On the Road to Babadag

by Andrzej Stasiuk

  This is my Hungary; I cannot help it. I realize that it all belongs to the past and may not actually have ever taken place. I realize that eighty-five kilometers farther and eighty-two years later is Budapest, then Esztergom, et cetera, and the glory and the power and everything that gets collected over the centuries in minds that want to live beyond their allotted time. But my Hungary is in Abony, where I didn't even stop. No doubt because the blind musician could show up in any of those places that no one knows and where no one ever goes, places never mentioned but that make the world what it is. Only a miracle saved him and his son from oblivion. "I took the picture on a Sunday. The music woke me. That blind musician played so wonderfully, I hear him to this day" (André Kertész).

  I can take my Hungary with me wherever I go, and it will lose none of its vividness. It's a negative, or a slide through which I shine the light of memory. In Tornyosnémeti, two men emerged from the dark and began to play. One had a harmonica, the other a guitar with a dull sound. It was freezing cold and foggy. The waiting tour buses formed a black wall. The guitarist's fingers must have hurt. The music, numb, could barely leave the instruments. I didn't make out the melody, only a hurried, nervous beat. A string broke, but they played on, with sad eyes and the stubbornness typical of hopeless enterprises. Then we tried conversing, in a borderland mix of Hungarian and Slovak. It wasn't money they wanted but to change it. They had a handful of Polish coins, tens, twenties, fifties, collected no doubt from our truckers. They sold them to me for forints. We said good-bye, and they were gone. They might have been from Gönc. The younger man, the harmonica player, could have been one of the two kids whom three years ago the bartender refused to serve at the pub next to the Hussite House. I'd ask, if I could, how that skinny one is doing, the one with the homespun coat over his bare back, the one I arm-wrestled that summer and drank with to the health of Franz Josef. If the musicians were from Gönc, they would know him. And know the man who was brown as chocolate, round as a ball, and naked to the waist, who every day went down the main street in a small horse-drawn two-wheel cart. I can still hear the muffled clop of horseshoes on asphalt softened by the heat.

  It's winter now, and I need such sounds. From my window I see a two-horse team and, on the cart, four men bundled up. The horses, though shod, step uncertainly on the ice. They all appear out of the mist and in a moment are gone again. If only it were summer—then, instead of returning to their Pętna or Małastów they could head for Konieczna and there by some miracle get around the guards and rules and make it to the Slovak side. And, in Zborov, say, they could blend in with the locals, being exactly like them in style, dress, expression, general appearance. May would be a good time; there's grass for the horses and only occasionally a touch of frost in the morning. I'd go with them, to look at the passing world and at their faces, so different and so familiar. I'd sit to the side like a ghost and listen to their words. Probably they would talk about how things change as they travel, but not so that a person feels at any point the bump of a border. Slovak names would imperceptibly become Hungarian, then Romanian, Serbian, Macedonian, finally Albanian—assuming that we keep more or less to country lanes that go along the twenty-first line of longitude. I'd sit to the side and drink with them all the varieties of alcohol that change with the changing land: borowiczka, körte palinka, cujka, rakija, and eventually, around Lake Ohrid, Albanian raki. No one would stop us, and no one would stare as we rested at a place off the thoroughfare. That region is full of forgotten roads. Turn down one, and time slackens, as if it has evaded someone's supervising eye. Time wears away gradually, like the clothes of the men traveling by cart. What seems ready for discarding persists as it degrades and fades, until the silent end, the moment when existence shifts invisibly to nonexistence. My mind in this way wandered after they vanished into the mist. I see them cross the Hungarian Lowlands, Transylvania, the Banat, as if they were born there and returning home from the marketplace, from a visit, from work in the field or in the woods. Time parts before them like the air and closes again as they pass.

