On the Road to Babadag (25 page)

It is for this reason, among other reasons, that my passport looks the way it does. Without a schedule, a guide, a plan, and abandoned to chance, I try to find out things on my own, and always have to start from square one. I go to Baia Mare, let's say, as if no one had ever been there before. Or, at noon in the middle of the summer, to Dukla, where your shadow contracts to a small patch at your feet and the solitude at Market Square thickens as if Judgment Day might come at any moment. Or I cross Pusztaradvány and climb the high barrens toward Slovakia in January, to see how dead the borderland there is and how the rows of hills appear untouched by human eyes, and how at Buzica the red-and-white crossing gate and the guard suggest a vigil for the repentant souls of smugglers. I went there one day in order to bypass Budapest, drove up the northern slopes of the Bukovec Mountains and Mátra in the hope that in a few hours I would reach, by some miracle, the Danube's bend, at Esztergom, where one August on a side street near the intersection of Pázmány and Batthyany I discovered a pub that inside was like a village cabin done up for a wedding reception: a few simple tables covered with checkered cloth, a few chairs, and that was it. A fat man in suspenders appeared and brought a menu on which the dishes, only a few, were written in longhand. The writing quaint, calligraphic. The room was cold, quiet, empty. I felt like a party guest who had come too early. I ordered
gombaleves,
mushroom soup. Suspenders brought it and placed it before me as one puts food before a person who just got off work. I could eat with my elbows on the table, even slurp, no one would care, though not far from here, more than a thousand years ago, Saint Stephen was baptized, making all Hungary Christian in one fell swoop.

It was August, and Basilica Hill shimmered like a mirage in the heat. I no longer recall where I had arrived from, but right after the green bridge over the Danube, Slovakia began, sleepy Slovakia, with its tranquil peasant waiting for what should come but might not. Cement-gray plaster and villages that ended abruptly; potbellied men in white undershirts drinking beer and sitting on plastic chairs in front of a
hostinec,
in shoes without socks, as if they hadn't left their yard, as if their home encompassed the entire village, the entire region, the rest of the world as far even as two, three bus stops away. Sometimes women would be standing beside them in dressing gowns and slippers—not sitting down, just there to exchange a few words.

Sleepy Slovakia, a deepening afternoon, with only the Gypsies astir and getting into things, turning in the swelter like scattered black rosary beads. It's five, six, and the Košice and Prešov beltways are as empty as dawn on a Sunday. In Medzilaborce, too, not a soul, but in a dark-gray pub at the exit to Zborov, where the only ATM in town stands, someone's hand holds a shot glass. Except that was another time. I was driving to Ubl'a, due east, above the Ukrainian border, because someone called Potok had had adventures there, a couple of times barely escaping with his life, and for weeks at a dusty border marketplace he drank the cheapest and vilest booze in that part of Europe, losing over and over again the pistol that he had stolen and that held only one bullet, kept for the darkest hour. I went to check all this out, in particular to find that fucked-up international bazaar at which the Moldovans spread out on the ground all the treasures of Transnistria in the hope of exchanging them for the riches of Transcarpathia, the jewels of Szabolcs-Szatmár, the inexhaustible goods of Maramureş. I wanted to take it all in, hear the Babylonian cacophony of tongues, Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Romance, see the eastern hodgepodge of tents, pubs of canvas and plywood, old buses turned into brothels on wheels. I wanted to smell Gypsy camps stocked with marvels that no woman or man could resist, because they came from a realm no one yet had reached or—more to the point—no one had returned from. Thus I set out for Ubl'a, east of the volcanic mountains of Vihorlat, mountains no one in his right mind would venture into, as they are haunted by the ghosts of field officers and front-line soldiers of the Warsaw Pact, and by pallid ghouls, deserters, who sell arms and uniforms as souvenirs. I drove through the town of Snina, where among weeping willows stood two-story garrison buildings with red roofs, all looking as if they had been thrown together that same day and had aged and fallen apart just as quickly. On benches in doorways sat women with children. Soldiers' wives, widows of the officer ghosts? Snina was a dream dreamt at the edge of a country that had lost all its enemies.

