Hot. Broken fridge

At eight o’clock, the merciless rays of the sun drive us out of our dwelling. We immediately seek out the shade under the thirsty cherry tree. Luda has to go to Cimislia to get supplies for her magazine. A friend picks them up in a completely rusty and rattling Lada. It’s a wonder how these ancient cars still drive here at all. They are often patched up with wire and all sorts of other things. It doesn’t matter, the main thing is that the boxes are still running. There is no Tüv in the country. After Luda leaves, we have to deal with her daughter. She is very nice, but incredibly lazy and slow on the uptake. Tanja tries to convince her with her hands and feet that she needs hot water for the thermos flask. Katja reacts by shrugging her shoulders. Tanja shows her the thermos flask and looks up the word hot in the dictionary. But nothing helps. Tanja then wants to go into the kitchen to boil her own water. But we are not allowed to enter the kitchen. Katja is not angry or malicious, she just doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to understand. It takes half an hour for her to put some mightily tortured white bread, sweaty meat and a few tomatoes on the table. However, we would like to pour only hot water over our ready meals. Tanja points to her stomach to make it clear that she can’t eat what’s on the table at the moment. Katja raises her squeaky voice and speaks Russian in an endless stream of words. “We don’t understand,” we reply clearly in Russian. No matter. Katja chatters on, but hot water remains out of reach for us. With combined forces and a few nerves of steel, we finally manage to fill the thermos with hot water. Then Tanja wants to wash herself. Katja leads her into the kitchen after all. Access to boil water was prohibited, but access for washing is permitted. Strange. Katja fetches a bowl from the bathroom. “Why am I not allowed in the bathroom?” Tanja wants to know. “Too hot there,” she understands. As a result, Tanja has to wash herself on a bowl on the carpet in the kitchen. Katja comes and sits down at the table with me. “Puh scharka (hot)”, she whines endlessly, never getting tired of repeating the word scharka. “That’s how you learn Russian”, I think out loud, because the word is eating its way into my brain. Suddenly a customer arrives. He calls over the fence. Would like to buy beer. Katja raises her young body, crosses her arms in front of her chest and shuffles to the store, groaning.

At lunchtime, the policeman Pavel visits us with a colleague. “This is Serioja,” he introduces his service colleague. The two greet us in a friendly manner, sit down in the plastic chairs and place a watermelon on the table. Katja manages to get a knife. We eat the melon together and are bombarded with questions. They want to see our tent, the bikes, the trailer and the maps. They ask for the visa and our papers. The younger Serioja speaks a few words of English. He doesn’t want us to use Russian words because he wants to improve his English. After an hour, my head is buzzing. Thank God they are saying goodbye. “We’ll be back after work tonight. You don’t mind, do you?” “No, no, it’s a pleasure to welcome you tonight,” we fib a little. The police in Moldova are considered to be corrupt through and through. It is downright hated by the population. We were told that the men get a bad education and are only there to take money out of people’s pockets. “Without their stick to stop the cars with, they are worth nothing. They always find a reason to siphon off money. Almost always wrongly. Most of the money goes into their own pockets,” a Moldovan told us. “Their salary is low. So they supplement their wages. Many of them even have to pay for their own gas for their company cars. So it’s no wonder that they take to the streets to hunt prey,” said our informant. So far, we’ve got on well with the legal guardians. The visit just now was also friendly. We assume that the police don’t see us as prey yet. Rather, they see us as a welcome change.

Luda returns from her shopping trip in the afternoon. She sweats terribly and fills the shelves in the store with another woman. Then she turns on a hidden tap and starts to fill the cistern. I am amazed, as I thought the shaft was a well. The water therefore comes from a pipe and is filled into the hole for emergencies. “I wonder if it gave Tanja such a stomach ache. Is the water really okay?” I ask myself. But what are we supposed to do? The alternative would be to simply die of thirst. The fact is that Luda has a water connection. This makes her one of the privileged ones in the villages, as most of Moldova’s rural inhabitants have to fetch their precious water from the village well by the bucketful.

While Katja has laid her suffering body down in the house, mother Luda rotates. She now begins to water a few thirsty vines with the sparse stream of water. To give her a helping hand, I take the hose, which has been repaired many times and is leaking, from her hand. “You have to water that one and the one over there,” she instructs me with a laugh, pointing to the plants. Every now and then I hold the hose over my head, which is steaming in the heat, to cool down to a reasonable temperature. A job that I like. “That’s what a German guest worker in Moldova looks like!” I shout jokingly, to which Tanja laughs heartily. It looks like she has survived the worst of it. Her stomach seems to have calmed down.

