On the Road to Babadag (21 page)

But the Romanians are no worse. Or the Ukrainians, or the Slovaks. Even Austrians can be cool. Occasionally someone slips a cog—like the Slovenian at the border in Hodoš who insisted on knowing how many dinars we were bringing in, because he had forgotten that for the past ten years his country was part of Yugoslavia. Occasionally someone draws a blank—like the Greek at Corfu who couldn't believe that we had spent two weeks in Albania for pleasure and who looked at our dirty underwear under a strong light to find the answer to the mystery.

Yes, 167 stamps, and if you include the stamps not made, a good 200. Red, violet, green, black; smeared, with a word or initial added in ballpoint pen, with pictures of antique locomotives, automobiles, with childlike outlines of planes and ships, because it is all childishness, a game of tag, blindman's buff, hide-and-seek, a pointless amusement that, once set into motion, cannot stop. Some stamps are indistinct, as if a carved potato were used, an amateur printing kit, or even as if I had made the mark myself with chalk or a fountain pen, as a joke.

I wonder what the stamp of Moldavia is like. That is to say, the Republic of Moldova, east of the Prut, its capital Chişinău. I must find out. I hope it's green. That's how I picture the country: green hills, with a forest now and then. Gardens and plots in the sun. Watermelon, paprikas, and grapevines growing. In the side streets of old Chişinău, the shade of chestnut trees. The cuisine, I understand, is rich, hard to digest, but delicious. The only problem: no vodka on the menu; instead, a sweetish, heavy brandy. According to one German newspaper, the most important thing in the Moldovan economy is the trade in human organs. Generally they sell their own, but sometimes those of foreigners. I'll go in the summer. I love traveling to little-known countries. Then I return, consult books, ask people, and gather a mountain of facts to determine where I actually was. It's hopeless, because in time everything becomes stranger, resembling a dream within a dream. I have to look at my passport to verify that those countries even exist. Because what sort of countries are they anyway? Memories of a dead past, projects for a dim future, vague potentials, promises, and "We'll show you yet." I ought to cross a true border, to a place where women walk in snakeskin boots and nothing reminds you of anything, where life is suddenly interrupted and carnival begins—or some kind of trauma, or transgression. My 167 stamps aren't worth a rat's ass; I always return as clueless as when I left. Everywhere guys stand at street corners and wait for something to happen, everywhere seats on trains have holes from cigarette burns, and people putter and watch calmly while history presses the gas pedal to the floor. I'm wasting my time and my money. I might as well not leave my house; I have everything here.

Wherever I go, I see Gypsies. In Prekmurje, I used a tank of gas in search of them, because I was fed up with that buttoned-down country and with the Slovenians, traitors all to the Slavic pigsty, but I found not one Gypsy, though I had read they were definitely there. Hiding, most likely, having smelled me from a hundred kilometers away, me with my love of disintegration, my sentimental fondness for whatever doesn't look the way it should. They smelled me even as I left my house, and back in Slovakia, when I passed their slums outside Zborov, a place by the road, on a hill, an ad hoc, slapped-together thumbing of the nose at the charms of order and plenty. It never fails to thrill my soul that one can say fuck you to the world and practice the ancient art of rag picking in the midst of the postmodern and postindustrial. The women carry tied bundles of twigs, the men drag carts heaped with scrap metal, the kids pull bottles from garbage. In front of plywood huts stand cars without wheels, carpets are drying, and plastic bags flutter everywhere. Basically these people are doing what we all do: trying to get by. Yet they don't pride themselves, don't write down their history, preferring their legends, folktales, fables passed from generation to generation, their "once upon a time" instead of, say, "on the thirteenth of December of the aforesaid year in Copenhagen." And so wherever I go, I look for them, for that living image of Mediterranean-Christian civilization, that nation without land, those people who, the moment something is built, must discard it, burn it for fun or in despair, and move their portable kingdom to a place where the white European horde heaves a little less with hatred of them. I look for the Gypsies—as in Slovenian Prekmurje—and am disappointed when I don't see them, feel that I've strayed too far and it's time to go back. I am related to them, in an illegitimate way: I learned how to put words together, and my words survive somewhere, and yet I cannot create a credible account. My nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech all detach from the world, fall off like old plaster, and I return to legend, fable, ballad, to things that truly happened yet are lies, rubbish, metaphoric claptrap. The existence of what I wrote was simply too brief to take on meaning. Or it lived on only in my brain.

