Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

Most likely a year ago, in Satu Mare, when I was on my way to Păltiniş, but only for a moment. The bridge was in the center of town, and as usual I was seeking a detour, reading the rusted sky-blue road signs, so this didn't count. Two years earlier, I spent a whole day wandering along the river. I had come from Carei and wasn't sure whether I wanted to continue on to Cluj or to Oradea, whether to go southeast or west — or anywhere. On the 1F to Bobota was truck hell: tank trucks, dump trucks full of gravel and earth, honking. Transylvania was a possibility, but I wasn't quite up to the Balkan method of driving after a long Hungarian night of pear brandy and Kadarka wine from Szekszárd. I checked out Crişeni on the map and headed there, north, and in Jibou entered a valley of the Szamos. Except I remember nothing of that drive, other than the coffee in some godforsaken place and a hailstorm among green hills. It is only Baia Mare that I remember clearly, hallucination that it was. Conveyor belts like black viaducts, mining cars for gold hanging lifeless above the earth, and the hopelessness of a suburb where people milled before worker compounds that looked like gutted ruins. The town had chewed its way into the mountains in search of ore, but the rust of poverty in turn eroded El Dorado. Baia Sprie perished in the same way, a victim of its own greed.

To the gap at Gutîi it was ten kilometers. There, at 987 meters, the world fell in two. Nearly a kilometer above sea level, continuity ended, chaos celebrated. The mocking memento of Baia lay at our back, and on the other side, along the northern peaks, lay, amazingly, the past. Deseşti, Hărniceşti, Giuleşti were dreams carved out of wood. In the sculpting of the homes, gates, and fences was an unending abundance of time: the eternity required to chisel and cut and shape and free all this from the elements. The miracle of patience had to have been performed in some other age, because ours could not accommodate each and every separate motion-gesture needed to fashion this Arcadia of wood. No minute or hour of ours could have contained the birth of this calm insanity of forms. Almost as if it simply grew, the next stage in the slow development of tree rings and branches, nature abandoning its previous designs to try something in the vein of human habitation. Insanity indeed, this Maramureş thousand and one nights, this Sagrada Familia of xylem, all the way to Sighetu, where the Pietri peak cut the sunset off from the rest of the world.

In the morning, I walked along the Tisa. On the Ukrainian side lay Solotvino, where two years before, I got off a train to take a chance at Stanislavov.

And again Babadag, exactly as two years ago: the bus sits for ten minutes, the driver's gone, kids beg without conviction in the southern swelter — nothing has changed. The thousand-lei notes with Eminescu have disappeared, replaced by aluminum disks featuring Constantin Brancoveanu. It's easier to identify them in your pocket, take them out, and press them into an outstretched hand. Thirty-seven of these aluminum coins equal one euro. As I ride to the city, I see three women in dresses that trail on the ground — Dobrujan Turks, no doubt. They look pretty but strange among the crumbling walls, the houses falling apart before they have aged. Babadag is weariness and isolation. People get off the bus and stand, with small shadows at their feet. A white minaret like a finger points at the empty blue. I distribute some of my change. The little beggars take the coins indifferently, without a word, not lifting their eyes. I am riding from Tulcea to Constanţa, the opposite direction from two years ago. Everything is the same, except that the bills are now plastic.

Babadag: twice in my life, twice for ten minutes. The world is made from such fragments, pieces of burning dream, mirage, bus fever. The tickets remain. From Tulcea to Constanţa it's 120,000 lei. Păstraţi biletul pentru control. Gara de Sud, the South Station area in Constanţa, is the shame of the Balkans, a black web of cables over streets, crap, horns, dogs, flies, food stands all jumbled. Tinfoil, lighters, cellophane, trash, a vortex of throwaway stuff, the reek of fried fat, smoke, men in uniform, fast operators without work but in constant motion, gold chains, flip-flops, a holstered pistol — civilian — barely covered by a shirt, watermelon rinds, a kaleidoscope of color, high heels, mascara, an anthill greenmarket camp. You can only list; description is impossible, since there is nothing here that lasts but weariness, weakness, decomposition, and frenetic toil under a sky bleached by the heat.

From Constanţa you pass through Valu lui Traian, Trajan's Bank, a village of dirt-floor huts, thin donkeys, old women in black gazing with wise eyes at the dust and emptiness. If you got out here, you wouldn't have the strength to leave. The present reigns in this place, as it always has. Hence all the names of heroes, rebels, leaders, governers, politicians: Nicolae Bălcescu, Mihail Kogălniceanu, Cuza Vodă, Vlad ţepeş, Mircea Vodă, ştefan cel Mare, Dragoş Vodă, ştefan Vodă, Alexandru Odobescu, and there's Independenţa and Unirea (Independence and Unity), Valea Dacilor (Valley of the Dacians). Not a thing to be seen, just villages scattered in the steppe along Road 3A or a little to the side. In this flat land they are hardly visible over the horizon. Goats, corn, horse harnesses, people stooped in fields, the same movements made a hundred, two hundred years ago, a thousand, forever, movements as unchanging as those of animals. The names are meant to give inert time a sense and direction.

A couple of days later I was driving northeast. I crossed the Seretu valley and in Tecuci recognized the crossroads and the fence where two years earlier I had spent an hour or two taking in the sight of the other end of the Carpathians. This time I kept the mountains on my left, and the landscape flattened. Delivery vans carrying melons. Fruit piled along the road. In the fields, cornstalk sheds. No trees, so the men were waiting out the afternoon heat in these rustling lean-tos. After Crasna, the hills began again — long, sleepy ridges of the Moldovan Highland. An old and crumbling plateau excavated by the river and enervated by the sun. Grassy slopes, white scree, sickly crests of groves presented a kind of geologic metaphor for the acceptance of one's fate, of erosion and decline. The earth showed its bones here.

Then Huşi, where in 1899 Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was born. I should have stopped there but didn't. The town appeared for a moment, then was gone, like a hundred other Romanian towns I had driven through. It was in no way different: low to the ground and pitiful. Gardens hid the decay. I should have stopped. Codreanu was half Polish, half German, but considered himself more Romanian than the Romanians. He thought of himself as a Romanian messiah. God the Father, Christ, and the archangel Michael were constantly included in his plans. In some photographs he appears in folk dress: a white linen shirt to the knees and white breeches. Under short trouser legs are stylish city shoes. He greets the crowds with a gesture like Hitler's heil, but it denotes a purely Roman legacy, unsullied by any connection with the barbaric Germans. On a white horse, he visits Moldovan and Bessarabian villages. The peasants listen and nod, because he tells them that all the evil comes from outside.

I drove through Huşi in minutes. It was twenty kilometers to the Prut and the border. Sheep grazed on the hills. At dusk they returned to their enclosure in the waste, a few fences with few crossbars. Nearby were the huts of the shepherds, with bulrush roofs. One could erect them practically without tools. They were part of the landscape in every respect. If all this vanished, it would be without a trace: no ruins, no lingering memories. Inside the huts there must have been objects — a bucket, a knife, an ax — but on the outside all was vegetation and ageless. Composed of the most basic elements: wood, grass, reeds. A few animals, sheep dung.