Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

At the entrance to the cemetery, we were stopped by a guard. He was large, a swarthy Rambo in military dress, with dozens of pockets and a walkie-talkie. He asked if we had someone here close to us. Roland answered in Romanian: absolutely, family, relatives. So the government was afraid and kept watch, lest he scramble out on a moonlit night, cross the avenue, and dig up Elena. They lay separately, some twenty meters between them. She had it much worse. Only an iron fence and an iron cross covered with black antirust paint. In the center, a patch of dry earth. Someone had planted something there, but it refused to grow. As if both husband and wife exuded a toxin that destroyed roots. All around, bushes, shrubs, ferns, saplings; here, nothing, as if the rhythm of vegetation had been interrupted by a defoliant. Their bodies did this, I thought. Deprived of voice, sight, motion, they sought to communicate through their decomposition, through corpse juices. Then I saw he had another stone, made of brown marble and standing beside the one with the red star. Much higher, topped with a cross, with a faience cemetery photograph that portrayed the shoemaker in a suit, white shirt, and tie. On the plinth was carved, "Olacrima pe mormitul tau din partea poporlui roman," which more or less means "The tear of the Romanian people on your grave." Nothing more, nothing less. Before this inscription, the Romanian people partied till they dropped and roared with laughter. Still another cross, the same kind as his wife's, black and iron. Someone had simply driven it into the ground next to the marble. The three made a dark parody of Golgotha. In a stone pot serving as an urn, a dried stalk. The base of the tombstone was covered with soot, smeared with yellow lamp oil, and there were burned-out lamps scattered on the ground — the melancholy of the makeshift, a cheap copy of eternal rest. Not far off, on a white slab stood a black dog watching, perhaps to make sure that the body would not dig itself out. As we left, the guard approached us and said, "I knew you had come to see him."

Today again the carters rode through. As yesterday and the day before, monotonously, slowly, in mist. Leaving horse shit on the white road. This time, only two of them. Heavy men, over forty. Both horses dun. At two thirty they come up from the valley. At three thirty it gets dark, and they're home. They unhitch the animals, lead them away, give them water and food. You hear straps hit the metal bucket. The horses shift from leg to leg, and the floorboards of the stable drum. It's humid and dark inside; it smells of manure and hay. The harnesses hang on rusty nails.

Several days ago I was in MezŐkövesd. There was rain and a sudden freeze. Ice coated everything. Sunday morning the Hungarians sold their wares in canvas stalls at the square. People skated, holding their bagged purchases. Ice covered the solemn holiday decorations. There was an ATM at King Matthias Street, the same King Matthias on the pale-blue thousand-forint banknote. I pulled out onto the highway. Three cars at the intersection like automotive phantoms in the haze and intensifying drizzle. I drove toward Miskolc. Everything gleamed: bare poplars, yellow grass, blue road signs. Jesus, how empty and plain the landscape. Nothing but a flat surface and once in a rare while a naked tree in the distance, like a comb. The air seemed to ring from this glassy ice. Near EmŐd, junctions, roads to Debrecen and Nyífregyháza. Glistening gray Möbius strips got lost in the void of the Great Lowlands, and it was hard to believe that all those cities, towns, and villages were there, with their houses, smoking chimneys, and life. I think it was near EmŐd, in the beginning of December, that infinity revealed itself to me for the first time. But only for a moment, as I thought of Esterházy and his Transporters. "They are coming!… The transporters are coming! Their shouts rip the dawn — the distant, gray, threadbare dawn — the silence fragile and empty… The reins flowed lightly, the tiny pieces of ice clinked under the rims of the wheels." I always wanted to write about Transporters. Twenty-five printed pages. The wet air, uncertain, parts, and it seems that they have stepped from a dream, a dream dreamt by one more powerful than we are, to appear on earth as messengers of temptation. Indistinguishable from their big animals, heated and sluggish, made completely of meat. "Their faces, almost all bearded, are broad, but they are not friendly, not at all! In the back of the cart you can hear their short, hoarse laughter. They understand one another, I see. They have powerful thighs; how tight their pants must be." Indeed, I saw them near EmŐd, on a bare plain, on a Sunday morning in December, in weather that evaded time. The world so slippery that even the air could not stick to it. They drove there at the same time of year, when the mud of the road finally hardens and autumn is done. The same trek for centuries. Salt transported from far away, and wine, let's say, from Eger to the south, to the other shore of the Tisa, to Timişoara, all as in a historical novel, action-packed, or a film, when over the flat horizon a horse-drawn cart appears, the music stops, and only the rattle of the axles, the clank of the wrought-iron rims, and the wheeze of the horses are heard. Those who cross the land always disturb its peace and incline it to evil, awakening fear mixed with need. After their passage, nothing is as it was. The horizon, cracked, will never heal.