  Whenever I come home from Romania in the summer, the undercarriage of the car is crusted with cow shit. One evening, as I was descending the switchbacks from Păltiniş and found myself among the first buildings of Răinari, I heard under my wheels a series of sharp, loud splashes. The entire road was covered with green diarrhea. Moments before, a herd had come down from its pasture. I could see the last of the cattle finding their paddocks. They stood under the gates with lifted tails and shat. Had I braked, I would have slid as on ice in winter. Cows and steers turned this crossing into a skating rink. Completely filled with crap, a route that Sibiu society would usually take to their vacation dachas in the mountains. Crap from one shoulder to the other. Crap drying in the last rays of the setting sun. People on motorcycles had the worst of it. The animal world had invaded the heart of the human world, which was fitting. Now whenever I drive at dusk through villages in Transylvania, the Puszta, or my own Pogórze, I think of that splashing, think that we have not been altogether abandoned.

  Another time, before Oradea, I turned off Highway 76 and got lost in a tangle of village roads. It might have been' Tăad, or Drăgeşti, I don't remember. In any case, in the distant east you could see the gentle cones of the mountains the Hungarians call Királyerdö, the Romanians Pădurea Craiului, and we Poles the Royal Forest. It was late afternoon, and the slanting light threw gold on everything and lengthened shadows. In an hour I was to leave Transylvania and enter the Great Hungarian Plain, so I wanted to have a last look. And ended up in this village. The houses, side by side, were arranged in a wide ring. In the center was a commons overgrown with young birches. A village, but it was like driving through a grove. The slender trees shone like honey. Here and there the gleam of a white wall, but no person in sight, only heavy pink pigs trotting through the scenery. Maybe ten of them. They sniffed, their snouts to the ground, looking for prey, as if they reigned here and were tracking down a foe. In the golden light, their hundred-kilogram hulks were an exquisite blasphemy. Clean, as if they didn't live in a sty. Under the dull and bristled skin, flesh swollen with pulsing blood. I will go back someday, to learn the name of that village. Without a name, it is too much like a vision, and I need real things to have faith in.

  Last summer I took a bus to Saranda. The bus, an old crate of a Mercedes, barely made it up the Muzinës pass. Below, at the bottom of the cliff, rusted chassis of vans and sedans that would lie there until Judgment Day. On the other side of the Gjëre Mountains, near Delvine, we drove into a cloudburst and entered Saranda in pouring rain. Two men—they looked like father and son—unloaded from the bus bundles, bags, sacks, packs, parcels tied, parcels taped; it could have been a lifetime's accumulation of possessions. A sad, sodden move someone was making. Finally they pulled from the bus's cavernous luggage bay a scruffy mutt. The little animal was added to the baggage, as if that was now its home. Then the bus took off, and the curtain of rain closed on them.

  I recall all the animals and see them as clearly as I see the people. The horses grazing untethered in Chornohora, the big-horned cattle of the Puszta, the cows belly-deep in the muddy current of the Delta, the Bucharest dogs, loose, moving freely, seeking food in a world that draws no borders between man and beast. In Sfântu Gheorghe, at dawn, I went to an outhouse in the backyard. The shed was so low, you dropped your pants before you entered, because inside you had to bend in half. And you stepped out to pull your pants up. Precisely then I was attacked by a red rooster, its beak aimed at the very thing I wished to conceal. The hens stopped scrabbling for a moment to look at him with admiration while I ran across plots to the protection of the house door. The rooster was no longer in pursuit, yet I still felt fear, because of this momentary crack in the world. In Përmet, or maybe it was in Kosinë, a woman rode a donkey on a side path. She was so ancient, so burned by the sun, and so wrinkled and shriveled, that if it hadn't been for her clothes, you could have mistaken her for part of the animal.
In the dust and heat, the two had passed this way hundreds of times. Their shadows on the white stone of the path fused into a single shadow, just as their fates were fused into one.

