On the Road to Babadag (8 page)

But it was a train, not the capital, that appeared. Ella Fitzgerald sat in the middle with three children. Evidently she had been unable to persuade her husband. We moved slowly. There is no better kind of rail travel in a foreign land than the local, second-class kind. People get on, get off, and perform their life in so unhurried a manner that it begins to resemble our own. Everything becomes familiar. Guys returning from work smell exactly like those who get on at the Żerań station in Warsaw and are bound for Nasielsk. A mother accompanying her sixteen-year-old daughter to the train hands her a plastic bag of candy. The girl gives her mother a perfunctory kiss, is a little sullen, gets on, and when the train moves, the mother waves with a helpless smile, but her child is already elsewhere in her thoughts and doesn't notice. That might have been in BoldogkŐváralja ... No, it definitely was, because there was a medieval castle on a hill to the left. The girl wore faded jeans and black boots with silver buckles. The conductor came and asked the Gypsy woman for something but got a flood of words, so he threw up a hand and passed. One could open a window, one could smoke and in lazy anticipation think of what would happen in an hour, in half an hour, and wonder, for example, if that dressed-up blonde with the red fingernails was going to Szerencs or would get off at some more backwater spot. Forty kilometers an hour at a steady clip lets you come to an understanding with space, lets you control it without causing it any injury.

The station at Szerencs smelled of chocolate, because right next door was the biggest chocolate factory in Hungary. Drinking beer, palinka, and coffee, we considered our next move. The timetable simply held too many possibilities, and for the moment intuition was dumb. To be able to go everywhere means not going anywhere. We decided to do nothing and let the world do. And we were right: after an hour, an empty bus pulled up, practically to our outdoor table at the summer pub, with the sign
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I woke up early in the morning and stepped out on the balcony. The red roofs had darkened from the night rain. The street pavement shone, steamed. The town was still. You could hear drops falling from leaf to leaf in the garden below. Only the storks made a racket. One by one they flew up from the Tisza and settled on their chimneys. I must have counted five nests. The birds clattered, raising echoes, then smoothed their feathers and returned to the river somewhere among ancient poplars. Tokaj lay motionless, glittering like fish scales. I stood in that preternatural silence, smoked a cigarette, and thought that all mornings of the world should be like this: we wake in absolute peace, in a foreign city that has no people in it, and everything around us is a continuation of sleep. Before the pastel gates of the houses, wrought-iron signs swayed in the breeze:
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S
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Ó ...
Z
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In the east, a violet lid of cloud hung heavily, let through a few rays, sank. It was all so beautiful, I wondered if I had died. To check, I returned to my room. M. was still asleep, so everything was okay, because we had never figured that we would go together, arguing instead who would outlive whom.

Don't assume there will be something to eat at eight in the morning in Tokaj. At the glassed-in pub on Kossuth Street, you can drink coffee after coffee and watch the rain fall in the empty square. Curious thoughts enter your head. For instance, should you follow the lead of that couple at the next table, who ordered two 300 ml glasses of aszú, or ask yourself quietly a question in the vein of "What am I doing here anyway?”—the fundamental mantra if not prayer of every traveler? For it is precisely on a trip, in the morning, in a strange city, before the second cup of coffee has begun to work, that you experience most palpably the oddness of your banal existence. Travel is no more than a relatively healthy form of narcotic, after all. Have another cup, wait for the rain to let up a bit, and walk to the river, the green and twisting Tisza, and your imagination will speak to you as unmistakably as a growling stomach. Because the water that poured at your feet here was on Montenegro a few days ago and will join the Danube near Novi Sad a few days from now. That's the way of it: geography orders space but muddles the head, and a man would rather be a fish than mentally straddle north and south, east and west.

