On the Road to Babadag

Moldova

THIS COUNTRY IS 300 kilometers at its longest and 130 at its widest. The entry at Leuşeni is all gray concrete and deserted. A woman in a uniform takes your passport and disappears for fifteen minutes. Only Moldovans and Romanians cross here, and probably not one of them comes for pleasure. After that, to the right, is a village on a slope. Several houses atilt; the rest have fallen. The earth sank and took a few dozen farms with it. On an untouched scrap of ground is a church outlined against the sky. The hills are long, low, green. In an occasional valley you can see a village, which at a distance resembles a camp: the houses all the same size, shape, and color, and all topped with the same asbestos tile. They look like tents of bleached canvas. Nothing stands apart; they are all of them together. Then you have nothing until the next village. Endless green, a gray blotch of cramped habitations, more green, more green, and again a clump of cement squares kept in place by an invisible perimeter.

The average salary here: twenty-five dollars. A dollar is about thirteen Moldovan lei. Moldovan bills are small and faded. Stephen the Great is on every one of them, with some official landmark on the back, a church or monastery. In Moldova there are 130 official landmarks. The list fits on one nine-by-twelve-inch page of the Moldovan atlas I bought in Chişinău. Half go back only to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The bills are generally threadbare. I spent not a little time wondering how the ATMs dealt with them. The machines gave me stacks of crumpled, limp, greasy, torn banknotes, but the sum was always correct. Until then I had thought that an ATM could count new bills only, or nearly new — or at least those that were still a little crisp. There are also coins, though few people use them. The fifty-bani piece is quite pretty: small, a matte gold color, with clumps of grapes on the back, in a lame attempt to convey prosperity. The cheapest cigarettes, Astras, cost two lei; the most expensive, Marlboros, sixteen.

You go to Cahul from the Sud-Vest Bus Station. It's at the edge of Chişinău, where the white apartment buildings end and the monotony of the hills begins. Under a metal overhang waits a solitary bus. The south is churchmouse-poor. The world ends there, and the best a person can do is move to Romanian GalaŢi.

Moldova is like an inland island. In order to get anywhere, the country recently obtained from Ukraine five hundred meters of Danube shoreline not far from Giurgiuleşti at the very south. But the big trucks still must grind through Ukraine and Poland to get to the Berlin and Frankfurt of their dreams. On the bus to Cahul, the passengers are all friendly. They share fruit. In exchange, they are glad for a slug of Ukrainian beer, Chernihiv, in a liter plastic bottle. They ask about everything and tell about themselves. They cannot fathom why someone would travel to Cahul or any other place. "But we have nothing there," they say.

On the day the Lord God distributed the earth to the human race, the Moldovan overslept. When he woke, it was too late. "And what about me, Lord?" he asked sadly. God looked down upon the sleepy, pitiful Moldovan and tried to think, but nothing came to Him. The earth had been divided up, and, being Lord God, He couldn't go back on His decisions, let alone start transplanting populations. Finally He waved a hand and said, "Too bad. Come on, then, you can stay with me in Paradise." So goes the legend.

When you travel to Cahul or any other place here, the legend rings true. The monotony suggests eternity. Continual green, continual fecundity, the land undulating, the horizon rising and falling, showing us only what we expect, as if not wishing to cause us the least unpleasantness. Grapes, sunflowers, corn, a few animals, grapes, sunflowers, corn, cows and sheep, on occasion a garden, and rows of nut trees always on either side of the road. No free space in this scenery, no sudden disjunction, and the imagination, encountering no ambush, soon dozes. Most likely events took place here a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago, but they left no trace. Life seeps into the soil, disperses into the air, burns calmly and evenly, as if confident that it will never burn out.

The stop in Cimişlia was the sort of place that is impossible to recall. Some kind of nothingness that for a moment attempted to be a bus station. A concrete apron open to the whistling wind at one end and closed off by a building at the other. Grayness, dust, and heat. The beer tap at the bar was a rubber hose wrapped with wire. Farther inside, everything was thrown together, layered haphazardly, by whim. Part dwelling, part rubbish heap; a dark, narrow, low area full of welded iron struts, pieces of sheet metal, laminated panels, all discarded from the start, to get the ruining over with early. The despair of objects despised. People sat, ate, drank, and waited, yet seemed naked, exposed to the wounding edges of all the junk.

