The Good Life Elsewhere

by Vladimir Lorchenkov

  Serafim felt a mass of questions bubbling up inside him. He stood up, almost rocking in the wind, but there was nobody he could ask these questions to. Usually, you seek advice from people you know. But Serafim didn’t know a soul in this city. He wasn’t even—and his heart froze when he realized this—he wasn’t even sure what city he was in. He hadn’t seen signs saying “Rome” anywhere. No – all this doubting was complete nonsense, a delusion! Nonetheless, Serafim lifted his head and noticed a banner in the gap between two beautiful clouds.

  One. Two. Boom. Boom. Serafim threw back his head and began to lose consciousness. Before he did, he was able to catch the surprised look on the face of Chairman Postolaki. And even before that, he had time to see – precisely to see, and not to read – what was written, what was written on the banner:

  “WELCOME TO CHISINAU!!”

  2

  MARIA WAS PLANNING ON HANGING HERSELF FROM THE acacia tree in the yard. Her husband, Vasily Lungu, could give a damn. He was extremely angry with Maria for the four thousand euros she’d paid for the voyage to Rome and a job in Italy. His wife’s guilt was not assuaged by the fact that she’d been swindled.

  “It could happen to anyone,” frowned Vasily at the village drinking sessions, turning around the muddy sediments of the wine in his mouth. “You all were taken in by those swindlers. They led you through Moldova by night. They let you off outside of Chisinau. I agree – I can’t blame Maria for that. But who, if not her, infected us with that idiotic, childish dream about Italy?”

  Thanks to that dream, Vasily had sold his tractor (though it was old), and gone into debt for one and a half thousand euros. The couple calculated that Maria would send home three hundred euros a month from Italy and, at that rate, they’d have the tractor and their farm back in a year.

  “The tractor’s nonnegotiable.” Vasily shook his finger at his wife. “No tractor – nothing doing.”

  Maria breathed a bitter sigh. She knew about Vasily’s extraordinary attachment to the tractor. It started in 1978, when Lungu, a peasant, was sent to attend a course for mechanics. Having discovered the world and machinery, as Vasily himself put it, he returned to the village with a tractor and a huge sense of self-importance. Alas, when Moldova gained its independence and lost its last remaining bits of prosperity, the need for Vasily’s tractor fell off. The villagers had no money for diesel anyhow, and they worked the land as in the days of old. With their hands. But Lungu, notwithstanding his wife’s exhortations, wouldn’t give up or sell his iron horse. It wasn’t until that very day in 2001 that Maria, tormented by poverty and wanting to escape, convinced him to temporarily sell his tractor.

  “And then we’ll buy it back!” she promised grandly. “Trust me.”

  Unfortunately, the forty-four underwater swimmers and curlers from Larga fell into the hands of crooks. Crooks who led the people through Moldova for four whole days, dumped them out onto the marshy ground near the Byk River—the very river that the local genius Serafim Botezatu took for the Tiber—and disappeared, just like that. When he found out he wasn’t getting his tractor back, Vasily fell into despair. When Maria returned home, first he beat her, then he stopped talking to his wife at all. Maria realized she’d never make it to Italy. She couldn’t imagine where she’d ever get the money for it, and so she decided to hang herself. True, she was helped along toward that decision.

  “Either way,” Vasily decided, “I’ll never forgive you. And I’ll thrash you till the end of your days, woman, like an ugly old dog. But God forbid I snuff the life out of you with my own hands. It’d be a sin. It’s better if you’d just snuff it out yourself.”

  And in the course of a single day, these words grew inside Maria like a bean sprout beneath the red sun in rich, black springtime soil.

  “I’m off to hang myself, Vasily,” she said to her husband, holding back tears. “Our life is darkness. I’m tired.”

  “Don’t even think about climbing up the walnut tree,” he said, without glancing up from his pocket Bible. “Or I’ll take you down off there and beat you to death. You’re going to break off the lower branches, and that’s where the nuts grow biggest.”

  “Then I’ll hang myself from the acacia,” Maria offered. “The branches are stronger.”

  “Well, now, that’s another story,” said Vasily, and bit his lip. “Hang yourself from the acacia. And stay until the Second Coming.”

