On the Road to Babadag (31 page)

Later, farther on, somewhere in a village near Sabinov, hogs were being butchered in a stockyard. On a black wire fence hung meat. In that dirty-white landscape of winter thaw, the meat glowed like fire. The house, the road, the sky, the people bustling, the whole village with vigilant mongrels pacing—as far as the eye could see, it lay in mist, was without color; only from those pieces of meat did the light of cruelty shine. Through the glass of my car window I felt the heat of the red pieces. In the Slovak slumber and stillness and sad tranquillity of my part of the world, a slaughter was taking place. No one hid the shame of death. Dogs and children watched the quick knife move, the innards in bowls and buckets, the blood. All as it had been for a thousand years. Nothing changing. Then dusk.

A red light at the passage to Konieczna. I waited for several minutes. Someone moved in the dimness, walked to the counter where passports are stamped, pressed a button, the green light went on, the crossing gate lifted. Inside sat one of ours; the Slovaks didn't care who was leaving their country. "Where are you coming from?" "When did you leave the country?" "What's your destination?" I watched as the passport was slipped into the scanner. "I'm going there. I left today," I answered. The customs window opened a little. "Purchases." "All in order." I saw no face, just the gesture to drive on. I had no sense that I was returning from somewhere. Right after the turn, in the village, the mist began.

OUR LEADER

For the title, the literal translation of
nasz bat'ko
is not "father leader" but "our father," a traditional way—in Ukrainian, in Russian—of identifying the master or leader: the patriarch of the manor, the owner of the serfs, the priest, the ruler of the region or nation. Our leader is our father, demanding obedience, fidelity, and love. This term has been and still is associated with czars and dictators—Stalin, for example, was called "little father" (
batiushka
)—so it points, at least for one in the modern West who knows a little Slavic history, to an old-fashioned, homey kind of fascism.

P.'s joke "... Shell, so we might be close" points to the sound similarity of
Shell
and
Szela;
the name in Polish is pronounced
shella
.

Quotations and facts about Jakub Szela are taken from Adam Bogusz,
Wieś Siedliska Bogusz
(Kraków, 1903).

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, S
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The motto in the church in Roşia is from a German hymn based on Revelation 2:10: "Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life."

Siebenbürgen, "seven fortresses," is the German name for Transylvania.

THE COUNTRY IN WHICH THE WAR BEGAN

The quotation of Emil Cioran is from his
History and Utopia.
The quotation about devils and suicide is from Drago Janč ar's
Mocking Desires.
These, and the one from Edvard Kocbek, are translated into English here not from their originals—from Romanian or Slovenian—but from the Polish edition of this book. (The Polish for Cioran was provided by Marek Bieńczyk; for Jančar, by Joanna Pomorska; for Kocbek, by Jerzy Snopek.)

SHQIPERIA

The 600,000 paranoid bunkers were built during the regime of Enver Hoxha, who ruled the country from 1944 to 1985.

The quotation on page 107 comes from Fatos Lubonja,
Piramidy z błota.

MOLDOVA

The Georgian ruler is Stalin.

The Slaughter of Praga: in 1794, the Russian army under Suvorov captured Warsaw. Winning the battle, his troops, against orders, went on a rampage and killed 20,000 of the inhabitants of Praga, a district of the city.

Sheriff: a company that controls many businesses in Transnistria and is also involved in its politics. It has connections, political and personal, with President Igor Smirnov.

ON THE ROAD TO BABADAG

As a result of the Treaty of Trianon after World War I, the borders of Hungary were redrawn. Hungary lost ten cities and about a third of its inhabitants.

Jo napot
means "hello."

Okęcie: the official checking passports is at the major Polish airport outside Warsaw.

"To sum up ...": The quotation is from Mircea Eliade's "Romania: A Historical Sketch." A caution to the reader, for this quotation and for others in which the English is twice removed from the original language. Eliade's Romanian was translated into Polish by Anna Kazmierczak, and from her Polish into this English. The stylistic-semantic drift inevitable in any literary translation is no doubt considerable here, having passed through two consecutive translators.

U lukomorya
... is the opening of Pushkin's
Ruslan i Lyudmila,
a Russian classic, an epic poem in fairy-tale style.

The creator of
Hair
was Milos Forman. His Czech first name, Miloš, and the Polish poet- philosopher's last name, Miłosz, are close in sound.

"Dyzio the Dreamer" is a humorous poem for children by Julian Tuwim. Dyzio wishes the whole world were ice cream and cake.

"There was no shade ...": A quotation from Miodrag Bulatović's "Red Rooster Flies Straight Up into the Sky." The Serbian original was translated into Polish by Maria Krukowska.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky was a Cossack leader; the seventeenth-century Khmelnytsky Uprising in Ukraine became emblematic in history of savage massacre (Poles and Jews were its victims). Jan Sobieski, a seventeenth-century king of Poland, was famous for a victory over the Ottoman Turks in the Battle of Vienna, which many believed saved Europe.

The Puszta: the Hungarian Plains, an emblem of Hungarian tradition and culture. The Hungarian word
puszta,
meaning "bare," "uninhabited," derives from the Slavic word for "empty" (e.g., in Polish,
pusty
).

"He stood on the edge...": the Kiš passage in Polish is Danuta Cirlic- Straszynska's translation from the Serbian.

"Wars were won ..." and "Love is the key ...": the Codreanu quotations come from the journal
Fronda
(6/1996), translated into Polish by Bogdan Koziel.

"They are coming!" and "Their faces, almost all bearded ..." are from Peter Esterhá zy's
Transporters,
translated from the Hungarian into Polish by Elżbieta Sobolewska.