The Good Life Elsewhere

by Vladimir Lorchenkov

  “Right,” the crowd obediently agreed. They were under Nikita’s spell. “Absolutely …”

  “Though what is absolute?” sighed Nikita, who spent two years (the second and the fourth year) at veterinary school. “Nevertheless, I’ll go on. And so, what we’ve got to do is choose a rare sport. Take it up. And play our way to Italy.”

  “Incredible!” The people were surprised at Nikita’s intelligence.

  “And in Italy this coming spring, only one sport will be having its championship,” Nikita concluded. “The European Curling Championship. We have to make it. We have to win the elimination rounds, which are going to be in Moldova, Romania and Ukraine. We have to become the best curlers in the region!”

  “Yes!!!”

  “Curlers, and no fools allowed. No fools allowed in curling!”

  “Yes-Yes-Yes!!!”

  “And what do we need in order to do this?”

  “A knowledge of the terminology and the rules. The ability to play. And the will!”

  “One hundred percent,” shouted Nikita. “Moldovans! Good people! Abandon your good-for-nothing fields, because your land yields naught. Throw down your plows and spades, shovels and hoes … Abandon your wretched farms and sign up for my curling team, for this is your only chance to make it to the Promised Land, to Italy!”

  “Yes!!!” Nikita’s followers howled. They were mad with ecstasy.

  “Which is exactly why I sent my last one hundred euros to Iasi, to buy thirty do-it-yourself guides to curling!” shouted Nikita. “Everything else, it’s true, we’ll have to make with our own hands. Everything, everything! The uniforms, the stones, the brooms! It won’t be easy. Are you ready?”

  “Yes!!!”

  “And how! I’m ready too, because at the end of our hard work, what awaits us?”

  “Italy!”

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “I-ta-ly!”

  “That’s not what I want to hear from you,” said Tkach, in ecstasy himself. “I want to know: What is a sweeper?”

  “Not what,” corrected the curling cult of Larga, who’d caught on to their leader’s methodology, “but who! He’s the player who sweeps the ice in front of the stone as it’s sliding. Each team has two players at this position!”

  “Yes!” howled Nikita. “And a draw?”

  “A set-up shot, the goal of which is to place your stone in the house without touching the opponent’s stones,” the people sang out in unison.

  “A take-out?” said Nikita, tilting his head back.

  “A knock-out shot,” the choir answered without hesitation, “with the goal of knocking the opponent’s stone out of the house. At the same time, depending on which tactic you choose, your stone either stays in the house or goes out, too.”

  “A guard. Who’s the guard?” said Nikita, being tricky again.

  “Not who, but what!” A defensive stone, placed in front of the house and preventing the opponent from accomplishing his mission!!!”

  The skylarks had fed their freshly-hatched nestlings with scarce and sleepy worms from the cool ground, and now they were thoroughly rinsing their feathers in Serafim’s mouth. They began to chirp. Serafim was just coming back down to earth, and he carefully extracted the fledglings from his mouth. Tudor did the same. After they released the skylarks, the men watched silently as the birds somersaulted beneath the autumn sun. The skylarks bathed in its icy light like the ghosts of mermaids playing in the waning waters of the Prut River, beneath the mists.

  “Our goal?” asked Nikita Tkach. “What is it, brothers?”

  “Italy!” answered the villagers, in unison.

  “Yes, but first, our goal is to master the game of curling,” explained Nikita. “This will lead us to Italy. Our goal is to get the disk-like object with the handle across the ice into the finely drawn target! And so – what’s our goal?”

  “Our goal is to get the disk-like object with the handle across the ice into the finely drawn target!”

  “Amen!” bellowed Nikita.

  Finally, after tumbling through the air, the birds disappeared. Tudor picked up his bicycle. Its wheels had stopped spinning. Serafim silently lent a hand, and the men walked out onto the fields to gather the remains of the dry cornstalks so they’d have something to kindle the stove with in the darkness of the coming winter evenings.

  The skylarks, meanwhile, flew off in search of other daydreamers.

