Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

Thus goes my litany in the swirl of ring roads, overpasses, throughways, as I squint at road signs and route numbers, my map spread across the steering wheel, with honking behind me as I glance in the rearview mirror, as I sit in the stinking shadows of trucks, at dawn in Duląbka, in the evening in Bratislava, and on to the knot of Viennese arteries, breaking through to the other side of the enormous imperial capital, then south to reach a sleepy village in the middle of the night, by the Zala River, then to Bajánsenye by the Slovenian border, where the fifty-year-old Mr. Geza runs a pension in an old watermill, and at two in the morning, over red wine and bacon and eggs, he repeats, "Budapest is different now. People don't talk to each other anymore." If January has no snow, the willows and reeds in the early sun are the color of faded wrapping paper. The soil is always wet. Or else the sky is low, unusually low even for Hungary, and its weight squeezes the moisture from the earth.

Twenty-two kilometers from Mr. Geza is where Danilo Kiš lived during World War II. His father made mad travels through this region and drank "handcrafted Tokay from Lendava" in its taverns. Lendava is now a border town on the Slovenian side. And Uncle Otton rode here on a bicycle. The uncle's left leg, frozen, hung while the right foot, tied to the pedal with a belt, pedaled. He took the dusty clay roads to Zalaegerszeg, to oversee his complicated business affairs. If Kiš's father was a character out of Bruno Schulz, his uncle was straight out of Beckett— that's how I see them when I read Kiš's Garden, Ashes in a black-green cover that by some strange twist of fate or accident has the photograph of a dark-brown clay bird on it. Two years before, in the winter, in that region, in Magyarszombatfa, I bought two clay angels of exactly that color. It's a place of potters, but the publisher, Marabut, was probably unaware of it. So this is a sign for me to go there once more, to find the Count's Forest and all the other topographic features scattered throughout the text, because a story should defy time and logic, just as our imagination separates itself from events. There should be a to-be-continued, which may have nothing to do with the beginning, so long as the story is nourished by the same substance, so long as it breathes the same (albeit somewhat stale) air. I tell myself it doesn't matter if I find nothing.

On the map I see the blue vein of a river. It's called the Kerka. In the underbrush along the bank, an eight- or nine-year-old boy, living in the memory or imagination of the grown Danilo Kiš, crawls on all fours, chews the leaves of wild sorrel, and suddenly sees, in the sky, God's image. "He stood on the edge of a cloud, dangerously leaning over, maintaining an inhuman, superhuman balance, with a burned wreath around his head. He appeared unexpectedly, and just as quickly and unexpectedly disappeared, like a falling star." Even if nothing remains of those days, the river is still there, and the underbrush, and the clouds in the sky. Theophany needs nothing more, just like eternity, which never comes to our cities, because such a visit would put them on an equal footing with the earth…

So Kiš finally arrived. "To travel means to live," he wrote in 1958, quoting Hans Christian Andersen but giving the words an altogether new meaning. A Schedule for Buses, Ships, Trains, and Planes, his father's project, in its full and perfected version would describe — more, would duplicate — the whole world in units of time and space. Empty places between hours of departure and between distances would be filled with accumulated knowledge of continents, bodies of water, culture and civilization, history and geography — information taken from every field, from alchemy to zoology. If such a book were published, all travel would become pointless, would be replaced by reading. I wouldn't need to make the trek from Duląbka to Bajánsenye, then go another twenty kilometers down to the Kerka. I could sit at home, knowing that whatever I saw as a traveler would be no more than a copy, a pale reflection of such and such a chapter and paragraph in the Universal Schedule. I wouldn't bother to pick up a pen, because the road from Duląbka and all other roads would exist in a pristine and ideal state untouched by human foot or vehicle wheel. The bus to Jasło would stay forever in its shed, the bus to Kraków also, and the 22:40 international to Budapest, and so on, to every corner of the planet, and no matter where people went, they would find evidence of the presence of the mad genius of the Schedule. Unfortunately this magnum opus was never completed, and the initial sketches, notes, and diagrams, on typescript covered with scrawled corrections, were lost in the 1940s somewhere by the Zala River.

