On the Road to Babadag (9 page)

Among these ruins and dumps, cows grazed on patches of maltreated grass. In the shadow of a giant steel chimney trotted a flock of sheep. In Baia Mare, time circled. Animals walked between inert machines. These seemingly frail, soft, and defenseless creatures had endured since the beginning of the world and now were quietly triumphant. It was the same in Oradea: cows sunning themselves at railroad junctions, and the train cars off on the sidings had the reddish brown color of the animals but were cold, dead, spent. It was the same outside Satu Mare, where sheep wandered down the center of Route 19, and in Suceava, where a white horse grazed in the heart of town, and again in Oradea, where horses, in a maze of rails and bypasses, among endless hangars and rolling trucks—bays, piebalds, grays, dapples—cropped on the toxic grass. It looked as if they had fed there forever.

A few days later in the Banat, Valiu told us about the first Romanian locomotive. It was built in the town of ReşiŢa in the year 1872, and the people wanted to show it to the emperor in Vienna, because the Universal Exhibition was fast approaching. Unfortunately there were as yet no train tracks in that region. So they hitched the steam engine to twelve pairs of oxen and pulled it toward the Danube, toward the Iron Gates, the port at Turnu-Severin or Orşova, in any case a good hundred kilometers across the green Banat Mountains. The heated bodies of the animals, gleaming with sweat, must have resembled steam engines themselves. Straps, chains, wooden yokes on necks, mud, squeaking, curses, the valley filled with the stink of golden piss mixed with the odors of people and beasts. Over the harnesses, flies swarmed to feed on cuts and scrapes. The black, oiled machine moved slowly, with dignity, and its red abdomen shone so bright that the Serbian and Romanian villagers it passed stood dazzled, made the sign of the cross, spat on the ground in disgust, fear, awe. They had never seen such a thing before and were convinced that the world was coming to an end. The riveted demon proceeded through the countryside to the crack of whips, and the wheels of the platform that carried the monster sliced the earth so deep, the marks would never heal. Fires were lit at the night bivouacs, soldiers stood guard, and the drivers drank themselves senseless, because their hearts were uneasy. Flames flickered in the dark-blue eyes of the oxen.

How long did this expedition take? Valiu, who knew everything about the Banat, didn't recall. Two weeks? Three? At the riverbank, the drivers unhitched the animals, received their pay, and with relief returned to the deep valley forest.

Yes, my Europe is full of animals. The huge muddy swine on the road between Tiszaörs and Nagyiván, the dogs in the beer gardens of Bucharest, the buffalo in Răinari, the horses set loose in Chornohora. I wake at five in the morning and hear the clank of sheep bells. Rain falls, and the mooing of cows is muffled, flattened, echoless. Once I asked a woman why there were so many cows on her farm if no one bought milk. "What do you mean, why?" she replied, puzzled. "We have to keep something, don't we?" It simply didn't occur to her that one could, you know, cut the ancient bond between beast and human being. "What are we if we don't have animals?" That was more or less the sense of her answer: fear of the loneliness of our species. Animals are our link to the rest of the world. We care for and eat our ancestors.

You can see this clearly here, as clearly as in Baia Mare, in the rubble of the industrial world, which lasted no more than a century, and even if someone rebuilds it, it will carry the seeds of its own destruction. Machines are zombies. They live on our lust after objects, on our greed, on our thirst for immortality. They live only as long as they are needed. We look away, and immediately they begin to fall apart, wither, and shake like vampires deprived of blood. Only a few reach a graceful old age. That ferry in Tiszatardos, for example: the creaking wooden platform, propelled by a small diesel engine, slowly and reluctantly crossing the green Tisa. Willows and poplars on both shores. No superstructure but a tin shack where pear brandy and strong coffee were served. The heat bringing the stink of fish and muck up from the river bottom. At one end of the run, a herd of black-and-white cattle belly-deep in the water. The honey sun slowing all motion and sound. In its light, the old boat like a dried leaf blown in from some remote autumn. The engineer as hoary as the boat. For the thousandth time gazing at the scenery, at the verdant mirror of the river. The diesel whirred, smelled of petroleum, blended into the picture. I could not conceive of its absence here. When the chill of fall came, the old man could warm himself beside it. During longer stops, when no customers waited on either shore, he must have tended to it, inspected it, wiped its dun chassis to make sure there was no fuel or oil leak. I think that both were lonely in that unending journey, which brought them neither close to nor far from anything. They were on a pendulum across the current of time.

