Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

It was that way everywhere. That's how it was at Hidasnémeti at the border station half an hour from Košice, where we got off on a hot platform and the sun rolled in the west like a cut- off rooster's head trailing a ribbon of red. Nothing, as far as the eye could see. The black railway wires vanished in the vastness of burned fields and blowing wind. About the station, guards in Slovak and Hungarian uniforms milling. The borders at the edge of old Europe must have looked like this: emptiness, wind, and garrisons, where you wait for something, for the enemy perhaps, and when the years pass and the enemy doesn't show, you put a bullet through your head out of boredom. A man on a rusty bicycle approached, but I knew only one Hungarian word — the name of a town, Gönc — so I repeated it over and over, until he finally squatted and wrote the departure time with his finger in the sand. He touched my backpack to tell me that the train would be red, raised a finger to tell me it would have only one car. He smelled of wine, beer, and cigarettes. He took off on his bicycle but returned in two hours to make sure we boarded the red car at the station.

It was that way also at Gönc, where in the middle of the night a Gypsy with a gold earring led us down dark lanes between vegetable plots and barking dogs, for several kilometers because he couldn't understand our request, and we followed till we reached a noisy pub where a man sat at a table: the only person in the neighborhood who spoke English. It was he who informed us, finally, that the local pension was closed, the hostess having passed away three days ago. But not to worry, he added, and put us in his Lada, and we went barreling up a hundred hairpin switchbacks deep into the Zemplén Hills. Now and then, in the distance and below, mercury lights flashed from the Slovak side, and over Vel'ka Ida rose a ghoulish industrial glow. But here, on the road to Telkibánya, was nothing but green forest, spruce. Gabor drove us to a hotel stuck in the mountains.

Nothing in Telkibánya, a village that hadn't changed in a hundred years. Wide, scattered houses under fruit trees. The walls a sulfurous, bilious yellow, the wood carving deep brown, the door frames sculpted, the shutters and verandas enduring in perfect symbiosis with the heavy, Baroque abundance of the gardens. The metaphor of settling and taking root appeared to have taken shape here in an ideal way. Not one new house, yet also not one old house in need of repair or renovation. Although we were the only foreigners, we drew no stares. From the stop, in the course of the day, four buses departed. Time melted in the sunlight; around noon, it grew still. In the inn, men sat from the morning on and without haste sipped their palinka and beer in turn. The bartender immediately knew I was a Slav and said, pouring, " dobre " and "na zdorovye. " It was one of those places where you feel the need to stay but have no reason to. Everything exactly as it should be and no one raising a voice or making an unnecessarily abrupt movement. On a slope above the village, the white of a cemetery. From windows of homes, the smell of stewing onions. In market stalls, mounds of melons, paprikas. A woman emerged from a cellar with a glass jug filled with wine. But we left Telkibánya eventually, because nothing ends a utopia quicker than the desire to hold on to it.

The return trip to Gönc ran through forests and limitless fields of sunflowers. The driver of the white delivery van talked nonstop and didn't mind at all that we couldn't understand him. We too talked. He listened with care and answered in his own tongue. In Gönc he pulled up in front of the Hussite House, but we were less interested in museums, more in the old women sitting in front of the houses on the main street. Like lizards in the sun. Their black clothes stored the afternoon heat, and their eyes gazed on the world without motion and without surprise, because they had seen everything. The women sat in groups of three, four, and in utter silence observed the passage of time.

A shiny škoda Octavia drove up, with Slovak plates, and a family got out. They looked around with uncertainty, and the father, like a brood hen, pushed them together and cast suspicious glances to either side, because — as everyone knows — Slovaks and Hungarians hold mutual grievances. This time it probably had to do not with history but with intuition, instinct, because those newcomers were white and plump as raised dough, round as loaves of bread, dressed up in tourist smartness — shorts, knee-high socks, pocket flaps — while the main street in Gönc was swarthy, dark-haired, and sinewy-nimble even in the quiet of siesta. This was the sort of thing we wanted to see, not the Hussite House with its "curious wooden bed that pulls out like a drawer," as the guidebook said. What happened on the main street in Gönc was more interesting than what had become mere history. It drew us, because life is made of bits of the present that stay in the mind. The world itself, really, is made of that.

The Slovaks drove off, and I went into a liquor store, because it was August 18, the hundred-and-sixty-ninth anniversary of the birth of Franz Josef, and I was determined to celebrate it. When I was again seated on the low wall before the store, there appeared beside me a bearded man in a herringbone coat and nothing under it. Without a word he produced from an inside pocket an enamel mug and lifted it toward me. How could I refuse him, and on this day, the birthday of His Highness? Here I was, traveling through his country, and he granted audiences even to simple peasants and made no distinction between Serb and Slovak, between Pole and Romanian. So I took out the flask of pear brandy I had just purchased and shared it with my fellow man. He drank in silence and pointed at my pack of Kossuths. I gave him a cigarette. Some citizen came by and in the international language of gestures gave me to understand that I was dealing with a lunatic. I reflected that in the empire lunatics too had their place, and I refilled the mug. We drank to the health of Franz Josef. I told my new friend that I had always been partial to sovereigns and caesars, that I particularly missed them in these threadbare times, because democracy cannot satisfy the thirst for the aesthetic and mythic, and so people feel abandoned. My friend nodded emphatically and held out his mug. I poured and told him that the idea of democracy contains a fundamental contradiction, because true power cannot, by its nature, be immanent; it would in that case resemble the most ordinary anarchy, though without all the entertainments and pleasures of anarchy. Power must come from without; only then can we embrace it and revolt against it. "Igen," said my new friend, nodding. A small crowd had gathered around us and was listening to the discussion. People also nodded and said, "Igen, igen." Then my friend proposed that we arm-wrestle. He won twice; I won twice. The crowd kibitzed and cheered. When it was all over, men came up to me, clapped me on the back, and said, "Franz Josef, Franz Josef."

South of Gönc, the plain began. Fields of corn to the blue horizon. The green-gold sea licked the Zemplén foothills and returned in a wave of warm air. On the roads in the fields stood old private automobiles with trailers loaded with the first harvest. The sun shone from straight above, making our shadows no larger than a dog at heel. The roads joined, crossed, separated — from the sky it must have looked like the board of a gigantic game. Ignorant of the rules, we took the wrong turn. That is, we had been making wrong turns from the start, the whole point of our trip, but this time we went in circles. Everywhere — hot wind and the rustle of leaves baked dry. One cornstalk is like another, so we were in a labyrinth. It took us three hours to get out. In a straight line, we must have gone three kilometers.