Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

It is good to come to a country you know practically nothing about. Your thoughts grow still, useless. Everything must be rebuilt. In a country you know nothing about, there is no reference point. You struggle to associate colors, smells, dim memories. You live a little like a child, or an animal. Objects and events may bring things to mind, but in the end they remain no more than what they are in fact. They begin only when we experience them, vanish when others follow. So they truly have no significance. They are made of that primal substance that touches our senses but is too light, too evanescent, to teach us anything.

When I returned to the waterfront, the day was well under way. The pubs were open, the cars were maneuvering on the narrow boulevard, guys in overalls were skillfully hoisting buckets on scaffolds, garbagemen were removing furniture that had been put out but looked perfectly fine, women in high heels were stepping around what was left of puddles, and stewed onions filled the air. A man in a sweater, old boots, and track pants went to the water's edge and cast his spinning rod. After the fifth or sixth cast, he reeled in a fish. He struck it against a stone slab and disappeared with his stunned prize down a small street. Children with backpacks walked to school, and pairs of elderly ladies took their strolls in mincing steps. At the port marina, fishermen in wool caps worked on their boats. One of them threw fish guts on the shore. A black cat immediately appeared. A moment later, a dog ran up, but the cat sent it packing. Under the arcades of the open market facing the port stood young men with tired faces, traditionally waiting for the day to bring an opportunity or surprise.

All this in blinding sun along the land's very edge. The interior of the town was dark, humid, labyrinthine. The houses grew one out of the other, leaned on one another, parted to a width of outstretched arms, and the dirty little cobblestone streets took paths in a way that bordered on the perverse. A hair separated neighbor from neighbor. Sometimes a door opened directly on the street, and you could see a neat row of boots, clothes on hangers, a mirror a person had quickly consulted before leaving. Wandering through the center of town, even when there was no one around, was like wandering through an invisible crowd. Voices on the other side of walls, conversations, tables placed under lit lamps, the smell of food, the sound of water in bathrooms, arguments, gestures, the entire intimacy of life in reach of your eyes, ears, nose. The town was one big house, a thousand rooms connected by cold, dark corridors — or a comfortable prison where each inmate could engage in his favorite activity. Piran: a monastery for the laity.

Such cities were possible, I thought, only by the sea or in the desert. In a locked landscape, the inhabitants might go mad. Here, only a few dozen steps were needed to take you off the human termitarium, this creation half architectural, half geological, to where limitless sea and air began, bounded only by the indistinct line of the horizon.

At eight in the morning I sipped coffee and watched the white ferry leave Pula for Venice. The waitress wiped the raindrops off my table. From a pub wafted Buena Vista Social Club. A little dog ran inside, lifted its leg to the leg of a chair, pissed, calmly departed. It was dim within, all wood, like an old ship, but I preferred to sit outside and see the air brighten. The delivery vans busy around the marina. The masts of yachts moving like uncertain needles on dials. A couple of old women chatting in Italian. More and more cats. They warmed themselves on the boulders along the beach. A quiet, unreal place, this, resembling no other, bringing to mind nothing but the abstract idea of harmony. Eight in the morning, sun, coffee, a white ferry, and Cuban music: an eclectic dream come to life.

Except I was here to see the country in which the last Balkan war began. It lasted ten days and claimed sixty-six lives. It's possible that the Yugoslav army departed in such haste because the Serbs felt that they were in a truly foreign land. Having no graves here, no memories, they confronted their deprivation. The invading of small, peripheral peoples is by necessity a provincial matter. You acquire territory that in some way reminds you of home, of the village you grew up in. Foreignness is a problem for the conqueror: it undermines his identity. Tiny Slovenia turned out to be too big for Greater Serbia. What could the Serbs do in this tidy, well-ordered land like some Hapsburg dream of the empire's mission to civilize? War must have a common language, some shared meaning, and bloody deeds are like all deeds, in that they cannot exist in a vacuum.

"I do not wish to defend the Balkan peoples, but neither do I wish to ignore their merits. The love of devastation, of internal disorder, the world like a brothel in flames, the sardonic view of cataclysms both past and future, the sourness, the sweet inactivity of those who cannot sleep or those who murder… They alone, the primitives of Europe, give Europe the fillip she needs, but she invariably considers it the ultimate humiliation. Because if the Southeast were nothing but an abomination, why should she feel, abandoning it and turning to these lands, as if she were falling — however magnificent the fall — into desert?"

At 8:15 I sat over my empty cup and ruminated on these words of Emil Cioran. And tried to situate the southeast and the Balkans.

I took home promotional material from some roadside inn near the Croatian border. The colorful brochure contained, in addition to ads for pubs, hotels, and camping grounds, a small map of Europe. Spain had its Madrid, France its Paris, Switzerland Zurich, Austria Vienna, and so on. But to the east and south of Prague and Budapest lay a terra incognita: countries without capitals, and some countries weren't even there. No Slovakia. Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus all evaporated in the dried-up sea of old empire. Yet the map was quite new, because the borders of the post-Yugoslav nations were clearly marked. The only city that had been preserved in the enigmatic southeast was Athens, apparently old enough to assume the role of fossil. Sofia, Bucharest, Belgrade, Warsaw, and Bratislava were gone, swallowed by a primordial void that one could point to but not name or describe. Which made sense, because what could come from that region other than inchoateness and weather reports? Names organized nothing, having no fixed, established, verifiable meaning.

It was late afternoon when I crossed the border at Hodoš. The winter light gave objects an extra sharpness. The customs officer asked me how many dinars I had, though for more than ten years now purchases had been made only in tolars. He took a second look in my trunk, said "Hvala," then I was driving between the rotten yellow hills of Prekmurje. At that time of the year, you always see more, because the bare landscape collects what has been dropped by human beings and reveals the vulnerability of matter left to itself. This time, however, nothing of the sort: the country seemed completely finished, done with care, polished. I could find no cracks in the scenery that imagination might slip into. Nothing here recalled the places from which I had come. Everything was secondhand yet at the same time respectably new. As far as the eye could see, no sign of decay or growth or ostentation. Sturdy gray walls, gabled roofs, dead gardens, and vineyards left for the winter in the best condition — you took it all in at a glance, but nothing claimed your attention. This country was made in imitation of the perfect country. Stuck in the corner of Europe, between Germanic Austria, Romance Italy, Finno-Ugric Hungary, and Slavic Croatia, it endured by mimicking a universal ideal. As I was getting ready to come here, my acquaintances said, "Go, it's one of the prettiest spots on the Continent." Immediately pleasing to the eye. Nothing superfluous anywhere. Quiet villages lay at the bottom of valleys. White churches on hilltops stood watch over such good fortune. In the towns, a Hapsburg Baroque drew refined shapes against a dark sky. Murska Sobota, Ljutomir, Ptuj, Majsperk, Rogatec, Rogaška Slatina. I couldn't stop, constantly feeling that there would be a sudden reversal, that the land — for my benefit alone — would do a salto mortale, but no, it remained on good terms with itself. I was a barbarian from the unwashed, unfinished east. There was no contrast here, no chaos, no trap to put my wits to the test. Accustomed to discontinuity, to losing the thread, to plot twists dreamlike and in bad taste, I could not deal with a space arranged in so irrevocable a way.