On the Road to Babadag

by Andrzej Stasiuk

  From the bank along this arm of the Danube, you had a view in both directions. On the right, the river's water flowed slime green. The dark boats anchored in the shallows, their bows and sterns turned slightly upward, were sleek and quaint. In the ever-changing waterscape, among the glinting mirrors of the current, among the tide pools roughened by the breeze, their shapes seemed unreal. Particularly at dusk, when you couldn't tell boat from shadow. They hung in the lucent space like cardboard cutouts, carvings from coal. Bringing to mind remnants of the most ancient night, when they were used to ferry souls. In the Delta I saw nothing more beautiful or more simple.

  To the left stretched a village of reeds. Fences, roofs, walls, sheds for cattle and for fowl—all made of dry, hollow stalks. Cut reeds lay loose in piles, were tied into sheaves, stood waiting in ricks. A flat human habitation, since nothing high could be built from such material. Bits of clay had fallen from earth-plastered walls, exposing the construction of poles woven with reeds. The village was like a vast campground. All that these people possessed seemed in constant peril. Barely raised above the ground, barely attached and joined and marked off by fence and stake and a few twigs, Sfântu Gheorghe had a heroic resignation about it: exposed to the elements, filled with uncertainty, doomed to oblivion, it held on to the land as a sparrow's nest holds on to a branch.

  Then, just as in Sulina, a bare stretch began and continued to the beach. At its edge, just past the village, stood radar towers. I saw a few camouflage trucks behind an enclosure. I was not drawn to it at all. The military in my part of the world, in times of peace, is always the same: sad and giving off a faint stink. I preferred to keep my distance. The black latticework of the antennas loomed above the huts of reeds and mud. I tried to imagine the tedium of a post like that, the tedium of empty sky and green computer monitors. Card games, booze smuggled in, talk about women, radio stations on which you might catch Western rock and roll or a folk number. Sleepiness, coffee, and no barbarians on the horizon.

  But it's quite possible the place was simply a point from which to observe the rest of the world, that monster with no shape or boundary that always lays siege to a people preoccupied with its own existence. I considered the cow patties drying in the sun and tried not to think about history. I couldn't help it, of course. Once again geography had made me prey to all the unclear events, murky pseudo-facts, muttered truths, and unimpeachable falsehoods cobbled together into meaning. Danger indeed lurks beyond the horizon and always has. As we wait in time for what we desire, space brings us unsolicited things: armies or ideas, and there's no escaping them. The age of portable, movable nations, nations whose history depends on an unending present, is long gone. Today there is nowhere we can go to start over, and that's why we live mired in a past that permeates our territories, just as an animal's den is filled with its smell.

  The radar was aimed, I am willing to bet, at Turkey.

  People lay on the beach. Several sun umbrellas were stuck in the sand, not much larger than rain umbrellas. Otherwise, as far as the eye could see, no shade. The thornbushes on the dunes were shoulder high in places. I walked south along the shore and soon reached the spot where the river current joined the salt water. The Danube, darker, fed into the transparent silver of the waves, like a cloud passing across a mirror. A gleaming black snake swam up on the beach and slithered over the sand toward vegetation, its small and supple presence an apparition on this great bare stage, so I followed. Sensing my shadow, it stopped and coiled. I left it in peace. It waited a moment, then proceeded landward.

  Sfântu Gheorghe came alive in the evening, as if everybody had been waiting for the lights to go on. It was no cooler, only darker. People came from the houses, the beach, the boats, from their fishing. The pub under the trees, unable to accommodate them all, resembled a bivouac: dozens, hundreds of people in constant motion, in patches of flickering light, their gestures beginning in light and cut off by a dark that magnified everything. Echoes came from deep in the night, as if the village were next to another village and that next to yet another, as if Sfântu Gheorghe had siblings in this void or were a dull, small planet attempting, without much success, to reflect the sounds and brilliance of planets many times larger than it. The sky now and then flashed mercury. Eto mayak, someone told me in Russian: a lighthouse. The beam, majestic in its repetition, made everything taking place on earth seem random, coincidental. The people expended their energy in quick, nervous bursts, like lizards. I got a Ciuc at the pub and stepped aside to watch the fiesta from a distance, a party whirling about inside a cave. The night pressed in on all sides, so one had to keep moving, talking, shouting over the canned music, clinking glasses, gesticulating, so that the hot dark wouldn't congeal and close up like a scab over a wound. This was a carnival, a European tropics, the fear of the harsh light of day, the bliss of oblivion, everything pierced by the quivering, plangent sound of a clarinet in that scale one encounters south of the Carpathians.

