Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

In Krompachy, their settlement rose. To the left of the road, on an almost vertical incline, house grew atop house, and the highest jutted into the boundless blue. Structures resting insanely on empty space. Jagged, exposed to wind and rain, hanging in defiance of gravity, they brought to mind bird nests perched on rock. Protruding, sagging, as if at any moment something would fall into the road — poles, pieces of sheet metal, sticks, parts of old houses hauled from who knows where, houses no one wanted to live in anymore, with mud and moss in the chinks between boards, scraps of tar paper pressed with stones. Everything had been found and made use of with paranoid cunning. From discarded matter, the magic of a domicile. It seemed that it all fluttered in the wind, that in a moment it would take to the air, fly away, and no sign of this aerial town would remain. I imagined the Gypsies sailing skyward like a tattered cloud, a great patchwork raft carrying a mountain of possessions, the whole dump and scrap heap of things nobody needed and only the Gypsies could put to use. I saw them fly over Rudohorie, over šariš and Spiš, over the entire world, in the nebular wealth of their poverty, the shreds and shards from which they had cobbled — pointedly without dignity — an ordinary life.

Then a small town and the usual industrial shit in a valley of the Hornád, to the right. Rust, the wretchedness of inert metal, the despair of outdated technology. Tanks, stacks, conduits, conveyor belts, sidings, hangars with broken windows, and pustules of installation among the greenery. Granted, it was a Sunday, but nothing suggested that by some miracle this equipment would return to life on Monday. Or ascend to heaven. It would have to sit here for all eternity, unless the Gypsies took pity and disassembled it and sold the parts for cigarettes, alcohol, ornaments for their women and sweets for their children, or built out of the parts vehicles not of this world, in which to travel through Europe, exciting among the local population — as they have done before — superstitious dread mixed with envy and admiration. Once people asked an old Gypsy why Gypsies didn't have their own country. "If a country was a good thing, the Gypsies too would have one, for sure," was his answer. So a united Europe is for them an improvement, making it easier for a person to move and live than any single nation can.

I close my eyes and see the Gypsies from Gjirokastër leaving their drafty huts assembled on the rooftops of concrete communal buildings, in which they couldn't endure the poor air and the heat. Those from Krujë leave their lime ovens; those from Iacobeni leave their scattered Saxon houses; those from Porumbacu and Sâmbăta de Sus leave their clay hovels; those from Vlachy leave their log cabins; those from Podgrodzie leave their single-story houses in a former Jewish district; those from Miskolc leave their slums, which barely rise above the ground along the road to Encs; those from Zborov leave their white barracks cut out of the mountainside; and the Gypsies leave all the thousand other places, the list and description of which I promise myself I will put together someday. A Europe without borders is a Gypsy dream, there is no denying it. White folk, lazy, rooted, fearful, stay in their homes, as one does on a Slovak Sunday. You see only the Gypsies, walking in their solitude, in twos and threes, on the roadsides from village to village, and the green countryside closes after them like water. It's as if they could not live without space. Freed from the workings of time, they are indifferent to the nothingness that will claim Gönc and all the other places we have given names to, because only by naming can we grasp the world, even as we condemn it to destruction.

By an empty field before Brezovička, a swarthy ten-year-old boy was doing push-ups in the middle of the road. He was naked. At the sight of my car, he stood, covered his genitals, and dove into nearby bushes, where three of his buddies, dressed, were laughing their heads off.

Old women carrying brushwood on their backs, men gathered around the open hoods of old cars, a boy in Podgrodzie cradling a puppy in his arms. A cart in Transylvania hitched to two horses, and in the cart a frightened foal, a couple of weeks old, its legs splayed, a child embracing its neck affectionately, face in the brown fur, as if the child had found a creature smaller than itself and more defenseless. Red Kalderash petticoats on the road to Mount Moldoveanu, bare feet covered with yellow dust. A smoldering dump in ErdŐhát; small, slender figures plucking metal, plastic, and glass from the smoking rubbish. A dump in Tiszacsécse, by the road that winds above the river, where an old man with a pipe in his mouth pulls long pieces of wood out of the hills of junk; he ties them in bundles and sets them beside a relic bicycle… I should create a catalog, an encyclopedia of these scenes and places, write a history in which time plays no part, a history of Gypsy eternity, because it is more enduring, and wiser, than our governments and cities, than our entire world, which trembles at the imminence of its demise.

Yes, Gypsies are my obsession, also the border wasteland, and the river ferries in eastern Hungary. The ferries in particular. The ferry on the Tisa ten kilometers beyond Sárospatak was a veritable Noah's ark. Hay wagons, tractors, cattle and sheep tethered, men in rubber boots and baseball caps; rakes, pitchforks, bottles of beer; as if these people were leaving their land, because it bored them or had gone barren, and were seeking a new one. Houses were the only thing missing on the wooden deck eaten away by the water and the sun and covered with cow shit. Mr. Ferenc Lenart of GávavencsellŐ was the owner of the boat — this fact was recorded on the blue ticket costing 290 forints. Living by the Tisa is like living on an island. You're constantly crossing. The river winds, turns back, can't make up its mind, oozes to the sides, pulls swampily away from the land, and Szabolcs-Szatmár and ErdŐhát float uncertainly, unmoored from the earth by a semiaqueous layer: bogs, quicksand, reeds, the sweet stink of rot and standing water cooked in the sun, houses on stilts and levees erected a kilometer from the main current so the spring waters from the Gorgany, Chornohora, and Maramureş have somewhere to go. Two hundred and ninety forints is nothing for a drowsy excursion across the flowing green on the back of this beautiful and strange device that like a weaver's shuttle joins the torn fabric of roads. Its wake immediately seals up, and everything is as it was before. In Szamossályi the price is even less, only twenty a head, or thirty and change.

Where the high bank descends was an enclosure filled with goats and sheep; on the other side were a small house and a board with laughably low prices for crossing. Black roof, yellow walls. The ferry trying to leave the opposite bank. It was the motorless variety, moved only by the river. Connected to two pulleys, long lines stretched across the current, it had to wait for the water to take it. Drawing in a cable with two winches, now this one, now that, it went back and forth like the simplest, earliest machine, barely conscious of the law of gravitation. The sole passenger a woman with a bicycle. The engineer cranked, shoved off from the bank with a pole, all without effort, without haste, submitting to the will of the river. Sometimes he left the wheel and oars to chat with the woman, who was sitting hunched on a bench. I saw it all from above: two small figures on a rectangular deck of thick planks the color of the sandy shore, waiting for this strip of land to detach itself from the Great Hungarian Plain and, like a much-burdened flying carpet, bear them to the other side of the Szamos. It was maybe fifteen kilometers to the Romanian border, and again I felt time subsiding, growing still, yielding the field to pure space — it was that way in Ubl'a; that way in Hidasnémeti, where immobile trains baked beneath the high heaven like grass snakes; that way also in stricken Buzica and in my own Konieczna. But eventually the ferry moved, drifted, arrived, and now I could drive down to the platform. I looked upstream and tried to remember when and where I saw this river last.