Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

We drove to the Sinistra district. Everything here belonged to the mountain riflemen, to Colonel Puiu Borcan, and, when he died, to Izolda Mavrodin-Mahmudia, also holding the rank of colonel and called Coca for short. From the Baba Rotunda Pass we had a view of Pop Ivan; in the valley crawled narrow-gauge, wood-burning locomotives. The inhabitants of Sinistra wore military dog tags on their chests. Everyone who came here and stayed was given a new name. From time to time, Coca would organize an ambush atop Pop Ivan against Mustafa Mukkerman, who carried mutton by truck from somewhere in Ukraine to Thessaloniki or even Rhodos, but besides mutton in the refrigerator he sometimes carried people in heavy coats. Comrades from Poland kept Coca informed about Mukkerman's movements. He was half Turk, half German, and weighed three hundred kilograms.

Diluted denatured alcohol was used here to dry mushrooms, and it was drunk with the fermented juice of forest fruits. The frosted glass for the Sinistra prison was made by Gabriel Dunka in his workshop: he frosted a pane by putting it in a sandbox and walking on it with his bare feet for hours. He was thirty-seven and a dwarf. One rainy day he picked up a naked Elvira Spiridon in his delivery van and for the first time in his life smelled a woman's body, but loyalty triumphed over desire and he turned her in, because it was only by accident that she hadn't climbed into Mukkerman's truck.

All this supposedly took place near Sighetu MarmaŢei, but I learned about it only two years later, in Ádám Bodor's Sinistra District, and the story has pursued me since. Pursued me and replaced the flat space on the map. Once again, the visible pales before the narrated. Pales but does not disappear. It only loses its force, its intolerable obviousness. This is a special quality of auxiliary countries, of second-order, second-tier peoples: the ephemeral tale in different versions, the distorted mirror, magic lantern, mirage, phantom that mercifully sneaks in between what is and what ought to be. The self-irony that allows you to play with your personal fate, to mock it, parrot it, turning a defeat into heroic-comic legend and a lie into something that has the shape of salvation.

There was no water where we finally turned in for the night. The manager took a flashlight and led us down cold corridors. He explained that the pump was broken and the mechanic was three weeks now en route from Suceava or Iaşi. He explained that the man who lived in this house was a foreigner, had come from far away, and drank the local cheap vodka to cope with his loneliness, so he didn't maintain the place, but the mechanic was certain to arrive soon.

It was cold. We lay down in our clothes and turned out the light. The Romanian night entered through the window. I tried to sleep but, instead of going with the flow of time and sleep, swam upstream in my thoughts, back through that long day after we crossed the border at Petea. Black watchtowers stood on the baking plain. Soon Satu Mare began, walls peeling from age and heat, the shade of huge trees along the streets, and church cupolas in extended green vistas. Hungary was behind us, the lowland sadness of ErdŐhát was behind us, and although it was equally flat across the border, I felt a definite change, the air had a different smell, and, with each kilometer, the light of the sky grew more ruthless. The distant shadow of the Carpathians on the horizon marked the limit to that blaze, framed it, and we drove on through a thick suspension of sun. Horse-drawn carts on the highway, the animals covered with sweat. Vintage automobiles carrying on their roofs pyramids of bags stuffed with wool. The dark gleaming bodies of people. A strong wind. Maybe that's why their houses looked so poor and impermanent on the great plain.

I lay in my unheated room and went over all this, just as now I am trying to remember that room and the morning when I rose and went outside to see that there had been a frost overnight and that its white was disappearing in patches of sun. People on the way to their wells with buckets looked at me, pretending that they weren't, that they were going about their business, that they were blinded by the light of the new day. Now, remembering, I see that a story could have begun exactly there. For example: "On that day, when I saw my father for the last time, because three men put him in a car and took him somewhere, on that day I touched the breast of Andrea Nopritz." Or: "On that day, Gizella Weisz set out, and everyone praised her. Even great Comrade Onaga looked deep into her eyes and said, I understand, our comrade has noble and lofty plans." On that day, that morning, the man who broke the pump might have appeared. He might have approached by the narrow village street between the wooden fences to ask what I was doing in front of his house. Swollen, with bloodshot eyes, with rumpled clothes, a kind of rustic Geoffrey Firmin leaning nonchalantly on a railing demanding to know what the hell brought me to this Pîrteştii de Jos or Pîrteştii de Sus, to the house where he lived, to observe him in this state at six thirty in the morning, as over their fences Germanized Poles were watching, and Romanianized Germans, and Polonized Ukrainians, the whole mongrel bunch from abroad, that golden dream of the followers of the cult of multiculturalism… A cynical monologue might have ensued, or a neurotic monologue, as buckets clattered in wells among the various morning noises appropriate to that backwater locale, the cackling of hens, the hewing of firewood, the shuffling and slapping of bovine backsides, and the 6:35 rusty passenger train to Suceava trundling through the valley. That would make a good beginning for the development of a tale, the unfolding of a fate, a trip back in time, when events shine brighter the more removed they are from today. But the man of the broken pump never approached me, and his life has remained in the realm of guesswork — that is to say, of complete freedom.

So I went up to an actual man, who was standing quietly by his fence and smoking. We started a conversation. The passenger train to Suceava was in fact trundling through the valley. The man, about sixty, stocky, in a faded twill suit, resembled most of the men I'd seen in my life. The smoke from his cigarette was blue, then gray, then gone. He talked. I listened and nodded. He said times were bad, had been better under Ceauşescu: there was justice then, equality, work, and order in the streets. I knew this tale but listened to it once again — avidly, because there is something beautiful in our traveling so far from home and seeing that so little changes. He told about the night visits of Securitate and, in the same breath, about the factories now shut. I asked him what he knew of the famous resettlement, in which seven thousand villages disappeared and their people were moved to concrete apartment blocks. Yes, he knew, had even seen the planes used to take the photographs that helped in the planning of that operation, but no price is too high to pay for justice and equality. I said nothing, for what could I say, seeing as I had come here, to this fence, as a visible sign of inequality, that I had come and would depart whenever I liked, leaving the old man in the wrecked suit holding a cheap cigarette on a rough road between two ancient houses made of wood, which had survived by some whim of history, though their inhabitants hadn't particularly wanted them to survive. I kept my mouth shut and listened to his pining for the dictatorship. Power must manifest itself in a concrete figure, and once it achieves that embodiment, it abides beyond good and evil. We are all orphaned children of some emperor or despot. I gave the man a Sobieski Super Light. The sun had now climbed above the green line of the hills, and I felt that my freedom to come and go meant shit here, was worth nothing.