In the Land of Birch

By Matt

Molly and I pulled up alongside a muddy knoll outside the town of Gura Humorului in northern Romania. I cranked back the emergency brake and took another look at the map. It was difficult to tell whether we’d found the right place.

Except for some crows cawing in the distance, the morning was quiet and dreary. A sweeping mist obscured the top of the hill, but we knew we were close. So wearing raincoats and jeans, we decided to continue the search on foot, and after making our way up a winding slippery path, we finally reached the top.

“This is it,” I said. “We found it.”

“Wow,” Molly breathed.

We gazed in silence, our fingers hooked in the chain-link fence that surrounded the lot. Among gnarled trees and tall dead grass, hundreds of tombstones stretched away from us, fading to white in the dense fog.

A small elderly woman emerged from a ramshackle house abutting the graveyard. Carrying a pail of water, she wore a burlap skirt, a brown peasant’s bandana and rubber boots. Smiling behind piercing blue eyes, I had the impression she’d been expecting us.

“Guten Morgen,” she said in German with a slight Romanian accent.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“Nein,” I said reflexively, surprised by the language switch. Then I relented, though ashamed at my pathetic lack of German. “Aber, ein bisschen.” Just a little.

I guessed this woman was a kind of groundskeeper for the cemetery, and I asked her if we could enter. Without a word, she unlatched the gate, turned on her heel and motioned for us to follow. She guided us through an old shed filled with clucking roosters and rusted farm tools hanging overhead. When we emerged into the burial ground on the other side, the lady mock-pushed at us, as if to say, “Go ahead, take your time. I’ll be here.”

Molly and I strolled alone among the jagged rows of graves. The moss-covered headstones leaned this way and that in the black earth. Frozen at dramatic angles, the cemetery seemed somehow alive, as if we’d interrupted an elaborate ballroom waltz. The thick morning haze allowed for only a few yards’ visibility in any direction, intensifying its sense of eternity, and I had difficulty imagining this place ever saw the sun.

We paced along slowly in the soft light, scanning the faded epitaphs of generations of Romanian Jews. All were carved in Hebrew except for the names – Moses Glasberg, Saul Dawid, Josef and Sarah Schmidt. I noticed that the small rocks, which usually adorn Jewish headstones in cemeteries the world over – placed lovingly by family or respectful visitors – were conspicuously absent here. There were no fresh flowers, no candles, no prayer books. No sign of anyone left behind. It seemed the loneliest spot on earth.

Molly and I had come to Bucovina to escape the noise and commotion of some of Eastern Europe’s great cities. We’d planned to spend a few days exploring the region’s painted monasteries, but stumbled upon this abandoned Jewish cemetery on a tip from a woman who is writing a book about the region. Depressing, yes. Morbid, perhaps. But I can’t think of another person besides Molly who would be as thrilled by this gloomy setting as I was.

***

Eastern Europe may not sound like the most ideal place to spend a vacation mid-way through a tour in Afghanistan, but it suited Molly and me. We share a penchant for melancholy and for traveling to places that put us out of our comfort zones. For us, it’s not the creature comforts that matter so much as places and experiences that stir the soul. From that perspective, Bucovina was the crown jewel of our trip.

I have been captivated by Romania ever since I first visited there more than two years ago. I was drawn, as I am now, by the rich cultural history of its land and people. The playground of empires for centuries, Romania has been occupied by Romans, Habsburg Austrians, Ottoman Turks, Nazis and Soviets. As a result, Romania is today one of the most diverse countries in all of Europe – a mish-mosh of ethnicities and languages that boggles the mind.

Orthodox Romanians, who speak a tongue derived from the coarse vernacular of Roman soldiers garrisoned there 2,000 years ago, find their country surrounded on all sides by Slavs and Magyars. Catholic Hungarians, Muslim Turks, Saxon Germans, Ukrainians, Jews and Gypsies. All have weaved their threads through the colorful ethnic tapestry of this land.

And then there is Bucovina – “the land of birch trees” – nestled in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains in the far northeast of the country. I’d first read about the region in Robert Kaplan’s travelogue “Balkan Ghosts” while living in Germany several years ago and before my first trip to Romania. I was intrigued by Kaplan’s description of Bucovina as a place almost lost in time, probably the only place where one can witness how most of rural Europe looked more than a hundred years ago. Largely due to its geographic isolation and inaccessibility, Bucovina, Kaplan explains, was incubated more recently from the worst ravages of the despotic communist regime that impoverished the rest of Romania.

Bucovina is a rich, bountiful land that is at once haunting and seductive. Weather-beaten wooden cottages line narrow mountain roads. Their sagging roofs bear the burden of perennially harsh winters. Men wearing fedoras and leather jackets bounce along on rudimentary wooden carts laden with hay or manure. Powerful steeds pull them along, their red tassles bouncing to the clop-clop-clop of hooves on crumbling roads. And old men sell jars of homemade honey from their Dalias, the car of choice during communist times.

