On the Road to Babadag

by Andrzej Stasiuk

  Such thoughts afflict me in the evening. The wind blows from the northwest, and the white semicircular edges of snowdrifts lie across the road leading to Konieczna. I should invent a graceful story that begins and ends there, provide a first-aid kit that cleverly soothes the mind, alleviates anxiety, and stills hunger. In the darknesses of life I should come up with one piece of evidence that miraculously points the way to what can be followed, what consoles. But no, not a prayer: the world is here and now and doesn't give a flying fuck about stories. When I attempt to recall one thing, others surface. Romania crawls out from under my childhood, Albania from under my visits to grandparents, and now that I am, as it were, an adult, I end up in a region filled with the earliest scenes of my life. I am over forty, yet it's the same randomness, the same hen houses, coal bins, bins for everything—as if someone were showing slides from the time we played cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. Snow falls on Konieczna, Zdynia, the whole parish of Uście Gorlickie, once called Uście Ruskie. In the monochromatic landscape are shovels of many colors: red, green, blue, yellow. People trying to get to their bins, storage shacks, buildings, outbuildings, where animals and old cars are waiting. Drifts grow at the pass, and no one heads out for the Slovak side. Here too, now, is one of those booths, the size of a kiosk selling magazines: a store, a bar, a currency exchange rolled into one—so says the sign in the window. But there is no one here today, other than the lieutenant in the balaclava, who tells me with a smile that the Slovaks have it better, their snowplows make the rounds every two hours. He is disappointed, I think, when I say that I don't drive, that I came only to watch the snow attempt to eradicate the border, bury the map, and level the Carpathian water gap. A man appears from nowhere with a blue shovel on his shoulder and says, sighing, "Looks like I'll need a tractor." I return to the snow-filled parking lot and think that in a year all this may be gone: the red-and-white crossing gate, the flashing lights, the rubber stamps, the suspense, and the questions: "Anything to declare?" "Destination?" And the dog sniffing for amphetamines and Semtex. And the small talk, the flicker of risk, the usual "Here's how you get to Konieczna ..." I will take no delight in their passing.

  I collect, putting aside black-and-gold hundred-crown notes with the Madonna of Master Paul on the front and, on the back, Levoča; green twenties with Pribin on the front and, on the back, Nitra; and violet thousands with Andrej Hlinka on the front and, on the back, the Mother of God. I also collect Czech fifties, hundreds, and two hundreds, with Saint Agnes, Karol IV, and Jan Amos Komenskû (Comenius), all in pastels and faded, like the wrapping for old-fashioned candies. The Hungarian forints, however, have a fierceness about them. Especially the light-blue thousand note showing King Hunyadi Mátyás (Matthias Corvinus), who was a Renaissance connoisseur of art and science but on this money looks like a man who could live on raw meat if he had to. More than twenty years younger, Francis II Rákóczi gazes from the five-hundred note more mildly, yet a sneer plays on his lips: a magnificent barbarian's contempt for the entire civilized West, for the Hapsburgs in particular. True, he introduced the fashion for the Transylvanian minuet at Versailles, yet his five-hundred-forint visage resembles less a Louis Bourbon than Bohdan Khmelnytsky on the twenty-hryvnia note or our Jan Sobieski. Yes, I love the Hungarian banknotes, because they don't mince words: they say, "Shove Trianon," and they pine for the day when the horses of the Huns swam the Adriatic. But my favorite banknote of all is the Slovenian fifty tolars. On the front is Jurij Vega ( 1754–1802), who unfortunately is passed over silently in the Polish PWN Encyclopedia. The design of the note suggests that Vega was an astronomer. His features: a young Beethoven, a Germanized General Kościuszko. But the reverse side is even better: three-quarters of the note is an intense blue, like the sky over Piran in January. A blue that, like a kindergarten drawing, makes no compromises. Only the Romanian two thousand lei, all in plastic and the national colors and with a transparent window, can compete with it. This last was released on the occasion of a full eclipse of the sun in 1999: "Doua mii lei, eclipsa totala de soare." It will all be gone someday, so I am collecting, for a private museum, to have a few memories in my old age.