Luckily the highway ended there, the road became crowded, and there was an end to philosophizing. A Hungarian maniac on the outskirts of Miskolc passed three cars at once with his Zafir. With the air a little warmer, ice fell from trees. On the other side of the city, by an exit, I saw a herd of cars gathered around a supermarket, their roofs the cold backs of cattle grazing on concrete pasture. After Encs the road emptied again: no one was driving out of the country. I was in a bit of a hurry, but as usual Gönc tempted, and I detoured a few kilometers. In a candy shop, an elderly man served at the counter. A woman with a small boy ordered a cappuccino to go in a Styrofoam cup. The two crossed Kossuth Street, to a bus stop, where a man waited with a silver tape recorder and two plastic shopping bags stuffed. He was short and smoked a cigarette, protecting it with his hand from large flakes of wet snow. Where were they going with the tape recorder and child, with the worn, much-used bags? They seemed poor, pitiful. A little family on the road two weeks before Christmas. Mother and son drank in silence, taking quick sips, as if they had no time, though the bus wasn't coming. The bus to Telkibánya, Pálháza, Sátoraljaújhely, across the Zemplén Mountains. The snow fell more heavily. Like people out of work, they didn't converse. Being out of work showed in their faces, in their gestures — I knew the signs, from home. Out of the main current of time, cast ashore, aside, left to their fate, a fate that no longer involved others. You wake one morning and the world is different, though nothing has changed. These were my thoughts in Gönc. But maybe they weren't out of work, maybe I invented that as a way not to leave with empty hands. The unemployed, like carters and transporters, are needed: a reason to go home.

This time I returned from Cres Island, sixty-eight kilometers long and with three thousand inhabitants. It takes twenty minutes by ferry from Brestova. Besides us there were only two trucks and an old Mercedes. Before we landed at Porozina, the driver of the Mercedes managed to down two brandies. From the deck, the island looked deserted. The ferry rumbled and stank of diesel. The bartender also appeared to have had one too many. Fifteen crossings a day, after all. The sky was overcast; the landscape took on weight. It all went together: the diesel ferry, the bartender, the inebriated driver, the dark, distinct water of the bay, the empty dock, the low sky, the sleepy movements of the crew, and the December light. A separate life. Cres, inland, was deserted indeed. The road went its length like a spine. White, treeless tract, stunted vegetation, wind. In one spot I saw a flock of sheep. They stood so still, it was hard to tell them from the rocks. They were the same color as the rocks. No one tended them. On the map, Cres looks like an old bone. The winter strips it of everything, and gusts from the sea fill the tiniest cracks. It was that way in the village of Lubenice at the top of a three-hundred-meter cliff. I never saw a human dwelling more exposed. A few dozen houses of old stone and a few scrawny, unprotected fig trees. The wind had access from every direction: endless air in every direction. In some places you feel you cannot go on, only go back, because reality has said the final word there. These houses were gray, I thought, because of the wind; the wind had wiped the color from the walls, color could persist only within. If Cres was an island, Lubenice was twice one, separated from land by water and air both. A gulf yawned behind this bedroom wall. Outside this kitchen window, seabirds rode air currents. Such was life here. At the cemetery, half the dead were named Muskardin. The cemetery lay at the edge of a rocky shelf. Death must have been a curse for the gravediggers. A grave wasn't dug but chiseled out. Everything said purgatory. No one would come here without a compelling reason. People driven by a sentence or by a fear, and once here, they hadn't the strength to leave.