Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

I'LL NEVER FORGET the sky when at dusk we left Nagykálló for Mátészalka. The entire train a single car. In addition, it was an express, and we had to make seat reservations. The heavy woman at the ticket window smiled and did a few broad sitting motions in her chair to show us what a seat reservation was.

Hungarian train tickets are pretty, resembling small banknotes. The young Gypsies going to Szerencs made accordions out of them, decks of cards, fans. In the Gypsies' ears were gold rings. But that happened two days earlier.

Now, a crest of crimson feathers unfurled in the west. A hand of fire poised above the plain, and below, in the cornfields and orchards, a blue dark had begun to float. We drank aszú from the bottle and sat with our backs to the front of the train, so the west, in a flood of blazing blood, was before us, and we could see the night slowly lifting from the earth, climbing, turning colder, until finally all was extinguished and the lights went on in the little red car of our train.

Less than half an hour had passed, and already we were reminiscing about Nagykálló: the bright warmth of the afternoon as we walked downtown between yellow houses. How we found an enormous church. How musicians sat on the bench by the entrance. One of them raised a gleaming trombone in greeting. I ventured into the vestibule, wanting to see what a Hungarian church looked like, but there was a crowd, a young couple standing up front, and at the altar a pastor. No organ, no chasubles, only the Word at its plainest, as it was in the beginning and shall be at the end, instead of all these wonders made by human hand for human consolation. Then the procession exited, slow, stately, and the three musicians waiting in their white shirts — the trombonist, the accordionist, the guitarist — who seemed so trifling, almost frivolous, practically Catholic, played a subdued piece, and the crowd moved in a cortege toward the marketplace.

We had gone to Nagykálló because, according to our guidebook, "at the end of a long and creepily empty square" stood a psychiatric hospital. Which might be, I thought, some kind of physically manifested metaphor, a metaphor for Eastern Europe. My imagination evoked a large dusty space surrounded by crumbling buildings. Divisions in various uniforms file through the square from time to time, but they stay no longer than needed for the ravage and rapine. They ride off, and the hot dust of the plain immediately hides the horsemen. From the windows of the hospital, the insane follow them with their eyes and pine, because in these eastern regions power, violence, and madness have forever lived in concubinage and sometimes in a completely legal union.

But no, nothing of the sort: this square was not a waste. It was shaded, cool. Before the hospital door, several madmen in dressing gowns smoked cigarettes. The atmosphere was, more than anything, that of a sanatorium, so the heated imagination of the tourist could take a breather.

So anyway, we were drinking aszú and traveling east. Actually, we were fleeing the west, fleeing hopeless Budapest, where in the worst gussied-up dive on Rákóczi Street a shot of pear brandy cost three times what it did in Nagykálló, and the coffee even more. Fleeing the rain as well, because the sky had opened up on the Danube, on Gellért Hill, on the bridges, on everything. But it was August 20, Saint Stephen's Day, therefore even with the downpour parachutists jumped from vintage An-24s, trailing ribbons of smoke in the national colors: green, red, and white. Around Parliament the police stood and made sure no one got too close. The rain fell in buckets on the big limos too, nature being a democrat. On Zoltán Street near the covered market, we had to step back, because the sidewalk filled with roller skaters, five hundred strong, raising their arms and reciting. They looked like a foreign horde bent on conquest. M. said, "That's what cities are becoming. To survive, you'll have to belong to something like that. As it used to be. Loners won't have a prayer." "Unless," I replied, "you're someone like Snake in Escape from New York. " Cars couldn't move in the jam. At a bus stop, two black men conversed in Hungarian. The water gurgled in our pockets and shoes. Sirens howled, horns honked, the glare of the city doubled, tripled, and we were ghosts now, having lost confidence in our existence. On Dohány Street, opposite the Great Synagogue, I found the small pub in which, a year before, a producer from Israel told me how a lion had eaten the hand of its trainer, a mishap that sank the film project, because no one in his right mind would do a comedy with a man-eating lion in the lead. The pub was now packed; between the walls papered with gazettes from the days of Franz Josef, it was so bad that mothers had to hold their children in their laps, the children dozing from the smoke and hot breaths. The weary barmaid knew what I wanted, reading my face, and over the heads of the customers she passed us two pear brandies and two coffees. We sat outside under a leaky umbrella, rain pattering in the cups and glasses.

When we took Rákóczi Street to the station at last, we saw a tremendous assembly on its steps. Black-market money changers were there, cabbies, young ladies, railroad employees, smooth operators, vendors — in a word, everyone: all looking into the deep night. We too turned to look. In the leaden sky over the Danube burst a thousand purple sparks, a myriad scarlet spiders and golden stars. The reports from the explosions, muffled by the rain and distance, reached us with delay, which made the spectacle doubly unreal. Celadon and bile, turquoise and violet, sapphire and silver, emerald and crystal — fictional, ephemeral gems that died instantly in the rain and did nothing to lift the darkness. As if old Austro-Hungary were making yet another effort to give a sign from the beyond. The wet night was a maniacal ballroom full of glistening black mirrors, spectral chandeliers, trick candelabras and sconces. The Turks on the street brandished long knives to cut meat for kebabs. A German who had lost his way, pulling a suitcase on wheels, muttered, "Scheisse, scheisse." And, wrapped in blankets, a Gypsy couple slept in a tunnel walkway beneath the street. A black hat lay beside his head; beside hers, a carefully folded, flower-patterned scarf.

We got on the train to Nyíregyháza, that being the farthest point east, and it would run until morning. Which was fine: we had to sleep somewhere. South and east, our plan. Somewhere near Hatvan the conductor appeared. I tried explaining that we didn't have tickets. He was over six feet, all smiles, and repeated, "Kein Problem." Then, with the aid of a piece of paper and a pen, he told us not to worry, we could stay on, he would return, maybe at Füzesabony or Tiszafüred, and sell us the tickets then, so they would be cheaper. He vanished, then reappeared in half an hour, apologetically, saying that it had to be now, there was someone onboard more important than he who might come through and check. With elaborate flourishes he wrote us a receipt. We also had some aszú with us but no corkscrew. Seeing the long-necked bottle, the conductor threw up his hands helplessly, but then disappeared and reappeared with a curious tool for locking compartments and punching ticket holes. We tried it, but the tool was too short, the cork came less than halfway out. Tremendous disappointment on the conductor's face. Again he disappeared, and all we could hear was the echo of his strides in the empty corridor. He returned in a few minutes, beaming, and pulled at my sleeve. The man is so invested in this Tokay, I thought; a pity that the bottle's only half a liter. He explained excitedly, pulling me to the john, pointing at the toilet-paper peg, which was thin, long enough, strong enough. We pushed the cork in. With a sigh of relief, I handed him the bottle. "Drink, brother," I said in Polish. He stood at attention and with solemnity pointed to his uniform, cap, all his officialdom, then clapped me on the shoulder and said something that must have meant "To your health." He appeared again at dawn. He was half asleep and repeated, "Nyíregyháza, Nyíregyhá za." He made sure we hadn't forgotten anything on the train, then waved from the window.