Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

I love this Balkan shambles, Hungarian, Slovak, Polish, the amazing weight of things, the lovely slumber, the facts that make no difference, the calm and methodical drunkenness in the middle of the day, and those misty eyes that with no effort pierce reality and with no fear open to the void. I can't help it. The heart of my Europe beats in Sokołów Podlaski and in Huşi. It does not beat in Vienna. Or in Budapest. And most definitely not in Kraków. Those places are all aborted transplants. A mock-up, a mirror of what is elsewhere. Sokołów and Huşi imitate nothing; they follow their own destinies. My heart is in Sokołów, though I was there for ten hours altogether, at most. Usually during transfers from one Pekaes truck to another in the early 1970s, when I went to visit my uncle and his wife on vacations. But my memory is good. Single-story wooden houses in the center of town, lilac bushes, shutters, dogs asleep on the asphalt, leaning posts of bus stops with round yellow signs, frames and planks painted brown and green, sand in the sidewalk joints, an ice cream store that inside smells like a village cottage, sugar peas in glass tubes, everything only just sprouting from the ground, only just begun, and of course the rotting, the scraping, the dozing, life without pretension, trying to make things last, the squeaking floorboards, the silly heroism of a quotidian that snaps in two as easily as an ice cream wafer. I remember it all and could go on and on. It's in my blood. So though I drove through Huşi in five minutes, there being no reason to stop, my heart is in Huşi.

Which indicates that I need my own country. Where I can travel in a circle. A country without clear borders, a country unaware that it exists and doesn't care that someone invented it and entered it. A sleepy country with murky politics and a history like shifting sand. Its present breaking ice, its culture the Gypsy palaces of Soroca. Nothing would last here without running the risk of being ridiculous. But why a country, why not an empire with an unspecified number of provinces, an empire in motion, in progress, driven by the idea of expansion, but also sclerotic, unable to remember its lands, its peoples, its capitals, so every morning it would need to start over? That would suit me, since I have the same problem: I remember things and events but do not know what separates or connects them other than my accidental presence.

Three days ago I was in Bardejov. An afternoon mass had begun at Saint Egidius. Those of the faithful who were late squeezed in through the half-open door. The interior must have been full, because you could hear an echoing rumble of voices, yet new people kept arriving. In a long stream across the square, the faithful wore their best and were flushed in their haste, slowing only in the shadow of the sanctuary to give their movement a little decorum. A scene that has been repeated for five hundred years. The Bardejov square crossing, I thought, must be worn from the touch of feet. A space unable after so many years to keep healing. I walked uphill, in the opposite direction, away from the crowd. Louis the Great gave this city the right to hold eight fairs a year and to do beheadings, activities that must have required a bit of room, but now, without commerce and the functions of justice, the square seemed abandoned. I turned down Veterná, then down Stöcklova, to the right, to find myself in a narrow path between a barbican wall and the rest of the city. I saw some steps and went up. The wall, at least six hundred years old, was crumbling here and there. It looked its age. From my height now I could see yards, gardens, back doors, hutches, chicken coops, doghouses, all the things a small town hides from sight, confining its rusticity. A graceful, relaxed clutter here, the remnants of projects never completed, storage gradually turning into rubbish. Plastic bags, compost, fallen apples, weeds, beaten paths, an eternal present crouched in the shadow of walnut and cherry trees. The Gothic slowly disintegrated here, and its disintegration led to things that had no history, things that had use and significance for a moment only. The new joined the old in a just order, a liberté, égalité, and fraternité of matter.

I sense this equality everywhere. There is no need for deception. I am blind and deaf to all else. But as a rule there is no all else. It was that way a month and a half ago in Uzlina. We reached it by motorboat from Murighiol. Around us lay four thousand square kilometers of canals, lakes, dead tributaries, bogs, wetlands, and land as flat as the mirror of still water. You could go for several hours and nothing would change. A hot, undisturbed, motionless sleep. The expanse swallowing up all detail. Our path left no trace. The great river carries silt from the depths of the continent and with it sculpts a new, uncertain land. In a kind of genesis, the landscape gathers its strength to lift itself above the surface of the water. A trance, this trip against the current of time, toward primordial childhood.

But Uzlina came first. A hotel there rose four stories out of the marshy, the flat, and the ancient. It looked like a thing misplaced during a move. In a radius of a few dozen kilometers, there was nothing higher. At the driveway entrance waited a young woman in a miniskirt and stiletto heels. She held a tray with glasses of slivovitz, cujka, simple peasant brandy. An olive in each glass. In front of the hotel, a swimming pool, umbrellas, deck chairs. Our room in the annex was as God wanted it. The view from the window: laundry tubs, rubble, vegetable patches (private plots), dogs on chains barking to protect the cabbage. The first night, I was bitten by bedbugs and had no air to breathe. In the main building nearby, the air-conditioning chugged. All evening, the employees of Coty Cosmetics Romania entertained themselves around a bonfire to global hit parade music.

The next day Mitka appeared. He sat down at our table in a bar under umbrellas. He wore trousers from a hundred-year-old suit and rubber flip-flops. He was maybe sixty. He seemed to come straight from the swamp and reeds. He drank beer after beer, complaining that he could no longer have vodka, not after the doctors cut something out of him. He spoke to us in Russian but called the waitresses in Romanian. He drank at the hotel every evening and didn't pay, though sometimes he contributed a ram or piglet to the hotel kitchen. The owner tolerated this, wanting to buy land from Mitka, who was a neighbor, to expand his business. Mitka's cows and swine wandered through and around, dozens of them foraging untethered through the mud and sand along the Saint Egidius tributary.

At dusk we went to see his farm, which was large and flat. A labyrinth of pens, sties, plots, half-open barns, and huts with bulrush roofs. No light on anywhere. Above, the bright, phosphorescent sky; below, the thickened dark, redolent of animals and excrement. The pigs ran up to Mitka like dogs. In a corner something snorted, grunted, chewed, belched, huffed, followed by a pulse of body heat, as if in the cavern of this farm a great antediluvian beast were settling down for the night.

In Mitka's cabin, a weak bulb burned under a low ceiling. His long and narrow room contained nothing more than a bed, a cupboard with utensils, and a table. Mitka ducked into a small doorway and emerged with a double-barreled shotgun. An old gun, metal shining through the oxidized finish. He said we could shoot, if I paid for the ammunition. Night had fallen, and I thought shooting didn't make sense. Another time, I said. Disappointed, he laid the gun on the bed. On the wall hung a framed black-and-white photograph, grainy. The man in it reminded me of someone, but I wasn't certain. I asked Mitka. "Yes, it's Ceauş escu," he said with a smile, pleased that I had recognized the leader. Then, since the subject was photographs, he produced from a drawer a picture of his dead wife.