On the Road to Babadag (26 page)

I close my eyes and see the Gypsies from Gjirokastër leaving their drafty huts assembled on the rooftops of concrete communal buildings, in which they couldn't endure the poor air and the heat. Those from Krujë leave their lime ovens; those from Iacobeni leave their scattered Saxon houses; those from Porumbacu and Sâmbăta de Sus leave their clay hovels; those from Vlachy leave their log cabins; those from Podgrodzie leave their single-story houses in a former Jewish district; those from Miskolc leave their slums, which barely rise above the ground along the road to Encs; those from Zborov leave their white barracks cut out of the mountainside; and the Gypsies leave all the thousand other places, the list and description of which I promise myself I will put together someday. A Europe without borders is a Gypsy dream, there is no denying it. White folk, lazy, rooted, fearful, stay in their homes, as one does on a Slovak Sunday. You see only the Gypsies, walking in their solitude, in twos and threes, on the roadsides from village to village, and the green countryside closes after them like water. It's as if they could not live without space. Freed from the workings of time, they are indifferent to the nothingness that will claim Gönc and all the other places we have given names to, because only by naming can we grasp the world, even as we condemn it to destruction.

By an empty field before Brezovička, a swarthy ten-year-old boy was doing push-ups in the middle of the road. He was naked. At the sight of my car, he stood, covered his genitals, and dove into nearby bushes, where three of his buddies, dressed, were laughing their heads off.

Old women carrying brushwood on their backs, men gathered around the open hoods of old cars, a boy in Podgrodzie cradling a puppy in his arms. A cart in Transylvania hitched to two horses, and in the cart a frightened foal, a couple of weeks old, its legs splayed, a child embracing its neck affectionately, face in the brown fur, as if the child had found a creature smaller than itself and more defenseless. Red Kalderash petticoats on the road to Mount Moldoveanu, bare feet covered with yellow dust. A smoldering dump in ErdŐhát; small, slender figures plucking metal, plastic, and glass from the smoking rubbish. A dump in Tiszacsécse, by the road that winds above the river, where an old man with a pipe in his mouth pulls long pieces of wood out of the hills of junk; he ties them in bundles and sets them beside a relic bicycle ... I should create a catalog, an encyclopedia of these scenes and places, write a history in which time plays no part, a history of Gypsy eternity, because it is more enduring, and wiser, than our governments and cities, than our entire world, which trembles at the imminence of its demise.

Yes, Gypsies are my obsession, also the border wasteland, and the river ferries in eastern Hungary. The ferries in particular. The ferry on the Tisa ten kilometers beyond Sárospatak was a veritable Noah's ark. Hay wagons, tractors, cattle and sheep tethered, men in rubber boots and baseball caps; rakes, pitchforks, bottles of beer; as if these people were leaving their land, because it bored them or had gone barren, and were seeking a new one. Houses were the only thing missing on the wooden deck eaten away by the water and the sun and covered with cow shit. Mr. Ferenc Lenart of GávavencsellŐ was the owner of the boat—this fact was recorded on the blue ticket costing 290 forints. Living by the Tisa is like living on an island. You're constantly crossing. The river winds, turns back, can't make up its mind, oozes to the sides, pulls swampily away from the land, and Szabolcs-Szatmár and ErdŐhát float uncertainly, unmoored from the earth by a semiaqueous layer: bogs, quicksand, reeds, the sweet stink of rot and standing water cooked in the sun, houses on stilts and levees erected a kilometer from the main current so the spring waters from the Gorgany, Chornohora, and Maramureş have somewhere to go. Two hundred and ninety forints is nothing for a drowsy excursion across the flowing green on the back of this beautiful and strange device that like a weaver's shuttle joins the torn fabric of roads. Its wake immediately seals up, and everything is as it was before. In Szamossályi the price is even less, only twenty a head, or thirty and change.

Where the high bank descends was an enclosure filled with goats and sheep; on the other side were a small house and a board with laughably low prices for crossing. Black roof, yellow walls. The ferry trying to leave the opposite bank. It was the motorless variety, moved only by the river. Connected to two pulleys, long lines stretched across the current, it had to wait for the water to take it. Drawing in a cable with two winches, now this one, now that, it went back and forth like the simplest, earliest machine, barely conscious of the law of gravitation. The sole passenger a woman with a bicycle. The engineer cranked, shoved off from the bank with a pole, all without effort, without haste, submitting to the will of the river. Sometimes he left the wheel and oars to chat with the woman, who was sitting hunched on a bench. I saw it all from above: two small figures on a rectangular deck of thick planks the color of the sandy shore, waiting for this strip of land to detach itself from the Great Hungarian Plain and, like a much-burdened flying carpet, bear them to the other side of the Szamos. It was maybe fifteen kilometers to the Romanian border, and again I felt time subsiding, growing still, yielding the field to pure space—it was that way in Ubl'a; that way in Hidasnémeti, where immobile trains baked beneath the high heaven like grass snakes; that way also in stricken Buzica and in my own Konieczna. But eventually the ferry moved, drifted, arrived, and now I could drive down to the platform. I looked upstream and tried to remember when and where I saw this river last.

