The Good Life Elsewhere

by Vladimir Lorchenkov

  “How’s that?”

  Ivan let loose with a horse’s laugh, then logged on the NATO air patrol frequency.

  “Paradox, Paradox, this is Symposium,” he shouted excitedly. “Symposium speaking. Do you read me?”

  “Loud and clear, Symposium.” The voice with a British accent could be heard in their earphones. And it spoke English!

  “We’ve got a huge column of armed Serbs penetrating the Italian side on our patrol,” shouted Ivan. “A downright invasion, blast those bastards!”

  “That right?” Doubt could be discerned in the voice of Paradox. “You sure it’s not like last time, Symposium? When we smashed two Turkish buses to smithereens?”

  “The buses were green, so I thought, Waddaya know, Islamic warriors …” said Ivan. He sounded hurt.

  “Alright,” sighed Symposium, “I’m coming over to you.”

  “Where are you?” asked Ivan, aka Paradox.

  “Over the Atlantic,” said Symposium. “Be there in two minutes. Where am I aiming?”

  “Third vehicle from the head,” said Paradox. “There’s a big fat bearded Serb sitting on top of the truck. Sitting there, the rat bastard, all smiles! Let him burn!”

  “I got him. I got him,” explained Symposium. “He’s pretty satisfied with himself, the bastard. I’m sure he’s remembering all those Albanians he killed in Kosovo.”

  “I’m sure!” repeated Ivan joyously. He was quietly laughing to himself. “I’ll tell you what else, Symposium. It seems to me, he’s got a familiar face. I think I’ve seen him, this Serb, on the list of war criminals on The Hague’s Most Wanted list.”

  “Bingo,” shouted Symposium. “We’ve hit the jackpot.”

  The road beneath the crop duster was colored by a black rose of smoke. Then another, and another, and the column of Romanian truck drivers, on their way to pick up more wine, were turned into an entire garden of black roses. Ivan and his copilot circled above, then picked up altitude and flew toward the sun. A little while later, Symposium came back on the radio to let them know his superiors were planning on giving him a medal. Symposium promised to stand his Croatian friends a glass of vodka. The Croatians, of course, agreed; the colleagues had a nice meal that evening in Zagreb.

  And for their latest attempt at aggression, the Serbian government was made to pay a fine to the European Union.

  48

  “THIS IS QUITE A LEGACY YOU LEFT ME, MISTER PRESIDENT,” whispered the Speaker of Parliament, Marian Lupu. He took a seat on Vladimir Voronin’s couch. “Quite a legacy.”

  Briefcases in hand, the advisors exited the office of the head of the government, which Lupu had recently become. Each advisor was green with envy; their briefcases overflowed with heaps of paper. Their reports had been deplorable. Moldova had been the poorest nation in Europe for the last fifteen or so years. There was no industry, no agriculture, and the population was taking flight. Lupu cursed up a storm—in French, since he was cultured and knew five languages—and got to thinking. It wasn’t that the general poverty of Moldova was distressing to him.

  “And if Moldova ceases to exist, then what?” He expressed his misgivings to a certain trusted advisor. “ What’ll I be president of?”

  The advisor sighed, walked up to the safe and opened it with the key that hung around his neck, right next to the little cross.

  “Mircea Snegur, the first president of Moldova, ordered that a safe be installed here,” the advisor began. “And he left a missive for his successors. He instructed me to turn over the contents of the safe to the President of Moldova whenever the time comes that things in this country can’t get any worse.”

  “Hmmm,” Lupu mumbled. “How did he know that things were going to get to where they couldn’t get any worse?”

  “Because that’s where things were headed from the beginning,” explained the advisor. “It’s just that then, for the first few years, we had what to eat through, drink up and steal blind. So. The envelope, Your Excellency.”

  Lupu made a motion for his advisor to remain present and opened the envelope. On the piece of paper was a note in the rough handwriting of Snegur:

  “When things in the country are in the pits, start a war with somebody.”

