buses, trams and maxi taxis stopped.

Desperately I scanned the street ahead in the hope that the shop might appear like a saviour before me, but it didn't. I took a moment to assess my immediate prospects. Having no map, hardly any language, and no idea in which direction we were heading, they probably weren't that good. After the ten minutes had elapsed which Iulian had estimated for the journey I felt I should take some action before I ended up somewhere in some remote backwater of the city's suburbs. The maxi taxi had now become rather full with bodies filling what little standing space had become available. I grabbed my bag and struggled forward to ask my chum the driver for assistance.

As I reached him he stopped the van to let a passenger off, much to my relief. It was too crowded on here, and now that I was standing I needed enough room to be able to bend down so that I could look out of the window for a glimpse of the elusive 'Avida'. A lady got off but the driver wanted to let three more on. What was he thinking of? There simply wasn't room. Two men forced themselves through the door but the third guy couldn't manage it. The driver turned to me, pointed to my bag which I was clutching to my chest, and signalled to me to put it on the floor by his gear stick. Reluctantly, and under a barrage of clamorous and ill-tempered Romanian, I obliged. This enabled the cramming in of one more body.

Excellent, what fun I was having. It was now difficult for me to bend down to see out of the window without forcing my bottom into the face of the elderly woman sitting immediately to my left. She looked a little shaken, probably never having been subjected to a British arse at such close proximity before. If things carried on like this, in ten minutes she would be able to select mine as her specialist subject on Mastermind.

When the driver made his next stop two people squeezed past me to get off but astonishingly another four were admitted. This had the alarming result of forcing me down the minibus and away from my bag and, given that I couldn't see beyond the back of the head of the man in front of me whose neck my nose was being plunged into, anyone could take my bag and I could do nothing about it Inside it there was a camera worth the equivalent of three years' salary for the average Moldovan. It might be someone's lucky day. So far, it hadn't been mine.

Just when I had finished an exhaustive mental search of the 'What on earth should I do?' section of my brain and decided that the only real option was to start crying and shout
'I want my mummy!'
at the top of my voice, quite miraculously we drew up alongside a shop with the letters 'AVIDA' spelt out above its window.

'Stop!' I bellowed, fighting my way forward towards the door.

Grudgingly, passengers made what little space they could and I forced my way through this black hole of Calcutta to the front of the mini-bus. To my immense relief, the bag with its valuable contents remained untouched at the very front of the vehicle. It seemed that the years spent under a disciplinarian communist regime with its harsh penalties for offenders meant that opportunist thieves were still thin on the ground. Never mind, a few more years of capitalism would sort that out. For now though, I thanked my lucky stars, grabbed my bag and hopped on to the pavement a relieved man.

With surprising ease I found the back gate to my lodgings and made my way through Grigore's small but nonetheless overgrown garden and headed round the side of the house to its back door. On reaching it, I realised that I had a problem. I had in my hand the front door key and I was standing in front of the back door. No problem you'd think – simply walk round the path to the correct door. Easy, but for the large Alsatian dog which was barring that particular route, chained to its kennel and staring me out with eyes which suggested that it was the dog equivalent of a fanatical terrorist. The dog looked mean. The dog looked hungry. The dog looked like it might be very good indeed at taking hold of my leg in its teeth and never letting it go.

I had a problem. No-one in the family would be back for three or four hours and, given recent experiences, I wasn't overly keen on taking a maxi-taxi back to the Journalism Centre. I weighed up the situation and decided that it might be possible to run past the dog. If I took a run up, I could be travelling at a sufficient speed to prevent it being able to get enough purchase on my leg to hang on. However, I knew there was a risk of injury and my fitness was of paramount importance, given that I was in this country on purely sporting business. I wasn't aware of any tennis player on the professional circuit who prepared for matches by running past savage-looking Alsation dogs – other than maybe Goran Ivanisevic. It was a risk, but eventually I concluded that it was a risk worth taking. Furthermore, I had the brilliant but perhaps in hindsight somewhat foolish idea to film the event so that my heroic encounter with a savage dog might be on record for posterity.

