On the Road to Babadag (27 page)

Anyone who was born in Huşi and spent his youth there is entitled not to believe in the future. I assume Codreanu visited Valea Grecului too; he was a young man on the move. He hated the Communists, who believed in the future, as much as the Jews. His dull, provincial mind probably had trouble telling them apart. Basically, he never stopped being a prophet from the sticks. The world was divided into Romania and the rest, and the rest had no value because it wasn't Romania, let alone Huşi.

During his studies in Berlin, he wears Romanian folk dress. At the same time, poverty forces him into trade. He buys salt pork and butter in the villages, sells them at a profit in the city. His Berlin life becomes a parody of the life of a Moldovan peasant. He is now no different from his conception of a Jew. In Grenoble, to survive, he and his wife sew Romanian folk costumes and sell them. Little enters his head other than Romania and folk merchandise. In a courtroom (he also tried his hand at lawyering), he pulls out a pistol and shoots the chief of police. His comrades murder "traitors" and despicable politicians, then surrender to the cops, as an act of Christian martyrdom. "Love is the key to the peace that our Savior offered to the peoples of the world ... But love does not release us from the duty of discipline, the duty of carrying out our orders," he ranted in 1936.

Parody and delirium. One must be born in Huşi to smell the poison of melancholy that eats into mind and soul. One must be born in Huşi, where even the crows turn back, to grasp this dream of glory of the native land, to understand this nightmare. Madness is left, because only in madness can one overturn, if for a moment, the order of a world that gives not a damn for Huşi, for Valea Dacilor, or even for the village of Decebal, cursed with its Gypsy multitude on every corner. Huşi dismissed, Huşi scorned, Huşi half asleep and dragging its feet, Huşi scratched by chickens and stuck like a broken cane in a crevice of time forever and ever amen. The train terminates there. To come into the world in Huşi is to live in eternity made flesh.

So thought Corneliu Codreanu. Because the past was sacred, it had to last forever, had to be resurrected constantly, driving off the specter of the future. The future always came from outside, was foreign, like an invader. The future was a violation of the perfection of enduring, which constituted the sense, the essence, the deepest mystery of Huşi and its environs.

I really should have stopped in Huşi. Now I must imagine myself going back. Autumn would be the best time, when the leaves are falling, for me to find confirmation of my ideas, to probe the cracking, the rotting, the mold that quietly, imperceptibly enters stone and wood and Sunday outfits kept on shelves. Microorganisms, gravity, humidity—these are the fundamental components of my part of the continent. They should be listed on the ingredients label, should appear on the coat of arms. Whoever thinks otherwise is in for a rude awakening. Codreanu's paroxysm resulted from his complete misunderstanding of the genius loci, which he wanted so much to change. Possessed by the need for his people to be great, he fell into the absurdity of imitating a foreign destiny. All that he bequeathed, then, was counterfeit.

I can't help it, I love this Balkan shambles. It begins right after Satu Mare. Everything half-assed and fucked up, and God only knows where the edge of the highway is, where the shoulder, plus the horse-drawn carts, and suddenly there is more dust in the air than there ever was in post-Hapsburg Hungary, and at every step you have to swerve because of something on the road, as if these Dacias and Aros were not properly tightened and lost parts or maybe had too many parts to begin with. Stocky Gypsies stand by Mercedes with open hoods, as if the radiator burst or a belt slipped, and desperately they wave at you to stop, then thrust gold or precious stones in your face at half price. The kids dart back and forth across the road, no doubt trained from the cradle in the famous Romanian indifference to death, in Geto-Dacian fatalism. No one uses directional signals, because times are tough and a person must conserve his strength. Horns, on the other hand, are heard constantly, because they don't wear out. It was that way in May 2000; it will be that way forever. I dwell on the memory as one dwells on one's childhood. It turns out that a man seeks only what he has seen before. It turns out that the Szatmár chaos, the empty lanes of Sulina and Giurgiu by the Danube recall my Sokołów Podlaski and Kałuszyn. The same material, the same improvisation desperately trying to be permanent. In the buses, the same smell of soap and milk when the villagers set out; on the rotting benches in the shady lanes, the same contemplation. The same carelessness with time, a watch no more than an ornament, like jewelry. Time, really, is just a piece of eternity you cut out for your own consumption.

