Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

Robert also owned a pub. That is, it was jointly owned, but he was the main entrepreneur. We took seats on the veranda. In the center were tables, the bar, and ten computers. Kids sat at the computers — mostly Gypsies, with a couple of Moldovans. The dads could comfortably chat, drink, and keep an eye on their Internet-marauding progeny. We sipped cognac and ate watermelon. Robert said that times had changed and now one had to keep one's children off the street. But things were good otherwise: the borders were open, you could travel, do business, all you needed were a passport, ideas, and connections. You could go to the Chukchi, if you wanted, and sell them Chinese linens. No one would forbid you. It wasn't that bad before, but there were fewer possibilities then. That's what Robert said, over a cognac.

Artur arrived, and Robert invited him to join us. Artur was a king — or baron. His business card read, in English: "Gypsy Baron of Moldova." He had a gray beard down to his belt, braided gray earlocks, and resembled a holy man of distant India. He was fully aware of that heredity and told us that the Nazis had collected the blood of their Gypsy victims, which held exceptional value for them because it was the purest Aryan blood. He said this without expression, entirely confident of our belief in what he said. He made marks on a card, deriving the Russian alphabet from the Sanskrit, and mentioned in passing that women ethnography students from Poland had visited him that summer. Yes, Artur was an important figure. In the courtyard of his palace he had a collection of Soviet samovars and two dusty limousines on flat tires. In the windshield of one limousine was a bullet hole. After he concluded his lecture on the Aryans and Sanskrit, Artur said goodbye, rose, got into a green BMW X5 driven by his son, and took off to attend to his royal duties.

Others slowly gathered, but this was not Moldovan hospitality; it was simple courtesy. They drank two bottles of cognac with us, ate three watermelons, spent three hours of their time, revealed as much of their life as they considered proper, until we went our separate ways, each to his own world.

We returned, according to the itinerary, by minibus. I sat next to the driver. He did some kind of hocus-pocus with the tickets, selling them and collecting them or yelling at passengers to hold them up. I couldn't figure it out. In the middle of an empty field, a woman got on. She cut her leg stepping on a sharp piece of metal and bled. The driver yelled at her for not being careful. He was lean, low-class, neurotic, and drove furiously. After thirty kilometers we were stopped by a patrol. A cop waved a black-and-white-striped stick, and we pulled over. The driver took a twenty-lei bill from a box, got out, walked over to the policeman, and gave him the money. The policeman, wearing a sort of aviator cap, waved us on. It was 150 kilometers to Chişinău, and we were stopped three more times. The same performance each time, this submission to power, acted silently and in full view. The cops' faces stony and dull, the driver's face resigned and resentful. I asked him if it was always this way on this road. "Always," he said. "Ever since the end of the Soviet Union."

The entry point at Leuşeni was as deserted as it had been two weeks before. I was waiting for an acquaintance who was supposed to come from the Romanian side. He was late. No traffic in either direction: no point, apparently, and nowhere to go. There weren't even bicycles loaded with bundles of sticks. Just void, immobility, heat. I stood an hour, an hour and a half, and watched how this small and solitary country ended.

At last Alexandru drove up and stopped on the other side. I waved to him and proceeded to the guard booth. They were pleased to see me, remembered my arrival two weeks before. I imagined that I was the only traveler they had recently let through. I threw my backpack into the trunk, got in, and we drove off. Twenty minutes later, we had passed Huşi.