Molly and I stayed in Voroneţ, just down the road from one of Bucovina’s best preserved monasteries of the same name. For $50 a night, we got a room with a balcony overlooking autumn-colored hills. Over the next three days we traveled to the Voroneţ monastery and others with names like Moldoviţa, Suceviţa and Humor.

Similar to one another in construction, each monastery generally consists of a large Orthodox church, a garden, a well and living quarters, all housed within four stone walls. The monasteries are remote and peaceful, the perfect setting for a life spent in decades of prayerful solitude. Today, serious nuns wearing black frocks and little square hats till the gardens that sustain them year round. Many of the nuns are surprisingly young, an indication that devotion runs deep in Bucovina.

The monasteries, most dating from the 15^th and 16^th centuries, must have been a marvel even in their own time. It is the churches within them that are the real reason people visit. Each one bears vibrant exterior frescoes in the Byzantine style. The images, painted in deep reds, blues, greens and yellows, recount the story of the Bible to what would have been illiterate medieval peasants. Most surprising of all is how well the murals have survived the elements for so long.

At Suceviţa Molly and I found ourselves alone in a courtyard with a well and a solitary stone cross. The air was heavy and wet and the faint sounds of brass instruments being played at a wedding in a nearby village could be heard over the monastery’s 20-foot walls. I thought about it only later, but at that moment, Afghanistan must have been the furthest thing from my mind.

“I wish I could just spend a summer here writing,” Molly said.

“Me, too,” I said. “I wish I could do it with you.”

Our stay in Bucovina was both romantic and relaxing. But the region’s secluded culture, unblemished for centuries, will soon be gone. It will be erased by the modernizing effects of Romania’s membership in the European Union, which it joined – along with Bulgaria, its Balkan neighbor to the south – in 2007. As Molly and I drove through village after village, it occurred to me that we were probably among the last people who would see this land as it has existed for ages.

Already in the larger towns, one could get a glimpse of Bucovina’s transformation. Construction is everywhere. Flashy new homes of concrete, vinyl and plastic seem vulgar against the backdrop of smoking chimneys and hay bails. Mercedes and Audis careen around horse carts on much-improved roads. Designed to last in a style that is unmistakably German, the new roads are sure to lay the foundation for a robust future in tourism. It won’t be long before monastery bus tours and gaudy hotels invade this sheltered way of life forever.

Which made discovering the abandoned Jewish cemetery at Gura Humorului all the more remarkable. Once at the center of a thriving Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, most of Bucovina’s Jews met their end in World War II, some in the camps, others at the hands of their fellow Romanians. The cemeteries are virtually the only evidence they were ever here. Now lying neglected and overgrown, I had the sense that before long the cemeteries, too, would vanish from the earth.

***

As Molly and I prepared to leave the graveyard that Monday morning, I fished around in my pocket for a 10 lei bill to give the old woman as a tip. But before I could hand it to her, she stopped us.

“Woher kommen Sie?” she asked us, her words tinged with a faint Latinate flourish. Where do you come from?

“America,” I replied. “New York.”

Her eyes sparkled and she stood silent for a moment. I wondered what New York must have looked like in her mind’s eye. I tried to remember what I expected of Bucovina before my first trip there more than two years ago.

Now I was dying to find out about this woman’s roots. Just how had she come to speak flawless German? Though I realized questions of nationality could be explosive in this part of the world, I asked anyway.

“Sind sie Sachsen Deutscher?” I said, betting she was among a small minority of Saxon Germans, descendants of 12^th and 13^th century settlers, who inhabit Bucovina’s neighboring region of Transylvania.

She laughed and shook her head. “Nein.”

“Well Jewish then?” I asked confused, wondering if I had mistaken German for its linguistic cousin Yiddish. But I was wrong there, too.

“Ich bin Österreicherin,” she whispered with a smile that said: “just between us.” Her family, she explained, had moved from the Austro-Hungarian capital of Vienna to this town in 1875, when it was then a far off city at the edge of the empire. Austria-Hungary, I thought. Empire. Something you read about in dusty old history books. And yet it wasn’t so long ago.

I slipped her the tip and thanked her for her company.

“Danke,” she said warmly. “Auf wiedersehen.”

With still a week remaining on our trip through Eastern Europe, Molly and I drove off again into the land of birch trees. The day had begun well. We were together again and in a place where no one could find us.

Our spirits soared.

New Normal

By Molly


Matt and I took the train from Poland to Ukraine on a Thursday night. It was a nice train, with bunk beds and fluffy white comforters in a tiny private compartment. We fell into a restless sleep as the train bumped along towards the border and we arrived in L’viv, a large city on Ukraine’s western edge, before 6am the next morning.

