A Chisinau bus will teach you the city. The Moldovan capital’s network of these vehicles, and its trolleybuses and marshrutkas – the decrepit minivans, unchanged since Soviet days – could take you anywhere, for nearly nothing. Mostly you paid in physical stress. Riders crammed into spaces meant for people half their size; young mothers loaded strollers into cavities that opened up, miraculously, where no space had existed before. Down the main thoroughfare –  Stefan cel Mare, named after Moldova’s proto-national hero of six centuries ago – public transport ran through the centre of town and the heart of the country.

In the seats and aisles waited the Kishinyovtsi, the Russian-language term for Chisinau’s residents. They scrolled their phones, endured each other’s odours, and squinted when the bus turned and took a broadside of Moldova’s golden sunlight. Pensioners rode for free. These older riders, especially the women, crossed themselves whenever the bus rolled within sight of a church. Adolescents watched TikTok and griped about their classes in Engleză. Old men smelled of sweat, cigarettes, mildewed clothing.

I, being young and male, never took a seat. This was on principle as well as by local culture: one morning I saw a twentysomething berated severely, by several people at once, when he refused to yield his place to an old woman on a crowded ride.

The ticket attendants plied the centre aisle, up and down, for the duration of their shifts. Most were older, if not card-carrying pensioners. They were the heavy-breathing proof of city planners’ choice of more employment over greater efficiency. The attendants could be portly,  even downright obese. Most of them, the men especially, favoured unvarying combinations of ex-Eastern bloc smart-casual: jeans and leather, blacks and blues. The men didn’t shower nearly often enough. They wore dark newsboy caps or baseball hats of black leather. Theirs were the aesthetics of the bowling ball: heavy, round, greasy. The work required the attendants to force past the same riders repeatedly. The transport authority might have hired a bunch of skinny teenagers. Ticket machines did not exist; they would have put the pensioners out of their jobs, and anyway, the government couldn’t afford such technological luxury. The attendants collected six lei, the Moldovan currency, from each paying rider. At peak times, this involved passing one’s fare up a brigade of strangers, then waiting to receive a ticket the same way. Heaven help you if your change fell into the thicket of legs and shoes and bags onto the bus floor. Even when inflation ran at a stratospheric 35 percent, a full bus fare was just a single US quarter. And that was after price hikes, which had in turn been spurred by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

*

It was the war, in a word, that had brought me to Moldova. I was working from home in February 2022, as pandemic restrictions persisted across US working life, and as Russian aggression grew exponentially beyond the earlier invasion of Ukraine that Russia had started in 2014. Home in America was too comfortable, and the war had afflicted me. Having studied eastern European history in grad school, I spoke some Russian and wanted to improve it. On the internet, I discovered a Boston-based charity which matched volunteers with humanitarian gigs around the world. The group had a new programme for helping Ukrainian war refugees in Moldova. I would work remotely at night. I signed up for eight weeks of service from September through October.

I presumed, naïvely, that I could do some good. I could improve my Russian. Ukrainians, especially those from the country’s south, speak Russian, versus the dominant Ukrainian language in the country’s west. Having been the southwestern-most republic of the Soviet Union, many of Moldova’s younger adults, and all its older ones, spoke Russian too. The language of the Moldovan countryside was near-exclusively Romanian, from Moldova’s western neighbour, a consequence of the countries’ shared culture. Moldova and Romania were episodically united across recent centuries, including for an early part of the twentieth. Moldova was then called Bessarabia. Romanian and Russian scholars still debate the term’s origin.  

After my arrival in Chisinau, I was settled into a free-labour agreement with a Catholic charity at the city’s western limit, in the Buiucan neighbourhood. The site was a complex of buildings and teams serving wartime and all-the-time needs. One group allocated on-site housing and hot meals to Ukrainian refugees as they came, made plans and phone calls, and then left again. Another group ran a preschool. There was a grocery delivery service for shut-ins. For the able-bodied, the centre sometimes ran excursions to points of interest, like the ancient cliffside village of Orhei, an hour to Chisinau’s northeast.

My Russian being limited, my Romanian non-existent, and subject to Moldova’s traditional notions that a man couldn’t cook food or tend children, I was seconded to Ivan, the centre’s groundskeeper. Ivan was a working-man’s Moldovan. He was strong as a horse. He moved two-person loads on his own. Understanding my will to practice Russian, Ivan issued simple, man-to-man instructions. Sweep here. Put this there. Let’s take this downstairs. His directness sprang from honesty. His honesty led to trustworthiness. Ivan was impossible not to like. 