Once, in Okęcie, an official at a control booth inspected my passport from every side, flipped through it, gave me a look, again glanced at the worn pages, until I thought, not a chance, I wasn't going anywhere, but finally he slid a glass panel open and asked, "Sir, what's the point of all this?" Fifty times I had traveled from here, going south, my heart in my mouth, feeling the delicious fear of what awaited, and he was oblivious, though his counterparts at my destinations sat and stamped with the same spring-loaded, handheld devices. There, everything begins for me: happy young men on the Slovak side selling five-liter bottles of juice—red, yellow, orange, green—the sun shining through and making them gleam like Ali Baba's treasure; selling vodka, beer by the case, the hardiest buying red Modranské wine, horribly dry but only five złoty a bottle; the women selling sacks of sugar, flour, rice; and three duty-free shops in an open field, by a forest, rocking like boats, like ships filled with emigrants crossing the ocean a hundred years ago, carrying the same mob, the same faces—even the cloaks and caps haven't changed that much. An abundance of cheap crap swaying among the gentle green of the Beskids, and a chance of getting something knocked down to half price animates my village, Konieczna, like the prospect of the Promised Land. I stand in line under the pretext of buying dark Thirsty Monk beer or bitter Demänovka herb liqueur, but in fact I am imagining that in "Na Colnicy," in this shop begins the south that leads to the Ionian Sea and the shore of the Peloponnesian peninsula, and along that shore, like birds on a wire, sit folks no different from those here. Their bags full of stuff, their heads full of schemes for getting by, with their own shabby, red-haired, bespectacled customs officials, and always with too little cash, so they must keep moving, dodging, to trick reality and come out on top by the close of day. Košice, Tokaj, Arad, Timişoara, and Skopje are the bright beads on this southern thread. From the shop called U Pufiho is a great view of the Kamenec valley. Peasants drink beer and look south. The light in that direction is better, more distinct, so there's more to see. Košice, Tokaj, Arad, Timişoara, Skopje ... Yes, you could transport Poles from Małastów, Zdynia, Gorlice, and place them in front of a shop in Hidasnémeti, where the last forints are available at the border, or at the marketplace in Suceava, or in Sfântu Gheorghe, where the Danube in swampy mist feeds into the Black Sea, or even in Tirana, when a fume-heavy dusk hangs over Skanderbeg Square and the harmony of the world is undisturbed. No one would know that they are foreigners. At least, not until they opened their mouths.

Not long ago I was wandering at night in Grójec, looking for the road to Końskie, and I had much the same feeling as I did once in the town of Abrud in Transylvania. The same darkness and doubtful light, the same uncertainty of human presence. Space not altogether wiped clean, still carrying the primordial gloom from which it was scraped. It's that way with these guys: begun but not completed. As if they had stopped to wait for the next step in evolution or creation, for events to unfold; as if they dwelled in an endless present endlessly turning into the past. The future is a fiction. It will come, of course, we hear about it all the time, but the old wisdom knows that only what is, and what was, exists. The rest does not, because no one ever saw it or touched it. And so at U Pufiho I too gaze south and plan trips into a present mixed half-and-half with the past. I cannot think ahead without looking back. Sometimes it seems to me that things hold together only thanks to the borders, that the true identity of these lands and peoples is the shape of their territories in an atlas. It's a stupid thought, but I can't shake it.

"To sum up, Romanian folk culture is one of the richest and most complex in Europe." Once, in Milan, I asked Francesco, "What are the Romanians—Romance brothers to the average Italian?" He answered, "To the average Italian, all Romanians are Gypsies." In Sibiu, I was looking for music in a record shop near Nicolae Bălcescu Avenue. The saleswoman asked where I was from. When I said Poland, she began to recite,
U lukomorya dub zyelony
( "By the bay, a green oak stands"). "You have it all wrong, ma' am," I said with a sigh. In a Kraków pub, Jabłoński, trying to impress two Slovak women, spoke to them in Czech for three hours, and they looked at him with diminishing interest. At last Kamil, who knew the women, entered and told Jabłoński, "They're Slovenian and have no idea what you're saying." The English are familiar with the name Czesław Miłosz but think he's the guy who did
Hair.
And so it goes, in a circle, and I'm fine with that. It's good to live in a nonobvious land, one whose borders contain more locations than any geography indicates: the vastness of the unknown, the expanse of guesswork, the retreating horizon of puzzlement, the sweet mirage of prejudices that no reality will correct.

