Citizen Vova, an essay

This essay, Citizen Vova, was published originally under my pen name, Basil Rosa, in North Dakota Quarterly. https://ndquarterly.org/

It is now available in the essay collection, How The Quiet Breathes.

Citizen Vova

“Perfection will never be reached; but to recognize a period of transformation when it comes, and to adapt themselves honestly and rationally to its laws, is perhaps the nearest approach to perfection of which men and nations are capable.”

 

Matthew Arnold, Democracy

 

An inexhaustible curiosity, as I saw it, kept him alive. Everyone, including me, called him Vova. During the winter of 1993, I lived as part of his family in the Moldovan city of Bălți, where I was a guest professor at the State Pedagogical University, Alec Russo. As I creep nearer to a sixth decade and continue to fill my shoebox of obits, I return to that winter and, more often than I like to admit, to what I think of as my Hamlet question. I suppose I must. Cogito, ergo sum and all that. Thing is, does one person’s life even matter? Such a query was one Vladimir Aladin, ever curious, would have very much appreciated.

Recovering from pneumonia, I slept in his son Sasha’s bedroom as if it were an infirmary. As a way to tutor each other, everyone in the Aladin family spoke only Russian on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays and Fridays, we spoke Romanian. English was reserved for Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Languages were not Vova’s métier, but as loyal husband and father he gave it his best shot, mumbling at dinner to say “friend” in English, or “acquaintance” in Romanian. A math whiz who tinkered with small appliances, Vova could comfortably argue Lenin versus Stalin in Russian, and it was impossible for me to beat him in games of chess, but I sensed he didn’t value those skills as necessary for his children to excel in future endeavors. When it came to English, however, he was happy to see his children gain fluency.

After serving a required two years in the Soviet army and graduating from Moscow State University, Vova met Elena, his future bride, while vacationing in Saint Petersburg. She was studying languages there and would graduate with fluency in Russian, Romanian, English, German, and French. During the summer after Elena’s graduation, they married and moved to Moldova where they had both been born, and Elena was hired as an English professor at Alec Russo. This was a hopeful time for newlyweds, both of them entering the work force as Mikhail Gorbachev was coming into power. After teaching for two years, Elena took maternity leave and gave birth to Sasha. A year later, Katrina, was born. To marry young, Vova explained, was the norm. Three years older than Elena, he had married at twenty-five.

Vova expressed his endearing intellectual curiosity in subtle ways. At the dinner table by candlelight, he would challenge Sasha by jotting out trigonometry problems on a scrap of paper. The unflinching intellectual curiosity that I saw in Vova burned just as brightly within his son. Both of them would get lost solving a mathematical problem I couldn’t begin to decipher. There was no television in the apartment – not even an old black-and-white Zenit, or a Rubin, the first Russian-made model, either of which could be found in some living rooms. Unannounced power blackouts happened at all hours and never lasted the same amount of time.

With his thorough knowledge of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, it seemed to me a waste that Vova’s first job in Moldova was as a tractor mechanic. Once the Soviet Union dissolved, so did Moldova’s tractor factories. Vova then worked briefly as a farmer in his mother-in-law’s village—yet who didn’t in an agrarian country where nearly everyone grew their own food? He then became a welder and did that until acetylene and electricity, both shipped in from Russian-controlled Soviet-era plants, became as rare as gasoline, meaning they were impossible to find outside of a black market controlled by an increasingly militant and growing Chechen mafia. Vova admitted without pride that he was employed as an engineer at a small factory that didn’t design or make anything. He wasn’t even sure if the factory had a name.

Individuals, especially men of Vova’s age, were getting piled on the post-Soviet scrap heap like so many corpses at a mass grave. Vova was expected to show up at the factory that employed him whether or not there was electricity or work to be done. In his unassuming way, he went on foot or took the trolley bus if available. He explained that his job was a twisted game. If he didn’t show up to do nothing, he’d be fired. Nine months might pass before he was paid, yet why should he be paid, he asked me, for doing nothing?