Most likely a year ago, in Satu Mare, when I was on my way to Păltiniş, but only for a moment. The bridge was in the center of town, and as usual I was seeking a detour, reading the rusted sky-blue road signs, so this didn't count. Two years earlier, I spent a whole day wandering along the river. I had come from Carei and wasn't sure whether I wanted to continue on to Cluj or to Oradea, whether to go southeast or west—or anywhere. On the 1F to Bobota was truck hell: tank trucks, dump trucks full of gravel and earth, honking. Transylvania was a possibility, but I wasn't quite up to the Balkan method of driving after a long Hungarian night of pear brandy and Kadarka wine from Szekszárd. I checked out Crişeni on the map and headed there, north, and in Jibou entered a valley of the Szamos. Except I remember nothing of that drive, other than the coffee in some godforsaken place and a hailstorm among green hills. It is only Baia Mare that I remember clearly, hallucination that it was. Conveyor belts like black viaducts, mining cars for gold hanging lifeless above the earth, and the hopelessness of a suburb where people milled before worker compounds that looked like gutted ruins. The town had chewed its way into the mountains in search of ore, but the rust of poverty in turn eroded El Dorado. Baia Sprie perished in the same way, a victim of its own greed.

To the gap at Gutîi it was ten kilometers. There, at 987 meters, the world fell in two. Nearly a kilometer above sea level, continuity ended, chaos celebrated. The mocking memento of Baia lay at our back, and on the other side, along the northern peaks, lay, amazingly, the past. Deseşti, Hărniceşti, Giuleşti were dreams carved out of wood. In the sculpting of the homes, gates, and fences was an unending abundance of time: the eternity required to chisel and cut and shape and free all this from the elements. The miracle of patience had to have been performed in some other age, because ours could not accommodate each and every separate motion-gesture needed to fashion this Arcadia of wood. No minute or hour of ours could have contained the birth of this calm insanity of forms. Almost as if it simply grew, the next stage in the slow development of tree rings and branches, nature abandoning its previous designs to try something in the vein of human habitation. Insanity indeed, this Maramureş thousand and one nights, this Sagrada Familia of xylem, all the way to Sighetu, where the Pietri peak cut the sunset off from the rest of the world.

In the morning, I walked along the Tisa. On the Ukrainian side lay Solotvino, where two years before, I got off a train to take a chance at Stanislavov.

And again Babadag, exactly as two years ago: the bus sits for ten minutes, the driver's gone, kids beg without conviction in the southern swelter—nothing has changed. The thousand-lei notes with Eminescu have disappeared, replaced by aluminum disks featuring Constantin Brancoveanu. It's easier to identify them in your pocket, take them out, and press them into an outstretched hand. Thirty-seven of these aluminum coins equal one euro. As I ride to the city, I see three women in dresses that trail on the ground—Dobrujan Turks, no doubt. They look pretty but strange among the crumbling walls, the houses falling apart before they have aged. Babadag is weariness and isolation. People get off the bus and stand, with small shadows at their feet. A white minaret like a finger points at the empty blue. I distribute some of my change. The little beggars take the coins indifferently, without a word, not lifting their eyes. I am riding from Tulcea to Constanţa, the opposite direction from two years ago. Everything is the same, except that the bills are now plastic.

Babadag: twice in my life, twice for ten minutes. The world is made from such fragments, pieces of burning dream, mirage, bus fever. The tickets remain. From Tulcea to Constanţa it's 120,000 lei.
Păstraţi biletul pentru control.
Gara de Sud, the South Station area in Constanţa, is the shame of the Balkans, a black web of cables over streets, crap, horns, dogs, flies, food stands all jumbled. Tinfoil, lighters, cellophane, trash, a vortex of throwaway stuff, the reek of fried fat, smoke, men in uniform, fast operators without work but in constant motion, gold chains, flip-flops, a holstered pistol—civilian—barely covered by a shirt, watermelon rinds, a kaleidoscope of color, high heels, mascara, an anthill greenmarket camp. You can only list; description is impossible, since there is nothing here that lasts but weariness, weakness, decomposition, and frenetic toil under a sky bleached by the heat.

