On the Road to Babadag (30 page)

Luckily the highway ended there, the road became crowded, and there was an end to philosophizing. A Hungarian maniac on the outskirts of Miskolc passed three cars at once with his Zafir. With the air a little warmer, ice fell from trees. On the other side of the city, by an exit, I saw a herd of cars gathered around a supermarket, their roofs the cold backs of cattle grazing on concrete pasture. After Encs the road emptied again: no one was driving out of the country. I was in a bit of a hurry, but as usual Gönc tempted, and I detoured a few kilometers. In a candy shop, an elderly man served at the counter. A woman with a small boy ordered a cappuccino to go in a Styrofoam cup. The two crossed Kossuth Street, to a bus stop, where a man waited with a silver tape recorder and two plastic shopping bags stuffed. He was short and smoked a cigarette, protecting it with his hand from large flakes of wet snow. Where were they going with the tape recorder and child, with the worn, much-used bags? They seemed poor, pitiful. A little family on the road two weeks before Christmas. Mother and son drank in silence, taking quick sips, as if they had no time, though the bus wasn't coming. The bus to Telkibánya, Pálháza, Sátoraljaújhely, across the Zemplén Mountains. The snow fell more heavily. Like people out of work, they didn't converse. Being out of work showed in their faces, in their gestures—I knew the signs, from home. Out of the main current of time, cast ashore, aside, left to their fate, a fate that no longer involved others. You wake one morning and the world is different, though nothing has changed. These were my thoughts in Gönc. But maybe they weren't out of work, maybe I invented that as a way not to leave with empty hands. The unemployed, like carters and transporters, are needed: a reason to go home.

This time I returned from Cres Island, sixty-eight kilometers long and with three thousand inhabitants. It takes twenty minutes by ferry from Brestova. Besides us there were only two trucks and an old Mercedes. Before we landed at Porozina, the driver of the Mercedes managed to down two brandies. From the deck, the island looked deserted. The ferry rumbled and stank of diesel. The bartender also appeared to have had one too many. Fifteen crossings a day, after all. The sky was overcast; the landscape took on weight. It all went together: the diesel ferry, the bartender, the inebriated driver, the dark, distinct water of the bay, the empty dock, the low sky, the sleepy movements of the crew, and the December light. A separate life. Cres, inland, was deserted indeed. The road went its length like a spine. White, treeless tract, stunted vegetation, wind. In one spot I saw a flock of sheep. They stood so still, it was hard to tell them from the rocks. They were the same color as the rocks. No one tended them. On the map, Cres looks like an old bone. The winter strips it of everything, and gusts from the sea fill the tiniest cracks. It was that way in the village of Lubenice at the top of a three-hundred-meter cliff. I never saw a human dwelling more exposed. A few dozen houses of old stone and a few scrawny, unprotected fig trees. The wind had access from every direction: endless air in every direction. In some places you feel you cannot go on, only go back, because reality has said the final word there. These houses were gray, I thought, because of the wind; the wind had wiped the color from the walls, color could persist only within. If Cres was an island, Lubenice was twice one, separated from land by water and air both. A gulf yawned behind this bedroom wall. Outside this kitchen window, seabirds rode air currents. Such was life here. At the cemetery, half the dead were named Muskardin. The cemetery lay at the edge of a rocky shelf. Death must have been a curse for the gravediggers. A grave wasn't dug but chiseled out. Everything said purgatory. No one would come here without a compelling reason. People driven by a sentence or by a fear, and once here, they hadn't the strength to leave.

I drove off the asphalt and down a field. A road was marked on the map, but in reality it was more a dry riverbed or broken steps leading to infinity. I covered a few dozen kilometers in first gear. All around, white rubble, rubble stretching to the sky, breaking off, falling off on the other side. Great birds soared above, seeking a living thing. But for us, people, everything was dead, cold, swept clean by the wind. Someone had divided this open area with stone walls. The walls went to the horizon, cutting rectangles out of the emptiness. A paranoid-meticulous marking off of property, I thought, but later people told me that this labyrinth of barriers was designed to prevent erosion of soil from the rain. The way was so narrow sometimes that I had to fold my side mirrors. In the carefully walled-off square patches of space there were only stones, no earth. An occasional twig grew between boulders. I passed a house with a collapsed roof, then another in equal disrepair, then there were no houses. I imagined summer in this place: blazing white, the lizards baking. As far as the eye could see, nothing that might throw a shadow. Then, high among the rocks, Lubenice. I could have reached it by the narrow asphalt ribbon from the other direction, from the sea, from Valun, but that would have been too simple, telling little of the truth about Cres Island, its hollow interior, where birds circled in search of prey.