Even if paid, his salary would not cover his debts and basic expenses. Elena suffered the same treatment, earning about $40 per month, while Vova’s salary was closer to $60 per month. They were supposed to pay rent, but Moldova had no currency, only coupons, and none of its banks had money, and privatization wasn’t in place yet, so to whom would they pay rent? They were also supposed to pay for electricity they didn’t have, but they wouldn’t have it until they paid for it. Natural gas was out of the question because Russia had decided to shut off all supply lines. Elena likened all this to theatre of the absurd.

It wasn’t lost on me that they were spending hard-earned coupons to have a fresh lemon with tea each morning, if they could find either of these commodities. Borscht and a loaf of bread, if available, meant a big dinner. One of Vova’s duties was to spend hours each day bundled in his Soviet-issue blue coat and rabbit-fur hat while waiting in line to purchase that bread. On many nights he arrived home empty-handed, looking morose, his face bleak with cold.

I tried to give Vova American dollars. He refused them. So did Elena. Rather than embarrass them, I left Moldovan coupons around the apartment and pretended they weren’t mine. I think Sasha scooped them up and stored them in a jar.

Vova was unusual in that he drank rarely and only cognac. He didn’t like vodka and he never faltered in his hyper-alert attention to acting as a role model for his children. I saw in him how unjust many stereotypes of the Soviet citizen had been. I found it easy to see the light that shone in his rheumy gray eyes when he arrived home after a long day spinning his wheels in a dank chilly factory. He enjoyed listening to spirited conversations between his wife and children. Sometimes, not often, there was laughter.

Before each dinner, we practiced a ritual of moving furniture to set up the table, turning living room into kitchen. Afterwards, the table was folded and stored against a wall. The couch was later opened into a bed. Normally, this was where Katrina slept—essentially her bedroom. During my convalescence, she slept in her parents’ bed with her mother. Vova moved to the small living room and shared the pull-out bed with Sasha.

In that three-room apartment this was an uncomfortable arrangement for the family, but none complained. I felt guilty about this and told Elena, who told me not to worry, that she and Vova had experienced much worse and I should respect just how ill I was.

Elena was right. For my first two weeks in her apartment, I had seethed through a prolonged fever nightmare in Sasha’s bed, shivering, boiling, sweating, and lacking enough strength to walk out of the room. Few things are worse than getting seriously ill alone in a country far from home. Elena nursed me back to health, burying me under as many blankets and small carpets known as kilims as she could find, forcing me to drink hot tea and a Moldovan remedy of heated red wine laced with sugar.

As I began to recover strength, eating steamy hot bowls of kasha with salt, I ventured out with Vova to walk Independence Street, a wide pedestrian concourse that up until 1991 had been called Lenin Street. Bălți epitomized the Soviet planned city, and the fountain that centered wide Independence Street stood as a showpiece in front of the former Soviet headquarters that still had the faces of Marx, Lenin, and Engels in stone bas-relief above its broad-shouldered pink limestone entryway.

The fountain didn’t function. Nothing did. Like most city residents, Vova walked the concourse daily. Neither a tall nor imposing figure, he stood upright, arms locked behind his back, and greeted politely every passing resident he was acquainted with. His apartment building, built pre-Khrushchev era and one of the more solid limestone blocks in a city roughly 700 years old, occupied one corner of Pushkin Street and Independence Street, not far from where a new landmark, Andy’s Pizza, draws many young residents today.

Once bundled up, he’d hazard the treads of a frigid stairwell and venture out with his kids until satisfied that they were safely off to school on foot with other classmates. He’d then walk to his trolley bus stop. Elena would leave a short while later, walking one block to her job at the university. The idea of a car, or to even talk of one, struck me as sadly ridiculous.

Still prone to shivering while sheathed in layers, when I walked with Vova he would take my left arm and link it firmly to his right arm, keeping my body snug against his. I found this remarkably comforting, an intimate sexless old-world way of expressing publicly our solidarity and budding friendship.

