On the Road to Babadag (28 page)

It's the second half of October. The weather is changing; the first frosts have come, the first powdering of snow. Winter begins in two or three weeks. Yet again I'll have to imagine all those places I visited in the spring and summer. This imagining makes the world bigger. The continent increases. Rozpucie, Baurci, Ubl'a, Máriapócs, Erind, Huşi, Sokołów Podlaski, Hodoš, Zborov, Caraorman, Delatyn, Duląbka—they all want to be great. To see Lvov in the spring and then imagine it in the winter is like doubling Lvov, making it twice as lovely, but that's as it should be. The poor road leading through the heart of the Čergov massif begins there. It is closed to traffic, and a man drives it at his peril, because the Slovak soldiers have no sense of humor. In any case, a beautiful stretch through complete wilderness all the way to Majdan. But I digress ...

I was speaking of greatness and in praise of memory that, like a lit match, burns a hole in the map, sending places and things into an eternity that can be ended only by cosmic dementia (which eventually will happen) and thus expanding the continent to infinite size, bringing oblivion out into the light. Whoever was in Rozpucie, Baurci, or Caraorman knows what I'm saying. The dark soul of a peninsula smolders there, and matter slumbers, like bone marrow producing the dense black blood of unrealized desires. To be in Rozpucie, Baurci, or Caraorman is to see a past that has not yet harbored doubts about the future, because it is a past that has not yet got under way. And it may never get under way and share the fate of the rest of the world, whose destiny is to weep over its own demise. Neither Rozpucie nor Caraorman will be depleted unto death. They are old but will die young, are weary but will die in the fullness of their strength, in midstride, on a road whose purpose and destination are beyond their ken. It's October, a cold night rain falls, and the wet and dark engulf the villages and towns. Lying at the bottom of the waters, they have lost their names: great sleeping fish with houses, people, and roads in their bellies. People whisper in the dark, huddled, intent, waiting out the flood and guessing the future. Time hasn't yet started; there is no light, and you must squint for the dawn to come. No news, only promises and myths. The world is so distant that by the time an account of it reaches you, it may no longer be.

On such nights I reach for the plastic box with the photographs. There are about a thousand of them. Like an organ grinder's monkey, I pull out the first that comes to hand. Usually I have no idea when this or that one was taken, but I always know the place. There's nothing of consequence in the snapshots: horses grazing in a dump, a vegetable garden with a scraped wall, green hills, a village hut, a piece of mountain scenery, a black cat and a manhole, a tree in mist and tire tracks in snow, the facade of a house on an empty street, and so on, with no pattern or sequence or reason, a purely random collection of insignificant objects and meaningless moments, a child's game-experiment to see if the camera click really does freeze reality. But I remember everything and without the box can identify the geographic names, the countries, regions, and villages. The cat was in Lviv, the horses on the outskirts of Gjirokastër, the triangular corner facade in Chernivtsi, the garden in Tokaj, the mountains at Kočevski Rog. I'm not sure about the tire tracks in the snow. Definitely somewhere near Kecskemét, west of the city, where I got lost and was frantically looking for an exit, because by every indication the road was taking me to the Budapest highway, which I hated like poison. Finally I found an exit, saw above me the dark arch of a viaduct and the long bodies of trucks creeping north. I became entangled in a web of yellow roads. Mist clung to the ground. Through vertical breaks in it I saw the remains of what were probably Hungarian state farms—rusting tractors, collectivization breathing its last, huge barns and stables—then fog covered the scene, the whole world, and you could imagine whatever you liked, the Great Lowland, Alföld, flat and sodden earth joined with the sky by the thick and heavy air, endless marsh with no horizon, a kind of semimaterialization of nothingness. The tire tracks in snow were there, and yellow grass, somewhere outside Kecskemét, at Kiskun.