SO, SPACE IS just a kind of eternal present. The cold air from Ukraine and Russia descends on Romania. My Bucharest friend says in the receiver, in English, "Very, very cold." I try to imagine a naked Danube Delta, blue ice covering the canals, but it's not easy; first I have to cross, mentally, the space that separates me from Sfântu Gheorghe and Sulina: šariš, Zemplén, Szabolcs-Szatmár, Maramureş, Transylvania, Baraganul, Dobruja… I have to imagine chill entering all those places I knew in spring and summer. I have to shake off their heat as a dog shakes off water, because I can't believe that it's freezing now between Samova and NiculiŢel, that the pigs aren't rolling in the dust of the concrete-hard clay yards behind cane fences, and that snow now lies on the thatched roofs of the mud huts along the curved pavement from which you can see Ukraine and the white ships sailing the Chilia arm of the Danube. It is hard to imagine hot dust not rising from the floor of the bus, hard to imagine the poplar grove by the ferry to GalaŢi leafless, empty, devoid of characters drinking vodka at 15,000 lei a flask, purchased in a store sided with sheet metal and hot as an oven. It seems impossible that Bratianu now is completely different, that the drunks have most definitely all gone away, and the dogs too, the pack of scruffy mongrels near the ferry that looked like the younger brothers of the drunks, man and dog equally sad and withered by the sun.

I lack the imagination. For that reason I have to pack, stuff into my pockets odds and ends, passport, money, and go see what it's really like. Whenever the time of year or the weather changes, I have to pack up whatever I can't do without and visit all those places I've been before, to make sure they still exist.

And the ferry to GalaŢi, embarking from the low shore, where gaunt horses once grazed on faded fields? Onboard, among a few newly washed cars, came a faded Dacia pickup carrying a huge sow that stank to high heaven. They must have come a long way, because the animal was covered with shit. I took in the foulness with pleasure as I leaned against the back fender of a black Mercedes in which a clean-shaven guy wearing mirror glasses was sitting with a blonde, gold on her ears, and I looked to the far bank of the Danube, at the big rusty cranes of the port. This was my Romania — this momentary brotherhood of Mercedes, gold, reeking pig, and industrialization whose tragic abandonment was on the same grand scale as its size. In five minutes the sow, the limos, and my group parted company forever.

It gives me no rest, my wish to know the fate of all these scenes that entered my eyes and have remained in my thoughts. What happens to them when I am no longer there? Unless I have taken them with me, immobilized them for all time in my mind, and they will be with me until the end, untouched by the change of seasons and the weather.

What will become of those two characters in dark trousers, white shirts, ties, and shoes that gleamed as if just polished? They extricated me from the middle of Tecuci, a flat and dusty town, took me out for a few kilometers' spin, and with a fountain pen on a scrap of paper wrote "Bacau" so I could have something to wave in the face of the drivers. In the stifling Moldovan dusk, they looked like angels. I didn't ask them for help; they simply appeared because I was tired and lost. Nor were these Orthodox angels. Later I read what was on the reverse side of the makeshift flier they handed me — this sentence among others: "Creaza o buna imagino publica Bisericii Adventiste." My angels were Seventh-Day Adventists and understood me, because in Tecuci they were just as lost as I was.

Now it all seems so simple. Events intersect free of any logic of sequence; they cover space and time in an even, translucent layer. Memory re-creates them from the back, from the front, or sideways, but to them it makes no difference. This is the only way in which meaning will not trip us up, not knock from our hands the thing we were grasping for. Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin? No doubt somewhere along Route 120, somewhere near a place called Tasca, the transition began. I was picked up by a hundred-year-old Audi. Inside, everything hung, peeled, fell apart. Loose wires from the dashboard, strips of upholstery from the ceiling, wind and dust from the floor. The man behind the steering wheel sat in shorts and an undershirt. A gold chain around his neck, yellow flip-flops on his feet. He was brown from the sun; only a little white showed from under his broad watchband. On the rotaries the engine would sputter, so he kept his foot on the gas and didn't slow down when he should have. We were to cross the deepest ravine in Europe. We tried conversing. He was from Satu Mare and hated Hungarians. To show me how much he hated them, he passed, with his wreck, spotless Passats and Cordobas that had Hungarian license plates. The road was not the best for passing, full of curves. He passed uphill, his head out the window to see a meter or two farther. I was afraid but I had a flask of Romanian brandy on me.