On the Road to Babadag Read online

  Maramureşwas behind us. So was the mountain gap covered with a hard crust of snow, and that swarthy man in the old Audi with German plates. He opened the trunk and took out a child's motorcycle, a miniature Suzuki or Kawasaki, sat a two-year-old kid on it, and took picture after picture. An icy wind blew through the gap, and there was no one there but us. Nothing but a cold, beautiful waste, the sun rolling over the marsh between Carei and Satu Mare, and I heard the click of the camera, saw the boy's grave face, red cheeks, then the father put the toy away, and they continued down, west, no doubt to their home. We left also, because on that wind-whistling height, hands turned numb and cheeks hurt. We descended by switchbacks to the BistriŢa valley, into darkening air.

  I see now how little I remember, how everything that happened could have happened elsewhere. No trip from the land of King Ubu to the land of Count Dracula will hold memories you can rely on later, as for example you can rely on Paris, Stonehenge, or Saint Mark's Square. Sighetu Marmaţiei, more than anything, ended up unreal. We drove through it quickly, without stopping, and I can say nothing about its shape, except that it looked like a sophisticated fiction. In any case we passed it in no time, and once again green mountains rose on the horizon, and I immediately felt regret and longing. Exactly as on awakening, when we are spurred by the desire to return to the world of dreams, which relieves us of our freedom of will and gives in its place the freedom, absolute, of the unexpected. This happens in places rarely touched by the traveler's eye. Observation irons out objects and landscapes. Destruction and decline follow. The world gets used up, like an old abraded map, from being seen too much.

  We drove to the Sinistra district. Everything here belonged to the mountain riflemen, to Colonel Puiu Borcan, and, when he died, to Izolda Mavrodin-Mahmudia, also holding the rank of colonel and called Coca for short. From the Baba Rotunda Pass we had a view of Pop Ivan; in the valley crawled narrow-gauge, wood-burning locomotives. The inhabitants of Sinistra wore military dog tags on their chests. Everyone who came here and stayed was given a new name. From time to time, Coca would organize an ambush atop Pop Ivan against Mustafa Mukkerman, who carried mutton by truck from somewhere in Ukraine to Thessaloniki or even Rhodos, but besides mutton in the refrigerator he sometimes carried people in heavy coats. Comrades from Poland kept Coca informed about Mukkerman's movements. He was half Turk, half German, and weighed three hundred kilograms.

  Diluted denatured alcohol was used here to dry mushrooms, and it was drunk with the fermented juice of forest fruits. The frosted glass for the Sinistra prison was made by Gabriel Dunka in his workshop: he frosted a pane by putting it in a sandbox and walking on it with his bare feet for hours. He was thirty-seven and a dwarf. One rainy day he picked up a naked Elvira Spiridon in his delivery van and for the first time in his life smelled a woman's body, but loyalty triumphed over desire and he turned her in, because it was only by accident that she hadn't climbed into Mukkerman's truck.

  All this supposedly took place near Sighetu MarmaŢei, but I learned about it only two years later, in Ádám Bodor's Sinistra District, and the story has pursued me since. Pursued me and replaced the flat space on the map. Once again, the visible pales before the narrated. Pales but does not disappear. It only loses its force, its intolerable obviousness. This is a special quality of auxiliary countries, of second-order, second-tier peoples: the ephemeral tale in different versions, the distorted mirror, magic lantern, mirage, phantom that mercifully sneaks in between what is and what ought to be. The self-irony that allows you to play with your personal fate, to mock it, parrot it, turning a defeat into heroic-comic legend and a lie into something that has the shape of salvation.

  There was no water where we finally turned in for the night. The manager took a flashlight and led us down cold corridors. He explained that the pump was broken and the mechanic was three weeks now en route from Suceava or Iaşi. He explained that the man who lived in this house was a foreigner, had come from far away, and drank the local cheap vodka to cope with his loneliness, so he didn't maintain the place, but the mechanic was certain to arrive soon.

