Lemons and Beans

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Train from Chisinau, Moldova to Bucharest, Romania

I was dreading this train ride like an amputation. We have had some wonderful train trips on this excursion but we have also had some ghastly ones. It might have been the crackling Ukrainian euro-pop that twittered out of some invisible speaker. It might have been the 110F compartment in which we were expected to achieve something like sleep. It might have been the smells floating back from the pressed aluminum weapon of awkwardness unworthy of the name toilet. Whatever it was, something prompted Collin to turn to me in a particularly low moment and confide that, “My mom couldn’t make this trip.” What he said went doubly for mine. She is a great lady but she doesn’t tolerate blankets threatening body lice. I have no evidence that the blankets we found in the bedrolls on these trains were lousy but that has not stopped me from reminding Collin of the imminent possibility. Now, he wont even let his luggage touch them.

So, we were happy to discover that our four-person sleeper compartment had no other occupants. Well, occupants other than a pair of older Moldovan men with enormous bundles swaddled in gingham nylon and trussed with bailing twine that we had to evict. Our state of mental preparation for this, our last train trip, had us in no mood for leniency. They shuffled off, cooperatively enough, to the compartment where their wives were already billeted. I would have spread out too; these compartments are hellish with four.

This is the beginning of one of those pell-mell rushes for the airport of international departure. When you try to squeeze as much as you can out of the time allotted for a trip. When your tastes in travel lean toward the profoundly out of the way. When you are averse to doubling back on yourself. Then you will arrive at a moment, two days before your ticket says you are headed home, when you have no idea how you will actually get to where you need to be. And that is why we are on a train to Bucharest, deep in Romania, a lovely country no doubt, but a country that we never intended to visit. For me it will then be a plane to Budapest, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Memphis and finally dearest Baton Rouge. Oh well, you wont get me to complain about Romanian stamps in my passport.

This little spot of earth, Moldova, Dacia, Thrace, Bessarabia, whatever you want to call it has been fought over so many times, occupied by so many armies and so generally pounded flat that everything that the people build looks like it was assembled from parts left behind by those passing empires and armies. A little short of midnight we stumbled off of the train and into the Chisinau station, Moorish peaked windows courtesy of the Ottomans, Russian domed outbuildings and Austro-Hungarian whimsical pediments were all jumbled together. It feels like an outlier, a frontier, a dusty market city of piled carrots, wild dogs and streets lined with beech trees painted white about the trunk.

The Russian Army liberated poor Chisinau during World War II, which apparently means shelled and bombed it until nothing squirmed in the rubble. There is no fine “Old Town.” It will not be luring architecture students to sketch its graceful buildings. But, there is a sort of up-and-coming cheerfulness to the place.

The central bus station is also the location of a large, open-air market of the sort that I have an unnatural fondness for. In addition to the glut of sandals, slippers, brassieres, pirated CDs and other daily objects you find spread out on top of stacked wooden crates across the developing world there was the full bounty of this agricultural countries Fall crop. Beets and garlic still smeared in the soil from which they were dug this morning, tiny rust-colored onions, raw goats cheese, pyramids of pinto-spotted quail eggs, small and horny cucumbers, mushrooms, orange-yellow ears of corn and walnuts recently picked from under the trees that surround the rural fields here. It was a treat. I could spend the rest of my life in places like that, eating figs the size of a toddler’s fist with sun-wrinkled old women in headscarves and talking about the weather.

And you should have seen the grapes. Every color and size, in long full hanging bunches, piled in wicker baskets, tiny pale green and pearl sized ones and big purple jumbles lying on newsprint amid the flagstones. Moldova is wine country. One of the vineyards once boasted that they could give every Soviet a glass of wine with what they had in their cellars. They didn’t actually do it, they just wanted people to know that they could; a conceit of the command economy. Moldova is wine country and the grapes are coming in from skies and fields drawn from Van Gough’s pallet.

All of this is a sort of long way round talking about a trip we made yesterday into those vineyards, labyrinths of cellars with cobweb hung bottles by the thousands and sandstone cliffs cut into the hills by monks for some greater purpose. We hired a car in Chisinau, a rattling FIAT without any evidence of seatbelts or a thought for safety, and headed north for the winery at Cojusna. Words fail any further boosterism of this beautiful place so I’ll just say we drove through more fabulous countryside. More accurately we rocketed through it but the white knuckle, “I wish I had told my mom I loved her one last time” driving of the former-Eastern Bloc is a cliché that needs no additional flogging from me.

Suffice it to say, we were happy to stop for a light lunch and sampling of seven wines in a hollow, limestone hall decorated with chandeliers that looked like they had been built to Torquemada’s specifications, but was otherwise pleasant. Massive dark oak table to seat fifty-five with firm backed wooden chairs, wild boar heads, cases of dusty wine, suitably rustic wall hangings and… two place settings. It was somewhat difficult to relax and sample numerous wines in a room better suited to a medieval punch-up or parking a mid-sized jet, but a few glasses of the grape got us passed that.

From Cojusna we went northeast toward a 13th century monastery called Orheiul Vechi and through more of those swaying, verdant fields. A few minutes after leaving the vineyard and somewhat more unnerved by the hell-for-leather driving, I asked if we could pull over and take pictures of the vineyard workers. Collin (and this is odd for a professional photographer) gets nervous taking pictures of people. I have no such reservations. I don’t try to snap shots of people praying or crying or slipping into the toilet but I figure that if you are out in public then you are fair game. I did have a fist-full of clams thrown at me in a Shanghai market for making this assumption, but I am no worse for it and that fishwife is a few clams lighter, so who’s laughing now? Regardless, our pleasant Moldovan guide made sure our photographs would not prompt a shower of foodstuffs.

After a few words from her, we were welcomed into a sort of wild tumble of hands and apples and grapes and smiling country people. I will never forget it. A lady in a headscarf and three gold teeth (and few others) passed me bunches of sweet, small-seeded grapes. Grinning with the plain happiness of sharing a thing you are proud of. Down from a thick, heavy wooden ladder leaned against their truck a man began handing me compact, red and mottled apples. This may sound off putting but they smelled like horses and wine. Not like an unmucked stall but the smell of a horse’s neck and mane when you lean over to whisper to it after a sudden movement in the brush made the animal spook. If it is possible for a piece of fruit to smell strong and vulnerable and a little like the outdoors and like a wine cork from the day before, then this is what these apples smelled like. My god they were good. I eat a lot of a lot of different things but the purity and complexity of that apple in that green and yellow vineyard, on that blue sky day in Moldova will always be near the top of my list of the wonders of the world.

From then on it was pure joy at the great beautiful riot of the world, all smells and sunflower fields and light off of rivers that sliced canyons into the stone of the hills. We stopped at a monastery and bought thin myrrh candles from a lone, wild as the Baptist, monk with a few strands of grey hair and a brown cassock. We lit them in front of Orthodox icons down caves cut into the rock and trampled around a hilltop like a spine in that lush, river canyon. We ate walnuts off of the ground and sucked grapes by the mouthful straight from the stems.

It was a day unlike any other. And that is why we go to a place no one has ever heard of, in countries that seem not to exist. We go to get to that spot, far away from the television or the detailed brochure or the multi-media presentation. We go far away to eat apples with farmers in a field, thousands of miles away from anyone or thing we know. We go because this is when we feel most ourselves.

Original post here: http://www.lemonsandbeans.com/?p=265