A cart waiting at an intersection, hitched to a donkey. Nothing in the vicinity. It was only farther on and lower, where the cornfield ended, that the cement village appeared, gray. A woman got off the bus, pulling a cage thing on two wheels. A small bag was attached to it. Cage and bag were both homemade. A girl was waiting for her. They hugged, as if after a long separation. Then they climbed onto the cart. The two bigger, together, than the entire vehicle. The brown donkey made for the village. It seemed a game, because woman and girl hardly fit on what looked like something stolen from a child's merry-go-round.

What to say about Cahul? From there it's a couple of kilometers to the Romanian border, and then you're off to GalaŢi, by the Danube. On the main street in Cahul you felt the proximity of the border. Cars passed with a rumble, and in the pubs the melancholy kings of life warmed themselves in the air. They ordered Moldovan cognac, drank it by the glass, but their faces didn't move. They were able only to move their mouths, that was it; the rest was permanently frozen. They adjusted their gold chains and made sure people were looking. They even kept their cars running, so everyone would know that they had plenty of gas. Cahul at first glance: a hick town on the border, the nervous indolence of two-bit confidence men driving in circles to kill time.

In a park by a white church, a guy was renting out go-carts. He sat behind a desk in the shade of a tree and, using an hourglass, kept track of the time per ride. After him, the city imperceptibly became village. The trees were now taller than the houses. Goats cropped the grass at the foot of a partisan memorial, its cement heroes with big scars across their faces. In a nearby shop, a yellow light burned, though it was in the middle of the day. Three men entered, and a woman behind the counter poured vodka for them into shot glasses. A pub, I realized.

In the square before the hotel, dogs chewed at themselves all night. And howled. At dawn, cars began assembling with merchandise. It was a bazaar. Train cars without wheels served as stores. An insanely varied spectacle from my sixth floor. Everything sparkling and shimmering in the sun: foil, plastic, cellophane, glass, metal. Pickles, tomatoes, watermelons. I went down and saw that here was everything a person needed to live. Belts, golden corn, pickling jars, barrels for marinating. The music went in a loop. Women sat motionless over their wares, hands folded in laps, as if at home or on a bench by the front gate. I saw little gesturing, a lot of simple waiting.

The owner of a light-blue Renault refused my twenty euros. He said the roads were awful and the car would be destroyed. He wanted thirty, not including the gas. He was in light blue too, dapper. Next in the line, a Zhiguli. So old, I don't remember the color. The driver was big, fat, and unpleasant to look at. He said he'd take us, and his name was Misha. He was about fifty. We left Cahul. The road went up through rolling hills, vineyards, cornfields. The villages began suddenly and stopped as if cut off with a knife. Times were bad now, Misha told me. He brought up Stalin, though he was too young to remember him. Stalin was worth bringing up: he shot thieves. The problem with Moldova today, in Misha's opinion, was thievery. The whole country had been stolen from the ordinary people. In the Soviet days, when everything was communal and didn't belong to anyone, theft was not a problem. Like everything else, it was communal: everybody stole, and nobody lost. Now only the richest stole, and they made sure the poor couldn't, by inventing property. Property was an invention against ordinary people, who owned nothing. That was Misha, in Russian.

I wanted to go to Comrat, the capital of Gagauzia. It's not completely known who the Gagauz people are. In Moldova, they number 20,000. Their language is Turkic, their faith Orthodox Christianity, and they came to the Comrat area from Dobruja, when Russia annexed Moldova in 1812 and called it Bessarabia to erase the past. They could be Bulgarized Turks or Turkified Bulgars; no one is sure. And practically no one knows that they exist. So I went to Comrat, on roads as empty as landing strips.

It's hard to describe Comrat, because it's so easy to overlook. You ride through a city you can barely see. There are homes, streets, but they are all sketched in, a stopgap not thought through, the sadness of matter only half materialized, lacking the conviction to take full shape. A monument to Lenin had gold paint slapped on. A funeral procession went down the main street, its open coffin on a pickup truck. Beside the coffin, on a chair, sat an old woman in black. It was hot. Flies circled above the face of the deceased. The woman brushed them away with a green branch: a slow, tedious motion. Peculiar, these mourners walking in silence through the din of the everyday, between booths selling bread and vegetables, among bicycles, cars, and carts. Pushing their way against the current of life.

Before the Gagauzia Museum stood a statue in honor of the heroes of the war in Afghanistan. A kid with a rifle was painted silver. I thought I'd try the museum, and it seemed that the group inside was waiting just for me. A woman tour guide, accompanied by two other women, took a wood pointer and began to speak about the great migration of people from the heart of Asia. She tapped the map, and it turned out that the Gagauz were Turks after all, who instead of occupying the southern coast of the Black Sea strayed north. We proceeded from room to room, in chronological sequence. An old man appeared through a side door and told us he was a member of the Union of Sculptors of Gagauzia. He was born in 1935, in the village of świątkowa Wielka, not far from where I live. His name: Andrej Kopcza.