I hold on to this rubbish collection of snapshots to imagine what lies outside them, all that is hidden from the eye and memory. A deck of a thousand worn and worthless cards, the faience shine of Fuji and Kodak, the dull light of the literal—these are the photographs I take. Hardly any people in them. As if a neutron bomb had wiped away everything that moved, aside from the cat in Lviv and the Albanian horses. Maybe it's the Bushman fear that the camera will steal a person's soul. Or maybe it simply shows how unpopulated the land is, how solitary my life. It's good to arrive in a country in which you find no one. You can start from scratch. History becomes legend, then, and reality a personal vision. You cannot grasp, say, Voskopojë at best, you can imagine it. In the pictures from Voskopojë there is not a soul, only two donkeys nibbling among thistles and stones. I know that their driver, Jani, ought to be with them, drinking brandy and beer in turn, and Greczynka, the owner of the pub, and her silent husband, and Jani's friend, as broad as a barn and with a Slavic face, and the retarded kid we picked up on the road, but then the account would bog down and I would never extricate myself from the confusion of their lives. And so: only two donkeys, stones, and a slate-blue sky over the ruin of a monastery. Ah, but of course I should drive after that to Boboshticë, thirty-some kilometers to the southeast, because the village was founded, supposedly, by Polish knights on some crusade. The inhabitants still know a few Polish words, though they have no idea what they mean. I should go there instead of watching the donkeys, stones, and thistles, but frankly, as interesting as Boboshticë is, it's of no interest to me. I returned to Korçë and for hours looked out my hotel window at the square as if I were a camera without an owner. It was the same in Gjirokastër. Netting to keep out bugs blurred the minaret. And in Seregélyes, rain, an empty courtyard, the wet branches of chestnut trees, and the tinny gurgle of water in downspouts. In Prelasko, frost on the grass, a parking lot with one car, and a house collapsing on the other side of the street.

It's the same everywhere. You sharpen the focus to pierce the envelope of air, to cut through the skin of space. A window in a new place does the job. In Cahul, it was the market closed for the night and the shadows of dogs many times larger than the dogs. In Chişinău it rained too, and Vasile Alecsandri Avenue became a gray river. In the tropical downpour I had to close the window. Every morning at nine, a man opened an office on the ground floor across the way. I remember the finial on the gate, a shape like a snail, a wave of the sea, the horns of a ram. I remember little else. I watched the finial for hours and imagined the rest. I am doing the same now. I take my pictures out of the plastic box, my change out of the metal canister for Absolut vodka, my parking tickets and hotel bills out of the cardboard box, my banknotes out of the drawer—nothing more, ever, only this thousandfold multiplication of the everyday.

In Máriapócs in September, on the large, flat, windswept field outside town, merchandise lay on plastic bags on the ground. No treasures here: Chinese schlock, jeans, Adidas and Nike knockoffs. All displayed in neat rows and spanking new. The vendors stood motionless over their wares and waited. Each selling the same stuff, essentially. The grass dry and trampled. No one buying anything, no one even looking. An itinerant tribe from an old tale, which spreads out its wares at the city gates, and the next morning it is gone without a trace. A bit farther on, merry-go-rounds and shooting galleries, then more stalls with candy and wine, church booths with wonders, and gingerbread hearts, handicrafts, panpipes, weathervanes, and stands with religious literature. Among the trees, people had set up camp, put out food: hard-boiled eggs, bottles of beer, canapés. Some had removed their shoes and were dozing. There were several cars from Romania with
SM
on their license plates, which meant Satu Mare, and a few from Slovakia. Music issued from one of the speakers, but under the vast sky of the Hungarian Lowlands it sounded quiet and insignificant. Budapest television had set up its cameras before a Baroque basilica. The crowd was lost in this great, flat, sandy area, absorbed like water.

I had hoped to meet some famous Gypsies from Moldova, Baron Artur Cerari or Robert—it was a Gypsy holiday, after all—but I saw no BMW 700 or X5. On the lot were only pathetic Dacias, tired Ladas, stalwart Trabants, and reeking diesels from the Reich. The one ATM had no forints. So yes, Máriapócs seemed the last town at the edge of the inhabited earth. It was not hard to imagine a sudden gust of wind spraying everything with sand. In the churchyard, the Uniate liturgy was in progress. The Maramureş Gypsies were dressed with elegance and dignity: black hats, belts studded with silver, gold chains, cowboy boots. A few had beautiful faces. An ancient, unsettling beauty not encountered today. The women's heels sank in the sand. I had driven three hundred kilometers to see this, and nothing was happening. God knows what I had expected: a city of tents, horses neighing, sword swallowers? I always play the idiot, because reality wins, as usual. In addition I was broke. I could only go back. Máriapócs that afternoon was dust and waiting for the evening mass to begin. To the Romanian border it was thirty kilometers, the town of Nyírbátor and two small villages. People strolled and magnanimously wasted time. Practically no one rode on the merry-go-round. Everyone passed as in a dreamy carnival, and the knockoff running shoes, motionless in the dust, seemed to mock themselves. I could picture cattle coming from the Lowlands, large black swine rooting for genuine food in the schlock, nudging the piles of clothing with their wet snouts, tasting and spitting out the painted plastic, squealing, shitting on the logos of international companies, turning this whole fake market into a sty, and the stink would rise to heaven and drift over Máriapócs and Szabolcs-Szatmár, mingling with the sound of bells, wood smoke, the lowing of cows, and the dry wind, forever and ever amen.