  On a shelf I keep a black canister for a liter flask of Absolut, and in it there are at least ten kilograms of loose change. When I am low, I dump it out on a table, to revisit all the pubs, shops, bus and train stations, gas stations, and cabs in which I obtained them. The coins remind me of things and places: the street stalls in Saranda, the lane stanchions on the Slovenian highway A1, the ferries on the Tisa, the parking meters on the Szentháromság tér, Holy Trinity Square, in Baja, the enormous yellow barrels of beer on the streets of Stanislavov, cigarettes, shot glasses, goblets, music boxes, the talking machine for tourists at Saint Jacob's Church in Levoča ... Whenever I come home, my pockets are full of change, and I can never discard these coins, believing as I do in the lovable bumpkin magic that will lead me back to those places so that I can finally spend them. But what can you buy with a hundred lei that bears the head of Michael the Brave? Not a thing. You could drill a hole in this substantial disk and hang it around your neck like a medal for valor in battle. Even worthless, this treasure lifts my spirits on bad days. I can picture all the hands it passed through, imagine the routes it took from town to town, from village to village. I see the men drinking in taverns, the women shopping in marketplaces, the children buying candy at kiosks. Who knows how many times my hundred lei with the hole in it went through Transylvania, Moldova and Wallachia, Mutenia, Oltenia, Dobruja and the Delta before it lost all its value? Into this heavy disk, as into a computer hard drive, has been inscribed the history of wealth, poverty, desires, profit, loss, market ups and down and arounds, but I cannot read it, I can only save it. I let the coins dribble from my fist and feel how time and space go by, society, economy, human lives, how the Carpathians, the Czech-Moravian Heights, the Great Hungarian Plain, the Romanian Lowlands, Transylvania, and a part of the Balkans all convert into a soft clink.

  Once, on Route 19, a few kilometers beyond Satu Mare, we saw a Gypsy camp in the red light of a setting sun. Three, four carts standing on the side of the road, dirt poverty, gaunt horses, and torn plastic spread over movable goods. Inside were sheets, blankets, mattresses, women, kids, pots, human existence as shit hole, but in the sun it blazed, as if it might be gone any moment, ascending to heaven like a multiplied Prophet Elijah, and the men, adjusting things in a hopeless tangle of harnesses, were darker than their own long shadows. "I must get that," Piotrek said and stopped the car right there. He grabbed his camera, ran out, began negotiating, but the miracle of the light would be over in a matter of minutes, so he waved for me to come and handle the financial end. I dug out of my pocket kronas, forints, lei—according to the route we had taken—and explained in pantomime that we were willing to pay but it had to be within reason. The thin, veiny leader, in a white undershirt, looked at the change, of which the forints amounted to two dollars at least (we were not far from the Hungarian border), finally grimaced and waved with contempt and said, "Nu, ţigari." I gave him all the cigarettes I had: a pack of Snags, the few Marlboros left, the few Carpati. He accepted them, went to his people, and distributed. Then the sun went down, and they set off for Satu Mare. The three, four tattered carts became darkness, nothingness, not having belonged to this world in the first place. They did not belong seven hundred years before, when on the Peloponnesian peninsula European memory first made note of their presence, nor on May 4, 2000, when a man resembling his own shadow said to me, "Nu, ţigari," because money seemed to him more trouble than it was worth.

  A year later I was at a traffic light somewhere past Sibiu—or it might have been Cristian, or Miercurea Sibiului. Roadwork was being done, and our side and the opposite side got the green light in turns. Two children took advantage of this forced wait. They ran up to the cars and put on a little show that combined comedy and begging. I gave one a bill, but the other grabbed it from his hand, and the first kid started bawling. I
consoled the bawler with a second bill. Then I saw them both in the rearview mirror, how in perfect harmony they were enjoying, together, the spoils of their performance.

