Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

In Göncruszka the sidewalks were violet from the plums. A swarm of wasps over the fruit, and not a soul in sight. We walked through a village. No sound from any yard. The windows all shuttered. Only Gypsies — they were having a fiesta instead of a siesta, drinking beer in the full sun before a roadside pub. An old Gypsy woman with the face of Ella Fitzgerald was telling her man to stand up. She had her hands on her hips and spoke in a voice that climbed to a scream, but he sat, answered her calmly, indifferently, punctuating his words with light gestures of his right hand. Apparently a scene that the couple had been repeating, with no variation, for God knows how many years. The woman stamped the ground, raising dust.

We walked on, beyond the village. The posts along the road were light blue, and each had painted on it a white infinity sign. Fifty meters apart, they went evenly up and down the hills, and we thought maybe they were a hallucination from the fierce heat, but when the Slovak van finally picked us up, they didn't vanish, they continued flickering past the window until Vilmány, where we got out to look for a railway station among the sunflowers. The station was simply one pair of rails and a patch of beaten earth — no board, no building, no sign or semaphore; we found it only because some people were gathered there, a couple of kids stretched out on dry grass and resigned, with an almost empty bottle of mineral water and a small backpack. There was no roof or tree to provide shade, but to the west lay a vast landscape that shimmered in lilac. The long ridges were indistinct in the heat, but you could make out the church spires in Hernádcéce, Fáj, Garadna, Novajidrány, Vizsoly, and who knows, the hot air may have carried apparitions from Miskolc and Eger all the way here to the Hornád valley. Anything was possible that day. Budapest itself could have sailed in, floating over our heads, and we wouldn't have been surprised.

But it was a train, not the capital, that appeared. Ella Fitzgerald sat in the middle with three children. Evidently she had been unable to persuade her husband. We moved slowly. There is no better kind of rail travel in a foreign land than the local, second-class kind. People get on, get off, and perform their life in so unhurried a manner that it begins to resemble our own. Everything becomes familiar. Guys returning from work smell exactly like those who get on at the Żerań station in Warsaw and are bound for Nasielsk. A mother accompanying her sixteen-year-old daughter to the train hands her a plastic bag of candy. The girl gives her mother a perfunctory kiss, is a little sullen, gets on, and when the train moves, the mother waves with a helpless smile, but her child is already elsewhere in her thoughts and doesn't notice. That might have been in BoldogkŐváralja… No, it definitely was, because there was a medieval castle on a hill to the left. The girl wore faded jeans and black boots with silver buckles. The conductor came and asked the Gypsy woman for something but got a flood of words, so he threw up a hand and passed. One could open a window, one could smoke and in lazy anticipation think of what would happen in an hour, in half an hour, and wonder, for example, if that dressed-up blonde with the red fingernails was going to Szerencs or would get off at some more backwater spot. Forty kilometers an hour at a steady clip lets you come to an understanding with space, lets you control it without causing it any injury.

The station at Szerencs smelled of chocolate, because right next door was the biggest chocolate factory in Hungary. Drinking beer, palinka, and coffee, we considered our next move. The timetable simply held too many possibilities, and for the moment intuition was dumb. To be able to go everywhere means not going anywhere. We decided to do nothing and let the world do. And we were right: after an hour, an empty bus pulled up, practically to our outdoor table at the summer pub, with the sign TOKAJ.

I woke up early in the morning and stepped out on the balcony. The red roofs had darkened from the night rain. The street pavement shone, steamed. The town was still. You could hear drops falling from leaf to leaf in the garden below. Only the storks made a racket. One by one they flew up from the Tisza and settled on their chimneys. I must have counted five nests. The birds clattered, raising echoes, then smoothed their feathers and returned to the river somewhere among ancient poplars. Tokaj lay motionless, glittering like fish scales. I stood in that preternatural silence, smoked a cigarette, and thought that all mornings of the world should be like this: we wake in absolute peace, in a foreign city that has no people in it, and everything around us is a continuation of sleep. Before the pastel gates of the houses, wrought-iron signs swayed in the breeze: ZIMMER FREI… SZOBA KIADÓ… ZIMMER FREI… In the east, a violet lid of cloud hung heavily, let through a few rays, sank. It was all so beautiful, I wondered if I had died. To check, I returned to my room. M. was still asleep, so everything was okay, because we had never figured that we would go together, arguing instead who would outlive whom.

Don't assume there will be something to eat at eight in the morning in Tokaj. At the glassed-in pub on Kossuth Street, you can drink coffee after coffee and watch the rain fall in the empty square. Curious thoughts enter your head. For instance, should you follow the lead of that couple at the next table, who ordered two 300 ml glasses of aszú, or ask yourself quietly a question in the vein of "What am I doing here anyway?”—the fundamental mantra if not prayer of every traveler? For it is precisely on a trip, in the morning, in a strange city, before the second cup of coffee has begun to work, that you experience most palpably the oddness of your banal existence. Travel is no more than a relatively healthy form of narcotic, after all. Have another cup, wait for the rain to let up a bit, and walk to the river, the green and twisting Tisza, and your imagination will speak to you as unmistakably as a growling stomach. Because the water that poured at your feet here was on Montenegro a few days ago and will join the Danube near Novi Sad a few days from now. That's the way of it: geography orders space but muddles the head, and a man would rather be a fish than mentally straddle north and south, east and west.

Persistently, if indirectly, we tended east. Somewhat in the style of š vejk's peregrination to České Budejovice. From Tokaj we ran to escape the rain, only to have the sky open on us in Budapest. From Budapest we ran to escape the crowds, chaos, and homelessness, only to find ourselves, at four in the morning, escorted off the train by an over-six-foot conductor, in the unknown yet sizable city of Nyíregyháza. Four in the morning is an hour when you either sit and weep or keep going. At the platform just then, an antique narrow-gauge pulled in, so we didn't hesitate. In the car was a genuine coal stove, its pipe going right through the ceiling. We rocked the whole way to SóstófürdŐ, because our pretty green choo-choo ended there. SóstófürdŐ still slept. A health resort at five A.M. is an uncommon sight. Between the trees gleamed the saucer of a salt lake. An old-fashioned water tower; huge umbrellas with the inscription John Bull Pub; an exquisite hotel, in the Swiss style yet standing here on the eastern border of the Great Hungarian Plain. Limos agleam in the morning sun; villas reminiscent of Chinese socialist realism; blocked signs that said no longer ZIMMER FREI but WOLNE POKOJE, "rooms available" in Polish; and no movement or sound other than the chirp of birds at dawn. Except a dog out of nowhere sniffed at us and continued on its way. A spa without people always seems like a stage set. We found a pension on a sandy lane. A woman in an apron swept the steps. We said we wanted to sleep, nothing more. She told us, in an English German, that we could sleep until five in the afternoon, because a disco started then.