Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

This was Răinari, the town in which Emil Cioran was born and spent his first ten years. The sun fell vertically on the paved little streets, on the pastel houses, on the red husk of the roofs, and brought out the oldest smells. At first I didn't know what was hanging in the air, penetrating the walls, the bodies of passersby, and the chassis of old vehicles. Only after a couple of days did I realize that it was the mix of animal effluvia. From locked yards came pig shit; the soil between the cobblestones had collected a century of horse piss; wisps of the stable rose from innumerable harnesses; from the fields came the choking air of pasture, from the gutters the cesspool seep of barns and sties; and one day in the river I saw entrails floating. The current was carrying the opalescent, flickering red in the direction of Sibiu. From the mountains the wind brought the sharp, acrid smell of pens — a mélange of trampled herbs, sticky, fat fleece, and dried green balls of excrement like stones. And occasionally a thread of hickory smoke in the air, a whiff of fried onions, a puff of gasoline fume.

"It would have been better for me had I never left this village. I'll never forget the day my parents put me on the cart that took me to the lyceum in town. That was the end of my beautiful dream, the destruction of my world."

Now a tram goes from Răinari to Sibiu. The line loops at the edge of the village. You sit on the steps between the bar and the cobbler. In the bar they sell vodka that tastes of yeast; it's thirty-six percent and cheap. Before the tram arrives, several men down a glass or two. Like that Gypsy we kept meeting for a few days in different places. Once he was waiting for a bus to Păltiniş; another time he was hanging around the station in Sibiu. A black felt hat on his head, a folded scythe and handle in his hands, an old knapsack on his back. It was August, hay-making time, and it's possible he was simply looking for work but couldn't find any or didn't want to, so he killed time, waiting for it all to pass, to end, so he could go back to wherever he came from.

Mornings and evenings we went to the pub on Nicolae Bălcescu Road. You enter down a few steps. Inside, the flies flit and the men sit. We drank coffee and brandy. You could take the same steps to the barber, where there was an antique barber's chair. The place was open late, to ten, eleven, and someone was always in the chair. We also drank beer, Ursus or Silva. From the street came the steady clop of horses. Sometimes, in the dark, you saw sparks from a horseshoe. Every drawn cart had a license plate. The shops worked late into the night. We purchased salami, wine, bread, paprika, watermelon. When the sun set, the shops glowed like warm caves. Our pockets were full of thousand-lei banknotes with Mihai Eminescu on them and hundred-lei coins with Mihai the Brave on them.

"Now, at this moment, I should feel myself a European, a man of the West. But none of that; in my declining years, after a life in which I saw many nations and read many books, I reached the conclusion that the one who is right is the Romanian peasant. Who believes in nothing, who thinks that man is lost, can do nothing, that history will crush him. This ideology of the victim is my idea as well, my philosophy of history."

One evening we went down the mountain to the village. Răinari lay in a valley filled to the brim with heat. I felt its animal proximity. The village gave off a golden blaze, but in the tangle of its side streets there was almost no light at all. The blinds, which during the day kept out the sun, now sealed the feeble light inside the homes. That's how it used to be, I thought. People didn't make unnecessary things; they wasted neither fire nor food. Excess was the duty and privilege of kings. In the square before the Church of Saint Paraskeva, a pack of children had gathered. In the dark, the gleam of chrome from their bicycles. Eighty years ago, little Emil spent the last of his vacation in the shadow of this very shrine. It was August then too, evening, and the boys teased the girls. There just weren't as many bicycles then, and the smell of Hungarian rule still hung in the air, and a few people kept using the name Resinar or Städterdorf. He would be leaving the next day and would never return.

Today, across from my house, four men gather wood. They pull to the forest edge stumps of spruce, stump by stump. When they have three or four, they load them onto a cart. They work like animals — slowly, monotonously, performing the same movements and gestures performed one hundred, two hundred years ago. The downhill road is long and steep. They use stakes to stop the cart. Even braked, the wheels slide on the wet clay. Wrapped in their torn quilted jackets and cloaks, the men seem fashioned from the earth. It's raining. Among the few things that distinguish them from their fathers and forefathers are a chain saw (Swedish) and disposable lighters. Well, and the cart is on tires. All the rest has remained unchanged for two hundred, three hundred years. Their smell, effort, groans, existence follow a form that has endured since unrecorded time. These men are as primeval as the two bay horses in harness. Around them spreads a present as old as the world. At dusk, they finish and leave, their clothes steaming like the backs of the animals.

