Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

Solec was like Sokołów Podlaski thirty years ago, like Huşi eight months ago. It was yet another candidate for the capital of my part of the continent. I didn't want to stop, didn't want to get out, afraid that all this would disappear, so impermanent was it, so fragile and fundamentally fake. At the church on the hill everything ended, and I too turned back. Horses wandered free in this parish, their long manes matted by winter. I'll come here before I die, I thought, come here when I no longer want to live. No one here will notice that all my strength has left me. At night I'll sit in the movie theater and watch the ghosts of films of former years. Death should bear some resemblance to life. It should be like a dream or movie. Reality in this part of the continent has assumed the aspect of the afterlife — no doubt so that people will fear death less and die with less regret.

I stood before the movie theater. It was like the photograph: existing and not existing, neither dead nor alive. Matter in imitation of the beyond. Possibly the photograph had more life in it than this. Evening gathered, and I felt a chill in the air. In the theater's dark interior, frost would cut the transparent images on old reels. Yes, there are places in which we are certain that something lies behind, something is concealed, but we are helpless, too stupid or too timid or perhaps not old enough to know how to cross to the other side. I stood like a post, freezing, and imagined the crooked doors opening and me entering, and beheld the narrow passage we all have been seeking, where Solec begins, Wygwizdów, Sulejów, Huşi, Lubenice, and the rails running from Stróże to Tarnov, the red train cars from Košice, everything that is no more yet endures, indestructible and without end, even that Saturday a few years ago when we drove through Hornád valley, once more at the foot of the airborne Gypsy village, but this time the miracles take place on the ground, on the flat pasture between the ascending road and the river. There was a thaw, and all the kids had come out from the settlement. A great snow fort was falling under the merciless attack of its besiegers. Towers knocked over, walls breached, the defenders with nowhere to hide. But the scene held more than this concluding battle. On a meadow as large as a couple of soccer fields were enormous spheres of snow. The children rolled each ball till they could roll no longer, then began a new one. Some were a meter in diameter. Several dozen such balls, looking as if they had fallen from heaven. Beautiful and unreal. Among them, colorfully dressed children rolled tirelessly. There was nothing more animated in the neighborhood, which lay in the shadow of a steel mill. I drove to the mill. Several dozen men were leaving just then. They walked with a heavy, numb step, as gray as smoke, as sad as all Krompachy and the twilight of the proletariat. Meanwhile the Gypsy children converted their energy into spheres of snow that in a day or two the sun would dwindle and turn to water to feed the Hornád River, which flowed in a complex maze of tributaries and catchments to the Black Sea, to which the government of Slovakia had no access.

Later, farther on, somewhere in a village near Sabinov, hogs were being butchered in a stockyard. On a black wire fence hung meat. In that dirty-white landscape of winter thaw, the meat glowed like fire. The house, the road, the sky, the people bustling, the whole village with vigilant mongrels pacing — as far as the eye could see, it lay in mist, was without color; only from those pieces of meat did the light of cruelty shine. Through the glass of my car window I felt the heat of the red pieces. In the Slovak slumber and stillness and sad tranquillity of my part of the world, a slaughter was taking place. No one hid the shame of death. Dogs and children watched the quick knife move, the innards in bowls and buckets, the blood. All as it had been for a thousand years. Nothing changing. Then dusk.

A red light at the passage to Konieczna. I waited for several minutes. Someone moved in the dimness, walked to the counter where passports are stamped, pressed a button, the green light went on, the crossing gate lifted. Inside sat one of ours; the Slovaks didn't care who was leaving their country. "Where are you coming from?" "When did you leave the country?" "What's your destination?" I watched as the passport was slipped into the scanner. "I'm going there. I left today," I answered. The customs window opened a little. "Purchases." "All in order." I saw no face, just the gesture to drive on. I had no sense that I was returning from somewhere. Right after the turn, in the village, the mist began.

OUR LEADER

For the title, the literal translation of nasz bat'ko is not "father leader" but "our father," a traditional way — in Ukrainian, in Russian — of identifying the master or leader: the patriarch of the manor, the owner of the serfs, the priest, the ruler of the region or nation. Our leader is our father, demanding obedience, fidelity, and love. This term has been and still is associated with czars and dictators — Stalin, for example, was called "little father" ( batiushka ) — so it points, at least for one in the modern West who knows a little Slavic history, to an old-fashioned, homey kind of fascism.

P.'s joke"… Shell, so we might be close" points to the sound similarity of Shell and Szela; the name in Polish is pronounced shella .

Quotations and facts about Jakub Szela are taken from Adam Bogusz, Wieś Siedliska Bogusz (Kraków, 1903).

ŢARA SECUILOR, SZéKELYFÖLD, SZEKLERLAND

The motto in the church in Roşia is from a German hymn based on Revelation 2:10: "Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life."

Siebenbürgen, "seven fortresses," is the German name for Transylvania.

THE COUNTRY IN WHICH THE WAR BEGAN

The quotation of Emil Cioran is from his History and Utopia. The quotation about devils and suicide is from Drago Janč ar's Mocking Desires. These, and the one from Edvard Kocbek, are translated into English here not from their originals — from Romanian or Slovenian — but from the Polish edition of this book. (The Polish for Cioran was provided by Marek Bieńczyk; for Jančar, by Joanna Pomorska; for Kocbek, by Jerzy Snopek.)

SHQIPERIA

The 600,000 paranoid bunkers were built during the regime of Enver Hoxha, who ruled the country from 1944 to 1985.

The quotation on page 107 comes from Fatos Lubonja, Piramidy z błota.

MOLDOVA

The Georgian ruler is Stalin.

The Slaughter of Praga: in 1794, the Russian army under Suvorov captured Warsaw. Winning the battle, his troops, against orders, went on a rampage and killed 20,000 of the inhabitants of Praga, a district of the city.

Sheriff: a company that controls many businesses in Transnistria and is also involved in its politics. It has connections, political and personal, with President Igor Smirnov.

ON THE ROAD TO BABADAG

As a result of the Treaty of Trianon after World War I, the borders of Hungary were redrawn. Hungary lost ten cities and about a third of its inhabitants.

Jo napot means "hello."

Okęcie: the official checking passports is at the major Polish airport outside Warsaw.

"To sum up…": The quotation is from Mircea Eliade's "Romania: A Historical Sketch." A caution to the reader, for this quotation and for others in which the English is twice removed from the original language. Eliade's Romanian was translated into Polish by Anna Kazmierczak, and from her Polish into this English. The stylistic-semantic drift inevitable in any literary translation is no doubt considerable here, having passed through two consecutive translators.