  To cool off, I walked to the water, to the dock where the ferry was moored. You could see nothing here. I heard the slap of waves, of fish, smelled the warm, muddy breath of the river, felt its enormous pulse and indifferent presence. I imagined green blood flowing out of the body of the continent, which went on living anyway, as it has done for thousands of years.

  I understood the pub frenzy. It was simply a sign of existence. People met in this poor light, drawn like moths, to see if they lived. They had to examine one another and raise a racket. Between the infinite sky and the dwindling land, there was no room for them. At this edge, this swampy island edge, they had to find their image in the eyes of others, for there is nothing worse than nothingness that takes the shape of geography.

  Bedbugs bit me through the night, and at dawn I got up and left the old woman's house. The air was blue-gray and a little cooler now, though heat still filled the sandy streets. The flame had been turned off for a moment, but there was no ventilation. Heat oozed from the walls of houses, from the ground, from gardens and fences, it oozed like thick juice from fruit, like the current from a sticky battery. I passed the wreck of a delivery van on four flat tires, the only vehicle in Sfântu Gheorghe. I walked to the end of the village. After the last houses, trash: nonrecyclable plastic, cans, glass, rags, tinfoil, cardboard, old pots, a bucket without a bottom, containers collecting humidity and decay, Tetra Pak and crushed PET bottles as far as the eye could see. The spit of the dump extended into a canal and at the water's surface lost some of its massiveness, spilled in an avalanche of jutting bottle necks, inflated bags, an even mix of wet corrugated board and aluminum wrap, the metal and broken glass resting somewhere lower.

  That's when I noticed the cross. It stood in the middle of the dump. It wasn't big, a meter, a meter and a half, fashioned with two rough planks and painted brown. The ends of the horizontal piece had been carefully rounded, to give the raw wood form. No inscription, no base. The thing was simply stuck in the ground. Its neighbors: a pail with holes, a broom, a paint can, a boot coming apart, and a box for Lux soap showing the face of a brunette. Had the cross been here before the dumping began, or had someone planted it in this cemetery of objects? But surely no one in Sfântu Gheorghe hoped for the salvation of things, dared think of their resurrection, their immortality. Probably few believed in their own resurrection—hence the symbiosis of the cross and this inorganic mortuary.

  I went back. It had to be after six, but not yet seven. A group of men sat at the pub, a bucket, a trowel, and a level at their feet. They looked like proletarian freemasons. Drinking vodka straight, with beer as a chaser. No trace remained of the evening carnival; the ashtrays on the table were clean. The men hardly conversed. Heat came from the east, and the shadows of people diminished like wet blotches drying. The masons drank up and left. The babushka promoter appeared, brush in hand, a rag wrapped around it, and wiped everything along his way: the curb by the pub, the concrete divider, the sidewalk. He did this quickly and efficiently. The rag, dry, left no mark. He disappe
ared around a corner, appeared again at the far end of the sandy square before a store, and did his hurried cleaning there too. For almost an hour I saw him come and go, in a constant rush, trousers bagging as he did battle with dirt and dust, a Buster Keaton of the Delta trying to stem the chaos of volatile substances and defend Sfântu Gheorghe against the rain of particles from outer space.

