Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

By Bicaz-Chei it was almost dark. The walls of the ravine were several hundred meters and we drove as if through a giant cave. I was in awe of this wonder of nature but at the same time wouldn't have missed the moment of our crash for anything. My driver muttered curses and punched the steering wheel when he lacked power and for several dozen meters had to stare at the silver rear of a Seat Ibiza with a Budapest license plate. At the mountain pass were stalls with handmade goods for tourists. Then we descended. After one curve, a herd of horses on the asphalt. Some with bells. We swerved left, directly into the path of an oncoming bus. Both we and the bus managed to stop athwart the road. Apparently this was normal, because my driver made the sign of the cross only three times, and we continued at the previous speed. But now he crossed himself each time he passed. I got out on the main street in Gheorgheni. Two men got into the car, both like the driver, only less brown and with thicker chains. I saw him give them large packs of bills, ten-thousand-lei notes, which throughout our drive had rolled back and forth in the backseat.

And that was all. Part two might have taken place in the evening, in Slovakia somewhere. In a roadside pub, let's say, between šariš and Zemplén, where two truck drivers ate potato pancakes with braised liver and onions. They drank tea and looked at a dripping faucet topped by a gold pheasant. From the small room by the bar, every now and then, a dark-haired young woman came out. She ordered four borovičkas and disappeared with the shot glasses behind a wood partition from which wafted cigarette smoke and male laughter. Each time she appeared for a new round, she whispered with the barmaid at length, as if wanting to put off the moment of her return. Only when voices were raised through the flimsy wall did she break off her nervous, rapid chatter. I couldn't figure out if the drinks on the tray belonged to her, or why she was serving those loud, invisible men. Coaxing them to commit a crime — or perform a good deed? Because she paid for each and every round, pulling from the tight pocket of her jeans rolls of red hundreds. All this happened in a place and season different from those I'm trying to summon now. Most likely it was between Nemecká and Predajná, on the road to Banská, and it was winter.

With events that have passed there is no problem, provided we don't attempt to be wiser than they are, provided we don't use them to further our own ends. If we let them be, they turn into a marvelous solution, a magical acid that dissolves time and space, eats calendars and atlases, and turns the coordinates of action into sweet nothingness. What is the meaning of the riddle? What is the use to anyone of chronology, sister of death?

At midnight in Kisvárda, bass speakers rumbled, and boys revved up and made their tires squeal, to stop ten meters further on. In the sultry night at the border, their shaved skulls glowed like milky lightbulbs. We were seeking a place to sleep, but this town had insomnia. The proximity of the border drove away sleep. In suburbs, the hedges of gaudy villas built in a month or a week. Vampire pistachio, rabid rose, venomous yellow. Downtown was old, hidden among trees full of deep shadows that swallowed up alleyways. But the crowd at Krucsay Marton Street, insect-like in its movements yet also lethargic, brought to mind a party of conquistadors at an aborted conquest. Or a herd of animals that found itself in the city but could derive no benefit from it. The young men shifted here and there, engaged, sniffed each other, parted, and again approached, joined by unseen threads of business, fear, need. They circled in the light like moths. The neurosis of the border: swift victory, swift defeat. Twenty kilometers farther on was Záhony, the only way from Hungary to Ukraine, so everything here budded, swelled, inflated, gathered strength. At the Hotel Bastya, a huge bleach blonde from another time wouldn't take dollars or marks, only forints, which we didn't have.

The hotel outside the city had Paris in its name, or Paradise. It looked like a set for a local remake of Caligula: plaster fountains, statues, plush, drapery. In the parking lot, the black gleaming fat asses of BMWs and Mercedes. A guy whose eyes were both empty and sensitive told us there were no rooms. But he took forints from his pocket and sold them to us at a relatively decent rate of exchange. We asked him who was staying here, Hungarians only or Ukrainians too? He regarded us as if we were children. "Ukrainians?" he replied in English. "They aren't European people."

We drove in the direction of Vásárosnamény and suddenly found ourselves in darkness and silence. Passing Ilk and Anarcs, we could hear the sound of sleepers breathing behind wooden shades in the windows of the low houses, and we could smell the nocturnal damp rising from the gardens. In the town we knocked long at a hotel door before a sleepy porter in carpet slippers opened for us. On the lobby walls were trophies: a zebra skin, the stuffed head of an antelope, exotic antlers. In the dimness of a side corridor, a spotted thing that could have been a leopard. Aside from the woman who finally turned on the lights in the kitchen and this porter, there was not a soul in the hotel.

Sometimes I get up before sunrise to watch the way the dark thins out and objects slowly reveal themselves, the trees, the rest of the landscape. You can hear the river below and roosters in the village. The light of dawn, cold and blue, gradually fills the world, and it's the same in every place I've been. The dark pales into the district of Sękowa, in the town of Sulina, on the edge of the Danube Delta — and everywhere time is made of night and day. I drink coffee and picture the light of another place.

IT'S THE MIDDLE of November, and still no snow. For two months I've been preparing for Hungary but am not yet prepared. I think of the northeast, of driving to Szabolcs-Szatmár, because winter must come eventually. I recall the road in Hidasnémeti and how almost a year ago on the day before New Year's Eve we crossed the border in rain. A wet December covered Zemplén like a curtain. Hungary was naked; the black trees hid nothing. Perhaps that is why we were constantly getting lost — in Gönc, Telkibánya, Bózsva, Pálháza, Hollóháza, Kéked, Füzér. The semitransparent land a labyrinth. In the summer this seemed a region of endless noon, even at night. Streetlights in the towns and villages burned long tunnels through the dark. Behind the fences, in muggy gardens among the leaves of walnut and apricot trees, flickered the pale fire from television screens. Now an aqueous light filled all the places that in the summer had lain in shadow. Tokaj was as empty and flat as an old stage set. The Bodrog and the Tisa had lost their smell. Calmly and ruthlessly the weather had taken over. Actually, little had changed since the time when there were no houses here, no cities, and no names. The weather, like the oldest religion, then reigned equally over Beskid, Zemplén, the swamp below the Tisa, ErdŐhát, Maramureş, the Transylvanian Hills, and all the other locations in which I spent months in the vain hope of seeing them as they really were. Rain in Mátészalka, rain in Nagykálló, rain in Nyírbátor. Soggy yards with deep hoofprints of hogs; stripped plots; gardens glistening like glass; houses lower and lower, as if pulled into the soft soil. In Cigánd or Dombrád, on both sides of the road, a chain of puddles looked like flat scraps of gray sky. But that could have been in Gönc as well, or anywhere in Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine. And not a soul in sight. As in a dream, long streets with single-story buildings on either side and no business, no pedestrians, vehicles, or dogs.