  My four men on the cart, I see them always at the same hour, trying to get home before nightfall, exhausted after a day in the woods, in melting snow and mud, and the horses too are exhausted, heads lowered, hoofs sloshing, the same heaviness in their movement as in the men sitting slumped, heads nodding. Enfolded in the mist, the human and the animal cannot be separated. I watch them pass, I smell them in the chill air: horse sweat, damp clothes, shirts that stick to backs, the worked leather of the harnesses. The odor of monotonous labor chained for centuries to matter. That's how the two shepherds smelled in the German pub in şpring, how the plots smelled in Nagykálló, how the train smelled, the Red Ruta leaving Delatyn at dawn for Kwasy, how the old houses smelled in Sulina. I stayed in one of them, south of the river. In the middle of the day I entered and saw a dark interior. People lay on a large mattress, three, four, more. In the mingling of half-naked bodies I could make out the narrow shoulders of a child, and feet sticking out from under a cover. Possibly an entire family, men and women, deep in sleep. They had taken shelter from the merciless white sky, but the heat had pursued them, or the heat came from them. Their skin was almost black against the sheets. I had entered someone's home and saw strange people in the moment of their greatest vulnerability. They made no attempt to conceal themselves, as pets sleep openly before us. I went to my room and never saw them again. I remember only dark bodies saturated with materiality and so heavy, it seemed they would never get up again.

  Clearly I am drawn to decline, decay, to everything that is not as it could or should be. Whatever stops in half stride because it lacks the strength or will or imagination to continue. Whatever gives in, gives up, does not last, and leaves no trace. Whatever in its passing stirs no regret or reminiscence. The present imperfect. Histories that live no longer than the relating of them, objects that are only when someone regards them. This is what haunts me—this extra being that everyone can do without, this superfluity that is not wealth, this hiddenness that no one explores, secrets that, ignored, are lost forever, memory that consumes itself. March draws to a close, and I hear the snow slipping off the mountains in the dark. The world like a snake sloughing another skin. The same feeling each year, and it deepens with each year: the true face of my region, of my corner of the continent—precisely this changing that changes nothing, this movement that expends itself. Some spring, not only will the snow melt, everything else will melt, too. The brown-gray water will wash away towns and villages, it will wash away animals, people, everything, down to the naked skeleton of the earth. Meteorology and geology will join forces, ruling in a dubious coalition with history and geography. The permanent will seize the transitory by the throat. The elements will resume their places on Mendeleev's eternal table, and no more tales, no more narratives will be needed to interpret existence.

  On the shore of Lalëzit Bay, around Jubë, I saw a military encampment. Tents and occasional barbed wire. Faded canvas torn and sagging. The jutting bare feet of soldiers asleep on cots. It was Sunday. A little farther on were people from Tirana sunbathing. The barbed-wire fence served no dividing purpose: neither side had anything. Each side could gather all it possessed and leave. If you folded up the tents and beach umbrellas, the shore would look as it had looked before. Only the bunkers of a previous era would remain, of no use to anyone, and they were now slowly becoming part of the natural landscape.

  People soak up time like sponges. They steep themselves in it, amass it like those who stockpile a thing they fear will run out. Sometimes I get into a car and drive a few hours, thirty, forty kilometers from home. I enter a maze of highways, lanes, shortcuts across meadows or through groves, because I saw on the map a hamlet called Lower Gaul or Bethlehem, or three huts given the name Ukraine or Siberia. I'm not making this up. Check The Lower Beskids and Foothills, the Eugeniusz Romer State Agency of Cartographic Publishers, Warsaw-Wrocław, fifth edition, it's all in the upper left corner. But along the way I forget my destination. All I need do is turn off the main road, and space thickens, resists, deigning to grace these homes and farms, the miserable little patches behind fences, the vegetation that has barely emerged from the ground, barely raised itself above the surface, and is now attempting to survive. This surviving is done day by day, without hope; fatalism alone holds things together. Concrete, bricks, steel, and wood combine in random proportions, as if waxing and waning can reach no final agreement. The old looks bedraggled, cast off, impotent; the new struts and challenges, wanting to overcome both the shame of the past and the fear of the future. Everything is temporary, ad hoc, a verb whose action is never completed. This could all disappear in a second, and space would accept the gap, fill it in, and smooth it over as if not a thing had happened. An introduction to what never begins; a periphery that has no center; a suburb that stretches to the horizon without ever reaching the city. The landscape devours, and space patches up the holes, because these backwaters that I drive through and love with my despairing love are emptied in the very act of their becoming, their sense drained in their very struggle to be. They are so like nature that on a misty day in early spring they can scarcely be distinguished from their surroundings. In a moment the low sky closes like a door, and everything is gone. That's why I rush to make these trips, why I'm so avid for details that will soon vanish and need to be re-created out of words. I don't know why all this is, and I lost the hope, long ago, that I would find an answer. Therefore, to be safe, I write down everything as it happens, substituting consistency for justice and meaning.

