Between Bozieni and Valea Parjei I saw two men by the road in the middle of a green field. For ten kilometers in one direction and fifteen in the other, there was nothing, no one. They sat in the shade of an Italian pine and played cards. They didn't even look up when the bus passed. A few days later I returned the same way and saw them again. They had moved maybe a kilometer, but the landscape was unchanged: a row of stone pines along the road, corn, and the men still immersed in their somnolent, monotonous game, as if their deck held a million cards. It's possible that night overtook them as they played and that they slept in the open field, to resume at dawn. Someone may have brought them here to do work, but when the hirer disappeared over a hill, they immediately began their game. They had not a thing with them, no tool, unless it was in a pocket. They sat as if they were at a table at home. Gray and crumpled, like most of the men in this region, yet unfazed by the overwhelming space and endless stretch of hours. The fragile abstraction of the game was their shield. At dusk, who knows, they might have lit a candle, or else the cards were marked and even in the dark their fingers could tell hearts from spades from clubs.
I love this Balkan shambles, Hungarian, Slovak, Polish, the amazing weight of things, the lovely slumber, the facts that make no difference, the calm and methodical drunkenness in the middle of the day, and those misty eyes that with no effort pierce reality and with no fear open to the void. I can't help it. The heart of my Europe beats in Sokołów Podlaski and in Huşi. It does not beat in Vienna. Or in Budapest. And most definitely not in Kraków. Those places are all aborted transplants. A mock-up, a mirror of what is elsewhere. Sokołów and Huşi imitate nothing; they follow their own destinies. My heart is in Sokołów, though I was there for ten hours altogether, at most. Usually during transfers from one Pekaes truck to another in the early 1970s, when I went to visit my uncle and his wife on vacations. But my memory is good. Single-story wooden houses in the center of town, lilac bushes, shutters, dogs asleep on the asphalt, leaning posts of bus stops with round yellow signs, frames and planks painted brown and green, sand in the sidewalk joints, an ice cream store that inside smells like a village cottage, sugar peas in glass tubes, everything only just sprouting from the ground, only just begun, and of course the rotting, the scraping, the dozing, life without pretension, trying to make things last, the squeaking floorboards, the silly heroism of a quotidian that snaps in two as easily as an ice cream wafer. I remember it all and could go on and on. It's in my blood. So though I drove through Huşi in five minutes, there being no reason to stop, my heart is in Huşi.
Which indicates that I need my own country. Where I can travel in a circle. A country without clear borders, a country unaware that it exists and doesn't care that someone invented it and entered it. A sleepy country with murky politics and a history like shifting sand. Its present breaking ice, its culture the Gypsy palaces of Soroca. Nothing would last here without running the risk of being ridiculous. But why a country, why not an empire with an unspecified number of provinces, an empire in motion, in progress, driven by the idea of expansion, but also sclerotic, unable to remember its lands, its peoples, its capitals, so every morning it would need to start over? That would suit me, since I have the same problem: I remember things and events but do not know what separates or connects them other than my accidental presence.
Three days ago I was in Bardejov. An afternoon mass had begun at Saint Egidius. Those of the faithful who were late squeezed in through the half-open door. The interior must have been full, because you could hear an echoing rumble of voices, yet new people kept arriving. In a long stream across the square, the faithful wore their best and were flushed in their haste, slowing only in the shadow of the sanctuary to give their movement a little decorum. A scene that has been repeated for five hundred years. The Bardejov square crossing, I thought, must be worn from the touch of feet. A space unable after so many years to keep healing. I walked uphill, in the opposite direction, away from the crowd. Louis the Great gave this city the right to hold eight fairs a year and to do beheadings, activities that must have required a bit of room, but now, without commerce and the functions of justice, the square seemed abandoned. I turned down Veterná, then down Stöcklova, to the right, to find myself in a narrow path between a barbican wall and the rest of the city. I saw some steps and went up. The wall, at least six hundred years old, was crumbling here and there. It looked its age. From my height now I could see yards, gardens, back doors, hutches, chicken coops, doghouses, all the things a small town hides from sight, confining its rusticity. A graceful, relaxed clutter here, the remnants of projects never completed, storage gradually turning into rubbish. Plastic bags, compost, fallen apples, weeds, beaten paths, an eternal present crouched in the shadow of walnut and cherry trees. The Gothic slowly disintegrated here, and its disintegration led to things that had no history, things that had use and significance for a moment only. The new joined the old in a just order, a liberté, égalité, and fraternité of matter.
