Salki

by Wojciech Nowicki

  That’s what has become of my travels. I’ve caught the bug and I can’t help it. Am I supposed to pretend I don’t see those two Tunisians who have been sharing the contents of wallets outside the same restaurant for years now? Or that I don’t see this nice Egyptian. I met him at M.’s party and then he disappeared. I stumbled upon him some time later in Warsaw, on Kościelna Street, working tourists outside the hotel; or those two men who come into restaurants late in the evening, wearing suits, speaking French, and always sitting close to the drunk guests? They go through the menu thoroughly, exchange opinions, and the waiters pretend they don’t see them.

  A brief catalog of my travels, very much incomplete. In it there are the lost watch and humiliations, there is extreme vigilance and the resolve for this time to be the last one. There is a readiness, against all odds, to slaughter the next thief.

  In the Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and other Slavic Countries, published in 1880, you can read the following about Tiraspol: “The county town of the Kherson Governorate” that “lays on the left shore of the Dniester River, opposite Bendery.” All this is true—once you’re past Sheriff Stadium you’re already in Bendery. “In 1870 it was composed of 3,546 houses (146 brick), 16,692 citizens (1,500 Old Believers, 3,614 Jews), 3 Orthodox churches, 1 Edinoverie church, 2 synagogues, 1 Jewish house of prayer, 12 depots, 123 stores, a county school, an alms-house, a hospital, a post office, train tracks, an a marina,” the Geographical Dictionary continues. I skip the incomes, they don’t tell me anything, I can’t figure out what it would be in today’s currency. But the citizens “deal in merchandise, orcharding and gardening (347 gardens occupying 950 dessiatin), and factory work (tallow-works, tallow candles, tobacco, and a giant steam mill).” The dissidents are the most interesting. I copy the text on the Don Cossacks in the work entitled Polish Extracts, Both in Prose and Verse, Collected From the Works of Past and Present Polish Authors, for the Amusement of Fine Individuals and Youth of Both Sexes by Tomasz Szumski, the Teacher at the Royal Gymnasium in Poznań (1821): “Old Believers, or the faithful, would cleanse their chambers and use incense on every piece of earthenware that had been touched by a Russian who was not faithful. If a non-believer were to smoke a pipe, the whole procedure had to be repeated several times, and a truly religious Old Believer would be ready to remodel his entire abode. Every household had a glass case that contained the silverware and goblets from all over the world, and other such artifacts, that, to this day, hold the family’s coat of arms.” None of this explains much, just that those Old Believers were seen as eccentric and that the country was full of surprises.

  Tiraspol has wide streets, as if for a parade; but it’s hard to say what for because there are very few cars. There’s a cinema that stands there like a spaceship in the middle of a training range; it only shows old movies. The church, gilded and painted in the colors of heaven, is permanently shut. The park behind the cinema and the church resembles a meadow, and people walk around it in circles with their dogs, practicing commands—“Sit!” and “Fetch!” and “Sit!” again; and “Heel!” There is a statue of Alexander Suvorov on horseback, and Russian tourists take pictures with their children beneath it. People come here as if it was a reservation. Tiraspol reminds me of the old days—cranky, tired women working in hotels and offices. You cross the border and have to go and get your passport stamped, all those visa forms in Cyrillic with the boxes you can’t possibly know how to fill in; the name of the hotel you’ll be staying at, the purpose of your visit, how long. Ministries of God knows what, since this country doesn’t even exist, with its headquarters on the main floor of a residential block of flats. For entertainment: you sit on a bench and wait. And have a drink, but in moderation, unless it’s night, because the police are rough, but they patrol less after dark. There are barely any cafes; and all they serve there are potatoes and pork cutlets anyway.

