On the Road to Babadag

by Andrzej Stasiuk

  The first time I was here, four years ago, it was July. I hardly noticed the Hapsburg ocher-and-gall yellow of the facades. We sped down the tunnel of shade that was the main street, and the town vanished as quickly as it had appeared. To the right, grapevines going up; to the left, an occasional gleam from the Bodrog. Route 27 cut the scenery in half. The east was the dark-green marsh of Bodrogköz, the west a mountain chain where dry heat reigned in the heights and from the volcanic soil jutted, here and there, limestone that looked like fragments of a primordial spine. Here was where the Great Hungarian Plain began, reaching as far as Belgrade. Its northern limit practically touched the Carpathians, and the western edge gently brushed the Northern Medium Mountains, Zemplén, then Bükk, Mátra. In the flat wetland forked by the Tisa and Bodrog stood groves of poplar, and only remnants of the true puszta west of Debrecen could surpass the melancholy of this region. You smelled water everywhere, and the spongy earth sank beneath the weight of the sky. The villages were islands of yellow brick. The world clung to the horizon, and from a distance everything assumed the form of a horizontal line. From the road through Tisacsermely and Nagyhomok you saw the mountains behind Sárospatak. They climbed suddenly, without warning or introduction, like pyramids in the desert, and their shape was just as geometric. But Sárospatak was some other time. Now we were watching the rain and an increasingly deserted, shuttered Sátoraljaújhely. Sátoraljaújhely means "a tent pitched in a new place."

  Delta

  I'VE BEEN DREAMING of water since I got here. I dream of many places in the world, but all are water. They have substantial names—London, Bulgaria, the GDR—but invariably they swim in the whirling deep. I accept this, because the voyage from which I returned was itself a dream. Transylvania, Wallachia, Dobruja, the Danube Delta, and Moldova were filled with heat, and I doubt now that my memory can re-create the things that continue existing back there without my participation. I search my pockets and my pack for evidence, but the objects I find look like props: thousand-lei banknotes with Mihai Eminescu on them, who died as Nietzsche did, from syphilis and dementia. You can buy nothing with them; only Gypsy children are happy to take them. The kids gather images of the national bard and go to a shop to exchange him for candy and chewing gum. So it was in Richiş, Iacobeni, Roandola. On the five-thousand note is Lucian Blaga, who wrote, "The cock of the Apocalypse crows, crows in every village of Romania." The ten-thousand note goes to Nicolae Iorga, who was murdered by the Iron Guard, although, as Eliade states, "he was a true poet of Romanianness." I saw them all tied with string into thick packets. In Cluj, at eight in the morning on Gheorge Doja Avenue, a van stopped and out stepped a fellow in a suit covered with such packets, like Santa Claus bearing gifts. At a bank in Sighişoara, piles of low-denomination bills, tied with twine, lay on a counter, but no one showed the least interest. The guard explained to me that foreigners were not allowed to sell Western currency. He shrugged apologetically and in a whisper advised, in English, "Black market ... black market ..."

  Now I take from a pocket these venerable faces, smooth them out, and am amazed that they haven't disappeared, that they didn't melt into thin air when on the return trip at four in the morning I crossed the border at Curtici. Above the station was a deep-blue sky. As I was getting off, the border guards and customs officials combed the Budapest train for currency smugglers. I saw them gut the luggage of the English travelers who boarded at Sighişoara. My conscience clean, I calmly drank a Bihor palinka. The uniformed officials stepped off, and the train was about to move when a girl jumped down with a backpack, her eyes wild, her hair loose. It could have been fear, it could have been fury— I'll never know. In any case she belonged to a group of foreigners. She ran across the platform and disappeared into the station building. No one chased her. The train left. Mine would come soon, with the silver light of dawn rising over the Bihor Mountains.

  The compartment and the corridor were empty. I could easily see on either side. Along the depot, in intervals of several dozen steps, stood soldiers. They had boyish faces and uniforms that didn't fit: the pants were too short, and the jackets didn't quite match in color. The nearest soldier wore civilian black boots with big buckles. These men looked as if they had just been pulled out of bed and taken prisoner. Without weapons, without belts, shivering in the morning cold. Staring into space, as if to avoid seeing the train, as if to avoid making eye contact.

  I take the bills from my pocket and see not Eminescu, Iorga, and Blaga but the faces of those kids.

