Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

Before Codreanu on his gray mare, an icon of the archangel Michael was carried, they say. It is not hard to imagine the procession precisely here, among these low hills and huts, or a little farther on, in Valea Grecului with its single church, cow field, and a green speckled with white geese. That's where I felt sure that I was beholding the immutable "it was always thus" or, in any case, a past that could never become the future, because from the very beginning its purpose was to endure.

Codreanu in his knee-length shirt and with his procession through miserable towns and villages brought the good news that nothing would change, that what had been would continue, having achieved perfect form long ago. It merely needed cleansing of the scum borne by the wave of modernity, cleansing of the slime of democracy, the dirt of liberalism, the contagion of the Jews. Poverty and impotence were ennobled by their heroic heritage. Codreanu's comrades wore amulets containing soil from battlefields in which their forefathers had resisted the Romans, Goths, Huns, Slavs, Tatars, Hungarians, Turks, and Russians. Magic, ancestor worship, and Christianity were treated as a tribal religion, an occult science to save the people. These few lines from Codreanu's text are essentially a howl: "Wars were won by those able to summon invisible forces from the beyond and enlist their help. These mysterious forces were the souls of the dead, the souls of our forefathers, who were tied to this land, to our fields and forests, having fallen in its defense. Today they are summoned by us, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, because we remember them. And above the souls of the dead stands Christ."

Anyone who was born in Huşi and spent his youth there is entitled not to believe in the future. I assume Codreanu visited Valea Grecului too; he was a young man on the move. He hated the Communists, who believed in the future, as much as the Jews. His dull, provincial mind probably had trouble telling them apart. Basically, he never stopped being a prophet from the sticks. The world was divided into Romania and the rest, and the rest had no value because it wasn't Romania, let alone Huşi.

During his studies in Berlin, he wears Romanian folk dress. At the same time, poverty forces him into trade. He buys salt pork and butter in the villages, sells them at a profit in the city. His Berlin life becomes a parody of the life of a Moldovan peasant. He is now no different from his conception of a Jew. In Grenoble, to survive, he and his wife sew Romanian folk costumes and sell them. Little enters his head other than Romania and folk merchandise. In a courtroom (he also tried his hand at lawyering), he pulls out a pistol and shoots the chief of police. His comrades murder "traitors" and despicable politicians, then surrender to the cops, as an act of Christian martyrdom. "Love is the key to the peace that our Savior offered to the peoples of the world… But love does not release us from the duty of discipline, the duty of carrying out our orders," he ranted in 1936.

Parody and delirium. One must be born in Huşi to smell the poison of melancholy that eats into mind and soul. One must be born in Huşi, where even the crows turn back, to grasp this dream of glory of the native land, to understand this nightmare. Madness is left, because only in madness can one overturn, if for a moment, the order of a world that gives not a damn for Huşi, for Valea Dacilor, or even for the village of Decebal, cursed with its Gypsy multitude on every corner. Huşi dismissed, Huşi scorned, Huşi half asleep and dragging its feet, Huşi scratched by chickens and stuck like a broken cane in a crevice of time forever and ever amen. The train terminates there. To come into the world in Huşi is to live in eternity made flesh.

So thought Corneliu Codreanu. Because the past was sacred, it had to last forever, had to be resurrected constantly, driving off the specter of the future. The future always came from outside, was foreign, like an invader. The future was a violation of the perfection of enduring, which constituted the sense, the essence, the deepest mystery of Huşi and its environs.

I really should have stopped in Huşi. Now I must imagine myself going back. Autumn would be the best time, when the leaves are falling, for me to find confirmation of my ideas, to probe the cracking, the rotting, the mold that quietly, imperceptibly enters stone and wood and Sunday outfits kept on shelves. Microorganisms, gravity, humidity — these are the fundamental components of my part of the continent. They should be listed on the ingredients label, should appear on the coat of arms. Whoever thinks otherwise is in for a rude awakening. Codreanu's paroxysm resulted from his complete misunderstanding of the genius loci, which he wanted so much to change. Possessed by the need for his people to be great, he fell into the absurdity of imitating a foreign destiny. All that he bequeathed, then, was counterfeit.

I can't help it, I love this Balkan shambles. It begins right after Satu Mare. Everything half-assed and fucked up, and God only knows where the edge of the highway is, where the shoulder, plus the horse-drawn carts, and suddenly there is more dust in the air than there ever was in post-Hapsburg Hungary, and at every step you have to swerve because of something on the road, as if these Dacias and Aros were not properly tightened and lost parts or maybe had too many parts to begin with. Stocky Gypsies stand by Mercedes with open hoods, as if the radiator burst or a belt slipped, and desperately they wave at you to stop, then thrust gold or precious stones in your face at half price. The kids dart back and forth across the road, no doubt trained from the cradle in the famous Romanian indifference to death, in Geto-Dacian fatalism. No one uses directional signals, because times are tough and a person must conserve his strength. Horns, on the other hand, are heard constantly, because they don't wear out. It was that way in May 2000; it will be that way forever. I dwell on the memory as one dwells on one's childhood. It turns out that a man seeks only what he has seen before. It turns out that the Szatmár chaos, the empty lanes of Sulina and Giurgiu by the Danube recall my Sokołów Podlaski and Kałuszyn. The same material, the same improvisation desperately trying to be permanent. In the buses, the same smell of soap and milk when the villagers set out; on the rotting benches in the shady lanes, the same contemplation. The same carelessness with time, a watch no more than an ornament, like jewelry. Time, really, is just a piece of eternity you cut out for your own consumption.

Between Bozieni and Valea Parjei I saw two men by the road in the middle of a green field. For ten kilometers in one direction and fifteen in the other, there was nothing, no one. They sat in the shade of an Italian pine and played cards. They didn't even look up when the bus passed. A few days later I returned the same way and saw them again. They had moved maybe a kilometer, but the landscape was unchanged: a row of stone pines along the road, corn, and the men still immersed in their somnolent, monotonous game, as if their deck held a million cards. It's possible that night overtook them as they played and that they slept in the open field, to resume at dawn. Someone may have brought them here to do work, but when the hirer disappeared over a hill, they immediately began their game. They had not a thing with them, no tool, unless it was in a pocket. They sat as if they were at a table at home. Gray and crumpled, like most of the men in this region, yet unfazed by the overwhelming space and endless stretch of hours. The fragile abstraction of the game was their shield. At dusk, who knows, they might have lit a candle, or else the cards were marked and even in the dark their fingers could tell hearts from spades from clubs.