  49

  DREAMS DIE JUST LIKE PEOPLE. THAT’S WHAT SERAFIM BOTEZATU, who’d aged a lot in the past decade, found out that fall in Larga. After publishing an advertisement in the regional newspaper that read, “Translator from Norwegian seeks work,” he was pleasantly surprised when Nikita Tkach showed up at his doorstep one day. Tkach was the founder of the first curling team in Larga.

  “You see, next summer we’ll be going to Norway to take part in a competition. I wanted you to make us welcome banners.”

  “Alright.” Serafim nodded. “And how about Italy?”

  “We were supposed to go there in the summer, but we changed our minds,” said Nikita. He was embarrassed.

  “They wouldn’t let you in,” asked Serafim, hanging his head.

  “No, they let us in,” Nikita explained. “We decided we didn’t want to go.”

  “You decided what?” said Serafim hoarsely.

  Nikita Tkach turned red. Then he explained. At first the curling team he’d knocked together as an excuse for taking his pals to Italy had only been a joke.

  “Then,” continued Nikita, lighting up, “we actually started to like the sport of curling. We fell in love with it. The game has its own philosophy. And we’ve taken that on. We realized that paradise for us is wherever there’s curling. That’s our Italy.”

  Serafim listened, but couldn’t believe his own ears. Nikita talked and talked, and in the stove the walnut tree was burning. It was the same one Serafim used to fall asleep under. Now he’d cut it down.

  In the past ten years, the curling team from Larga had achieved considerable success. Second place in the European Championships; bronze at the World Championships. Now they were training for the Olympic Games in Beijing. Sure, they were tempted during those first overseas tournaments to flee the hotel and hide, but love for curling triumphed. And now they were supposed to go to Italy for a tournament, but …

  “But what?” asked Serafim through clenched teeth.

  “You see,” said Nikita guiltily, “we refused, because the tournament in Norway will be better for us. The competition is stronger. So we’re saying no to Italy.”

  Serafim wiped away a tear, trembling like a flame, from the corner of his eye.

  “Maybe you don’t understand. You’d be betraying not just us, but yourselves. Maybe you don’t understand that by denying the dream to get to Italy, you’re defiling the ashes of Old Man Tudor? Of poor Vasily, killed by a bullet? Of the shining memory of Father Paisii’s runaway bride? Of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of our countrymen who died on the Holy Crusade in their quest to make it to the Holy Land, to Italy? And maybe you don’t understand that you, Nikita Tkach, are denying yourself … ”

  Nikita was silent. He sighed, stood up, and left. Serafim walked after him, waved his arm in the air, and crawled back under his blanket. The man was shivering. He started to cry.

  50

  THE NEW PRESIDENT HELD COUNSEL WITH HIS ADVISORS. Lupu was extremely nervous. He’d never planned on taking over the reins of government. What could be better than doing nothing as a simple member of parliament? And here he was, on the presidential throne, about to start a war.

  Lupu crumpled Snegur’s missive. “It’s easy to say, ‘Go to war.’ On the other hand, it does distract people. War …”

  “Yessir.”

  “Ok. It’s decided. True, there are questions. With whom? Who’s weaker than we are?”

  “Nobody,” said his advisor, shaking his head with absolute certainly. “Nobody at all. Which means—”

  “Which means,” said Lupu, picking up the thread, “we have to go to war with ourselves?”

  “Absolutely,” said the advisor. “We’ll pick a certain region to attack, one, two, easy as pie.”


  “Excellent,” Lupu decided. “Let’s attack Transnistria!”

  “No can do,” sighed the advisor. “We might lose.”

  Lupu threw up his arms. “Then what?”

  The advisor thought a minute, then drew aside a heavy velvet curtain that was usually kept closed. Lupu’s mouth dropped. Before him was a giant pornographic sculpture: Zeus and Europa. Zeus, according to the sculptor’s interpretation, was in the middle of his transformation into a bull. He still had the body of an athlete but the head of an aurochs, and on his forehead there was a burning star, like the Moldovan flag. The monster was ravishing a maiden with a halo of stars above her head, which, Lupu recalled, was the flag of the European Union. The virgin was no longer protesting and was in fact impassioned. What was especially spicy, the figured moved and breathed heavily.