Under his outsized brown rabbit-fur shapka, his pink features never seemed to mind the cold. Introducing me as if I were family whenever he greeted friends and acquaintances, he displayed such care in his use of Russian and courtesy, extending to the public arena his parental example of behaving as a model of propriety. In this way, I came to meet many city residents in a short period of time. They often asked how I liked Bălţi. Rarely was anyone indifferent or in too much of a hurry. There were seldom smiles or big handshakes in these daily interactions. However briefly expressed, there was an intensity of interest that I found disarming but never offensive. This was how one learned one’s community. I was the disoriented one, not any of them, and so what if they were suspicious of my intentions. I did my best to answer a variety of questions. A few who spoke English did not ask if, but when I’d come to their apartment for dinner, applying the guilt-inducing reminder, “We’re waiting for you.”

Vova never spoke for me. Nor would he correct my errors in Russian. He’d remark to others how impressed he was with my Romanian. He’d seen me so weak I’d been unable to stand. He knew I wore a brave face in public as the city’s first and only American resident. I’d been told one other American had been to the city, a missionary, and one of my students had been his translator. I felt uncomfortable with and undeserving of this minor claim to fame.

What helped was that I embraced meeting strangers and stumbling through either Russian or Romanian, depending on the stranger’s politics or ethnicity. Though I wanted to project an image of healthy good will, my runny eyes and perpetually sore throat made that impossible. Everyone, it seemed, knew who I was, yet I believed I was nobody. Did these people really hold the United States in such high regard? I felt like the product of an infatuation which I suspected would not last. I heard often that with my dark hair I looked like a young Moldovan, which given my Italian heritage was understandable. To the students, Kevin Costner from The Bodyguard I was not, but they didn’t seem to care. My being there, I suppose, smelled of hope and confirmed that their little republic was not going to be the iron-walled behemoth it had been for their parents.

I shared these observations with Vova one morning. He nodded sedately, walking close to my side, taking my arm. He guided me along, protecting me from the wild dogs that ran the streets in packs. We saw them daily. Sometimes, they’d rear up on their hind legs and fight each other, gnashing their fangs. Other pedestrians would gather and watch in horror. Vova would coolly steer me in another direction.

He asked me about family life in America. “A man without family is nothing,” he said.

So, a person must play a role. One must work, create, or else manage and instruct. Otherwise, of what value did one possess? This question plagued me then, still plagues me now. I did my best to dissect and approach it in Russian. I was more comfortable in Romanian, but Vova hadn’t mastered that language, though in his newly independent Moldova, he now needed it to keep his job. This troubled him. All his life, Russian had been Moldova’s official state language, not Romanian. Many Soviet Russians had denounced Romanian as Moldavski, calling it a kitchen language, using Cyrillic for all municipal signs in Romanian and hence bastardizing the language in ways that native Moldovans and Romanians found offensive.

West of the Dniester River, newly democratic Moldova had declared Romanian its mother tongue. Starting in 1991, on August 31 each year, they celebrated Day of Our Language. Once known as Bessarabia, Moldova had a tortured history of being forced to accept conquering cultures and tongues. Vova spoke about how his lack of Romanian shamed him and many of his Moldovan-born friends. Many ethnic Russians had intermarried with Moldovans, but many also labeled Moldovans goats and pigs, idiomatic slurs which can be translated to mean idiots and slobs. Centuries before, Moldova had been part of Romania, its blood ancestry tied to Rome. It had also been a vassal state ruled by Ottoman Turks, so it was no small act to speak Romanian as a declaration of independence from its most recent conquerors, the Soviets.

Vova would get philosophical and ask me if America was really independent, and if such a state for any nation was even possible. He hoped for his children’s sake that it might be, but he confessed to being a realist. Throughout its long history, Moldova had never known true independence. The country lacked a seaport, a big military, and it offered few raw materials. The Soviets had annexed it for exotic fruits, nuts, brandy, cognac, and wine. In exchange, needing support, Moldova enjoyed the benefits of Russia’s inexpensive and diverse raw materials.

When I asked Vova to tell me more about his job, he dismissed the topic. I never learned what his factory made. Maybe he wasn’t joking. Maybe they didn’t make a thing.

He spoke fondly and with a trace of nostalgia about inexpensive rail travel, vacationing in the Crimea and Odessa, his younger days in Moscow and Saint Petersburg where he’d soaked up Russia’s great culture and traditions, and how hard it was to hate Russians, even if both his parents had died by Stalin’s hands. He couldn’t say with any certainty how they’d died. They’d just disappeared one day. He’d been a child. His brother and grandmother had raised him, both of whom were now dead.