I drove to Ubl'a, through Stakčín, Kolonica, Ladomirov, in the shadow of the Bukovec divide, through Transcarpathian Rus, because a few years before, Potok gave voice, supposedly, to the spirit of these lands and times, because the genius loci of this corner of the continent spoke in tongues, as if in a kind of early capitalist Pentecost. Somewhere around there, perhaps a little to the south, was the square, the commons, the market to which the cursed of the earth were drawn as soon as the crossing gates lifted. The miracle of liberty, of the free exchange of commodities in dust, dirt, an open field, a city rising from nothing and unlike anything the world had seen. Because it had to be as it was once: caravans, troops on the march, migration. The supernatural reality of different prices, different currency drawing entire families from their homes, entire tribes, and making them walk an uncertain path, as once it drew people to the farthest seas, to the ever-retreating horizon of adventurers and discoverers. So I went to Ubl'a, beyond which lay Vyšne Nemecké and Čierna nad Tisou, not unlike traveling between the Tigris and the Euphrates to a new Nineveh. Not two rivers met here but three borders, like three currents carrying the fertile sediment of smuggled riches, cunning, greed, fake vodka, pipes for which no excise tax was paid, Siberian skins, exotic parrots and turtles, bullets for Makarov pistols, and Hungarian pornography. Three borders like three rivers, each gathering the best from the depths of each land. I imagined that somewhere between Čierna, Chop, and Záhony a city would grow from the naked soil like a hallucination of the damned, with twenty-four-hour commerce, unlimited supply and demand, and that consumption and capital expenditure would be joined forever in mystical marriage. Such thoughts accompanied me.

But there was nothing in Ubl'a. Only two rows of tidy houses, one on either side of the road. A Slovak cop stopping an old Ukrainian Mercedes driven by some bald bozo. Nothing happening aside from that. You drive and drive, and suddenly the country ends, for no reason, it seems, almost as if it simply got bored and quit. The uniform waved; the Ukrainian slowly continued on his way. Two girls emerged from between houses and were gone in a moment, swallowed by the international wasteland. In this wasteland, odd thoughts occur. We think that on the other side of the border we will be someone else. Meanwhile it is May 26 today, tonight, and to the south, above the Republic of Slovakia, the sky brightens now and then from soundless lightning. I returned from Ubl'a, and nothing had changed. Back to square one. Which is where everything should begin. That's what it depends on, on the imagination, which draws no conclusions. Memory, meteorology, visions.

Should it rain tomorrow, I'll reconstruct that day when in a small town we boarded a ferry to take us across a lake. Sheets of gray rain passed over the water. No one was at the pier. Dun reeds, a solitary purveyor of souvenirs in a shop, and faded signs for ice cream from a season long gone. Hard to believe it ever got hot here. The greasy overalls of the crew were soaked. For the thousandth time they released the anchor, raised the plank, started up the rumbling diesel, but there was no escape: these inlets could accommodate at most a child's boat of cork, a raft of twigs. To ease the dreariness of inland sailing, I pretended we were at the end of a long transatlantic voyage and heading for the coast of a country mentioned only in mist-shrouded legend. The border of the real world lay nearby. Up ahead, everything seemed familiar and authentic, yet only the natives could believe that their land existed, that it wasn't a reflection, shadow, mirage, or parody of an actual land. Raindrops fell on the deck. On the faces of the crew, boredom competed with indifference. Meanwhile I imagined we were now entering a strait in which space loses its thread, matter its concentration. I leaned against the railing, lit a cigarette, and played the stranger who has ventured into questionable territory without a guide, preconceived notions, or proud knowledge. It was the end of April, and the air, landscape, and whole day were filled with spring. Humidity wafted like gray smoke. We passed boarded-up houses. On the other shore now, the dingy mirror of water still in view, we drove through lethargically expectant country. The entire region idle. It would all change in a month, maybe even in a week, when the sun rose on a Saturday or Sunday, because this was an area of health resorts, a vacation spot, which right now was waiting, dozing, conserving its breath and energy, only half alive. It would endure strangers with their brief excitement, immoderate activity, carnival prodigality, then stillness would settle once again and life return to the old and tested ways, leading to a relatively painless end.

