Moldova PCV Nicole Sheets says Unofficial pastime of ‘reparatsie’ can create adventure
Unofficial pastime of ‘reparatsie’ can create adventure
By NICOLE SHEETS - Moldova column
Sometimes a man answers my telephone.
It’s Andrei the floor guy who has spent afternoons laying new panels of fake hardwood in the rooms of my apartment. Or it could be Edik, the landlady’s son-in-law, trying to sweet-talk the bathtub drain into working again. Regardless, these men are at my place both when I am not and when almost everyone who knows me calls and assumes I have finally taken up with a hunky Moldovan lover. If I get the chance, I correct these folks’ errant thinking. If not, I let them imagine my life is more adventurous than it actually is.
Replacing a floor is but one flavor of "reparatsie" -- repairs or renovations -- which seems to be the Moldovan national pastime. If I happen to be home during the day, the music of home improvement wafts down from the fifth floor and from next door.
I saw my next-door neighbors hauling out bag after bag of broken tile and cement. One evening I asked the woman of the house about it. Have a look, she said, and showed me the vanished bathroom wall, a lonely light switch suspended in the middle of nothing and a curtain for a door.
As the reparatsie saga continued at my place, I eventually had to sleep somewhere else for a night because I couldn’t step on the hallway floor. My friend Liliana put me up.
I felt on the verge of getting a cold and crumpled from end-of-the-week fatigue, so I parked myself uselessly in a chair. I don’t have a television and don’t much miss it; I lived successfully without one for a long while in the U.S. But when a TV is on, I find it mesmerizing.
Liliana was expecting a movie about babies switched at birth. Instead, "Charlie’s Angels" came on, and I gleefully watched their subtitled stunts. Liliana chopped vegetables for salad and red borsch, beet soup, my favorite. She’d bring the cutting board and chop in her lap until the erratic and elongated commercial breaks began.
Two bowls of hot soup restored my health. After the film, I crashed in the living room with the empty birdcage. When you sleep in a new place for the first time, you dream of your future husband, Liliana told me. My dreams were blank like clouds. I had nothing to report at breakfast, but the coffee was good.
Nicole Sheets is a Barboursville native and Peace Corps volunteer in Moldova. Her e-mail address is moldovanicole@yahoo.com. Her column appears on the Life page the first Sunday of each month.
