On the Road to Babadag (19 page)

In Sulina we arrived at the main street. A crowd at the shore was waiting for family and friends. Along Deltei Street, trees and shade. At the nearest pub, I got a coffee and sat under an umbrella. Waiting for it to sink in, awareness of the end. The river had emptied into the sea, and the land, with all its events, had come to a halt. There was no returning by the same route. I could feel how time, until now given human aspects, was dissolving to its original form. Here, in Sulina, it was as palpable as the humidity in the air. It ate at the houses and ships, etched faces and landscapes, the glasses in the bars, the merchandise in the stores. It consumed like a fire the delicate envelope of minutes, hours, and days and took possession of all that was seen and unseen, including thought.

The way to the sea led through desolate, treeless pasture. Hulls of ships, tugs, motorboats rusting in sand. The stink of manure hung over this region. Salty gusts from the sea disappeared in its hot fog without a trace. In the marsh, shoals of litter gleamed white among stunted, thorn-bearing shrubbery. A plastic bottle, blue-gray, shone like the belly of a dead fish. Concrete bunkers were stuck in dirty yellow land; angular military ruins stood along the shore in this baked, windswept place; in their shadow, an occasional horse, untethered, tried to rest. From across the bleached, shaggy dunes, the sound of waves crashing, as old as the world and as monotonous. The sound overflowed the levee and made for the town. Quiet loss filled every corner, every low house and garden, the tenements along the promenade. Grass grew on the driveway to the Hotel Sulina. The Hotel Europolis was shut and still. The Association of Victims of Communism had its quarters in a building not much bigger than a dollhouse.

About five in the afternoon, wagons, handcarts, and bicycles began to gather at the harbor. People came. From the west, from Tulcea, the ferry
Moldova
brought news, goods, passengers. It docked majestically and dropped anchor. Those who carried little disembarked first, then the cargo was unloaded, everything that Sulina lacked: cases of bottled water and beer, cartons of bread, jars of fruit, foam mattresses, sausages in foil that sweated from the heat, coffee, white wine in plastic jugs, rubber boots, glass and porcelain, a market of miracles, rolls of tarpaper from my hometown, reins, T-shirts, Balkan cheddar and Romanian Hochland, contraband, soap, jam, beads, notebooks, Nescafé, chairs, a cuckoo clock, and a bunch of beach umbrellas. The wagons, carts, and a white Dacia pickup truck transporting it to a couple of shops on Deltei Street could barely hold all this stuff.

I walked toward the sea between the dead hulls and bunkers. I climbed up onto a giant concrete platform ramp, from which someone, someday, might want to launch land-sea missiles. From there I could see the sun dropping to the Danube. The river glowed phosphorescent green, like a taut lizard skin. A ship approaching from the open sea was several stories high and black as pitch in the dying light of day. It slipped through the narrow estuary and crossed the red sun. I did not see any movement on deck—no one stood at the edge, no one smoked, spat, or watched the port. When it got dark, I followed its path. The ship anchored at the end of the shore, not far from the Hotel Sulina. Ship and hotel were equally dark and silent. The ship sailed under the Lebanese flag. Stopping for the night, to continue upriver at dawn.

In the room where I slept, the tapestry over my bed depicted Mecca.

To Sfântu Gheorghe, directly north, it takes less than three hours. My boat was sky-blue, sleek, and had a Honda motor. First it went a little above the main current, then took a network of canals. The craft couldn't have been wider than 1.2 meters, but it was long. A fifty-year-old man sat at the bow and signaled to the man at the helm. The canals were narrow and full of tricky spots. Sometimes we had to turn off the motor and lift it to get across a sandbank or keep the propeller free of seaweed. At the narrowest places, we passed through a tunnel of green reeds." Vietnam," remarked the captain, lighting up a Snagov cigarette. Now and then the reeds thinned and you could see plots of corn and cabbage. Plots not much larger than a gravesite mound or flowerbed went right to the water's edge. Some were guarded by dogs on short chains. We returned to the main channel and looked for the next canal. A patrol boat blocked our path, and a cop, standing a meter above us, asked the captain our origin, destination, type of motor. Finally he waved, and we headed due north.

