On the Road to Babadag (2 page)

This sequence of images was not Poland, not a country; it was a pretext. Perhaps we become aware of our existence only when we feel on our skin the touch of a place that has no name, that connects us to the earliest time, to all the dead, to prehistory, when the mind first stood apart from the world, still unaware that it was orphaned. A hand stretches from the window of a truck, and through its fingers flows the earliest time. No, this was not Poland; it was the original loneliness. I could have been in Timbuktu or on Cape Cod. On my right, Baranów, "the pearl of the Renaissance," I must have passed it a dozen times in those days, but it never occurred to me to stop and have a look at it. Any place was good, because I could leave it without regret. It didn't even need a name. Constant expense, constant loss, waste such as the world has never seen, prodigality, shortage, no gain, no profit. The morning on the coast, Wybrzeże, the evening in a forest by the San River; men over their steins like ghosts in a village bar, apparitions frozen in mid-gesture as I watched. I remember them that way, but it could have been near Legnica, or forty kilometers northeast of Siedlec, and a year before or after in some village or other. We lit an evening fire, and in the flickering light, young guys from the village emerged; probably the first time in their lives they were seeing a stranger. We were not real to them, or they to us. They stood and stared, their enormous belt buckles gleaming in the dark: a bull's head, or crossed Colt revolvers. Finally they sat near, but the conversation smacked of hallucination. Even the wine they brought couldn't bring us down to earth. At dawn they got up and left. It's possible that a day or two later I stood for ten hours in Złoczów, Zolochiv, and no one gave me a lift. I remember a hedgerow and the stone balustrade of a little bridge, but I'm not sure about the hedgerow, it could have been elsewhere, like most of what lies in memory, things I pluck from their landscape, making my own map of them, my own fantastic geography.

One day I went to Poznań in a pickup truck. The driver shouted, "Hop on. Just watch out for the fish!"I lay among enormous plastic bags filled with water. Inside swam fish, no larger than a fingernail. Hundreds, thousands of fish. The water was ice-cold, so I had to wrap myself in a blanket. In Września the fish turned toward Gniezno, so at dawn I was alone again on the empty road. The sun had not risen yet, and it was cold. It's possible that from Poznań I went on to Wrocław. Most likely heading for Wybrzeże a day or two later, or Bieszczady. If toward Bieszczady, around Osława, in the middle of a forest, I saw a naked man. He was standing in a river and washing himself. Seeing me, he simply turned his back. But if it was Wybrze że, then I was at Jastrzębia Góra, and it was evening, and I walked barefoot on a forsaken beach in the direction of Karwia and saw, against the red sky, the black megaliths of Stonehenge. I had nowhere to sleep and it was as if those ruins had fallen out of the sky. Fashioned from planks, plywood, burlap. Such things happened in those days. Someone built it and left it, no doubt a television crew. I crawled through a hole into one of the vertical pillars of rock and lay down.

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I have is the Slovak two hundred. It's so detailed that once it helped me out of an endless cornfield somewhere at the foot of the Zemplén Mountains. On this huge sheet, which contains the entire country, even footpaths are shown. The map is frayed and torn. On the flat image of land and little water, the void peeks through in places. I always take it with me, inconvenient as it is, requiring so much room. The thing is like a talisman, because after all I know the way to Košice, then on to Sátoraljaújhely, without it. But I take the map, interested precisely in its deterioration. It wore out first at the folds. The breaks and cracks have made a new grid, one clearer than the cartographic crosshatching in light blue. Cities and villages gradually faded from existence as the map was folded and unfolded, stuffed into the glove compartment of a car or into a backpack. Michalovce is gone, Stropkov too, and a hole of nonbeing encroaches on Uzhhorod. Soon Humenné will disappear, Vranov nad Topl'ou wear away, Cigánd on the Tisa crumble.