The Catholic centre’s others were a motley collection. They ran the gamut, from dour, overworked women, and an extremely pretty but standoffish assistant named Viktoria, to a building supervisor named Ion, who had a male-pattern bald spot that looked uncannily like a monk’s tonsure. Even Ion’s genes seemed Catholic. Among the volunteers, the only commonality was a go-it-alone aloofness: the unmarried forty-something from Wisconsin, a lapsed Catholic but community-service zealot with “Offer it up” tattooed on her arm; the pretty white South African hippie, with dreadlocks, hemp pants, and tattoos of her own. We had all flown halfway around the world to help.

The Ukrainian refugees who lived at the centre were blue-collar at the Ukrainian level. Anyone with the money to move on had already done so. A young, lovely, single mother named Anna, who had been a beautician back in Odessa, had collagen lips and a six-year-old daughter with wild hair and a deep overbite. Anna told me that Chisinau’s apartment rentals –some at a mere $200 per month – were simply unaffordable for her.

Another Ukrainian refugee, with a better education and prospects, taught me Russian twice a week for the duration of my Chisinau stay. Tanya also came from Odessa – she didn’t want to go further than someplace like Chisinau, she said, which was only a four-hour drive away. She was about my age. Tanya became the smiling face I looked forward to seeing on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Even taking the bus from Buiucan to the southeastern district of Botanika – a forty-five-minute tour of sour smells – it was worth it.

On weekends I made for the Piața Centrală, a sprawling organism of a downtown market, where buyers and sellers congregated for transactions of the regulated and the less-so. This was where the other half shopped. Counterfeit clothes proliferated. I saw and sometimes tried on garments that, had they actually been from the upscale brands on their labels, would have cost several months’ Moldovan wages. In a country without baseball, New York Yankees hats came in every conceivable colour. Some had the NY logo upside-down. Sneaker stands offered models with dubious brand names like “NEKI” and “Wikipedia”.

But it was the Piața Centrală’s people, more than its aberrations of capitalism, that drew my strongest interest. Drunks of all ages sat slugging from bottles. Gypsies obliging every cliché – dark skin, bright scarves, gold teeth – hung around on corners, begging and tending their ragged children. Once, a legless woman moved by, dragging herself along the ground with her arms, her hands tied into sneakers. Outside the market proper, commerce spilled over onto the sidewalk. Old women laid out used clothing and old appliances. The women were selling the attic. I was told that most do it not for the profit (there was none) but for the exercise. It gets one out of the house. Connects one with friends selling the same junk in the same place.

Another time, I bought a cheap digital wristwatch there for 50 lei – $2.50. When the vendor heard my accent, she asked, “Are you Polish?”

I was American, I said, volunteering with Ukraine’s refugees.

“This war is Zelensky’s fault”, she said quietly, referring to Volodymyr Zelensky, the embattled Ukrainian president, whom Time magazine would name the Person of the Year for 2022. Some feel that Zelensky was pursuing an agenda of provocation against Russia and its interests at Europe’s eastern fringe.

“Ukraine and Ukrainians were doing fine before”, she said.

I didn’t bother to say that parts of Ukraine had been occupied by Russia since 2014. That the latest explosion of violence was not the start, but a monstrous escalation of a longer-burning conflict. Even the pro-Russian Ukrainians had been calling, for decades, for an end to Ukraine’s poverty, stagnation, and corruption. There wasn’t a Ukrainian in Ukraine or its ballooning diaspora who would have said the country before 2022 was fine.

Thus the city market served, as ever, as a platform for ideas. The value of those ideas — whether authentic or, like the sneakers, fabricated distortions — became what was really in  trade at the Piața Centrală. I went there as much as I could.

*

Chisinau’s people were its history. Ivan was a walking relic, a specimen of homo sovieticus — the Soviet Man, a Marxist-Leninist ideal type. He was born when the Soviet paradigm would disappoint its adepts the most, by vanishing. Ivan collected Soviet bric-à-brac — farm tools, dumbbells, machine parts — and loved them all. One time, he dusted off a ribbed, cotton, mustard-coloured jacket like the Red Army used to wear, and insisted on putting me in it. Ion walked by and laughed hard when Ivan shouted, “Battle of Stalingrad!”