Misha kept getting lost. Fifty kilometers from his neighborhood, and his sense of direction left him. I showed him the map. He wouldn't trust roads he had never been on. They might be on the map, but he refused to believe in their existence. "Only Turks live there, so what's the point?" "Nothing but Bulgars there…" He wouldn't get out of the car, refused coffee, said no to lunch. It was beyond him how someone could waste time and money like this, why someone would come here. What kind of destination was the village Albota de Sus? Or Sofievca? Misha stayed in the car and looked at the gray post-Soviet pocks and scars spread throughout the green landscape, and I looked at him, and our minds were mutually impenetrable. He pined for what had been and despised what was left. "I am Soviet man," he declared that morning. But how could anything other than this be left, if there had been nothing other than this in the first place? The poverty and misery of objects created ad hoc could do only what they had been created to do: eat away at reality. The whole region seemed abandoned. A tractor and cart on the empty road, a man tossing out fresh-cut greens with a pitchfork, a few clumps at each turn. Charity or some kind of payment?

We were in Baurci at dusk. Misha took his money and drove off. In Baurci there are only Gagauz. We looked for Elena. We had met her two days earlier on a bus to Cahul. She had red hair and a shy, beautiful smile. She said she worked in Istanbul but was coming home now to see her children. She invited us, so here we were, trying to locate her in a village of 10,000 situated on low hills in the middle of a treeless plateau. "That's the one who had two husbands, and the second was a Turk," the villagers told us. We finally found her house. It stood in a long row of similar houses. The entrance was through a small, shady courtyard covered with creeping vines. Elena smiled again. She was surrounded by children. Her father came out. We were all embarrassed. "This is how we live," she said a few times. She wanted to show us everything at once. We went to the garden, inspected the vegetables, the grapes, here's the cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, we repeating after her, because we had come from afar and might not know what these things were. We inspected a gaunt roan calf tethered by a short chain to a dunghill. Pigs sat somewhere in the dark: we could smell them. Everything compact, close together. "They didn't give us much land," Elena said.

We slept in the biggest room. It was filled with knickknacks, in glass, plastic, porcelain, metal; figurines, ornaments, souvenirs, weavings, innocent nonsense — pale ballerinas, cheap watches, crystal balls — art with no pretension, a museum of neat stuff, oriental splendor, an orgy of beauty, trinkets, and dreams, a vision made flesh. It reminded me of the rooms of my country aunts and grandmothers, but those could not compare with this room in Baurci.

In the morning we inspected the village. Everyone came along: Elena, her children, her father, sister, brother-in-law Ilya, who knew the world, having served in the army in East Germany and built houses in Moscow. On the facade of the House of Culture, a folk-socialist mosaic. On a two-meter pedestal, a concrete bust of Lenin. "The best man, he," Elena said in Russian, smiling her smile. I understood then that they had nothing else here, that the memory of Baurci began sixty, seventy years ago; before that there was a blank. A donkey pulled the wagon; a child held the reins. Inside the cavernous House of Culture, the rumble of spiritless music. We found the source: an eighteen-year-old, pasty girl making gestures learned from television. The music issued from a tape, and she sang in a mechanical voice, lost in her sad and restless dance. For breakfast that morning we had a local dish: cooked pig skin. "Someday a movie theater comes," Elena said. Under a tree sat an old woman dressed in black. Beside her was a sack of sunflower seeds, and on a branch hung a rusty scale. The woman sat quietly, hands folded in her lap. On the tin gates leading out were images of the Olympics in Moscow: a stylized skyscraper topped with a red star.

Baurci was the true end of the Revolution. That's what it looked like. Nothing remained that could be used or that had any value — seventy years not worth shit. A caricature monument to a criminal before an empty building in which rumbled a desperate imitation of music from the rotten West. Only the donkey's harness made sense, had substance. I'll be frank: I was at a loss. People, you would think, know what is good for them, and their longing hearts cannot lie. Something didn't fit here, was not in key. I felt I was an intruder, an imbecile in a world I couldn't parse.

There was only one new building in Baurci, but it was large, perhaps even larger than the House of Culture. Beige walls, huge windows, a red roof. Simplicity, functionality, and overall a kind of bright challenge to the weary village. One sees something like that brightness in American films, say, when a young couple gets married. "Protestants," Elena said. I asked about the size of the congregation, but she didn't know. She said only that the converts "did no work and got a lot of money from somewhere." Inside, gleaming pine pews, a pine altar, Ikea-like. Later I saw the house of one of the congregants; it didn't differ from the others, except for the Japanese off-road vehicle, a few years old, in the front. "He drives to Chişină u," Elena said, and it sounded like a reproach.

