The Good Life Elsewhere

by Vladimir Lorchenkov

  “A submarine!” whispered the border guard, barely able to believe his eyes. “A small, but damned if-it-ain’t submarine! Jesus Christ. What will these Moldovans do next, huh? Are they planning on hawking that small thing in Iassi?”

  Shaking his head in disbelief, the Romanian watched as the two strange birds approached the checkpoint. And if their lugging a submarine weren’t enough, they also happened to be decked out like jesters. One was an admiral without a fleet, the other, in his striped sailor’s vest and pirate’s bandana on his good-for-nothing noggin …

  “Oh boy, again with the nutcases?” he thought.

  “Here you are,” said Serafim, practically luminous, handing his accompanying documents to the border guard. “Kindly have a look.”

  He stood straight at attention next to Vasily. Tongues sticking out of their mouths from the heat, both of them yearned to have a seat in the shadow of the customs booth and let the breeze blow through their beards. Alas, that space was occupied by several stray dogs, whom the agents fed and whom they allowed to crisscross over the government border whenever the animals felt like it. The guard tsk-tsked, scratched his sun-frazzled hair, and began to read:

  “An unusual competition is under way in the American state of Maryland, where engineering students are demonstrating their pedal-operated homemade submarines. The winning team will sail a distance of a hundred meters in their vessel in the shortest time. The tournament is taking place in special US Navy training waters,” stammered the agent, reading the piece of paper. “According to participants, the requirements for victory include innovative submarine construction – and strong legs.”

  Vasily and Serafim smiled and nodded.

  “What in God’s name is this?” asked the Romanian in surprise.

  “This,” said Serafim, pointing to the piece of paper he’d ripped out of the newspaper, “is a document confirming our participation in an international competition that’s going to take place in the United States. We’ll be there as honorary guests.”

  “And how are you going to get to the States? On foot?” The agent, so flabbergasted by the insolence of the Moldovans, couldn’t even muster anger.

  “By sea,” Vasily said, looking pityingly at the Romanian. “Isn’t that obvious?”

  Taking a deep breath, the agent stood his ground for a minute, fastened up his guard jacket with the high collar, adjusted his cap and saluted the two crazy Moldovans. He spun around precisely, as if on a parade ground, and marched straight to the booth, where, choking with laughter, he told his colleagues everything. They’d been following the scene out of boredom. The men picked themselves up, stretched themselves out, and went to meet Vasily and Serafim, as if attending a grand ceremony.

  The commanding officer bit his lip.

  “We’re happy to welcome such valiant representatives of what, without a doubt, is the embryo of the great nascent naval fleet of Moldova.”

  32

  “DO YOU THINK OLD MAN TUDOR WILL FORGIVE US FOR stealing his bicycle?” Vasily asked as he lazily pedaled their contraption.

  “Not his bicycle” Serafim corrected him. “Just the pedals.” He was charting their course through the small Plexiglass window he’d filched from the office of the regional land surveyor’s office.

  “We stole the entire bicycle!” Vasily said testily.

  “But we only took the pedals,” objected Serafim. “There’s a difference.”

  “No, there isn’t,” Vasily decided, thinking on it for a while. “If a fox strangles a goose just to eat the brains, you wouldn’t say the fox killed the brains. You’d say the fox offed the goose.”

  “If your conscience is bothering you because of Old Man Tudor’s bicycle, it shouldn’t.” There was a note of understanding in Serafim’s voice and he clapped his friend on the shoulder. “When we get to Italy and make heaps of money, we’ll buy him the best racing bike there is, you can be sure of that. And we’ll send him the bicycle along with a heap of money.”

  “And the old one?” Vasily asked nervously, anxiously. “What’ll happen with the old one? It’s not completely ready for the scrap heap. You can’t waste all that good hardware!”

  “We’ll put the bicycle without pedals into the Larga Village Museum, when we get as rich as Croesus,” Serafim promised grandly. We’ll put our submarine there, too. Schoolchildren will feast their eyes on our submarine and our bicycle!”

  “It’s not our bicycle, but Old Man Tudor’s, to be exact,” said Vasily.

