Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

In Máriapócs in September, on the large, flat, windswept field outside town, merchandise lay on plastic bags on the ground. No treasures here: Chinese schlock, jeans, Adidas and Nike knockoffs. All displayed in neat rows and spanking new. The vendors stood motionless over their wares and waited. Each selling the same stuff, essentially. The grass dry and trampled. No one buying anything, no one even looking. An itinerant tribe from an old tale, which spreads out its wares at the city gates, and the next morning it is gone without a trace. A bit farther on, merry-go-rounds and shooting galleries, then more stalls with candy and wine, church booths with wonders, and gingerbread hearts, handicrafts, panpipes, weathervanes, and stands with religious literature. Among the trees, people had set up camp, put out food: hard-boiled eggs, bottles of beer, canapés. Some had removed their shoes and were dozing. There were several cars from Romania with SM on their license plates, which meant Satu Mare, and a few from Slovakia. Music issued from one of the speakers, but under the vast sky of the Hungarian Lowlands it sounded quiet and insignificant. Budapest television had set up its cameras before a Baroque basilica. The crowd was lost in this great, flat, sandy area, absorbed like water.

I had hoped to meet some famous Gypsies from Moldova, Baron Artur Cerari or Robert — it was a Gypsy holiday, after all — but I saw no BMW 700 or X5. On the lot were only pathetic Dacias, tired Ladas, stalwart Trabants, and reeking diesels from the Reich. The one ATM had no forints. So yes, Máriapócs seemed the last town at the edge of the inhabited earth. It was not hard to imagine a sudden gust of wind spraying everything with sand. In the churchyard, the Uniate liturgy was in progress. The Maramureş Gypsies were dressed with elegance and dignity: black hats, belts studded with silver, gold chains, cowboy boots. A few had beautiful faces. An ancient, unsettling beauty not encountered today. The women's heels sank in the sand. I had driven three hundred kilometers to see this, and nothing was happening. God knows what I had expected: a city of tents, horses neighing, sword swallowers? I always play the idiot, because reality wins, as usual. In addition I was broke. I could only go back. Máriapócs that afternoon was dust and waiting for the evening mass to begin. To the Romanian border it was thirty kilometers, the town of Nyírbátor and two small villages. People strolled and magnanimously wasted time. Practically no one rode on the merry-go-round. Everyone passed as in a dreamy carnival, and the knockoff running shoes, motionless in the dust, seemed to mock themselves. I could picture cattle coming from the Lowlands, large black swine rooting for genuine food in the schlock, nudging the piles of clothing with their wet snouts, tasting and spitting out the painted plastic, squealing, shitting on the logos of international companies, turning this whole fake market into a sty, and the stink would rise to heaven and drift over Máriapócs and Szabolcs-Szatmár, mingling with the sound of bells, wood smoke, the lowing of cows, and the dry wind, forever and ever amen.

Two days before, it was All Souls' Day. As every year, I bought a few candles and drove to cemeteries. A strong wind blew from the south, so it was hard to light them. But with tin protectors, the candles wouldn't go out. Occasionally someone preceded me and I'd find lamps burning. I always wondered, Who in this godforsaken place is remembering the Bosnian dead? the Croatian dead? the Hungarian? The Königliche Ungarische Landsturm Huzaren Regiment — in Hungarian, Honwedzi. Or the Tyroleans. The Tiroler Kaiser Jäger Regiment. Nothing there. You must make a special trip, and there isn't always a road. In Radocyna, the country simply comes to an end: the way for a horse-drawn cart or a four-by-four dissolves into meadow, vanishes in russet grass or scummy ponds two kilometers from Slovakia, and yet soldiers came. Four Austrians from the twenty-seventh regiment, infantry, and seventy-nine Ruthenians, also on foot. There were names: infanteria, the child's brigade, brats with bayonets, the slaughter of the innocent. Most didn't know where they were or why. The likeness of one emperor or another had to suffice — and did. There was no way out for them. Four Austrians, which means they could have been Slovenians or Slovaks, or Hungarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Poles. A cosmopolitan spot. They lie with a view of Wisłoki valley, Dębi Wierch (Oak Peak), and the border gap. So I light a candle for them and set it beside one already burning. The trees are bare, but the sun shines, and it's so still and empty, as if nothing ever happened here. It's all in the earth: metal buttons, buckles, bones.

At Długi, the same thing, except that they lie in a completely open field. No trees or bushes, so the lamp must be shielded by a flap of your jacket until the flame takes. Again, infantry and Feldjägers. Forty-five subjects of the emperor and 207 Russians. But in Czarny they rest more peacefully: trees were planted over the graves, and now there's shade and quiet. Even in summer the light is dim. The crowns of beeches meet, and in the center is such tranquillity, you could be in a cathedral. That's where they lie. Twenty-seven Austrians and 372 Russians. With the Russians it's the same as with the Austrians: half were Ukrainians, Poles, Kyrgyz, Finns, who knows what else — consult a map. No wind to speak of here, so I have no trouble lighting a candle and setting it on a stone pedestal with an inscription in German. Beneath it, the mortal remains of half of Europe and a piece of Asia. Strange to think of the Adriatic, palm trees, the campanile in Piran, mountaineer huts in Chornohora, the Finnish tundra, the steppes, Zaporoże, Crimean Tatars, the vineyards of Tokaj, Viennese decadence, Asiatic sands, the Prešov secession, Don Cossacks, the Transylvanian Gothic, yurts, camels, and all the rest of it lying here, a meter and a half under, tightly packed, mingled, seeping lower, joining sand, stone, clay, and the roots of the trees that for more than seventy years now have been feeding on the bodies of Estonians and Croats, in a corner of the world no one visits. So I light a candle, stand and watch, and say a prayer for the dead, because the important things take place only in the past. In these regions, the future doesn't exist until it is over.

The cold light of November falls on forest, road, and meadow, making everything too bright and hard, as if it must remain so for ages. They came far from home to die here, five hundred, seven hundred, a thousand kilometers. Manure of Europe. Without names or dates of birth. Complete oblivion, perfect community. I love to come here and walk on them. Beneath my feet I feel it all, the subterranean stream oozing, the rains washing minerals from bones, the water carrying them down into the valleys, to merge with rivulets and tributaries, and farther, finally to where the soldiers came from, because they were innocent at their death and do not need to wander like the damned. They enter their homes, the clocks begin to measure the minutes, and nothing has changed. Time has merely held its breath; it's 1914 again. Because they died once before, there will be no war, no sequence of events; the taut spring of history, rusting through, will snap.

Such was my reverie in November as I walked a meter and a half above their bodies. I picture their places of origin and am certain I visited some. The closed circle that this creates is a ceremony. Some of the fallen, like those in the Beskid Mountains, with a good rain can flow directly down the other side of the Carpathians, then, by the Kamenec, the Topl'a, the Latorica, the Ondava to the Bodrog, the Bodrog to the Tisa, and the Tisa to the Danube. They have a shorter route than those who must go by the Vistula and the sea. The Beskids are the Carpathian divide, and when it pours, the water justly parts in two, flowing north and south, taking the fallen with it. A hundred and sixty-eight Austrians and 135 Russians, all infantry. How much time does it take to flow to, say, Tiszalok, when you are a molecule, a speck of calcium or phosphorus?