I worked with Ivan every day, running through the routines of cleaning, moving heavy loads, chatting with the refugees, the odd delivery by car, and more cleaning. Ivan told stories about Soviet days and the thirty years since. Again and again he compared Moldovan life to that in the US. He’d never been there, but his thesis was evergreen — Moldova’s not so bad, America’s not so good. Ivan’s capacity to riff on this idea seemed far larger than my eight-week run at his side.

“You Americans, you work all the time”, Ivan would repeat. “Work, work, work, work. In Moldova, as you can see” — he spread his arms toward the city limits — “we work a little, we live a little. We work, we live…” This, to Ivan, was irrefutable proof of the Moldovan art de vivre.

I accompanied Ivan on a couple of his grocery-delivery runs. He would explain the city as we passed through it. I saw a Catholic church and asked, “Is this neighbourhood Catholic?”

He laughed with condescension. “You see, in Moldova, it’s not like in America. We don’t have the Catholics over here, the Chorny over there”, he said, using the Russian word for Blacks. “We’re all mixed in together.” He didn’t mention that Moldova had its own neighbourhoods for Gypsies, or the generations-long tension between Romanian and Russian speakers, or that Moldova had exercised lethal pogroms against Jews throughout its history. Even the Ukrainian refugees had stirred resentment among Moldovans for the supposedly lavish aid they were receiving from the state. Ivan’s Moldova was even-handed and harmonious. Soviet socialist equality, achieved.

Other reflections of history popped up in strange places. I saw graffiti that screamed: “Bessarabia is Romania!” The old Bessarabia, which is roughly equivalent to Moldova’s borders today, had been a contested space for centuries. So was Ukraine. And as far as Russia was concerned, the struggle for Ukraine was ripe for reopening. Moldovans have wondered if their country – prized by empire-builders from the Mongols to the Ottomans to the Soviets – is next.

My Russian lessons helped me make sense of what I was absorbing in Chisinau. Tanya, the Ukrainian from Odessa, shared my outsider’s view.

“Semieyni gorod”, she termed the city, mid-way through our lessons. “A family town”. And she was right. You couldn’t spend two minutes there without seeing strollers, preschools, young mothers with young children. Perhaps by the same token, Chisinau held very little for the creative, alternatively-minded young adult. Hipsters were few. Artists, designers, and other makers usually left while still teenagers, to study in Romania, Ukraine, or Russia, and to stay gone. A deep conservatism ran through the city. The unorthodox were mocked. My South African hippie friend suffered derision from old men on the street as they pointed to other, skirted, well-made-up women and demanded “Why don’t you dress like them?” Kishinyovtsi were allergic to difference.

Ukrainian refugees like Anna, the Odessan beautician, cast Chisinau’s conservatism and its blessing of peace in harsh relief. If Anna couldn’t afford Chisinau rents, she could work and live at the Catholic centre. This she did with energy and competence. She ran the communal laundry and mediated politics among the refugees and the Moldovan staff. Around her daughter, Anna was alert and demure. She cared for the girl on her own. The father wasn’t around. Even in Odessa, he only occasionally spent time with their child. In Buiucan, Anna went to a coffee stand by the centre so often that they knew her by name.

Anna and I developed a kind of dating pattern, if you could call it that. Walks out for coffee (I always paid) allowed us to speak Russian and get to know each other. Anna was kind and put-together, in a working-girl way; she had the urban street style of a woman who pulls off baggy pants and beanies and lovely painted nails – and those collagen lips – all at the same time.

In Anna I saw Ukraine’s war in miniature: a fight that separated women and children from the men in their lives, or that pushed those separations wider. The economic consequences of that separation brought hardships of their own: privations, delayed plans. Ukrainians like Anna weren’t prosperous to begin with; Anna was a small person with scant means and a deeply uncertain future. Yet she invested, in her family of two, all the strength and humanity she possessed. Surviving in Chisinau meant that her daughter stayed safe. This was their family town now. Anna never mentioned her druthers. I respected her and the country that produced such women.  

