Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

Returning from the military cemeteries, I look through old Hungarian photographs to stir a little mourning, to feel a tie with the dead. I don't know why, but Hungarian photographs are the best at capturing the dead. In 1919, Rudolf Balogh took five pictures. A section of a wall, a gallows, five figures. The four men carrying out the sentence wear boots that gleam. The sun on them as on a mirror. The convicted man is calm. No despair or fear on his young face. Sorrow, perhaps, and gravity. The sleeves of his uniform are too long. The mast of the gallows is made of old timber. You can see the carpenter's marks on it. It could be a crossbeam from a ceiling, from a house torn down. The execution must have been painfully drawn out, because in the first photograph, in which the man stands alone by the mast and the three-step wooden footstool, he is accompanied by a shadow from the wall; in the next photograph, as they put the noose on him, he is completely in the sun. Yet no despair or fear. He has taken the three steps up, with still no change in his stance: his hands hang at his sides, his head slightly tilted. He'll be that way to the end. Only when two soldiers jerk the stool out from under his feet does his right arm lift. Then his body resumes its former peaceful position, and you can see that his sleeves are still too long. Whereas the executioners are in motion. As if they are eager to leave this place encircled by a wall, to escape in their polished boots. Their stride is soldierly, mustaches bristling, eyes lowered when it's over. Their shadows on the bare earth around the gallows make a complicated drawing.

The captions indicate no exact date or specific place. Only 1919, and in the narrow space above the wall is a leafy tree branch, so we're somewhere between April and October, it's the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and Béla Kun is writing his "To All!": "The workers no longer want to groan under the yoke of the big capitalists and landowners. Only socialism and communism can save the country from anarchy." In April the Romanians come from the east, the Czechs from the north. The Romanians take Szolnok and then must take Abony, because there is no other way to Budapest. Kerté sz's violinist, younger by two years, definitely hears them. In the evenings they rest in villages and burn bonfires under the open sky. They drink and sing, of course, because the amusements of soldiers haven't changed for centuries. They are sad and raucous. Two years earlier, they came this way in Hungarian uniforms, to die in Ożenna; now they wear Romanian uniforms, to conquer Budapest on August 3. The ones from Transylvania, at least. By every indication they are attacking their own country, and so they drink more and sing louder to drown the clamor of their time and of their own hearts, because it must be hard to be a Hungarian Romanian and then suddenly a Romanian Romanian and despise what you died for two years before. In any event, the violinist hears them, and his ear automatically records their melodies, so who knows, Kertész may have heard them that Sunday morning under his window. Heard something from the Carpathians, or a doina, the Romanian blues of illiterate shepherds, or a verbunk known to every Hungarian recruit and therefore to the hanged man as well.

These are my thoughts, more or less, around All Souls' Day. Still no snow. In the leafless trees you can see abandoned bird nests: irregular black spheres made of twigs. The light knows no pity. The thin shadows resemble skeletons. The day ends at four in the afternoon. The sun sinks behind the mountain. The rest of the road to take is hidden from view. Curious: hidden where usually I picture noon, Konieczna and everything else that lies on the other side of the Carpathians. It's evening here, while there the world is just beginning to burn in golden red. Bardejov charred, Spiš smoldering, Rudohorie and Mátra, and the Great Hungarian Plain, and the little town of MezŐkövesd, which has a museum of agricultural machinery. I stopped there twice in my life, once to find an ATM, once to buy something to eat and drink. Wine and salami, no doubt, and something else, and that evening I slept in Bakoński Woods, and the next day or rather night I ended up in Ankaran, at a campsite by the Adriatic, trying to hammer tent pegs into stony ground after midnight, with no success, so I had to curl up in a limp tent. In the morning I saw that among the tall pines all the vacationers who had gathered here to stay for weeks had built a kind of village. There were large, many-person tents, trailers, umbrellas, canvas shelters, field kitchens, and open dining areas. Some people had marked off their place with twine or strips of plastic bags. Laminates, plywood, sheet metal, and polyester formed ad hoc homesteads, garden plots, the only thing missing was wandering cattle, swine on holiday, cows touring, rams and goats taking a break. The town had come here to play at being in the country, a psychoanalytic return to the past. Spa cachet, gold sandals, baggy pants with palm trees and parrots, gag glasses, the smell of creams and lotions, suntanned tits and mostly bare asses all created a slightly off-kilter rusticity, complete with folksy looking into pots and gossiping at fences, people in close quarters carefully keeping their property separate. Badminton, soccer, sunburn, lathering backs, grilling, going for walks, activities to kill time and alleviate boredom and therefore very like activities in the true sticks. Ljubljana and Maribor relaxed, re-creating the life of their ancestors in a Microsoft version.

