Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

We slept no more than three hours. It was just as stifling in the street as it was inside. Dust hung in the still air. Toddlers sitting in the shade of concrete stairs watched us pass. From a bar on the corner came the smell of food. We had sour tripe soup, with a roll and hot green paprika, which made us break into a sweat. We phoned, and the driver actually came for us. Again he was all energy and happy to help. We asked him if he had slept. He said no. He looked at the door of Hotel Socim but was tactful and said nothing. We told him we needed to buy train tickets, to change money, to be in Cluj that evening. To everything he said, "No problem." He put our bags in the trunk, but it wouldn't close, so he tied it with wire, and we were off, leaving Jean Bart Street 24 forever. In fact everything for him was no problem. He found an exchange office that gave the best rate. At the window counter, he took the wad of bills from me and carefully counted them; only then did we leave. At the Romanian Orbis, the line had been there two hours and was hardly moving. The computer screen at the cashier's desk was blank. When someone reserved a seat, the woman phoned all the stations and made the reservation. We didn't want to wait. Our train would leave in half an hour, and it didn't matter to us whether we boarded with or without a ticket, as long as we left baking Suceava. Our taxi driver, however, said something like "Take it easy" in Romanian and stood at the head of the line, delivering a speech to the people there. Ten minutes later we were rushing through the city, our pockets full of small brown-and-green tickets in antique cardboard. Everyone honked at us, and we honked at everyone. The red Dacia took the turns like a fire engine. Our new friend drove with one hand, looking for music on the radio with the other. We were at the Gara de Nord five minutes before departure. We wanted to run to make the train, but he said the trip was long and we had nothing to eat or drink. The line at the station kiosk was long, almost half that for the tickets, but he entered the glass stand, asked us through the window how many beers we wanted, mineral water, and what on our sandwiches, as he hugged and kissed the girl working in a white cap behind the counter. That's how it was, I'm not making this up. The girl took our money, gave us change, and we were at the platform on the dot, with just time enough to say goodbye and shake hands. The kid took what was on the meter, no more.

So we traveled southwest: Gura Humorului, Cîmpulung Moldovenesc, Vatra Dornei, in the heart of green Bukovina, among the mountains. I remember nothing in particular of that trip, so I must invent it from scratch. A heavyset man in our compartment took up a seat and a half and didn't like us. He was about sixty, well fed, and no doubt remembered better days, when there was order in his country and foreign riffraff didn't wander in at will and drink Ursus beer on trains. At any rate he made that sort of face. Now I reconstruct: his gray suit and the purple shirt he removed before Vatra Dornei. The light-blue towel he hung around his neck. He went to the toilet in a white undershirt, his arms flabby and hairless. Anyway, I have to make up these details because something must have happened that long day before the evening in Cluj, where it poured as it is pouring now. I have to invent, because days cannot sink into a past filled only with landscape, with inert, unchanging matter that finally shakes us from our corporeality, brushes off and away all these little incidents, faces, existences that last no longer than a glimpse. So the old man returned and dozed, though we had hoped he would wash before he returned, not before bedtime. Perhaps one travels for the purpose of preserving facts, keeping alive their brief, flickering light.

In Cluj it poured. In front of a pizza parlor by the station, guys in leather jackets did some business while their girls gossiped. And as happens everywhere, two grabbed a third by the arms and dragged him into the dark. The station in Cluj: again a crowd, dim yellow light, the stink of bodies and cigarettes. We had to get our tickets stamped for the next day. A boy spotted us in the crush, saw that we were not local, standing there like calves, unsure where to go. He took the old-fashioned cardboard from us, and in five minutes the stamping was done. He said, "Drum bun," and disappeared in the crowd like a guardian angel in worn Adidas.

The next morning, Horea Street gleamed in the sun. The synagogue, not far from the bridge on the Şomes, had four towers topped with gilded cupolas. It resembled the one in the Gypsy quarter of Spišské Podhradie but was larger. For lunch we had the usual, ciorba de burta, Romanian tripe soup, with a roll and paprika. Somewhere in the vicinity, Hungarian lords had burned Gheorghe Doja at the stake, then quartered his remains and hung them on the gates of Buda, Pest, Alba Iulia, and Oradea. Szeged got the head. The typical end, this, of "peasant kings." Even when an army of tens of thousands stands behind them and the pope gives his blessing for a final albeit failed crusade against the Turks. I sat at a pub on the street named after Doja, drank coffee, and in a couple of hours would be looking, from the windows of a train, at the grassy waste of Transylvania, where five hundred years ago Doja's peasant divisions marched. In the compartment of the train was that Japanese man who collected women's folk costumes. According to T., he put them on in front of a mirror in his home in Tokyo or Kyoto.

His tour guide had said that Ceauşescu united the Romanian people, making everyone equally guilty, and anyone claiming not to have taken part in it was lying. But I gazed at the scorched hills and tried to picture the divisions of light cavalry, dark moving points on the horizon appearing and disappearing with the rhythm of the hills. I tried to imagine this death-dealing procession of beggars. For the first and last time as free people they measured their land. In clothes and weapons taken from their masters, on horses taken from their masters, they marched to Cluj, to Timişoara, to fall at last in defeat under the July sun. Fifty thousand cut down, hanged, left to the birds and thrown to the dogs. Ravens drawn from the Carpathians, the Hungarian Lowlands, from Moldavia and Wallachia. The heat hastens decay, erases the traces. Nothing is left of these rebel poor. Doja was burned on a mock throne with a mock scepter in his hand. So writes Sándor PetŐfi.

On the train I looked out the window and imagined the tattered and ecstatic army of shepherds, swineherds, peasants who attempted, if only for a moment, to grasp for themselves the life of their masters — that is, to be free, to seize the wealth of others, and to rule by force. A few months earlier, I had sought out the grave of Jakub Szela in Bukovina. I asked here and there, my excuse for traveling to the end of the world. Some said he lay in Clit; others, near the Ukrainian border, in Vicşani.

I believed them both. I even began to think that the Austrians dealt with him somewhat as the Hungarian lords had dealt with Doja: dismembering the memory of him, a memory that at any moment might prove dangerous. Finally Szela, according to Ludwik Dębicki, "pretended to be a mystic and sectarian in a peasant's cloak." Of all possible places of concealment I liked Vicşani best, unlikely as it was: lost among fields, far from everything, godforsaken. Beyond it, nothing, nothing in any direction. The great expanse of treeless land, which nevertheless someone tilled here and there, was a breathtaking contradiction of the pathetic little village where the only machine I saw was one bicycle. Our automobile here was a monstrosity, a challenge. In this piece of upland between RădăuŢi and Suceava, small horse-drawn carts moved among endless folded fields. The black earth, newly plowed, joined the sky, and those tiny figures — thin, veined horses — were practically invisible in their insignificance. If they stopped moving, there would no longer be a reason for their existence. A whim: to set little toys in a vast landscape, to enjoy the helplessness of figurines out of a Christmas crèche.