“Seems to me, that’s fair.”
The consul offered his colleague a Gauloise and they both lit up.
“We understand perfectly,” said Buonarroti, breaking the silence, “that this won’t stop the invasion of Moldovan workers. Things are good here, they’re bad in Moldova, that’s all there is to it. They’ll keep coming here forever. Illegally. But if we don’t turn down their visa requests, the entire country will storm Italy’s walls!”
“Terrible,” shuddered the colleague. “Really terrible.”
“This way, at least, they leave the old folks, the children, and the unenterprising ones at home,” explained the consul. “And they’re obliged to send them money to somehow scrape by in the homeland.”
“Those aren’t our problems,” remarked the consul’s colleague drily.
“You’re right. And so, our charge is to not grant anybody a visa. Nobody. If you grant a visa to just one person, you’ll get overloaded with applications. I denied visas to a Moldovan water polo team traveling to a tournament in Milan. They were real water poloists, I know it. We wouldn’t let a group of Moldovan Members of Parliament into Italy. We refused a group of journalists. Once we wouldn’t let in an entire symphony orchestra that had been invited to Rome by Signor Berlusconi himself!”
“That’s strict.”
“What else can we do? I assure you, let the above-mentioned into Italy, even if their visas aren’t fraudulent, they’re going to stay here no matter what.”
“Honestly?”
“Yes. By the way, I’ll let you in on a secret. But not a word to anybody. Do you know why the protocol desk back in Italy won’t organize a meeting between Berlusconi and President Voronin of Moldova? Do you know why the meetings that had been planned in Italy were postponed for an undetermined date?”
“You’re not saying …?”
“I am, I am, my friend. We have one hundred percent accurate information that the entire presidential delegation of Moldova, with the president himself at the helm, are planning to leave their hotel in Rome at night and spread out across Italy to set themselves up with work. One as a road paver, one as a shepherd on a farm, another as a maid …”
“My God!”
“That’s nothing. Think about this: President Voronin himself collected four thousand euros from everybody in the delegation. That’s the price human traffickers usually charge for the trip and a job once they arrive in Italy. The president himself!”
“Oh, my God,” repeated his colleague, dumbstruck. “My God …”
“That’s nothing, either. Because they even took four thousand euros from President Voronin himself!”
“That can’t be!”
“That’s not the whole of it. He paid four thousand euros so that, once he lands in Italy, he can sweat it out in a pizzeria as an assistant cook.”
“Unbelievable … ”
Buonarroti looked at his college with glee. He liked to surprise people. He nodded his head one more time, put out his cigarette and began passing his files to his successor. Buonarroti himself had been promoted. The post of Ambassador to Albania awaited him.
“Tell me, you don’t come from that family, do you?” The new consul, his face reddening, had waited until dark to ask.
“The sculptor?” laughed the now former consul. “No, indeed. Now matter how I searched for a family connection, I never found one. It’s all because my old man was a big fan of a certain chap from Florence.”
“I see,” said his colleague.
“You’re disappointed,” smiled the former consul.
“Not at all, said his successor with surprise. “Why would I be?”
“You’re disappointed,” insisted Buonarroti. “I can tell. Everybody is disappointed when they find out. Everybody thinks a man who’s called Michelangelo Buonarroti can’t not be a descendant of the other man they called Michelangelo Buonarroti.”
“Astute as always,” admitted the new consul. “Forgive me.”
Buonarroti smiled, stood up, walked over to the window. Above his right shoulder Bucharest’s glittering, darkening central square was staring the new consul in the face.
“Plus, I’ve never done any sculpture work.” Buonarroti sighed in the direction of the square below. “And I draw poorly.”
The consul was very uncomfortable. “I apologize for bringi—”
“Nonsense,” said Buonarroti. He waved his hand and turned around to face his colleague. “Let’s get back to our Moldovans. Do you know that since they’re all living in Italy illegally, they’re completely terrified to leave the country.”