I sense this equality everywhere. There is no need for deception. I am blind and deaf to all else. But as a rule there is no all else. It was that way a month and a half ago in Uzlina. We reached it by motorboat from Murighiol. Around us lay four thousand square kilometers of canals, lakes, dead tributaries, bogs, wetlands, and land as flat as the mirror of still water. You could go for several hours and nothing would change. A hot, undisturbed, motionless sleep. The expanse swallowing up all detail. Our path left no trace. The great river carries silt from the depths of the continent and with it sculpts a new, uncertain land. In a kind of genesis, the landscape gathers its strength to lift itself above the surface of the water. A trance, this trip against the current of time, toward primordial childhood.
But Uzlina came first. A hotel there rose four stories out of the marshy, the flat, and the ancient. It looked like a thing misplaced during a move. In a radius of a few dozen kilometers, there was nothing higher. At the driveway entrance waited a young woman in a miniskirt and stiletto heels. She held a tray with glasses of slivovitz, cujka, simple peasant brandy. An olive in each glass. In front of the hotel, a swimming pool, umbrellas, deck chairs. Our room in the annex was as God wanted it. The view from the window: laundry tubs, rubble, vegetable patches (private plots), dogs on chains barking to protect the cabbage. The first night, I was bitten by bedbugs and had no air to breathe. In the main building nearby, the air-conditioning chugged. All evening, the employees of Coty Cosmetics Romania entertained themselves around a bonfire to global hit parade music.
The next day Mitka appeared. He sat down at our table in a bar under umbrellas. He wore trousers from a hundred-year-old suit and rubber flip-flops. He was maybe sixty. He seemed to come straight from the swamp and reeds. He drank beer after beer, complaining that he could no longer have vodka, not after the doctors cut something out of him. He spoke to us in Russian but called the waitresses in Romanian. He drank at the hotel every evening and didn't pay, though sometimes he contributed a ram or piglet to the hotel kitchen. The owner tolerated this, wanting to buy land from Mitka, who was a neighbor, to expand his business. Mitka's cows and swine wandered through and around, dozens of them foraging untethered through the mud and sand along the Saint Egidius tributary.
At dusk we went to see his farm, which was large and flat. A labyrinth of pens, sties, plots, half-open barns, and huts with bulrush roofs. No light on anywhere. Above, the bright, phosphorescent sky; below, the thickened dark, redolent of animals and excrement. The pigs ran up to Mitka like dogs. In a corner something snorted, grunted, chewed, belched, huffed, followed by a pulse of body heat, as if in the cavern of this farm a great antediluvian beast were settling down for the night.
In Mitka's cabin, a weak bulb burned under a low ceiling. His long and narrow room contained nothing more than a bed, a cupboard with utensils, and a table. Mitka ducked into a small doorway and emerged with a double-barreled shotgun. An old gun, metal shining through the oxidized finish. He said we could shoot, if I paid f
or the ammunition. Night had fallen, and I thought shooting didn't make sense. Another time, I said. Disappointed, he laid the gun on the bed. On the wall hung a framed black-and-white photograph, grainy. The man in it reminded me of someone, but I wasn't certain. I asked Mitka. "Yes, it's Ceauş escu," he said with a smile, pleased that I had recognized the leader. Then, since the subject was photographs, he produced from a drawer a picture of his dead wife.
That was Mitka. He worshipped his dictator, remembered his wife, liked shooting into the dark. He lay down to sleep beside his shotgun. There was nothing near his farm, no houses or people. I'm not even sure all his animals returned at night. He may not have known how many he had, may not ever have counted them. Half a kilometer away, at the Coty party, were women in bikinis around the pool and men resembling gigolos in their white trousers. The old man, small and veiny, slept like a child. I imagined him dreaming of cows, pigs, chickens, and dogs, that they surrounded him in a close circle to protect him from the traps and treacheries of the world. The noisy hotel, beside this dark and foul-smelling farm, seemed a thing made of paper, which could ignite in a moment from a careless match.
It's the second half of October. The weather is changing; the first frosts have come, the first powdering of snow. Winter begins in two or three weeks. Yet again I'll have to imagine all those places I visited in the spring and summer. This imagining makes the world bigger. The continent increases. Rozpucie, Baurci, Ubl'a, Máriapócs, Erind, Huşi, Sokołów Podlaski, Hodoš, Zborov, Caraorman, Delatyn, Duląbka—they all want to be great. To see Lvov in the spring and then imagine it in the winter is like doubling Lvov, making it twice as lovely, but that's as it should be. The poor road leading through the heart of the Čergov massif begins there. It is closed to traffic, and a man drives it at his peril, because the Slovak soldiers have no sense of humor. In any case, a beautiful stretch through complete wilderness all the way to Majdan. But I digress ...