  But I have other evidence to prove that I didn't dream it all. This ticket for a hydrofoil ride for 120,000 lei. "Rapid, Commodious, Efficient." I bought it in Tulcea, to go to Sulina. To see the continent sink into the sea, the land slip beneath the surface, leaving behind people, animals, and plants, escaping its business, shaking off all the noise of histories, nations, tongues, the ancient mess of events and destinies. I wanted to see it find repose in the eternal twilight of the deep, in the indifferent and monotonous company of fish and seaweed. And so I got up early to catch the train, at the Gara de Nord in Bucharest, to Constanţa.

  Braneşti, Dragoş Vodă, ştefan cel Mare—on the steppe-like plain the houses all burrowed into the earth in search of coolness. They were low, scorched by the sun, and brittle. They resembled stones, crusts. On occasion I saw distant horses and people, their silhouettes as black as their shadows. The sky in these parts, I thought, if you rapped on it, there would be a metallic clang. After Feteşti the train went up an embankment over marsh, and in the Cernavodă district it clattered across a bridge that spanned the Danube. A nuclear power plant rose like a phantom, then disappeared. Gray cliffs filled with bird nests. I thought I could smell the sea, but at the station in Constanţa the smell dissolved.

  At the bus station on the other side of town, it was like being in a village. Kerchiefed women sat with their hands folded over their bellies; the children flitted about them like sparrows. I bought cheese and bread and went to a nearby pub to have a beer. A teenage girl crawled in. She had a pretty face. She moved along the floor using her arms. The men laughed and threw cigarettes. She gathered them, laughing too. It was a game they were playing, one they knew well. Later I saw her in the station. She gave the cigarettes to an old woman who sat motionless among children.

  The first minaret I ever saw was in Babadag. I was on the way to Tulcea, to take the Sulina boat. The microbus was operated by two men. One drove and sold tickets; the other, younger, jumped out at every stop to open and close the door. In Mihai Viteazu someone tried to ride without paying. The second man pushed him from the door so hard, the guy went rolling.

  The yellow, bare hills of Dobruja resembled dead anthills. The heat penetrated the earth and tore it apart from inside. To the right somewhere was Histria. Greek ruins, marble columns from the seventh century BC—but I was unimpressed: the farther back the past, the more wretched it is. Human thought wears at it, the way a telephone book gets worn by human hands. The minaret in Babadag was simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky. We had a five-minute stop, but no one went to take a leak. Everyone drank water, which immediately appeared on the skin. A dark stain spread between the driver's shoulders. The tape kept playing: folk melodies in that strange, moaning key that went with the minaret, with the heat and dust. I could feel the continent ending, the sigh of the land casting off its responsibilities. We would remain with our property, with our curses and our nerves, as we watched the naked back of the land slide under the smooth surface of the water.

  I saw Tulcea from a distance and from a height. We descended by gentle zigzags through the hills. A blue-gray mist hung over the city and the river. The Danube divided into three branches here, into dozens of canals, lakes, backwaters. The river's arm became a wide, splayed hand, whose fingernails were sandy beaches, whose bracelet was ponds and pools, all covered with the green skin of marsh and with endless reeds. Tulcea was the wrist.

  Horses grazed at the port, cropping wisps of something on the barren
square among cranes, train tracks, mounds of scrap metal. Their roan backs were lost in the rust red of the ships behind them, of the belt conveyors of ore. No one was about, only a couple of boys jumping back and forth between the shore and the wreck of a tugboat. I sniffed the air for the sea but smelled only river: a warm fish-and-slime odor mixed with motor oil.

  A hundred twenty thousand lei. "Rapid, Commodious, Efficient." A crowd had gathered early at the ramp. The hydrofoil was of Soviet vintage. Those who had tickets boarded first—God knows where they purchased them. The rest had to wait and see if there were seats left. Two young Frenchmen slowly, sleepily counted out banknotes. They passed them to each other, as in a game. The banknotes fluttered in the breeze. The two seemed stoned. There were peasants with bundles, boxes, bags, and a few fishermen carried loaves of bread in backpacks. And men in uniform, of course. I saw four kinds of military or paramilitary uniform. Each soldier was wearing a holstered pistol. I couldn't tell which were protecting us and which were simply taking the boat somewhere. All had the same face: grave, drawn.