Hate simply wasn’t in him. Throughout the Cold War, he never felt hate for an American.

“Then what did you feel?” I asked.

“Curiosity.”

“That was dangerous then,” I said.

“I know. It still is.”

He didn’t say anything more. He didn’t need to. Curiosity was a source of heat, a big part of what defined him, along with his steady practice of fulfilling duties, playing his role in the family, holding to the shredded remains of Moldovan customs. There weren’t very many nights when he came home with two loaves of bread, known as bricks, in his cloth sack. Still, he remained animated, removed coat, gloves, and hat. Rubbed his hands to warm them before he took off his boots and placed them by the door with everyone else’s shoes. This was Moldovan custom, rigidly upheld. He’d fulfilled his duty, and on some nights when there was bread, he had to slice at least one “brick” he’d brought home while his children did homework and his wife set the table. Would I like to join him as he treated himself to 100 grams of cognac?

Most of the time, no matter how long Vova waited in line, there wasn’t any bread. This meant returning his cloth sack, empty, to its place near his coat. Still, the children did their homework. Still, he remained animated. Was this the promise of democracy? Why had his country been torn apart by a civil war? His duty as a father was to procure bread. A man hunted and gathered. As long as he had duties, he felt important, necessary. I thought of my own father who struggled to find time for us while growing up. He was working constantly to provide, justifying his existence.

If Elena wanted a luxury such as butter, either she or Vova had to hike out to the tolchock (the black market) held once a week at the edge of the city. Due to the fuel shortage, buses didn’t run there. They had to get lucky there, as well, and nothing was guaranteed. Vova often made this journey alone on a Saturday. Though both of them were professed atheists, with religion coming back into vogue and talk of churches getting rebuilt, they adhered to resting on Sunday. We’d take two walks that day. One with the kids before a mid-day dinner, and one after, without them.

Elena, like most Moldovan women, shopped almost daily and made small purchases. Without electricity or reliable fridges, stocking up on perishable food wasn’t common practice. After teaching, she purchased in the afternoon what she hoped to prepare that evening. We sat through many dark nights and ate from jars of tomatoes that Elena had grown and pickled at her mother’s house in the country. In the central market, Elena bought when possible a salty white cheese called brînză made from sheep’s milk. She’d buy jars of sour cream, if available, made by village women. This went with the potatoes she and Vova had grown at her mother’s. She kept a bucket of them, along with homegrown onions, garlic, beets, carrots, and cabbage on the tiny balcony that acted as a refrigerator.

Once a month she and Vova would ride the one diesel train that ran to her mother’s village to re-fill large sacks with more of such food. The train stopped running, though, so they’d taken to walking the twelve miles if only to check on Elena’s mother, who had no phone or indoor plumbing in her home. If Elena stocked up on anything, it was the bags of kasha and rice she’d find at the central outdoor market. If she bought beef or sausage, she’d cook it as soon as there was electricity, no matter the time of day. Forget about milk. There wasn’t any. I’d insist on giving her money. At first, she’d refused, but with time she softened her stance.

Staying warm without electricity meant keeping the floors and walls, if possible, covered with Moldovan-made wool carpets. Once a week, Vova would roll them up and carry them one at a time out to the square courtyard between his block building and those that neighbored it. There, in full view of all neighbors, he hung the carpets over a raised steel bar and proceeded to whack them with a large round paddle to beat out the dust. This was routine practice. Not a day passed when I didn’t hear the sound of repeated whacks rising out of the courtyard to echo off the walls between grey multi-storied limestone buildings all the same height. If not a dutiful Moldovan man or woman, sometimes a boy or girl was spanking those carpets. Everyone did their part.

Again, purpose. Duties. Curiosity. Reasons to stay alive.

Vova also checked to make sure the natural gas tank for his building hadn’t rusted to the point that it might leak. All such tanks remained empty. He shared a rumor that only one building in a city of roughly 200,000 had natural gas. It was home to a despotic former KGB operative with ties to the Russian oligarchs. Essentially, a new Democrat by name.

“You see,” he told me. “This is how independence works here.”

