Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

In the end, however, he did return to Răinari. Before the house in which he was born stands his bust. The house is the color of a faded rose. The wall facing the street has two windows with shutters. The facade is done with a cornice and pilasters. The bust itself is on a low pedestal, Cioran's face rendered realistically and unskillfully. A folk artist might have done it, imitating refined art. The work is "small, modest, and without qualities" aside from its resemblance to the original, but it suits this village square. Every day, herds of cows and sheep pass it, leaving behind their warmth and smell. Neither the wide world nor Paris left any mark on that face. It is sad and tired. Such men sit in the pub next to the barber and in the store-shed under the grapevine. Everything looks as if someone here had made his dream come true, granted his final wish.

"Acel blestemat, acel splendid Ră inari."

BUT THAT'S WHAT it's like: any moment you take the wrong turn, stumble, get lost— geography's no help — and forget the objective eye. Nothing is as it first appears; splinters of meaning lurk everywhere, and your mind catches on them like pants on barbed wire. You can't simply write, for example, that we crossed the border at Siret at night on foot, and the Romanian guards, who kept in check the entire passageway and five buses carrying dozens of tons of contraband, let us through with a gruff but friendly laugh. On the other side, there was only the night. We waited for something to come from Ukraine and take us, but nothing came, no old Lada, no Dacia. It's strange finding yourself in a foreign land when the only scenery is the dark. Off to a side, crawling shadows beyond the glass, so we went in their direction, because at that hour a man is like a moth, drawn to any light. In the border tavern, two guys sat at a small table playing a game resembling dominoes. We ordered coffee. The bartender made it in a saucepan on a hot plate. It was good, strong. Hearing us speak Polish, he tried too, but we understood only babka ("grandmother") and Wrocław. We asked about the bus or whatever, but he spread his arms and said something like "dimineaŢă tîrg in Suceava." In that blue, breath-humid light I drank Bihor palinka for the first time. It was worse than any Hungarian brandy, but it warmed, and I wanted something more than coffee since this fellow had a grandmother in Wrocław.

We went back to the road, but nothing had changed. A glow above the border; the darkness to the south, like India ink drying. An hour before dawn, cars began to assemble in front of the tavern. They stopped and waited for those buses that had been imprisoned between barriers; they were waiting for merchandise. A Dacia arrived, its tail scraping the asphalt. Four men inside. The driver got out and said, "Suceava zece dolar." He grabbed our knapsacks, threw them on the roof of the car, and tried tying them down. I asked him how the hell he thought this could work, pointing at the guys packed inside. He smiled and patted his knees: we'd fit somehow, one on top of the other. He was in a wonderful mood, and you could smell the drink on him. M. shouted no, she didn't care to end up a statistic without seeing even a little of verdant Bukovina. So we untied the cords and pulled our stuff down. The driver made a sad face and said, "Cinci dolar." M. replied, "Eu nu merg"; then we were alone in the cold wind blowing from Chernivtsi.

When the sky had turned to dark blue, a red Passat Kombi drove up and a man said, "Cincisprezece dolar," and we didn't object, because this conveyance was empty, spacious, and warm. Cincisprezece is not much for fifty kilometers after a sleepless night. We took off like a bat out of hell. Ahead of us, mist. The man chattered, mixing Romanian, Russian, and German. He attempted Polish. He had done Europe, including Warsaw. He said he would take us, then come back here, because the buses with the goods would be let through eventually, and the wheeling and dealing would start up just past the barriers. They always let the buses in, and he would fill his Passat to the top with bicycle wheels, tires, boxes of laundry detergent, chocolate bars, earflap hats in the middle of summer because they were cheaper now, and all the other riches of the Ukrainian land. He would take us, then return, and go back again to Suceava, to the big market not far from a factory that stank of sulfuric acid, a field covered with tented booths to the horizon. He went on and on, and in his headlights now and then we saw the gleaming eyes of horses pulling unseen wagons with sleeping drivers. He talked, but I kept dozing off. T. turned and remarked, "Look at that steering wheel." Again we passed a mysterious vehicle, and the man made a full half-turn of the wheel before the car responded. Our speedometer was broken, but I was certain he had the gas pedal to the floor. So I opened my eyes and listened to the map of Europe: Berlin, Frankfurt, Kiev, Budapest, Vienna…

Suceava was a shadow in ultramarine. We tore across a viaduct. The main station was under repair, so we went to Gara Suceava Nord, wanting to continue south, without stopping, along the Siret River and turn west only around Adjud, leave Moldova, and get to Transylvania. That was our plan. To keep going and sleep on the trains, which would all come at our convenience and take us where we wanted to go.

Gara Suceava Nord was as big as a mountainside and dark. Like entering a cave. The yellow light barely dispersed the gloom. We made our way through a crowd. A crowd at four in the morning is a curious thing: a meeting in a madhouse. Those who stood or moved had their eyes open but seemed asleep, under a spell, the effect of that insomniac light, which trickled out from who knows where. It could have come from the ceiling, from the walls, or maybe from people's bodies. Not enough of it, in any case, for us to believe in the reality of all these tableaux vivants, in fitful slow motion, in the belly of the station. Someone here wasn't real: either we or they.

At any rate, there were no trains heading south at that hour, and we didn't have the strength to wait. We went outside. Taxis in a row, their drivers chatting and smoking. Mainly Dacias, and two ancient Mercedes. Instead of going by rail, I thought we could take a car across the Petru Vodă Pass, the Bicaz Gorge, the Bicaz and Bucin Passes, in this way crossing the main ridge of the Carpathians to reach at last the heart of Transylvania. But the keepers of meters went wide-eyed when they heard "Tîrgu Mureş," and they shook their heads when they heard "Sighiş oara." It was only three hundred kilometers, we said, but they opened their arms and kicked the tires of their automobiles, because they didn't believe that any of them could climb so high and return in one piece. Only one, who drove an old green boxy Mercedes, put his hands in his pockets, spat, and said, "Două sute dolar." We realized then that they took us for lunatics.

A young, slender boy said he would drive us to a hotel, so we could sleep. Like children, we let ourselves be packed into a red Dacia. We were powerless. Hotel Socim, we said. He didn't advise that. But we were stupidly stubborn, thinking the kid wanted to fleece us. He smiled, as if to say, "Lord Jesus has forsaken you," but he helped us with our bags and drove us into the dawning city. He took what was on the meter, no more, and promised that if we phoned, he would come for us.

And what an awakening that was on Jean Bart Street 24… The ceiling so low, it was hard to sit on the bed. To be safe, I didn't get up, only listened to one big truck after another right at the window. They passed by like a train, without pause. You couldn't close the window, either, because it was an oven inside. An oven at the window too. The room had only the bed and a dresser. I was afraid to open it. Odd noises came from the corridor. I was afraid to go out. But I finally did, in search of a toilet. From a window in the corridor I saw laundry on a line, an apartment building, sheds, a white horse grazing. In the bathroom, a cleaning woman yelped with fright at the sight of me, overturning a bucket of dirty water. It didn't matter, because there was a wooden grating on the floor, as in barracks and prisons. The bathroom was cool, quiet.