One summer, for a week, I wended my way through eastern Hungary along the Romanian border and pictured what lay on the other side. I went through Szabolcs-Szatmár, sandy villages, the sticks, air stifling with pig shit, somewhere between Mátészalka, Nyírbátor, and Nagykálló, and imagined a Romania I knew not a blessed thing about, yet my imagination soared, I walked in a waking dream, dreamt without agenda, without form, touched by the unreal that everyone knows is more real than what is real. Then, at Záhony, I crossed over to Ukraine and, along the Tisa, took a slow train east, again with Romania on my right, at arm's length, and it was only when I got to Sighetu Marmaţiei that I turned north and could free myself of this illness. A year later I went to Romania in earnest, but that "in earnest" was a repetition of the old dream, of my hallucination on the border, and it lasts to this day, despite the successive stamps in my passport, because you cannot stamp hallucinations that are larger and more permanent than any border or boundary in the world.

I know something about stamps. A hundred and sixty-plus over seven years, and the greater part of them in "the belt of mixed population," in a region where B follows A without logic or any consideration for the bigger picture, where vampires and werewolves still mate and the mind finds no peace, because only it can do battle with the chaos of what, though invisible and impalpable, is confirmed by misfortune. South, southeast ... Everything here reminds you of freedom and childhood. As if you are traveling back in time and have an unlimited number of paths to choose from. In Konieczna, oblivion hangs in the air, and in the Zborov district a man begins to lose his identity. It dwindles with each kilometer, just as, proceeding back to infancy, you finally part with yourself as something different from the rest of the world.

On the way to Hungary, as you pass through Slovenské Nové Mesto, at the intersection of the road with Route 55, begins a ten-kilometer stretch on which you can see what your car can do. If it's spring, the Zemplén Hills are yellow with blooming rapeseed. The place is so empty, you're not sure whether you're looking at a landscape or a diorama. The road climbs hill after hill, descends, and runs straight, as if someone had tossed a ball of gray ribbon. For those ten kilometers, I felt that I had found at last the seam of existence; it was like beholding the world from the other side: everything the same as before yet different. At Čerhov I slowed down for a railroad crossing, and things gradually returned to their places, probably to allow me to feel that I had survived, to allow me to weave these tales that provide a break from a reality I don't understand and don't particularly care to. I know that at the Slovnaft gas station I should go straight—not right, as I usually do—to see the village Borša, the birthplace of Francis II Rákóczi, hero of an episode from the French series entitled
Great Escapes
and leader of the Hungarian popular uprising against the Hapsburgs in 1703. I know I should take the straight path, to face reality at least once in my life, but instead, like Dyzio the Dreamer, I flee into sweet fantasy, and if it isn't a railroad crossing that distracts me, in another ten minutes I'll be driving into the shade of old trees growing on the main street of Sátoraljaújhely. This shade, it gives me no peace. Its contrast with the green semidesert of the final Slovak kilometers: the perfect scenery versus the perfect town, where venerable trees block the facades with such cunning that you can't distinguish the moving patches of sunlight from the lichen on the stucco. It's the same in Satu Mare in the main square, the trees obscuring the light-blue signs, so you drive in circles looking for the road to Cluj or Sighetu or Oradea or Baia Mare, until finally you park—anywhere—and sit on a bench in the green shade, cursing Romanian vegetation and waiting for autumn, when the leaves will fall and reveal the world's directions.

And it's the same in Chernivtsi: the ancient light and shade trying to break down the walls, the stucco, to smooth away the complicated surfaces, get rid of all the cornices, pilasters, balconies, oriels. But my memory of Chernivtsi is hazy, because Sashko, in his indescribable hospitality, set such a pace that the next day was like being in a furnace, albeit an inviting furnace. At the bus station, heavyset cabdrivers said that nothing today was going to Suceava. They swung their key rings: car keys, house keys, keys to basements, gates, safes, mailboxes, God knows what else. They rattled this metal and were put out that no one believed them, that no one was willing to go with them to Siret for a lousy fifty, and they stood—or rather, fidgeted and paced—and peered above the crowd, because cabdrivers in that part of the world, even when they are runts, see farther than anyone. It's rough for a guy with wheels who can't give anyone a ride. Ditto in Gorlice, Kolomyia, Delatyn, and Gjirokastër in Albania: they charge as much to take you one kilometer as in Berlin, in these places where the gross national product is $1,500 per capita. They sit in their twenty-year-old Mercedes wrecks, in a line, and no, sorry, German prices only. Zero negotiation.