  “Pardon, sir,” said the advisor, blushing. “The painful legacy of President Voronin.”

  He shifted the curtain and the mechanism, judging by the fact that Zeus and Europa went quiet, was switched off. The advisor pulled aside the curtain from the other wall and exposed an enormous map of Moldova.

  “Take your pick!” He put his finger to the map. “Any population point that suits your fancy!”

  “What do you say we attack somebody in the north,” suggested Lupu. “I can’t stand them. Instead of wine, they’re always making moonshine.”

  “No problem.” His advisor shrugged his shoulders. “How about – Larga?”

  “What the hell is that?” said Lupu with curiosity, putting his feet up on the table. “A city?”

  “A village. They’re always giving us trouble. Remember that priest who gathered a few thousand ragamuffins and led them into Italy? He was from Larga. They’re all a little crazy. In the local elections, one candidate for mayor even proposed that Larga become a free Italian city.”

  “That’s it, let’s attack Larga,” said Lupu, scratching his nose. “What’ll we blame them for?”

  “Let’s drag up their ‘free Italian city’ idea,” said the advisor. “We’ll accuse them of separatism.”

  “And then we’ll rain war down on them!”

  “Absolutely correct, Your Excellency” the advisor smiled.

  Lupu sent his advisor off to prepare the order, and he himself glanced behind the curtain. The bull with the star on his forehead looked at the new president approvingly. The length of his manly apparatus in centimeters, divided by two, equaled Marian Lupu’s favorite number: fourteen.

  Lupu decided this was a good sign. He felt at peace.

  51

  IN OCTOBER, THE TIME CAME TO DIE. SERAFIM, DEVASTATED after the death of his friend Vasily, the burning of Old Man Tudor and the betrayal of Nikita Tkach, had laid in bed a long time in his half-abandoned home. He thought of himself as a vampire who’s foresworn evil deeds and whiles away the endless years far away from everything, even blood. He just rolled around the wool blanket, unkempt as his own head of hair, and rarely went outside for air. Serafim didn’t watch television. Therefore, he knew nothing of the destruction of Eurograd, nor of the mysterious disappearance of Father Paisii. He didn’t suspect that the Moldovan Ministry of Foreign Affairs had advised the Metropolitan of Moldova to canonize Father Paisii as a “fervent ally of European values and a fighter for European integration.” He did not hear the surrounding churches proclaiming that Father Paisii had been taken straight to Heaven, and that there, in the Italy in the sky, he passes his days listening to the singing of the angels. There was no news in the life of Serafim. There was no nothing.

  He simply lay between blankets and stared blankly at the wall painted white ten years ago. He tallied the wounds his dream had caused him. Serafim understood that, by chasing after Italy, he had lost everything: Vasily, who could have been a friend; Old Man Tudor, who could have taken the place of a father; Stella, who wanted to give her body and soul to him so badly. At the same time, Serafim understood clearly, he could never have not yearned for Italy because here, in his homeland, all that awaited him was poverty, darkness and despair. From time to time Serafim heard somebody enter the house and he would close his eyes, stubbornly determined not to see anybody. The visitor placed food on the table and quietly left. Serafim realized it was Stella, who loved him so. He could never forgive her for giving him that Norwegian textbook.

  His season had come and gone, realized Serafim, and it was time to die. He barely touched his food. Time passed, and once, on top of the pillow he rested his head on, Serafim found a yellow leaf cuddled up beside him. Serafim thought that the yellowing of leaves was like the graying of human hair.

  “And what made you grow old, and who betrayed you?” he asked the leaf. “And where are your dreams weeping now, you poor thing?”

  He cradled the leaf in his hands and brought it out to the yard. Just then, there was an explosion on the outskirts of Larga. The village, which sat atop a hill on the lip of a river, was being shelled by the Moldovan Army. At first the artillerymen had to calibrate their shots and a series of shells overshot their mark. The slice of land on which Larga lay began to slowly slide into the river.