We too went to the capital that afternoon. It was ten kilometers to the bus stop. Ilya took us in his Zhiguli. Since morning we had been drinking beer and wine, alternating, but that was no problem for Ilya. Chişinău was no problem either, he said, if the bus didn't come. He was short, sinewy, and feared nothing, having seen both Dresden and Moscow. But the bus came, and we hugged each other tight on the dusty road to Congaz. We vowed that we would meet again. These were wonderful people. They said, "This is how we live," and showed us their life as naturally as others would give a tour of their house. Elena's sister had got up at four in the morning to kill a rabbit and a chicken for our breakfast. The mother of the two sisters, paralyzed, sat on a chair in the shade of a grapevine and watched, grinning, as we drank wine. The father shared with us his slivovitz colored with raspberry juice. Plates of melon and watermelon slices. Now we embraced Ilya on the dusty road to Congaz and vowed that we would meet again, though none of us believed it.

Chişinău, ah Chişinău! White apartment blocks on green hills. You saw them from the north, south, east, and west. Massed like high cliffs gleaming in the sun. A paean to geometry in the rolling, irregular landscape. There is nothing larger or taller in all Moldova. Giant tombstones stuck in the fertile, plump earth. Stone tablets of egalitarianism. Termite towers of universal progress. A New Jerusalem dying a technological death.

At the exits from the city stood trucks loaded with plastic kegs, jugs of wine, Weck jars, a thousand containers into which Moldova had stored its wealth to make it through the winter. Marinating, pickling, fermenting, pasteurizing, salting, canning the produce of its gardens and plots. Downtown, on the Boulevard of Stephen the Great and Holy, among stores selling Japanese electronics and Italian boots, people went burdened with jars. They carried ten, twenty cleverly packed, brand-new mason jars at a time. Or shiny galvanized pails. Or sacks bulging with cucumbers and tomatoes. Pickup trucks loaded with melons, cars pulling trailers loaded with melons. Old Chişinău was really more village than town. A little off the main walkway, you found one- and two-story homes wrapped in green, separated by wood fences, cats strolling, people sitting on front steps. That was downtown: twenty crisscrossing streets, and the last wafts of sleepy imperial province. If you took away the cars, everything would be as it was a hundred years ago.

So that was Chişinău. I spent many hours under an umbrella in Green Hills Nistru on the Boulevard of Stephen the Great and Holy, at the corner of Eminescu. In the pub sat a more international gathering, speaking in English and German. Probably office workers who had chosen to throw away their European and American money in this particular spot. Besides them was the growing Moldovan middle class, the men wearing gold, sporting sunglasses, in the common style that combines hood, pimp, and gigolo, the women like the women you see on television, practically all with cell phones on silver chains around their necks. I recalled something like that in Romania. I ordered my beer, coffee, and so on in Romanian, but the waiters pretended not to understand entirely; they answered in Russian. Of course they understood, but Russian was for them the mark of refinement, urbanity. It's possible they took me for a Bessarabian hick — or a spy who had been incompletely briefed.

A strange city. Frightened eighteen-year-old cops patrolling in threes; men in Land Cruisers who think they own the streets; shady types by the post office selling additional minutes for phone cards; people hauling utensils; bald juveniles in oversize pants, their meek eyes fixed on the ground, making a humble, Franciscan-monk kind of gang member; and young women with exposed bellies and unsteady on their stiletto heels as they strut the main street as if it were a beauty pageant runway, a Romanian-Slavic mix of loveliness and risqué makeup: peasant modesty in dance-hall gear. The general impression that everyone is playing at being something other, each according to a private notion of a world not here. For that reason we finally left Chişinău.

Kola said that for thirty euros we could ride all day. He had an old Renault van with a plastic outer-space ornament. In the Soviet time he taught the samba. A heavy, mustached, good-natured fellow. To Old Orhei, Orheiul Vechi? Sure. He'd never been, but no problem. We headed due north. At an exit, perhaps Ciorescu, not far from the road, in the shade of a tree, stood an old desk. An overweight cop sat and watched the younger cops in big round hats stop victim after victim and without a word take twenty lei. But we were going to Old Orhei. Someone told us we had to, and he was right. The Răut River had dug its way deep into the earth, as if to reach the other side. A thin spit of land risen several dozen meters. The Golden Horde built a city here once. They had good taste. The landscape was from before Creation. In the beginning, a sketch only, a rough idea of how the planet should look, an abstraction really, the most basic shapes: vertical cliff, valley flat as a table, and a slow river in search of its tectonic shift. No change in 100,000 years, except the water had sunk deeper into the earth and had a mud-gray color.