It is for this reason, among other reasons, that my passport looks the way it does. Without a schedule, a guide, a plan, and abandoned to chance, I try to find out things on my own, and always have to start from square one. I go to Baia Mare, let's say, as if no one had ever been there before. Or, at noon in the middle of the summer, to Dukla, where your shadow contracts to a small patch at your feet and the solitude at Market Square thickens as if Judgment Day might come at any moment. Or I cross Pusztaradvány and climb the high barrens toward Slovakia in January, to see how dead the borderland there is and how the rows of hills appear untouched by human eyes, and how at Buzica the red-and-white crossing gate and the guard suggest a vigil for the repentant souls of smugglers. I went there one day in order to bypass Budapest, drove up the northern slopes of the Bukovec Mountains and Mátra in the hope that in a few hours I would reach, by some miracle, the Danube's bend, at Esztergom, where one August on a side street near the intersection of Pázmány and Batthyany I discovered a pub that inside was like a village cabin done up for a wedding reception: a few simple tables covered with checkered cloth, a few chairs, and that was it. A fat man in suspenders appeared and brought a menu on which the dishes, only a few, were written in longhand. The writing quaint, calligraphic. The room was cold, quiet, empty. I felt like a party guest who had come too early. I ordered gombaleves, mushroom soup. Suspenders brought it and placed it before me as one puts food before a person who just got off work. I could eat with my elbows on the table, even slurp, no one would care, though not far from here, more than a thousand years ago, Saint Stephen was baptized, making all Hungary Christian in one fell swoop.

It was August, and Basilica Hill shimmered like a mirage in the heat. I no longer recall where I had arrived from, but right after the green bridge over the Danube, Slovakia began, sleepy Slovakia, with its tranquil peasant waiting for what should come but might not. Cement-gray plaster and villages that ended abruptly; potbellied men in white undershirts drinking beer and sitting on plastic chairs in front of a hostinec, in shoes without socks, as if they hadn't left their yard, as if their home encompassed the entire village, the entire region, the rest of the world as far even as two, three bus stops away. Sometimes women would be standing beside them in dressing gowns and slippers — not sitting down, just there to exchange a few words.

Sleepy Slovakia, a deepening afternoon, with only the Gypsies astir and getting into things, turning in the swelter like scattered black rosary beads. It's five, six, and the Košice and Prešov beltways are as empty as dawn on a Sunday. In Medzilaborce, too, not a soul, but in a dark-gray pub at the exit to Zborov, where the only ATM in town stands, someone's hand holds a shot glass. Except that was another time. I was driving to Ubl'a, due east, above the Ukrainian border, because someone called Potok had had adventures there, a couple of times barely escaping with his life, and for weeks at a dusty border marketplace he drank the cheapest and vilest booze in that part of Europe, losing over and over again the pistol that he had stolen and that held only one bullet, kept for the darkest hour. I went to check all this out, in particular to find that fucked-up international bazaar at which the Moldovans spread out on the ground all the treasures of Transnistria in the hope of exchanging them for the riches of Transcarpathia, the jewels of Szabolcs-Szatmár, the inexhaustible goods of Maramureş. I wanted to take it all in, hear the Babylonian cacophony of tongues, Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Romance, see the eastern hodgepodge of tents, pubs of canvas and plywood, old buses turned into brothels on wheels. I wanted to smell Gypsy camps stocked with marvels that no woman or man could resist, because they came from a realm no one yet had reached or — more to the point — no one had returned from. Thus I set out for Ubl'a, east of the volcanic mountains of Vihorlat, mountains no one in his right mind would venture into, as they are haunted by the ghosts of field officers and front-line soldiers of the Warsaw Pact, and by pallid ghouls, deserters, who sell arms and uniforms as souvenirs. I drove through the town of Snina, where among weeping willows stood two-story garrison buildings with red roofs, all looking as if they had been thrown together that same day and had aged and fallen apart just as quickly. On benches in doorways sat women with children. Soldiers' wives, widows of the officer ghosts? Snina was a dream dreamt at the edge of a country that had lost all its enemies.