  “What’s the difference, anyway?”

  “And, by the way, as soon as our sudmarine …”

  “A sudmarine is what you get when you drop your soap in the sea,” said Serafim. He made a sour face. “What we’ve got is a submarine. Got it? Remember. SUBmarine.”

  “I got it. So, when our submarine floats to … ”

  Serafim interrupted viciously: “Floating is for feces that get taken by the waves. A submarine cruises. Got it? Remember. A submarine cruises. Remember that. Submarine. Cruises.”

  “You’re a real sea dog,” said Vasily with respect. “Where’d you manage to pick it all up?”

  “From books,” Serafim admitted, “like just about everything else I know in life. I learned the Italian language and the country from books, I fell in love with Michelangelo’s sculptures thanks to books. You can tell, I haven’t actually seen or heard anything firsthand in this life.”

  “Your love for Italy is worthy of the greatest respect,” said Vasily approvingly. “But where did you find a book to teach yourself Italian?”

  Serafim took a deep breath and his head sagged. Grey hairs shone atop his head, just like the occasional ray of sunshine that bounced off the dark waters of the river. And for a brief moment Vasily admired the profile of his friend, now pensive and gloomy.

  “We’re leaving the estuary,” said Serafim quietly. “In a minute we’ll be on the open sea. Don’t push the pedals too hard. We don’t want to stray too far from shore.”

  Vasily nodded and let up on the pedals. As he glanced at his surroundings, he was surprised at his own engineering genius. A small submarine, encased in metal panels taken from a long-suffering tractor, with an interior like a comfortable little closet. The two men were quartered quite freely inside. Besides the two seats—for the captain and his oarsman—there were deck chairs set up for relaxation. A retractable pipe had also been put in, which, in case of an accident, would let in air. Vasily smiled. Everything was going according to plan.

  “Don’t get too comfy,” Serafim warned him. “We’ve got lots of work to do. It was the current that carried us to the estuary, but we won’t have such luck in the sea.”

  Toward midnight the friends brought the vessel to the surface and heaved to. Vasily stared at the warm stars of the estuary, still native and Moldovan, but already nearly Ukrainian and thus, almost foreign. He daydreamed, letting his hand down into the warm water.

  And Serafim was watching the path the moon’s reflection made in the water. It reminded him of Stella’s hair.

  33

  FLYING PAST THE ALPS, THE AIRPLANE TOOK A STEEP TURN and the president heard a whistling in his ears. After waiting for the aircraft to straighten out, he got up from his seat, ignoring the stewardesses’ request, and walked into the cockpit.

  “Can’t you take it easy? You’ve flipped your lids, dogfighters,” he shouted.

  “Sorry, Mister President, but in order to disappear from the radar, that was an absolutely necessary trick,” the pilots explained.

  President Voronin grumbled a minute longer, then took a seat directly on the floor and sipped tea from a thermos. “Some cognac in here would be nice,” the president thought. But that would come later, he decided. At his age, risky procedures like this one ought to be carried out stone-cold sober.

  “Some cognac,” thought the pilot, licking his lips. He’d read his boss’s mind. “I’ll get drunk later.”

  The president surveyed his surroundings. In the cabin, twenty m
embers of his retinue crowded in the aisle. Five advisers, six people from the Office of Protocol, one Minister of Reintegration and eight complete strangers. These had joined the presidential delegation simply because they’d come up with four thousand euros for the trip to Italy. Also on board were two men whose fate was unclear: an economic advisor and a political advisor on domestic affairs; Voronin was not overly fond of the latter.

  “Fellows, everything will go off without a hitch?” Voronin asked. “You’ll smash the plane to bits, right?”

  The young pilots with their toothy grins smiled. “ To smash a plane just a little bit, Mister President, isn’t really possible. So we’ll smash it to bits. Don’t worry. Have you got your parachute?”

  “Yes, Sir!” answered Voronin, suddenly in military mode, and again he felt a yen for cognac. “Have you got what to drink? For later, I mean. On the ground.”

  “It stands to reason!”

