Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

The village smelled of manure and spring. Orchards bloomed behind fences. The cooperative store was located in a brick building. A peasant clad in black told us they had beer there. We found a girl with keys at the farm next door. She opened it for us. We asked about Szela, said to have been buried around there, but she didn't know, didn't even seem to know the name, though she was Polish. A few small tables, and a peculiar jumble, as if someone had been building sets for a film. The interior a gray-green. Wooden boxes on the floor, the sort once used to transport siphons for seltzer, except they were filled with liter-and-a-half bottles of wine. Two kinds of beer, two kinds of cigarettes, ashtrays full of butts as if after a reception. Propaganda posters on the wall, and a window that opened to a yard in which pink piglets wandered. That was it. Yet these few objects, pieces of furniture, and commodities together created an extraordinary chaos, as if things had been tossed here in the middle of their use, dropped, as if in this very spot the energy of the world had run out. We drank a beer each.

The girl was silent but finally said she would take us to the old cemetery outside the village; maybe Szela was there. But only clumps of thorny plants were there — no gravestones, crosses, or markers. A pity, I thought, for him to have to lie here — and someday be resurrected here, of all places. Little imagination was needed to see him enter the cooperative store: it would come as no surprise, because immobility, sorrow, and abandonment do not change in time or space. It must have been the same in the tavern of the Jew Semek in Siedliska on February 20, 1846. Snow lay on the fields; it was cold and dim inside, full of the stink of heated, unwashed bodies. "Get to work, boys, and hurry, for time passes." Szela wore his black cassock, held in his hand the saber taken at Bogusze and tapped the ground with it like a walking stick. In the courtyard, blood seeped into the snow. You could smell the vodka from broken kegs. The Austrians had made him king of the peasants for twenty-four hours, and the day was drawing to a close. "Get to work, boys, and hurry, for time passes." The cursed blood of the lords seeping into the snow, the taken saber, the peasants with ducats clinking in their pockets, but the dimness and the stink were unalleviated. The village elder Breinl told him in Tarnów, "The Archduke Ferdinand is number one, but in Galicia you are second in command." Some say Szela planned to take the ten-year-old Zosia Boguszówna for his wife. Peasant blood would mix with noble blood and give rise to a race that would inherit the reborn land. It's possible that he had no faith in his strength, that the blueprint for a new world would repeat the gestures of the lords in an empty, abstract reality that puts up no resistance.

So he could rise from the grave and enter the cooperative store in Vicşani, and it would be as if he had never died, since no doubt there was little difference between that store and the tavern of the Jew Semek. He could simply start again after a hundred and fifty years, though without the Austrian blessing. So I reflected, standing in the noon sun. Having traveled several hundred kilometers, I had the right to these thoughts. In addition, I came from his native region. I looked in the direction of Moldova and wondered whose blood he would want to shed today, and with whose blood he would want to mix his own. The flies flew heavy and slow in the cooperative store. On the shelf were two kinds of cigarettes, the cheapest. No aristocracy nearby, yet the air inside had the same stuffy, impoverished taste. I thought: You sit here, Szela, drinking Ursus or Silva, and there's no one for you to go after. If you try, the world will part before you like a phantom, and your hands will clutch emptiness. You'll accomplish shit here. The most you could do is go to Suceava and like a postindustrial Luddite smash a sky-blue ATM. Nowadays you can't become another person through the simple transfer of goods or objects. Killing won't let you enter your victim's body and life. Wealth has become an elusive thing; it floats in the air, materializing now and then — here, there. Whereas poverty, abandonment, and ruin are concrete, tangible, and thus it will always be. All the treasures of the world are now the property of no one in particular, and no plunder will exalt you, no violence ennoble you. Left to you is only the ATM in Suceava as a physical emanation of the remote, all-powerful evil that will never permit the last to be first.

In this way I spoke to the spirit of Jakub Szela on the edge of Europe among the lanes of Vicşani. I was filled with left-wing sentiments but had no regard whatever for revolutionary fire. A kilometer on, in an open field by the road, sat a man reading a newspaper. Nothing as far as the eye could see, yet he hardly looked up at our car. We drove south, to the village of Clit, to check another possible resting place. Which made sense, because Clit lay a few kilometers from Solca. The Austrians sent Szela to Solca when it was all over. At an intersection after RădăuŢi stood a Romanian cop. He stood smack in the middle of the intersection. At the sight of our car, he turned his back pointedly and looked off into the distance. A friendly gesture, probably, pretending not to notice us, because we were a provocation.

In Clit, people spoke an odd tongue. Like Ukrainian, but I understood only every fifth word. I asked a woman in a kerchief if this was a Ukrainian village. My Ruskie, she replied: We are Russians. We asked about Szela, if she had heard such a name here or in the area. She shook her head, then said she would take us to the oldest man in the village. The road was dry and dusty. The wooden houses had white-and-green walls and shutters. On the ground lay pink and white petals from flowering apple trees. In the distance, the gleam of a pond. Geese walked in that direction, unattended. A man in faded jeans emerged from the shadows and dust. He didn't look so very old. He pondered awhile, asked that the name be repeated, then asked us himself, directly, if this Szela person… was that one of our "father leaders"? "Perhaps, in a way," we answered evasively. He finally gave up and said there was someone here, not old but worldly, just got back from Germany, who might be able to help. The old man called him out of a roadside bar. This person was about forty and dressed in overalls with a sewn-on Esso patch. P. remarked that Esso was practically Shell, so we might be close. We spoke in Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Polish, but it turned out that all they could do for us was show us where the cemetery was. They took us there, wished us luck, a pleasant trip, good health, and left us in the cool of the trees. The old man went down the hill slowly and carefully. Occasionally the younger man took his arm. They didn't have to accompany us; they could have pointed to the hill from a distance; but in that part of the world, looking for someone's grave is far more important than the usual tourism, and people treat it with respect. By entering their cemetery, apparently we became their guests.

Yes. Szela could have been lying in Clit. From the hill we had a view of a white, cupolaed Orthodox church and a neo-Gothic Catholic church. His native Smarzowa was also in the Pogórze range, though the valleys there were narrower and the peaks covered with forest. Here everything was naked, whether tilled or grassy. On the horizon, a ribbon of blue heat. There was no trace of our "father leader."

Nor could there be a trace, because as you travel, history constantly turns into legend. Too much is happening and in too big a space. No one can remember it all, let alone write it down. You can't devote attention to events that come out of nowhere and whose purpose and sense remain unclear to the end. No one will wrap things into a whole, cobble a finished tale. Neglect is the essence of this region. History, deeds, consequences, ideas, and plans dissolve into the landscape, into something considerably older and vaster than all the striving. Time gets the better of memory. Nothing can be remembered with certainty, because actions do not line up according to the principle of cause and effect. A long narrative about the spirit of the times in this place seems a project as pathetic as it is pretentious, like a novel written from the point of view of God. Paroxysm and tedium rule here in turn, and that is why this region is so human. "One of your father leaders?" Why not? I thought. In a sense, both ours and yours. Ultimately, in Szela was embodied the desire for violent change, a rejection of one's fate that at the same time suddenly turns into acceptance of what that fate brings.