  Maria, knowing her husband’s kind heart, went to the acacia, tightened the rope and stood on a stool beneath the noose. Nobody emerged from the house. “He’s hiding behind the door,” she thought to herself. And she noticed people staring at her from neighboring windows. “They’ll pull me down straight away,” said the woman, and she jumped. First, it was her own jump that made her swing. Then, it was the wind.

  Maria swung on the acacia all through the following week.

  3

  VASILY LUNGU TURNED OUT TO BE THE ONLY RESIDENT OF Larga who didn’t dream of making it to Italy.

  “It doesn’t exist, this Italy you keep talking about!” he would yell during village drinking bouts. “Has anyone ever seen it? Huh? That’s right!”

  The only one who could challenge Lungu was Father Paisii, Larga’s priest. Everyone knew for a fact that his wife Elizaveta, the parish Matushka, had gone to Italy in 1999, using the money her ministering husband earned performing last rites, christenings, and requiem services. And since the land near Larga was barren and the peasants were poor, everybody knew the priest never swallowed a piece of bread he didn’t pay for. And he always paid full price.

  “All day long, like a cursed man, I pray for rain, I offer benedictions, and all for a sack of beans,” Paisii would complain bitterly to his wife when she called from Bologna, where she’d found work as a housemaid. “I barely earn enough to feed myself and the kids. At least, if you could send some money …”

  For a while, Elizaveta, the priest’s wife, did send three hundred euros a month to her husband and three kids. Then she stopped. A year later she sent five hundred euros. Then silence for a year. Father Paisii wore himself out, tried everything, was even planning on appealing to the Red Cross or some other sort of Organization for the Search for Missing Priests’ Wives of Larga when Matushka Elizaveta turned up. Oh, did she turn up.

  “Darling,” she said into the receiver, puffing away at a cigarette, “I’ve decided to stay here and link my fate with Adriano. Don’t be jealous. He’s a real man, a Man with a capital M. I’m sorry, I won’t be coming back to Larga, or Moldova. To that dump? After being in Italy? By the way, I’ve become a completely liberated woman. And I’ve found a job. Actually, Adriano found me a job. Where?”

  It turned out, the woman once known as Matushka Elizaveta had become the secretary at the Center for Modern Art and Atheism. After breaking the news to her husband, she hung up the phone. Father Paisii cried the whole night through, and by morning he’d managed to fall asleep. He dreamed of Elizaveta in a miniskirt. She licked her lips and gave Paisii a wink. Twirling a cigarette in her hands, she said, “Got a light?” When Paisii shrugged his shoulders, Elizaveta disappeared. She said a reproachful goodbye: “You don’t have a light, but I’m one hot broad, see. You better stay in Larga, you knucklehead!”

  Paisii woke up broken and convinced that, in the end, Italy did in fact exist. After all, that accursed bitch, that cheap prostitute, that fat cow, that thrice-damned fool, that snake in the grass, that rotten slut, his former wife, had telephoned him from there. And if Italy exists, and Elizaveta was there, then he was simply obligated to curse the country in his next sermon. Without a doubt, Italy was a font of vice, and he’d fallen out of love with it, and with his wife, too, during that terrible night.

  “A country of degenerate tarts and their gigolos! Den of depravity, Whore of Babylon!” he proclaimed in church.

  The crowd, after listening to the sermon, dispersed silently.

  And in the spring, Father Paisii began collecting money and packing his suitcases f
or a trip to Italy.

  4

  SERAFIM WAS AWAKENED BY A MYSTERIOUS DIN IN THE DISTANCE. The drone wasn’t very loud, but it was constant, persistent, menacing. Lazily drawing open his eyes, Serafim looked sadly at the room’s whitewashed ceiling. A house. His house. In Larga. Some two weeks ago he thought he’d never wake up here again, now here he was …

  Sighing, Serafim extracted his feet from the down comforter he and his wife had received as a wedding gift and slapped them down onto the hideous carpet with a rooster pattern. His wife Marchika ran off with an agitator who gave lectures on atheism in 1987, but before that, she’d covered all the floors in the house with rugs like this. She was an irrepressible fan of the color red. Serafim sat for a while and once his feet got used to the cool floor, he distracted himself from his distressing thoughts and perked up his ears again. The din hadn’t faded. It was an unusual noise for the village. Serafim had heard something similar once in Chisinau, when he’d walked by Stadionul Republikan, the national stadium.

