On the Road to Babadag (18 page)

Except that this was the day after, when we were on our way back. Now we were looking for lodging in a maze of roads and refused to slow down, so the light-blue signs with names of localities had to be read quickly and with that pleasant sense of amazement we always got from Hungarian, which freed our trip from geography, letting it follow instead the path of fairy tale, legend, toward a childhood in which the sound and music of words mattered more than their meaning.

We stopped, I believe, in Hollóháza. Around a gravel lot, long, one-level houses with arcades. We were given rooms and asked no questions. Everyone was occupied with tomorrow: smells from the kitchen, the clatter of pots and pans, garlands, streamers, and balloons in the hall where the guests of this roadside inn or camp building were served food. We left our things and drove on. Spruce trees in the village squares; cardboard angels and stars on them, wet and losing their shape. This was a year ago, and now I cannot distinguish Tokaj from Hidasnémeti, Sárospatak from Pálháza. I remember the brown roofs of Mád on the right side of the road. They were like clay deposits on a hillside. Bright, soaked, bare because there were no trees, only dead grapevines with rows of wooden crosses that followed the rise and fall of the land and went on forever. But Mád was the day after, and we were probably on our way then to Mikóháza, to find that solitary pub outside the village, the pub like a campsite. Embers glowed in the mist at dusk, and you could smell smoke. Men fanning big grills in the open air, under the eaves; women putting things on tables. Everyone as if they had just come down from the mountains or up from the swamp: covered with mud, in the paramilitary dress of hunters. All that was missing was horses, the quiet neighing in the dark, the clink of bridles, the stamp of hooves. People drank palinka. Its smell mixed with the smell of burning logs and roasting meat. Behind the pub was a scummy pond and the mess of a village yard: chicken coops, hay, a green wallow, a wire fence. Beyond that, the dying day, and from deep in the landscape I could smell the wet presence of mountains. We entered the wooden hut to eat goulash and drink red wine. At the tables sat people in thick sweaters and heavy boots. No one paid attention to us. It's not impossible that in this rain-sodden end of the world, in the dead of winter, foreigners were a daily occurrence.

Now, a year later, I consult the Slovak map of Zemplén and see that I was right about the swamp and mountains. Just beyond the pub, beyond the duck pond, flows the Bózsva, and after that is marsh, and then, in complete darkness, the Ritkahegy range. This information is of no use to me, really, but I collect it, as if to fill in a space, to keep returning to the beginning, keep renewing, to write an endless prologue to what was, because this is the only way that the past and dead can be brought back, even if only for a moment, in the absurd hope that memory will somehow work its way into an invisible crack and pry open the lid of oblivion. So I repeat my hopeless mantra of names and landscapes, because space dies more slowly than I do and assumes an aspect of immortality. I mutter my geographic prayer, my topographic Hail Marys, chant my litany of the map, to make this carnival of wonders, this Ferris wheel, this kaleidoscope, freeze, stop for a second, with me at the center.

Then came Sátoraljaújhely and a night as glossy as a silk lining. On Kossuth Street, moving curtains of rain. We looked for an ATM or anything open, but in the windows we saw only cashiers in stores going through receipts, people sweeping, mopping floors, guys making small talk in doorways as they let out the last customers.

The first time I was here, four years ago, it was July. I hardly noticed the Hapsburg ocher-and-gall yellow of the facades. We sped down the tunnel of shade that was the main street, and the town vanished as quickly as it had appeared. To the right, grapevines going up; to the left, an occasional gleam from the Bodrog. Route 27 cut the scenery in half. The east was the dark-green marsh of Bodrogköz, the west a mountain chain where dry heat reigned in the heights and from the volcanic soil jutted, here and there, limestone that looked like fragments of a primordial spine. Here was where the Great Hungarian Plain began, reaching as far as Belgrade. Its northern limit practically touched the Carpathians, and the western edge gently brushed the Northern Medium Mountains, Zemplén, then Bükk, Mátra. In the flat wetland forked by the Tisa and Bodrog stood groves of poplar, and only remnants of the true
puszta
west of Debrecen could surpass the melancholy of this region. You smelled water everywhere, and the spongy earth sank beneath the weight of the sky. The villages were islands of yellow brick. The world clung to the horizon, and from a distance everything assumed the form of a horizontal line. From the road through Tisacsermely and Nagyhomok you saw the mountains behind Sárospatak. They climbed suddenly, without warning or introduction, like pyramids in the desert, and their shape was just as geometric. But Sárospatak was some other time. Now we were watching the rain and an increasingly deserted, shuttered Sátoraljaújhely.
Sátoraljaújhely
means "a tent pitched in a new place."