Persistently, if indirectly, we tended east. Somewhat in the style of š vejk's peregrination to České Budejovice. From Tokaj we ran to escape the rain, only to have the sky open on us in Budapest. From Budapest we ran to escape the crowds, chaos, and homelessness, only to find ourselves, at four in the morning, escorted off the train by an over-six-foot conductor, in the unknown yet sizable city of Nyíregyháza. Four in the morning is an hour when you either sit and weep or keep going. At the platform just then, an antique narrow-gauge pulled in, so we didn't hesitate. In the car was a genuine coal stove, its pipe going right through the ceiling. We rocked the whole way to SóstófürdŐ, because our pretty green choo-choo ended there. SóstófürdŐ still slept. A health resort at five
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is an uncommon sight. Between the trees gleamed the saucer of a salt lake. An old-fashioned water tower; huge umbrellas with the inscription
John Bull Pub;
an exquisite hotel, in the Swiss style yet standing here on the eastern border of the Great Hungarian Plain. Limos agleam in the morning sun; villas reminiscent of Chinese socialist realism; blocked signs that said no longer
Z
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W
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"rooms available" in Polish; and no movement or sound other than the chirp of birds at dawn. Except a dog out of nowhere sniffed at us and continued on its way. A spa without people always seems like a stage set. We found a pension on a sandy lane. A woman in an apron swept the steps. We said we wanted to sleep, nothing more. She told us, in an English German, that we could sleep until five in the afternoon, because a disco started then.

We woke to the sound of our native tongue. Before the pension, three guys in baggy shorts urged their girlfriend, "Andżelika, fucking take it!" "You have to pose," replied Andżelika, trying to get the swaying group in her lens. "We're all standing here, take it!" the guys pleaded, steadying one another. Our trip had become a little too Polish.

We took our leave of SóstófürdŐ with a modest lunch. In the square where the pub was, a wild show advertising Sprite. Gangsta rap over loudspeakers while Hungarian kids on skateboards slalomed in and out of giant green bottles, imagining themselves black brothers. At a table nearby, the father of a family called to the waiter in Polish, "
Kotlet schabowy z frytkami!
Veal cutlet with fries! Veal cutlet, dummy!" No matter how much the man raised his voice, however, the Hungarian dummy didn't understand a word. It was time to go. I couldn't find Kossuths in any kiosk or shop. I had become dependent on them, flattened and twenty-five to a pack. Those orange packs mark the divide between provincial and urban: they are a provincial attempt at urban. You can get them in any village or Zemplén town cut to the human scale, but not in Tokaj, and no way in Budapest.

And that, more or less, was our trip. Instead of following the path of Lajos Kossuth, we took the route of cheapest possible tobacco. Lajos Kossuth endures in the names of streets, squares, and boulevards, but those cigarettes in orange packs vanish along with the world that smokes them, just as the obscure country inns in which I felt so much at home vanish. I thought of my Europe as a place where, no matter what the distance covered and despite the borders and changing languages, a person feels he is merely going, say, from Gorlice to Sanok. Thus I reflected on the last decent myth or illusion to be applied like a bandage to the wounds and abrasions of homelessness in this ever more orphaned world. My thoughts were sentimental, yet I indulged in them on the road between Nagykálló and Mátészalka under the purple western sky. The purple I imagined as the glow from burning Vienna, which was treating its provinces and peripheries to one last spectacle, sacrificing in a gigantic auto-da-fé its spit-and-polish shops, Graben display windows, archetypal burghers walking their dogs in the morning, memories and deep sadness blowing like the wind between the Hofburg Palace and Maria Theresa Square. At most only the Café Havelka would be spared, and a night sausage stand on St. Stephen's Square. Thus I reflected between Nagykálló and Mátészalka, trying to stage a heroic, impressive end for a world dying naturally, of simple old age.

***

"This route is known for robbery. Even the customs officers on the Ukrainian side will extort money from travelers or confiscate possessions that they want." So says the guidebook. Obviously that's the route we immediately chose. Not that there was another way to get from Hungary to Ukraine.

Waiting for the border train at the station in Záhony, we took all the necessary precautions. First we hid, at the bottom of the backpack, the possession that they would want: a fifteen-year-old Praktica camera. Then we prepared ourselves for extortion, stuffing in various pockets bills of all the currencies we carried. A dollar here, two there, ten in another place in case a higher bribe was needed. Also Slovak crowns, forints, even Romanian lei, because who knew what those guys would want? For courage, we drank the last of our pear brandy, brushing aside the unpleasant thought that it might be our last in this life.