Water was another issue. At sunrise and once again after dark, Vova walked to a well in the center of a neighboring courtyard. He carried a galvanized metal bucket. He’d fill it from the well, no matter how cold or windy. I’d join him sometimes, the wind whistling and slicing through the alleys between buildings, and dogs in feral packs snarling out of the darkness.

With no light except for the moon on clear nights, Vova lugged his two-gallon bucket across the hardpan of the courtyard encased under layers of ice hidden under layers of snow. Each time I joined him, no matter how careful, I either slipped or wiped out completely. He never laughed at me. Nor did he ever insist I join him. “Winter,” he explained, “is even harder in Russia, but that’s how I learned.”

Complain? Never. Elena often told me he was a good man, that he’d been punished by political winds of change. The more I saw Vova in action, the better I came to understand this. How did he do it? In his professional life, he had to feel unfulfilled. Did countries collapse or did they endure shifts in their power bases, ideals, and methods? Studying Vova, I saw that what collapsed and provided the most danger was the spirit inside a person, proving that people and not their governments defined a country.

Through his diligent show of integrity in the face of tectonic political shifts, Vova reinforced libertarian seeds in me. All of thirty-two at the time and in the first blush of any interest in geopolitics, I began to experience a slow turning away from liking the idea of a maternal government, no matter its allegations of generosity. As an individual I had to find self-worth in supporting loved ones, a career, or a spiritual life. No nation could be a guiding hand that replaced family or God.

Citizens like Vova, once touted and lionized as Working Men in the Soviet machinery and all the propaganda that went with it, had become dispensable cogs. As a globalized new century approached, nations would become increasingly interconnected and therefore would have no use for solitary actors, no matter how dutiful or honest. They would have to be part of an institution or a corporation.

Unless he or she found gainful ways to create or repair something, or else filled a role that defined reasons for living, no one person mattered. Naturally, this thought provided little comfort. I began to feel what I see in retrospect was an irritating shift, a maturation that I tried to fend off. I was moving away from youthful left-leaning naïve political beliefs grounded in assumptions that the best governments of any kind anywhere served as benevolent caregivers. Decades later, I remain irritated and conflicted when it comes to thinking maturely about governments and ideologies and their roles in any empirical or practical sense. My rugged individualism, I suppose, has firmly defined me as American. I’m not prone to jumping on bandwagons or supporting trendy programs that will feed us all and pave our roads at the same time. Nor am I enamored with the endless and bloated military-industrial-paranoiac funding to extinguish amorphous global enemies such as drugs, dictatorial threats, and terrorism. Frankly, I’m still not sure what I believe about politics, though I never think along party lines. I trust my skepticism, and I doubt that entirely benevolent governments exist at all, anywhere on the globe. Some government employees, be they senators or governors, may be kind and incorruptible. Some PR machines and propaganda campaigns are better than others at creating an illusion of caring stewardship that provides solutions which might transcend any existential threat. If I take a more adult view of geopolitics now, it’s simply because my experience, starting with my close observation of Vova, has taught me to lower expectations and to respect the ways any individual achieves peace of mind, an education, and any form of status or advancement within a society in spite of the political situation. Could a small nation state such as Moldova do anything more than erode, if not perish, without being attached to, dependent on, and indebted to a larger one? Without a friendly relationship to Russia, where would Moldovans turn to for help? To Romania? Perhaps. And there was a Big Romania political party that wanted this, but the Romanians had their own excess of messy problems.

So, the Soviet Union was no more. Fine. Big ideological theories didn’t matter. Not true. They had to matter. In Vova’s case, one governing idea had changed, and he had to adjust to not knowing what it was going to be replaced with. As if he mattered. As if he was doomed to fail—and I think he sensed this—because any nation-state fails its citizens when it neglects to celebrate them as worthy individuals and doesn’t offer at least primary ways to gain self-respect. I told Vova I envisioned Moldova as drowning in its uncertainties, a puppet trapped between emptiness and empires, needing to find either a Russian hand to assist her or a European one. He agreed with me, calling independence both a curse and a deception.

“But I don’t want to go back to what we had,” he said. “Nobody here does. We want to make something new and better.”