It's November, and I'm recalling thoughts and places from a year and a half ago. The past, locations — there is nothing else to describe. A perpetual All Souls' Day, with every fact an epitaph. We outlive events. That is all we have. From that campsite I drove to Trieste, but Trieste was not important and now lies elsewhere. So let me head southeast. Across the Balkans, down the shore, then through Cetinje and Podgorica to enter Albania at the border by the village of Hani Hotit and pass Shkodët, stopping only in Milot, since I had spent no more than an hour there once and remember practically nothing of it: low houses, a crowd in the street, horse harnesses, possibly a market day, old women in white harem pants sitting on benches in front of stone cottages— that's really all. Also: the front yard of a one-story house, a few tables in the shade of trees, beaten earth, a place to drink raki and coffee. A thirty-year-old woman entered, big-breasted and dressed in bright red, a wide black sash around her waist. She was covered with gold jewelry; her sweeping hair was navy blue; she wore high heels and tight pants and carried a glittering handbag. This was in Milot, among the horse harnesses and women in harem pants, where the Albanian north begins and the old times endure and "You may not enter someone's house without first calling from the fence" or "Bread and salt, a smile, a fire in the hearth, and bedding for guests at any time of day or night." The woman in red spoke to someone in a loud voice, gesticulating. This sleepy spot, gray from the heat and dust, seemed a flame that could ignite everything, and nothing would remain as it was.

Then the village Rreth-Baz, and at the home of Xhemal Cakoni I drank raki with curdled milk for the first time in my life. We sat barefoot at a low table. On the wall was a tapestry with a view of Mecca. We ate grapes. The women brought plates, returned to the kitchen, or stood in the doorway. We made a toast to success, to happiness, to health. Xhemal introduced his son with pride. A small guy, thin and shy. Worked in Germany. Just took off on his own. Xhemal reminisced with Illyet; they remembered the old days, when Illyet was a teacher in this region. He lived in an isolated house by the cemetery and feared vampires. I wondered about the lot of ghosts in the country of Enver Hoxha, who on April 29, 1967, proclaimed Albania to be the first atheist nation in the world. Almost as strange as the sight of Ceauş escu's grave, a year later, at the Ghencea Cemetery in Bucharest. The tombstone was more than a meter high and topped with a white cross. In the place where you would expect the head of Christ in a crown of thorns was a red, five-pointed star. Affected, I had to smoke. Around the grave, an iron fence. The paranoid shoemaker, even in death, was raving mad: the cross and the Commie star would light his way in the afterworld. Fear had eaten at him all his life, so in cowardly fashion he was armed with both, just in case. To weasel out of it somehow. No telling who would be dealing the cards on the other side. Most likely, however, he rotted altogether in his iron cage, rotted body and soul. There were stains of oil lamps there, wax from candles, so someone came to say a pitiful prayer for the dead. Secret emissaries from the English queen? She had, after all, driven him around London in her own carriage, had put him up for the night in Buckingham Palace. Who can fathom the people of the West, who can guess what they feel? In any case, I thought, a fitting punishment, for him to lie in an ordinary cemetery, not covered much, without marble, some two kilometers from the House of the People, that pyramid raised in shoemaker taste, its base measuring 250 by 250. To reach it, even by the most direct path, you'd have to walk a quarter of a kilometer across scorched and treeless pasture. Which I didn't do, observing it instead from a distance. I preferred to see his grave: more interesting.