A whim of the river formed a steep, long peninsula. The monastery was carved into a wall of rock. A few tiny windows looked out on the primeval scene, on beauty still not sure what shape to take. You reached the cells only from the cliff, by a chain ladder. When the friars pulled the chain up, there was nothing but solitude and empty space. As in the Egyptian Sketis, where the Desert Fathers challenged demons to battle. I saw other monasteries later, but they seemed imported. They actually were imported, because the Russians built them, in the grand imperial style. Orhei, however, was nothing but holes bored into rock, an attempt to escape the curse of time and live in eternity. In the cells — so low you could only lie down or kneel — were seashell outlines, round crustacean ornaments, traces of the first days, when the deep was separated from the dry land, the darkness from the light. I tried to picture monks crawling in the dimness, like animals in caves, on all fours, how in a way unimaginable to us they left behind their corporeal forms, their humanity. Abandoned their stinking, lice-infested bodies, because the visible and the palpable exist only to keep us from the truth.

But that was long ago. Now the few brethren lived in a village at the base of the cliff. We found one monk in a small chapel dug out of the earth. He was gaunt, bearded, voluble, and evidently conversant with the world, because he took us for Slovaks. He gave us a summary of the history of the monastery, showed us the clean-swept cells without windows in which you had to bend, then turned to three officers from the Russian, Moldovan, and Ukrainian armies, respectively. They looked out of place in their uniforms, holding cameras instead of rifles. The Russian, in an aviator hat, was the oldest and seemed to have the highest rank. The Ukrainian, the youngest, handsome, and wearing mirror sunglasses, looked like a Hollywood actor playing a soldier. They were quite odd in this timeless landscape, with this monk in the role of guide. Later we saw them having their picture taken with the cliff and the twisting Răut behind them. They handed the camera around and stood taut, as if facing not a barren waste but a battalion at least. These were peacekeepers patrolling the border of a nonexistent country, patrolling Transnistria, Trans-Dniester. They were probably on leave here.

Transnistria is not recognized by any government. It has a length of about two hundred kilometers but is narrow, a kind of European Chile. Thirty kilometers, maybe, at its widest point. We were a little nervous about going there. They told us that if anything happened, it wouldn't be clear who to talk to. In a phantom state, the etiquette is phantom too. We went anyway. Valerij drove us in a ten-year-old Vectra. Valerij feared nothing: yesterday Kiev, tomorrow Moscow, Vienna the day after that, and Transnistria — sure, why not? The Communist time, when he worked as an agrotech engineer, was better, but you could manage now too, you just had to make the effort. Valerij was all right and took everything in stride. We wanted to see the nonexistent country at its most out-of-the-way, going through RăscăeieŢi, because the Dniester divided there, its branches meandering, weaving, a blue ribbon thrown at random across the map. First, a long, empty bridge and not a single vehicle, only two kids on bicycles from the Transnistrian side. In their baskets they carried tied bundles of twigs. Then cornfields began, and in the midst of them stood a sentry box with a solitary Moldovan customs officer in a black uniform. Moldova obviously does not accept the secession of this would-be state, according it only the status of an autonomous region. Since the border also is unrecognized, we didn't need to show passports. But Moldova keeps its customs officers on duty just in case. After all, it's in Transnistria, at Cobasna, that you have one of the largest ammunition depots in Europe. From there, from Tiraspol, the Soviets planned to launch their liberation of the Balkans, Greece, and so on.

The customs officer didn't want anything from us. He didn't even put on his cap as he consulted the road map with us — all the river's bends and turns, marshes and lakes, the stream occasionally looping back — spread out on the hood of the car. He tapped a finger and said that this place was the best, but our Vectra probably couldn't make it there. Not a blink from him at our camera or camcorder; the man was in his early twenties, and the spy obsession had not yet poisoned his mind. He waved as we left. When we came to another Transnistrian sentry box, the situation changed: the same kind of makeshift hut but containing four guards. These men were disheveled, in uniform but as if just pulled out of bed and half asleep. Their shoelaces (the shoes entirely civilian) dragging in the dust, their post-Soviet shirts and trousers crumpled, their solemnity quickly assumed. The moment they took our passports, we felt that we were enemies. They wouldn't look us in the eye, looked up instead, at the sky, to the limitless horizon of an all-union republic gone forever. Could this really be the first time they set eyes on a foreigner? In the next dozen minutes, a wagon with hay went by, a woman with a hoe. The wagon and woman passed without questions asked and were gone among the rows of corn. At last the guards told us to go back, to the town of Bender, where the headquarters were, and people who would know what to do with us.