From Constanţa you pass through Valu lui Traian, Trajan's Bank, a village of dirt-floor huts, thin donkeys, old women in black gazing with wise eyes at the dust and emptiness. If you got out here, you wouldn't have the strength to leave. The present reigns in this place, as it always has. Hence all the names of heroes, rebels, leaders, governers, politicians: Nicolae Bălcescu, Mihail Kogălniceanu, Cuza Vodă, Vlad ţepeş, Mircea Vodă, ştefan cel Mare, Dragoş Vodă, ştefan Vodă, Alexandru Odobescu, and there's Independenţa and Unirea (Independence and Unity), Valea Dacilor (Valley of the Dacians). Not a thing to be seen, just villages scattered in the steppe along Road 3A or a little to the side. In this flat land they are hardly visible over the horizon. Goats, corn, horse harnesses, people stooped in fields, the same movements made a hundred, two hundred years ago, a thousand, forever, movements as unchanging as those of animals. The names are meant to give inert time a sense and direction.

A couple of days later I was driving northeast. I crossed the Seretu valley and in Tecuci recognized the crossroads and the fence where two years earlier I had spent an hour or two taking in the sight of the other end of the Carpathians. This time I kept the mountains on my left, and the landscape flattened. Delivery vans carrying melons. Fruit piled along the road. In the fields, cornstalk sheds. No trees, so the men were waiting out the afternoon heat in these rustling lean-tos. After Crasna, the hills began again—long, sleepy ridges of the Moldovan Highland. An old and crumbling plateau excavated by the river and enervated by the sun. Grassy slopes, white scree, sickly crests of groves presented a kind of geologic metaphor for the acceptance of one's fate, of erosion and decline. The earth showed its bones here.

Then Huşi, where in 1899 Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was born. I should have stopped there but didn't. The town appeared for a moment, then was gone, like a hundred other Romanian towns I had driven through. It was in no way different: low to the ground and pitiful. Gardens hid the decay. I should have stopped. Codreanu was half Polish, half German, but considered himself more Romanian than the Romanians. He thought of himself as a Romanian messiah. God the Father, Christ, and the archangel Michael were constantly included in his plans. In some photographs he appears in folk dress: a white linen shirt to the knees and white breeches. Under short trouser legs are stylish city shoes. He greets the crowds with a gesture like Hitler's heil, but it denotes a purely Roman legacy, unsullied by any connection with the barbaric Germans. On a white horse, he visits Moldovan and Bessarabian villages. The peasants listen and nod, because he tells them that all the evil comes from outside.

I drove through Huşi in minutes. It was twenty kilometers to the Prut and the border. Sheep grazed on the hills. At dusk they returned to their enclosure in the waste, a few fences with few crossbars. Nearby were the huts of the shepherds, with bulrush roofs. One could erect them practically without tools. They were part of the landscape in every respect. If all this vanished, it would be without a trace: no ruins, no lingering memories. Inside the huts there must have been objects—a bucket, a knife, an ax—but on the outside all was vegetation and ageless. Composed of the most basic elements: wood, grass, reeds. A few animals, sheep dung.

Before Codreanu on his gray mare, an icon of the archangel Michael was carried, they say. It is not hard to imagine the procession precisely here, among these low hills and huts, or a little farther on, in Valea Grecului with its single church, cow field, and a green speckled with white geese. That's where I felt sure that I was beholding the immutable "it was always thus" or, in any case, a past that could never become the future, because from the very beginning its purpose was to endure.

Codreanu in his knee-length shirt and with his procession through miserable towns and villages brought the good news that nothing would change, that what had been would continue, having achieved perfect form long ago. It merely needed cleansing of the scum borne by the wave of modernity, cleansing of the slime of democracy, the dirt of liberalism, the contagion of the Jews. Poverty and impotence were ennobled by their heroic heritage. Codreanu's comrades wore amulets containing soil from battlefields in which their forefathers had resisted the Romans, Goths, Huns, Slavs, Tatars, Hungarians, Turks, and Russians. Magic, ancestor worship, and Christianity were treated as a tribal religion, an occult science to save the people. These few lines from Codreanu's text are essentially a howl: "Wars were won by those able to summon invisible forces from the beyond and enlist their help. These mysterious forces were the souls of the dead, the souls of our forefathers, who were tied to this land, to our fields and forests, having fallen in its defense. Today they are summoned by us, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, because we remember them. And above the souls of the dead stands Christ."