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of water since I got here. I dream of many places in the world, but all are water. They have substantial names—London, Bulgaria, the GDR—but invariably they swim in the whirling deep. I accept this, because the voyage from which I returned was itself a dream. Transylvania, Wallachia, Dobruja, the Danube Delta, and Moldova were filled with heat, and I doubt now that my memory can re-create the things that continue existing back there without my participation. I search my pockets and my pack for evidence, but the objects I find look like props: thousand-lei banknotes with Mihai Eminescu on them, who died as Nietzsche did, from syphilis and dementia. You can buy nothing with them; only Gypsy children are happy to take them. The kids gather images of the national bard and go to a shop to exchange him for candy and chewing gum. So it was in Richiş, Iacobeni, Roandola. On the five-thousand note is Lucian Blaga, who wrote, "The cock of the Apocalypse crows, crows in every village of Romania." The ten-thousand note goes to Nicolae Iorga, who was murdered by the Iron Guard, although, as Eliade states, "he was a true poet of Romanianness." I saw them all tied with string into thick packets. In Cluj, at eight in the morning on Gheorge Doja Avenue, a van stopped and out stepped a fellow in a suit covered with such packets, like Santa Claus bearing gifts. At a bank in Sighişoara, piles of low-denomination bills, tied with twine, lay on a counter, but no one showed the least interest. The guard explained to me that foreigners were not allowed to sell Western currency. He shrugged apologetically and in a whisper advised, in English, "Black market ... black market ..."

Now I take from a pocket these venerable faces, smooth them out, and am amazed that they haven't disappeared, that they didn't melt into thin air when on the return trip at four in the morning I crossed the border at Curtici. Above the station was a deep-blue sky. As I was getting off, the border guards and customs officials combed the Budapest train for currency smugglers. I saw them gut the luggage of the English travelers who boarded at Sighişoara. My conscience clean, I calmly drank a Bihor palinka. The uniformed officials stepped off, and the train was about to move when a girl jumped down with a backpack, her eyes wild, her hair loose. It could have been fear, it could have been fury— I'll never know. In any case she belonged to a group of foreigners. She ran across the platform and disappeared into the station building. No one chased her. The train left. Mine would come soon, with the silver light of dawn rising over the Bihor Mountains.

The compartment and the corridor were empty. I could easily see on either side. Along the depot, in intervals of several dozen steps, stood soldiers. They had boyish faces and uniforms that didn't fit: the pants were too short, and the jackets didn't quite match in color. The nearest soldier wore civilian black boots with big buckles. These men looked as if they had just been pulled out of bed and taken prisoner. Without weapons, without belts, shivering in the morning cold. Staring into space, as if to avoid seeing the train, as if to avoid making eye contact.

I take the bills from my pocket and see not Eminescu, Iorga, and Blaga but the faces of those kids.

But I have other evidence to prove that I didn't dream it all. This ticket for a hydrofoil ride for 120,000 lei. "Rapid, Commodious, Efficient." I bought it in Tulcea, to go to Sulina. To see the continent sink into the sea, the land slip beneath the surface, leaving behind people, animals, and plants, escaping its business, shaking off all the noise of histories, nations, tongues, the ancient mess of events and destinies. I wanted to see it find repose in the eternal twilight of the deep, in the indifferent and monotonous company of fish and seaweed. And so I got up early to catch the train, at the Gara de Nord in Bucharest, to Constanţa.

