Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

From the bank along this arm of the Danube, you had a view in both directions. On the right, the river's water flowed slime green. The dark boats anchored in the shallows, their bows and sterns turned slightly upward, were sleek and quaint. In the ever-changing waterscape, among the glinting mirrors of the current, among the tide pools roughened by the breeze, their shapes seemed unreal. Particularly at dusk, when you couldn't tell boat from shadow. They hung in the lucent space like cardboard cutouts, carvings from coal. Bringing to mind remnants of the most ancient night, when they were used to ferry souls. In the Delta I saw nothing more beautiful or more simple.

To the left stretched a village of reeds. Fences, roofs, walls, sheds for cattle and for fowl — all made of dry, hollow stalks. Cut reeds lay loose in piles, were tied into sheaves, stood waiting in ricks. A flat human habitation, since nothing high could be built from such material. Bits of clay had fallen from earth-plastered walls, exposing the construction of poles woven with reeds. The village was like a vast campground. All that these people possessed seemed in constant peril. Barely raised above the ground, barely attached and joined and marked off by fence and stake and a few twigs, Sfântu Gheorghe had a heroic resignation about it: exposed to the elements, filled with uncertainty, doomed to oblivion, it held on to the land as a sparrow's nest holds on to a branch.

Then, just as in Sulina, a bare stretch began and continued to the beach. At its edge, just past the village, stood radar towers. I saw a few camouflage trucks behind an enclosure. I was not drawn to it at all. The military in my part of the world, in times of peace, is always the same: sad and giving off a faint stink. I preferred to keep my distance. The black latticework of the antennas loomed above the huts of reeds and mud. I tried to imagine the tedium of a post like that, the tedium of empty sky and green computer monitors. Card games, booze smuggled in, talk about women, radio stations on which you might catch Western rock and roll or a folk number. Sleepiness, coffee, and no barbarians on the horizon.

But it's quite possible the place was simply a point from which to observe the rest of the world, that monster with no shape or boundary that always lays siege to a people preoccupied with its own existence. I considered the cow patties drying in the sun and tried not to think about history. I couldn't help it, of course. Once again geography had made me prey to all the unclear events, murky pseudo-facts, muttered truths, and unimpeachable falsehoods cobbled together into meaning. Danger indeed lurks beyond the horizon and always has. As we wait in time for what we desire, space brings us unsolicited things: armies or ideas, and there's no escaping them. The age of portable, movable nations, nations whose history depends on an unending present, is long gone. Today there is nowhere we can go to start over, and that's why we live mired in a past that permeates our territories, just as an animal's den is filled with its smell.

The radar was aimed, I am willing to bet, at Turkey.

People lay on the beach. Several sun umbrellas were stuck in the sand, not much larger than rain umbrellas. Otherwise, as far as the eye could see, no shade. The thornbushes on the dunes were shoulder high in places. I walked south along the shore and soon reached the spot where the river current joined the salt water. The Danube, darker, fed into the transparent silver of the waves, like a cloud passing across a mirror. A gleaming black snake swam up on the beach and slithered over the sand toward vegetation, its small and supple presence an apparition on this great bare stage, so I followed. Sensing my shadow, it stopped and coiled. I left it in peace. It waited a moment, then proceeded landward.

Sfântu Gheorghe came alive in the evening, as if everybody had been waiting for the lights to go on. It was no cooler, only darker. People came from the houses, the beach, the boats, from their fishing. The pub under the trees, unable to accommodate them all, resembled a bivouac: dozens, hundreds of people in constant motion, in patches of flickering light, their gestures beginning in light and cut off by a dark that magnified everything. Echoes came from deep in the night, as if the village were next to another village and that next to yet another, as if Sfântu Gheorghe had siblings in this void or were a dull, small planet attempting, without much success, to reflect the sounds and brilliance of planets many times larger than it. The sky now and then flashed mercury. Eto mayak, someone told me in Russian: a lighthouse. The beam, majestic in its repetition, made everything taking place on earth seem random, coincidental. The people expended their energy in quick, nervous bursts, like lizards. I got a Ciuc at the pub and stepped aside to watch the fiesta from a distance, a party whirling about inside a cave. The night pressed in on all sides, so one had to keep moving, talking, shouting over the canned music, clinking glasses, gesticulating, so that the hot dark wouldn't congeal and close up like a scab over a wound. This was a carnival, a European tropics, the fear of the harsh light of day, the bliss of oblivion, everything pierced by the quivering, plangent sound of a clarinet in that scale one encounters south of the Carpathians.

To cool off, I walked to the water, to the dock where the ferry was moored. You could see nothing here. I heard the slap of waves, of fish, smelled the warm, muddy breath of the river, felt its enormous pulse and indifferent presence. I imagined green blood flowing out of the body of the continent, which went on living anyway, as it has done for thousands of years.

I understood the pub frenzy. It was simply a sign of existence. People met in this poor light, drawn like moths, to see if they lived. They had to examine one another and raise a racket. Between the infinite sky and the dwindling land, there was no room for them. At this edge, this swampy island edge, they had to find their image in the eyes of others, for there is nothing worse than nothingness that takes the shape of geography.

Bedbugs bit me through the night, and at dawn I got up and left the old woman's house. The air was blue-gray and a little cooler now, though heat still filled the sandy streets. The flame had been turned off for a moment, but there was no ventilation. Heat oozed from the walls of houses, from the ground, from gardens and fences, it oozed like thick juice from fruit, like the current from a sticky battery. I passed the wreck of a delivery van on four flat tires, the only vehicle in Sfântu Gheorghe. I walked to the end of the village. After the last houses, trash: nonrecyclable plastic, cans, glass, rags, tinfoil, cardboard, old pots, a bucket without a bottom, containers collecting humidity and decay, Tetra Pak and crushed PET bottles as far as the eye could see. The spit of the dump extended into a canal and at the water's surface lost some of its massiveness, spilled in an avalanche of jutting bottle necks, inflated bags, an even mix of wet corrugated board and aluminum wrap, the metal and broken glass resting somewhere lower.

That's when I noticed the cross. It stood in the middle of the dump. It wasn't big, a meter, a meter and a half, fashioned with two rough planks and painted brown. The ends of the horizontal piece had been carefully rounded, to give the raw wood form. No inscription, no base. The thing was simply stuck in the ground. Its neighbors: a pail with holes, a broom, a paint can, a boot coming apart, and a box for Lux soap showing the face of a brunette. Had the cross been here before the dumping began, or had someone planted it in this cemetery of objects? But surely no one in Sfântu Gheorghe hoped for the salvation of things, dared think of their resurrection, their immortality. Probably few believed in their own resurrection — hence the symbiosis of the cross and this inorganic mortuary.