*

A solo trip to the town of Orhei deepened my understanding of all that Bessarabia had seen and been. On a golden Saturday in October, I took a marshrutka north from Chisinau. Along the way, scenes of autumn unfurled: natural features of yellow, burgundy, rust. Villages of Moldovan peasant houses, with whitewashed walls and trapezoidal roofs, came close as the van made stop after unscheduled stop. It sufficed to call out “Ostanovki, pozhalyusta!” – “Stop, please!” – for the driver to pull over, delaying everyone else’s arrival. On these marshrutkas, as on Chisinau’s buses, you got what you paid for, which wasn’t much.

Orhei – or Great Orhei, as the settlement is sometimes called – owes its importance to its perch on a ridge above an S-shaped canyon. The Răut River has cut a track through the stone here, carving into the landscape a geographical oddity to which ancient peoples, across epochs and mutually exclusive religions, ascribed spiritual significance. Pre-Christian groups marked fertility signs, a circle with a five-petaled flower inside, representing proliferation, on rock faces and cave walls. Mongols – descendants of Eurasia’s medieval Golden Horde – conquered the region. Ottoman Turks spent generations here, erecting mosques and bathhouses by the Răut. In the early modern era, Orthodox monks lived in Orhei, either in a community or hermetic isolation. They dug cliffside homes and, famous to Moldovans, a cave monastery, whose vertiginous windows look out a dozen stories above the river and the slanted plain. On the ridge sits an Orthodox church, its paint yellow and beige, its gold onion domes burning in the sunlight. When I visited, the landscape married autumn tones with the brown and lichen-green of rocky scrub. The total effect was Levantine, even Biblical. Old Testament prophets had sought seclusion in similar environments.

If Orhei was a sacred place, it was for the same reasons a contested one. Peoples and truths displaced one another. Turks ceded to Christians. Christians ceded to the atheist builders of socialism: under Soviet rule the cave monastery was closed. Then Soviets ceded to Moldovans. The monastery was reopened in 1992, amid a Moldovan national revival and Soviet disintegration.

On the same ridge as the church stood a five-foot white stone cross. Tourists and pilgrims meandered between the two, snapping photos. The cross at its centre bore the same pagan fertility symbol I’d seen through the countryside: the circle with the five-sided flower. On it a woman had placed her hand. She touched her forehead to the cross’s top segment as if to an icon. Her mouth was moving. Her eyes squinted with intensity and tears. Those who know Orhei call this the Wishing Cross, and the custom is to come and pray for a dream to come true, walking around the cross three times while wish-making.

Just before I descended, a Moldovan woman led an older American man, his shorts flapping in the breeze, to the foot of the cross. She explained in heavy English the monument’s origin story:

Centuries ago, two young lovers from Orhei – the beautiful daughter of a wealthy merchant, and the handsome, poor son of a peasant – wanted to marry. The merchant father forbade the union: he knew that his daughter’s beauty could enable her marriage into even greater wealth. Such a marriage could increase his fortune, too.

The young couple ran away to elope. They hadn’t gone far when the merchant, who had sent armed men in pursuit, had the two dragged back to Orhei.

The lovers formed a suicide pact. Holding hands, they hurled themselves from the cliff above the town.

The girl’s father, realizing his catastrophic mistake, ordered a cross – this very one – to be erected at the place of his daughter’s last moment alive.

The American stayed quiet a moment, blinking under the sun, before the guide descended the hill. Whether the tale is historically precise, or a flight of folkloric imagination, no one on the ridge that day seemed to care. Those who put their faith in the promise of the Wishing Cross – Moldovans and everyone else – come down from the mountain confident that their desires will be fulfilled. They would remember their wishes and the young couple who were denied theirs.

*

Chisinau’s women are gender-traditionalists who love a good salon. All over town you see visions of a forthright, even aggressive femininity. Make-up is good and more make-up is better. Monochrome sweatsuits were trendy, especially in pastels, while  watercolour figures circulated in parks and playgrounds. Black-haired Moldovans go blonde, their Romanian roots be damned. At the Catholic charity centre, on breaks with the other employees, staff women routinely asked how I liked my coffee, then made and brought it to me, even the ones who otherwise didn’t give me the time of day. Most Moldovan women would call themselves entirely modern. They aren’t ‘bad feminists,’ to use the silly term. They aren’t feminists at all.