  A few days ago I drove through Duląbka. The shadow of Cieklin Mountain filled the valley. Up the clay slope climbed a horse harnessed to a plow held by a bent man. Behind them, a woman, doubled over as she tossed plowed-up stones to the side. A scene of biblical poignancy. The wind blew, and through the clouds on occasion came the slanting rays of early evening. The three silhouettes on the hill stood out so sharply, they seemed not of this world. Duląbka a few days ago, Turza a few days before that, and in a week from now some other nowhere town in Moldova or Macedonia. But if you wrote, "I was driving through Golden Prague" or "Once in Budapest" or "In Kraków one day" or "In Sosnowiec," that wouldn't work either, there's nothing there, no key or legend to use, no metaphor, no language that will travel beyond the gates of the city. "One day in Warsaw" makes no sense. Cities in this neck of the continent arise on the spur of the moment, by coincidence. No good reason for them to be there. Try navigating Budapest during rush hour. There's no way to get around it: it sits like a spider in the middle of its web of streets. Or try making it through Warsaw, through Bucharest. A city on a trip is a disaster. Especially in countries that are like large villages. Villagers don't know how to build a city. They end up with totems to foreign gods. The downtown area takes a stab at copying something, while the suburbs invariably resemble an aborted farm. The hypertrophy of storefronts with the melancholy of lost illusions. Whenever I am driving along and suddenly an edifice looms in the center of a small town, I am stunned, because nothing prepares for or explains it. At every opportunity I skirt such centers, taking bypasses, trying roads barely visible on the map, going way out of my way to miss the long shadows of downtown towers and high-rises. Any place with a population over 100,000, I cross it off my list: Go ahead, build in the hope that someday it will completely block the view of where you come from.

  Thus goes my litany in the swirl of ring roads, overpasses, throughways, as I squint at road signs and route numbers, my map spread across the steering wheel, with honking behind me as I glance in the rearview mirror, as I sit in the stinking shadows of trucks, at dawn in Duląbka, in the evening in Bratislava, and on to the knot of Viennese arteries, breaking through to the other side of the enormous imperial capital, then south to reach a sleepy village in the middle of the night, by the Zala River, then to Bajánsenye by the Sloven
ian border, where the fifty-year-old Mr. Geza runs a pension in an old watermill, and at two in the morning, over red wine and bacon and eggs, he repeats, "Budapest is different now. People don't talk to each other anymore." If January has no snow, the willows and reeds in the early sun are the color of faded wrapping paper. The soil is always wet. Or else the sky is low, unusually low even for Hungary, and its weight squeezes the moisture from the earth.

  Twenty-two kilometers from Mr. Geza is where Danilo Kiš lived during World War II. His father made mad travels through this region and drank "handcrafted Tokay from Lendava" in its taverns. Lendava is now a border town on the Slovenian side. And Uncle Otton rode here on a bicycle. The uncle's left leg, frozen, hung while the right foot, tied to the pedal with a belt, pedaled. He took the dusty clay roads to Zalaegerszeg, to oversee his complicated business affairs. If Kiš's father was a character out of Bruno Schulz, his uncle was straight out of Beckett— that's how I see them when I read Kiš's Garden, Ashes in a black-green cover that by some strange twist of fate or accident has the photograph of a dark-brown clay bird on it. Two years before, in the winter, in that region, in Magyarszombatfa, I bought two clay angels of exactly that color. It's a place of potters, but the publisher, Marabut, was probably unaware of it. So this is a sign for me to go there once more, to find the Count's Forest and all the other topographic features scattered throughout the text, because a story should defy time and logic, just as our imagination separates itself from events. There should be a to-be-continued, which may have nothing to do with the beginning, so long as the story is nourished by the same substance, so long as it breathes the same (albeit somewhat stale) air. I tell myself it doesn't matter if I find nothing.