  It was cold. We lay down in our clothes and turned out the light. The Romanian night entered through the window. I tried to sleep but, instead of going with the flow of time and sleep, swam upstream in my thoughts, back through that long day after we crossed the border at Petea. Black watchtowers stood on the baking plain. Soon Satu Mare began, walls peeling from age and heat, the shade of huge trees along the streets, and church cupolas in extended green vistas. Hungary was behind us, the lowland sadness of ErdŐhát was behind us, and although it was equally flat across the border, I felt a definite change, the air had a different smell, and, with each kilometer, the light of the sky grew more ruthless. The distant shadow of the Carpathians on the horizon marked the limit to that blaze, framed it, and we drove on through a thick suspension of sun. Horse-drawn carts on the highway, the animals covered with sweat. Vintage automobiles carrying on their roofs pyramids of bags stuffed with wool. The dark gleaming bodies of people. A strong wind. Maybe that's why their houses looked so poor and impermanent on the great plain.

  I lay in my unheated room and went over all this, just as now I am trying to remember that room and the morning when I rose and went outside to see that there had been a frost overnight and that its white was disappearing in patches of sun. People on the way to their wells with buckets looked at me, pretending that they weren't, that they were going about their business, that they were blinded by the light of the new day. Now, remembering, I see that a story could have begun exactly there. For example: "On that day, when I saw my father for the last time, because three men put him in a car and took him somewhere, on that day I touched the breast of Andrea Nopritz." Or: "On that day, Gizella Weisz set out, and everyone praised her. Even great Comrade Onaga looked deep into her eyes and said, I understand, our comrade has noble and lofty plans." On that day, that morning, the man who broke the pump might have appeared. He might have approached by the narrow village street between the wooden fences to ask what I was doing in front of his house. Swollen, with bloodshot eyes, with rumpled clothes, a kind of rustic Geoffrey Firmin leaning nonchalantly on a railing demanding to know what the hell brought me to this Pîrteştii de Jos or Pîrteştii de Sus, to the house where he lived, to observe him in this state at six thirty in the morning, as over their fences Germanized Poles were watching, and Romanianized Germans, and Polonized Ukrainians, the whole mongrel bunch from abroad, that golden dream of the followers of the cult of multiculturalism ... A cynical monologue might have ensued, or a neurotic monologue, as buckets clattered in wells among the various morning noises appropriate to that backwater locale, the cackling of hens, the hewing of firewood, the shuffling and slapping of bovine backsides, and the 6:35 rusty passenger train to Suceava trundling through the valley. That would make a good beginning for the development of a tale, the unfolding of a fate, a trip back in time, when events shine brighter the more removed they are from today. But the man of the broken pump never approached me, and his life has remained in the realm of guesswork—that is to say, of complete freedom.

  So I went up to an actual man, who was standing quietly by his fence and smoking. We started a conversation. The passenger train to Suceava was in fact trundling through the valley. The man, about sixty, stocky, in a faded twill suit, resembled most of the men I'd seen in my life. The smoke from his cigarette was blue, then gray, then gone. He talked. I listened and nodded. He said times were bad, had been better under Ceauşescu: there was justice then, equality, work, and order in the streets. I knew this tale but listened to it once again—avidly, because there is something beautiful in our traveling so far from home and seeing that so little changes. He told about the night visits of Securitate and, in the same breath, about the factories now shut. I asked him what he knew of the famous resettlement, in which seven thousand villages disappeared and their people were moved to concrete apartment blocks. Yes, he knew, had even seen the planes used to ta
ke the photographs that helped in the planning of that operation, but no price is too high to pay for justice and equality. I said nothing, for what could I say, seeing as I had come here, to this fence, as a visible sign of inequality, that I had come and would depart whenever I liked, leaving the old man in the wrecked suit holding a cheap cigarette on a rough road between two ancient houses made of wood, which had survived by some whim of history, though their inhabitants hadn't particularly wanted them to survive. I kept my mouth shut and listened to his pining for the dictatorship. Power must manifest itself in a concrete figure, and once it achieves that embodiment, it abides beyond good and evil. We are all orphaned children of some emperor or despot. I gave the man a Sobieski Super Light. The sun had now climbed above the green line of the hills, and I felt that my freedom to come and go meant shit here, was worth nothing.

