Day 31 - Discretion

A I Cuza University in Iasi, Romania, image by blankdots,
via Flickr

When I lived in Romania, I learned a lot about the need for discretion. The best example is the story I heard twice and what the second story teller didn't realize she was giving away that the first story teller had been so careful to hide.  I know it is unlikely that more than one reader of this piece knows any of the same people I do in Romania, but I will give my two story tellers fictitious names in order to illustrate discretion myself.  The need for discretion in this case is gone, but its value is eternal.

The English department of the University in Iasi consisted of a large room, with tables and chairs lining three sides, leaving an area open in the middle of the room. This room served as the communal office for all of the faculty of the English department, in contrast to the separate offices - or at most one shared with one other person - University instructors are accustomed to in the United States. A desk served as the communications center where a bound ledger for messages was kept.  The first thing any of the teachers did when they entered the English department was to look for the ledger to see if there were any messages for them.  A teacher was on duty throughout the day. That teacher's responsibility consisted of answering the telephone and taking messages in the ledger. It was that rotating responsibility of serving as the teacher on duty that gave me the opportunity to meet the other teachers.

Most of the time, there was at least one more person than the teacher on duty in the department. If students had a question for a teacher, they also would enter the department to meet the teacher or to leave a message.  It was therefore very difficult for any of the teachers to share information privately with me or one another. So it is remarkable that there were two occasions during my year there when I was in the department with two different teachers long enough for them to tell me their stories.

London, image by Anirudh Koul, via Flickr

I'll call the first story teller Marina. She was not much older than I. She hadn't had many opportunities to travel, so she was eager to tell me about her one trip to England for a month-long course in English. As was typical of the times, Romanians were seldom permitted to travel on their own outside of the country, so Marina's trip was as part of a group of Romanian teachers of English. But even being part of a group wasn't sufficient assurance to the Romanian government that she would return; the fact that Marina was married was essential to the arrangements. Marina was allowed to travel to London with a group of other Romanian English teachers because her husband, and I think there may be been a child, remained behind to "guarantee" her return. But Marina told me that as soon as she learned she would be allowed to travel to England, she made plans to extend her stay.

Romanian currency was not convertible, not a hard currency. That is in contrast to US dollars, which were and still are accepted in payment for goods and services around the world and can be converted into nearly any other currency imaginable. In Romania, therefore, I could take US dollars to the bank and exchange them for Romanian lei, but if I left the country with any lei - an illegal act - I wouldn't be able to take them to a bank in the US to get dollars in exchange.

So the first challenge for Marina was to figure out a way to accumulate enough hard currency to be able to live on during her extended stay.  Just as it was illegal to take lei out of the country, it was illegal for Romanians to possess hard currency. That meant Marina had to figure out how to make the British pound Sterling allowance she would receive during the month's training cover more than her expenses. To do that, Marina got up very early every morning so that she could walk from the hotel to the school, saving the cost of the train or bus. She also ate as much as she could at breakfast, included with the cost of the hotel, and she took packages of crackers with her to eat in place of lunch and dinner. She walked from the school back to the hotel as well.

At the end of the month, Marina deliberately missed the bus to the airport so that she missed the plane back to Romania. The tickets of all of the teachers were on the Romanian national airline, Tarom; there was no option for Marina to get back to Romania on another airline. And since the organizers of the group had all of the passports -- the government would never allow individuals to hold their own passports -- she would have to wait another week for someone to bring her passport back to London so she could catch the next Tarom flight back to Romania.

Marina may have told me how she spent her time in London, but if she did, those details were not as memorable as the story of how she arranged the week. I was still having difficulty understanding what life was like under such a system. My passport had so many entry and exit stamps in it that I had had to get extension pages added, and I had only had my passport for less than three years.

Statue of Alexandru Ioan Cuza in Iasi,
Romania, image by Waqas Ahmed, via
Flickr

It was my passport, with its extension pages, that led to the second story. I'll call the second story teller Ana. I had had to leave my passport at the University to get a residence permit. When my residence permit was ready, it along with my passport was turned over to the teacher on duty in the English department for me to pick up. Ana was on duty when I arrived. When she pulled my passport out of the drawer, she held onto it a little longer so she could open it up and pull out all those extension pages to examine the stamps indicating the number of countries I had visited since it was issued. As she was looking at my passport, Ana said she had only traveled outside of Romania once, a few summers ago, when she went with a group of other English teachers to England for a month's training course. Ana's story was the same as Marina's except in one detail: Ana told me that she and a friend had decided ahead of time that they would stay in England for an additional week. Ana never named the friend. She understood the need for discretion to that degree. But in telling the story in second person plural, Ana unwittingly gave away Marina's role in the story at the same time as illustrating to me just how important discretion is.

Before hearing the two versions of the story of Marina's and Ana's adventure in London, I was annoyed when someone told a story as though they were alone when I had a good idea that there was another person involved. But after hearing Marina's and Ana's stories, I realized that my annoyance was misplaced. Those story tellers weren't trying to hide something. They were just being discrete.