Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

This is my Hungary; I cannot help it. I realize that it all belongs to the past and may not actually have ever taken place. I realize that eighty-five kilometers farther and eighty-two years later is Budapest, then Esztergom, et cetera, and the glory and the power and everything that gets collected over the centuries in minds that want to live beyond their allotted time. But my Hungary is in Abony, where I didn't even stop. No doubt because the blind musician could show up in any of those places that no one knows and where no one ever goes, places never mentioned but that make the world what it is. Only a miracle saved him and his son from oblivion. "I took the picture on a Sunday. The music woke me. That blind musician played so wonderfully, I hear him to this day" (André Kertész).

I can take my Hungary with me wherever I go, and it will lose none of its vividness. It's a negative, or a slide through which I shine the light of memory. In Tornyosnémeti, two men emerged from the dark and began to play. One had a harmonica, the other a guitar with a dull sound. It was freezing cold and foggy. The waiting tour buses formed a black wall. The guitarist's fingers must have hurt. The music, numb, could barely leave the instruments. I didn't make out the melody, only a hurried, nervous beat. A string broke, but they played on, with sad eyes and the stubbornness typical of hopeless enterprises. Then we tried conversing, in a borderland mix of Hungarian and Slovak. It wasn't money they wanted but to change it. They had a handful of Polish coins, tens, twenties, fifties, collected no doubt from our truckers. They sold them to me for forints. We said good-bye, and they were gone. They might have been from Gönc. The younger man, the harmonica player, could have been one of the two kids whom three years ago the bartender refused to serve at the pub next to the Hussite House. I'd ask, if I could, how that skinny one is doing, the one with the homespun coat over his bare back, the one I arm-wrestled that summer and drank with to the health of Franz Josef. If the musicians were from Gönc, they would know him. And know the man who was brown as chocolate, round as a ball, and naked to the waist, who every day went down the main street in a small horse-drawn two-wheel cart. I can still hear the muffled clop of horseshoes on asphalt softened by the heat.

It's winter now, and I need such sounds. From my window I see a two-horse team and, on the cart, four men bundled up. The horses, though shod, step uncertainly on the ice. They all appear out of the mist and in a moment are gone again. If only it were summer — then, instead of returning to their Pętna or Małastów they could head for Konieczna and there by some miracle get around the guards and rules and make it to the Slovak side. And, in Zborov, say, they could blend in with the locals, being exactly like them in style, dress, expression, general appearance. May would be a good time; there's grass for the horses and only occasionally a touch of frost in the morning. I'd go with them, to look at the passing world and at their faces, so different and so familiar. I'd sit to the side like a ghost and listen to their words. Probably they would talk about how things change as they travel, but not so that a person feels at any point the bump of a border. Slovak names would imperceptibly become Hungarian, then Romanian, Serbian, Macedonian, finally Albanian — assuming that we keep more or less to country lanes that go along the twenty-first line of longitude. I'd sit to the side and drink with them all the varieties of alcohol that change with the changing land: borowiczka, körte palinka, cujka, rakija, and eventually, around Lake Ohrid, Albanian raki. No one would stop us, and no one would stare as we rested at a place off the thoroughfare. That region is full of forgotten roads. Turn down one, and time slackens, as if it has evaded someone's supervising eye. Time wears away gradually, like the clothes of the men traveling by cart. What seems ready for discarding persists as it degrades and fades, until the silent end, the moment when existence shifts invisibly to nonexistence. My mind in this way wandered after they vanished into the mist. I see them cross the Hungarian Lowlands, Transylvania, the Banat, as if they were born there and returning home from the marketplace, from a visit, from work in the field or in the woods. Time parts before them like the air and closes again as they pass.

Whenever I come home from Romania in the summer, the undercarriage of the car is crusted with cow shit. One evening, as I was descending the switchbacks from Păltiniş and found myself among the first buildings of Răinari, I heard under my wheels a series of sharp, loud splashes. The entire road was covered with green diarrhea. Moments before, a herd had come down from its pasture. I could see the last of the cattle finding their paddocks. They stood under the gates with lifted tails and shat. Had I braked, I would have slid as on ice in winter. Cows and steers turned this crossing into a skating rink. Completely filled with crap, a route that Sibiu society would usually take to their vacation dachas in the mountains. Crap from one shoulder to the other. Crap drying in the last rays of the setting sun. People on motorcycles had the worst of it. The animal world had invaded the heart of the human world, which was fitting. Now whenever I drive at dusk through villages in Transylvania, the Puszta, or my own Pogórze, I think of that splashing, think that we have not been altogether abandoned.

Another time, before Oradea, I turned off Highway 76 and got lost in a tangle of village roads. It might have been' Tăad, or Drăgeşti, I don't remember. In any case, in the distant east you could see the gentle cones of the mountains the Hungarians call Királyerdö, the Romanians Pădurea Craiului, and we Poles the Royal Forest. It was late afternoon, and the slanting light threw gold on everything and lengthened shadows. In an hour I was to leave Transylvania and enter the Great Hungarian Plain, so I wanted to have a last look. And ended up in this village. The houses, side by side, were arranged in a wide ring. In the center was a commons overgrown with young birches. A village, but it was like driving through a grove. The slender trees shone like honey. Here and there the gleam of a white wall, but no person in sight, only heavy pink pigs trotting through the scenery. Maybe ten of them. They sniffed, their snouts to the ground, looking for prey, as if they reigned here and were tracking down a foe. In the golden light, their hundred-kilogram hulks were an exquisite blasphemy. Clean, as if they didn't live in a sty. Under the dull and bristled skin, flesh swollen with pulsing blood. I will go back someday, to learn the name of that village. Without a name, it is too much like a vision, and I need real things to have faith in.

Last summer I took a bus to Saranda. The bus, an old crate of a Mercedes, barely made it up the Muzinës pass. Below, at the bottom of the cliff, rusted chassis of vans and sedans that would lie there until Judgment Day. On the other side of the Gjëre Mountains, near Delvine, we drove into a cloudburst and entered Saranda in pouring rain. Two men — they looked like father and son — unloaded from the bus bundles, bags, sacks, packs, parcels tied, parcels taped; it could have been a lifetime's accumulation of possessions. A sad, sodden move someone was making. Finally they pulled from the bus's cavernous luggage bay a scruffy mutt. The little animal was added to the baggage, as if that was now its home. Then the bus took off, and the curtain of rain closed on them.

I recall all the animals and see them as clearly as I see the people. The horses grazing untethered in Chornohora, the big-horned cattle of the Puszta, the cows belly-deep in the muddy current of the Delta, the Bucharest dogs, loose, moving freely, seeking food in a world that draws no borders between man and beast. In Sfântu Gheorghe, at dawn, I went to an outhouse in the backyard. The shed was so low, you dropped your pants before you entered, because inside you had to bend in half. And you stepped out to pull your pants up. Precisely then I was attacked by a red rooster, its beak aimed at the very thing I wished to conceal. The hens stopped scrabbling for a moment to look at him with admiration while I ran across plots to the protection of the house door. The rooster was no longer in pursuit, yet I still felt fear, because of this momentary crack in the world. In Përmet, or maybe it was in Kosinë, a woman rode a donkey on a side path. She was so ancient, so burned by the sun, and so wrinkled and shriveled, that if it hadn't been for her clothes, you could have mistaken her for part of the animal. In the dust and heat, the two had passed this way hundreds of times. Their shadows on the white stone of the path fused into a single shadow, just as their fates were fused into one.