On the Road to Babadag (6 page)

His tour guide had said that Ceauşescu united the Romanian people, making everyone equally guilty, and anyone claiming not to have taken part in it was lying. But I gazed at the scorched hills and tried to picture the divisions of light cavalry, dark moving points on the horizon appearing and disappearing with the rhythm of the hills. I tried to imagine this death-dealing procession of beggars. For the first and last time as free people they measured their land. In clothes and weapons taken from their masters, on horses taken from their masters, they marched to Cluj, to Timişoara, to fall at last in defeat under the July sun. Fifty thousand cut down, hanged, left to the birds and thrown to the dogs. Ravens drawn from the Carpathians, the Hungarian Lowlands, from Moldavia and Wallachia. The heat hastens decay, erases the traces. Nothing is left of these rebel poor. Doja was burned on a mock throne with a mock scepter in his hand. So writes Sándor PetŐfi.

On the train I looked out the window and imagined the tattered and ecstatic army of shepherds, swineherds, peasants who attempted, if only for a moment, to grasp for themselves the life of their masters—that is, to be free, to seize the wealth of others, and to rule by force. A few months earlier, I had sought out the grave of Jakub Szela in Bukovina. I asked here and there, my excuse for traveling to the end of the world. Some said he lay in Clit; others, near the Ukrainian border, in Vicşani.

I believed them both. I even began to think that the Austrians dealt with him somewhat as the Hungarian lords had dealt with Doja: dismembering the memory of him, a memory that at any moment might prove dangerous. Finally Szela, according to Ludwik Dębicki, "pretended to be a mystic and sectarian in a peasant's cloak." Of all possible places of concealment I liked Vicşani best, unlikely as it was: lost among fields, far from everything, godforsaken. Beyond it, nothing, nothing in any direction. The great expanse of treeless land, which nevertheless someone tilled here and there, was a breathtaking contradiction of the pathetic little village where the only machine I saw was one bicycle. Our automobile here was a monstrosity, a challenge. In this piece of upland between RădăuŢi and Suceava, small horse-drawn carts moved among endless folded fields. The black earth, newly plowed, joined the sky, and those tiny figures—thin, veined horses—were practically invisible in their insignificance. If they stopped moving, there would no longer be a reason for their existence. A whim: to set little toys in a vast landscape, to enjoy the helplessness of figurines out of a Christmas crèche.

The village smelled of manure and spring. Orchards bloomed behind fences. The cooperative store was located in a brick building. A peasant clad in black told us they had beer there. We found a girl with keys at the farm next door. She opened it for us. We asked about Szela, said to have been buried around there, but she didn't know, didn't even seem to know the name, though she was Polish. A few small tables, and a peculiar jumble, as if someone had been building sets for a film. The interior a gray-green. Wooden boxes on the floor, the sort once used to transport siphons for seltzer, except they were filled with liter-and-a-half bottles of wine. Two kinds of beer, two kinds of cigarettes, ashtrays full of butts as if after a reception. Propaganda posters on the wall, and a window that opened to a yard in which pink piglets wandered. That was it. Yet these few objects, pieces of furniture, and commodities together created an extraordinary chaos, as if things had been tossed here in the middle of their use, dropped, as if in this very spot the energy of the world had run out. We drank a beer each.

The girl was silent but finally said she would take us to the old cemetery outside the village; maybe Szela was there. But only clumps of thorny plants were there—no gravestones, crosses, or markers. A pity, I thought, for him to have to lie here—and someday be resurrected here, of all places. Little imagination was needed to see him enter the cooperative store: it would come as no surprise, because immobility, sorrow, and abandonment do not change in time or space. It must have been the same in the tavern of the Jew Semek in Siedliska on February 20, 1846. Snow lay on the fields; it was cold and dim inside, full of the stink of heated, unwashed bodies. "Get to work, boys, and hurry, for time passes." Szela wore his black cassock, held in his hand the saber taken at Bogusze and tapped the ground with it like a walking stick. In the courtyard, blood seeped into the snow. You could smell the vodka from broken kegs. The Austrians had made him king of the peasants for twenty-four hours, and the day was drawing to a close. "Get to work, boys, and hurry, for time passes." The cursed blood of the lords seeping into the snow, the taken saber, the peasants with ducats clinking in their pockets, but the dimness and the stink were unalleviated. The village elder Breinl told him in Tarnów, "The Archduke Ferdinand is number one, but in Galicia you are second in command." Some say Szela planned to take the ten-year-old Zosia Boguszówna for his wife. Peasant blood would mix with noble blood and give rise to a race that would inherit the reborn land. It's possible that he had no faith in his strength, that the blueprint for a new world would repeat the gestures of the lords in an empty, abstract reality that puts up no resistance.