The train pulled in: all of two cars, plus the locomotive. In the first car, young men and women loaded merchandise—washers, refrigerators, stoves, tires, halves and quarters of automobiles, and miscellaneous items of daily use. The second car was for us and a hundred other travelers. Besides our Polish, people spoke Hungarian, Ukrainian, Russian, Romany, and Romanian. A woman sitting opposite us had only her passport and a five-liter bottle of oil. The Hungarians checked our papers as the train crossed the border bridge over the Tisza. Then something happened in the passageway between the two cars. One skinhead kid hit another skinhead kid. The girls got into it, and so much was going on, you couldn't see a thing. Someone must have lost the fight, because one of the girls came to our compartment and asked for a bottle of water, for reviving the injured party. It seemed a completely internal disagreement, so we were calm and admired the scenery. A Ukrainian guard appeared with a customs officer. He nonchalantly looked at the passports and stamped them with no interest. Feverishly I tried to remember which pockets held which bills. Fear had driven it all out of my head, so there was a chance I might pull out, like an utter fool, a fifty. The border folk were approaching; in a panic I clutched five hundred Romanian lei in my hand—that is, enough to buy a box of matches in Bucharest. The guard finally came to us, and I handed him our passports. He barely looked at them, slipped them in his pocket, and said in Ukrainian, "See me at the station in Chop."

At the station in Chop, the unloading took time. Washers, refrigerators, halves and quarters of cars were lifted and passed over people's heads. The two skinheads, in perfect amity, carried a television set together. We saw our guard in the crowd. He gestured for us with a tired look. We followed him, and now I remembered where I had hidden the hundred dollars. He led us, like convicts, through the hall for arrivals. Now and then he nodded at someone. We passed the customs table, the passport window, pushed through the crowd, and were suddenly on the other side. Then our cicerone gave us our stamped passports and said, "I didn't want you to have to stand in those lines. You have hryvnias?" "Only dollars," I blurted, idiot that I was. He looked around the hall and waved over a short guy who held a plastic bag. The guy approached. The guard said, "Exchange money for them, but at a decent rate." The bag was full of hryvnias in bundles tied with rubber bands. The guard asked us if we needed anything else, wished us a pleasant trip, and we were again alone.

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Baia Mare in the rays of the sun sinking westward on the Great Hungarian Plain. Remnants of rain still hung in the air, and a rainbow rose over the valley of the Lăpuş River. Damp golden dust billowed up from the plain, the road, the bridge, pastures, from the white clouds of trees in bloom, from the world: the whole province of Maramureş. Light like that occurs only after a storm, when space fills with electricity. It's possible, however, that this light emanated from deep within the earth, from hidden veins of mountain ore. Baia Mare, Nagybánya, the Great Mine, lodes of gold, a Transylvanian El Dorado 250 kilometers from my home—these were my thoughts as I crossed the Lăpuş. To the north, Ignis Mountain, still in shade, its peaks a wet dark blue. The storm preceded us and now was moving along the Black Tisa above Chornohora and Świdowiec.

I saw Baia Mare from a distance, not wanting to drive into the town. Ahead, a bypass to Sighetu and Cluj wove through industrial suburbs. There was not one car or person in sight. The flat field was choked with rusting metal, pieces of concrete, abandoned plastic. Landfill smoldered sleepily, reeking. The sun shone on red-brown construction beams, on the broken windows of factories, on gutted warehouses, on lifeless cranes, on corroded steel, and on eroded brick. Pylons, silos, cranes, and chimneys cast long black shadows. As far as the eye could see, a tangle of wires in the sky, a web of rails on the ground. Mounds of black sludge—some kind of chemical waste—gave way to mounds of containers: polymer, cardboard, glass. Tin cans, rubber hoses, radioactive mud, cyanides from gold mines, lead and zinc, rags and nylon, acids and bases, asphalt, ponds of oil, soot, smoke, the final decadence of industry, all under a bright sky.