Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

And it's the same in Chernivtsi: the ancient light and shade trying to break down the walls, the stucco, to smooth away the complicated surfaces, get rid of all the cornices, pilasters, balconies, oriels. But my memory of Chernivtsi is hazy, because Sashko, in his indescribable hospitality, set such a pace that the next day was like being in a furnace, albeit an inviting furnace. At the bus station, heavyset cabdrivers said that nothing today was going to Suceava. They swung their key rings: car keys, house keys, keys to basements, gates, safes, mailboxes, God knows what else. They rattled this metal and were put out that no one believed them, that no one was willing to go with them to Siret for a lousy fifty, and they stood — or rather, fidgeted and paced — and peered above the crowd, because cabdrivers in that part of the world, even when they are runts, see farther than anyone. It's rough for a guy with wheels who can't give anyone a ride. Ditto in Gorlice, Kolomyia, Delatyn, and Gjirokastër in Albania: they charge as much to take you one kilometer as in Berlin, in these places where the gross national product is $1,500 per capita. They sit in their twenty-year-old Mercedes wrecks, in a line, and no, sorry, German prices only. Zero negotiation.

Heat beat from the sky, no shade, horses digging with their hoofs through overturned garbage cans, men picking their noses, balling the snot, and flicking it into the dust of the street, exactly as our Polish cabdrivers do at their eternal stands. But I had to go to Erind, where the road ended and the Lunxherise massif loomed, unpopulated, a long piece of moon embedded in the wild and lovely body of Albania. They must have seen the need in my eyes, must have sensed it with their seventh cabdriver sense. I got into a green 200, its rear practically touching the ground, and off we went. I had to make it to Erind, so I could understand. We crept uphill — in second gear, second, sometimes in third — the tailpipe clanging on the stones. "There was no shade along the road. Travelers slogged through the dust as if it were mud and gazed at the withered yellow slopes on either side, slopes from which flooding, strong winds and the sun had taken everything that a hungry wretch might grasp at." A fair description. Then the rubble that was Erind. Houses like caves, heat-resistant greenery, and a few kids among white walls, the rest of the people no doubt gone to plantations in Greece. No dogs, not even a chicken, only a monument at the very end, in a small burning square, to fallen partisans, with tombstone photographs in porcelain frames. One of the fallen was Misto Mame, another Mihal Duri — twenty-one and twenty-four, respectively. The cabdriver stood there and waited for me to take it in. He thought I had come for this, because what else was here? To hell with the German prices, I thought to myself as I saluted. The guy had shown me what they valued most in this place. He might not get a passenger here for another two years, so the money divided over that time amounted to nothing.