I was speaking of greatness and in praise of memory that, like a lit match, burns a hole in the map, sending places and things into an eternity that can be ended only by cosmic dementia (which eventually will happen) and thus expanding the continent to infinite size, bringing oblivion out into the light. Whoever was in Rozpucie, Baurci, or Caraorman knows what I'm saying. The dark soul of a peninsula smolders there, and matter slumbers, like bone marrow producing the dense black blood of unrealized desires. To be in Rozpucie, Baurci, or Caraorman is to see a past that has not yet harbored doubts about the future, because it is a past that has not yet got under way. And it may never get under way and share the fate of the rest of the world, whose destiny is to weep over its own demise. Neither Rozpucie nor Caraorman will be depleted unto death. They are old but will die young, are weary but will die in the fullness of their strength, in midstride, on a road whose purpose and destination are beyond their ken. It's October, a cold night rain falls, and the wet and dark engulf the villages and towns. Lying at the bottom of the waters, they have lost their names: great sleeping fish with houses, people, and roads in their bellies. People whisper in the dark, huddled, intent, waiting out the flood and guessing the future. Time hasn't yet started; there is no light, and you must squint for the dawn to come. No news, only promises and myths. The world is so distant that by the time an account of it reaches you, it may no longer be.
On such nights I reach for the plastic box with the photographs. There are about a thousand of them. Like an organ grinder's monkey, I pull out the first that comes to hand. Usually I have no idea when this or that one was taken, but I always know the place. There's nothing of consequence in the snapshots: horses grazing in a dump, a vegetable garden with a scraped wall, green hills, a village hut, a piece of mountain scenery, a black cat and a manhole, a tree in mist and tire tracks in snow, the facade of a house on an empty street, and so on, with no pattern or sequence or reason, a purely random collection of insignificant objects and meaningless moments, a child's game-experiment to see if the camera click really does freeze reality. But I remember everything and without the box can identify the geographic names, the countries, regions, and villages. The cat was in Lviv, the horses on the outskirts of Gjirokastër, the triangular corner facade in Chernivtsi, the garden in Tokaj, the mountains at Kočevski Rog. I'm not sure about the tire tracks in the snow. Definitely somewhere near Kecskemét, west of the city, where I got lost and was frantically looking for an exit, because by every indication the road was taking me to the Budapest highway, which I hated like poison. Finally I found an exit, saw above me the dark arch of a viaduct and the long bodies of trucks creeping north. I became entangled in a web of yellow roads. Mist clung to the ground. Through vertical breaks in it I saw the remains of what were probably Hungarian state farms—rusting tractors, collectivization breathing its last, huge barns and stables—then fog covered the scene, the whole world, and you could imagine whatever you liked, the Great Lowland, Alföld, flat and sodden earth joined with the sky by the thick and heavy air, endless marsh with no horizon, a kind of semimaterialization of nothingness. The tire tracks in snow were there, and yellow grass, somewhere outside Kecskemét, at Kiskun.
I hold on to this rubbish collection of snapshots to imagine what lies outside them, all that is hidden from the eye and memory. A deck of a thousand worn and worthless cards, the faience shine of Fuji and Kodak, the dull light of the literal—these are the photographs I take. Hardly any people in them. As if a neutron bomb had wiped away everything that moved, aside from the cat in Lviv and the Albanian horses. Maybe it's the Bushman fear that the camera will steal a person's soul. Or maybe it simply shows how unpopulated the land is, how solitary my life. It's good to arrive in a country in which you find no one. You can start from scratch. History becomes legend, then, and reality a personal vision. You cannot grasp, say, Voskopojë at best, you can imagine it. In the pictures from Voskopojë there is not a soul, only two donkeys nibbling among thistles and stones. I know that their driver, Jani, ought to be with them, drinking brandy and beer in turn, and Greczynka, the owner of the pub, and her silent husband, and Jani's friend, as broad as a barn and with a Slavic face, and the retarded kid we picked up on the road, but then the account would bog down and I would never extricate myself from the confusion of their lives. And so: only two donkeys, stones, and a slate-blue sky over the ruin of a monastery. Ah, but of course I should drive after that to Boboshticë, thirty-some kilometers to the southeast, because the village was founded, supposedly, by Polish knights on some crusade. The inhabitants still know a few Polish words, though they have no idea what they mean. I should go there instead of watching the donkeys, stones, and thistles, but frankly, as interesting as Boboshticë is, it's of no interest to me. I returned to Korçë and for hours looked out my hotel window at the square as if I were a camera without an owner. It was the same in Gjirokastër. Netting to keep out bugs blurred the minaret. And in Seregélyes, rain, an empty courtyard, the wet branches of chestnut trees, and the tinny gurgle of water in downspouts. In Prelasko, frost on the grass, a parking lot with one car, and a house collapsing on the other side of the street.