  We said goodbye, and I went for a bucket to draw water from a well.

  It's night, rain is falling, and I am remembering all this for the hundredth time. Ádám Bodor and the Sinistra district are a transparency superimposed over an actual Maramureş and Bukovina, and to both clings the flickering and vital substance of my thoughts, my love, my fear. Sinistra won't let me sleep. On the shelf, side by side, A History of Ukraine, A History of Bulgaria, A History of Hungary, with many smaller books and accounts, along with the History of Slovakia and Eliade's The Romanians—but to no effect. I read them all before bed and finally drift off, but not once have I dreamt of Jan Hunyadi or Czar Ferdinand, of Vasile Nicola Ursu, called Horea, or Vlad ţepeş, of Father Hlinka or Taras Shevchenko. I dream, at most, of the enigmatic Sinistra district. Of the uniforms of nonexistent armies. Of old wars in which no one truly perishes. I dream of white limestone ruins and mustached border guards, and when you cross those borders, everything changes and nothing changes. I dream of banknotes with the portraits of heroes on one side and romantic windswept crags on the other. I dream of coins too. And of cigarette packs for cigarettes I never smoked. And of gas stations on plains, all of them like the one in that suburb of the Slovenské Nové Mesto, and of Red Bull with the inscription špeciálne vyvinutû pre obdobie zvûšenej psychickej alebo fyzyckej námahy, "developed especially for periods of increased mental and physical exertion." I dream of moldering watchtowers in wastes and cyclists taking their rusted bikes over hill after hill to places whose names can be said in at least three languages, and I dream of horse harnesses and people and food and hybrid landscapes and all the rest.

  Yes, the rain falls on all these places, on Maramureş, on my dreams, on Sinistra, on Spišské Podhradie on that day, Friday, July 21, when we stopped at the muddy parking lot beside the Morgečanka. A one-floor building ran along the only street. We took a narrow sidewalk and came upon a yellow synagogue. Its facade was crowned by four spherical tin cupolas. The vaulted windows were all black and dead, as if they had been taken from a nineteenth-century factory. In the span between the place of worship and the houses you could see hills and the distant towers of Spišská Kapitula. On a slope above the town shone the white ruins of a castle, so large and bright they resembled a kind of atmospheric caprice, an angular stacking of cumuli or a mirage imported from the sky of a land that had long ceased to exist. A car went by, another, then stillness. The gray rear of a škoda vanished in the green shade of trees, but it was really vanishing in time. Taking a tunnel dug into immobility. The road cut through the town as through a mountain, a foreign territory that graciously allowed such passage. From the low house at the turn, a dark, squat woman came out, tossed soapy water on the asphalt, and scrubbed away all trace of the vehicles.

  A few steps on, I saw through a low open window the interior of a large room. Someone had begun work and stopped. A fresh brick wall across the center. A TV on, somewhere in the back: blue flickering in the dimness. By the new wall, a billiard table. Several balls stopped in mid-play. It was too dark for me to see their colors. The smell of wet plaster and mildew. Beyond the wall, beyond the dark and the burble of the television, you could hear men's voices raised. Then I saw them, in a gap between the houses. They were arguing over an upturned wagon. One was turning a spoked wheel, another was gesturing, shaking his head: the thing was garbage, worthless, they had to start over. The men were dark, stocky, animated, as if their bodies did not feel the inertia around them, as if they inhabited another, weightless space. That was definitely it. They lived in the old Jewish quarter, at the edge of a Slovak town, at the foot of a Hungarian castle, so in order to exist and not disappear, they had had to create their own rules, their own special theory of relativity, and a gravity that would keep them on the surface of the earth and not let them fall into the interstellar void, into the vacuum of oblivion.

