Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

We said goodbye, and I went for a bucket to draw water from a well.

It's night, rain is falling, and I am remembering all this for the hundredth time. Ádám Bodor and the Sinistra district are a transparency superimposed over an actual Maramureş and Bukovina, and to both clings the flickering and vital substance of my thoughts, my love, my fear. Sinistra won't let me sleep. On the shelf, side by side, A History of Ukraine, A History of Bulgaria, A History of Hungary, with many smaller books and accounts, along with the History of Slovakia and Eliade's The Romanians —but to no effect. I read them all before bed and finally drift off, but not once have I dreamt of Jan Hunyadi or Czar Ferdinand, of Vasile Nicola Ursu, called Horea, or Vlad ţepeş, of Father Hlinka or Taras Shevchenko. I dream, at most, of the enigmatic Sinistra district. Of the uniforms of nonexistent armies. Of old wars in which no one truly perishes. I dream of white limestone ruins and mustached border guards, and when you cross those borders, everything changes and nothing changes. I dream of banknotes with the portraits of heroes on one side and romantic windswept crags on the other. I dream of coins too. And of cigarette packs for cigarettes I never smoked. And of gas stations on plains, all of them like the one in that suburb of the Slovenské Nové Mesto, and of Red Bull with the inscription špeciálne vyvinutû pre obdobie zvûšenej psychickej alebo fyzyckej námahy, "developed especially for periods of increased mental and physical exertion." I dream of moldering watchtowers in wastes and cyclists taking their rusted bikes over hill after hill to places whose names can be said in at least three languages, and I dream of horse harnesses and people and food and hybrid landscapes and all the rest.

Yes, the rain falls on all these places, on Maramureş, on my dreams, on Sinistra, on Spišské Podhradie on that day, Friday, July 21, when we stopped at the muddy parking lot beside the Morgečanka. A one-floor building ran along the only street. We took a narrow sidewalk and came upon a yellow synagogue. Its facade was crowned by four spherical tin cupolas. The vaulted windows were all black and dead, as if they had been taken from a nineteenth-century factory. In the span between the place of worship and the houses you could see hills and the distant towers of Spišská Kapitula. On a slope above the town shone the white ruins of a castle, so large and bright they resembled a kind of atmospheric caprice, an angular stacking of cumuli or a mirage imported from the sky of a land that had long ceased to exist. A car went by, another, then stillness. The gray rear of a škoda vanished in the green shade of trees, but it was really vanishing in time. Taking a tunnel dug into immobility. The road cut through the town as through a mountain, a foreign territory that graciously allowed such passage. From the low house at the turn, a dark, squat woman came out, tossed soapy water on the asphalt, and scrubbed away all trace of the vehicles.

A few steps on, I saw through a low open window the interior of a large room. Someone had begun work and stopped. A fresh brick wall across the center. A TV on, somewhere in the back: blue flickering in the dimness. By the new wall, a billiard table. Several balls stopped in mid-play. It was too dark for me to see their colors. The smell of wet plaster and mildew. Beyond the wall, beyond the dark and the burble of the television, you could hear men's voices raised. Then I saw them, in a gap between the houses. They were arguing over an upturned wagon. One was turning a spoked wheel, another was gesturing, shaking his head: the thing was garbage, worthless, they had to start over. The men were dark, stocky, animated, as if their bodies did not feel the inertia around them, as if they inhabited another, weightless space. That was definitely it. They lived in the old Jewish quarter, at the edge of a Slovak town, at the foot of a Hungarian castle, so in order to exist and not disappear, they had had to create their own rules, their own special theory of relativity, and a gravity that would keep them on the surface of the earth and not let them fall into the interstellar void, into the vacuum of oblivion.

We went back to our car and drove on. The squat woman again came out of her house with her bowl of suds. The Morgečanka flowed below us on the right. On the left rose the ridge of Drevenik. Outside the town, on the slope, on terraces carved along the slope, stood their homes. Not the homes of others, not ancient homes, homes inherited, but their very own. Like children's drawings, so simple, small, and fragile. Like ideas only just forming. Fashioned of barely stripped pine logs, more poles than logs, not thicker than a man's arm, and with gable roofs all tarred. They were so modest, the most you could do in them was sit and wait as time elapsed between one event and the next. They leaned against each other, piled and climbing like a pueblo of wood. From the thin chimneys curled resinous smoke. The jumble of yards, rummage, the vivid conglomeration of stuff seemingly useless and exhausted covered the ground like postindustrial vegetation. It could have been the day in which they appeared or the day in which they departed. Below, along the shaded road, children played. The grownups stood and talked of grownup matters, perhaps about the foreigners who passed through every now and then. Here everything belonged to these people. I had no idea that a space could be so unequivocally and unconditionally owned without doing it injury. A little farther on, quite alone, stood a girl in a red dress. Very pretty, she was looking to one side, in a direction in which not a thing was happening. I saw her for a moment; then, in the rearview mirror, the red flame went out.

"INFESTED WITH LICE and placid, we should seek the company of animals, squat beside them for a thousand years, breathe the air of the stable not the laboratory, die from disease not medicine, keep within the borders of our wild and sink mildly into it."

All day, it blew from the south. Under the sky's blue glaze, the dry light etched black outlines on objects. On such days, the world is as delineated as a cutout. Look too long in one place and you could go blind. The air carries a dazzle we are unaccustomed to here. The African, Mediterranean light flows over the Carpathian range and descends on the village. The landscape is stripped, transparent. In the leafless branches you can see abandoned nests. High up, along the edge of a meadow burned to bronze, a herd of cattle. Then they have vanished in the woods, where it's still, dark, and where green brambles spread. The animals retreat a few thousand years, leave our company, return to themselves, until in a day or two someone finds them and drives them home.

"We should seek the company of animals, squat beside them." I read this in July. In August, I went to see the village where Emil Cioran was born. Never able to accept that an idea is an abstract thing, I had to go to Răinari. Across the Gorgons, across the Ukrainian and Romanian Bukovina, past Cluj and Sibiu, I reached the southern border of Transylvania. Right after the last houses of the village, the Carpathians began. Literally. The way was flat, then immediately you climbed by cattle path, stopping to catch your breath every several steps. To the north, in a gray mist, lay Transylvania. The steep, warmed meadows above Răinari smelled of cow dung. It hadn't rained for many days, and the earth exuded its accumulated odors.

A few days later we witnessed the evening return from the pastures. Along the road from Păltiniş, in the red rays of the sun, came hundreds of cows and goats. Over the herds rose heat and stink. Grizzled, wide-horned cows led the way. People stood in the open gates of the paddocks and waited. All this took place in silence, without yelling, without pushing. The animals separated themselves from the herd and entered their pens. They disappeared in the twilight of shaded yards, and the carved stable doors closed after them in a very civilized way. Enormous buffalo shone like black metal. Two steps of theirs equaled a cow's three. They were monsters, demons. The wet, quilled muzzles brought to mind some distant, sensual mythology. In a jerky trot, the goats came last. Mottled and animated, both. Goat reek hung over the herd. The asphalt shone from cow slobber.