  “The main river of the county is the Dniester River, constituting its western border and having many tributaries found in the plains. It is flush with water in the spring and dried out during the summer,” the Dictionary continues its list of facts. The Dniester River is a safe haven for all the living things. Framed by concrete, with poplars planted in its sides—their trunks smeared with lime. During the day, the beach on the other side, toward Bendery, becomes populated. After sundown, in the bushes, the young couples couple; young males with chains around their necks fight bloody battles for the females; and the females, for their own peace of mind and to kill boredom, raise their skirts for the victors and the defeated alike. The police walk around, checking IDs. Prostitutes spend entire nights waiting around the Gnome bar. Nobody ever comes. Their fridge is out of order. The stench is so bad, you can almost feel it on your skin. They sit there together, as a family; the bartender the mother, the prostitute her daughter. Mother says “Have pity, comrade, she’s young, pretty, take her to a room.” She’s the one from the neighboring room, the companion of the small Hungarian guy and his bodyguard from before; drugged, drunk Lolita—too young to be awake at this late hour. The janitor’s drinking beer with me, the national anthem is playing on the TV; it’s 1 A.M. and the nation is going to sleep. Crops wave in the wind, people are marching, and youth are dancing. And then the payback, we drink knock-off cognac in the janitor’s little room and the receptionist tries to eavesdrop through the slightly open door.

  We were eating dinner in one of the blocks of flats behind the market. All the blocks are identical. Broken light bulbs, stains on the walls, crooked stairs. Garbage underneath the windows and withered bushes. And in the apartments—chocolates; always in a crystal bowl, because there might be an unexpected guest coming any time; there’s always a shiny bedspread on the bed. As if the world was contained within those forty square-meters of fenced property; and the rest is some worthless ubi leones that you have to make your way through. And no one wants to care about and nobody really notices what’s on the outside, behind the bars. We were having dinner in one of those apartments and our host said “You see, comrades, we have higher education—the elite of our nation, one could say. My wife graduated from the music academy and I’m an engineer. We live well in our republic. We run a store at the market, or a stand, rather, and our daughter has a stand next to ours, too.” We were eating fried fish, potatoes, vegetables, and drinking sweet wine from the Kvint production plant. “It’s the best champagne in the world,” our host would say. It would be rude to disagree, he was paying after all. “To your health, comrades, and to ours as well. I raise a toast to our meeting.”

  The square consisted of flattened dirt shaded by poplars. There was a little kiosk right next to it, and the kiosk had all the usual things—plastic bottles of vodka with fruits on the labels, cigarettes, instant coffee, and a can of sugar set out on the counter. The counter lost its shine a long time ago. That was in Romania, in the city of Bystrzyca, or Bistrița—which used to be called Beszterce in Hungarian, but the Hungarian town is long gone, disappeared without a trace; everything here was Romanian now. I was standing under the poplar with my coffee and a cigarette, half-awake, and around me people were on their way to work, carrying lunch or any number of things in their carefully-saved plastic bags from the supermarket. The mess at home always feels more bearable than abroad because it’s already tamed. When I’m at home, everything seems to be slightly more meaningless to me. But there—I was the king of the world; standing by the kiosk, buying my cigarettes cheap, drinking my coffee with half a cup of sugar, because otherwise it would be undrinkable, and telling myself: how beautiful and how disgusting. Or something along those lines.

  I have no clue why I stopped in that city. There must’ve been a reason, but I can’t remember now. I was tired. There was no train. First I had been to Budapest, and slept on a train station bench; in the morning I took a train to Oradea, Romania. There were geraniums hanging under a little canopy at the train station, a woman’s touch, a southern sensitivity. So, I guess, you could’ve expected some
kind of sensitivity in the poverty that at that point in time reigned in the entire country. I went to the park. An old janitor lady was sitting on a bench and smoking cigarettes. Her broom was standing next to her, casually propped against the same bench. The woman was smoking and laughing. In the shade of the dying trees, her golden teeth sparkled like sun shining through the holes in a circus tent. From that park I went to Cluj-Napoca. On the street I saw a group of people, all wearing hats; one man was missing his leg from the knee down, and the other leg was sticking out to the side; he was dragging it. The only vacancy we could find was in a small hotel by the bus station. There was nothing to eat. B. came back from the bathroom all pale and said curtly, “Don’t go in there, don’t ask.” But at least we had a place to sleep. The bed bugs came out at night and we slept with the lights on.