So he could rise from the grave and enter the cooperative store in Vicşani, and it would be as if he had never died, since no doubt there was little difference between that store and the tavern of the Jew Semek. He could simply start again after a hundred and fifty years, though without the Austrian blessing. So I reflected, standing in the noon sun. Having traveled several hundred kilometers, I had the right to these thoughts. In addition, I came from his native region. I looked in the direction of Moldova and wondered whose blood he would want to shed today, and with whose blood he would want to mix his own. The flies flew heavy and slow in the cooperative store. On the shelf were two kinds of cigarettes, the cheapest. No aristocracy nearby, yet the air inside had the same stuffy, impoverished taste. I thought: You sit here, Szela, drinking Ursus or Silva, and there's no one for you to go after. If you try, the world will part before you like a phantom, and your hands will clutch emptiness. You'll accomplish shit here. The most you could do is go to Suceava and like a postindustrial Luddite smash a sky-blue ATM. Nowadays you can't become another person through the simple transfer of goods or objects. Killing won't let you enter your victim's body and life. Wealth has become an elusive thing; it floats in the air, materializing now and then—here, there. Whereas poverty, abandonment, and ruin are concrete, tangible, and thus it will always be. All the treasures of the world are now the property of no one in particular, and no plunder will exalt you, no violence ennoble you. Left to you is only the ATM in Suceava as a physical emanation of the remote, all-powerful evil that will never permit the last to be first.

In this way I spoke to the spirit of Jakub Szela on the edge of Europe among the lanes of Vicşani. I was filled with left-wing sentiments but had no regard whatever for revolutionary fire. A kilometer on, in an open field by the road, sat a man reading a newspaper. Nothing as far as the eye could see, yet he hardly looked up at our car. We drove south, to the village of Clit, to check another possible resting place. Which made sense, because Clit lay a few kilometers from Solca. The Austrians sent Szela to Solca when it was all over. At an intersection after RădăuŢi stood a Romanian cop. He stood smack in the middle of the intersection. At the sight of our car, he turned his back pointedly and looked off into the distance. A friendly gesture, probably, pretending not to notice us, because we were a provocation.

In Clit, people spoke an odd tongue. Like Ukrainian, but I understood only every fifth word. I asked a woman in a kerchief if this was a Ukrainian village.
My Ruskie,
she replied: We are Russians. We asked about Szela, if she had heard such a name here or in the area. She shook her head, then said she would take us to the oldest man in the village. The road was dry and dusty. The wooden houses had white-and-green walls and shutters. On the ground lay pink and white petals from flowering apple trees. In the distance, the gleam of a pond. Geese walked in that direction, unattended. A man in faded jeans emerged from the shadows and dust. He didn't look so very old. He pondered awhile, asked that the name be repeated, then asked us himself, directly, if this Szela person ... was that one of our "father leaders"? "Perhaps, in a way," we answered evasively. He finally gave up and said there was someone here, not old but worldly, just got back from Germany, who might be able to help. The old man called him out of a roadside bar. This person was about forty and dressed in overalls with a sewn-on Esso patch. P. remarked that Esso was practically Shell, so we might be close. We spoke in Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Polish, but it turned out that all they could do for us was show us where the cemetery was. They took us there, wished us luck, a pleasant trip, good health, and left us in the cool of the trees. The old man went down the hill slowly and carefully. Occasionally the younger man took his arm. They didn't have to accompany us; they could have pointed to the hill from a distance; but in that part of the world, looking for someone's grave is far more important than the usual tourism, and people treat it with respect. By entering their cemetery, apparently we became their guests.