  The masons returned, but now without their tools. Once again, glasses of vodka with beer chasers. Evidently they had started a job and so now with a clear conscience could, without haste, take the measure of the new day. More people gathered at the tables. It was after seven; the sky took on a dull milky hue and began to swell. I drank Ciuc and Ursus, alternating, wanting to be less conspicuous in this morning company, to participate in the fatigue that came from their faces and bodies. Sleep in this place, apparently, took as much effort as getting through the day. I would have loved to sit at the wooden table until my soul sank out of notice, until my limbs became immersed in this strange soup of dawn and dusk. It is possible that my perverse love for the periphery, for the provincial, for everything that passes, fades, and falls apart had found peace at last in Sfântu Gheorghe. I could sit here for years and grow comfortable with death. I could go out to the ferry dock every day and watch death come in. The worn, threadbare measurements of time would hasten its arrival, or delay it, and eventually I might acquire a kind of immortality. Because if life was extinguished here so easily, death would have to take on some thinned-out, spectral aspect. In my daily walk between the shadows of the pub's lindens and the harbor, I would keep just enough of my energy so my mind wouldn't shut down, so I could continue imagining the world, make sure I had lost nothing. At noon, when boredom struck, I would walk to that flat sandy stretch along the shore. From inland would come mirages of distant cities. Between the mirror of the water and the clouds, Bucharest might appear, Berlin might float, Prague, London, Istanbul, and, with the right combination of light and convection currents, a fusion of New York and Montevideo, Tokyo and Montreal. Atmospheric-optical flux might also let me view my past life, my gestures and actions preserved among the layers of air, frozen in stratosphere lockers but now reanimated for my amusement or moral instruction. In Sfântu Gheorghe anything could happen—I was convinced of this around seven thirty, when the first guests sat down at the tables. There are places where only potentials exist. And in this place the only way out might indeed be a miracle, a sign, a sudden revelation. Void, paralysis, the horror of decline, the sorrow of elements forced to assume geometrical shape, earth and sky pulling at weary, sleepy humanity in either direction—all this in itself was miracle and sign, stopping the imagination in midstride, replacing it with implacable reality.

  I finished my Ciuc or Ursus and got up. The schemes I had dreamed of were so alluring that I needed to take some action. At the dock, a couple of boats were anchored. On a board hammered to a mast, someone had chalked "crap 35000, som 38000." The prices for carp and catfish. Two men sat by a wooden shed. I went up to them and asked how people got out of here. Was there a boat to Sulina? They mulled awhile. Finally one said no, there was no such boat, not in the whole village, no one was going out, and there was no ferry until tomorrow. I heard the same thing from men who were tarring a dinghy that had been hauled from the water. Anyone I asked, it was the same: No one is going out. I didn't really want to leave, I just wanted to know. Everyone spoke of the ferry and sometimes of a tractor that at five in the morning set out through the marsh toward Sulina. The thought of tomorrow's ferry depressed me; I intended to take it but not that soon.

  At a shop I bought bread, caşcaval cheese, mineral water, and white wine in a plastic flask. I made for the beach. At eight, it was as hot as it is at noon at home. The ground smelled of cow dung and dust. I found an isolated spot. When I waded into the sea, the water was as warm as the air. The bottom barely dropped. I went out so far, the land became a thin line, but even so the water hardly reached my chest. Now and then I felt a cooler current, but it was gone in a moment, and once again it turned as warm as if I were sinking in enormous, churning innards.

  IT'S POSSIBLE THAT everything I've written so far began with this photograph. The year is 1921, in a small Hungarian town, Abony, seven kilometers west of Szolnok. A blind violinist crosses the street, playing. He is led by a barefoot boy wearing a visored cap, a boy in his early teens. The shoes on the musician's feet are worn, broken. His right foot at the moment rests on a narrow track made by a cart's iron wheel. The street is unpaved. The ground must be dry: the boy's feet are not muddy, and the tracks are not deep. The tracks arc gracefully to the right and disappear into the blurry depths of the photograph. Along the street, a wooden fence, and part of a house is visible—a reflection of sky in its window. Farther on stands a white chapel. Trees grow behind the fence. The musician's eyes are shut. He walks and plays, for himself and for the unseen space around him. Besides these two pedestrians on the street is a child of a few years. He is turned toward them but looks beyond, as if there is something of greater interest following them outside the frame. It's a cloudy day, because neither people nor things cast a sharp shadow. On the violinist's right arm (so he's left-handed) hangs a cane, and on the guide's arm what appears to be a small blanket. Only a few steps separate the two from the edge of the photograph. They'll be gone in a moment, and the music with them. Leaving only the toddler, the road, and the wheel tracks.