  I dribble the change from my fist, I leaf through my banknotes, and it's like touching photography in Braille, because my fingers can feel the things that happened and my nose can smell the places. The small but heavy hundred-forint coin will forever be for me the emblem of the green hills of Zemplén. It was the price, that year, for a glass of palinka in the village taverns. In Gönc, Telkibánya, Vilmány. The worn thousand-lei note with Eminescu on it will always evoke Transylvania and the tiny dark shops in Biertan, Roandola, Copşa Mare, Floreşti, which were cool caves dug into the Transylvanian heat, and when I bought bottle after bottle of wine, the change I got was wads and stacks of these rags heavy with sweat and dirt. What is memory, anyway, if not the endless exchange of currency, a continual allotting and distributing, a counting in the hope that the total will be right, that what once was will return with no shortage, whole, untouched, and perhaps even with interest, through love and longing? What is travel, anyway, if not spending, then reckoning what's left and turning your pockets inside out? The Gypsies, the money, the passport stamps, the tickets, the stone from the bank of the Mát, the cow's horn smoothed by the Danube current in the Delta, blok na pokutu, the fine in Slovakia, račun parkiranja, the parking ticket in Piran, nota de plata, the bill at the pub in Sulina: two fried catfish, two salads, a carafe of wine, one Silva beer, in all 85,700 ...

  This was off Deltea Avenue. You entered from the street, into a room with four small tables. Upstairs was a small hotel. Behind the counter stood a willowy young woman with short hair, her face delicate and sad. She did the cooking herself, wiped the glasses, served the food, a moving shadow. Men came in stinking of fish and diesel fuel. The chairs creaked beneath them as they drank their beer, smoked, muttered, and returned to the shore, to the rusting barges and tugboats, iron in scummy water, to a river that in despair had opened its arteries. The young woman cleaned the ashtrays and bottles and went back to the counter to insert a tape cassette, a medley of stuff in English: Elton John, Gilbert and Sullivan, the Carpenters, the seventies, the eighties. A bony black horse outside the window was hitched to a cart on rubber tires behind a blackened wood house. A beanpole cop for the seventh or twelfth time that day paced the length of the sandy walkway. A little farther on, at a wire fence, a man in striped pajamas stared into space. The building seemed abandoned, but the sign said it was a hospital. On the driveway to the Hotel Sulina, uncut grass. The continent ended here, and events too had run their course, but the grass quietly waited for something that would happen nevertheless. With a barely noticeable smile, she brought us the check, then returned to her world.

  And this parkovaci preukaz, parking permit, at the small hotel in Ruǽomberok ... We ended up there late one evening after an entire day on the road. The town stank from a cellulose factory. The black silhouette of mountains darkened against the sky. In the center of town, everything was cheap and throwaway. Things normally made from solid material here were all plastic. Walls, doors, and furniture pretending to be bona fide. In the pub, the owner and his family were being entertained. Two musicians in shirts and cherry vests on the bandstand adjusted the Yamahas and microphone. The singer held a notebook stuffed with songs. One of the musicians improvised. Seven, eight people danced. Two little girls watched the stars: they were the boss's granddaughters. A fifty-year-old character—wooden face, gold watch, gold chain—tried to preserve his dignity on the dance floor. Everyone moved frugally and stiffly, as if afraid of bumping into something, though there was plenty of room. An imposed task for them, this, or a game they were still learning, or a rehearsal for completely new roles. The lightbulbs, dim and melancholy, were as tentative as the guests. The women had high hairdos and trouble with their high heels. The boss took off his jacket, wore a gray vest and white shirt. Moved his massive body as if hearing music for the first time in his life. Three or four more people entered, led by an enormous guy in a black suit, shaved bald, with dark glasses. Making exactly the impression he wanted to make. Someone behind him held a bouquet. They stood there waiting to be greeted, but there was no greeting, so they slowly made their way into the lifeless party, and only the enormous one, his neck thicker than his bare skull, remained at the entrance and surveyed the room as if it belonged to him. These folks must have watched all three parts of The Godfather, especially the party scenes, and now they were trying to reenact it among plastic chandeliers, artificial flowers, and beet-red leatherette upholstery, to the rhythm of the indomitable hit "Comme Ci, Comme Ça."