We passed old-fashioned boats with diesel engines and structures like sentry boxes. White pelicans glided over Roşu Lake. We passed a fishing village. Only men on the shore, puttering among their boats and nets. The canal was straight as an arrow and smooth as glass. Geometry kept a tight rein on the reeds, with nowhere for the eye to rest, nothing that stood out, that was irregular, in the monotony of green lines and rectangles under an endless, clear sky. The Delta here was infinity done in simple parallels and perpendiculars. Every now and then, on the border of vegetation, fishermen stood in high rubber boots, motionless, aloof, gray, like large herons.

At the landing in Sfântu Gheorghe lay a pile of rotting hay. I walked toward a two-story concrete building. The ground floor was unoccupied, full of crap. People lived above—you could see curtains in the windows. Heat hung in the dusty, empty square. The sky was the color of sand. I looked for a little shade. A few high trees grew before an outdoor pub. In a shed they had seven kinds of beer and twelve wines, and men sat at plank tables. It was now two in the afternoon. I got a Ciuc beer and sat too, because I had finally reached a place from which one could only return.

The ferries to Istanbul left from Constanţa. Trains to the outside world left from Tulcea, possibly also from Galaţi. I sat on an island separated by mud, swamp, and time, a time decomposing over the Delta like organic matter, moldering, giving off the smell of a beginning that preceded the cycle of life and death. The continent here burned slowly, like the edge of a fabric. Sand, dust, dogs, and siesta without end. Men got up from the tables, disappeared, reappeared. Women sat on benches a bit to the side and listened to the conversation, their bodies calm, languorous, heavy. A cart went by, harnessed to an unbelievably thin horse. The boy driver wielding a broken stick. Carrying mineral water and yellow cases of Bergenbier. They turned a corner in ridiculous, neurotic haste.

A man approached me and asked if I needed a room, a place to sleep, because if I did, he knew a "babushka" here who would be glad to take me in, but I had to decide now, because he was leaving. He spoke in Russian, like many in Sfântu Gheorghe. I really didn't know what I would be doing next, I said, I had to give it thought. I didn't care to rush my beer, to leave the shade. The guy left but remained in sight. He hurried across the pub, said words here and there, but went on, not waiting for an answer. Quick, busy, as if serving as an emissary in a paralyzed village. He wore a gray shirt, old trousers from a suit, and, on his bare feet, flip-flops. He wasn't interested in taking care of any business for me. One of the times he passed, he said that the girl working at the bar spoke Russian and could help me find a room. Before I could open my mouth, he was gone.

After an hour or two I went to the babushka after all. She lived not far from the pub, in a small white house. Green posts held up the porch. A burst of flowers in front. In back, the thick shade of nut trees, pear trees, apple trees. The old woman was as small as her house and full of chatter. She would ask a question but continue talking, or nod: from Poland, yes, staying for a few days, of course, arrived by boat, what I did, where I lived, in the country, in town—a mix of gentle prying, indifference, and goodwill.

She opened the room. Tiny, it smelled like the room of my grandmother. The still air was of old wood, sheets, and damp. No one, at least no stranger, had used it for a long time. A table, a chair, and the bed took up the space exactly. Everything in its place since time immemorial. When I moved the chair out to hold my backpack, I felt like a criminal, as if I were destroying this piece of dark-brown furniture by exposing it to the present moment, that it would die as a sea creature dies when wrenched from the depths to the surface.

"And God you have?" she asked, pointing to the icon hanging in a corner right below the ceiling. "I have," I answered in Russian. She nodded, gave me the key, and left. At the same height as the icon and right next to it was a cupboard filled with boxes for Western perfume, deodorant, and coffee. No doubt from the son in Bucharest or the daughter in Constanţa, because the old woman, in the course of fifteen minutes, had managed to tell me about her children too. The icon and that Western trash bin were the only ornaments in this spare interior. I didn't care to consider the symbolism or the semantics of their juxtaposition. I felt old, no longer having the strength for the obvious. I left my luggage and went to look at the sea.

From the bank along this arm of the Danube, you had a view in both directions. On the right, the river's water flowed slime green. The dark boats anchored in the shallows, their bows and sterns turned slightly upward, were sleek and quaint. In the ever-changing waterscape, among the glinting mirrors of the current, among the tide pools roughened by the breeze, their shapes seemed unreal. Particularly at dusk, when you couldn't tell boat from shadow. They hung in the lucent space like cardboard cutouts, carvings from coal. Bringing to mind remnants of the most ancient night, when they were used to ferry souls. In the Delta I saw nothing more beautiful or more simple.