Between Bozieni and Valea Parjei I saw two men by the road in the middle of a green field. For ten kilometers in one direction and fifteen in the other, there was nothing, no one. They sat in the shade of an Italian pine and played cards. They didn't even look up when the bus passed. A few days later I returned the same way and saw them again. They had moved maybe a kilometer, but the landscape was unchanged: a row of stone pines along the road, corn, and the men still immersed in their somnolent, monotonous game, as if their deck held a million cards. It's possible that night overtook them as they played and that they slept in the open field, to resume at dawn. Someone may have brought them here to do work, but when the hirer disappeared over a hill, they immediately began their game. They had not a thing with them, no tool, unless it was in a pocket. They sat as if they were at a table at home. Gray and crumpled, like most of the men in this region, yet unfazed by the overwhelming space and endless stretch of hours. The fragile abstraction of the game was their shield. At dusk, who knows, they might have lit a candle, or else the cards were marked and even in the dark their fingers could tell hearts from spades from clubs.

I love this Balkan shambles, Hungarian, Slovak, Polish, the amazing weight of things, the lovely slumber, the facts that make no difference, the calm and methodical drunkenness in the middle of the day, and those misty eyes that with no effort pierce reality and with no fear open to the void. I can't help it. The heart of my Europe beats in Sokołów Podlaski and in Huşi. It does not beat in Vienna. Or in Budapest. And most definitely not in Kraków. Those places are all aborted transplants. A mock-up, a mirror of what is elsewhere. Sokołów and Huşi imitate nothing; they follow their own destinies. My heart is in Sokołów, though I was there for ten hours altogether, at most. Usually during transfers from one Pekaes truck to another in the early 1970s, when I went to visit my uncle and his wife on vacations. But my memory is good. Single-story wooden houses in the center of town, lilac bushes, shutters, dogs asleep on the asphalt, leaning posts of bus stops with round yellow signs, frames and planks painted brown and green, sand in the sidewalk joints, an ice cream store that inside smells like a village cottage, sugar peas in glass tubes, everything only just sprouting from the ground, only just begun, and of course the rotting, the scraping, the dozing, life without pretension, trying to make things last, the squeaking floorboards, the silly heroism of a quotidian that snaps in two as easily as an ice cream wafer. I remember it all and could go on and on. It's in my blood. So though I drove through Huşi in five minutes, there being no reason to stop, my heart is in Huşi.

Which indicates that I need my own country. Where I can travel in a circle. A country without clear borders, a country unaware that it exists and doesn't care that someone invented it and entered it. A sleepy country with murky politics and a history like shifting sand. Its present breaking ice, its culture the Gypsy palaces of Soroca. Nothing would last here without running the risk of being ridiculous. But why a country, why not an empire with an unspecified number of provinces, an empire in motion, in progress, driven by the idea of expansion, but also sclerotic, unable to remember its lands, its peoples, its capitals, so every morning it would need to start over? That would suit me, since I have the same problem: I remember things and events but do not know what separates or connects them other than my accidental presence.

Three days ago I was in Bardejov. An afternoon mass had begun at Saint Egidius. Those of the faithful who were late squeezed in through the half-open door. The interior must have been full, because you could hear an echoing rumble of voices, yet new people kept arriving. In a long stream across the square, the faithful wore their best and were flushed in their haste, slowing only in the shadow of the sanctuary to give their movement a little decorum. A scene that has been repeated for five hundred years. The Bardejov square crossing, I thought, must be worn from the touch of feet. A space unable after so many years to keep healing. I walked uphill, in the opposite direction, away from the crowd. Louis the Great gave this city the right to hold eight fairs a year and to do beheadings, activities that must have required a bit of room, but now, without commerce and the functions of justice, the square seemed abandoned. I turned down Veterná, then down Stöcklova, to the right, to find myself in a narrow path between a barbican wall and the rest of the city. I saw some steps and went up. The wall, at least six hundred years old, was crumbling here and there. It looked its age. From my height now I could see yards, gardens, back doors, hutches, chicken coops, doghouses, all the things a small town hides from sight, confining its rusticity. A graceful, relaxed clutter here, the remnants of projects never completed, storage gradually turning into rubbish. Plastic bags, compost, fallen apples, weeds, beaten paths, an eternal present crouched in the shadow of walnut and cherry trees. The Gothic slowly disintegrated here, and its disintegration led to things that had no history, things that had use and significance for a moment only. The new joined the old in a just order, a
liberté,
égalité,
and
fraternité
of matter.