On the thoroughfare in Bender, a shambles: barracks, plywood, corrugated metal, crumbling concrete, makeshift structures, barriers. Dissolution and melancholy with an undercurrent of menace. First thing, they saw the camcorder, which roused in them the primal fear of those who have something to hide. They said we were filming the border crossing. Of course we were, but we insisted we weren't. They took our passports, and three or four went with them into the plywood hut. We were left out in the burning sun. A. was covered with sweat. He sat on the edge of an open car trunk and slowly, inconspicuously removed the cassette from the camcorder and put a new one in. No one noticed. Occasionally a guard emerged from the hut, glared at us, and retreated with a few stiff steps. No question but that we were the enemy, lurking to take their possessions. They kept our passports, which they couldn't even stamp, assuming they had a stamp, because no nation would recognize it.

Valerij finally went to the guards. After a while he came back and said that they knew we were filming, which was a serious matter and forbidden, but for a hundred lei we could move on. We gave them the money. They didn't want the cassette. We were the enemy, but we had paid. We received a scrap of paper, a kind of receipt. On the back was written, in pen: one car, four persons, and a camcorder. That was our Transnistrian visa.

Transnistria broke away from Moldova in 1992. It was a regular war; several thousand people died. Historically Transnistria had never really belonged to Moldova. When after World War II the Soviets took from Romania the lands between the Prut and the Dniester and turned them into yet another SSR, Stalin attached to the Moldovan SSR this narrow strip on the left bank of the Dniester. There was industrialization there, a power plant, an arms factory — and obviously the Russians, who kept their paws on it all. Across the river were farms, cornfields, vineyards, a village, cattle, and Moldovans speaking Romanian. It's not impossible that the Georgian ruler foresaw all this and planned accordingly, making sure that the collapse of his aborted empire would cause as much trouble as possible. He simply had no other idea about how to be remembered. And so in Transnistria there were too many weapons and too many Russians for an independent, green, and poor Moldova to do more than dream of acquiring Transnistria.

From the border to Tiraspol it may have been ten kilometers. There are landscapes and towns that are impossible to recall. You seem to see something, but it's all vague, dull, as if you were inside someone else's oppressive dream. There's nothing there. Two lanes, gray square houses, the gaunt red of Soviet slogans along the road, rusty Zhigulis with new license plates that pretend to be German license plates: the ground floor of the imagination. That's what the ride to the capital looked like. We stopped at a bazaar. I wanted to see what their money looked like. Right at the gate, the exchange booths. One simply went in and gave Moldovan lei to a person in the dim interior. I saw no face, only a hand with a gold bracelet. For one leu you got two Transnistrian rubles. A five-ruble bill measured five and a half centimeters by thirteen. On the front, naturally, was Suvorov; on the back, a four-story building in the style of the 1960s, at the bottom of which were the words Kwint Factory, the local producer of cognac (which actually wasn't bad). So on the front you had history, conquest, the Slaughter of Praga, the glory of the Russian military — a glory mainly abroad — and on the back you had booze (however you looked at it) as government accomplishment or national pride.

In any case, Valerij took a satchel and went shopping for groceries. Everything was supposed to be cheaper in Tiraspol than in Chişinău. He bought melons, watermelons, peaches. We drove to look for a place to have lunch but found nothing. In general, this was more outlying district than city. As if an attempt had been made to start something, but it petered out. At last we were shown the way to the center: a wide street lined with old trees. An occasional car came through — an antique Moskvich, humble Zhigulis, and among them, once in a while, a big SUV with tinted windows and usually black. Tiraspol was not a place where you would want to stay. Soldiers everywhere. They probably made up half the population of the city. We came to a huge bookstore that had practically no books. Instead, portraits of Lenin and blank certificates of honor with his picture on them. In one pub, bald men sat in tracksuits drinking beer. From time to time one of them would leave, but he soon came back, because in Tiraspol there was nowhere to go. These people were waiting for something to happen, waiting to be called, to be needed.