Sometimes I think that this is how it should be: the entire world's treasury, all the dough of the Frankfurt banks, the vaults of the Bank of England, the virtual funds of corporations circulating in electronic space, the contents of the multilevel underground coffers on Bahnstrasse in Zurich, all the paper, all the ore, the rows of digits coursing through the icy bloodstream of fiber-optic cables, should be thrown out, should lose its value, should be exchanged for zeroes in such loci as Erind, Vicşani, Sfântu Gheorghe, Rozput, Tiszaszalka, Palota, Bajram Curri, Podoliniec, the square in front of the church in Jabłonna Lacka, the train station in Vilmány, the train station in Delatyn at dawn, the grocery store in Livezile, the grocery store in Spišská Belá, the pub in Biertan, the rain in Mediaş, and a thousand others, because the map I look at is a fishnet, a star-studded night sky, an old T-shirt or torn bedsheet, and through all those spots that I visited shines a light stronger than the failing light of simple geography, stronger than the ominous glow of political geography and the moribund glow of economic geography. And nothing will sew up those holes. The future will pass through them like food through a duck, will sift through them like sand through fingers. No big ideas or big fortunes or degenerate time will disturb these places, these rips in the gist and foundation, these traces of my presence. Yes, I know, my attitude is benighted, backward. It's January 11, a quarter after two in the morning, and I'm aware that I'm dreaming of building a reservation of sorts here and that the citizens of the above-mentioned towns and villages, if they got wind of it, would boot me in the ass. But it's unlikely, especially in Erind, that anyone will ever read this. Indeed, a reservation, an open-air museum bathed in everlasting light, that's how I imagine it, desire it, because my heart sinks whenever something disappears from view, with a bend in the road or in growing darkness, and I cannot free myself of the thought that it has disappeared forever and I am the only one who witnessed it and now must tell, tell — assuming that anyone will want to listen. Moreover, all these places are falling apart, totally wrecked, hardly one stone upon another, the remnants of former glory, so this fear of mine is no figment: if I return to where I once was, I may find nothing. It's a characteristic of my part of the world, this continual disappearance mixed half-and-half with progress, this crafty undevelopment that makes people wait for everything, this unwillingness to be the subject of an experiment, this perpetual halfheartedness that lets you hop out of the flow of time and substitute contemplation for action. Whatever is new here is bogus; only when it ages and becomes a ruin does it take on meaning. Boys from Kisvárda, Gorlice, Preszów, and Oradea with their baseball caps on backward imitate black brothers in slums across the ocean, because there's nothing to imitate here. Everything new is a movie that has no connection with the past. And so I prefer the old and choose decay, whose continuity cannot be undermined. In Elbasan on the main street I saw great piles of rags. Commerce, apparently, but it looked like a dump. Women poked through the garbage, which went on for many meters, and spread it out on the pavement, as if seeking the bodies of relatives after a catastrophe. They put rags on, took them off, dug for something better. Two truckloads, and God knows where it came from. Greece, Italy, in any case from a place where it was no longer needed. Ideas and concepts arrive here in the same secondhand condition, particularly those made ad hoc for a distant situation. This is a realm of recycling, and the realm itself will be, in the end, recycled.

Such thoughts afflict me in the evening. The wind blows from the northwest, and the white semicircular edges of snowdrifts lie across the road leading to Konieczna. I should invent a graceful story that begins and ends there, provide a first-aid kit that cleverly soothes the mind, alleviates anxiety, and stills hunger. In the darknesses of life I should come up with one piece of evidence that miraculously points the way to what can be followed, what consoles. But no, not a prayer: the world is here and now and doesn't give a flying fuck about stories. When I attempt to recall one thing, others surface. Romania crawls out from under my childhood, Albania from under my visits to grandparents, and now that I am, as it were, an adult, I end up in a region filled with the earliest scenes of my life. I am over forty, yet it's the same randomness, the same hen houses, coal bins, bins for everything — as if someone were showing slides from the time we played cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. Snow falls on Konieczna, Zdynia, the whole parish of Uście Gorlickie, once called Uście Ruskie. In the monochromatic landscape are shovels of many colors: red, green, blue, yellow. People trying to get to their bins, storage shacks, buildings, outbuildings, where animals and old cars are waiting. Drifts grow at the pass, and no one heads out for the Slovak side. Here too, now, is one of those booths, the size of a kiosk selling magazines: a store, a bar, a currency exchange rolled into one — so says the sign in the window. But there is no one here today, other than the lieutenant in the balaclava, who tells me with a smile that the Slovaks have it better, their snowplows make the rounds every two hours. He is disappointed, I think, when I say that I don't drive, that I came only to watch the snow attempt to eradicate the border, bury the map, and level the Carpathian water gap. A man appears from nowhere with a blue shovel on his shoulder and says, sighing, "Looks like I'll need a tractor." I return to the snow-filled parking lot and think that in a year all this may be gone: the red-and-white crossing gate, the flashing lights, the rubber stamps, the suspense, and the questions: "Anything to declare?" "Destination?" And the dog sniffing for amphetamines and Semtex. And the small talk, the flicker of risk, the usual "Here's how you get to Konieczna…" I will take no delight in their passing.