Braneşti, Dragoş Vodă, ştefan cel Mare—on the steppe-like plain the houses all burrowed into the earth in search of coolness. They were low, scorched by the sun, and brittle. They resembled stones, crusts. On occasion I saw distant horses and people, their silhouettes as black as their shadows. The sky in these parts, I thought, if you rapped on it, there would be a metallic clang. After Feteşti the train went up an embankment over marsh, and in the Cernavodă district it clattered across a bridge that spanned the Danube. A nuclear power plant rose like a phantom, then disappeared. Gray cliffs filled with bird nests. I thought I could smell the sea, but at the station in Constanţa the smell dissolved.

At the bus station on the other side of town, it was like being in a village. Kerchiefed women sat with their hands folded over their bellies; the children flitted about them like sparrows. I bought cheese and bread and went to a nearby pub to have a beer. A teenage girl crawled in. She had a pretty face. She moved along the floor using her arms. The men laughed and threw cigarettes. She gathered them, laughing too. It was a game they were playing, one they knew well. Later I saw her in the station. She gave the cigarettes to an old woman who sat motionless among children.

The first minaret I ever saw was in Babadag. I was on the way to Tulcea, to take the Sulina boat. The microbus was operated by two men. One drove and sold tickets; the other, younger, jumped out at every stop to open and close the door. In Mihai Viteazu someone tried to ride without paying. The second man pushed him from the door so hard, the guy went rolling.

The yellow, bare hills of Dobruja resembled dead anthills. The heat penetrated the earth and tore it apart from inside. To the right somewhere was Histria. Greek ruins, marble columns from the seventh century
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—but I was unimpressed: the farther back the past, the more wretched it is. Human thought wears at it, the way a telephone book gets worn by human hands. The minaret in Babadag was simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky. We had a five-minute stop, but no one went to take a leak. Everyone drank water, which immediately appeared on the skin. A dark stain spread between the driver's shoulders. The tape kept playing: folk melodies in that strange, moaning key that went with the minaret, with the heat and dust. I could feel the continent ending, the sigh of the land casting off its responsibilities. We would remain with our property, with our curses and our nerves, as we watched the naked back of the land slide under the smooth surface of the water.

I saw Tulcea from a distance and from a height. We descended by gentle zigzags through the hills. A blue-gray mist hung over the city and the river. The Danube divided into three branches here, into dozens of canals, lakes, backwaters. The river's arm became a wide, splayed hand, whose fingernails were sandy beaches, whose bracelet was ponds and pools, all covered with the green skin of marsh and with endless reeds. Tulcea was the wrist.

Horses grazed at the port, cropping wisps of something on the barren square among cranes, train tracks, mounds of scrap metal. Their roan backs were lost in the rust red of the ships behind them, of the belt conveyors of ore. No one was about, only a couple of boys jumping back and forth between the shore and the wreck of a tugboat. I sniffed the air for the sea but smelled only river: a warm fish-and-slime odor mixed with motor oil.

A hundred twenty thousand lei. "Rapid, Commodious, Efficient." A crowd had gathered early at the ramp. The hydrofoil was of Soviet vintage. Those who had tickets boarded first—God knows where they purchased them. The rest had to wait and see if there were seats left. Two young Frenchmen slowly, sleepily counted out banknotes. They passed them to each other, as in a game. The banknotes fluttered in the breeze. The two seemed stoned. There were peasants with bundles, boxes, bags, and a few fishermen carried loaves of bread in backpacks. And men in uniform, of course. I saw four kinds of military or paramilitary uniform. Each soldier was wearing a holstered pistol. I couldn't tell which were protecting us and which were simply taking the boat somewhere. All had the same face: grave, drawn.

I don't really remember anything of that trip. Seventy kilometers with three stops, and the seating as on a bus. Once in a while, when we crossed omeone's wake, the belly of the hydrofoil slapped the water in a soft, fishy way. Around Crişan we passed a Turkish freighter as large and black as an old factory. It was carrying sheep. In dozens of stacked cages, several hundred white-gray animals standing up, lying down. Pieces of straw jutting. I went out on the upper deck. The Frenchmen were on their backs at the stern, their eyes shut. Two Turkish sailors, smoking cigarettes, leaned against the railing of the freighter and contemplated the endless green of the Delta. For a moment I thought that their boat was named "Bethlehem," but that was just my imagination struggling with the extraordinary.