Sometimes I imagine a map composed only of the places I'd like to see once more. A not so serious map, having nothing important on it: wet snow in Gönc, Zborov and its ruined church, Caraorman with its desert sand and rusted machines that were supposed to uncover gold in the waters of the Danube, the heat in Erind, Spišská Belá and a grocery store barely visible at dusk, dawn and the smell of cat piss in Piran, Răinari at evening and the aroma from a gingerbread factory, pigs not far from Oradea, hogs in Mátészalka, Delatyn and its train station on a dreary morning, Duląbka, Rozpucie and Jabłonna Lacka, Huşi and Sokołów, and back again to Lubenice. I close my eyes and draw the roads, rails, distances, and scenes between the wastes, between one insignificance and the next, and I try putting together an atlas that will carry all this on its flat back, to make it a little more permanent, a little more immortal.

A few days ago I rode to Kraków on the Košice express, taking the 10:11 from Stróże. Snow still lay on the fields. Grays and blacks emerging from beneath. And, God, the pathetic rubbish along the tracks, the wire fences, the strings of forgotten holiday lights burning in the dark blue of January, the naked trees in yards, piles of old lumber, scrap metal, broken bricks, all of it framed by linear geometry, a supernatural precision that suddenly bares the skeleton of the world. Bobowa, Ciężkowice, Tuchów, Pleśna—as if the tongue of frost has licked the human landscape to the bone, leaving only what is most important, what you can't do without, else nothingness takes over. Noon finally, but in some windows of homes near the track I saw the yellow glow of lightbulbs. The yards were obsessively neat. All cleaned and made pretty, like a body at a funeral. It was the snow, its thin layer outlining every object, that gave the form of the ideal to the poverty of the everyday. Noon finally, yet there was no one about. No reason for people to be about. The land was turning toward the abstract, so they preferred to stay indoors. I opened my window to smell the burning coal, thought of pans on hot stoves, skillful pokers stoking, moments when the fire escapes the iron grate, black smoke rises, and a red glow fills the kitchen. How many such homes on the way? Hundreds, thousands, and the same details in gray, the same sad order set against the chaos of the world.

The train car was Slovak. Its seats were upholstered in red fake leather. Before I got on, it had passed Prešov, Sabinov, Lipany. Things were the same there. The houses stood a little closer together and were more alike, but everything else was similar: the crouching provisionality, the uncertain fate, life as improvisation. What had there been in Sabinov two or three years back, in early spring? A hip roof, Gothic dome, church spire, tower clock; beside the church, a yellow building in the Renaissance style, its facade covered with soot, grillwork in the windows, then the remnants of defending walls, puddles reflecting the smoky sky, and a few chickens looking for dry ground to scratch. I'm sure I landed there by accident. I was probably investigating new roads on the Spiš and šariša border. Possibly I took a shortcut off Road 18 with the old idea that someday I'd get to the other side of the landscape and see everything I saw now but greatly magnified, a kind of ultra landscape that in some miraculous way would unite all scraps and fragments, every Lipany and Sabinov, which would all find their places, they and their chickens, mud, coal-fired kitchens, smoke, tidy desperation of yards, expectation, and become twice, no, a thousand times as large and never, ever again fret over their random, stopgap existence.

In Piotrków, equidistant between the junction to Kielce and the junction to Radom, is a narrow-gauge railway. Unused for many years. Two reddish threads here and there covered by the sandy earth, then reappearing on the right side of the pavement. My
People's Atlas of Poland
says that this line was built in 1904 and still operating in 1971. It was Saturday, February, the sun was shining, and I couldn't tear my eyes from what was left of those Lilliputian train tracks. In Uszczyn there was even a little station still standing. The red-brick structure tried to suggest the Gothic but instead looked like a building-block house. Its naive ornamentation had a puppet quality. The whole area seemed childishly miniaturized. The houses on either side of the road were almost all facade. Especially in Uszczyn, Przygłów, and the area around Sulejów. On these facades with neither age nor style would be a cornice sometimes, a circular window, a pilaster, something put there not for function but simply out of the longing to be a little more, a little better than average. Behind these walls was nothing but the wind. The poultry had their coops, the dogs their doghouses, but every effort had gone into the awful facades, this last defense against the form, so like formlessness, of the world. So instead of going to see a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey, I was drawn to Sulejów garden plots full of blue puddles, to atrophied little squares, yards, and balconies where old furniture accumulated, credenzas eaten by the weather, the mortal remains of human employment. On a thin column, like Simon Stylites, sat a local angel. He looked like the homes he protected. Cut from the same cloth, he would stay with them until the end. The Mother of God by the church on the hill had at least a shelter over her, made of L-square rulers and Plexiglas. The angel had nothing, just heaven. A little farther on stood a trash receptacle. Thirty kilometers due south lay the village of Wygwizdów. I was supposed to go and stay there. The sky over the plain that day was cold and bright. On the way I was likely to encounter three or four broken-down cars.

