Playing the Moldovans At Tennis Read online

  I walked to the National Tennis Centre in the hope of picking up a game, and on my arrival I was lucky enough to bump into my old French-speaking chum Jan, who arranged for me to play with a promising young 15-year-old, Alexandru. After an hour's practice he beat me rather soundly in a tie break. Suddenly I was only too aware that I was out of shape and that I would need to perform much better than this if I was to win my bet. Maybe I could use these four days to get my game up to scratch.

  After the game, the outgoing and rather cheeky-looking Alexandru taught me how to score tennis in Romanian. In a few minutes I knew all I hoped I'd need for my upcoming encounters.

  Cincisprezece zero

  Trezece zero

  Patruzece zero

  Avantaj Hawks

  Ghem Hawks

  Alexandru, oddly assuming that I was some sort of authority on the game, asked me if I knew why tennis has such an unconventional scoring system. Yes, good question, this had been something which had always bothered me. Why fifteen? Why deuce? Why love? Advantage this, advantage that? Back in London, an afternoon in the library had done little more than reveal to me that no-one is entirely sure, tennis being a very old game which originated in France before people bothered to write things down much. The method of scoring by 15s is believed to be medieval in origin, and 40 is used as an abbreviation of the original 45. 'Deuce' is a corruption of the French à deux, indicating that one player had to win two consecutive points for the game. No-one is certain about the origin of 'love' being used for zero, but it either came from I'oeuf – meaning egg and being the shape of a nought – or the fact that the word 'love' had become equated with 'nothing' in such phrases as 'a labour of love' and 'neither for love nor money'. (It says something of the savagery of the times that 'love' could have come to mean 'nothing'.) It was called a 'service' because the task of beginning the rally was carried out by a servant for his master. The canny player might have used this to his advantage: 'Ah, my good Lord Salisbury, I am so looking forward to the game. Have you met my servant, Sampras?'

  Alexandru didn't look entirely satisfied as I attempted to translate the gist of all this into simple English.

  'Did you follow that Alexandru?' I asked.

  The most of it, yes,' he replied.

  'You know what I always say,' I continued. 'I think it would be better if we took what the umpire says at the beginning of every match as a piece of advice. "Love all". If we did, then the world would be a much better place. It's only as shitty as it is because we're all trying to get the advantage.'

  A baffled Alexandru eyed me blankly.

  'I do not understand.'

  You're not alone there, Alexandru.

  Elena was thrilled. Maybe she'd thought that I wouldn't turn up, but her little face beamed with excitement as I met her outside the school gates.

  This is my friend Mariana,' she said, gesturing to a pretty girl who did a kind of half curtsy. 'You must come inside now, Miss Tudoreanu is expecting you.'

  She was too. She ushered me into the class and proceeded with her lesson much as if I was a school inspector. Had that actually have been my metier then I would have been well impressed, as the attentive children took it in turns reading from a text book. Soon I found myself engrossed in the gripping story of Uncle Oscar and Aunt Agatha.

  "'My Uncle Oscar was a very nice man",' began Elena, who in volunteering herself as the first reader had raised her arm with such enthusiasm that she must have nearly pulled it out of its socket. "'Every morning on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday he usually took the seven forty-five bus and started for work . . ."'

  Only the occasional corrections from Miss Tudoreanu prevented me from losing myself totally in the dramatic events of Uncle Oscar's life.

  '"Uncle Oscar went to the bank early in the morning and returned home rather late. He didn't go in for sports. He liked music but didn't play the piano, the violin, the flute or any other instrument. He practically never went to the theatre or to the cinema and he didn't visit exhibitions or museums either . . .'"

  He was quite a guy this Uncle Oscar. Had anyone secured the film rights to his story, I wondered?