Elderly Moldovan women – babushkas, meaning “grandmothers”,is the pan-Slavic descriptor – wore brightly coloured headscarves, for warmth and in fidelity to the Moldovan Orthodox church. The babushkas added an enduring brightness to the Moldovan landscape. Ivan and I used to visit them as we delivered food packages. In Chisinau’s outskirts we travelled along badly paved courtyards to mouldering apartment blocks. With Ivan I trudged upstairs, the straps of heavy plastic bags cutting into our palms. The women greeted us with suspicion – they didn’t know we were coming, didn’t remember that we had called ahead, didn’t recall that Ivan had visited many times before. When they let us inside they grew friendly, even emotional; they offered tea and cookies and other, odd gifts of kindness to us, their benefactors. The women suffered from isolation as well as bad hygiene. Often their children couldn’t look after them; they were working abroad. The women had lived through World War II, Communism, the Soviet Union’s collapse, mass labour emigration – and now a pandemic, inflation, and war all over again. The walls of their homes bore framed portraits of departed husbands, often in Soviet military uniforms. The women’s televisions blared overdubbed Turkish sitcoms or news from the country’s farm industries on Agro TV Moldova. A few of the women blessed us with exuberant prayer. Grabbing us by the arms, they squeezed as they shouted: “May God grant you children and long life! Health and strength and peace from Our All-Merciful Lord be upon you!”

One woman, mostly blind, insisted on giving Ivan and me little yellow packets, which I thought were candies. Walking down from her dim rooms into the sunlight of the alley, I studied the packet. It had a little cartoon lemon. There was another cartoon figure of a dead insect, its furry wings on the ground and its dead legs in the air. “Maximum efficiency!” the packet screamed. “Stronger protection for clothing and linens! Lemon-scented!”

The lady had given us mothballs.

Whether she, too, had thought they were candies – her home was dark, and her eyes were worse than Ivan’s or mine – it was too late to ask. Ivan and I drove away chuckling. We moved down the road, deeper into Chisinau, toward the next, needy, kind-hearted babushka.

*

My last few days in Chisinau brought the same rush-around I go through before any big trip. The surge of errands, the panic over the dwindling time, the last visits to people and places you want to see once more.

I wound down my volunteering. I said goodbye to Ivan, telling him I wished I’d worked with him more. It would have lessened the awkwardness of working with the unpleasant women at the Catholic centre. But I didn’t tell Ivan that, or anyone else. I wished Anna, the Odessa beautician, all the best. The gift I chose to give her and her daughter was one I figured any six-year-old would appreciate: a box of pink frosted doughnuts. The girl loved them, and I believe Anna liked the gesture, also. To Ion and his monk’s tonsure, I bid farewell; to Viktoria the standoffish blonde beauty, I smiled goodbye. I gave a round of hugs to the volunteers who remained.

I realized I had learned, from those around me, something about constancy. About pursuing life. Anna, despite her poverty, never denied herself a cup of coffee. Anna wanted her daughter to play, to go to school and learn Romanian, to make Moldovan friends. To keep growing up. Other refugees who had neither cash for today nor prospects for tomorrow still found the time, and the courage, to laugh, to endure, to inquire about me and the other volunteers and our lives back home. Perhaps they did so out of some feeling of gratitude – these odd foreign volunteers, here under the presumption they could make a difference. And maybe that’s what we were: arrogant, and, worse, entirely sincere about it. If that was the case – if that was how they saw me – they thanked me anyway. I left grateful to them also.

A few hours before my evening flight out of town, the Piața Centrală brought its usual circus. There shined the same, butter-gold light, Moldova’s gorgeous secret. Here were the Gypsies, and the drunks. There were the babushkas with their old clothes and appliances. Vendors sold fake brands at real discounts. The dusty marshrutkas stood sentry, undaunted by the potholed roadways ahead. The Kishinyovtsi shopped and waited for their transportation, passing the time till they could return to the network of communities that make a country a nation. Only the lady who sold me my cheap watch – the one who blamed Ukraine’s president for the ongoing bloodshed – wasn’t there.

I wanted badly then, in a flash of unexpected, wrenching pathos, to stay in Chisinau longer. In that moment Moldova’s annoyances and rigamarole seemed not so bad after all. But I stuck to my plan, called a cab, made my flight. I weathered the changes as the Moldovans and their refugees had done. As they continue to do. This, too, was a lesson from my Bessarabian days.

*

William Fleeson is a writer and former journalist. A native and resident of Washington, DC, his writing has appeared in BBC Travel, Narrative, National Geographic, Newsweek, Porridge, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated, most recently, for The Best American Essays anthology.
http://www.willfleeson.com