Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

I slept in Prelasko. The inn was empty. At the bar sat two locals. Not particularly different from our locals who worked on a slightly better class of farm. They drank Laško beer and some kind of clear liquor in turn. Smoked cigarettes, conversed in low voices. Wore dirty clothes, looked like beggars. Unshaven, rumpled, and evidently not worried about the day's division between work and rest. They were the kind who could get into bed as they were. They had another round, but I saw no change in them. They drank calmly, as if performing a duty. In their words and gestures, not a trace of the impatience so common where I came from. They were stolid and solemn in their drinking, without inebriation or male neurosis. Both drank "internally." The peace and melancholy of their conversation didn't go at all with the four or five fifties they drank in the course of an hour or hour and a half. Not to mention all the beer. Finally they rose, shuffled in their rubber boots, and left, and the innkeeper didn't even come out from behind the bar to see if the right money had been left on the table. I was alone with my wine. The boss got into a black Mercedes with double exhaust pipes and took off. I went out to the driveway to look at the Slovenian night. Frost had settled on last year's grass. The round moon silvered the long mountain ridge. In the distance, a lone dog was barking.

"He sensed and at the same time knew: this is the home of devils, depressed and morose… Here among the alpine valleys and a little farther, on the plains of Panonia. They are in the wind, in the air; you cannot hide from them. In the lakes and among the hills, in the roots of trees, in the fens, among the rocky cliffs. They are in the village taverns and on the city streets empty on a Sunday. They are in children, men, old men… Everyone here is steeped in death. Death in the likeness of a lovely landscape, autumnal and cold, vernal and warm. In the fall, Gothic; in the spring, Baroque. They are strewn, as the churches are, throughout the country; as thick as gravestones — which the people here love to decorate with flowers, candles, angels… On Sunday afternoons, when foreigners and immigrants wander the abandoned streets, surprised at the emptiness — on Sunday afternoons it does not seem out of place that a man will open a window on the fourth floor, where every window is shuttered, and throw himself out with a rope around his neck."

The next day I drove across Kočevski Rog, a stretch of mountains to the south, near the border with Croatia. For thirty-five kilometers I saw no other car. The gravel road ran through a forest and climbed the main peak, Visoki Rog. I was on snowy, icy switchbacks, doing no more than thirty kph. Not a soul. This was one of the most beautiful roads I had ever seen. The sun a golden mist floating among the fir trees. Snow melting in the warmth, and sometimes, when I stopped, I could hear, in the stillness of the high forest, the whisper of a thousand drops joining to make a stream. Light and shadow intermingled endlessly, and though it was a bright day, everything seemed submerged in green water. The southern side of the peak steamed. I saw birds I couldn't name. This was neither Gothic nor Baroque. Kočevski Rog suggested an architecture that would never come to pass, because the simplicity of its beauty would throw into question the whole point of an imagination.

In the dark valleys lay 10,000 bodies. I was driving through the largest unmarked cemetery in Slovenia. In the summer of 1945, Tito's Communists murdered in this place, without a trial or witnesses, prisoners who had been handed over to them by armies of the Allies. These were partisans who had fought on the wrong side — the Croatian Home Guard, the Slovenian White Guard. Tito didn't brook competition. It's possible that the wolves, lynxes, and bears — more numerous then, definitely, than today — took care of the burial. Later the Marshal came here to hunt. Who knows, it might have occurred to him that he was killing the souls of traitors living on in the bodies of the animals.

At nine I left the blue coast and walked to Tartinijev Square to see some fifteenth-century Venetian Gothic architecture and the memorial to Tartini. He stood on a pedestal, in a wig, with a violin in his lowered hand, most likely bowing to the audience. I would have preferred to feel like a tourist but felt instead like a spy doing cursory reconnaissance. I could touch things but had no idea what they meant to those for whom they had been made. I remembered the golden light at Kočevski Rog and couldn't shake the thought that there were places, whole cities, whole countries, whose form and content defied description. Because if communism elsewhere was simply a crime, then here, in this land, it must have seemed a marriage of horror and imbecility. An idea conceived in empty heads fearing empty space was applied in a land that had ruled out the possibility of change. Marshal Tito in a white uniform among palm trees on a promenade in nearby Portoroǽ must have seemed an African chieftain. Communism, after all, had been the fruit of long, hopeless winters, when people began to go mad from boredom and from the fear of the self. It made sense, if it made sense at all, only on a flat, featureless plain where nothing happened and therefore anything could happen.

Small countries should be allowed to cut history class. They should be like islands off to the side of the main current of progress. That was my thought two days later, on the highway to Ljubljana. Near Postojna it suddenly turned cold and foggy. I considered this fairy-tale, utopian variant as I passed Croatian trucks. Small countries should be protected as childhood is protected. The citizens of hypertrophied powers should visit them to learn sense. A wasted effort, no doubt, but why not give people a chance to reflect on the many other ways to look at this best of all possible worlds? The existence of small countries of moderate temperament is simply a challenge to common ideas on such subjects as expansion, might, size, mission, and all those other collective axioms. As for me, I've always wanted to live in a smaller country — never, God forbid, in a larger one. It is much more difficult for negligibility to turn into a caricature of itself than for greatness to do so. And in any case it does less harm to its surroundings.

The Slovenian writer Edvard Kocbek, in his Parisian Notebook, wrote: "Our history is not marked by great passions; its poverty does not permit the assumption of any weighty mission. We can rely on no original declaration of faith, no communal character. The nature of our country is convex rather than concave; it has no true center of gravity, which would indicate a geographic as well as moral center. For this reason we lack thinkers of centripetal energy, souls who bear witness to our identity, souls of a crystallized fate… We never regarded our national borders as a test of quality, as trustworthy passage, as solution or inspiration — or as temptation, shame, and an opportunity for smuggling."

So again, that lack, that unfulfillment, that sigh for a life elsewhere. Greatness does not apply here. For sure something similar has been written by a Romanian from Romania's twenty million, by a Pole from Poland's forty million.

I circled Ljubljana's congested downtown area, looking for a place to park. On Congress Square I managed to squeeze in between a Land Rover and a BMW. On an ice rink with lanterns and music, children and an old man with a gray mustache were skating. It was Viennese-ish, except more cheerful. I heard laughter, a loud conversation on the street, and saw girls dressed in a way that was at once careless and refined. My first time here, yet I felt I knew this city. It was alive, charming. It gave the impression that it was exactly where it ought to be, not thinking about its destiny, not asking itself hard questions. Quite possibly it was utterly indifferent to, did not pine one bit for, the rest of the world. Mist shrouded the spires of the churches. At a bar not far from the fish market, I ate a sandwich and drank a small beer.