The day after, I had to be in Baia Mare, which once was called Nagybánya. I had to sniff out that incessant
once,
which, where I live, is the present, because tomorrow never arrives; it remains in distant countries. Our tomorrow is seduced by their allure, bribed, or possibly just tired. Whatever is to come never gets here; it gets used up en route, flickers out like the light from a lantern too far away. A perpetual decline reigns here, and children are born exhausted. In the slanting light of late autumn, the gestures and bodies of people are more expressive the less meaning they have. Men stand on street corners staring at the emptiness of the day. They spit on the sidewalk and smoke cigarettes. That's the present. That's how it is in the town of Sabinov, in the town of Gorlice, Gönc, Caransebeş, in the whole region between the Black Sea and the Baltic. They stand and count the cigarettes in the packs and the change in their pockets. Time, approaching from afar, is like the air that someone else has already breathed.

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my old map back together with tape. It had torn and cracked from being constantly folded and unfolded in the wind, across my knees, on the hood of the car. I bought it long ago in Miercurea-Ciuc, 150 kilometers to the east. No maps are for sale here, though the land between Sachsenbach, Magyarcserged, and Roşia de Secaş is like an illustration out of the oldest geography book: treeless undulation. The hills collapsing under their own weight, the enormous sky bearing down. In this limitless monotony of ground, the flocks of sheep are nearly invisible. The animals are the color of sunburned grass.

It's an oven every time I come here. I consult my map and notice that on the field path from Cergău two men are pushing bicycles. They mount when they reach asphalt and ride along a desolate hollow. They roll like black pebbles on the edge between sky and bleached grass. Soon I can make out the fluttering of their open jackets. When the road sinks a little, they don't need to pedal. The first passes me and takes a hairpin turn down toward Rothkirch. The second brakes, approaches, stands. He is tattered and dirty. The clothes and old-fashioned bicycle are both coming apart. Of what he says, I understand only
foc
and
fuma,
so I take out my lighter as he digs in his pockets and finds a pack of Carpat
i. I light his cigarette; he inhales, thanks me, and takes off again on his squeaking bicycle, whose rust has eaten the grease in every mechanical part. The cloud of smoke and the body odor he leaves behind dissipate in the air, which in turn fills with ubiquitous sheep dung and trampled herbs. The wind again lifts his black jacket, then the man is gone forever. I consult the map and try to determine if he is headed toward Székásveresegyháza, Tău, or Ohaba, villages that resemble muddy turtle shells lying in a depression. Seen from above: the walls a dusty, dingy bile-yellow, the roofs covered with bronze scales.

It's the same at Şpring, a ground-floor town. The houses run like walls along either side of the road. Squat and heavy houses, whose canopied gateways lead to cramped yards, but that's just my guess, because the gates are all shut and seem permanently locked, in fear of the vastness above the bare hills.

Desertum— that's what this region was called when King Bela III brought settlers from Flanders and from the Rhine and Mosel regions. In those days, a distance of 1,500 kilometers meant for the common man that he would not have the strength to return. Clumsy carts on huge wheels, yoked oxen across the Brabant, up the Rhine. Through Moguntia, the narrow valleys of the Black Forest, with cattle blatting-bellowing all about, in mud, then near Freiburg they had to find the thin thread of the Danube, then endure rain at stops between Augsburg and Ratisbon, campfires made from wet logs, the smoke blackening earthen pots, the continent tilting gently to the east, but what suffices for the flow of a river is small comfort for people who are mired and dread a future that mingles with and is mistaken for open space.

I stopped at şpring, for coffee. But it easily could have been in Gergeschdorf. The pub had iron chairs and tables. A hot and filthy place. Two men sat in a corner, reeking of sheep, looking as if they had emerged from a primeval time: black, thickset, with beard and matted hair tangled into one. Beside them, a dilapidated pinball machine. They had obviously just left their animals: the pants at the knees gleamed with the grease that covers wool. Despite the heat they wore sweaters and cloaks. They drank their Ciuc beer without a word, staring, to each side, at the room, which must have been too small for them, confining, so they drank gulp after gulp, to get back outside as soon as possible.