  We went back to our car and drove on. The squat woman again came out of her house with her bowl of suds. The Morgečanka flowed below us on the right. On the left rose the ridge of Drevenik. Outside the town, on the slope, on terraces carved along the slope, stood their homes. Not the homes of others, not ancient homes, homes inherited, but their very own. Like children's drawings, so simple, small, and fragile. Like ideas only just forming. Fashioned of barely stripped pine logs, more poles than logs, not thicker than a man's arm, and with gable roofs all tarred. They were so modest, the most you could do in them was sit and wait as time elapsed between one event and the next. They leaned against each other, piled and climbing like a pueblo of wood. From the thin chimneys curled resinous smoke. The jumble of yards, rummage, the vivid conglomeration of stuff seemingly useless and exhausted covered the ground like postindustrial vegetation. It could have been the day in which they appeared or the day in which they departed. Below, along the shaded road, children played. The grownups stood and talked of grownup matters, perhaps about the foreigners who passed through every now and then. Here everything belonged to these people. I had no idea that a space could be so unequivocally and unconditionally owned without doing it injury. A little farther on, quite alone, stood a girl in a red dress. Very pretty, she was looking to one side, in a direction in which not a thing was happening. I saw her for a moment; then, in the rearview mirror, the red flame went out.

  Răşinari

  "INFESTED WITH LICE and placid, we should seek the company of animals, squat beside them for a thousand years, breathe the air of the stable not the laboratory, die from disease not medicine, keep within the borders of our wild and sink mildly into it."

  All day, it blew from the south. Under the sky's blue glaze, the dry light etched black outlines on objects. On such days, the world is as delineated as a cutout. Look too long in one place and you could go blind. The air carries a dazzle we are unaccustomed to here. The African, Mediterranean light flows over the Carpathian range and descends on the village. The landscape is stripped, transparent. In the leafless branches you can see abandoned nests. High up, along the edge of a meadow burned to bronze, a herd of cattle. Then they have vanished in the woods, where it's still, dark, and where green brambles spread. The animals retreat a few thousand years, leave our company, return to themselves, until in a day or two someone finds them and drives them home.

  "We should seek the company of animals, squat beside them." I read this in July. In August, I went to see the village where Emil Cioran was born. Never able to accept that an idea is an abstract thing, I had to go to Răinari. Across the Gorgons, across the Ukrainian and Romanian Bukovina, past Cluj and Sibiu, I reached the southern border of Transylvania. Right after the last houses of the village, the Carpathians began. Literally. The way was flat, then immediately you climbed by cattle path, stopping to catch your breath every several steps. To the north, in a gray mist, lay Transylvania. The steep, warmed meadows above Răinari smelled of cow dung. It hadn't rained for many days, and the earth exuded its accumulated odors.

  A few days later we witnessed the evening return from the pastures. Along the road from Păltiniş, in the red rays of the sun, came hundreds of cows and goats. Over the herds rose heat and stink. Grizzled, wide-horned cows led the
way. People stood in the open gates of the paddocks and waited. All this took place in silence, without yelling, without pushing. The animals separated themselves from the herd and entered their pens. They disappeared in the twilight of shaded yards, and the carved stable doors closed after them in a very civilized way. Enormous buffalo shone like black metal. Two steps of theirs equaled a cow's three. They were monsters, demons. The wet, quilled muzzles brought to mind some distant, sensual mythology. In a jerky trot, the goats came last. Mottled and animated, both. Goat reek hung over the herd. The asphalt shone from cow slobber.

  This was Răinari, the town in which Emil Cioran was born and spent his first ten years. The sun fell vertically on the paved little streets, on the pastel houses, on the red husk of the roofs, and brought out the oldest smells. At first I didn't know what was hanging in the air, penetrating the walls, the bodies of passersby, and the chassis of old vehicles. Only after a couple of days did I realize that it was the mix of animal effluvia. From locked yards came pig shit; the soil between the cobblestones had collected a century of horse piss; wisps of the stable rose from innumerable harnesses; from the fields came the choking air of pasture, from the gutters the cesspool seep of barns and sties; and one day in the river I saw entrails floating. The current was carrying the opalescent, flickering red in the direction of Sibiu. From the mountains the wind brought the sharp, acrid smell of pens—a mélange of trampled herbs, sticky, fat fleece, and dried green balls of excrement like stones. And occasionally a thread of hickory smoke in the air, a whiff of fried onions, a puff of gasoline fume.