Dumbly, I began setting up the camera tripod, just beyond reach of the dog's chain. For some reason, this seemed to provoke the dog and it began barking furiously. With the sound of each extension of the tripod's legs my canine friend became more agitated, for as far as the poor dog could make out, not only was I an unwanted trespasser but now I was an unwanted trespasser setting up a piece of equipment specifically designed for dog torture. It didn't make for a relaxed atmosphere. The deafening sound of the barking was augmented by the rattling of the chain as the now terrified dog made successive charges at the man who was about to commence its ritual torture. The combination of sounds was louder than any house alarm I had ever heard. I tried to quieten the dog down but my pleas of There, there, it's only a camera tripod' fell on deaf ears.

By the time the tripod was fully erected a neighbour had appeared on the scene. An old man who shouted at me in Romanian, doing his utmost to be heard above the already tumultuous hubbub which I had brought to this otherwise peaceful neighbourhood. The old man was convinced he had caught a man red-handed in the act of robbery. To the dog my camera tripod looked like an instrument of torture but to the neighbour it was quite evidently the apparatus and housebreaking equipment of an experienced burglar. He began screaming at me and waving his arms. I had every reason to suspect that he was threatening to call the police. I needed to try and calm him down but I did not know the Romanian for 'I am not a burglar, I am simply setting up camera equipment so that I may film this angry dog.' Those Teach Yourself language books just don't give you the useful phrases you need for everyday life. I shouted back at him in English, just to add further to the general clamorous cacophony.

'It's all right, I live here!' I cried, as unthreateningly as is possible while bellowing.

A woman appeared now, anxious to see the cause of all this unexpected brouhaha. I continued my high-volume pointless exchange of ideas with the old man, the dog continued to try and break free from its chains in order to tear me apart limb by limb, and the woman continued to look on, dumbstruck. Iulian would have been proud of me.

Presently, the old man concluded that I wasn't a burglar, presumably because most criminals don't tend to hang around and argue their case, even though in this instance my argument must have been as incomprehensible as it was incoherent. In a rare moment of calm when the dog must have been pausing for breath, he was able to make a series of sounds and pointing gestures which suggested to me that there was another way around the house to the front door. I set off and discovered that a lengthy circuitous route did exist which eventually brought me out into the road by the entrance. The old man viewed me with suspicion.

Thank you for your help,' I offered meekly, and made my way to the door.

He made some remark or another which could have meant anything from 'Glad to have been of assistance' to 'Sod you!'. I didn't care. I had made it home, and I had made it into the house. All on my own. Was there no limit to what I could achieve in this country?

Further forays into the world of independence were considerably more successful in the latter half of the day. The first of these took the form of my walking to Moldova's National Tennis Centre, which I found with ease, unhampered as I was by Lilian's idiosyncratic sense of direction. I walked through the gates and there on my left was a large statue in the style of socialist realist art – a huge, Greek godlike, semi-naked man clasping a tennis racket, and doing so in such a way as to suggest that this particular item was going to provide the solution to all of Man's problems. An image which resonated with this particular beholder who was only too aware that the tennis racket would have to provide the solution to one of his. My growing worry was that the tennis racket was never going to have the opportunity.

Without Iulian by my side I had assumed that any form of communication with those who ran the centre would be impossible, or at best unsatisfactory. Not for the first time on this extraordinary day, I'd got things quite wrong. Jan spoke no English, but we were still able to understand each other perfectly.

Jan was the short, stocky man who had called me over, having for some minutes watched me with interest wandering aimlessly around his tennis courts. Our initial verbal exchanges furnished neither of us with any answers as to who we were or what either of us wanted. But then came an unusual twist.

'Est-ce que vous parlez français?'
asked Jan.

'Out, je parte français,'
I replied, instantly launching us into an unexpected new world of communication.

Jan's French was considerably more adequate than Dina's and he was able to alert me to the fact that he was the director of the tennis centre, before going on to outline the many problems facing Moldovan tennis. I learned that in Uri Gorban, Moldova had once boasted the number one player in the whole of the USSR, but now he couldn't even make the lower reaches of the world rankings because he didn't have the funds to travel to the tournaments. The sad truth was that a government which couldn't afford to power the street lights in its capital was never going to prioritise the overseas travel of budding tennis players.

When I told Jan what I was doing in his country he managed a brief smile before his face returned to its 'business as usual' expression. I was getting used to this now. This was not a country where they made a fuss. Asking if it would be OK for me to play the pick of the nation's footballers on his tennis courts provoked no raising of the eyebrows, but instead just the deadpan reply that it would be no problem provided it did not coincide with a junior training session, when all the courts were used. When I suggested that I would telephone ahead to ensure this didn't happen, Jan alerted me to a problem.