I went out on the veranda to look south again. A truly November dark there, but I was looking back, to last August, and my sight stretched across Bardejov, Sárospatak, Nagykálló, the Bihor Mountains, Sibiu, to reach Răinari on that day at three in the afternoon, when we descended, the black-blue clouds thickening behind us. We went down and down, finally to that mercilessly beshitted field on which stood and lay dozens of red, gray, and spotted cows. Below the field the village began. The first houses were makeshift, scattered, resembling more a camp than a settlement. Over the road and river rose a cliff with young birches; they clung to the vertical rock with the aid of some miracle. Several dozen meters over our heads, a solitary man felled saplings with an ax. Then he tied them together in a knot and let them fall. These sliding bundles knocked stones loose, and the rattling plummet echoed through the valley. At the bottom, women and children waited to pull all this across the river and pile it into wheelbarrows. They were in no hurry. Along the road lay blankets, a campfire, a mangled doll. Their home was a few dozen meters away, yet they had set up another shelter here. Near the fire lay the remains of a meal, plastic bottles, mugs, other things, but we didn't want to pry. One clump of saplings caught halfway down the cliff, and the man slowly lowered himself to free it.

Rain began to fall after we were back inside. I sat at an open window in the attic, listening to the patter on the roof and on the leaves of the grapevine that filled the yard below. The pale mountains in the south darkened like a soaked fabric. A herd of white goats took cover in a thicket. I reflected that he would now be eighty-nine and could be sitting where I sat. This house, after all, belonged to his family. Our host was Petru Cioran. He had Emil's books on his shelf, though I doubt that he ever opened them. Anyway, they were in French and English. He and his wife showed us washed-out photographs: This is Emil when he was eight, and this is Relu, his younger brother. The stocky fifty-year-old man was proud, but every day he ran his store. He got up early, put crates in the van, drove to town for merchandise. At breakfast, we had a shot of slivovitz. It smelled like moonshine, was as strong as pure alcohol, and went well with smoked pork, goat cheese, and paprika.

So Emil could have been sitting here instead of me, could have been watching the rain wet the sacks of cement piled on the platform of the van parked in the street. The pavement shines, the smoke from the chimneys disappears in the gray haze, the water in the gutters swells and gathers trash, and he has returned, as if he never left, and is merely an old man alone with his thoughts. He no longer has the strength to walk in the mountains, nor the wish to chat with the shepherds. He looks, he listens. Philosophy gradually assumes physical shape. It enters his body and destroys it. Paris and traveling were a waste. Without them, things would have gone on a little longer, and boredom would have taken a less sophisticated form. From the kitchen on the ground floor comes the smell of heated fat and the voices of the women. The grapevines gleam and rustle in the rain. Then, from the east, dusk arrives, and the men assemble in the shed by the store. After the long day, they will be tired and dirty. They'll want a bottle of yeast vodka. The woman selling it will give them a thick glass, and they'll finish off the bottle in fifteen minutes. He will hear their talk, which becomes louder and faster, and smell the smell of their bodies through the foliage. The first man will give off tar, the second smoke, the third goats in a stable at the threshold of spring, when the animals begin to reek of urine, musk, and rut. The third will get drunk the quickest, and his friends will hold him up, prop him against a wall, with no interruption in the talk. A pack of Carpati cigarettes will be empty in an hour, and by then they will be drinking yellow beer from green bottles. The gold-gray light from the store's open door mixes with their hot breath, with the stuffy night, making their shapes light, transparent, cleansed of dirt and weariness. Then a couple enters: he swarthy, with a thin mustache, in a plaid jacket, gallant, graceful, boots shining and black trousers pressed, aglow and fluent; she a bit confused, occupied, as if deciding something important. The woman will smile timidly and adjust her peroxide hair. He will entertain her, hop about, brag, at the same time buy things — chocolate, vodka, beer — and stuff it all in a plastic bag, keeping up the nuptial dance throughout. They drink one beer on the premises, standing and gazing at each other. She from a glass, he from the bottle. Then they leave, arms around each other, into the dark, and her high heels tap the pavement.