  For all my reservations about the communist system, education appeared to be one domain where they had got things largely right. The schools had been well funded, the teachers had been highly respected members of society, and the kids were well disciplined. I hate to sound like a conservative old fogy on this one, but children need discipline. They bloody love it. They just can't get enough of it, and, from my experience, they don't. I am now at that hellish age where you go to parties and people bring their children along. Consequently too many times at too many barbecues and for too many years have I had my afternoon ruined by some spoilt little brat trying to poke my eye out or pour ketchup in my hair. There's a lot to be said for a regime which rewards that kind of behaviour with a lengthy stint in a Siberian gulag. At least at barbecues under a communist regime you'd never hear the sentence; 'Sweetness, don't insert the meat skewer there, I don't think Tony likes it.'

  As the lesson drew to a close, Miss Tudoreanu turned and addressed me.

  Tony, will you finish the lesson by doing a short talk for the children?' she asked, taking me quite by surprise.

  'About what?'

  'About London. Maybe you could talk about the British Museum.'

  Before I had a chance to explain that I knew absolutely nothing about the British Museum, I had been ushered to the front of the class and been announced in such a way as to suggest that I was the world's leading expert on the subject.

  What followed was a curious mixture of bullshit and fabrication. My hope was that none of the children was really listening, and instead they were allowing the curious foreign sounds coming from my mouth to become the background noise to a world of daydreams. However there remains the worry that one day there'll be a Moldovan teenager inside the British Museum demanding to see the Crown Jewels and asking where the Beefeaters are. I finished my talk and the kids cheered and applauded rapturously. They'd been an easy audience to please. Frankly, all I'd had to do was not be Miss Tudoreanu, and I though I say so myself, I'd carried it off with some aplomb.

  In the coming days I made absolutely no progress in the attainment of the goal which had brought me here, but significantly I began to feel more at home than I had before. Instead of breeding contempt, familiarity was beginning to instil a nagging respect and fondness for the place. I started to see behind the grim faces of the people on the streets and to realise that there was a smile within which couldn't be coaxed out by a mere pleasantry. This was a land where the people had suffered, were still suffering, and expected to suffer tomorrow. This culture had no room for benign social platitudes. This was not a society where you urged people to 'Have a nice day' because they would simply turn round and say 'No thanks, I've already made other plans.' I was discovering that you had to be patient and wait for people to open up instead of trying to force it. Trust, like so many other commodities here, was not something which was acquired easily, but once it had been earned then the doors would begin to open.

  The family began to warm to me in a way that I had not expected. Maybe there was an empathy between us which hadn't existed when I had first arrived in their country, rather cocky as I was, and full of the joys of spring. Perhaps since things had gone wrong and become a struggle, I had started to display a humility which made me more accessible to them. At the dinner table we laughed more. Sure the language was still a barrier, but I found the route to their funny bones through big visual slapstick gags. Dina, on watching me mimic a vodka-sodden man I had seen stumbling from a bar one afternoon, said that I reminded her of Mr Bean. (It was at this point that I decided to tone my performances down somewhat.)

  I was now included in family outings. Adrian began to shun the confines of his room in favour of conversation. For Elena, who had always been on my side, I could do no wrong, especially since her popularity rating had greatly increased at schoo
l after the guest appearance at her English class. Grigore, who still seemed to be genuinely surprised each day when I returned to the house not having become fluent in Romanian, became more tactile, patting me on the back or putting his arm round me each time our fruitless attempts at communication ground to a halt. The barriers were down. I was starting to feel like one of the family.

  On one occasion I was invited down from my room to share in a toast to Grigore's old schoolfriend Anatol, who had called round after just having been promoted to colonel in the army. As he stood proudly in his full military regalia, he made an unnerving sight for a Westerner like me who had only ever seen figures like this represented as the enemy. A brandy later, however, we felt comfortable enough to pose for photos together and put each other right on a couple of common misconceptions which we both held about the other's politicians. I now knew that Gorbachev was a prat, and Anatol that Margaret Thatcher was completely bonkers.