Only one Wygwizdów in the nation, but I had to go on, to reach Solec before nightfall. That was the plan. I had never been in Solec. I had only seen a photograph once; it was of a movie theater. The entrance overgrown with grass; in the poster marquee, tatters; a cloudy sky. In the background, an old wooden cottage. The theater was called simply Cinema; that was the word over the entrance. A willow grew nearby. They had shown nothing for years. Inside, in the dark, chairs rotted. I tried to imagine the surroundings. There are photographs and places that give you no peace, though nothing much is there. The movie theater in the photograph was from a time when direct names sufficed for things. The facade rose in a gentle arc to accommodate the simple letters. Solitude and desertion moved through the frame like a cold wind. That's why I drove there in the middle of February, patches of snow still on the fields. I had the strong feeling that somewhere between Sulejów, Wygwizdów, and Solec time had ground to a halt or simply evaporated or melted like a dream and no longer separated us from our childhood. Perhaps even no longer from the entire past. I left Road 777, turned right, and empty space began. The land lifted, like a plain gradually approaching the sky or like an oppressive dream in which you can neither reach your destination nor escape. I drove to Solec, through country that laughs at you, for one black-and-white photograph.

Solec was like Sokołów Podlaski thirty years ago, like Huşi eight months ago. It was yet another candidate for the capital of my part of the continent. I didn't want to stop, didn't want to get out, afraid that all this would disappear, so impermanent was it, so fragile and fundamentally fake. At the church on the hill everything ended, and I too turned back. Horses wandered free in this parish, their long manes matted by winter. I'll come here before I die, I thought, come here when I no longer want to live. No one here will notice that all my strength has left me. At night I'll sit in the movie theater and watch the ghosts of films of former years. Death should bear some resemblance to life. It should be like a dream or movie. Reality in this part of the continent has assumed the aspect of the afterlife—no doubt so that people will fear death less and die with less regret.

I stood before the movie theater. It was like the photograph: existing and not existing, neither dead nor alive. Matter in imitation of the beyond. Possibly the photograph had more life in it than this. Evening gathered, and I felt a chill in the air. In the theater's dark interior, frost would cut the transparent images on old reels. Yes, there are places in which we are certain that something lies behind, something is concealed, but we are helpless, too stupid or too timid or perhaps not old enough to know how to cross to the other side. I stood like a post, freezing, and imagined the crooked doors opening and me entering, and beheld the narrow passage we all have been seeking, where Solec begins, Wygwizdów, Sulejów, Huşi, Lubenice, and the rails running from Stróże to Tarnov, the red train cars from Košice, everything that is no more yet endures, indestructible and without end, even that Saturday a few years ago when we drove through Hornád valley, once more at the foot of the airborne Gypsy village, but this time the miracles take place on the ground, on the flat pasture between the ascending road and the river. There was a thaw, and all the kids had come out from the settlement. A great snow fort was falling under the merciless attack of its besiegers. Towers knocked over, walls breached, the defenders with nowhere to hide. But the scene held more than this concluding battle. On a meadow as large as a couple of soccer fields were enormous spheres of snow. The children rolled each ball till they could roll no longer, then began a new one. Some were a meter in diameter. Several dozen such balls, looking as if they had fallen from heaven. Beautiful and unreal. Among them, colorfully dressed children rolled tirelessly. There was nothing more animated in the neighborhood, which lay in the shadow of a steel mill. I drove to the mill. Several dozen men were leaving just then. They walked with a heavy, numb step, as gray as smoke, as sad as all Krompachy and the twilight of the proletariat. Meanwhile the Gypsy children converted their energy into spheres of snow that in a day or two the sun would dwindle and turn to water to feed the Hornád River, which flowed in a complex maze of tributaries and catchments to the Black Sea, to which the government of Slovakia had no access.