Vova thought tirelessly about these large complex issues. When we discussed them, it was on a primitive level. I could open up more with Elena in English, but she preferred American literature and English grammar to ruminations on political science. At the same time, she translated for me when Vova was burning to share some doubts and insights. As much as rest, hot tea, and friendship, it was this concerned thinking, these big-picture discussions with Vova and Elena, that helped me return to health.

As I grew less dependent and started teaching again, I saw each night in Vova’s face less certainty, less calm, and less of a sense of wellness. Here was T.S. Eliot’s patient etherized on a table—one who had realized his life, as dreamed of, was over, even while he clung to hopes that life would be better for his children. So much despair, I thought. Who back in the United States will get this?

Vova also began to share a reasonable nostalgia for certain reliable if not primitive elements of the old Soviet Union. He hadn’t had any way of life to compare to his own, so he’d never known what he’d been missing. Now he wasn’t sure of what he had. For his generation, stability had vanished. I saw in him a profound sadness as if he knew he’d outlived his era.

This is how I’m feeling these days, and what’s led me to these recollections of Vova. I’ve been back to Moldova a handful of times and seen its changes, some for the better, some not. Many young people live for one thing—to get the hell out. The more I study other nations, the more I realize young Moldovans are not alone in this desire. I need look no further than the recent floods of refugees to Europe.

Vova was wise to know that larger geopolitical issues might cease thwarting his ambitions, but they would not, as they’d done to some of his friends, lead to self-destructive impulses. I watched him seated at dinner and I saw a man enduring a winter that had made him grow increasingly pensive and sullen. Yet in spite of disappointments, he and his ever generous and adorable wife had jobs, and his children were healthy.

He wasn’t the last man in that country to tell me, “This democracy, I fear all it means is we’ll soon be forced to think about nothing more than money.”

So cold indoors and no electricity. Candles burned on the table, casting our faces in a honeyed glow. Vova asked for the word for bread in English. His eyes sharpened as I told him, but he didn’t repeat the word.

Elena woke me early the next morning and hurried me to dress and join Vova, who was already bundled up.

“Bread,” said Vova. He repeated it twice, as if pleased to display he’d summoned the will to risk embarrassment. Elena, standing near him, rose to her toes and caressed his cheek.

Vova adjusted his fur shapka until it fit tightly on his head. He sat on the family stool where he put on his boots. He opened the apartment’s thick door padded in black vinyl on both sides. The hallway, still dark and cold, smelled of boiled cabbage. We heard a cat meowing. Vova blushed as Elena fussed with his blue overcoat to make sure it was buttoned all the way. She told him in Russian his English pronunciation was good. She didn’t correct it. She asked him to say it again, and he said “bread” one more time.

I shot him a thumbs-up. He appeared to like this gesture, but he didn’t smile. Striking a deadpan note infused with wisdom, he said in Russian, “Bread in life, it’s not a false equation. We have bread today, so I can think for now that we have everything, even if we don’t.”

That was Vova—everyman, realist, father, husband, and gently stoic agent of endurance and frustration. I didn’t weep in 2011 when I learned he’d died. His life was tragic, but the way he’d lived it, ever curious, unwilling to shut himself down, raising two children, befriending someone like myself, loving Elena in a marriage he’d nurtured for multiple decades in the face of so much raw discomfort—all this made him a hero to me, and I’m not one, as you might guess, who believes easily in heroes. I lack his obit for my shoe box. I don’t know where Elena and the children live. Perhaps in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital city. Perhaps somewhere in Europe. Not in Bălţi, since during my last visit I asked around and learned the family had left the city and Elena’s mother had died. No one could tell me where they had gone. I also don’t know where he’s buried or how old he was at his death, maybe sixty but not sixty-five. That age seems young to me now. And if I weep eventually, it will be over the cruel way his life devolved, making him in so many ways dispensable. I can’t weep now, and I may never, and I don’t think he’d want me to. So instead, in my mind I not only remain curious about everything, I host parades each day, along with firework displays and all-night parties in his honor. He and I attend these fabulous ribbon-cutting ceremonies that I invent to honor imaginary new factories where each worker will have to do more than show up and sleepwalk through a shift. These workers not only know, they cherish the products made there.