  5

  OLD MAN TUDOR AND SERAFIM RETURNED IN THE EVENING, tired and angry. The road ahead of them glimmered with the yellow-grey stalks of dried-up corn. In reality there were no such stalks shimmering on the road, but the villagers couldn’t help but imagine them wherever they looked. Just as the green sprouts of the tomato seedlings winked at them in spring and the grapevines sparkled green and blue in the summer.

  “The fields aren’t really shimmering,” said Old Man Tudor. “It’s the work itself that’s dogging our every step.”

  Serafim kicked a can of Coca-Cola that had just been tossed from the window of a speeding car. “Stay put, you say. What awaits us here? Dirt, poverty, a whole lot of lousy nothingness. And how quickly everything went to pot. All in the twenty or so years since the Soviet Union fell apart.”

  “Under the Soviets, things were bad, too, it’s just that you’re young and you don’t remember anything,” said the old man, pedaling harder and barely opening his eyes. “But I remember. Dirt, poverty, and a whole lot of lousy nothingness have always been here.”

  “I’ve got to go to Italy,” Serafim said.

  “Italy, Italy, you keep chirping,” said Tudor, getting angry. “Better you tell me this: Have you heard about Maria hanging herself?”

  “Yeah,” Serafim sighed. “When are they burying her?”

  “First they’ve got to take her down.”

  “What? They haven’t taken her down yet?”

  “She’s been hanging on the acacia tree for three weeks,” the old man said sadly. “Her husband doesn’t want to take her down. Her swaying body has a soothing effect on him, he says.”

  “Tfu,” spit Serafim. “Inhuman.”

  “We’re all human,” admitted Tudor. “We’re all people, we’re all little persons. He should be pitied. The man’s lost his tractor.”

  “His tractor is a piece of metal. We’re talking about a human being!” said Serafim angrily.

  “But for him, a tractor isn’t simply a piece of metal. For him, it’s everything. Just like Italy is for you,” said Tudor, needling his young friend.

  “And you dare compare them!” said Serafim, all worked up. “Italy is a beautiful country, easy work. Money, cleanliness, museums, paintings, pizza. And on the other hand, you’ve got a greasy tractor!”

  Tudor was silent. Then, in a strained voice, he spoke up.

  “Akh, Serafim, Serafim, you featherbrain. The wind blows in one ear and out the other. That’s why Marchika left you. What does a woman need in life? She needs an anchor. A man made of steel, heavy, who doesn’t doubt himself. And you’ve got a breeze blowing through your head. A breeze, and that Italy of yours.”

  “Alright, already—” Serafim tried to interrupt his friend, but Tudor was determined to finish.

  “For a tractor driver, a tractor is his dream. Just like Italy is for you. That’s what I mean. I’m comparing Italy to a dream. I’m not comparing Italy to a tractor. You see?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” nodded Serafim, not understanding a thing.

  “There, there. And you immediately bring up nonsense.”

  The bicycle pulled up to the Lungu house and the men dismounted. Serafim walked behind the house to get a look at Maria, while Tudor politely but insistently knocked on the door. Vasily, with a yawn, stepped out of the house and skeptically looked over the visitors.

  “You’ve come for my Maria?” he asked right away.

  “For her,” Tudor confirmed the purpose of the visit. “I brought some nuts …”

  An hour later a fire was blazing in the
middle of the courtyard, and its shadows danced along the walls of the house. The walls were a mixture of clay, straw and horse manure. The men sat around the fire and lazily raked the walnuts out of the ashes with little sticks. With their fingers, stiff from working in the fields, they cracked them open, and the men ate the sweet hearts at the center. They drank down the sweet nuts with a sour wine. Maria had been a master wine presser.

  “Maria was a master, she pressed the best wine for roasted nuts,” said Tudor pensively. He drank from the glass, then passed it on to Vasily. “You can drink wine like this instead of the vitamins they sell at the pharmacy.”

  “You’re not wrong,” agreed Vasily. “Hear that, wife? The villagers are talking you up!” he shouted to the back of the house.

  Serafim and Vasily snickered a little under the disapproving glance of Tudor, cleared their throats, and once again passed the wine around the circle. By their fourth liter, Serafim entered the game.