  “Serafim, how long can one man sleep?” shouted his bachelor neighbor, Old Man Tudor, through the open window. “Get to work, you lout, you.”

  Serafim got up. He had a soft spot in his heart for Old Man Tudor, who’d helped him, through conversation and advice, during the difficult period after his wife left. He threw off the blanket and went out into the yard. The sun, as if suffering from a hangover, was swaying unsteadily on the edges of the horizon, illuminating land that had contracted from the cold. “Like a baby in its mother’s womb,” thought Serafim. And he clenched his teeth. He and Marchika never had any children.

  “Screw it,” he blurted out halfheartedly, under the stern glance of Old Man Tudor. “Who cares about work, or the fact that yesterday I had a drop or two? Who cares about anything here? I’m leaving for Italy no matter what. As for this, it could all burn to the ground. Let the homestead crumble!”

  Tudor looked at Serafim sternly. Serafim shivered and rinsed his face and torso with water that had partially frozen overnight. It was a practice his father taught him. “You put a bucket with well-water in the yard, and during the night the cold kills all the microbes, all the nastiness. The bits gets drawn into the ice,” his old man told him. “And whatever hasn’t frozen or fallen to the bottom—that’s water for life! Bathe with it, rinse your mouth, and in twenty years you won’t lose five teeth. Drink it, and flowers will grow in your heart. Pour it over your body, and your body’ll turn green and pull itself upwards, just like a young poplar tree …”

  Serafim shook himself off and spit, recalling his forty-year-old father’s rotten teeth, his stooping spine and his ever-present hand-rolled cigarettes, stuffed with unbearably smoky Moldovan tobacco. True, his dad always said it was hard work on the land that had killed him. And so he told his son, “Never give your all to this land. Think about how to get yourself out of here.”

  So Serafim came up with a plan: Italy. He’d go to Italy. To a country where the streets are always clean, the people are kind and pleasant, where without having to kill yourself you’d make in a month what you couldn’t earn in three years of working the land in Moldova. Where the earth smells fresh, like pasta seasoning, where the sea is salty, warm and radiant, like the sweat of a woman you’re lying on top of …

  “Let the whole place burn, you say?” Old Man Tudor bit his lips sternly. “Well, it looks like the farm heard your plea. The earth’s got a good grasp of the human mind.”

  Serafim looked around and smiled involuntarily. It really did look like the place had been overrun by the Turks. The picket fence surrounding the house had long ago begun to resemble his father’s jaw, with slats missing here and there. And the modest attempts by the owner to conceal the gaps in the fence with shrubbery, while effective enough in the summer, were a complete fiasco in winter. The leaves fell off the trees and the fence looked even more pathetic. Neglected apple trees grew near the back entrance behind the house. The small pigsty for three or four hogs had long stood empty. Sometimes Serafim, coming home drunk and in no condition to fit his key into the lock, would lie down there and snore away, keeping warm in the thin, dusty straw where the pigs used to roll around. It seemed to Serafim that the straw still retained the warmth of the piggy bodies, just like his down comforter still retained the heat from the thighs of his licentious wife, Marchika. But owing to an odd weakness of his, and the bliss that gripped his body every time he cuddled up with his comforter, he couldn’t bring himself to throw it out.

  Usually the yard was full of mud, up to the knees, and in bad weather Serafim hopped through it from one rock to another, which he scattered around the house.

  “This is that whatsitcalled,” Old Man Tudor would laugh, scrunching his thin lips. He was smarter than he liked to look. “The Moldovan Stonehenge! And Serafim, that pancake, has gone and turned himself into a Druid.”

  Fortunately, the ground wasn’t soft now. It had frozen and shrunk just like an abandoned child at a train station, and it was asking you to take it in your hands and warm it with your breath.

  “The land demands toil!” barked the thoughtful Tudor, standing near the fence. “So that’s your plan, in the end?” he asked. “Italy, Shmitaly, without our cornstalks we won’t be able to warm ourselves …”

  Serafim dutifully completed his morning ablutions, threw on a checkered cowboy shirt, and followed behind Tudor’s bicycle, mumbling something on the way.