“Because at the border they’ll put them on the black list, and they’ll never have a chance at Italy again,” confirmed the consul.
“Absolutely right,” nodded Buonarroti. “The only thing left is for them to send money home, write letters and make the occasional phone call. That’s why, if you can imagine it, there are rumors going around Moldova that Italy doesn’t exist.”
“How ridiculous.” The consul shrugged his shoulders, taking a seat in the chair against the wall. “Do you mind if I have a seat?”
“Please, not at all, especially since you already have. Plus, it’s your chair now, anyway … They’re sure that the Italians in Italy have never heard of Moldovan workers. And as for this supposed country where two hundred thousand Moldovans vanish into thin air … They think it’s a myth, the invention of a gang of international swindlers who kidnap people. Or they think it’s a fantasy. A mass hallucination.”
“Then why do they come?”
Buonarroti shrugged his shoulders.
“Because things are in such a bad way in their homeland, they’re ready to flee into a black hole in space, to a concentration camp, to the Sargasso Sea of international criminal brigands.”
“Between the devil and the deep blue sea,” said the new consul, demonstrating his knowledge of international idioms.
Buonarroti nodded and thrust the window all the way open. A restless Bucharest wind whisked through the room like a gypsy thief. The former consul stood a few moments more by the window, then parted ways with his replacement and headed home. Potato chip, nut and ice cream wrappers swirled around the gates of the consulate. “The kids from the local schools have been cutting class and coming here,” thought the former consul. Kicking one of the wrappers, Buonarroti glumly recalled his childhood and the constant teasing he received from his classmates. His father and that stupid name – damn them both!
“A normal person wouldn’t name his son Leonardo da Vinci, would he?” he muttered. He’d been having the same argument for forty years. Of course, his father had thought otherwise.
When Buonarroti arrived home, he glanced around the room where everything was already packed and peeked inside the hiding place his cleaning lady didn’t know about. After extracting one hundred and twenty thousand euros, he hid the money in his pocket and laughed.
On the last day of work the former consul had sold a visa stamped “APPROVED” to a Moldovan curling team. Everything was in order. A secret investigation showed they were real athletes, absolutely set on participating in the competition in Italy and then continuing on to Beijing for another competition. Buonarroti wasn’t a man who was usually for sale, and his conscience was tormenting him. But he had no other way out. In the last few years Buonarroti had lost a lot of dough on gambling. He needed the money in order to forever solve his one big problem: his name. But changing his name would have been a shameful escape, so he’d found the single means to overcome the malicious intent and mockery of his father.
Michelangelo Buonarroti was going to study to become a master sculptor.
13
VASILY LUNGU HAD BEEN FASCINATED BY MACHINES SINCE childhood. Everything made by the hands of man brought him to sheer ecstasy – from the smallest plastic rabbit who banged a drum with his forepaws while standing on the back of a turtle, as a song drifted out of his head and his eyes sparkled, to the complicated structure of the Chisinau TV
tower. This surprised his parents all the more since Vasya, like the past twenty generations of his ancestors, was a country boy to the core.
“Us Lungus – we don’t know anything but the land,” said Vasily’s perplexed father, shrugging his shoulders. “And here my little whippersnapper only gives a hoot about machines …”
From the age of five, Vasily’s hands lost the smell of the earth peculiar to people who wake up before the cock crows. He was covered in machine grease. Gradually the boy’s hands lost their sensitivity due to the various scratches and scars and injuries they sustained out of Vasily’s carelessness with his tools. At ten years old, after spending the entire summer bent over in the tobacco fields, Vasily took the money he saved and bought a set of files, a soldering iron, a few vices and a circular saw. For this his father gave him a minor beating, but after Vasily fixed the television, his father stopped hounding his son for his strange obsession. And when official propaganda began extolling machines, it really wouldn’t do to be ashamed of a son for the very activity the Soviet powers wished on all young people. Although sometimes, it’s true, Vasya took his love for machines to the extreme.