It was only a couple of years ago that I began to pay this kind of attention to maps. I used to treat them as ornaments or, maybe, anachronistic symbols that had survived in our era of hard information and full disclosure from every corner of the earth. It started with the war in the Balkans. For us, everything starts or ends with a war, so there's no surprise there. I simply wanted to know what the artillery was aiming at, what the pilots were seeing from their planes. The newspaper maps were too neat, too sterile: the name of a region and, next to the name, the stylized flash of an explosion. No rivers, terrain, topography, no indication of land or culture, just a bare name and a boom. I searched for Vojvodina, because it was nearest. War always rouses men, even when it frightens them. Red flame along the Danube—Belgrade, Batajnica, Novi Sad, Vukovar, Sombor—twenty kilometers from the Hungarian border and maybe four hundred and fifty from my house. Only a real map could tell us when to start listening for the thunder. Neither television nor newspaper can chart such a concrete thing as distance.

That may have been why the destruction in my map of Slovakia represented, for me, destruction in general. The red flames along the Danube begin to eat the paper, travel from Vojvodina, from the Banat, take hold in the Hungarian Lowlands, claim Transylvania, to spill finally to the edge of the Carpathians.

All this will vanish, go out like a lightbulb, leaving only an empty sphere that must fill with new forms, but I have no interest in them, because they will be an even more pathetic version of the everyday pretending to be sacred, of poverty gussied up as wealth, of rubbish that parades and magnifies itself, plastic that breaks first thing yet lasts practically forever, like stuff in garbage dumps, until fire consumes it, because the other elements are helpless against it. These were my thoughts as we drove through Leordina, Vişeu de Jos, Vişeu de Sus, toward the mountain pass at Prislop. Almost no cars on the road, but people had come out in the hundreds. They stood, sat, strolled, all in the dignity of their Sunday best. They emerged from their homes of wood with roof shingles like fish scales. They joined as drops join to make a rivulet, and finally spread in a broad wave to the shoulders of the road, spread across the asphalt and down to the valley. White shirts, dark skirts and jackets, hats and kerchiefs. Through the open window, the smell of mothballs, holiday, and cheap perfume. In Vişeu de Sus, there were so many people we had to come to a complete stop and wait for the crowd to part. We stopped, but our journey did not. The festive gathering enveloped us, took us against the current of time. No one sold anything or bought anything. Or at least we didn't see it. In the distance rose the dun massif of Pietrosul. Snow at the top. This was the third day of Orthodox Easter, and the occasion marked the pleasant inertia of matter. Human bodies surrendered to gravity, as if to return to the primal condition in which the spirit was not yet imprisoned, and did not struggle, did not attempt to take on any kind of feeble likeness.

After Moisei we stopped. In the desolation by the road sat four old villagers. They pointed far ahead, at something on the opposite forested slope. We understood: a monastery there. Among the trees we could make out the top of a tower. The people simply sat and looked in that direction, as if their sitting served as participation in the solemn liturgy. They urged us to go there. But we were in a hurry. We left them half reclining, motionless, watching, listening. They may have been waiting for a bell to toll, for something to move in the frozen holiday.

***

All this would vanish. At night on the main street in Gura Humorului, fifteen-year-old boys wanted to sell us German license plates. They assured us that the plates were from a BMW. All this would be gone, it would become part of the rest of the world. Yes, that first day in Romania the whole sorrow of the continent weighed on me. I saw decline everywhere and could not imagine renaissance. The attendant at the gas station in Cimpulung carried a gun in a holster. He appeared out of the dusk and told us in mime that he had nothing for us. But a kilometer farther, another station was lit up like a carnival in the ancient night. They had everything there, but the pour spouts were stuck in the necks of plastic cola bottles. Men came up with one or two bottles, then went into the darkness to find their dead vehicles.

Maramureşwas behind us. So was the mountain gap covered with a hard crust of snow, and that swarthy man in the old Audi with German plates. He opened the trunk and took out a child's motorcycle, a miniature Suzuki or Kawasaki, sat a two-year-old kid on it, and took picture after picture. An icy wind blew through the gap, and there was no one there but us. Nothing but a cold, beautiful waste, the sun rolling over the marsh between Carei and Satu Mare, and I heard the click of the camera, saw the boy's grave face, red cheeks, then the father put the toy away, and they continued down, west, no doubt to their home. We left also, because on that wind-whistling height, hands turned numb and cheeks hurt. We descended by switchbacks to the BistriŢa valley, into darkening air.