  Larga entered the water like a ship, and began to float.

  Serafim couldn’t believe his eyes. With trembling hands he set the leaf down on the ground and looked around. The village really was floating. The sky above them skated slowly by, and the waves of the Dniester gently lapped against Larga’s earth. The village, an island now, was taken even further along by the current. Serafim thought they’d float right down to the Black Sea, and then – straight on to Italy. Somewhere in the distance the impotent, spiteful soldiers were wildly waving their arms. From the other side of the village people ran up to Serafim, happily shouting something. In front of them all, running weightlessly, just like a little leaf, was Stella, and Serafim for the first time in many years thought that perhaps they had a future together. Of course, he’d need money for a wedding, but they could earn it in Italy, couldn’t they? Larga floated on, rocking gently, toward the sea. Toward the ocean, cleansed by the ashes of Vasily Lungu. Through the breeze, where Father Paisii’s spirit was floating with them.

  Larga approached the sea.

  The villagers came ever closer and Serafim went out to meet them, opening his heart and his arms. He smiled.

  “Straight on till Italy, Admiral!” he heard somebody say.

  COCAINE BY PITIGRILLI

  Paris in the 1920s – dizzy and decadent. Where a young man can make a fortune with his wits … unless he is led into temptation. Cocaine’s dandified hero Tito Arnaudi invents lurid scandals and gruesome deaths, and sells these stories to the newspapers. But his own life becomes even more outrageous when he acquires three demanding mistresses. Elegant, witty and wicked, Pitigrilli’s classic novel was first published in Italian in 1921 and retains its venom even today.

  newvesselpress.com/books/cocaine/

  SOME DAY BY SHEMI ZARHIN

  On the shores of Israel’s Sea of Galilee lies the city of Tiberias, a place bursting with sexuality and longing for love. The air is saturated with smells of cooking and passion. Some Day is a gripping family saga, a sensual and emotional feast that plays out over decades. This is an enchanting tale about tragic fates that disrupt families and break our hearts. Zarhin’s hypnotic writing renders a painfully delicious vision of individual lives behind Israel’s larger national story.

  newvesselpress.com/books/some-day/

  FANNY VON ARNSTEIN: DAUGHTER OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT BY HILDE SPIEL

  In 1776 Fanny von Arnstein, the daughter of the Jewish master of the royal mint in Berlin, came to Vienna as an 18-year-old bride. She married a financier to the Austro-Hungarian imperial court, and hosted an ever more splendid salon which attracted luminaries of the day. Spiel’s elegantly written and carefully researched biography provides a vivid portrait of a passionate woman who advocated for the rights of Jews, and illuminates a central era in European cultural and social history.

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y-von-arnstein-daughter-of-the-enlightenment/

  KILLING THE SECOND DOG BY MAREK HLASKO

  Two down-and-out Polish con men living in Israel in the 1950s scam an American widow visiting the country. Robert, who masterminds the scheme, and Jacob, who acts it out, are tough, desperate men, exiled from their native land and adrift in the hot, nasty underworld of Tel Aviv. Robert arranges for Jacob to run into the widow who has enough trouble with her young son to keep her occupied all day. What follows is a story of romance, deception, cruelty and shame. Hlasko’s writing combines brutal realism with smoky, hardboiled dialogue, in a bleak world where violence is the norm and love is often only an act.

  newvesselpress.com/books/killing-the-second-dog/

  THE MISSING YEAR OF JUAN SALVATIERRA BY PEDRO MAIRAL

  At the age of nine, Juan Salvatierra became mute following a horse riding accident. At twenty, he began secretly painting a series of canvases on which he detailed six decades of life in his village on Argentina’s frontier with Uruguay. After his death, his sons return to deal with their inheritance: a shed packed with rolls over two miles long. But an essential roll is missing. A search ensues that illuminates links between art and life, with past family secrets casting their shadows on the present.

  newvesselpress.com/books/the-missing-year-of-juan-salvatierra/

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