Later, we left the lake and found another, much smaller one, known for not freezing even in the bitterest winter, and smelling as if it were fed by an underground stream from Hades. The rain continued. Wooden pavilions and footbridges stood in murky water and were rotting from both the water and the heat. The white bodies of old men floated on childish inner tubes. Walkways on slippery boards. The men were mostly German or Austrian retirees, but also some spoke Slovak, and some Hungarian. Steam descended from structures on stilts, the structures thick with blindingly white bodies. When naked and crammed together, people seem dead, even when they move. An ominous scene: the stink of swamp decay and sulfur mixed with the smell of steaming flesh. I went inside one structure for a moment, then left. I recall it now as a persistent vision, or as something one only reads about. Nothing remains; Ubl'a, Heviz, Lendava, Babadag, Leskovik, et cetera, leave no evidence that quantity eventually becomes quality, that one meshes with the other and like the gears of a marvelous machine begins to produce sense.

Two days before, I was back in Gönc. A candy store the color of lilac appeared to be closed. A padlock hung at the door, and through the dusty windows I could see black, empty oven pans. Each time I come here, there is less of Gönc. One day I will come and find no Gönc at all. The town will have disappeared from the map, and only I will know what it looked like, only I will remember the man with the checkered hat and fishing rod waiting for the yellow bus that went to the other side of the green Zemplén Hills. But all places are wearing out, wearing away. Almost as if they were already in my head only, as outlines, fading colors, shapes blurring at the edges. I drank coffee, looked at the street, and felt oblivion encroach on every side, from the air, the walls, the sidewalk, from the vastnesses of the past and future. A man in a green shirt passed my little table. I saw his back: old, worn cloth that someone had carefully repaired, preserved, with white thread.

It was Sunday, and I met no other car all the way to Tornyosnémeti. Nothing afterward either: thirty kilometers in total solitude. It was only on the approach to Košice that an occasional car moved on this absurdly many-laned blank. I took Road 547 and at the edge of Rudohorie, the Ore Mountains, turned northwest. As usual, I saw Gypsies, their desperate liveliness in the slumbering monotony of Slovak towns and villages. As if everyone, exhausted by the everyday, was taking a nap, hidden behind curtains, behind rambling roses in gardens, behind the windows of furtive cars, in the stuffy interiors of gray homes, and only these dark-skinned and cursed people were surrendering themselves to life, making use of the world and their few minutes in it like a winning ticket. So I always keep an eye out for red, rusting roofs and blue wisps of pine smoke. And for patches of bare clayey soil on which not a thing can grow, because the Gypsies are constantly on the move, stepping, visiting, going to endless parties under the open sky, passing stories from mouth to mouth, and peering into every corner, for the earth belongs to no one, and no one has the right to claim it for himself.

In Krompachy, their settlement rose. To the left of the road, on an almost vertical incline, house grew atop house, and the highest jutted into the boundless blue. Structures resting insanely on empty space. Jagged, exposed to wind and rain, hanging in defiance of gravity, they brought to mind bird nests perched on rock. Protruding, sagging, as if at any moment something would fall into the road—poles, pieces of sheet metal, sticks, parts of old houses hauled from who knows where, houses no one wanted to live in anymore, with mud and moss in the chinks between boards, scraps of tar paper pressed with stones. Everything had been found and made use of with paranoid cunning. From discarded matter, the magic of a domicile. It seemed that it all fluttered in the wind, that in a moment it would take to the air, fly away, and no sign of this aerial town would remain. I imagined the Gypsies sailing skyward like a tattered cloud, a great patchwork raft carrying a mountain of possessions, the whole dump and scrap heap of things nobody needed and only the Gypsies could put to use. I saw them fly over Rudohorie, over šariš and Spiš, over the entire world, in the nebular wealth of their poverty, the shreds and shards from which they had cobbled—pointedly without dignity—an ordinary life.

Then a small town and the usual industrial shit in a valley of the Hornád, to the right. Rust, the wretchedness of inert metal, the despair of outdated technology. Tanks, stacks, conduits, conveyor belts, sidings, hangars with broken windows, and pustules of installation among the greenery. Granted, it was a Sunday, but nothing suggested that by some miracle this equipment would return to life on Monday. Or ascend to heaven. It would have to sit here for all eternity, unless the Gypsies took pity and disassembled it and sold the parts for cigarettes, alcohol, ornaments for their women and sweets for their children, or built out of the parts vehicles not of this world, in which to travel through Europe, exciting among the local population—as they have done before—superstitious dread mixed with envy and admiration. Once people asked an old Gypsy why Gypsies didn't have their own country. "If a country was a good thing, the Gypsies too would have one, for sure," was his answer. So a united Europe is for them an improvement, making it easier for a person to move and live than any single nation can.