I see now how little I remember, how everything that happened could have happened elsewhere. No trip from the land of King Ubu to the land of Count Dracula will hold memories you can rely on later, as for example you can rely on Paris, Stonehenge, or Saint Mark's Square. Sighetu Marmaţiei, more than anything, ended up unreal. We drove through it quickly, without stopping, and I can say nothing about its shape, except that it looked like a sophisticated fiction. In any case we passed it in no time, and once again green mountains rose on the horizon, and I immediately felt regret and longing. Exactly as on awakening, when we are spurred by the desire to return to the world of dreams, which relieves us of our freedom of will and gives in its place the freedom, absolute, of the unexpected. This happens in places rarely touched by the traveler's eye. Observation irons out objects and landscapes. Destruction and decline follow. The world gets used up, like an old abraded map, from being seen too much.

We drove to the Sinistra district. Everything here belonged to the mountain riflemen, to Colonel Puiu Borcan, and, when he died, to Izolda Mavrodin-Mahmudia, also holding the rank of colonel and called Coca for short. From the Baba Rotunda Pass we had a view of Pop Ivan; in the valley crawled narrow-gauge, wood-burning locomotives. The inhabitants of Sinistra wore military dog tags on their chests. Everyone who came here and stayed was given a new name. From time to time, Coca would organize an ambush atop Pop Ivan against Mustafa Mukkerman, who carried mutton by truck from somewhere in Ukraine to Thessaloniki or even Rhodos, but besides mutton in the refrigerator he sometimes carried people in heavy coats. Comrades from Poland kept Coca informed about Mukkerman's movements. He was half Turk, half German, and weighed three hundred kilograms.

Diluted denatured alcohol was used here to dry mushrooms, and it was drunk with the fermented juice of forest fruits. The frosted glass for the Sinistra prison was made by Gabriel Dunka in his workshop: he frosted a pane by putting it in a sandbox and walking on it with his bare feet for hours. He was thirty-seven and a dwarf. One rainy day he picked up a naked Elvira Spiridon in his delivery van and for the first time in his life smelled a woman's body, but loyalty triumphed over desire and he turned her in, because it was only by accident that she hadn't climbed into Mukkerman's truck.

All this supposedly took place near Sighetu MarmaŢei, but I learned about it only two years later, in Ádám Bodor's
Sinistra District,
and the story has pursued me since. Pursued me and replaced the flat space on the map. Once again, the visible pales before the narrated. Pales but does not disappear. It only loses its force, its intolerable obviousness. This is a special quality of auxiliary countries, of second-order, second-tier peoples: the ephemeral tale in different versions, the distorted mirror, magic lantern, mirage, phantom that mercifully sneaks in between what is and what ought to be. The self-irony that allows you to play with your personal fate, to mock it, parrot it, turning a defeat into heroic-comic legend and a lie into something that has the shape of salvation.

There was no water where we finally turned in for the night. The manager took a flashlight and led us down cold corridors. He explained that the pump was broken and the mechanic was three weeks now en route from Suceava or Iaşi. He explained that the man who lived in this house was a foreigner, had come from far away, and drank the local cheap vodka to cope with his loneliness, so he didn't maintain the place, but the mechanic was certain to arrive soon.

It was cold. We lay down in our clothes and turned out the light. The Romanian night entered through the window. I tried to sleep but, instead of going with the flow of time and sleep, swam upstream in my thoughts, back through that long day after we crossed the border at Petea. Black watchtowers stood on the baking plain. Soon Satu Mare began, walls peeling from age and heat, the shade of huge trees along the streets, and church cupolas in extended green vistas. Hungary was behind us, the lowland sadness of ErdŐhát was behind us, and although it was equally flat across the border, I felt a definite change, the air had a different smell, and, with each kilometer, the light of the sky grew more ruthless. The distant shadow of the Carpathians on the horizon marked the limit to that blaze, framed it, and we drove on through a thick suspension of sun. Horse-drawn carts on the highway, the animals covered with sweat. Vintage automobiles carrying on their roofs pyramids of bags stuffed with wool. The dark gleaming bodies of people. A strong wind. Maybe that's why their houses looked so poor and impermanent on the great plain.