On the Road to Babadag (23 page)

This was off Deltea Avenue. You entered from the street, into a room with four small tables. Upstairs was a small hotel. Behind the counter stood a willowy young woman with short hair, her face delicate and sad. She did the cooking herself, wiped the glasses, served the food, a moving shadow. Men came in stinking of fish and diesel fuel. The chairs creaked beneath them as they drank their beer, smoked, muttered, and returned to the shore, to the rusting barges and tugboats, iron in scummy water, to a river that in despair had opened its arteries. The young woman cleaned the ashtrays and bottles and went back to the counter to insert a tape cassette, a medley of stuff in English: Elton John, Gilbert and Sullivan, the Carpenters, the seventies, the eighties. A bony black horse outside the window was hitched to a cart on rubber tires behind a blackened wood house. A beanpole cop for the seventh or twelfth time that day paced the length of the sandy walkway. A little farther on, at a wire fence, a man in striped pajamas stared into space. The building seemed abandoned, but the sign said it was a hospital. On the driveway to the Hotel Sulina, uncut grass. The continent ended here, and events too had run their course, but the grass quietly waited for something that would happen nevertheless. With a barely noticeable smile, she brought us the check, then returned to her world.

And this
parkovaci preukaz,
parking permit, at the small hotel in Ruǽomberok ... We ended up there late one evening after an entire day on the road. The town stank from a cellulose factory. The black silhouette of mountains darkened against the sky. In the center of town, everything was cheap and throwaway. Things normally made from solid material here were all plastic. Walls, doors, and furniture pretending to be bona fide. In the pub, the owner and his family were being entertained. Two musicians in shirts and cherry vests on the bandstand adjusted the Yamahas and microphone. The singer held a notebook stuffed with songs. One of the musicians improvised. Seven, eight people danced. Two little girls watched the stars: they were the boss's granddaughters. A fifty-year-old character—wooden face, gold watch, gold chain—tried to preserve his dignity on the dance floor. Everyone moved frugally and stiffly, as if afraid of bumping into something, though there was plenty of room. An imposed task for them, this, or a game they were still learning, or a rehearsal for completely new roles. The lightbulbs, dim and melancholy, were as tentative as the guests. The women had high hairdos and trouble with their high heels. The boss took off his jacket, wore a gray vest and white shirt. Moved his massive body as if hearing music for the first time in his life. Three or four more people entered, led by an enormous guy in a black suit, shaved bald, with dark glasses. Making exactly the impression he wanted to make. Someone behind him held a bouquet. They stood there waiting to be greeted, but there was no greeting, so they slowly made their way into the lifeless party, and only the enormous one, his neck thicker than his bare skull, remained at the entrance and surveyed the room as if it belonged to him. These folks must have watched all three parts of
The Godfather,
especially the party scenes, and now they were trying to reenact it among plastic chandeliers, artificial flowers, and beet-red leatherette upholstery, to the rhythm of the indomitable hit "Comme Ci, Comme Ça."

I keep all these events in a shoebox. Sometimes I take out one or another, like a parrot plucking a slip in a lottery drawing. Valabil-2 Calatoria, a thin strip in green, red, and orange, and a tram ticket, punched twice, from Sibiu to Răinari. The tram shuttles between the city and the village. Even my most detailed maps don't show its route, yet I took it at least twice and drove along its tracks four times. From this scrap of paper you could segue to a few good stories: about Emil Cioran's insomnia in Sibiu; about the Păltiniş madness of Constantin Noica, who wanted to breed Romanian geniuses; or Lucian Blaga, who in the summer months in Gura Râului attempted to establish a Mioritic ontology ... All three men had to take this tram that harks back to the Austro-Hungarian time. The shoebox works exactly that way, my brain like the parrot plucking slips in a lottery. The metal canister for Absolut vodka works that way, too, a magic lantern of coincidence, accident, and adventure making a story that goes in all directions and cannot go otherwise, because it involves memory and space, both of which can commence at any point, both of which never end. You can see this just by driving to Konieczna. By driving there and returning after a week or two, to find that time is dead, or was waiting for us to come back, not accompanying us at all, and everything that happened on our trip happened simultaneously, without sequence or consequence, and we did not age one minute. It's a kind of illusion of immortality when the red-and-white crossing gate is raised, a cunning version of tai chi, meditation in motion, and ultimately— let's be honest—a most ordinary escape.