Salmonella poisoningA little later, we’re sitting in the shade again, listening to Katja whine as she wakes up. Then two workmen enter the garden. You are to lay the cables of a telephone. We watch them at work. When one of them climbs onto a wobbly chair and tries to pry open Luda’s window from the outside with a screwdriver, I intervene. “Why don’t you open the window from the inside? Then it won’t be broken and you can pull the cable through more easily,” I say in German, going into the house to take a closer look. All closures are pasted over with white paint. The craftsman follows me. Now use his screwdriver again and, lo and behold, the lock gives way and the window opens undamaged. Luda is unaware of the rescue operation on her window. She is back in the store sizing. “Denis, can you come here?” I hear her call. I immediately get up and go to the magazine. “Look at this. My fridge is broken. The cable has a loose connection. If I don’t have cold drinks, my business won’t work,” she explains. Stunned, I look at the provisionally patched cable on the floor. “How long has your fridge been broken?” I want to know. “For weeks now. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” I understand and I realize where Tanja’s stomach pains come from. Without question, we have been eating ice cream that has been constantly defrosting for weeks. The best breeding ground for salmonella. Tanja brings me some insulating tape from our repair box. I pull the plug and repair the short circuit professionally. Then I put the plug back into the socket and lo and behold, the fridge is humming. Luda is so pleased that she immediately buys me a beer. I clink glasses with a guest. Luda also opens a bottle for herself and we celebrate the successful rescue of her business and certainly the minimization of sick people in the village.

After dinner, Pavel and Serioja actually turn up again. Luda is not even asked by the gentlemen whether they are welcome or not. We sit down at the table again. This time Serioja has a Moldovan-English dictionary with him. The English course begins, cautiously at first, but then quite intensively. My head is spinning after a short time. Serioja keeps pointing to some sentence in his book, for example: “Can I show you the way to the station? That’s very kind of you, but I know my way around here” and so on. The conversation really makes me sweat. If the two of them weren’t civil servants, I would have said goodbye long ago, but this way we have to play along. Then I show them one of the few pictures we have with us from our expedition to Australia. “That’s for me,” says officer Pavel with a laugh. As we only have two of them, I’m just about to say no. “Gladly,” I hear bubbling out of my mouth. “But with an autograph, please,” he smiles kindly at me. “Of course,” I reply, and we dutifully put our signatures underneath. Then it turns out that National Geographic broadcast a movie about our Australian expedition around the world about 1 ½ years ago. “I’ve seen that. I now know where I know you from. A dog rode on the back of a camel,” Serioja suddenly says excitedly. “Can we buy you a drink?” they then ask. As refusing is rather rude, we agree. “Schnapps? Vodka?” asks Serioja. “Just a beer, please. We have to drive on tomorrow. “No, you’re not going on tomorrow. Tomorrow we’re inviting you to a barbecue in the forest. It’s breezy there, much better than here. There will be lots of meat and beer. No, you’re not going anywhere tomorrow,” they say with the kind of determination that only policemen and soldiers can muster. Tanja and I look at each other. We think hard about how to get out of this invitation. “Uh, we have to go on tomorrow,” I say in a language that requires hands, gestures, English and some Russian. “The two of them reply in the same gibberish. “You’re going to the barbecue with us tomorrow. That’s what we’ve decided,” says Serioja, the main speaker, because he speaks four or five words of English. “Uh, no. Really we have to go on tomorrow,” I reply awkwardly. The two look at each other briefly. “We’ll take your papers, then you have to come with us,” jokes Pavel. His joke gets under my skin. If we go on a drinking spree with police officers and their colleagues who don’t speak the language, it can’t end well. What if their boss invites us next? No, we don’t want to go under any circumstances. Unless we’re left with no way out, and that’s what it looks like at the moment. Unfortunately, there’s another problem. Luda is going to the capital Chisinau tomorrow for two days with her daughter. We can’t leave our equipment here alone under any circumstances. That would be a very, very bad idea. What’s more, tomorrow is our interview day with our local TV station. How are we supposed to explain this to our two hosts? It’s no problem for them, as long as they can show us off to their friends. We are trapped and don’t know how to get out of it. “We’ll just tell them that we have to go into town for the interview. They’ll understand that. Apart from that, we offer them to visit us in Causen tomorrow. We’ll invite them there,” Tanja suggests. “A good idea,” I reply with relief and tell the two civil servants. They discuss it for a few minutes and, to our relief, accept the proposal. The sun has long since disappeared over the horizon when Pavel and Serioja finally stand up. We hug each other, shake hands and learn that they probably won’t be coming. Suddenly they have important duties to attend to. Tanja and I combine the two: Firstly, they don’t have their own car. Secondly, they are not allowed to enter a district 40 kilometers away from here in their official vehicle. And thirdly, the fuel costs for such a jaunt are far too high. “Maybe we’ll come when we’ve fulfilled our duties,” says the Serioja and gets into the police car. We stand there to wave to them. The engine won’t start. “Come on, let’s go before they get embarrassed,” says Tanja. “Okay,” I reply and we go into Luda’s little store. She rolls her eyes. We understand what she’s trying to say. Suddenly the horn honks outside. The police car has pulled up and is speeding away.

Before we crawl into the tent, we give Luda and Katja each a ring. We have a few little things for special cases. The two are very happy. Katja in particular is beaming all over her face and looks at the delicate piece of jewelry on her finger with undisguised pride. “Do you need hot water?” she suddenly asks. Tanja smiles. “No, thank you very much. We’ve had enough for today.”

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