The bartender had a white, puffy face. I spoke a few words in Romanian, but he only took my money, gave me change, and returned to his dreary kingdom of a couple of bottles of Bihor palinka, Carpati cigarettes, and capped, potbellied flasks of wine cheaper than Coke or Fanta. There was also an enamel pot and a percolator covered with charred brown—a veteran of hundreds of boiled coffees.

I took my coffee and sat by the window to gaze out at the Transylvanian swelter. The two men now had produced, from somewhere, 1.5-liter plastic jugs and were waiting at the counter for them to be filled with beer. Then I saw them walking down the baked street, their silhouettes as dark as their shadows, their movements quick, minimal, efficient, like those of animals.

No one else entered. The guy behind the bar killed time with the help of little activities that invariably slowed and stopped. Pale and massive, he absorbed time like a sponge. Moved something, wiped something, adjusted something, but the future never came. His ancestors arrived here eight hundred years ago on carts drawn by oxen. They built cities, villages, and fortified churches on hilltops. They established hospitals and homes for the elderly. They chose their own priests and judges. They answered to the king alone and were exempt from paying taxes. They only had to provide the Royal Hungarian Army with five hundred mounted soldiers. They brought with them, in their heads, images of their homes and shrines left along the Rhine, to re-create them here in the same shape and proportions. A Gothic of brick and stone thus materialized among the hills of this desert. Clocks on four-sided towers were wound and began marking the hours, which before had passed in an uninterrupted flow.

Nothing happening outside the window. From over the dry hills the heat came, floated in through the open door, filled the interior, all the crap and clutter, dirt, notched glasses, greasy steins, cloudy bottles, cadaverous plastic. The heat settled in stifling waves on the broken furniture, pressed against the walls, against the flyspecked panes, swept this entire dumping ground of remnants pretending to be useful, resolutely playing out a comedy of survival. The Transylvanian desert entered the pub in Gergeschdorf and made itself at home.

I took my cup to the counter. The man didn't even look up. Only when I said, "Danke, auf wiedersehen," did he look, as if seeing me for the first time. He tried to do something with his heavy face, but I was no longer there.

That same day I drove to Roşia, a village forty kilometers southeast. I wanted to see the place where the pastor lived who wrote books and was a prison chaplain. He wasn't at home, had gone to Budapest. Or that's what the man said who opened the church for me. Inside, it was cramped and bare. Cushions on the benches. In that space of stone, all the fittings were random and flimsy, as if somebody had attempted to put furniture in an ancient cave. From the motto on the black pennant, I could recall only “ ... so will ich dir die Krone des Lebens geben." Six-armed candelabras, red tapers. The pews held no more than a dozen people. I had read that the parishioners were mostly Gypsies. The smell of sacred antiquity had permeated the walls, and now the walls exuded it, but as a feeble, reproachful scent, attenuated by many years of damp and cold, as in the house of old people whom no one ever visits. Or in a dollhouse long outgrown by its owner. Afterward, I went to the edge of the village, to look at the Oltu valley. On the northern slopes of the Negoiu and Moldoveanu lay snow. A swarthy family in a small cart rattled down a yellow stone road, and the children yelled at me in greeting: "Buna ziua! Buna ziua!"

On the way back to my car, I noticed the little shop. A few steps up to the entrance; inside, room enough only to stand and turn around. A narrow counter divided the tiny area in two. Over it, a few shelves on the wall. The merchandise was like that in other shops in this Romanian province: a bit of this and that, everything faded and humble. The jars, bags, bottles looked as if they had been there forever and would stay to the end, until a time of some graceful evaporation. But the pity of this insignificance, this reminder of the necessities—sugar, rice, matches, Carpati cigarettes—created in that dark and close interior an aura of the heroic. Everything was in order, tidy without compromise. The shelves were lined with clean paper, the various objects placed at distances from each other measured precisely. A world that was gone, passed on, yet it would take with it to the grave its considered and purposeful style.