To the left stretched a village of reeds. Fences, roofs, walls, sheds for cattle and for fowl—all made of dry, hollow stalks. Cut reeds lay loose in piles, were tied into sheaves, stood waiting in ricks. A flat human habitation, since nothing high could be built from such material. Bits of clay had fallen from earth-plastered walls, exposing the construction of poles woven with reeds. The village was like a vast campground. All that these people possessed seemed in constant peril. Barely raised above the ground, barely attached and joined and marked off by fence and stake and a few twigs, Sfântu Gheorghe had a heroic resignation about it: exposed to the elements, filled with uncertainty, doomed to oblivion, it held on to the land as a sparrow's nest holds on to a branch.

Then, just as in Sulina, a bare stretch began and continued to the beach. At its edge, just past the village, stood radar towers. I saw a few camouflage trucks behind an enclosure. I was not drawn to it at all. The military in my part of the world, in times of peace, is always the same: sad and giving off a faint stink. I preferred to keep my distance. The black latticework of the antennas loomed above the huts of reeds and mud. I tried to imagine the tedium of a post like that, the tedium of empty sky and green computer monitors. Card games, booze smuggled in, talk about women, radio stations on which you might catch Western rock and roll or a folk number. Sleepiness, coffee, and no barbarians on the horizon.

But it's quite possible the place was simply a point from which to observe the rest of the world, that monster with no shape or boundary that always lays siege to a people preoccupied with its own existence. I considered the cow patties drying in the sun and tried not to think about history. I couldn't help it, of course. Once again geography had made me prey to all the unclear events, murky pseudo-facts, muttered truths, and unimpeachable falsehoods cobbled together into meaning. Danger indeed lurks beyond the horizon and always has. As we wait in time for what we desire, space brings us unsolicited things: armies or ideas, and there's no escaping them. The age of portable, movable nations, nations whose history depends on an unending present, is long gone. Today there is nowhere we can go to start over, and that's why we live mired in a past that permeates our territories, just as an animal's den is filled with its smell.

The radar was aimed, I am willing to bet, at Turkey.

People lay on the beach. Several sun umbrellas were stuck in the sand, not much larger than rain umbrellas. Otherwise, as far as the eye could see, no shade. The thornbushes on the dunes were shoulder high in places. I walked south along the shore and soon reached the spot where the river current joined the salt water. The Danube, darker, fed into the transparent silver of the waves, like a cloud passing across a mirror. A gleaming black snake swam up on the beach and slithered over the sand toward vegetation, its small and supple presence an apparition on this great bare stage, so I followed. Sensing my shadow, it stopped and coiled. I left it in peace. It waited a moment, then proceeded landward.

Sfântu Gheorghe came alive in the evening, as if everybody had been waiting for the lights to go on. It was no cooler, only darker. People came from the houses, the beach, the boats, from their fishing. The pub under the trees, unable to accommodate them all, resembled a bivouac: dozens, hundreds of people in constant motion, in patches of flickering light, their gestures beginning in light and cut off by a dark that magnified everything. Echoes came from deep in the night, as if the village were next to another village and that next to yet another, as if Sfântu Gheorghe had siblings in this void or were a dull, small planet attempting, without much success, to reflect the sounds and brilliance of planets many times larger than it. The sky now and then flashed mercury.
Eto mayak,
someone told me in Russian: a lighthouse. The beam, majestic in its repetition, made everything taking place on earth seem random, coincidental. The people expended their energy in quick, nervous bursts, like lizards. I got a Ciuc at the pub and stepped aside to watch the fiesta from a distance, a party whirling about inside a cave. The night pressed in on all sides, so one had to keep moving, talking, shouting over the canned music, clinking glasses, gesticulating, so that the hot dark wouldn't congeal and close up like a scab over a wound. This was a carnival, a European tropics, the fear of the harsh light of day, the bliss of oblivion, everything pierced by the quivering, plangent sound of a clarinet in that scale one encounters south of the Carpathians.