  Marcel was the opera singer brother of Andrei from The Flying Postmen, the overly loud fellow I had met briefly on my first morning. He had promised to organise a car and a driver to take us out to Orheiul Vecchi where he was going to let me film him singing the Moldovan national anthem from a cliff top. I couldn't think of a better way of presenting to Arthur the musical piece which he would have to perform. The only difference between the two renditions would be that Marcel's would be performed with his clothes on, and that Arthur's would be crap. I allowed myself an inward chuckle at the thought of this, valiantly failing to acknowledge that the way things stood it was far more likely that I'd be the one who'd be doing all the naked singing.

  It was a beautiful crisp autumn morning. Marcel had promised to pick me up from the house at nine o'clock. At ten o'clock I became a little concerned. At eleven o'clock I gave up on him. Unreliability, I had discovered, was another Moldovan trait. Twice Corina had arranged for a journalist from a newspaper to come and interview me about my business in Moldova but on both occasions no-one had shown up. They never rang to apologise, give an explanation or attempt to arrange another appointment. Seemingly there was nothing newsworthy in an English comedian coming to Moldova attempting to beat the national football team one by one at tennis. The mind boggled as to what you had to do before a Moldovan newspaper would deign to write a few words about you on an inside page. I had questioned Corina on this and she had replied that the press had been controlled for so long that it had not yet found its own true voice.

  'You have to remember,' she'd said rather poetically, 'that for more than half a century we have been like caged birds. Now the cage is open we don't know how to fly.'

  This one sentence helped me to understand so much of what I had been experiencing here.

  'Can you get to Orheiul Vecchi by bus?' I asked Adrian, who was only too pleased to take a break from his Saturday morning chore of hoovering the house.

  'I think it is possible, but I thought that Marcel had arranged a car.'

  'He may have done, but he hasn't bothered to come here in it.'

  This does not surprise me. I think that he is a strange guy,' commented Adrian, who had formed this opinion of Marcel as a result of speaking to him on the phone in the course of setting up this morning's non-event.

  'Right, I may have been let down,' I announced proudly, 'but it is far too nice a day not to make something of it, so I am going to go to Orheiul Vecchi by bus.'

  'I think that this will be difficult,' said the cautious Adrian.

  'It may be so,' I said, adopting the statuesque posture and weighty tone of a great adventurer about to embark on his boldest journey yet. 'But you will see that I will succeed, for I do not know the meaning of the word "failure".'

  Instead of eliciting the smile I had hoped for, this remark prompted a swift return to hoovering. Although Adrian had dispensed with his initial frostiness, he was still the only one in his family whom I hadn't really been able to make laugh. He was proving to be a tough nut to crack.

  The first part of the journey was easy enough. I had become something of an old hand in the art of maxi-taxi travel, and so when I arrived at the bus station I felt confident enough. Why shouldn't I be? I'd been here twice before on my trips to Soroca and Transnistria, and not had any difficulties. Admittedly I had been with Iulian, but really how hard could it be to buy a ticket and take a bus somewhere? The ticket hall and waiting room were packed with people, the hurly-burly of Saturday morning travel being something I hadn't witnessed before. I joined the queue for tickets at kiosk number fourteen and after ten minutes I found myself at the front. However on each occasion when I was about to begin my transaction with the woman in the booth, a fellow traveller barged unceremoniously in front of me. This continued until there was no-one left to slide in front of me and I was finally able to address the woman who was seated behind the scratched piece of glass which separated us.

  'Orheiul Vecchi, va rog' I said in my best Romanian.

  The woman shook her head. I repeated myself. She shook her head again. What was she saying? That Orheiul Vecchi didn't exist? That I had made it up? I had one more go.

  'Orheiul Vecchi, va rog.'

  This time she just pointed into the distance. This was no use. I didn't want directions, I wanted a ticket. I stood before her looking bemused until she said something in Romanian which I failed to understand. Seeing that I was a foreigner, she repeated it louder and faster. I nodded, turned round and wandered off having decided that this lady didn't like me much and that I might have more luck at kiosk fifteen.