We lugged our large backpacks into the station’s main hall, groggy after the short night that had been punctuated by unfamiliar noises and multiple passport checks. The sky was still dark and the air, frozen. The station was empty but for a handful of gray-haired men standing by the door, sipping coffee from tiny plastic cups. Matt put coins into the large automatic espresso machine for us while I waited, bleary-eyed, scruffy-haired, and totally confused.


I looked around. All the signs in the station were written in Cyrillic—that strange, symbolic alphabet first used in the 9th century Bulgarian Empire. Matt, who had memorized the pronunciation of each symbol when he first traveled to Russia years before, could at least sound out the words, even if he often didn’t know what they meant. I, however, was completely lost.

We stood outside the station for a few minutes, stamping our feet on the frozen ground. Our breath billowed out in cold white puffs as we tried to figure out the next step. We watched commuters walk by in heavy coats and thick fur hats. Sputtering taxis and trolleys caked in dust ran up and down the street. We listened to the swirls of language around us, what sounded like a back-of-the-throat garble. Crumbling buildings lined a muddy street littered with trash.

Matt and I had purchased a sub-par city map from a confused-looking woman at a kiosk inside, which we peered at in the dark, unable to tell if the city center was too far to walk. It looked like it. Not wanting to be ripped off by a pernicious cab driver, we figured we could take the tram.

We walked over to what appeared to be the bus station and pantomimed with a clerk selling mineral water and cheap cigarettes inside. We thought she understood our question when she smiled and picked up a pen. On a scrap of paper she wrote “57 40” and handed it to us.

“What does this mean?” I asked Matt on our way out. The numbers didn’t seem to correspond to any specific buses or trolleys or times.

“No idea,” he said.


We walked along the road next to the trolley track, asking a chain of commuters, one by one, where to go. Matt used simple English and his rudimentary Russian. I gave moral support. Eventually we found ourselves in a steamy trolley car heading in what we hoped was the right direction. The streets were empty as we rolled past, the sun just beginning to rise. Neither Matt nor I had ever been to Ukraine before. Everything seemed new.

We found our hotel, an imposing building just off the old Town Square with an elegant but weary marble staircase cascading into the foyer. A thuggish-looking bellhop with no neck and humorless eyes took our bags. Then we went on a walk.


The city was still quiet despite the hour. The ground was covered in frost. I thought that the buildings—big classic stone constructions, beautiful and grand in the distance—looked old and neglected up close. We stood in front of the Opera House for a few minutes. Pigeons flocked around a woman wielding bread. Bright yellow buses careened on the curving roads around us. And then, as the streets began to fill with men and women on their way to work, I noticed the masks. Almost everyone in L’viv, it seemed, was wearing a surgical mask. Noses and mouths hid behind light blue cloth, dark eyes peering above. I felt unnerved by the eerie glow they cast upon the city. Is this the Twilight Zone? I wondered.


But then we understood: Swine flu. Unlike other countries that have recently experienced elevated but not alarming levels of the virus, Ukraine was in a crisis. Matt and I had read about it from an English language paper in Poland a few days before. We hadn’t taken it too seriously. Swine flu is everywhere, we thought. No use changing our plans. But we soon realized that in Ukraine everyone was afraid. The opera, we learned, had been shuttered. Half of the restaurants were closed. And the streets were full of masks.

We asked about it in our hotel later that morning. We had just eaten breakfast in an empty dining room, served omelets by a young man whose face was obscured by the light blue of his mask.

“Ukraine hasn’t seen the flu in 300 or 400 years!” said the hotel receptionist, a hyper-bubbly blond woman. “That’s why we are so nervous!”

Matt and I traded glances. Ok, I thought.



That night we entered a sign-less, basement restaurant by knocking on the door and saying the password—Slava Ukraina, or “Glory to Ukraine”—to a masked man behind the peephole. He opened the door laughing and let us in with a wave. Before we descended the stairs, he handed Matt and me each a single raw clove of garlic. He gestured to his mouth. I smiled, confused, and held it in the palm of my hand for a moment while Matt popped his into his mouth and chewed. We walked down into the smoky, crowded dining room.

“Is this normal?” I asked.

Matt shrugged.

“Who knows,” he said.




***

Before I left the U.S. to meet Matt in Warsaw, I wrote about his upcoming leave. I wrote that I was nervous. “My life here, alone, has become normal,” I wrote. “I’m used to sleeping alone, to waking alone. I’m used to setting my own schedule, no longer in possession of anyone else’s needs.” I wrote that the loneliness had become normal, the guilt and the anger had become normal. I no longer remembered the normal that came before this normal, the one where Matt was a presence and not an absence, the one where I wasn’t afraid all the time.

I had been thinking a lot about normalcy. What is it? Where did it go?