  The flyers chuckled and Voronin felt relieved. Only ten minutes until the realization of his dreams. Two minutes ago his plane had dropped off earth’s radar. Now they were already flying above Italian territory. In five minutes he and his retinue—everybody who’d contributed four thousand euros—would jump with their parachutes. Some Moldovans who were in the business of setting up work for their countrymen in Italy would be waiting for them at an agreed-upon point.

  “Finally,” Voronin said to himself, “I’m going to a normal country. Where the streets are clean. Where people are polite. Where everybody lives like they’re in paradise. Maybe,” he thought, feeling inside his jacket lining for the ten thousand euros sewn in there, “I’ll open a pizzeria someday.

  “Meanwhile, let Speaker Lupu sort things out back home. He’s young, he’ll figure things out. And anyway,” Voronin reasoned, “no matter who comes to power in that country, nobody can improve things. Moldova is doomed. So to hell with it!

  “In ten minutes,” his thoughts went, “I’ll jump with this parachute, they’ll be waiting for me, they’ll bring me to a village in the north of Italy, give me documents and a job. And my whole retinue will get the same treatment. After the pilots jump, the airplane will crash into the summit of the mountains. And in the weeks before anybody finds it, it’ll be covered with snow and ice, and it’s doubtful they’ll even search for the bodies.” The president saw the plan come together as a whole and again marveled at the minds of those who map out these little crossings of Moldovans into Italy. If more of them went into government, maybe Moldova would see its way out!

  “So, you’re the president?”

  The man in the Chisinau office had pensively spun Voronin’s business card in his hands.

  “And you want to hightail it to Italy, but you’ve only got four thousand euros? Well, what’s the problem? That happens to be our normal fee. You don’t want to go by bus? Then how? Let’s think, how can we ship you? There’s just one condition.”

  “Sure, sure,” the president had eagerly replied.

  He arrived to the office in the evening. He’d found the firm by an announcement pasted onto a telephone pole. The announcement read: “We’ll send you to Italy. Legitimate, fully-clothed activity.” And two telephone numbers.

  “The condition is simple,” said the businessman. “Gas is on you.”

  Voronin laughed when he thought about the mug of mourning Berlusconi would slap onto his face. “Serves him right, that old fraud. He didn’t want to let the President of Moldova’s delegation in, then let him extend his sympathies!”

  “Mister President.” The lead pilot clapped Voronin on the shoulders. “Get ready.”

  The president stood up. He glanced at his advisors without parachutes and remembered something.

  He pointed his thumb in their direction. “And with these ones – what’ll we do?”

  “Nothing,” said the pilot, a young man, waving his hand. “Let them stay.”

  “Where?” The president didn’t understand. “The plane can’t fly back to Moldova without a pilot, can it?”

  “Let them stay on the plane,” the pilot explained. “That’s my suggestion.”

  The president thought for a minute and decided that this was not a very good plan. Inhumane, somehow.

  “Inhumane, somehow,” he yelled to the pilot, who was already opening the hatch. “We’re not animals, after all.”

  “Correct!” shouted the pilot. “We’re people and, as distinct from animals, we have ideas, we can think.”

  “True!” affirmed the president.

  “And so I was thinking and thinking, and this is what I thought up. If they manage to reach the plane right away … In other words, if they find two bodies, there’ll be fewer questions. That’s one. And if we take even one person to Italy for free, we’ll destroy the whole business model. That’s two. So, what’ll it be?”

  The president appraisingly glanced at his advisors, shrugged his shoulders and approached the open door. His hair was blown across his face by a mighty wind, and it was as if Voronin shed a dozen years. Right before he jumped, the pilot asked him one more time:

  “So what’ll we do with these two?

  “Extend our sympathies.”

  34

  SERAFIM, ENTANGLED IN THOUGHTS OF STELLA’S HAIR, RECALLED the girl with sadness. He blamed life for the fact that things hadn’t turned out as they might have. After all, Serafim had been in love with the librarian since first grade from the moment when, mesmerized by her slightly damp forehead, he sat down right on top of a pencil case. The years passed, they grew up, but the school desks had stayed the same. Stella had never let on that she liked him. “Maybe that’s the reason I found a second love in my life – Italy,” Serafim thought gloomily.

