Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

At night somewhere outside Maribor, I was stopped by the police for doing eighty in a residential area. They were in black leather and polite. I asked what would happen if I didn't pay. They told me that they would take my passport, let me go, and wait at the station for me to appear with the money. Twice as much as I would pay on the spot. They didn't look bribable. They gave me a pretty receipt with ornamental stamps, took practically everything that I had in their currency, and wished me a pleasant trip.

To get even, I decided to spend the night in Hungary.

AT FIVE THIRTY in the morning in Korçë in front of the Grand Hotel, several men were already standing. In the course of the day, more came. Particularly on the wide street that led to the fairgrounds. But they also stood in front of the post office and in the shaded lane by the newspaper kiosk. By the afternoon there was a whole crowd of them. All guys. In twos and threes or by themselves, engaged in conversation or staring into space. Sometimes they took a step or two forward, then back, but the movement had no direction, it was a short break in the absence of motion. A few held bundles of Albanian bills in their hands and tried to exchange these for euros or dollars. But most just stood, smoking long, thin Karelia cigarettes, at almost three-quarters of a dollar a pack. They seemed to be waiting for something, an important piece of news, an announcement, an event, but no news came, and at each dawn they assembled again, the crowd growing as the hours passed, thinning a bit at siesta time, but in the afternoon the street was packed, the crowd swaying yet never really moving in the heat. Women appeared from time to time, secretly, sideways, barely visible. They carried bags, packages, but were ignored by the male herd. The men stayed in place, awaiting some change, staring at the vast emptiness of time, sentenced to their own stationary presence. I had seen the same thing in Tirana, at Skanderbeg Square, and in Gjirokastër, on the main street that ran from the mosque on the hill to the town. In Saranda, at six thirty in the morning, at the Lili Hotel, I went down for breakfast and found the bar filled with men. They sat over morning coffee and little glasses of raki, immersed in cigarette smoke — fifteen, maybe twenty men. They watched the street, and sometimes one spoke to another, but evidently the day had no surprises in store for them. Prisoners of the day from its beginning, they had nowhere to go; wherever they went, it was in the shackles of nothing to do.

Around Patos the land began to flatten. The mountains were now at our back. To the Adriatic it was a dozen kilometers, and the horizon to the left took on a gray-blue color. It was hot and stuffy in the bus. People tossed cans of cola and beer out the windows.

On the outskirts of Fier, on either side of the road were abandoned cars, mostly Mercedes and Audis, in various stages of decay. The cars were ten, fifteen, twenty years old, and there were hundreds of them, in smaller or larger groups. Near Durrës, the hundreds became thousands in the beating heat, on the bare ground, among clumps of burned grass. Some were nude, stripped, their metal pulled off, revealing the whole pornography of axle, undercarriage, transmission, brake drum, rusted remains; others still had parts of their chassis, baked dull, and stood staunchly on bald, wrinkled tires. Through this endless field of bodies wandered blackened men with blowtorches, there to cut off sheets of metal still in good health. White streams of sparks brighter than the sun. A butchering of the unalive. Other men waited to receive the needed parts. The rest of the cars, lying about, had taken root in the ground: the broken bones of connecting rods, crooked pistons, blind headlights, crushed radiators, fenders eaten through, gas cans full of holes, gutted oil filters, gearboxes with their insides strewn. Gangrene in hoses, cancer in floorboards, syphilis in gaskets, and the cataracts of shattered windows. The suburb of Durrës was a great field hospital for automotive Germany, a hospital in which only amputation was performed.

Durrës is a port, so these thousands of bodies must have come here by ship. I remember photographs of the famous Albanian exodus of 1992: people hanging over the sides like desperate bunches of grapes, from the quarterdeck, from the rigging, and fishing boats, ferries, and barges all covered with living human tape, as if the whole nation wished to flee from itself, to go as far as possible, beyond the sea, to the other side of the Adriatic, Italy, the wide world, which seemed salvation, being an unimaginable, fairy-tale opposite of their cursed land. Now from that wide world came flotillas laden with scrap, junk, internal combustion corpses.

When the highway turned toward Tirana, the bunkers began. Gray concrete skulls, jutting a meter above the ground, gazed with eyes that were black vertical slits. They looked like corpses buried standing. Each with room to accommodate a machine-gun crew. Scattered across low, flat hills, they overlooked the lifeless automobile junkyards. Junkyard and bunker both indestructible. Astrit said that in the whole country, most likely, there was not one mill in operation in order to melt down all this German metal. Nor enough dynamite to level these 600,000 bunkers built to hold off an invasion by the entire world.

An hour and a half by boat from Corfu. Half an hour by hydrofoil. The building at the Greek port is long and squat. Italian, English, and German tourists sit on piled luggage or drag day packs on wheels. The crowd pushes at the edge, divides into separate streams, forms lines at the gangplanks leading to the ferries, some of which look like seven-story department stores. Tour buses bring all of Europe. Heaps of carry-ons with keypad locks await baggage handlers. Five guys in black leather tend their burdened Hondas and Kawasakis. At the quay stands the three-mast Von Humboldt, the color of dark vegetation. Also a mahogany yacht with a British flag. On board, young men in white trousers hurrying. Glittering snakes of automobiles slowly slide into the deep holds. In the sky, you can see the white bodies of Boeings and DCs descending to land. Couples take their last snapshots in the Greek light.

We didn't have to ask where the ship to Saranda was. The crowd of people waiting there was still, pressed at the gangplank. They had boxes, cartons, circles of green garden hoses, those plastic bags in red-and-blue checks familiar in Europe and throughout the world, packages wrapped in foil, ordinary duffels, plastic bags with store names long since rubbed off, and they all seemed weary, but their weariness was not yesterday's or last month's. It was significantly older.

A Greek border guard in a white shirt and dark glasses took passports from a wooden box and called out names: Illyet… Freng… Myslim… Hajji… Bedri… The people grabbed their things and ran onto the feeble ship. The border guard handed the passports to a stocky civilian. It was as if a shadow had fallen on them, as if they stood under an unseen cloud, while the rest of the port — the vacationing crowd, the tanned arms of the women, the gold rings, sandals, and backpacks — was bathed in a light straight out of Kodak.

A small Amstel onboard cost two euros. We sailed along the strait, the land remaining in sight. The mountain shore on our right was treeless. The burned ridge looked as if the sun had always stood at the zenith above it: eternal south, rock as old as the world, flaking from the heat.

Then I saw Saranda. It began suddenly, without warning. On the bare slopes, the skeletons of houses appeared. From a distance you'd think there had been a fire, but these buildings were unfinished. Darker than the mountains but as mineral, as if baked in a great oven and stripped by fire of everything that might suggest a home. Deep in the bay, the city thickened a little, gleamed with glass, turned green, but we sailed on, to reach the shore. A rusted crane stood in a cement square. Over a gray barrack fluttered the two-headed Albanian eagle and the blue flag of the EU. Inside were a desk and two chairs. A woman in a uniform told us to pay twenty-five euros, took thirty, gave us a receipt, and said with a smile that she had no change. On the hill above the port stood apartment blocks of rust-red concrete. But for the clothes drying on lines and the satellite dishes, they looked abandoned.