  By the next day I was in Bistrița, or Bystrzyca in Polish, by the river of that same name, again king of the world, with a TV and a shower in my room. And yet, there was something broken about this part of the world that was drawing me in, something far more tempting than your obligatory tour with a tour guide. Besides, there’s nothing more boring than a guidebook for this part of the world. It lies all the time—that’s its role—it always shows how interesting the country is. In the section on Romania it kept pointing to the mountains, naming a camping site with shitty cabins for the lovers of humiliating experiences. It encouraged travelers to indulge in winter sports, but it was summer. It kept telling stories about the merits of hunting, about the bears, about the Saxons, as if they were yet another element of the local fauna; and those necessary bits about Dracula, shameful pages I keep leafing through nervously. And when it finally happened, I found myself standing one morning, well rested, in the middle of Bistrița, and saw for the first time all that I would be seeing for years to come, all that I have been on a pilgrimage to, and all that I have later despised in this bed in Gotland, because it occurred to me that it was time to stop for a moment. It was a city of a questionable charm, like Baia Mare for example, were Roma women shoveled hot asphalt from the bed of the truck in the afternoon heat on Strada Victorei, while others patted it into a road. The overseer kept shouting from the bushes: “Faster, faster I say,” and they kept pretending he’s wasn’t there; pretending that the entire street was empty. They were doing the most physically demanding work with the most primitive tools, and their dignity depended on showing him that they didn’t see both him and the beer he was holding. A small steamroller kept going back and forth along the entire length of Strada Victorei, pressing the asphalt laid down by the women into a decent street. Half an hour later the first cars were driving on it, creating new ruts. In the newer part of town, in a fancy hotel, there was a pile of rubble, tall as a man. There was a decent-sized, but badly beaten up palm tree standing in the corner, a piano covered in dust, and the currency exchange office. Next to it was a bank, already closed, with a stuffed bear in the atrium. In the evening we drank warm alcohol, sitting on our beds in the hotel because, even though the guidebook encouraged us to explore the city, it was dead, crusted over. And the only thing left to do was to wait until morning. It was getting dark, and I remember the violet of the sky. Baia Mare, Nagybánya—a one-night-stand city. New residential areas stretched beyond the railroad tracks. Children, sheep, and stray dogs wandered aimlessly, people walked home along the tracks after work—everything in a great, symbiotic coexistence with the train. But this intertwined life wasn’t perfect. Along the tracks was a line of crosses rising from the ground with fake flower wreaths resting at their feet for all who died tragically in accidents. Anyway, all roadsides in Romania are spotted with crosses. Baia Mare. You think it means something beautiful, but all it means is a Giant Mine. Fuck Baia Mare. Imagine a city for which there is no better name. Giant Hole in the Ground, Giant Black Hole Full of Stink. We took off in the morning. And now—I was lying, as if there were no walls or windows, inside the tempest that was inundating Gotland. I was scheduled to leave in the morning, and here I was remembering Baia Mare, with its smell of asphalt and dust.