  “You see,” he said, looking pleadingly into Vasily’s face, “other people nearby won’t understand our village if they find out there’s a corpse dangling in one of our backyards. They’ll think we’re apostates.”

  “We are apostates!” said Vasily sharply. “Even without a tractor,” he added illogically.

  “We’ll buy you another tractor,” said Serafim, trying to comfort his fellow villager. “Once we’re in Italy, we’ll save up our money and buy one!”

  “I’ve had it up to here with your Italy,” snapped Vasily. “My wife chewed my ear off about it, too. And how did it all end? You got taken for a ride. And why? Well, because simple people always get made fools of. Dunces! Ah, pour me some more!”

  “I give you my word,” said Serafim, crossing himself, “I’ll send you the money myself. Just let us bury Maria. Like a human being. As it is, she’s hanging there turning everybody’s blood cold. What do you need it for?”

  “I guess I don’t, really,” admitted Vasily. “I’ve been thinking, I went too far when I said I’d never forgive her no matter what. I know a guy from the town of Alexeevca who’s got an old beat up car. He promised to let me have it. It’s got no motor. I’ll fit it out with an engine, cook something up and turn it into a tractor.”

  “It turns out,” sighed Old Man Tudor, “you did go too far.”

  “We went too far,” Vasily repeated. “You hear that, Maria? We went too far with this hanging business!” he shouted into the night.

  “Well, if it’s like that, let’s bury her,” said Tudor thoughtfully. “It’ll be quick. It’s not as if you need her hanging there outside the house, do you?”

  “Ah, no,” said Vasily with a wave of his hand. “Dead or alive, she’s of no use. Even the crows are scrambling to get into the garden, out of her sight, and they’re not afraid of anything. Except … Oh, there’s nothing to say. It’s better to see something a hundred times, than hear it twice. Or how’s the expression go? Anyway, let me show you.”

  Vasily got up from his seat and, a bit unsteady on his feet, ran into the cellar. Serafim and Tudor were sitting back to back, and they moved their pitchforks closer, just in case. Tudor, to the same effect, heated the end of a fat metal rod in the fire so that, if anything happened, he could poke out drunk Vasily’s eyes in a flash.

  Here he was at last, running up from the cellar with a new jug of wine. He placed the jug on the ground, took a slug of it, and passed it around to his drinking buddies. They didn’t bother with a glass anymore. The friends let their guard down and Vasily began his confession.

  “At night,” he said, raising a finger, “I hang strands of garlic on her to dry.”

  “Why not in the cellar?” asked Tudor stupidly.

  “The air’s stagnant down there. Up here there’s some air,” Vasily explained. “The body spins around in the breeze, and that’s good, because garlic needs ventilation.”

  6

  TOWARD FEBRUARY, THE VILLAGERS OF LARGA DECIDED TO hold their first curling tournament. The ground was extremely warm and the already dried-up cornstalks were becoming even drier in the barns, waiting in anguish for the warm embrace of a fire. Owing to these circumstances, plus the lack of an ice rink in town, they decided to play on the simple dirt. The players dragged along a stone, until they put a sort of skateboard beneath it. Vasily the tractor driver had rigged it up. The game was starting at noon, and the crowd couldn’t care less that Father Paisii, the village priest, had already cursed the whole mini-tournament, calling it a demonic delusion of a demonic Italy.

  Nikita Tkach, dressed in his most stylish threads, addressed the villagers.

  “Train like a grunt, conquer like a general. The bullet flies but a sword never lies. You want to go to Italy, don’t put the cart before the … I mean, you’ve got to push that stone! Are you ready?”

  “Ready!” shouted the players.

  The whistle blew and the game was on. True, the curlers from Larga were supposed to be playing with a forty-five pound stone. The stone they had weighed an unofficial three hundred pounds, give or take; the Largans decided to train in the most difficult conditions in order to achieve maximal effectiveness. This way, they’d qualify for the international tournament for sure.

