Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

Then, out of nowhere, five kids. The oldest could have been ten. They were incredibly alive in that dead afternoon landscape. As if the sun gave them strength. They surrounded me in a circle and one after the other tried to start a conversation, in several languages at once: Romanian, German, an indeterminate Slavic tongue — Russian? Slovak? — inserting the occasional English word and, who knows, Hungarian. At the center of this verbal vortex, I could only laugh. At last I understood: they wanted to show the ignorant wanderer their village — that is, Saxon curiosities in the form of ruins of a fortified church. I clearly wasn't the first or last. I went with them but had not the least interest in venerable monuments. I watched these young Gypsies. The whole village belonged to them. Most likely they hadn't been born here. Their parents occupied homes of Germans who had returned to the old country. Everything here was in Gypsy possession now. This village of several hundred years had become an encampment. What had seemed immutable was now temporary, practically nonexistent. The kids showed me a medieval church that they hadn't built, gave me pears from roadside trees that they hadn't planted, and spoke in languages that were not their own. They arrived two hundred years or more after the Saxons, and no one had invited them. They did not bring with them, in their heads, images of a homeland, pictures of residences or shrines that they could reproduce. Their memory held no history, only tales and fables — forms that by our criteria belong to children and are not worth preserving. As for artifacts, they had only those that would disappear with them and leave no trace.

They showed me the house in which the local priest or pastor lived. They called him pater. Through the closed and grated gate, not much could be seen: a cared-for yard, a grapevine shielding the house, and something like a pool. In comparison with the rest of the village, it seemed absurd. I rang, but no one appeared. I asked if the priest was all right: "Bun pater?" They shook their heads: "Nu bun, nu…”

I considered this decaying village, the trash in the center of the square, the rectory and pool all fearfully gated and locked, and decided that it was the Gypsies' victory. Since the year 1322, when Europe first noted their presence on the Peloponnesian peninsula, they had not changed. Europe brought into being nations, kingdoms, empires, and governments, which rose and fell. Focused on progress, expansion, growth, it could not imagine that life might be lived outside time, outside history. Meanwhile the Gypsies with a sardonic smile regarded the paroxysms of our civilization, and if they took anything for themselves, it was the rubbish, the garbage, the ruined homes, and alms. As if all the rest were of no value.

Now Saxon Iacobeni had fallen to them. Among the walls that had absorbed centuries of effort, thrift, tradition, and all such virtues that maintain the continuity of civilization, they simply set up camp, exactly as one sets up camp in an open field, as if no one had been there before them.

We left the locked rectory in peace. The kids pulled me down various lanes. Chattering nonstop, singing, whirling about me, until finally our procession à la Breughel reached a shop, because that had been their purpose all along. It was completely unlike the one in Roşia: a dark cubbyhole sort of depot-shack. Black-market stuff, soap, jam, everything in jumbled heaps and piles, thrown here and forgotten, covered with dust and waiting for a buyer to take pity. I bought several bottles of some kind of carbonated beverage, a bag of candy, and we went outside. I gave it all to them, and in an instant they had divided the booty according to a complex system but one that followed the basic principle that the strongest and oldest get the most. Engaged in eating and stuffing into pockets, they no longer paid attention to me. They returned to their world, and I stayed in mine. That's how it had to be, how it had been since 1322.

On my old taped map the place-names are in Romanian, Hungarian, and German. ţara Secuilor, Székelyföld, Szeklerland. No one thought to write them also in Romany. I think that the Gypsies themselves are the least interested in this. Their geography is mobile and elusive. It very likely will outlast ours.

AT 5:30 IN THE MORNING it was still completely dark. I went out to Prešernovo Nabreǽje, Prešeren Quay, and turned right, northwest. The water was black-blue and smooth. In the light of the streetlamps, the beach stones gleamed after yesterday's rain. I had traveled here to see the western edge of Slavic Europe.

From the narrow inlets between the stones came the stink of cat piss. The lighthouse beacon at the promontory delivered its last flashes into the night; in half an hour it would go off. At its base, a solitary red Renault was parked. It looked rundown; you could see the lighthouse keepers here didn't have it so good. Passing it, I reached the other side of the peninsula. The sea was heavier here, louder, more in motion. A few dozen meters from the shore, the water merged with the dark, yet I saw, in the distance, white clouds. Brighter there.

The waterfront stopped, but I went on, hopping from stone to stone. To the right, a vertical cliff of slate. Someone had put up the sign that you proceeded at your own risk.

I came for only three days and was ready for anything. Less than twenty kilometers to the northeast lay Trieste; Venice was eighty to the west. The only thought that entered my head: the air there is just as cold and damp. From the port, the putter of diesel engines. Soon I saw the first fishing boat, small and indistinct on the dark mirror of the water. The motor died. The man at the stern sat as if waiting for the dawn to begin in earnest.

Correction: those were not clouds. An hour later I stood in the courtyard of the Saint George Cathedral and from that height could see the bay, the white peaks of the Julian Alps, and, who knows, maybe even Triglav itself. Because what are a hundred kilometers on a morning like this, when the sun shines as bright as on an afternoon in July and objects cast shadows as dark as night? The mountains burned red, orange, dimmed to violet, then dun, as the light slid down the ridges and valleys. This crystal air rendered distance null and void. The fishing boats seemed to float in the bay, only to become stuck, in an hour, in half an hour, in foothills. I had to leave the vista; it was too unreal.

Bells ringing at Saint Steven, Saint Francis, and the Immaculate Mother of God. The red rooftops of the homes arranged in an intricate mosaic. From the chimneys, vertical columns of sky-blue smoke. The smell of resin and incense, logs burning in stoves. No doubt an illusion, but I could have sworn there was also a whiff of ground and steamed coffee. Among the geometry of the tiled surfaces, the green daubs of gardens. Not one scrap of free space in this town; nothing wild, nothing abandoned or in disrepair, no space simply as space. That's why there were so few dogs here, despite those occasional containers with a picture of Fido taking a dump. This was a town of cats. Looking down, I saw them coming out of their nooks and crannies to find a warm patch of sun. Dozens of toms and tabbies in a hundred different colors and shades. Singly, in pairs, chasing down, sidling up to, courting, ignoring, tails lifted as they tensely patrolled the perimeter of their territory, gamboling, enjoying a morning stretch. They were small, medium, and as large as an ordinary dog. In thirty minutes in one spot I counted fifty cats. They rubbed against chimneys, licked themselves, jumped from their place and back to it. A veritable feline kingdom. It was the only movement I could observe from the high walls of Saint George. All to the accompaniment of the bells of the Immaculate Mother of God.