On the Road to Babadag

by Andrzej Stasiuk

  On the day the Lord God distributed the earth to the human race, the Moldovan overslept. When he woke, it was too late. "And what about me, Lord?" he asked sadly. God looked down upon the sleepy, pitiful Moldovan and tried to think, but nothing came to Him. The earth had been divided up, and, being Lord God, He couldn't go back on His decisions, let alone start transplanting populations. Finally He waved a hand and said, "Too bad. Come on, then, you can stay with me in Paradise." So goes the legend.

  When you travel to Cahul or any other place here, the legend rings true. The monotony suggests eternity. Continual green, continual fecundity, the land undulating, the horizon rising and falling, showing us only what we expect, as if not wishing to cause us the least unpleasantness. Grapes, sunflowers, corn, a few animals, grapes, sunflowers, corn, cows and sheep, on occasion a garden, and rows of nut trees always on either side of the road. No free space in this scenery, no sudden disjunction, and the imagination, encountering no ambush, soon dozes. Most likely events took place here a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago, but they left no trace. Life seeps into the soil, disperses into the air, burns calmly and evenly, as if confident that it will never burn out.

  The stop in Cimişlia was the sort of place that is impossible to recall. Some kind of nothingness that for a moment attempted to be a bus station. A concrete apron open to the whistling wind at one end and closed off by a building at the other. Grayness, dust, and heat. The beer tap at the bar was a rubber hose wrapped with wire. Farther inside, everything was thrown together, layered haphazardly, by whim. Part dwelling, part rubbish heap; a dark, narrow, low area full of welded iron struts, pieces of sheet metal, laminated panels, all discarded from the start, to get the ruining over with early. The despair of objects despised. People sat, ate, drank, and waited, yet seemed naked, exposed to the wounding edges of all the junk.

  A cart waiting at an intersection, hitched to a donkey. Nothing in the vicinity. It was only farther on and lower, where the cornfield ended, that the cement village appeared, gray. A woman got off the bus, pulling a cage thing on two wheels. A small bag was attached to it. Cage and bag were both homemade. A girl was waiting for her. They hugged, as if after a long separation. Then they climbed onto the cart. The two bigger, together, than the entire vehicle. The brown donkey made for the village. It seemed a game, because woman and girl hardly fit on what looked like something stolen from a child's merry-go-round.

  What to say about Cahul? From there it's a couple of kilometers to the Romanian border, and then you're off to GalaŢi, by the Danube. On the main street in Cahul you felt the proximity of the border. Cars passed with a rumble, and in the pubs the melancholy kings of life warmed themselves in the air. They ordered Moldovan cognac, drank it by the glass, but their faces didn't move. They were able only to move their mouths, that was it; the rest was permanently frozen. They adjusted their gold chains and made sure people were looking. They even kept their cars running, so everyone would know that they had plenty of gas. Cahul at first glance: a hick town on the border, the nervous indolence of two-bit confidence men driving in circles to kill time.

  In a park by a white church, a guy was renting out go-carts. He sat behind a desk in the shade of a tree and, using an hourglass, kept track of the time per ride. After him, the city imperceptibly became village. The trees were now taller than the houses. Goats cropped the grass at the foot of a partisan memorial, its cement heroes with big scars across their faces. In a nearby shop, a yellow light burned, though it was in the middle of the day. Three men entered, and a woman behind the counter poured vodka for them into shot glasses. A pub, I realized.

  In the square before the hotel, dogs chewed at themselves all night. And howled. At dawn, cars began assembling with merchandise. It was a bazaar. Train cars without wheels served as stores. An insanely varied spectacle from my sixth floor. Everything sparkling and shimmering in the sun: foil, plastic, cellophane, glass, metal. Pickles, tomatoes, watermelons. I went down and saw that here was everything a person needed to live. Belts, golden corn, pickling jars, barrels for marinating. The music went in a loop. Women sat motionless over their wares, hands folded in laps, as if at home or on a bench by the front gate. I saw little gesturing, a lot of simple waiting.