  Nikita watched the players from the tribune he’d knocked together himself with no small excitement. Every minute or so, Tkach would gargle water in his throat from a dusty decanter he’d found in the village general store a few years back. The decanter was cracked but the spider web of fractures along its thick side only made the vessel appear more graceful, like a touch of grey on the temples of a respected elder. The decanter and his glass clinked as they touched, and so did Nikita Tkach’s heart when he saw the first ever curler in the village of Larga launch the first ever curling stone in the village of Larga across the field during the first ever curling tournament in the village of Larga …

  “Launching the stone!” the attacker shouted, and with a running start he began pushing the stone in front of him. “Step aside!”

  The players on one team carefully swept the ground in front of the stone with actual brooms, stand-ins for real curling equipment. Theoretically, they were smoothing the ice the imagined stone was supposed to spin on, to make it go quicker. The attackers labored on, but the stone didn’t spin any faster. In fact, the brooms were merely furrowing the ground.

  “The brooms are furrowing the ground!” one of the players shouted to Nikita. He was getting under Nikita’s skin, pestering him with leading questions. “The brooms are supposed to smooth out the ice, not tear it up!”

  “Keep on smoothing out the ground!” warned Tkach.

  “How am I supposed to smooth it out if—” The annoying player glanced at his broom with surprise. It was laced with nails.

  Nikita filled his lungs with air so he could mock the ignoramus. He would have explained that the brooms had been specially laced with nails to make the game even harder. But he didn’t have time, because a minute later, there was nobody to explain anything to.

  “Smooth out the ground with a broom that’s laced with nails?” the player had said, surprised. “That’s imposs—”

  And then he died, felled by the stone that had fallen off the wooden board. In the ensuing silence Nikita took a swig of air from the glass (since it was empty and Tkach had forgotten to refill it) and slowly made his way down toward the stone. Brownish blood trickled out from underneath it, mixing with the earth.

  He didn’t suffer much,” somebody hesitantly offered.

  “We have to check. We might be able to save him. Although …” A voice in a hoarse whisper was coming from the rear of the assembly.

  “Don’t remove the stone,” decided Nikita. “He’ll lie here like a submarine at the bottom of the sea.”

  The players took off their hats for a moment of silence.

  Father Paisii, as a priest of the Moldovan Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, refused to sing the requiem.

  However, as a priest of the Bessarabian Metropolitan, which in no way at
all recognized the authority of the Moldovan Metropolitan, Paisii performed it.

  7

  IN THE OLD DAYS, WHEN THE VILLAGERS WERE MORE OR less contented and hadn’t begun dreaming about Italy, Larga was known all over Moldova for two major attractions.

  The first was a trolley park.

  The first trolley appeared in Larga in 1970, ten years before the appearance of the Ferris wheel. The trolley park came about because the region was the country’s leader in the cultivation of aromatic plants. And for that, it received a prize of fifteen million rubles.

  “Fifteen million rubles to the region,” said the chairman of the collective farm, holding the congratulatory telegram in his trembling hand. “And nearly a million is earmarked for our village!”

  After the announcement, many of the villagers lapsed into deep thought. What to spend the money on? They all had to decide together. On the one hand, this simplified the task; on the other hand, it made it much harder.

  “If we use the money to buy a tractor, it’ll be Vasily’s lucky break, but what about the rest of us?” This was overheard in one of the courtyards.

  “If we buy feed or seed,” they said in the park, “then we’ll be giving all our money to the government again. And how long can we keep fluffing their pillows?”

  “No way they’re building a cowshed!” they decided at the town club. “The chairman’s daughter is the chief milker. Why should we give her a present?”

  “Road construction?” said somebody else, skeptically. “What would that do for us?”

  Which is why nobody had any immediate objections at the meeting when Dygalo, the village idiot who moonlighted as an agronomist with a PhD in Agricultural Sciences, suggested the following:

  “Hey, let’s put a trolley in town!”

  The suggestion only seemed silly at first glance. After some thought, it was thoroughly appealing. Indeed, installing a trolley wouldn’t give anybody a pretext for jealousy. It wouldn’t put a feather in anybody’s cap. It wouldn’t improve anybody’s life. Everyone was satisfied.