So let's assume he heard it all and smelled the perfume through the foliage. The night filled the room in the attic, and he could recall his life without obstacle, because insomnia, just as many years ago in Sibiu, has again taken the place of eternity for him. On Brazilor Avenue and Father Bratu Avenue and Episcopei Avenue and Andrei Saguna Avenue and Ilarie Mitrea Avenue, the animals sleep. In the dim, close barns the cows lie and chew as they sleep. The horses stand with lowered heads at their empty cribs. As it ought to have been and as in fact it is. The heat departs from him forever and over Răinari joins the heat of the livestock. Then it lifts into the black sky above the Carpathians and flows toward the cold stars like a vision of the soul, a vision he couldn't stand, because it kept him awake.
Three months later I was riding, at dusk, through the village Rozpucie at the feet of Słonne Góry, Brine Mountains. The cows were returning from the meadows and taking up the full width of the road. I had to brake, then come to a complete stop. They parted before the car like a lazy reddish wave. In the frosty air, steam puffed from their nostrils. Warm, swollen, indifferent, the animals stared straight ahead, into the distance, because neither objects nor landscape held meaning for them. They simply looked through everything. In Rozpucie too I felt the enormity and continuity of the world around me. At that same hour, in that same dying light, cattle were coming home: from Kiev, say, to Split, from my Rozpucie to Skopje, and the same in Stara Zagora. Scenery and architecture may change, and the breed, and the curve of horn or the color of mane, but the picture remains untouched: between two rows of houses moved a herd of sated cattle. They were accompanied by women in kerchiefs and worn boots, or by children. No isolated island of industrialization, no sleepless metropolis, no spiderweb of roads or railroad lines, could block out this image as old as the world. The human joined with the bestial to wait out the night together.
There will be no miracle, I thought, putting the car in first gear. In the rearview mirror I saw swaying behinds. The tails hung unmoving, because there were no flies now. All this will have to perish in order to survive, if only in rudimentary form. The "worst and smallest" nations live with their animals, and would like to be saved with them. They would like to be respected with their livestock, because they have little else. The dark-blue abyss of a bovine eye is a mirror in which we see ourselves as animate flesh, yet flesh vouchsafed a certain grace.
At the highway I turned left. I wanted to get free of the hairpin turns on the main summit of Brine Mountains before the sun went down. It was empty and cold. Not a soul on the road. In Tyrawa, mist blended with chimney smoke. Here the evening persisted with a will, but after five minutes the sky suddenly cracked and out poured a brilliant red. I left the car at a miserable roadside parking area and walked to the edge of the drop. The highway to Sanok — gray as ashes. In Zału ż, the first lights coming on: weak, barely visible, like pinpricks. The fog in the valley obscured the houses and farms, as if no one were there. On the other hand, the Carpathians were on fire. The western wound stretched across the horizon. The entire south was freshly cut meat, a dazzling slaughterhouse.
I recalled the trip from Cluj to Sighişoara. We went by train. In our compartment sat a Japanese collector of folk costumes and his Romanian interpreter. After Apahida, the grassy plain began. I had never seen earth so naked. Gentle hills in a row in the distance. When the train climbed a little higher, you saw that beyond the horizon was another, and still another. The treeless, uninhabited expanse was a pale, desiccated yellow, the color of something waiting for a tremendous blaze, a single match. Nothing there. On occasion a far building flicked by, a cottage with a pigsty, a hayrick, then again a vastness of air and folded earth. Small flocks of sheep appeared. With them, always, a solitary man no larger than a pin. Under the burned sky, on the baked land, they seemed lost in a blinding afterlife. Going from somewhere to somewhere else. In the brittle grass lived only flies, birds, and lizards. The earth gave off heat and dust.
Now it's a wet, snowless December, and the weather maps say December is in that place too. Like a sheet heavy with water, the sky hangs over Erdély, and the hills are covered with mud and rotting grass instead of dust, and I would like to be there and repeat my summer route, this time getting off at Boju-Catun with ten Romanian words in my head and five Hungarian. I don't remember the station, it was so small and hopeless. Possibly it is nothing more than a metal sign by the rails. But I would like to be there on December 14, with no plan in mind, because the future has not been of concern to me for a long time now and I am drawn increasingly to places that tell of a beginning or else where sadness has the power of fate. In a word, screw where we're headed, I'm interested only in where we came from. So ten words in Romanian, five in Hungarian, the Boju-Catun station, and, let's say, a million lei in small bills, to see the void between heaven and earth through which black buffalo wade. Five hundred kilometers to Vienna, 800 to Munich, 1,800 to Brussels, all of it more or less, approximately, as the crow flies. But the air cracks somewhere en route, parts like tectonic plates separating continents. Yes, a little money, good shoes, something for the rain, Bihor palinka in a plastic bottle, and I'll be fine, because I'm haunted by the vision of those hills; they gleam through all the landscapes I've seen since, because somewhere between Valea Florilor and Ploscoş I believed again that man was fashioned out of clay. Nothing else could have happened in that land, and man grieves only because his making cannot be repeated, ever.
"My country! At all cost I desired to connect with it — but there was nothing to connect with. Neither in its present nor in its past did I find anything genuine… My mad lover's rage had no object, you could say, because my country crumbled under the force of my gaze. I wished it were as powerful, immoderate, and wild as an evil power, a doom to shake the world, but it was small, modest, and without the qualities that make destiny." So wrote Emil Cioran in 1949, returning in his mind to his adventure in the Iron Guard.
The cows have disappeared into the woods. They moo in the December dimness. Romania Mare, Greater Serbia, Poland from sea to sea… The incredibly stupid fictions of those countries. A hopeless yearning for what never was, for what can never be, and an adolescent sulk over what is. Last year in Stará L'ubovňa, at the foot of a castle, I overheard the jabber of a Polish tour group. The leader was a forty-year-old moron in Gore-Tex and sunglasses. He knocked at the gate of the museum, which was closed at that hour. Finally he kicked the gate and told those assembled, "It should be ours again, or Hungarian. Then there would be some order!"
Indeed. In this part of the world, everything should be other than it is. The discovery of maps came here too early, or too late.
I drink strong coffee and think constantly about Emil Cioran's broken heart in the 1930s. About his insanity, his Romanian Dostoyevskianism. "Codreanu was in reality a Slav, a kind of Ukrainian hetman," he would say after forty years. Ah, these cruel thoughts. First they devastate the world like a fire or earthquake, and when everything has been consumed and dashed into tiny pieces of shit, when there is nothing around them but desert, wilderness, and the abyss before Creation, they throw away their self-won freedom and submit to a passionate faith in things that are hopeless and causes that are lost. Exactly as if trying to redeem doubt with disinterested love. The loneliness of a liberated mind is as great as the sky over Transylvania. Such a mind wanders like cattle in search of shade or a watering place.
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