  But it was hard to forget Stella. He recalled her lover, the head of the region, whose liaisons with Stella were the talk of the town; Serafim felt as if the invisible hand of the Archangel Gabriel was crushing his ribs. But he gradually if begrudgingly, accepted his lot.

  “What to do?” Serafim moaned quietly, so as not to wake Vasily. “You don’t choose your fate. If she wasn’t meant for me, she wasn’t meant for me.”

  Serafim recalled, too, how he’d approached Stella for an Italian textbook he could use by himself, and how she was so cold to him, and how he tried to telepathically awake in her some feeling but was too shy to say to speak up and so he left, placing the blame on his own shoulders. And he thought that she hadn’t given him another thought once he walked out the door, and that she’d immediately begun sprucing herself up in expectation of her lover’s arrival.

  What to do? In the life of every man, there’s a woman who doesn’t give a fiddle for him, and the life gets sucked out of him on her account, like sheep’s cheese that’s been taken out of the brine and thrown onto the display counter at the market...

  Serafim bit his lips and froze again. Then, with clear intentions, but carefully so as not to flip the boat, he stood up. Enough! He was a grown man. He had more to worry about than these boyhood diversions! Even if the eyes of his old flame were like dark grapes, and her chest rounded as a hill at the Dniester riverhead, and her body desired as a Christmas gift and supple as a young willow that grows through the frozen ground … Enough! At the end of the day, he was no longer a boy. Serafim exhaled and peered ahead of him. It was already the tenth day of their expedition. The friends had been lucky with the weather. By all accounts it seemed that they weren’t far from the shores of Italy. There was a lapping sound, and Serafim glanced around. A coastguard boat loomed suddenly before him. Serafim smiled and put his hands in the air.

  “I greet you, valiant sons of Rome!” he shouted, in perfect Italian.

  The coast guard laughed and Serafim relaxed. With a smile on his face, he immediately felt his head being plunged into the warm water of the welcoming sea. His legs shook as if from a blow, and Serafim was barely able to grab on to Vasily’s collar. The coast guard, who had hit the submarine straight on with a hand grenade, sailed away without even bothering to check
for survivors. Serafim held onto Vasily until morning, when they were picked up by Ukrainian sailors traveling to Odessa. From there, the friends were deported to Moldova.

  “Welcome home, breadwinners!” the Moldovan customs inspector told them. “Don’t tell me you’re not carrying any money!”

  35

  IN FACT, THE ONLY REASON SERAFIM HAD GOTTEN HOLD of the book was because Stella, the librarian, was in love with him.

  The region’s librarian, Stella Zaporozhanu, had been in love with Serafim Botezatu since that day in the first grade when the strict village teacher sat them at the same desk. She stared the boy with the pained and pensive look on his face, his eye so hard to catch, and when she saw his thick eyebrows, she wondered if her own chest would be just as thick in ten years. Stella couldn’t manage to grab his attention for nearly a half a year. She spent sleepless nights wondering where his eyes were always wandering.

  And when she finally did catch the glance of her desk-mate, her hopes were dashed, because she understood: only the most beautiful things in the world could catch his eye. His eye, reflected in her eye … Since then, Stella’d had no peace of mind, and twenty years of life became hell. Especially after Serafim, upon turning fourteen, became obsessed with Italy and lost his interest in the world around him. And unlike her body, which blossomed and bloomed, Stella simply wilted inside.

  “I dipped his photograph in wax. I stuck a pin into the hem of my dress. I brushed away his legs with my skirt, I secretly snipped off a lock of his hair to sink into my witch’s brew at midnight and fan the flames of love. Is there a quack superstition I haven’t tried?”

  Stella’s mother shook her head and advised her daughter to separate her heart from him. “He’s not for you,” she said, and she was right, because Serafim wasn’t fit for Stella. Nor was he fit for the woman his parents sought out to be his wife, though he dutifully lived with her. At his own wedding, Serafim sat with empty eyes and kept trying to understand: In Venice, did people enter a gondola with their left foot first or was it, after all, with the right foot?