“When’s your flight?” I asked.
“I’ll double-check, but I think it’s next Wednesday,” she said.
“It might be easiest to take the train to Odessa and catch a taxi from there for Chisinau. Will you be all right the rest of the way to Bucharest on your own?” She said yes and we agreed on this plan.
Over the next few days, I checked the wires for news from Moldova and saw nothing of note. We planned our trip with time for interviews in Chisinau. A few days before Charlotte’s flight from Bucharest, we boarded the overnight Kiev-Odessa express. We arrived in Odessa on schedule the next morning. We slid our cabin door open, walked along the narrow train corridor and climbed down a short set of metal steps to the platform.
I found a taxi driver near the station entrance.
“Odessa-Chisinau, how much?” I asked.
“Fifty dollars,” the driver replied.
“What!” I thought a normal rate might be ten. I interrogated him but obtained no specific information that could justify such a big jump in price. The next driver I approached refused to take us to Moldova. Several others also said no. I suspected they did not want the hassle of crossing a border. I negotiated with the first driver. We eventually agreed on a forty-dollar fare.
Our taciturn driver ignored our attempts to start a conversation with him. Charlotte and I sat and chatted in the back seat. We watched countryside fly by as we sped along the road, over the border into Trans-Dniester. We reached Tiraspol quickly. The driver stopped at a local Intourist hotel.
“Why have we stopped here?” I asked.
“This is as far as I’ll go.”
“But we negotiated a fare to Chisinau.”
“You can catch another taxi from here.” I felt my jaw tighten and my pulse rate quicken. I translated for Charlotte.
“Whaat! It’s not that much farther on. He’s only got to get us across the bridge and go on for a bit.” I argued with the driver. He would not budge and demanded the fare. He had already put our bags on the sidewalk near the hotel entrance.
“It’s no use,” I told Charlotte. “Let’s just get another car.” We reluctantly paid the driver. He sped off. We looked for a taxi, but the streets by the hotel seemed deserted.
“Shall we check in here tonight and leave for Chisinau tomorrow?” Charlotte suggested. I agreed.
“I wonder if they have a decent restaurant,” Charlotte mumbled. I asked the woman at the reception desk for a room.
“Impossible,” she replied. “It’s not safe here. You might be shot.”
“Shot?”
“The front line is just over there,” she said and pointed at the Dniester River.
“There’s actual fighting now?”
“Yes, snipers fire across the river.”
“It seems perfectly safe to me,” Charlotte said. We both suspected the receptionist was exaggerating but she insisted that we sleep at a different hotel a few blocks back from the river. We picked up our bags and walked to the next hotel.
“Cossacks,” Charlotte said, as we stood by the check-in desk. I turned and saw mismatched uniforms.
“Just our luck,” Charlotte added. “Trapped in a hotel with fifty drunk Cossacks.” After dark, we went down to the restaurant for dinner, but the door was locked. A sign said Closed for Curfew. We banged on the door. When a waiter arrived, he agreed to sell us bread and cheese for dollars. We ate this small picnic on our saggy hotel beds, then went to sleep.
“Wake up.” I felt Charlotte shake my shoulder. “Did you hear that?” I listened for a minute, then heard the pop of a gun, less distinctive than Grozny gunfire, but someone was shooting.
“We need to take cover,” Charlotte said. She slid under the bed. I felt no adrenaline rush.
“Come on,” Charlotte urged. I crawled under my bed.
“Snipers?” Charlotte asked.
“Who knows,” I said. “It might just be some Cossack celebration.”
“Those shots came from the direction of the river. They’re fighting,” Charlotte insisted. We waited until the gunfire stopped and then climbed back into our beds, Charlotte’s white nightgown now speckled with dust. The gunfire started again. We slid under the beds. Once it was quiet again, we got back into them. After an hour of this, we both gave up and stayed in bed.
Charlotte woke first in the morning.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here,” she said. We packed our bags, paid the bill and stood outside the hotel. We flagged down cars.
“Chisinau?” the first driver snorted. “I’d never make it there alive.” We stood on the street for nearly an hour but could not find a driver who would take us.
“You don’t think we’re stuck here do you?” Charlotte asked. We returned to the hotel reception desk and asked to check back in.
“Why, you just checked out?” the receptionist said. When she heard our story, she said “Of course. No one will go to Moldova. It’s dangerous.” Go to Moldova? We are in Moldova, I thought, but kept quiet. I still wanted a room. Pointing out that no government recognized Transdniestrian independence might mean eviction.
“But you don’t understand,” Charlotte said. “I have to cross for a London flight. I’ll lose my ticket and I can’t afford another. I’ll miss my exams. This is academic D-day. These are my final exams. My degree’s at stake.” The receptionist shrugged her shoulders and handed us a key.
After we had checked back in, we heard about funeral services in the main square for Cossacks who had been killed and decided to attend. We left the hotel and walked toward the square.
“Bizarre,” Charlotte said as a military vehicle — an armoured car, I guessed — passed by. It looked like a fortified garden shed on wheels.
“That must be home made,” I said. I felt worried by this escalation. We had only seen guns before.
“I think they’re gearing up for a fight. Why don’t you come back to Kiev and catch a flight from there?” I suggested to Charlotte.
“I can’t.” Like a homing pigeon, Charlotte remained determined to find a way over the river, through Moldova and back to Romania.
In the square, people stood by open coffins. We saw two. The bodies of young men lay inside. Men with megaphones chanted anti-Moldovan slogans. One shouted that changes in the alphabet from Cyrillic to Roman letters would be the first step by the Moldovan government to merge Moldova with Romania. An elderly woman came up to Charlotte and me. She said, “How can I learn a new alphabet at my age?” I sympathized but thought there must be a better way to resolve such conflict than with guns.
The next day passed slowly. We went to see the general in charge of Russian forces based in Trans-Dniester. General Lebed was a giant of a man. I shook his hand and guessed it must be three times the size of mine. We tried to extract information on how Russian forces planned to respond to the escalating conflict. Charlotte also explained her predicament of not being able find a way over to the Chisinau side. General Lebed joked that he planned to attack the next day and that we could have a lift over in his tank.
With so much time on our hands, we’d even become friendly with the Cossacks in our hotel. We spent the evening with them. They played their guitars and sang songs for us. Their words became increasingly slurred as they tanked up on moonshine.
The next morning, we visited government offices, hopeful there might now be an open route across the Dniester River so that we could reach Chisinau. As we approached one building, a bus pulled up alongside it. A Cossack who stood near us said the bus would travel to Dubasari. We knew that a bridge there crossed the Dniester, but no one knew if this bridge remained open. The Cossack boarded the bus. We followed.