But in Tiraspol, it seemed that everyone was expendable, a fifth wheel to affairs that were foreign, major, and murky. These people were auxiliary — auxiliary to the troops, to the arsenal, to the Russian Fourteenth Army stationed here, to the black SUVs, and to the omnipresent firm of Sheriff which belonged to Smirnov, the shadow president of a shadow nation. If there was anything new in Transnistria, anything not wrecked, it bore the name Sheriff. All the gas stations in Tiraspol were Sheriff, and the supermarket too. The yellow star of the Wild West gleaming with absurd brightness in this post-Soviet diorama. Anything was possible here. An old apparatchik dressed as an American lawman won the hand, raked in the chips, in this land of unpleasant miracles.

We drove north along the Ukrainian border. Corn grew everywhere, and in that corn, across paths in fields, stood red-and-white barriers and sentry boxes. It all looked a bit surreal but on the other hand, it held a sad beauty. The guards were protecting space, a vacuum, borders that were merely an idea. On the map it looked completely awkward, angular, drawn with a ruler, soundless, lacking the fluid grace characteristic of territories in which history merges with geography, with human presence, and with ancient clutter. The proportions of this frontier on the map brought to mind African borders drawn across the Sahara. "They mark the borders of the former sovkhozy and kolkhozy,” I was later told by an acquaintance who knew a little about Moldova. Now the barriers divided sandy lanes on which cattle went, horses, swine, wagons on rubber tires, boys to visit girls at night, women to exchange gossip, drunkards to get drunk, thieves to thieve, relatives to see one another, people to meet people. We drove down an empty highway, and the men in uniform in the sea of corn resembled scarecrows. Most likely they were armed and had orders, but in that agrarian expanse, what could they do? They could make the birds overhead veer, search peasants who carried bundles of twigs, turn back carts piled with hay, and return lost animals.

There was no one, nothing on the road. Far off the beaten track, we passed the ruins of gas stations. In places this country looked like the set of a film. Between Mălăieşti and Butor, for instance, someone had built a wide highway that had not a single car on it, and someone had built gas stations that were reverting to the earth. Everything seemed cast away, thrown aside, of no use or value. People sat in their homes and were completely isolated. You stepped from your door, opened your gate, and wasteland began, a no- man's-land. Perhaps that was why Valerij took us to his family, to a normal house with a garden in Grigoriopol. He wanted to show us ordinary life.

We passed a high wall and entered the cool shade of grapevines. We were greeted by Misha, enormous, big-bellied, and naked to the waist. He talked continually, or rather orated, delivering florid, ceremonious speeches. He took us into the garden, presented to us the patches and beds, and praised self-sufficiency and the fertility of the Moldovan soil. The garden was in fact as green and lush as the tropics. The vegetation towered, trailed, twined, spilled over, so that you had no place to put your foot and the ground was invisible beneath the profusion. But Misha pranced like a ballerina among the cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, paprikas, melons, moved like a thickset Moldovan Pomona. He explained to us the various uses of cucumbers, and it was a bit like being among the Gagauz: once again we were barbarians who came from a land that had no vegetables.

Then an obligatory visit to the cellar, which was roomy, with a high ceiling, and cold. Everything that grew in the garden lay here in jars, vats, jugs, bottles. Over and over, Misha poured red wine into glasses and talked, talked, talked. Still half naked but completely comfortable. Surrounded by his cellar abundance, he spoke of how in earlier, less happy times, the eighties, he visited Warsaw with a Moldovan-Soviet song-and-dance troupe. Having plenty of rubles, he drank champagne and cognac, took taxis everywhere, and was a king in that haggard city. He was accompanied by a Polish friend, a Party secretary as poor as a churchmouse. Refilling our glasses, Misha asked us to find his buddy and convey his hugs and greetings. I drank what he gave me and promised to locate the former secretary in the city of two million.

All this was preliminary to the real hospitality. We went to the house. Misha's father was celebrating his patron saint's day. On the table were wine, cognac, and grape moonshine. We ate and drank continually, not wanting to offend our host. Before long, I was both drunk and stuffed. Our hosts were Russified Ukrainians. On the walls hung their youthful portraits, the celebrant and his wife in Soviet military uniforms. New dishes kept arriving. A Moldovan Eden: a garden, a feast, toasts made among family and friends. Misha recalled the time he served as a prison guard. His mother recalled her days teaching Romanian. Valerij insisted that there was no such thing as a Romanian people. Everyone agreed that life was better before. Even I began to agree, but resisted and hoped Valerij would soon give us a sign that it was time to go.

On the border bridge in Vadul lui Vodă stood armored transporters. No one stopped us, and in a few minutes we saw the apartment blocks of Chişinău.

We drove to the city of Soroca with W., who had business there. Soroca lies to the north of the Dniester, and beyond it is Ukraine. As you head north, the vineyards are gradually replaced by corn, which becomes omnipresent. We went to Soroca to meet Gypsies, who had a mini country of their own there.