  The owner of a light-blue Renault refused my twenty euros. He said the roads were awful and the car would be destroyed. He wanted thirty, not including the gas. He was in light blue too, dapper. Next in the line, a Zhiguli. So old, I don't remember the color. The driver was big, fat, and unpleasant to look at. He said he'd take us, and his name was Misha. He was about fifty. We left Cahul. The road went up through rolling hills, vineyards, cornfields. The villages began suddenly and stopped as if cut off with a knife. Times were bad now, Misha told me. He brought up Stalin, though he was too young to remember him. Stalin was worth bringing up: he shot thieves. The problem with Moldova today, in Misha's opinion, was thievery. The whole country had been stolen from the ordinary people. In the Soviet days, when everything was communal and didn't belong to anyone, theft was not a problem. Like everything else, it was communal: everybody stole, and nobody lost. Now only the richest stole, and they made sure the poor couldn't, by inventing property. Property was an invention against ordinary people, who owned nothing. That was Misha, in Russian.

  I wanted to go to Comrat, the capital of Gagauzia. It's not completely known who the Gagauz people are. In Moldova, they number 20,000. Their language is Turkic, their faith Orthodox Christianity, and they came to the Comrat area from Dobruja, when Russia annexed Moldova in 1812 and called it Bessarabia to erase the past. They could be Bulgarized Turks or Turkified Bulgars; no one is sure. And practically no one knows that they exist. So I went to Comrat, on roads as empty as landing strips.

  It's hard to describe Comrat, because it's so easy to overlook. You ride through a city you can barely see. There are homes, streets, but they are all sketched in, a stopgap not thought through, the sadness of matter only half materialized, lacking the conviction to take full shape. A monument to Lenin had gold paint slapped on. A funeral procession went down the main street, its open coffin on a pickup truck. Beside the coffin, on a chair, sat an old woman in black. It was hot. Flies circled above the face of the deceased. The woman brushed them away with a green branch: a slow, tedious motion. Peculiar, these mourners walking in silence through the din of the everyday, between booths selling bread and vegetables, among bicycles, cars, and carts. Pushing their way against the current of life.

  Before the Gagauzia Museum stood a statue in honor of the heroes of the war in Afghanistan. A kid with a rifle was painted silver. I thought I'd try the museum, and it seemed that the group inside was waiting just for me. A woman tour guide, accompanied by two other women, took a wood pointer and began to speak about the great migration of people from the heart of Asia. She tapped the map, and it turned out that the Gagauz were Turks after all, who instead of occupying the southern coast of the Black Sea strayed north. We proceeded from room to room, in chronological sequence. An old man appeared through a side door and told us he was a member of the Union of Sculptors of Gagauzia. He was born in 1935, in the village of świątkowa Wielka, not far from where I live. His name: Andrej Kopcza.

  Misha kept getting lost. Fifty kilometers from his neighborhood, and his sense of direction left him. I showed him the map. He wouldn't trust roads he had never been on. They might be on the map, but he refused to believe in their existence. "Only Turks live there, so what's the point?" "Nothing but Bulgars there ..." He wouldn't get out of the car, refused coffee, said no to lunch. It was beyond him how someone could waste time and money like this, why someone would come here. What kind of destination was the village Albota de Sus? Or Sofievca? Misha stayed in the car and looked at the gray post-Soviet pocks and scars spread throughout the green landscape, and I looked at him, and our minds were mutually impenetrable. He pined for what had been and despised what was left. "I am Soviet man," he declared that morning. But how could anything other than th
is be left, if there had been nothing other than this in the first place? The poverty and misery of objects created ad hoc could do only what they had been created to do: eat away at reality. The whole region seemed abandoned. A tractor and cart on the empty road, a man tossing out fresh-cut greens with a pitchfork, a few clumps at each turn. Charity or some kind of payment?

  We were in Baurci at dusk. Misha took his money and drove off. In Baurci there are only Gagauz. We looked for Elena. We had met her two days earlier on a bus to Cahul. She had red hair and a shy, beautiful smile. She said she worked in Istanbul but was coming home now to see her children. She invited us, so here we were, trying to locate her in a village of 10,000 situated on low hills in the middle of a treeless plateau. "That's the one who had two husbands, and the second was a Turk," the villagers told us. We finally found her house. It stood in a long row of similar houses. The entrance was through a small, shady courtyard covered with creeping vines. Elena smiled again. She was surrounded by children. Her father came out. We were all embarrassed. "This is how we live," she said a few times. She wanted to show us everything at once. We went to the garden, inspected the vegetables, the grapes, here's the cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, we repeating after her, because we had come from afar and might not know what these things were. We inspected a gaunt roan calf tethered by a short chain to a dunghill. Pigs sat somewhere in the dark: we could smell them. Everything compact, close together. "They didn't give us much land," Elena said.

