Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

IHAVE COUNTED THE stamp marks in my passport. In seven years, 167, but there ought to be more, because some of the officials were too lazy to lift a finger. They waved me past in Oradea, for example. A couple of days later, I returned through Satu Mare; no one else at the crossing, noon, but they said, "Pull over, leave your car." Nodding for me to follow into a glass hangar, a hothouse, fifty degrees Celsius, Amazonia. A door, another, then finally the control center, ten dead computers, a guy with his feet on the desk and a pile of sunflower seeds. He gnawed the entire time. He did take his feet off the desk. We were alone; the others had left, no doubt to the sentry box, lest someone dangerous sneak through. I understood a little— Cinde? unde? intrare, ştampila —but played dumb. He inspected my passport from every angle, from the back, from the front, upside down, my driver's license too, my registration, my carte verde, and finally told me to go out in the corridor. I watched him through the glass door. Again the feet up on the desk, and more sunflower seeds. He was waiting for me to soften in this oven, to confess to spying, smuggling, having plastic surgery done, and to be willing to wipe away these crimes with the help of a few dollars. I leaned against the wall, shut my eyes, and pretended to sleep on my feet. After half an hour he called me back and again said something, but I answered in Polish that it wasn't my fucking fault if his colleagues in Oradea had failed to do their job. In this vein we conversed. At last he threw me a look of reproach, handed me my documents, and waved me away.

So they don't always stamp, but neither do they always give you a hard time if you didn't get stamped. There's no rule. The Hungarians sometimes won't stamp but then won't fuss, they just make this slow, heavy gesture, my favorite, which means, Screw the lot of you. Generally I like Hungarian border guards. Particularly at Sátoraljaújhely in the summer. They're lazy, a bit unbuttoned-unbuckled, holsters hanging carelessly, but they move with dignity, as if to say, Once this was all ours, but you wanted Trianon, so now you have to stand in this stupid line. I say "jo napot" to them, and they let me by. This jo napot I owe to a border guard on a train at a crossing at LŐkösháza. I was returning then from Sibiu, and it was something like five in the morning. The man appeared at the end of a corridor, and my heart sank. He was two and a half meters high, had a head shaved bald, wore a field jacket much too small for him, and carried an enormous gun at his side. A dog of war, a mutant mercenary. I sat in my compartment, put my hands on my knees, and held my breath. Then the door opened, I saw a big smile, and heard, in Polish, "Hello, your humble servant — is that how you say it? Any drugs, weapons, pornography, Semtex? No? Thank you. Toodle-oo — is that how you say it?" And he was gone.

But the Romanians are no worse. Or the Ukrainians, or the Slovaks. Even Austrians can be cool. Occasionally someone slips a cog — like the Slovenian at the border in Hodoš who insisted on knowing how many dinars we were bringing in, because he had forgotten that for the past ten years his country was part of Yugoslavia. Occasionally someone draws a blank — like the Greek at Corfu who couldn't believe that we had spent two weeks in Albania for pleasure and who looked at our dirty underwear under a strong light to find the answer to the mystery.

Yes, 167 stamps, and if you include the stamps not made, a good 200. Red, violet, green, black; smeared, with a word or initial added in ballpoint pen, with pictures of antique locomotives, automobiles, with childlike outlines of planes and ships, because it is all childishness, a game of tag, blindman's buff, hide-and-seek, a pointless amusement that, once set into motion, cannot stop. Some stamps are indistinct, as if a carved potato were used, an amateur printing kit, or even as if I had made the mark myself with chalk or a fountain pen, as a joke.

I wonder what the stamp of Moldavia is like. That is to say, the Republic of Moldova, east of the Prut, its capital Chişinău. I must find out. I hope it's green. That's how I picture the country: green hills, with a forest now and then. Gardens and plots in the sun. Watermelon, paprikas, and grapevines growing. In the side streets of old Chişinău, the shade of chestnut trees. The cuisine, I understand, is rich, hard to digest, but delicious. The only problem: no vodka on the menu; instead, a sweetish, heavy brandy. According to one German newspaper, the most important thing in the Moldovan economy is the trade in human organs. Generally they sell their own, but sometimes those of foreigners. I'll go in the summer. I love traveling to little-known countries. Then I return, consult books, ask people, and gather a mountain of facts to determine where I actually was. It's hopeless, because in time everything becomes stranger, resembling a dream within a dream. I have to look at my passport to verify that those countries even exist. Because what sort of countries are they anyway? Memories of a dead past, projects for a dim future, vague potentials, promises, and "We'll show you yet." I ought to cross a true border, to a place where women walk in snakeskin boots and nothing reminds you of anything, where life is suddenly interrupted and carnival begins — or some kind of trauma, or transgression. My 167 stamps aren't worth a rat's ass; I always return as clueless as when I left. Everywhere guys stand at street corners and wait for something to happen, everywhere seats on trains have holes from cigarette burns, and people putter and watch calmly while history presses the gas pedal to the floor. I'm wasting my time and my money. I might as well not leave my house; I have everything here.

Wherever I go, I see Gypsies. In Prekmurje, I used a tank of gas in search of them, because I was fed up with that buttoned-down country and with the Slovenians, traitors all to the Slavic pigsty, but I found not one Gypsy, though I had read they were definitely there. Hiding, most likely, having smelled me from a hundred kilometers away, me with my love of disintegration, my sentimental fondness for whatever doesn't look the way it should. They smelled me even as I left my house, and back in Slovakia, when I passed their slums outside Zborov, a place by the road, on a hill, an ad hoc, slapped-together thumbing of the nose at the charms of order and plenty. It never fails to thrill my soul that one can say fuck you to the world and practice the ancient art of rag picking in the midst of the postmodern and postindustrial. The women carry tied bundles of twigs, the men drag carts heaped with scrap metal, the kids pull bottles from garbage. In front of plywood huts stand cars without wheels, carpets are drying, and plastic bags flutter everywhere. Basically these people are doing what we all do: trying to get by. Yet they don't pride themselves, don't write down their history, preferring their legends, folktales, fables passed from generation to generation, their "once upon a time" instead of, say, "on the thirteenth of December of the aforesaid year in Copenhagen." And so wherever I go, I look for them, for that living image of Mediterranean-Christian civilization, that nation without land, those people who, the moment something is built, must discard it, burn it for fun or in despair, and move their portable kingdom to a place where the white European horde heaves a little less with hatred of them. I look for the Gypsies — as in Slovenian Prekmurje — and am disappointed when I don't see them, feel that I've strayed too far and it's time to go back. I am related to them, in an illegitimate way: I learned how to put words together, and my words survive somewhere, and yet I cannot create a credible account. My nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech all detach from the world, fall off like old plaster, and I return to legend, fable, ballad, to things that truly happened yet are lies, rubbish, metaphoric claptrap. The existence of what I wrote was simply too brief to take on meaning. Or it lived on only in my brain.