It's the same everywhere. You sharpen the focus to pierce the envelope of air, to cut through the skin of space. A window in a new place does the job. In Cahul, it was the market closed for the night and the shadows of dogs many times larger than the dogs. In Chişinău it rained too, and Vasile Alecsandri Avenue became a gray river. In the tropical downpour I had to close the window. Every morning at nine, a man opened an office on the ground floor across the way. I remember the finial on the gate, a shape like a snail, a wave of the sea, the horns of a ram. I remember little else. I watched the finial for hours and imagined the rest. I am doing the same now. I take my pictures out of the plastic box, my change out of the metal canister for Absolut vodka, my parking tickets and hotel bills out of the cardboard box, my banknotes out of the drawer—nothing more, ever, only this thousandfold multiplication of the everyday.
In Máriapócs in September, on the large, flat,
windswept field outside town, merchandise lay on plastic bags on the ground. No treasures here: Chinese schlock, jeans, Adidas and Nike knockoffs. All displayed in neat rows and spanking new. The vendors stood motionless over their wares and waited. Each selling the same stuff, essentially. The grass dry and trampled. No one buying anything, no one even looking. An itinerant tribe from an old tale, which spreads out its wares at the city gates, and the next morning it is gone without a trace. A bit farther on, merry-go-rounds and shooting galleries, then more stalls with candy and wine, church booths with wonders, and gingerbread hearts, handicrafts, panpipes, weathervanes, and stands with religious literature. Among the trees, people had set up camp, put out food: hard-boiled eggs, bottles of beer, canapés. Some had removed their shoes and were dozing. There were several cars from Romania with SM on their license plates, which meant Satu Mare, and a few from Slovakia. Music issued from one of the speakers, but under the vast sky of the Hungarian Lowlands it sounded quiet and insignificant. Budapest television had set up its cameras before a Baroque basilica. The crowd was lost in this great, flat, sandy area, absorbed like water.
I had hoped to meet some famous Gypsies from Moldova, Baron Artur Cerari or Robert—it was a Gypsy holiday, after all—but I saw no BMW 700 or X5. On the lot were only pathetic Dacias, tired Ladas, stalwart Trabants, and reeking diesels from the Reich. The one ATM had no forints. So yes, Máriapócs seemed the last town at the edge of the inhabited earth. It was not hard to imagine a sudden gust of wind spraying everything with sand. In the churchyard, the Uniate liturgy was in progress. The Maramureş Gypsies were dressed with elegance and dignity: black hats, belts studded with silver, gold chains, cowboy boots. A few had beautiful faces. An ancient, unsettling beauty not encountered today. The women's heels sank in the sand. I had driven three hundred kilometers to see this, and nothing was happening. God knows what I had expected: a city of tents, horses neighing, sword swallowers? I always play the idiot, because reality wins, as usual. In addition I was broke. I could only go back. Máriapócs that afternoon was dust and waiting for the evening mass to begin. To the Romanian border it was thirty kilometers, the town of Nyírbátor and two small villages. People strolled and magnanimously wasted time. Practically no one rode on the merry-go-round. Everyone passed as in a dreamy carnival, and the knockoff running shoes, motionless in the dust, seemed to mock themselves. I could picture cattle coming from the Lowlands, large black swine rooting for genuine food in the schlock, nudging the piles of clothing with their wet snouts, tasting and spitting out the painted plastic, squealing, shitting on the logos of international companies, turning this whole fake market into a sty, and the stink would rise to heaven and drift over Máriapócs and Szabolcs-Szatmár, mingling with the sound of bells, wood smoke, the lowing of cows, and the dry wind, forever and ever amen.
On the Road to Babadag Page 21