  We slept in the biggest room. It was filled with knickknacks, in glass, plastic, porcelain, metal; figurines, ornaments, souvenirs, weavings, innocent nonsense—pale ballerinas, cheap watches, crystal balls—art with no pretension, a museum of neat stuff, oriental splendor, an orgy of beauty, trinkets, and dreams, a vision made flesh. It reminded me of the rooms of my country aunts and grandmothers, but those could not compare with this room in Baurci.

  In the morning we inspected the village. Everyone came along: Elena, her children, her father, sister, brother-in-law Ilya, who knew the world, having served in the army in East Germany and built houses in Moscow. On the facade of the House of Culture, a folk-socialist mosaic. On a two-meter pedestal, a concrete bust of Lenin. "The best man, he," Elena said in Russian, smiling her smile. I understood then that they had nothing else here, that the memory of Baurci began sixty, seventy years ago; before that there was a blank. A donkey pulled the wagon; a child held the reins. Inside the cavernous House of Culture, the rumble of spiritless music. We found the source: an eighteen-year-old, pasty girl making gestures learned from television. The music issued from a tape, and she sang in a mechanical voice, lost in her sad and restless dance. For breakfast that morning we had a local dish: cooked pig skin. "Someday a movie theater comes," Elena said. Under a tree sat an old woman dressed in black. Beside her was a sack of sunflower seeds, and on a branch hung a rusty scale. The woman sat quietly, hands folded in her lap. On the tin gates leading out were images of the Olympics in Moscow: a stylized skyscraper topped with a red star.

  Baurci was the true end of the Revolution. That's what it looked like. Nothing remained that could be used or that had any value—seventy years not worth shit. A caricature monument to a criminal before an empty building in which rumbled a desperate imitation of music from the rotten West. Only the donkey's harness made sense, had substance. I'll be frank: I was at a loss. People, you would think, know what is good for them, and their longing hearts cannot lie. Something didn't fit here, was not in key. I felt I was an intruder, an imbecile in a world I couldn't parse.

  There was only one new building in Baurci, but it was large, perhaps even larger than the House of Culture. Beige walls, huge windows, a red roof. Simplicity, functionality, and overall a kind of bright challenge to the weary village. One sees something like that brightness in American films, say, when a young couple gets married. "Protestants," Elena said. I asked about the size of the congregation, but she didn't know. She said only that the converts "did no work and got a lot of money from somewhere." Inside, gleaming pine pews, a pine altar, Ikea-like. Later I saw the house of one of the congregants; it didn't differ from the others, except for the Japanese off-road vehicle, a few years old, in the front. "He drives to Chişină u," Elena said, and it sounded like a reproach.

  We too went to the capital that afternoon. It was ten kilometers to the bus stop. Ilya took us in his Zhiguli. Since morning we had been drinking beer and wine, alternating, but that was no problem for Ilya. Chişinău was no problem either, he said, if the bus didn't come. He was short, sinewy, and feared nothing, having seen both Dresden and Moscow. But the bus came, and we hugged each other tight on the dusty road to Congaz. We vowed that we would meet again. These were wonderful people. They said, "This is how we live," and showed us their life as naturally as others would give a tour of their house. Elena's sister had got up at four in the morning to kill a rabbit and a chicken for our breakfast. The mother of the two sisters, paralyzed, sat on a chair in the shade of a grapevine and watched, grinning, as we drank wine. The father shared with us his slivovitz colored with raspberry juice. Plates of melon and watermelon slices. Now we embraced Ilya on the dusty road to Congaz and vowed that we would meet again, though none of us believed it.

  Chişinău, ah Chişinău! White apartment blocks on green hills. You saw them from the north, south, east, and west. Massed like high cliffs gleaming in the sun. A paean to geometry in the rolling, irregular landscape. There is nothing larger or taller in all Moldova. Giant tombstones stuck in the fertile, plump earth. Stone tablets of egalitarianism. Termite towers of universal progress. A New Jerusalem dying a technological death.