But it's great, in the middle of winter, to say, "Fuck this, I'm going to Abony, that hole in the center of the Hungarian Lowlands near Szolnok, I'm going from one nowhere to another." And only because six years ago, I saw a picture that André Kertész took on June 19, 1921, and that I can't get out of my head: a blind fiddler crossing a sandy village road as he plays, led by a teenage kid. It hasn't rained for a while, because the road is dry—the kid's feet are not muddy, and the thin tracks made by the metal wheels of a cart are not deep. They curve to the left and leave the frame, blurring first. In the washy background sit two figures by the curb. The two white daubs near them are probably geese. There is also a toddler standing midway between the focus and the rim of the photograph. He looks to the side, as if not hearing the music, or perhaps the appearance of these two pedestrians is an everyday thing. Because of this, I went to Abony in the dead of winter. And found nothing there. I filled my tank on leaving Budapest but in four minutes had driven through the town. A woman hanging up laundry, then there were no more houses. I was not really looking for anything, because, after all, nothing could have lasted; it all remained in the photograph. I turned toward the Tisza. A reddening dusk over the Puszta. A few scattered houses, groves of poplar, two children walking to the horizon over naked earth, black and empty stork nests, all this beneath a limitless, blazing sky. Darkness fell somewhere after Tisaalpár.

The next day, in the photography museum in Kecskemét, I bought an album of Kertész, to discover that the blind fiddler is not left-handed: the picture I had at home was flipped. I needed to drive to Abony in January, pass through it without stopping, to discover, a few dozen kilometers farther, that the boy leading the musician was his son. This information is of no use to me. I cannot know, can only imagine, their life, unfold that day beyond the frame of the picture, fill that ancient space with their fragile presence. The father's shoes are worn, falling apart. He wears a dark jacket, but over his right shoulder he has thrown another covering, which resembles a torn blanket. The son also carries something like a blanket or towel. They are prepared for bad weather and the cold. The boy holds in his hand a small bundle. Under the brim of the fiddler's hat is a crushed white cigarette. At least I think so. I must gather what facts I can, to flesh out that day. On June 19, the sun rose at 3:14, and an hour or two later the heat of the Puszta set in. There is no shade here. It's far from one town to another. The roads to isolated homes beyond the horizon are straight and scarlike. It's fourteen kilometers to ûÚjszász, fourteen to ûjszilvás, ten to Törtel and KŐröstetétlen, seventeen to Tószeg. The air is still and smells of manure. When the breeze comes from the east, it brings the swamp reek of the Tisza. You can hear the birds over the bogs. A trained ear distinguishes even the dry whistling beat of their wings. Sometimes a heavy team of gray, big-horned oxen passes, or a clattering carriage. Then you get a whiff of tobacco, untanned leather, and horse sweat. These conveyances, passing, grow silent, are gone, leaving only dust.

This is my Hungary; I cannot help it. I realize that it all belongs to the past and may not actually have ever taken place. I realize that eighty-five kilometers farther and eighty-two years later is Budapest, then Esztergom, et cetera, and the glory and the power and everything that gets collected over the centuries in minds that want to live beyond their allotted time. But my Hungary is in Abony, where I didn't even stop. No doubt because the blind musician could show up in any of those places that no one knows and where no one ever goes, places never mentioned but that make the world what it is. Only a miracle saved him and his son from oblivion. "I took the picture on a Sunday. The music woke me. That blind musician played so wonderfully, I hear him to this day" (André Kertész).

I can take my Hungary with me wherever I go, and it will lose none of its vividness. It's a negative, or a slide through which I shine the light of memory. In Tornyosnémeti, two men emerged from the dark and began to play. One had a harmonica, the other a guitar with a dull sound. It was freezing cold and foggy. The waiting tour buses formed a black wall. The guitarist's fingers must have hurt. The music, numb, could barely leave the instruments. I didn't make out the melody, only a hurried, nervous beat. A string broke, but they played on, with sad eyes and the stubbornness typical of hopeless enterprises. Then we tried conversing, in a borderland mix of Hungarian and Slovak. It wasn't money they wanted but to change it. They had a handful of Polish coins, tens, twenties, fifties, collected no doubt from our truckers. They sold them to me for forints. We said good-bye, and they were gone. They might have been from Gönc. The younger man, the harmonica player, could have been one of the two kids whom three years ago the bartender refused to serve at the pub next to the Hussite House. I'd ask, if I could, how that skinny one is doing, the one with the homespun coat over his bare back, the one I arm-wrestled that summer and drank with to the health of Franz Josef. If the musicians were from Gönc, they would know him. And know the man who was brown as chocolate, round as a ball, and naked to the waist, who every day went down the main street in a small horse-drawn two-wheel cart. I can still hear the muffled clop of horseshoes on asphalt softened by the heat.