Yes. Szela could have been lying in Clit. From the hill we had a view of a white, cupolaed Orthodox church and a neo-Gothic Catholic church. His native Smarzowa was also in the Pogórze range, though the valleys there were narrower and the peaks covered with forest. Here everything was naked, whether tilled or grassy. On the horizon, a ribbon of blue heat. There was no trace of our "father leader."

Nor could there be a trace, because as you travel, history constantly turns into legend. Too much is happening and in too big a space. No one can remember it all, let alone write it down. You can't devote attention to events that come out of nowhere and whose purpose and sense remain unclear to the end. No one will wrap things into a whole, cobble a finished tale. Neglect is the essence of this region. History, deeds, consequences, ideas, and plans dissolve into the landscape, into something considerably older and vaster than all the striving. Time gets the better of memory. Nothing can be remembered with certainty, because actions do not line up according to the principle of cause and effect. A long narrative about the spirit of the times in this place seems a project as pathetic as it is pretentious, like a novel written from the point of view of God. Paroxysm and tedium rule here in turn, and that is why this region is so human. "One of your father leaders?" Why not? I thought. In a sense, both ours and yours. Ultimately, in Szela was embodied the desire for violent change, a rejection of one's fate that at the same time suddenly turns into acceptance of what that fate brings.

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the sky when at dusk we left Nagykálló for Mátészalka. The entire train a single car. In addition, it was an express, and we had to make seat reservations. The heavy woman at the ticket window smiled and did a few broad sitting motions in her chair to show us what a seat reservation was.

Hungarian train tickets are pretty, resembling small banknotes. The young Gypsies going to Szerencs made accordions out of them, decks of cards, fans. In the Gypsies' ears were gold rings. But that happened two days earlier.

Now, a crest of crimson feathers unfurled in the west. A hand of fire poised above the plain, and below, in the cornfields and orchards, a blue dark had begun to float. We drank aszú from the bottle and sat with our backs to the front of the train, so the west, in a flood of blazing blood, was before us, and we could see the night slowly lifting from the earth, climbing, turning colder, until finally all was extinguished and the lights went on in the little red car of our train.

Less than half an hour had passed, and already we were reminiscing about Nagykálló: the bright warmth of the afternoon as we walked downtown between yellow houses. How we found an enormous church. How musicians sat on the bench by the entrance. One of them raised a gleaming trombone in greeting. I ventured into the vestibule, wanting to see what a Hungarian church looked like, but there was a crowd, a young couple standing up front, and at the altar a pastor. No organ, no chasubles, only the Word at its plainest, as it was in the beginning and shall be at the end, instead of all these wonders made by human hand for human consolation. Then the procession exited, slow, stately, and the three musicians waiting in their white shirts—the trombonist, the accordionist, the guitarist—who seemed so trifling, almost frivolous, practically Catholic, played a subdued piece, and the crowd moved in a cortege toward the marketplace.

We had gone to Nagykálló because, according to our guidebook, "at the end of a long and creepily empty square" stood a psychiatric hospital. Which might be, I thought, some kind of physically manifested metaphor, a metaphor for Eastern Europe. My imagination evoked a large dusty space surrounded by crumbling buildings. Divisions in various uniforms file through the square from time to time, but they stay no longer than needed for the ravage and rapine. They ride off, and the hot dust of the plain immediately hides the horsemen. From the windows of the hospital, the insane follow them with their eyes and pine, because in these eastern regions power, violence, and madness have forever lived in concubinage and sometimes in a completely legal union.

But no, nothing of the sort: this square was not a waste. It was shaded, cool. Before the hospital door, several madmen in dressing gowns smoked cigarettes. The atmosphere was, more than anything, that of a sanatorium, so the heated imagination of the tourist could take a breather.