  I don't really remember anything of that trip. Seventy kilometers with three stops, and the seating as on a bus. Once in a while, when we crossed omeone's wake, the belly of the hydrofoil slapped the water in a soft, fishy way. Around Crişan we passed a Turkish freighter as large and black as an old factory. It was carrying sheep. In dozens of stacked cages, several hundred white-gray animals standing up, lying down. Pieces of straw jutting. I went out on the upper deck. The Frenchmen were on their backs at the stern, their eyes shut. Two Turkish sailors, smoking cigarettes, leaned against the railing of the freighter and contemplated the endless green of the Delta. For a moment I thought that their boat was named "Bethlehem," but that was just my imagination struggling with the extraordinary.

  In Sulina we arrived at the main street. A crowd at the shore was waiting for family and friends. Along Deltei Street, trees and shade. At the nearest pub, I got a coffee and sat under an umbrella. Waiting for it to sink in, awareness of the end. The river had emptied into the sea, and the land, with all its events, had come to a halt. There was no returning by the same route. I could feel how time, until now given human aspects, was dissolving to its original form. Here, in Sulina, it was as palpable as the humidity in the air. It ate at the houses and ships, etched faces and landscapes, the glasses in the bars, the merchandise in the stores. It consumed like a fire the delicate envelope of minutes, hours, and days and took possession of all that was seen and unseen, including thought.

  The way to the sea led through desolate, treeless pasture. Hulls of ships, tugs, motorboats rusting in sand. The stink of manure hung over this region. Salty gusts from the sea disappeared in its hot fog without a trace. In the marsh, shoals of litter gleamed white among stunted, thorn-bearing shrubbery. A plastic bottle, blue-gray, shone like the belly of a dead fish. Concrete bunkers were stuck in dirty yellow land; angular military ruins stood along the shore in this baked, windswept place; in their shadow, an occasional horse, untethered, tried to rest. From across the bleached, shaggy dunes, the sound of waves crashing, as old as the world and as monotonous. The sound overflowed the levee and made for the town. Quiet loss filled every corner, every low house and garden, the tenements along the promenade. Grass grew on the driveway to the Hotel Sulina. The Hotel Europolis was shut and still. The Association of Victims of Communism had its quarters in a building not much bigger than a dollhouse.

  About five in the afternoon, wagons, handcarts, and bicycles began to gather at the harbor. People came. From the west, from Tulcea, the ferry Moldova brought news, goods, passengers. It docked majestically and dropped anchor. Those who carried little disembarked first, then the cargo was unloaded, everything that Sulina lacked: cases of bottled water and beer, cartons of bread, jars of fruit, foam mattresses, sausages in foil that sweated from the heat, coffee, white wine in plastic jugs, rubber boots, glass and porcelain, a market of miracles, rolls of tarpaper from my hometown, reins, T-shirts, Balkan cheddar and Romanian Hochland, contraband, soap, jam, beads, notebooks, Nescafé, chairs, a cuckoo clock, and a bunch of beach umbrellas. The wagons, carts, and a white Dacia pickup truck transporting it to a couple of shops on Deltei Street could barely hold all this stuff.

  I walked toward the sea between the dead hulls and bunkers. I climbed up onto a giant concrete platform ramp, from which someone, someday, might want to launch land-sea missiles. From there I could see the sun dropping to the Danube. The river glowed phosphorescent green, like a taut lizard skin. A ship approaching from the open sea was several stories high and black as pitch in the dying light of day. It slipped through the narrow estuary and crossed the red sun. I did not see any movement on deck—no one stood at the edge, no one smoked, spat, or watched the port. When it got dark, I followed its path. The ship anchored at the end of the shore, not far from the Hotel Sulina. Ship and hotel were equally dark and silent. The ship sailed under the Lebanese flag. Stopping for the night, to continue upriver at dawn.

  In the room where I slept, the tapestry over my bed depicted Mecca.

  To Sfântu Gheorghe, directly north, it takes less than three hours. My boat was sky-blue, sleek, and had a Honda motor. First it went a little above the main current, then took a network of canals. The craft couldn't have been wider than 1.2 meters, but it was long. A fifty-year-old man sat at the bow and signaled to the man at the helm. The canals were narrow and full of tricky spots. Sometimes we had to turn off the motor and lift it to get across a sandbank or keep the propeller free of seaweed. At the narrowest places, we passed through a tunnel of green reeds." Vietnam," remarked the captain, lighting up a Snagov cigarette. Now and then the reeds thinned and you could see plots of corn and cabbage. Plots not much larger than a gravesite mound or flowerbed went right to the water's edge. Some were guarded by dogs on short chains. We returned to the main channel and looked for the next canal. A patrol boat blocked our path, and a cop, standing a meter above us, asked the captain our origin, destination, type of motor. Finally he waved, and we headed due north.