I sense this equality everywhere. There is no need for deception. I am blind and deaf to all else. But as a rule there is no all else. It was that way a month and a half ago in Uzlina. We reached it by motorboat from Murighiol. Around us lay four thousand square kilometers of canals, lakes, dead tributaries, bogs, wetlands, and land as flat as the mirror of still water. You could go for several hours and nothing would change. A hot, undisturbed, motionless sleep. The expanse swallowing up all detail. Our path left no trace. The great river carries silt from the depths of the continent and with it sculpts a new, uncertain land. In a kind of genesis, the landscape gathers its strength to lift itself above the surface of the water. A trance, this trip against the current of time, toward primordial childhood.

But Uzlina came first. A hotel there rose four stories out of the marshy, the flat, and the ancient. It looked like a thing misplaced during a move. In a radius of a few dozen kilometers, there was nothing higher. At the driveway entrance waited a young woman in a miniskirt and stiletto heels. She held a tray with glasses of slivovitz, cujka, simple peasant brandy. An olive in each glass. In front of the hotel, a swimming pool, umbrellas, deck chairs. Our room in the annex was as God wanted it. The view from the window: laundry tubs, rubble, vegetable patches (private plots), dogs on chains barking to protect the cabbage. The first night, I was bitten by bedbugs and had no air to breathe. In the main building nearby, the air-conditioning chugged. All evening, the employees of Coty Cosmetics Romania entertained themselves around a bonfire to global hit parade music.

The next day Mitka appeared. He sat down at our table in a bar under umbrellas. He wore trousers from a hundred-year-old suit and rubber flip-flops. He was maybe sixty. He seemed to come straight from the swamp and reeds. He drank beer after beer, complaining that he could no longer have vodka, not after the doctors cut something out of him. He spoke to us in Russian but called the waitresses in Romanian. He drank at the hotel every evening and didn't pay, though sometimes he contributed a ram or piglet to the hotel kitchen. The owner tolerated this, wanting to buy land from Mitka, who was a neighbor, to expand his business. Mitka's cows and swine wandered through and around, dozens of them foraging untethered through the mud and sand along the Saint Egidius tributary.

At dusk we went to see his farm, which was large and flat. A labyrinth of pens, sties, plots, half-open barns, and huts with bulrush roofs. No light on anywhere. Above, the bright, phosphorescent sky; below, the thickened dark, redolent of animals and excrement. The pigs ran up to Mitka like dogs. In a corner something snorted, grunted, chewed, belched, huffed, followed by a pulse of body heat, as if in the cavern of this farm a great antediluvian beast were settling down for the night.

In Mitka's cabin, a weak bulb burned under a low ceiling. His long and narrow room contained nothing more than a bed, a cupboard with utensils, and a table. Mitka ducked into a small doorway and emerged with a double-barreled shotgun. An old gun, metal shining through the oxidized finish. He said we could shoot, if I paid for the ammunition. Night had fallen, and I thought shooting didn't make sense. Another time, I said. Disappointed, he laid the gun on the bed. On the wall hung a framed black-and-white photograph, grainy. The man in it reminded me of someone, but I wasn't certain. I asked Mitka. "Yes, it's Ceauş escu," he said with a smile, pleased that I had recognized the leader. Then, since the subject was photographs, he produced from a drawer a picture of his dead wife.

That was Mitka. He worshipped his dictator, remembered his wife, liked shooting into the dark. He lay down to sleep beside his shotgun. There was nothing near his farm, no houses or people. I'm not even sure all his animals returned at night. He may not have known how many he had, may not ever have counted them. Half a kilometer away, at the Coty party, were women in bikinis around the pool and men resembling gigolos in their white trousers. The old man, small and veiny, slept like a child. I imagined him dreaming of cows, pigs, chickens, and dogs, that they surrounded him in a close circle to protect him from the traps and treacheries of the world. The noisy hotel, beside this dark and foul-smelling farm, seemed a thing made of paper, which could ignite in a moment from a careless match.