  For four years I have been haunted by this picture. Wherever I go, I seek its three-dimensional, color equivalent, and often seem to find it. That's how it was in Podoliniec; in the side streets of Lewoczy; in white-hot Gönc, where I was looking for a train station, which turned out to be an empty, ruined building, and no train departed until the evening. That's how it was in Vilmány, on an empty platform amid vast fields melting in the heat; how it was at the marketplace in Delatyn, where old women sold tobacco; how it was in Kwasy, when the train had already left and there was not a soul in sight, though the houses stood close together. And in Solotvino, among the dead mine shafts covered with salt dust, and in Dukla, when a heavy, tedious wind blew from the mountain pass. In all these spots, in 1921, André Kertész put his stamp on the transparent screen of space, as if time had halted then and the present was revealed to be a misunderstanding, joke, or betrayal, as if my appearance in these various locations was an embarrassing anachronism, because I came from the future, but was no wiser for that, only more afraid. The space of this photograph hypnotizes me, and all my traveling has had only one purpose: to find, at long last, the secret passage into its interior.

  On the Road to Babadag

  IHAVE COUNTED THE stamp marks in my passport. In seven years, 167, but there ought to be more, because some of the officials were too lazy to lift a finger. They waved me past in Oradea, for example. A couple of days later, I returned through Satu Mare; no one else at the crossing, noon, but they said, "Pull over, leave your car." Nodding for me to follow into a glass hangar, a hothouse, fifty degrees Celsius, Amazonia. A door, another, then finally the control center, ten dead computers, a guy with his feet on the desk and a pile of sunflower seeds. He gnawed the entire time. He did take his feet off the desk. We were alone; the others had left, no doubt to the sentry box, lest someone dangerous sneak through. I understood a little—Cinde? unde? intrare, ştampila—but played dumb. He inspected my passport from every angle, from the back, from the front, upside down, my driver's license too, my registration, my carte verde, and finally told me to go out in the corridor. I watched him through the glass door. Again the feet up on the desk, and more sunflower seeds. He was waiting for me to soften in this oven, to confess to spying, smuggling, having plastic surgery done, and to be willing to wipe away these crimes with the help of a few dollars. I leaned against the wall, shut my eyes, and pretended to sleep on my feet. After half an hour he called me back and again said something, but I answered in Polish that it wasn't my fucking fault if his colleagues in Oradea had failed to do their job. In this vein we converse
d. At last he threw me a look of reproach, handed me my documents, and waved me away.

  So they don't always stamp, but neither do they always give you a hard time if you didn't get stamped. There's no rule. The Hungarians sometimes won't stamp but then won't fuss, they just make this slow, heavy gesture, my favorite, which means, Screw the lot of you. Generally I like Hungarian border guards. Particularly at Sátoraljaújhely in the summer. They're lazy, a bit unbuttoned-unbuckled, holsters hanging carelessly, but they move with dignity, as if to say, Once this was all ours, but you wanted Trianon, so now you have to stand in this stupid line. I say "jo napot" to them, and they let me by. This jo napot I owe to a border guard on a train at a crossing at LŐkösháza. I was returning then from Sibiu, and it was something like five in the morning. The man appeared at the end of a corridor, and my heart sank. He was two and a half meters high, had a head shaved bald, wore a field jacket much too small for him, and carried an enormous gun at his side. A dog of war, a mutant mercenary. I sat in my compartment, put my hands on my knees, and held my breath. Then the door opened, I saw a big smile, and heard, in Polish, "Hello, your humble servant—is that how you say it? Any drugs, weapons, pornography, Semtex? No? Thank you. Toodle-oo—is that how you say it?" And he was gone.