  “I’m conjugating verbs,” he admitted halfheartedly; he’d seen the surprised look on his crony’s face. “What do you expect? I get no practice speaking it, so I might at least learn the grammar by heart.”

  Tudor nodded without saying a word. He began pedaling faster and faster. The din was louder now. Serafim and Tudor, intrigued, stepped up their respective paces and finally came to the edge of the village. Behind the last house, where there was a plateau about one square mile wide, they saw twenty villagers arrayed around a small, but genuine, podium. Serafim’s acquaintance, Nikita Tkach, was standing on top of it, conducting. With every wave of his hand he shouted something out. The people who were gathered around him all piped up at once with a few phrases. Everybody was holding a book in his hands, which was even more surprising considering how what was left of the village library had perished ten years ago under the snow, wind, burning heat and rain. And these books seemed to be brand new. It didn’t take the devil to see that some devilish plan was being hatched.

  Serafim fell off the bicycle and Tudor just barely managed to catch him under the arm. The two men—one young, one old—froze in astonishment. The bicycle lay nearby, doubled up like an ancient Moldovan acacia. Its wheels went round and round, and from the grey sky’s perspective, they recalled a potter’s wheel with their pointless spinning …

  “The stone,” cried Nikita Tkach—

  “Is equipment used in the game,” the choir glanced at their books and shouted, “weighing thirty-eight pounds and fourteen inches in diameter!”

  Tkach raised his hand. “Attention! Exactly 38, and not 39, or, for example, 37! Be diligent with the details, got it?”

  “Got it!!!”

  “I’ll go on,” shouted Tkach. “The house. What is the house?”

  “The house is a circle, 3.6 meters in diameter, where the stones are aimed,” the gathered crowd called back at once.

  “How about the end?” asked Nikita, with the intonation of the author of the Apocalypse.

  “A period of the game during which the teams take turns sliding their 16 stones. Each game consists of 10 ends!” the listeners chanted.

  “What’s a skip?” asked Nikita trickily, with a squint.

  “Not what, but who!” The villagers crowding the rostrum reproached their leader in a voice. “The skip is the captain of the team, he calls the shots.”

  “And the vice-skip?” Nikita asked a very easy question. “What’s that?”

  “Not what, but who!” the crowd answered, again with reproach and, of course, of one voice. “According
to the rules, he’s the player who has to stand at the other end of the curling sheet behind the house and help the skip call the shots!”

  Two skylarks weaving a nest flew into the gaping mouths of Serafim and Old Man Tudor and deposited their young. Leaving the chicks to chirp, the birds flew off to the field for sustenance. It was getting cold now. The wheels of the fallen bicycle spun and spun. Nikita Tkach, catching sight of the observers on the sidelines out of the corner of his eye, puffed out his chest. The people stared at him adoringly. From a distance, it brought to mind the first Christians listening to their prophet or apostle and repeating after him. And these were the first Christians, in a way. Nikita sang them the praises of the City of God. More precisely, he talked about reaching it.

  “Let’s put aside the terminology,” he shouted, leaning over the podium. “Listen to what I say. Remember, getting to Italy under the auspices of a tourism agency is a rotten business. We’ll end up in the hands of swindlers, just like last time, and waste a lot of money again. Which we don’t have, by the way. Isn’t that right?”

  “Uh-huh!” droned the crowd, approvingly.

  “That means, we’ll have to make sure they let us into Italy without any money. And who travels penniless, without anybody placing obstacles in their way? Who?”

  “Tramps!” shouted out the village shepherd, Gitse. “Tramps and beggars!”

  “True,” nodded Nikita. “But so do diplomats and athletes!”

  “So we’re going to be diplomats?” asked Gitse, correcting himself.

  “We’re going to be athletes,” said Tkach, correcting him, in turn. “And real ones, too. If we get the paperwork as a sports team and make it to Italy, the first policeman we come across is going to stop us. Because it’ll be easy to figure out we’re not athletes, won’t it?”

  “Yes,” answered the audience.

  “And we can’t become a track team or a swim team, or, say, a boxing team, because the swimming, track and field and boxing federations have long been taking care of these issues, and they don’t tolerate competition! Not to mention, we’re neither swimmers nor runners nor boxers, right?”