  We passed old-fashioned boats with diesel engines and structures like sentry boxes. White pelicans glided over Roşu Lake. We passed a fishing village. Only men on the shore, puttering among their boats and nets. The canal was straight as an arrow and smooth as glass. Geometry kept a tight rein on the reeds, with nowhere for the eye to rest, nothing that stood out, that was irregular, in the monotony of green lines and rectangles under an endless, clear sky. The Delta here was infinity done in simple parallels and perpendiculars. Every now and then, on the border of vegetation, fishermen stood in high rubber boots, motionless, aloof, gray, like large herons.

  At the landing in Sfântu Gheorghe lay a pile of rotting hay. I walked toward a two-story concrete building. The ground floor was unoccupied, full of crap. People lived above—you could see curtains in the windows. Heat hung in the dusty, empty square. The sky was the color of sand. I looked for a little shade. A few high trees grew before an outdoor pub. In a shed they had seven kinds of beer and twelve wines, and men sat at plank tables. It was now two in the afternoon. I got a Ciuc beer and sat too, because I had finally reached a place from which one could only return.

  The ferries to Istanbul left from Constanţa. Trains to the outside world left from Tulcea, possibly also from Galaţi. I sat on an island separated by mud, swamp, and time, a time decomposing over the Delta like organic matter, moldering, giving off the smell of a beginning that preceded the cycle of life and death. The continent here burned slowly, like the edge of a fabric. Sand, dust, dogs, and siesta without end. Men got up from the tables, disappeared, reappeared. Women sat on benches a bit to the side and listened to the conversation, their bodies calm, languorous, heavy. A cart went by, harnessed to an unbelievably thin horse. The boy driver wielding a broken stick. Carrying mineral water and yellow cases of Bergenbier. They turned a corner in ridiculous, neurotic haste.

  A man approached me and asked if I needed a room, a place to sleep, because if I di
d, he knew a "babushka" here who would be glad to take me in, but I had to decide now, because he was leaving. He spoke in Russian, like many in Sfântu Gheorghe. I really didn't know what I would be doing next, I said, I had to give it thought. I didn't care to rush my beer, to leave the shade. The guy left but remained in sight. He hurried across the pub, said words here and there, but went on, not waiting for an answer. Quick, busy, as if serving as an emissary in a paralyzed village. He wore a gray shirt, old trousers from a suit, and, on his bare feet, flip-flops. He wasn't interested in taking care of any business for me. One of the times he passed, he said that the girl working at the bar spoke Russian and could help me find a room. Before I could open my mouth, he was gone.

  After an hour or two I went to the babushka after all. She lived not far from the pub, in a small white house. Green posts held up the porch. A burst of flowers in front. In back, the thick shade of nut trees, pear trees, apple trees. The old woman was as small as her house and full of chatter. She would ask a question but continue talking, or nod: from Poland, yes, staying for a few days, of course, arrived by boat, what I did, where I lived, in the country, in town—a mix of gentle prying, indifference, and goodwill.

  She opened the room. Tiny, it smelled like the room of my grandmother. The still air was of old wood, sheets, and damp. No one, at least no stranger, had used it for a long time. A table, a chair, and the bed took up the space exactly. Everything in its place since time immemorial. When I moved the chair out to hold my backpack, I felt like a criminal, as if I were destroying this piece of dark-brown furniture by exposing it to the present moment, that it would die as a sea creature dies when wrenched from the depths to the surface.

  "And God you have?" she asked, pointing to the icon hanging in a corner right below the ceiling. "I have," I answered in Russian. She nodded, gave me the key, and left. At the same height as the icon and right next to it was a cupboard filled with boxes for Western perfume, deodorant, and coffee. No doubt from the son in Bucharest or the daughter in Constanţa, because the old woman, in the course of fifteen minutes, had managed to tell me about her children too. The icon and that Western trash bin were the only ornaments in this spare interior. I didn't care to consider the symbolism or the semantics of their juxtaposition. I felt old, no longer having the strength for the obvious. I left my luggage and went to look at the sea.