It's winter now, and I need such sounds. From my window I see a two-horse team and, on the cart, four men bundled up. The horses, though shod, step uncertainly on the ice. They all appear out of the mist and in a moment are gone again. If only it were summer—then, instead of returning to their Pętna or Małastów they could head for Konieczna and there by some miracle get around the guards and rules and make it to the Slovak side. And, in Zborov, say, they could blend in with the locals, being exactly like them in style, dress, expression, general appearance. May would be a good time; there's grass for the horses and only occasionally a touch of frost in the morning. I'd go with them, to look at the passing world and at their faces, so different and so familiar. I'd sit to the side like a ghost and listen to their words. Probably they would talk about how things change as they travel, but not so that a person feels at any point the bump of a border. Slovak names would imperceptibly become Hungarian, then Romanian, Serbian, Macedonian, finally Albanian—assuming that we keep more or less to country lanes that go along the twenty-first line of longitude. I'd sit to the side and drink with them all the varieties of alcohol that change with the changing land: borowiczka, körte palinka, cujka, rakija, and eventually, around Lake Ohrid, Albanian raki. No one would stop us, and no one would stare as we rested at a place off the thoroughfare. That region is full of forgotten roads. Turn down one, and time slackens, as if it has evaded someone's supervising eye. Time wears away gradually, like the clothes of the men traveling by cart. What seems ready for discarding persists as it degrades and fades, until the silent end, the moment when existence shifts invisibly to nonexistence. My mind in this way wandered after they vanished into the mist. I see them cross the Hungarian Lowlands, Transylvania, the Banat, as if they were born there and returning home from the marketplace, from a visit, from work in the field or in the woods. Time parts before them like the air and closes again as they pass.

Whenever I come home from Romania in the summer, the undercarriage of the car is crusted with cow shit. One evening, as I was descending the switchbacks from Păltiniş and found myself among the first buildings of Răinari, I heard under my wheels a series of sharp, loud splashes. The entire road was covered with green diarrhea. Moments before, a herd had come down from its pasture. I could see the last of the cattle finding their paddocks. They stood under the gates with lifted tails and shat. Had I braked, I would have slid as on ice in winter. Cows and steers turned this crossing into a skating rink. Completely filled with crap, a route that Sibiu society would usually take to their vacation dachas in the mountains. Crap from one shoulder to the other. Crap drying in the last rays of the setting sun. People on motorcycles had the worst of it. The animal world had invaded the heart of the human world, which was fitting. Now whenever I drive at dusk through villages in Transylvania, the Puszta, or my own Pogórze, I think of that splashing, think that we have not been altogether abandoned.

Another time, before Oradea, I turned off Highway 76 and got lost in a tangle of village roads. It might have been' Tăad, or Drăgeşti, I don't remember. In any case, in the distant east you could see the gentle cones of the mountains the Hungarians call Királyerdö, the Romanians Pădurea Craiului, and we Poles the Royal Forest. It was late afternoon, and the slanting light threw gold on everything and lengthened shadows. In an hour I was to leave Transylvania and enter the Great Hungarian Plain, so I wanted to have a last look. And ended up in this village. The houses, side by side, were arranged in a wide ring. In the center was a commons overgrown with young birches. A village, but it was like driving through a grove. The slender trees shone like honey. Here and there the gleam of a white wall, but no person in sight, only heavy pink pigs trotting through the scenery. Maybe ten of them. They sniffed, their snouts to the ground, looking for prey, as if they reigned here and were tracking down a foe. In the golden light, their hundred-kilogram hulks were an exquisite blasphemy. Clean, as if they didn't live in a sty. Under the dull and bristled skin, flesh swollen with pulsing blood. I will go back someday, to learn the name of that village. Without a name, it is too much like a vision, and I need real things to have faith in.