Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

I drove off the asphalt and down a field. A road was marked on the map, but in reality it was more a dry riverbed or broken steps leading to infinity. I covered a few dozen kilometers in first gear. All around, white rubble, rubble stretching to the sky, breaking off, falling off on the other side. Great birds soared above, seeking a living thing. But for us, people, everything was dead, cold, swept clean by the wind. Someone had divided this open area with stone walls. The walls went to the horizon, cutting rectangles out of the emptiness. A paranoid-meticulous marking off of property, I thought, but later people told me that this labyrinth of barriers was designed to prevent erosion of soil from the rain. The way was so narrow sometimes that I had to fold my side mirrors. In the carefully walled-off square patches of space there were only stones, no earth. An occasional twig grew between boulders. I passed a house with a collapsed roof, then another in equal disrepair, then there were no houses. I imagined summer in this place: blazing white, the lizards baking. As far as the eye could see, nothing that might throw a shadow. Then, high among the rocks, Lubenice. I could have reached it by the narrow asphalt ribbon from the other direction, from the sea, from Valun, but that would have been too simple, telling little of the truth about Cres Island, its hollow interior, where birds circled in search of prey.

Sometimes I imagine a map composed only of the places I'd like to see once more. A not so serious map, having nothing important on it: wet snow in Gönc, Zborov and its ruined church, Caraorman with its desert sand and rusted machines that were supposed to uncover gold in the waters of the Danube, the heat in Erind, Spišská Belá and a grocery store barely visible at dusk, dawn and the smell of cat piss in Piran, Răinari at evening and the aroma from a gingerbread factory, pigs not far from Oradea, hogs in Mátészalka, Delatyn and its train station on a dreary morning, Duląbka, Rozpucie and Jabłonna Lacka, Huşi and Sokołów, and back again to Lubenice. I close my eyes and draw the roads, rails, distances, and scenes between the wastes, between one insignificance and the next, and I try putting together an atlas that will carry all this on its flat back, to make it a little more permanent, a little more immortal.

A few days ago I rode to Kraków on the Košice express, taking the 10:11 from Stróże. Snow still lay on the fields. Grays and blacks emerging from beneath. And, God, the pathetic rubbish along the tracks, the wire fences, the strings of forgotten holiday lights burning in the dark blue of January, the naked trees in yards, piles of old lumber, scrap metal, broken bricks, all of it framed by linear geometry, a supernatural precision that suddenly bares the skeleton of the world. Bobowa, Ciężkowice, Tuchów, Pleśna — as if the tongue of frost has licked the human landscape to the bone, leaving only what is most important, what you can't do without, else nothingness takes over. Noon finally, but in some windows of homes near the track I saw the yellow glow of lightbulbs. The yards were obsessively neat. All cleaned and made pretty, like a body at a funeral. It was the snow, its thin layer outlining every object, that gave the form of the ideal to the poverty of the everyday. Noon finally, yet there was no one about. No reason for people to be about. The land was turning toward the abstract, so they preferred to stay indoors. I opened my window to smell the burning coal, thought of pans on hot stoves, skillful pokers stoking, moments when the fire escapes the iron grate, black smoke rises, and a red glow fills the kitchen. How many such homes on the way? Hundreds, thousands, and the same details in gray, the same sad order set against the chaos of the world.

The train car was Slovak. Its seats were upholstered in red fake leather. Before I got on, it had passed Prešov, Sabinov, Lipany. Things were the same there. The houses stood a little closer together and were more alike, but everything else was similar: the crouching provisionality, the uncertain fate, life as improvisation. What had there been in Sabinov two or three years back, in early spring? A hip roof, Gothic dome, church spire, tower clock; beside the church, a yellow building in the Renaissance style, its facade covered with soot, grillwork in the windows, then the remnants of defending walls, puddles reflecting the smoky sky, and a few chickens looking for dry ground to scratch. I'm sure I landed there by accident. I was probably investigating new roads on the Spiš and šariša border. Possibly I took a shortcut off Road 18 with the old idea that someday I'd get to the other side of the landscape and see everything I saw now but greatly magnified, a kind of ultra landscape that in some miraculous way would unite all scraps and fragments, every Lipany and Sabinov, which would all find their places, they and their chickens, mud, coal-fired kitchens, smoke, tidy desperation of yards, expectation, and become twice, no, a thousand times as large and never, ever again fret over their random, stopgap existence.

In Piotrków, equidistant between the junction to Kielce and the junction to Radom, is a narrow-gauge railway. Unused for many years. Two reddish threads here and there covered by the sandy earth, then reappearing on the right side of the pavement. My People's Atlas of Poland says that this line was built in 1904 and still operating in 1971. It was Saturday, February, the sun was shining, and I couldn't tear my eyes from what was left of those Lilliputian train tracks. In Uszczyn there was even a little station still standing. The red-brick structure tried to suggest the Gothic but instead looked like a building-block house. Its naive ornamentation had a puppet quality. The whole area seemed childishly miniaturized. The houses on either side of the road were almost all facade. Especially in Uszczyn, Przygłów, and the area around Sulejów. On these facades with neither age nor style would be a cornice sometimes, a circular window, a pilaster, something put there not for function but simply out of the longing to be a little more, a little better than average. Behind these walls was nothing but the wind. The poultry had their coops, the dogs their doghouses, but every effort had gone into the awful facades, this last defense against the form, so like formlessness, of the world. So instead of going to see a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey, I was drawn to Sulejów garden plots full of blue puddles, to atrophied little squares, yards, and balconies where old furniture accumulated, credenzas eaten by the weather, the mortal remains of human employment. On a thin column, like Simon Stylites, sat a local angel. He looked like the homes he protected. Cut from the same cloth, he would stay with them until the end. The Mother of God by the church on the hill had at least a shelter over her, made of L-square rulers and Plexiglas. The angel had nothing, just heaven. A little farther on stood a trash receptacle. Thirty kilometers due south lay the village of Wygwizdów. I was supposed to go and stay there. The sky over the plain that day was cold and bright. On the way I was likely to encounter three or four broken-down cars.

Only one Wygwizdów in the nation, but I had to go on, to reach Solec before nightfall. That was the plan. I had never been in Solec. I had only seen a photograph once; it was of a movie theater. The entrance overgrown with grass; in the poster marquee, tatters; a cloudy sky. In the background, an old wooden cottage. The theater was called simply Cinema; that was the word over the entrance. A willow grew nearby. They had shown nothing for years. Inside, in the dark, chairs rotted. I tried to imagine the surroundings. There are photographs and places that give you no peace, though nothing much is there. The movie theater in the photograph was from a time when direct names sufficed for things. The facade rose in a gentle arc to accommodate the simple letters. Solitude and desertion moved through the frame like a cold wind. That's why I drove there in the middle of February, patches of snow still on the fields. I had the strong feeling that somewhere between Sulejów, Wygwizdów, and Solec time had ground to a halt or simply evaporated or melted like a dream and no longer separated us from our childhood. Perhaps even no longer from the entire past. I left Road 777, turned right, and empty space began. The land lifted, like a plain gradually approaching the sky or like an oppressive dream in which you can neither reach your destination nor escape. I drove to Solec, through country that laughs at you, for one black-and-white photograph.