Even from a distance, from the boulevard along the river, you could see it: on the hill above the city and down the steep bank to the Dniester, the Gypsy district. You could see that it was unlike anything else in Moldova. Tin roofs agleam in the sun like fish scales, looking like a Baroque-Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampment — good words, these. Roofs piled high, roofs bellied like wind-filled sails, roofs budding one from the other like living tissue. This from afar. Closer, it was a roller-coaster ride through centuries and continents. Victorian mansions, Mauritanian residences, Chinese pagodas, classic Greek facades, the Romanian Renaissance, and a reduced replica of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow with three plastic steeds on top. Before a pavilion with twenty front windows, amid a green garden tangle, rose a six-meter fountain of white stone in an austere rococo style. At its base rested a crocodile, life-size and of the same material. Two Moldovans were finishing the monument, smoothing the last sharp edges, as Gypsy women watched, smoking cigarettes with holders of gold. I asked Robert who designed all this. Robert had a black-and-gold business card, owned a bakery, was building a mansion, had a BMW 700 with Slovak tags in his backyard, and was a kind of gray eminence in Soroca. "We did," he answered. "It's all from the imagination."

Robert also owned a pub. That is, it was jointly owned, but he was the main entrepreneur. We took seats on the veranda. In the center were tables, the bar, and ten computers. Kids sat at the computers — mostly Gypsies, with a couple of Moldovans. The dads could comfortably chat, drink, and keep an eye on their Internet-marauding progeny. We sipped cognac and ate watermelon. Robert said that times had changed and now one had to keep one's children off the street. But things were good otherwise: the borders were open, you could travel, do business, all you needed were a passport, ideas, and connections. You could go to the Chukchi, if you wanted, and sell them Chinese linens. No one would forbid you. It wasn't that bad before, but there were fewer possibilities then. That's what Robert said, over a cognac.

Artur arrived, and Robert invited him to join us. Artur was a king — or baron. His business card read, in English: "Gypsy Baron of Moldova." He had a gray beard down to his belt, braided gray earlocks, and resembled a holy man of distant India. He was fully aware of that heredity and told us that the Nazis had collected the blood of their Gypsy victims, which held exceptional value for them because it was the purest Aryan blood. He said this without expression, entirely confident of our belief in what he said. He made marks on a card, deriving the Russian alphabet from the Sanskrit, and mentioned in passing that women ethnography students from Poland had visited him that summer. Yes, Artur was an important figure. In the courtyard of his palace he had a collection of Soviet samovars and two dusty limousines on flat tires. In the windshield of one limousine was a bullet hole. After he concluded his lecture on the Aryans and Sanskrit, Artur said goodbye, rose, got into a green BMW X5 driven by his son, and took off to attend to his royal duties.

Others slowly gathered, but this was not Moldovan hospitality; it was simple courtesy. They drank two bottles of cognac with us, ate three watermelons, spent three hours of their time, revealed as much of their life as they considered proper, until we went our separate ways, each to his own world.

We returned, according to the itinerary, by minibus. I sat next to the driver. He did some kind of hocus-pocus with the tickets, selling them and collecting them or yelling at passengers to hold them up. I couldn't figure it out. In the middle of an empty field, a woman got on. She cut her leg stepping on a sharp piece of metal and bled. The driver yelled at her for not being careful. He was lean, low-class, neurotic, and drove furiously. After thirty kilometers we were stopped by a patrol. A cop waved a black-and-white-striped stick, and we pulled over. The driver took a twenty-lei bill from a box, got out, walked over to the policeman, and gave him the money. The policeman, wearing a sort of aviator cap, waved us on. It was 150 kilometers to Chişinău, and we were stopped three more times. The same performance each time, this submission to power, acted silently and in full view. The cops' faces stony and dull, the driver's face resigned and resentful. I asked him if it was always this way on this road. "Always," he said. "Ever since the end of the Soviet Union."

The entry point at Leuşeni was as deserted as it had been two weeks before. I was waiting for an acquaintance who was supposed to come from the Romanian side. He was late. No traffic in either direction: no point, apparently, and nowhere to go. There weren't even bicycles loaded with bundles of sticks. Just void, immobility, heat. I stood an hour, an hour and a half, and watched how this small and solitary country ended.

At last Alexandru drove up and stopped on the other side. I waved to him and proceeded to the guard booth. They were pleased to see me, remembered my arrival two weeks before. I imagined that I was the only traveler they had recently let through. I threw my backpack into the trunk, got in, and we drove off. Twenty minutes later, we had passed Huşi.