Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

"But it soon became apparent that the north-south civil war was not going to happen. Anarchy took its place. The Albanians — some of them — followed orders; others followed their old dream of getting a rifle; some, fearing the future or just copying others, broke into the armories and took whatever they could put their hands on, mines and radioactive material included. Later they shot into the air — in celebration, joy, terror, or simply to try out their new weapons. Armed people went to the prisons and released 1,500 prisoners, 700 of whom had been convicted for murder. On that day [March 10, 1997], more than 200 died, mainly from the bullets shot into the air, and thousands were wounded. Marauding thieves began their work, and no one knew whether these were Berisha people or just bandits. It got to the point that railroad tracks were taken apart, so that the individual rails could be sold as scrap in Montenegro."

I can't help seeing a resemblance between the slogans in stone and the suicidal shooting into the air. Both gestures are absurd, yet in a way they constitute a challenge to reality. The citizens of the collapsed government, having been chained by Hoxha's totalitarian vision and having embraced anarchy, behaved as if the world would perish with them. At the same time, Enver was as confident of his immortality as the rebellious mob. Both he and they lived entirely in the present. Hoxha probably believed that everything depended on his will, so no limits existed for him. The men shooting into the air felt that nothing depended on them, therefore they could do anything.

"Shqiperia" is "Albania." Even its true name, in a sense, means isolation, because outside the Balkans hardly anyone knows it. For two weeks I listened to Albanian spoken in the street, on buses, on the radio, and I don't think I heard once the word Albania. It was always Shqiperia, Shqiptar, shqiperise …

The word comes from the verb shqiptoj, which is simply "to talk," "to speak." In a tongue that no one else understands.

THIS COUNTRY IS 300 kilometers at its longest and 130 at its widest. The entry at Leuşeni is all gray concrete and deserted. A woman in a uniform takes your passport and disappears for fifteen minutes. Only Moldovans and Romanians cross here, and probably not one of them comes for pleasure. After that, to the right, is a village on a slope. Several houses atilt; the rest have fallen. The earth sank and took a few dozen farms with it. On an untouched scrap of ground is a church outlined against the sky. The hills are long, low, green. In an occasional valley you can see a village, which at a distance resembles a camp: the houses all the same size, shape, and color, and all topped with the same asbestos tile. They look like tents of bleached canvas. Nothing stands apart; they are all of them together. Then you have nothing until the next village. Endless green, a gray blotch of cramped habitations, more green, more green, and again a clump of cement squares kept in place by an invisible perimeter.

The average salary here: twenty-five dollars. A dollar is about thirteen Moldovan lei. Moldovan bills are small and faded. Stephen the Great is on every one of them, with some official landmark on the back, a church or monastery. In Moldova there are 130 official landmarks. The list fits on one nine-by-twelve-inch page of the Moldovan atlas I bought in Chişinău. Half go back only to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The bills are generally threadbare. I spent not a little time wondering how the ATMs dealt with them. The machines gave me stacks of crumpled, limp, greasy, torn banknotes, but the sum was always correct. Until then I had thought that an ATM could count new bills only, or nearly new — or at least those that were still a little crisp. There are also coins, though few people use them. The fifty-bani piece is quite pretty: small, a matte gold color, with clumps of grapes on the back, in a lame attempt to convey prosperity. The cheapest cigarettes, Astras, cost two lei; the most expensive, Marlboros, sixteen.

You go to Cahul from the Sud-Vest Bus Station. It's at the edge of Chişinău, where the white apartment buildings end and the monotony of the hills begins. Under a metal overhang waits a solitary bus. The south is churchmouse-poor. The world ends there, and the best a person can do is move to Romanian GalaŢi.

Moldova is like an inland island. In order to get anywhere, the country recently obtained from Ukraine five hundred meters of Danube shoreline not far from Giurgiuleşti at the very south. But the big trucks still must grind through Ukraine and Poland to get to the Berlin and Frankfurt of their dreams. On the bus to Cahul, the passengers are all friendly. They share fruit. In exchange, they are glad for a slug of Ukrainian beer, Chernihiv, in a liter plastic bottle. They ask about everything and tell about themselves. They cannot fathom why someone would travel to Cahul or any other place. "But we have nothing there," they say.

On the day the Lord God distributed the earth to the human race, the Moldovan overslept. When he woke, it was too late. "And what about me, Lord?" he asked sadly. God looked down upon the sleepy, pitiful Moldovan and tried to think, but nothing came to Him. The earth had been divided up, and, being Lord God, He couldn't go back on His decisions, let alone start transplanting populations. Finally He waved a hand and said, "Too bad. Come on, then, you can stay with me in Paradise." So goes the legend.

When you travel to Cahul or any other place here, the legend rings true. The monotony suggests eternity. Continual green, continual fecundity, the land undulating, the horizon rising and falling, showing us only what we expect, as if not wishing to cause us the least unpleasantness. Grapes, sunflowers, corn, a few animals, grapes, sunflowers, corn, cows and sheep, on occasion a garden, and rows of nut trees always on either side of the road. No free space in this scenery, no sudden disjunction, and the imagination, encountering no ambush, soon dozes. Most likely events took place here a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago, but they left no trace. Life seeps into the soil, disperses into the air, burns calmly and evenly, as if confident that it will never burn out.

The stop in Cimişlia was the sort of place that is impossible to recall. Some kind of nothingness that for a moment attempted to be a bus station. A concrete apron open to the whistling wind at one end and closed off by a building at the other. Grayness, dust, and heat. The beer tap at the bar was a rubber hose wrapped with wire. Farther inside, everything was thrown together, layered haphazardly, by whim. Part dwelling, part rubbish heap; a dark, narrow, low area full of welded iron struts, pieces of sheet metal, laminated panels, all discarded from the start, to get the ruining over with early. The despair of objects despised. People sat, ate, drank, and waited, yet seemed naked, exposed to the wounding edges of all the junk.

A cart waiting at an intersection, hitched to a donkey. Nothing in the vicinity. It was only farther on and lower, where the cornfield ended, that the cement village appeared, gray. A woman got off the bus, pulling a cage thing on two wheels. A small bag was attached to it. Cage and bag were both homemade. A girl was waiting for her. They hugged, as if after a long separation. Then they climbed onto the cart. The two bigger, together, than the entire vehicle. The brown donkey made for the village. It seemed a game, because woman and girl hardly fit on what looked like something stolen from a child's merry-go-round.

What to say about Cahul? From there it's a couple of kilometers to the Romanian border, and then you're off to GalaŢi, by the Danube. On the main street in Cahul you felt the proximity of the border. Cars passed with a rumble, and in the pubs the melancholy kings of life warmed themselves in the air. They ordered Moldovan cognac, drank it by the glass, but their faces didn't move. They were able only to move their mouths, that was it; the rest was permanently frozen. They adjusted their gold chains and made sure people were looking. They even kept their cars running, so everyone would know that they had plenty of gas. Cahul at first glance: a hick town on the border, the nervous indolence of two-bit confidence men driving in circles to kill time.