  I don't know whether the rules of queueing were entirely different in this country, but I certainly wasn't getting the best of them. I was being particularly badly served by the rule which stated that every time an Englishman reached the front, then provided you approached briskly from the right and pushed him rather impolitely with your left hand, you got served next.

  During the ten minutes in which I was tantalisingly close to getting served, I observed the woman inside the kiosk and drew some comfort from the fact that however fed up I was becoming, I would never manage to look as pissed off as she did. Her ID photo, which was stuck to the window, made her look rather ugly, and to be fair, this was flattering. Her name was Lolita Levchenko. Lolita – that name which conjured up images of sensuous nubile beauty. Well, used to. This middle-aged and obese Lolita, bless her, waited until the very moment I was about to announce my intended destination before she decided to go off and make a phone call. A long one, and not to her agent regarding the modelling shoot in St Tropez, I'd wager.

  'Orheiul Vecchi, va rog,' I said when she eventually returned and had finished dealing with the bloke who'd just shoved his way in front of me.

  'Casa patruzece,' she said, gesturing off into the middle distance.

  Ah. This I understood. It meant I had to go to kiosk number forty. Quite why, I was unable to establish, but from the vigorous pointing she was doing with one of her stubby little fingers, it seemed that kiosk forty appeared to be in another building entirely.

  I followed the direction of her finger but all this did was lead me outside and into the busy marketplace where people were busy wandering around with chickens and other livestock tucked underneath their arms, or stuffed in bags. Guessing that this wasn't kiosk forty I went back inside. However, after four circuits of the building I'd still had no luck, so I went outside again where a man tried to sell me a live turkey. I declined the invitation to purchase, partly because what I really wanted was a bus ticket to Orheiul Vecchi, and partly because only a fool buys the first turkey he sees. (The really wise buyer will browse through What Turkey magazine before he sets foot anywhere near the market.)

  This market place was brimming over with people, and for a moment I was carried along by the forward momentum of those around me. Everything appeared to be on sale here. Clothes, electronic goods, tools, kitchen implements, live animals, fish, and even a stall selling drugs and medication. Iulian had told me a few days earlier that most of the drugs on these stalls h
ad been donated to the government by foreign aid agencies but had found their way on to the streets as a result of this country's institutionalised corruption. The poor folk swarming around me now were having to pay for what had been a gift to their country, and as a result some were having to sell their turkeys to keep the family healthy.

  The momentum of the eager shoppers dumped me in front of a single storey pre-fab building and I looked up to see the numbers 40-44 written above four glass windows. Aha! Kiosk number forty was here. In their wisdom, the relevant authorities had evidently decided that selling tickets at random locations would make life far more interesting for the traveller than if they housed them all somewhere as obvious as the bus station.

  I joined a queue, now resigned to the inevitable lack of respect that the locals would show for it, and in a mere twenty minutes I found myself dealing with a woman who didn't immediately send me somewhere else at the mention of Orheiul Vecchi. She even spoke a little English and drew a little map for me, explaining that I needed to get two buses, one towards Orhei and another at the point where the road branched off to Ivancea. Provided I got off at the right place, this second bus would eventually deliver me to my desired destination. It sounded tricky, but surely not beyond the orienteering skills of someone who'd already successfully located kiosk forty.

  I showed the kiosk lady's map to the driver and he made lots of positive sounds which seemed to be consistent with this being the correct bus. The girl who was getting on behind me also nodded in confirmation. Good. I was on my way, and it had only taken a little more than an hour and a half. All the seats were full so I made my way to the back of the bus where there was adequate standing room. I leant on a little ledge above the spare tyre which was below the rear window, and readied myself for the view of the city as we left it behind. The girl who'd got on behind me stood close by and she gave me a sweet little smile, revealing some badly neglected teeth. She was probably a little surprised to see the likes of me travelling alone on a bus. The few Westerners who did visit this country tended not to avail themselves of public transport, having been warned that the dilapidated buses were nearly always overcrowded, especially on a Saturday morning. This one wasn't too bad though – I may not have had a seat, but there was a little room to move about and I'd experienced worse.