  I keep all these events in a shoebox. Sometimes I take out one or another, like a parrot plucking a slip in a lottery drawing. Valabil-2 Calatoria, a thin strip in green, red, and orange, and a tram ticket, punched twice, from Sibiu to Răinari. The tram shuttles between the city and the village. Even my most detailed maps don't show its route, yet I took it at least twice and drove along its tracks four times. From this scrap of paper you could segue to a few good stories: about Emil Cioran's insomnia in Sibiu; about the Păltiniş madness of Constantin Noica, who wanted to breed Romanian geniuses; or Lucian Blaga, who in the summer months in Gura Râului attempted to establish a Mioritic ontology ... All three men had to take this tram that harks back to the Austro-Hungarian time. The shoebox works exactly that way, my brain like the parrot plucking slips in a lottery. The metal canister for Absolut vodka works that way, too, a magic lantern of coincidence, accident, and adventure making a story that goes in all directions and cannot go otherwise, because it involves memory and space, both of which can commence at any point, both of which never end. You can see this just by driving to Konieczna. By driving there and returning after a week or two, to find that time is dead, or was waiting for us to come back, not accompanying us at all, and everything that happened on our trip happened simultaneously, without sequence or consequence, and we did not age one minute. It's a kind of illusion of immortality when the red-and-white crossing gate is raised, a cunning version of tai chi, meditation in motion, and ultimately— let's be honest—a most ordinary escape.

  But it's great, in the middle of winter, to say, "Fuck this, I'm going to Abony, that hole in the center of the Hungarian Lowlands near Szolnok, I'm going from one nowhere to another." And only because six years ago, I saw a picture that André Kertész took on June 19, 1921, and that I can't get out of my head: a blind fiddler crossing a sandy village road as he plays, led by a teenage kid. It hasn't rained for a while, because the road is dry—the kid's feet are not muddy, and the thin tracks made by the metal wheels of a cart are not deep. They curve to the left and leave the frame, blurring first. In the washy background sit two figures by the curb. The two white daubs near them are probably geese. There is also a toddler standing midway between the focus and the rim of the photograph. He looks to the side, as if not hearing the music, or perhaps the appearance of these two pedestrians is an everyday thing. Because of this, I went to Abony in the dead of winter. And found nothing there. I filled my tank on leaving Budapest but in four minutes had driven through the town. A woman hanging up laundry, then there were no more houses. I was not really looking for anything, because, after all, nothing could have lasted; it all remained in the photograph. I turned toward the Tisza. A reddening dusk over the Puszta. A few scattered houses, groves of poplar, two children walking to the horizon over naked earth, black and empty stork nests, all this beneath a limitless, blazing sky. Darkness fell somewhere after Tisaalpár.

  The next day, in the photography museum in Kecskemét, I bought an album of Kertész, to discover that the blind fiddler is not left-handed: the picture I had at home was flipped. I needed to drive to Abony in January, pass through it without stopping, to discover, a few dozen kilometers farther, that the boy leading the musician was his son. This information is of no use to me. I cannot know, can only imagine, their life, unfold that day beyond the frame of the picture, fill that an
cient space with their fragile presence. The father's shoes are worn, falling apart. He wears a dark jacket, but over his right shoulder he has thrown another covering, which resembles a torn blanket. The son also carries something like a blanket or towel. They are prepared for bad weather and the cold. The boy holds in his hand a small bundle. Under the brim of the fiddler's hat is a crushed white cigarette. At least I think so. I must gather what facts I can, to flesh out that day. On June 19, the sun rose at 3:14, and an hour or two later the heat of the Puszta set in. There is no shade here. It's far from one town to another. The roads to isolated homes beyond the horizon are straight and scarlike. It's fourteen kilometers to ûÚjszász, fourteen to ûjszilvás, ten to Törtel and KŐröstetétlen, seventeen to Tószeg. The air is still and smells of manure. When the breeze comes from the east, it brings the swamp reek of the Tisza. You can hear the birds over the bogs. A trained ear distinguishes even the dry whistling beat of their wings. Sometimes a heavy team of gray, big-horned oxen passes, or a clattering carriage. Then you get a whiff of tobacco, untanned leather, and horse sweat. These conveyances, passing, grow silent, are gone, leaving only dust.