Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

It's the same at Şpring, a ground-floor town. The houses run like walls along either side of the road. Squat and heavy houses, whose canopied gateways lead to cramped yards, but that's just my guess, because the gates are all shut and seem permanently locked, in fear of the vastness above the bare hills.

Desertum— that's what this region was called when King Bela III brought settlers from Flanders and from the Rhine and Mosel regions. In those days, a distance of 1,500 kilometers meant for the common man that he would not have the strength to return. Clumsy carts on huge wheels, yoked oxen across the Brabant, up the Rhine. Through Moguntia, the narrow valleys of the Black Forest, with cattle blatting-bellowing all about, in mud, then near Freiburg they had to find the thin thread of the Danube, then endure rain at stops between Augsburg and Ratisbon, campfires made from wet logs, the smoke blackening earthen pots, the continent tilting gently to the east, but what suffices for the flow of a river is small comfort for people who are mired and dread a future that mingles with and is mistaken for open space.

I stopped at şpring, for coffee. But it easily could have been in Gergeschdorf. The pub had iron chairs and tables. A hot and filthy place. Two men sat in a corner, reeking of sheep, looking as if they had emerged from a primeval time: black, thickset, with beard and matted hair tangled into one. Beside them, a dilapidated pinball machine. They had obviously just left their animals: the pants at the knees gleamed with the grease that covers wool. Despite the heat they wore sweaters and cloaks. They drank their Ciuc beer without a word, staring, to each side, at the room, which must have been too small for them, confining, so they drank gulp after gulp, to get back outside as soon as possible.

The bartender had a white, puffy face. I spoke a few words in Romanian, but he only took my money, gave me change, and returned to his dreary kingdom of a couple of bottles of Bihor palinka, Carpati cigarettes, and capped, potbellied flasks of wine cheaper than Coke or Fanta. There was also an enamel pot and a percolator covered with charred brown — a veteran of hundreds of boiled coffees.

I took my coffee and sat by the window to gaze out at the Transylvanian swelter. The two men now had produced, from somewhere, 1.5-liter plastic jugs and were waiting at the counter for them to be filled with beer. Then I saw them walking down the baked street, their silhouettes as dark as their shadows, their movements quick, minimal, efficient, like those of animals.

No one else entered. The guy behind the bar killed time with the help of little activities that invariably slowed and stopped. Pale and massive, he absorbed time like a sponge. Moved something, wiped something, adjusted something, but the future never came. His ancestors arrived here eight hundred years ago on carts drawn by oxen. They built cities, villages, and fortified churches on hilltops. They established hospitals and homes for the elderly. They chose their own priests and judges. They answered to the king alone and were exempt from paying taxes. They only had to provide the Royal Hungarian Army with five hundred mounted soldiers. They brought with them, in their heads, images of their homes and shrines left along the Rhine, to re-create them here in the same shape and proportions. A Gothic of brick and stone thus materialized among the hills of this desert. Clocks on four-sided towers were wound and began marking the hours, which before had passed in an uninterrupted flow.

Nothing happening outside the window. From over the dry hills the heat came, floated in through the open door, filled the interior, all the crap and clutter, dirt, notched glasses, greasy steins, cloudy bottles, cadaverous plastic. The heat settled in stifling waves on the broken furniture, pressed against the walls, against the flyspecked panes, swept this entire dumping ground of remnants pretending to be useful, resolutely playing out a comedy of survival. The Transylvanian desert entered the pub in Gergeschdorf and made itself at home.

I took my cup to the counter. The man didn't even look up. Only when I said, "Danke, auf wiedersehen," did he look, as if seeing me for the first time. He tried to do something with his heavy face, but I was no longer there.

That same day I drove to Roşia, a village forty kilometers southeast. I wanted to see the place where the pastor lived who wrote books and was a prison chaplain. He wasn't at home, had gone to Budapest. Or that's what the man said who opened the church for me. Inside, it was cramped and bare. Cushions on the benches. In that space of stone, all the fittings were random and flimsy, as if somebody had attempted to put furniture in an ancient cave. From the motto on the black pennant, I could recall only “… so will ich dir die Krone des Lebens geben." Six-armed candelabras, red tapers. The pews held no more than a dozen people. I had read that the parishioners were mostly Gypsies. The smell of sacred antiquity had permeated the walls, and now the walls exuded it, but as a feeble, reproachful scent, attenuated by many years of damp and cold, as in the house of old people whom no one ever visits. Or in a dollhouse long outgrown by its owner. Afterward, I went to the edge of the village, to look at the Oltu valley. On the northern slopes of the Negoiu and Moldoveanu lay snow. A swarthy family in a small cart rattled down a yellow stone road, and the children yelled at me in greeting: "Buna ziua! Buna ziua!"

On the way back to my car, I noticed the little shop. A few steps up to the entrance; inside, room enough only to stand and turn around. A narrow counter divided the tiny area in two. Over it, a few shelves on the wall. The merchandise was like that in other shops in this Romanian province: a bit of this and that, everything faded and humble. The jars, bags, bottles looked as if they had been there forever and would stay to the end, until a time of some graceful evaporation. But the pity of this insignificance, this reminder of the necessities — sugar, rice, matches, Carpati cigarettes — created in that dark and close interior an aura of the heroic. Everything was in order, tidy without compromise. The shelves were lined with clean paper, the various objects placed at distances from each other measured precisely. A world that was gone, passed on, yet it would take with it to the grave its considered and purposeful style.

From a narrow door leading to a supply room, a little old woman emerged. I didn't need anything but asked for something to drink. She moved like a wizened ghost: slow, noiseless, careful not to disturb the still of the shop. She smiled and said she had to go down to the basement, which served as her icebox. She returned with a cool bottle of some kind of juice. She gave me my change slowly, counting the money with great care.

I went out and sat on the steps. The late afternoon smelled of manure and resignation. From the high walls around the houses no sound reached me. The burning shadow of eternal siesta filled the lanes and weakened time in the village of Roşia. No doubt there were clocks in the homes, but their hands turned to no purpose.

The next day I was in Iacobeni, forty kilometers to the northeast. Unable to extricate myself from the Siebenbürgen labyrinth. Leaving Hortobágyfalva, I ended up on the Härwesdorf turnpike. I drove into AlŢina, drove out of Alzen. What began as Agnita ended up Szentágota. Everything took much longer than any calculation of kilometers and hours would have indicated. Traveling through a multiplied land, I went twice, three times as slowly.

Iacobeni was empty. In the center of a big square grew several old trees. A grassy parade ground was rimmed by buildings close together. Most of the houses looked abandoned. The rest of the village too gave that appearance. The sun was at its zenith, so possibly everyone was asleep, yet no one could have been that tired, to leave both square and houses to their own devices. Overgrown, crumbling, tilted, full of cracks, returning to the soil. Paint fell from boards, plaster from walls. Unsupervised, matter was collapsing under its own weight. I stood in the shade of a tree.