  At the exits from the city stood trucks loaded with plastic kegs, jugs of wine, Weck jars, a thousand containers into which Moldova had stored its wealth to make it through the winter. Marinating, pickling, fermenting, pasteurizing, salting, canning the produce of its gardens and plots. Downtown, on the Boulevard of Stephen the Great and Holy, among stores selling Japanese electronics and Italian boots, people went burdened with jars. They carried ten, twenty cleverly packed, brand-new mason jars at a time. Or shiny galvanized pails. Or sacks bulging with cucumbers and tomatoes. Pickup trucks loaded with melons, cars pulling trailers loaded with melons. Old Chişinău was really more village than town. A little off the main walkway, you found one- and two-story homes wrapped in green, separated by wood fences, cats strolling, people sitting on front steps. That was downtown: twenty crisscrossing streets, and the last wafts of sleepy imperial province. If you took away the cars, everything would be as it was a hundred years ago.

  So that was Chişinău. I spent many hours under an umbrella in Green Hills Nistru on the Boulevard of Stephen the Great and Holy, at the corner of Eminescu. In the pub sat a more international gathering, speaking in English and German. Probably office workers who had chosen to throw away their European and American money in this particular spot. Besides them was the growing Moldovan middle class, the men wearing gold, sporting sunglasses, in the common style that combines hood, pimp, and gigolo, the women like the women you see on television, practically all with cell phones on silver chains around their necks. I recalled something like that in Romania. I ordered my beer, coffee, and so on in Romanian, but the waiters pretended not to understand entirely; they answered in Russian. Of course they understood, but Russian was for them the mark of refinement, urbanity. It's possible they took me for a Bessarabian hick—or a spy who had been incompletely briefed.

  A strange city. Frightened eighteen-year-old cops patrolling in threes; men in Land Cruisers who think they own the streets; shady types by the post office selling additional minutes for phone cards; people hauling utensils; bald juveniles in oversize pants, their meek eyes fixed on the ground, making a humble, Franciscan-monk kind of gang member; and young women with exposed bellies and unsteady on their stiletto heels as they strut the main street as if it were a beauty pageant runway, a Romanian-Slavic mix of loveliness and risqué makeup: peasant modesty in dance-hall gear.
The general impression that everyone is playing at being something other, each according to a private notion of a world not here. For that reason we finally left Chişinău.

  Kola said that for thirty euros we could ride all day. He had an old Renault van with a plastic outer-space ornament. In the Soviet time he taught the samba. A heavy, mustached, good-natured fellow. To Old Orhei, Orheiul Vechi? Sure. He'd never been, but no problem. We headed due north. At an exit, perhaps Ciorescu, not far from the road, in the shade of a tree, stood an old desk. An overweight cop sat and watched the younger cops in big round hats stop victim after victim and without a word take twenty lei. But we were going to Old Orhei. Someone told us we had to, and he was right. The Răut River had dug its way deep into the earth, as if to reach the other side. A thin spit of land risen several dozen meters. The Golden Horde built a city here once. They had good taste. The landscape was from before Creation. In the beginning, a sketch only, a rough idea of how the planet should look, an abstraction really, the most basic shapes: vertical cliff, valley flat as a table, and a slow river in search of its tectonic shift. No change in 100,000 years, except the water had sunk deeper into the earth and had a mud-gray color.

  A whim of the river formed a steep, long peninsula. The monastery was carved into a wall of rock. A few tiny windows looked out on the primeval scene, on beauty still not sure what shape to take. You reached the cells only from the cliff, by a chain ladder. When the friars pulled the chain up, there was nothing but solitude and empty space. As in the Egyptian Sketis, where the Desert Fathers challenged demons to battle. I saw other monasteries later, but they seemed imported. They actually were imported, because the Russians built them, in the grand imperial style. Orhei, however, was nothing but holes bored into rock, an attempt to escape the curse of time and live in eternity. In the cells—so low you could only lie down or kneel—were seashell outlines, round crustacean ornaments, traces of the first days, when the deep was separated from the dry land, the darkness from the light. I tried to picture monks crawling in the dimness, like animals in caves, on all fours, how in a way unimaginable to us they left behind their corporeal forms, their humanity. Abandoned their stinking, lice-infested bodies, because the visible and the palpable exist only to keep us from the truth.