Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

One day I went to Poznań in a pickup truck. The driver shouted, "Hop on. Just watch out for the fish!" I lay among enormous plastic bags filled with water. Inside swam fish, no larger than a fingernail. Hundreds, thousands of fish. The water was ice-cold, so I had to wrap myself in a blanket. In Września the fish turned toward Gniezno, so at dawn I was alone again on the empty road. The sun had not risen yet, and it was cold. It's possible that from Poznań I went on to Wrocław. Most likely heading for Wybrzeże a day or two later, or Bieszczady. If toward Bieszczady, around Osława, in the middle of a forest, I saw a naked man. He was standing in a river and washing himself. Seeing me, he simply turned his back. But if it was Wybrze że, then I was at Jastrzębia Góra, and it was evening, and I walked barefoot on a forsaken beach in the direction of Karwia and saw, against the red sky, the black megaliths of Stonehenge. I had nowhere to sleep and it was as if those ruins had fallen out of the sky. Fashioned from planks, plywood, burlap. Such things happened in those days. Someone built it and left it, no doubt a television crew. I crawled through a hole into one of the vertical pillars of rock and lay down.

THE BEST MAP I have is the Slovak two hundred. It's so detailed that once it helped me out of an endless cornfield somewhere at the foot of the Zemplén Mountains. On this huge sheet, which contains the entire country, even footpaths are shown. The map is frayed and torn. On the flat image of land and little water, the void peeks through in places. I always take it with me, inconvenient as it is, requiring so much room. The thing is like a talisman, because after all I know the way to Košice, then on to Sátoraljaújhely, without it. But I take the map, interested precisely in its deterioration. It wore out first at the folds. The breaks and cracks have made a new grid, one clearer than the cartographic crosshatching in light blue. Cities and villages gradually faded from existence as the map was folded and unfolded, stuffed into the glove compartment of a car or into a backpack. Michalovce is gone, Stropkov too, and a hole of nonbeing encroaches on Uzhhorod. Soon Humenné will disappear, Vranov nad Topl'ou wear away, Cigánd on the Tisa crumble.

It was only a couple of years ago that I began to pay this kind of attention to maps. I used to treat them as ornaments or, maybe, anachronistic symbols that had survived in our era of hard information and full disclosure from every corner of the earth. It started with the war in the Balkans. For us, everything starts or ends with a war, so there's no surprise there. I simply wanted to know what the artillery was aiming at, what the pilots were seeing from their planes. The newspaper maps were too neat, too sterile: the name of a region and, next to the name, the stylized flash of an explosion. No rivers, terrain, topography, no indication of land or culture, just a bare name and a boom. I searched for Vojvodina, because it was nearest. War always rouses men, even when it frightens them. Red flame along the Danube — Belgrade, Batajnica, Novi Sad, Vukovar, Sombor — twenty kilometers from the Hungarian border and maybe four hundred and fifty from my house. Only a real map could tell us when to start listening for the thunder. Neither television nor newspaper can chart such a concrete thing as distance.

That may have been why the destruction in my map of Slovakia represented, for me, destruction in general. The red flames along the Danube begin to eat the paper, travel from Vojvodina, from the Banat, take hold in the Hungarian Lowlands, claim Transylvania, to spill finally to the edge of the Carpathians.

All this will vanish, go out like a lightbulb, leaving only an empty sphere that must fill with new forms, but I have no interest in them, because they will be an even more pathetic version of the everyday pretending to be sacred, of poverty gussied up as wealth, of rubbish that parades and magnifies itself, plastic that breaks first thing yet lasts practically forever, like stuff in garbage dumps, until fire consumes it, because the other elements are helpless against it. These were my thoughts as we drove through Leordina, Vişeu de Jos, Vişeu de Sus, toward the mountain pass at Prislop. Almost no cars on the road, but people had come out in the hundreds. They stood, sat, strolled, all in the dignity of their Sunday best. They emerged from their homes of wood with roof shingles like fish scales. They joined as drops join to make a rivulet, and finally spread in a broad wave to the shoulders of the road, spread across the asphalt and down to the valley. White shirts, dark skirts and jackets, hats and kerchiefs. Through the open window, the smell of mothballs, holiday, and cheap perfume. In Vişeu de Sus, there were so many people we had to come to a complete stop and wait for the crowd to part. We stopped, but our journey did not. The festive gathering enveloped us, took us against the current of time. No one sold anything or bought anything. Or at least we didn't see it. In the distance rose the dun massif of Pietrosul. Snow at the top. This was the third day of Orthodox Easter, and the occasion marked the pleasant inertia of matter. Human bodies surrendered to gravity, as if to return to the primal condition in which the spirit was not yet imprisoned, and did not struggle, did not attempt to take on any kind of feeble likeness.

After Moisei we stopped. In the desolation by the road sat four old villagers. They pointed far ahead, at something on the opposite forested slope. We understood: a monastery there. Among the trees we could make out the top of a tower. The people simply sat and looked in that direction, as if their sitting served as participation in the solemn liturgy. They urged us to go there. But we were in a hurry. We left them half reclining, motionless, watching, listening. They may have been waiting for a bell to toll, for something to move in the frozen holiday.

***

All this would vanish. At night on the main street in Gura Humorului, fifteen-year-old boys wanted to sell us German license plates. They assured us that the plates were from a BMW. All this would be gone, it would become part of the rest of the world. Yes, that first day in Romania the whole sorrow of the continent weighed on me. I saw decline everywhere and could not imagine renaissance. The attendant at the gas station in Cimpulung carried a gun in a holster. He appeared out of the dusk and told us in mime that he had nothing for us. But a kilometer farther, another station was lit up like a carnival in the ancient night. They had everything there, but the pour spouts were stuck in the necks of plastic cola bottles. Men came up with one or two bottles, then went into the darkness to find their dead vehicles.

Maramureşwas behind us. So was the mountain gap covered with a hard crust of snow, and that swarthy man in the old Audi with German plates. He opened the trunk and took out a child's motorcycle, a miniature Suzuki or Kawasaki, sat a two-year-old kid on it, and took picture after picture. An icy wind blew through the gap, and there was no one there but us. Nothing but a cold, beautiful waste, the sun rolling over the marsh between Carei and Satu Mare, and I heard the click of the camera, saw the boy's grave face, red cheeks, then the father put the toy away, and they continued down, west, no doubt to their home. We left also, because on that wind-whistling height, hands turned numb and cheeks hurt. We descended by switchbacks to the BistriŢa valley, into darkening air.

I see now how little I remember, how everything that happened could have happened elsewhere. No trip from the land of King Ubu to the land of Count Dracula will hold memories you can rely on later, as for example you can rely on Paris, Stonehenge, or Saint Mark's Square. Sighetu Marmaţiei, more than anything, ended up unreal. We drove through it quickly, without stopping, and I can say nothing about its shape, except that it looked like a sophisticated fiction. In any case we passed it in no time, and once again green mountains rose on the horizon, and I immediately felt regret and longing. Exactly as on awakening, when we are spurred by the desire to return to the world of dreams, which relieves us of our freedom of will and gives in its place the freedom, absolute, of the unexpected. This happens in places rarely touched by the traveler's eye. Observation irons out objects and landscapes. Destruction and decline follow. The world gets used up, like an old abraded map, from being seen too much.