I was afraid that seeing Matt again would bring our lack of normalcy into clear focus. I was afraid that being together again in the midst of his deployment to Afghanistan and my year of writing a book in New York would be hard because our perspectives have changed, and our new normals are nothing alike. I was afraid it would be too much.

But we hugged in the Warsaw airport on that last Saturday afternoon in October. And then we laughed when we got on a bus going in the wrong direction. Suddenly, it felt as if we had never been away.

In part, this is because nothing was normal on this trip. That was the beauty of it all. Over the course of two weeks we used four different currencies. We struggled with four incomprehensible languages. The cities were confusing and the local customs at times mysterious. We rode a crowded train filled with the stench of feet and feces through rural Ukraine and tried soup made from the lining of a cow’s stomach in Bucovina, Romania. We stayed in a plush hotel near Warsaw’s Stare Miasto and walked along the Danube River in Budapest one evening close to midnight, watching the lights of the Parliament building shimmering in the water below.

Eating pickles and borscht in an underground restaurant of flu-wracked Ukraine, raw garlic perfuming our breath, the only normal thing for me was Matt. It was wonderful.

***


Early on a Sunday morning Matt and I took a bus over the border into Romania. It was a rickety bus with faded red curtains covering the windows. It smelled stale and musty. The two drivers—one Ukrainian, and the other Romanian—sat us in the very front of the bus. “Amerikansky,” they said, gesturing to our seats. Soon the back of the bus was full of a dozen other passengers, men and women, all carrying large plastic shopping bags filled to the brim. They all seemed to know each other, Matt and I thought. We heard whispering and laughter. The drivers addressed people by their first names.

We were in Chernowitz, a small city in southern Ukraine, and only fifty miles or so from the Romanian border. We drove down narrow roads coated in a thick fog. Matt and I shared some rye bread and yogurt that I had stashed in my bag.

We sat silent as the bus picked up other passengers along the way, all carrying similar shopping bags, all handing over a few bills to the drivers. At the border we watched the nervous shuffle of our fellow riders as the uniformed border officials collected passports. Our drivers followed them inside, bringing loaves of bread along. Back on the bus, we wondered what was happening, smiling at our naiveté.

“Do you think they’re smugglers?” Matt asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

After an hour at the border, the drivers reboarded us passengers and we carried on. After a brief moment of excitement when we passed a police checkpoint on the road in Romania, we pulled over and everyone but us quickly disembarked. They ran to waiting escorts and three cars parked nearby. Once their merchandise was loaded, we watched from the window as they were quickly whisked away.

“Weird,” I said.

For the next 20 miles or so—the final leg of the journey to Suceava, Romania—Matt and I were alone on the bus.

“Do you think that’s normal?” I asked.

Matt shrugged. Probably.

Together Again

By Molly


I am sitting by the window of a hotel room in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. I can see the red-brick roof of a building across the way, the sun slowly sinking in the luminescent gray sky behind. It smells of firewood, and I can hear a police siren sounding softly in the distance. Matt, who is the same but maybe a little bit different, is lying on the bed nearby. I can see his hand twitch as he falls asleep. We're both tired after a day walking among the markets and museums of this colorful city, which is filled with ornate Hapsburg-style buildings and a language both unintelligible and striking.

Matt was waiting for me in the Warsaw airport when I stepped off the plane on an afternoon almost two weeks ago. I dropped my bag and he hugged me. I could smell his shampoo and, almost immediately, it felt as though we had never been apart.

Since then, Matt and I have done a lot. We explored the old town squares of Warsaw and Krakow, L'viv and Cherniv'tsi and Cluj. We've eaten many bowls of borscht and plates of mititei. We've drunk countless mugs of tangy dark beer and glasses of surprisingly smooth vodka. We stood by the train tracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, surrounded by crumbling buildings, imposing fences, and a crushing sense of the past. We took a sleeper train to L'viv, Ukraine, where we encountered a mask-wearing population terrified of swine flu and stayed in a hotel with a grand but decaying marble staircase. We took a rickety bus filled with smugglers over the border to Romania and found a bucolic countryside--its medieval monasteries painted in deep blues and reds, its Jewish cemeteries crumbling and covered in moss. We drove a car down winding roads through Transylvania, passing countless mud-caked dogs and weather-beaten farmers guiding horses decorated with red tassels. Tonight we'll see an opera, and tomorrow we will take the train to Budapest. Early next week Matt and I will fly our separate ways. I'll return to New York and Matt to Afghanistan, each with countless stories of this trip, which has been a constant adventure. We will be writing more, soon.

As I sit here watching the quickly darkening sky, I'm happy not to think of that next step. I'm not sure what I expected of this time here in Eastern Europe. I'm not sure what I expected of Matt's leave. But thus far it has been a bright and exciting couple of weeks, ones that have reminded me what it feels like to be close, to be together, to laugh in tandem and sleep at the same time. I miss him again already.