  But I would come back to Romania because it was not about gloating over its poverty that, back then, was still very apparent; the level of neglect had nothing to do with it. I would catch a cab that wasn’t really a cab and kept repeating to myself: “Fuck, fuck, in the name of the Lord,” and the young driver, speeding like a maniac even though he was in no rush in this rusty Dacia of his—and repeating that there’re no jobs out here, none; and he would dance around the word “unemployed,” as if he didn’t know it in the first place. For a guy like him, raised in the suburbs, it was shameful to admit to unemployment, to the peanuts of severance pay he got a few months earlier from the bankrupt factory, and his current, almost non-existent income. A temporary change of plans is what he called it; a temporary lookout camped outside the train station in Syhot for people like me, to take us wherever we want; “as long as it’s not too far because my parents get worried,” he said, but it was more him who was worried about his Dacia, so that it wouldn’t die on him somewhere on the road. It ran on diesel fuel; diesel was cheap. Everyone bought it from the bus drivers. I’ve seen it many times, buses won’t go back to their base at night, but instead park in villages, outside the drivers’ houses. They wouldn’t even wait for night to fall, they would just sit outside in the garden, in their white undershirts, sipping beer, and the neighbors just kept coming as if they were going to buy bread. The driver would suck on a plastic hose and the clients would put their pots and buckets to catch the fuel. That’s how it was. That’s how my driver bought his fuel. He also had to keep his rates low, he knew best; if he weren’t cheap, he wouldn’t exist at all.

  Those were the days when a hustler was a king. They wanted to fit everyone on their wagons and motorcycles; a few thousand leu for a short ride to the market in a neighboring village, but they wouldn’t charge extra for whatever people might be riding with; sometimes you’d ride along with a pig, or chives would tickle your calf. They would charge ten thousand leu for longer rides, but wouldn’t drop you off at the house. You had to exit somewhere along the route, at a crossing, and walk the rest of the way, those few kilometers to my old host. My old host would never recognize me, always welcoming me with a surprised expression; as if she was seeing me for the first time and as if no one had ever rented a room from her. I always stayed at her place and it’s always been a pain; we always reenacted the same scene: she wouldn’t want any money and I would insist on paying. She had two houses, a small wooden one with a summer kitchen—that’s where she lived—and a much larger house on the other side of the backyard—for showing off—currently covered with plastic siding. She would rent me a bedroom in the larger house. Nobody had lived in it for a long time now. She was the only one left, the oldest in the family, and she walked back across the yard to the little cottage where she had raised her kids because she preferred this old way of life. Her daughter was far away, her son died in a car crash, and her husband—like every man—drank too much and one day didn’t come home because he’d hanged himself, she would explain patiently one evening in the backyard. She was wearing a quilted vest with the filling sticking out. We were constantly lacking words, so we replaced them with gestures, putting on a pantomime. When she was talking about her husband, she made a dead face and wrapped an imaginary rope around her neck. She had a gift for that kind of thing, you could talk with her for hours. In the corner of her backyard, there was an outhouse stocked with a book printed on glossy paper, entitled Partidul Comunist Român and with a portrait of Ceauşescu on the first page. When in need, you’d tear out one page. The old lady would step out of the outhouse and wave at me happily with the party book, you could see it well from a distance because the cover was red; she waved to indicate what she thought about it, what she thought about the Conducător. She probably never had the opportunity for jokes like that before. Behind the outhouse was a pigsty. When she woke me up in the morning she would serve me eggs and speck, sometimes
cucumbers and instant coffee. Everything came from her own backyard, except for the coffee, which came from the store. The pigs were given scraps, their diluted manure was used in the vegetable garden, and so on and so forth. When the pigs were fat, she would get a visit from the butcher—a next-door neighbor—who would take care of them, and get paid in meat. She would set a table in the middle of the backyard, she would serve, bring more coffee and eggs; and neighbors from all over the village would pass by behind the fence and she would stand by the table covered with an oilcloth repeatedly asking me if I need anything. She wouldn’t sit because that would be a disgrace. I was her prize, her reason to be proud, her guest from abroad, a connection to the outside world. She would eat her own breakfast around 4 A.M., usually plain bread. She would wash it down with milk. From behind the fence you could hear horse hooves on the sand, a herdsman was leading his horses to pastures farther up the hill, so they could put on some weight. It felt like it was still summer, but you could feel the winter in your bones.