Two days before, it was All Souls' Day. As every year, I bought a few candles and drove to cemeteries. A strong wind blew from the south, so it was hard to light them. But with tin protectors, the candles wouldn't go out. Occasionally someone preceded me and I'd find lamps burning. I always wondered, Who in this godforsaken place is remembering the Bosnian dead? the Croatian dead? the Hungarian? The Königliche Ungarische Landsturm Huzaren Regiment—in Hungarian, Honwedzi. Or the Tyroleans. The Tiroler Kaiser Jäger Regiment. Nothing there. You must make a special trip, and there isn't always a road. In Radocyna, the country simply comes to an end: the way for a horse-drawn cart or a four-by-four dissolves into meadow, vanishes in russet grass or scummy ponds two kilometers from Slovakia, and yet soldiers came. Four Austrians from the twenty-seventh regiment, infantry, and seventy-nine Ruthenians, also on foot. There were names:
infanteria,
the child's brigade, brats with bayonets, the slaughter of the innocent. Most didn't know where they were or why. The likeness of one emperor or another had to suffice—and did. There was no way out for them. Four Austrians, which means they could have been Slovenians or Slovaks, or Hungarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Poles. A cosmopolitan spot. They lie with a view of Wisłoki valley, Dębi Wierch (Oak Peak), and the border gap. So I light a candle for them and set it beside one already burning. The trees are bare, but the sun shines, and it's so still and empty, as if nothing ever happened here. It's all in the earth: metal buttons, buckles, bones.

At Długi, the same thing, except that they lie in a completely open field. No trees or bushes, so the lamp must be shielded by a flap of your jacket until the flame takes. Again, infantry and Feldjägers. Forty-five subjects of the emperor and 207 Russians. But in Czarny they rest more peacefully: trees were planted over the graves, and now there's shade and quiet. Even in summer the light is dim. The crowns of beeches meet, and in the center is such tranquillity, you could be in a cathedral. That's where they lie. Twenty-seven Austrians and 372 Russians. With the Russians it's the same as with the Austrians: half were Ukrainians, Poles, Kyrgyz, Finns, who knows what else—consult a map. No wind to speak of here, so I have no trouble lighting a candle and setting it on a stone pedestal with an inscription in German. Beneath it, the mortal remains of half of Europe and a piece of Asia. Strange to think of the Adriatic, palm trees, the campanile in Piran, mountaineer huts in Chornohora, the Finnish tundra, the steppes, Zaporoże, Crimean Tatars, the vineyards of Tokaj, Viennese decadence, Asiatic sands, the Prešov secession, Don Cossacks, the Transylvanian Gothic, yurts, camels, and all the rest of it lying here, a meter and a half under, tightly packed, mingled, seeping lower, joining sand, stone, clay, and the roots of the trees that for more than seventy years now have been feeding on the bodies of Estonians and Croats, in a corner of the world no one visits. So I light a candle, stand and watch, and say a prayer for the dead, because the important things take place only in the past. In these regions, the future doesn't exist until it is over.

The cold light of November falls on forest, road, and meadow, making everything too bright and hard, as if it must remain so for ages. They came far from home to die here, five hundred, seven hundred, a thousand kilometers. Manure of Europe. Without names or dates of birth. Complete oblivion, perfect community. I love to come here and walk on them. Beneath my feet I feel it all, the subterranean stream oozing, the rains washing minerals from bones, the water carrying them down into the valleys, to merge with rivulets and tributaries, and farther, finally to where the soldiers came from, because they were innocent at their death and do not need to wander like the damned. They enter their homes, the clocks begin to measure the minutes, and nothing has changed. Time has merely held its breath; it's 1914 again. Because they died once before, there will be no war, no sequence of events; the taut spring of history, rusting through, will snap.