“Listen up, old man.” The chairman waved Vasily’s father over for a serious conversation behind the house. “I have a feeling your son’s making trouble.”
“What’s he done?” said the father, surprised. “Besides his gears and gadgets, what else can he think up? And even so, they’re just gadgets …”
“Follow me and you’ll see,” the chairman said. His voice was sinister and grim. Vasily’s father suddenly felt especially uncomfortable and lonely in the dusty yard.
Sneaking up on the barn where Vasily did all his technical tinkering, the men cautiously opened the door a crack and peeked inside. Vasya wasn’t home, he was working in the fields, so there was nothing to be afraid of. But all the same, it was scary. What if there was some devil’s contraption in the barn?
And that’s basically what they found. The chairman and Vasily’s father looked at the strange construction in silent horror. Its shape was reminiscent of three bookcases stacked one on top of the other. Its function was unclear. The chairman managed to whisper that it reminded him of a giant ship with an abundance of sails. The only thing that came to the father’s mind was his own exile to Siberia. A baby, he’d barely survived there with his kulak parents. The peasant didn’t recall this out loud, however, as the current chairman was the one who’d sent them there. Why remind a good man of a bad deed?
“I wonder what it is,” he said instead. “Up there, on top of the veneer, with those rods – that can’t be rigging, can it?”
“Oh, that’s rigging, alright, with rods, on top of the veneer,” the chairman sneered venomously. “But unless we know the main thing, what’s the use?”
“The what?” asked the father, frightened, and his heart squeezed up because he loved his son and because after Siberia his heart was weak, and his eyes prone to tears. “What don’t the both of us know?”
The chairman frowned and clenched his teeth. “We don’t know the purpose of this criminal apparatus your son constructed.”
“Listen here, Koval,” said Vasily’s father, growing brave out of cowardice. “Don’t you poke your nose around here, looking for my son. Far’s I know, the Twentieth Congress is over. We exposed all you Stalinists for what you were. And I won’t let you send my son to suffer in the North, like you sent me and mine. Understand?”
“Come on,” said the chairman, genuinely offended. “Look, we’ll send him somewhere and he’ll be reeducated.”
The father had tears in his eyes, remembering his years as a young boy in Siberia.
“I’ll reeducate you with a pitchfork through your ribs,” he said. And he promptly pinned the chairman against the wall of the barn with the farm instrument. The men stared at each other for a few minutes while the brightly colored village chickens raced by their feet like fleas. Vasily’s father’s eyes grew white, and he pressed the pitchfork harder. He himself nearly died of fear. After all, his entire life he’d been not a man, but a broken down old rag – though he wouldn’t admit it to anyone. He was afraid of everything, and he often cried at night when he remembered his father: how his old man would return to that northern settlement with hands bloodstained from the slave labor, biting his lip as Mother rubbed ointment into the wounds … how his mother used to collect pinecones at night, so nobody would see, and peel them, then pound the seeds and add them to the bread … how the supplies ran out in January of the long Siberian winter and his brother, his beloved brother, five-year-old Greisha, who had swollen up from hunger, his stomach bloated, at death’s door, kept asking Mama for something to eat. And one day he stopped asking …
Vasily’s father’s eyes filled with tears as he remembered his parents, dead not long after returning from exile. He threw nearly all his weight onto the pitchfork. The chairman was saved by the secret file he’d tucked beneath his shirt.
Koval’s shock turned to fear and he tried to relieve the tension.
“Well, maybe he’s not a damaging element, your sonny boy,” he appeased with a mutter. “Maybe he ended up, say, in a Trotskyite circle by mistake, and then knocked this together.”
“And what is this?” asked the boy’s father, crying again. “Maybe it’s nothing to worry about!”
“Just look closely,” said the chairman again, bravely. “How can such a thing not be dangerous, suspicious and seditious?!?”
Vasily’s father sighed, let go of the pitchfork and sat down on his haunches. He stared intently at his son’s mishmash. What was there to say? It did look dangerous, suspicious and seditious. And that could mean only one thing. They’d lock up his son. The father’s heart tensed up and froze forever. From then on, he developed a little stutter and his lower lips would tremble from time to time. The chairman watched with satisfaction as his fellow villager suffered, and regretted not having the chance to take a picture of the scene to hang on the wall of shame at the Larga town office. For in the depths of his heart a Stalinist he remained, Twentieth Congress be damned.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” Vasily froze at the threshold of the barn. “Papa? Comrade Chairm …”
He hadn’t finished speaking when his father threw himself at his feet, sobbing.
“Oh, Vasya, Vasenka, tell me, what have you gotten yourself into?” he begged. “What’s this devil’s machine you’ve got here? Confess! We’re going together to the regional offices, we’re turning ourselves in. When you turn yourself in you don’t suffer as much. Oh, flesh of my flesh, what have you done?”
“Let him write a confession,” suggested the chairman, businesslike. He’d settled back on his haunches. “I’ve got a piece of paper and a pen. Just make sure to specify at the bottom that it was me, Chairman Koval, who with his vigilance helped expose these intrigues.”
“He’ll specify, he’ll specify,” sobbed Vasily’s father, writing. “He’ll specify everything, just don’t make him suffer, let him alone, you cretins. My only son!”
The chairman was already scribbling. “ ‘Cretins’ is going into the report, as well!” He stuck out his tongue.
At first Vasily didn’t understand a thing. When he realized what was going on, he broke out in laughter. He threw open the barn window and the chickens flew up, up and away, feathers swirling, and the fresh air flew in, and Vasily laughed so long and so contagiously that his father’s eyes leaked as if somebody had poked them out. And the father understood that the times had changed, and nobody was going to execute his only son, and that the boy—a member of the Youth Komsomol and an A student in physics, chemistry and mathematics, and, well, in literature there was room for improvement—the boy hadn’t done anything wrong. And Chairman Koval also understood it, and with sadness he tore up the confession and the report he’d already filled out. Vasya had laughed himself out and walked up to the strange apparatus that engendered so much suspicion in the vigilant chairman.
“Now, you
son of a bitch, I want you to drag the first Soviet replica of the first Wright Brothers plane to the village square.”
14
“COMRADES! IN FRONT OF US WE HAVE THE FIRST SOVIET replica of the first Wright Brothers plane – which makes it the first replica of the first plane in the world!”
Seventeen year-old Vasily began his lecture. He was handsome, with a resemblance to the latest fashionable movie star.
The crowd was respectfully silent, watching as Vasily slowly drew circles around the apparatus—which didn’t look like an airplane at all—with his pointer. Nobody protested, since thanks to the lecture they’d been let off work in the orchards and the fields. Not far from the villagers, the chairman of the regional VSCAAF, the Volunteer Society for Cooperation with the Army, Aviation and Fleet, paced up and down, happy that in a village in his jurisdiction there was to be found a natural-born mechanic.
“And what, comrades, exactly is this Wright Brothers plane?” asked Vasily. Then he added maliciously, “A plane that a few of our comrades took for a strange and suspicious mishmash?”
“Vasenka,” whispered Koval, using an endearing nickname for the boy. “Sweet boy …”
Vasya smiled gloatingly and continued his lecture. He’d decided the following with the chairman: Vasily wouldn’t say anything about Koval’s subversive idea to call the first Soviet replica of the Wright Brothers plane a suspicious mishmash; in return, Koval would have to fly as the copilot.
“Don’t worry, scumbag,” Vasily growled as they dragged the plane to the village council. “The machine runs like clockwork, I’ve already tested it. We’ll fly low, about two hundred meters off the ground. And not for too long, either. About three miles. Then we’ll turn around.”
“Vasya, I’m afraid of heights,” whimpered the chairman. “Don’t …”
“As you well should be, scumbag.” Vasya, who never used bad language, nodded his head. “But I’ll be flying with you. So you’re not going to die.”
The Good Life Elsewhere Page 6