On the Road to Babadag (7 page)

So anyway, we were drinking aszú and traveling east. Actually, we were fleeing the west, fleeing hopeless Budapest, where in the worst gussied-up dive on Rákóczi Street a shot of pear brandy cost three times what it did in Nagykálló, and the coffee even more. Fleeing the rain as well, because the sky had opened up on the Danube, on Gellért Hill, on the bridges, on everything. But it was August 20, Saint Stephen's Day, therefore even with the downpour parachutists jumped from vintage An-24s, trailing ribbons of smoke in the national colors: green, red, and white. Around Parliament the police stood and made sure no one got too close. The rain fell in buckets on the big limos too, nature being a democrat. On Zoltán Street near the covered market, we had to step back, because the sidewalk filled with roller skaters, five hundred strong, raising their arms and reciting. They looked like a foreign horde bent on conquest. M. said, "That's what cities are becoming. To survive, you'll have to belong to something like that. As it used to be. Loners won't have a prayer." "Unless," I replied, "you're someone like Snake in
Escape from New York.
" Cars couldn't move in the jam. At a bus stop, two black men conversed in Hungarian. The water gurgled in our pockets and shoes. Sirens howled, horns honked, the glare of the city doubled, tripled, and we were ghosts now, having lost confidence in our existence. On Dohány Street, opposite the Great Synagogue, I found the small pub in which, a year before, a producer from Israel told me how a lion had eaten the hand of its trainer, a mishap that sank the film project, because no one in his right mind would do a comedy with a man-eating lion in the lead. The pub was now packed; between the walls papered with gazettes from the days of Franz Josef, it was so bad that mothers had to hold their children in their laps, the children dozing from the smoke and hot breaths. The weary barmaid knew what I wanted, reading my face, and over the heads of the customers she passed us two pear brandies and two coffees. We sat outside under a leaky umbrella, rain pattering in the cups and glasses.

When we took Rákóczi Street to the station at last, we saw a tremendous assembly on its steps. Black-market money changers were there, cabbies, young ladies, railroad employees, smooth operators, vendors—in a word, everyone: all looking into the deep night. We too turned to look. In the leaden sky over the Danube burst a thousand purple sparks, a myriad scarlet spiders and golden stars. The reports from the explosions, muffled by the rain and distance, reached us with delay, which made the spectacle doubly unreal. Celadon and bile, turquoise and violet, sapphire and silver, emerald and crystal—fictional, ephemeral gems that died instantly in the rain and did nothing to lift the darkness. As if old Austro-Hungary were making yet another effort to give a sign from the beyond. The wet night was a maniacal ballroom full of glistening black mirrors, spectral chandeliers, trick candelabras and sconces. The Turks on the street brandished long knives to cut meat for kebabs. A German who had lost his way, pulling a suitcase on wheels, muttered, "Scheisse, scheisse." And, wrapped in blankets, a Gypsy couple slept in a tunnel walkway beneath the street. A black hat lay beside his head; beside hers, a carefully folded, flower-patterned scarf.

We got on the train to Nyíregyháza, that being the farthest point east, and it would run until morning. Which was fine: we had to sleep somewhere. South and east, our plan. Somewhere near Hatvan the conductor appeared. I tried explaining that we didn't have tickets. He was over six feet, all smiles, and repeated, "Kein Problem." Then, with the aid of a piece of paper and a pen, he told us not to worry, we could stay on, he would return, maybe at Füzesabony or Tiszafüred, and sell us the tickets then, so they would be cheaper. He vanished, then reappeared in half an hour, apologetically, saying that it had to be now, there was someone onboard more important than he who might come through and check. With elaborate flourishes he wrote us a receipt. We also had some aszú with us but no corkscrew. Seeing the long-necked bottle, the conductor threw up his hands helplessly, but then disappeared and reappeared with a curious tool for locking compartments and punching ticket holes. We tried it, but the tool was too short, the cork came less than halfway out. Tremendous disappointment on the conductor's face. Again he disappeared, and all we could hear was the echo of his strides in the empty corridor. He returned in a few minutes, beaming, and pulled at my sleeve. The man is so invested in this Tokay, I thought; a pity that the bottle's only half a liter. He explained excitedly, pulling me to the john, pointing at the toilet-paper peg, which was thin, long enough, strong enough. We pushed the cork in. With a sigh of relief, I handed him the bottle. "Drink, brother," I said in Polish. He stood at attention and with solemnity pointed to his uniform, cap, all his officialdom, then clapped me on the shoulder and said something that must have meant "To your health." He appeared again at dawn. He was half asleep and repeated, "Nyíregyháza, Nyíregyhá za." He made sure we hadn't forgotten anything on the train, then waved from the window.

It was that way everywhere. That's how it was at Hidasnémeti at the border station half an hour from Košice, where we got off on a hot platform and the sun rolled in the west like a cut- off rooster's head trailing a ribbon of red. Nothing, as far as the eye could see. The black railway wires vanished in the vastness of burned fields and blowing wind. About the station, guards in Slovak and Hungarian uniforms milling. The borders at the edge of old Europe must have looked like this: emptiness, wind, and garrisons, where you wait for something, for the enemy perhaps, and when the years pass and the enemy doesn't show, you put a bullet through your head out of boredom. A man on a rusty bicycle approached, but I knew only one Hungarian word—the name of a town, Gönc—so I repeated it over and over, until he finally squatted and wrote the departure time with his finger in the sand. He touched my backpack to tell me that the train would be red, raised a finger to tell me it would have only one car. He smelled of wine, beer, and cigarettes. He took off on his bicycle but returned in two hours to make sure we boarded the red car at the station.

It was that way also at Gönc, where in the middle of the night a Gypsy with a gold earring led us down dark lanes between vegetable plots and barking dogs, for several kilometers because he couldn't understand our request, and we followed till we reached a noisy pub where a man sat at a table: the only person in the neighborhood who spoke English. It was he who informed us, finally, that the local pension was closed, the hostess having passed away three days ago. But not to worry, he added, and put us in his Lada, and we went barreling up a hundred hairpin switchbacks deep into the Zemplén Hills. Now and then, in the distance and below, mercury lights flashed from the Slovak side, and over Vel'ka Ida rose a ghoulish industrial glow. But here, on the road to Telkibánya, was nothing but green forest, spruce. Gabor drove us to a hotel stuck in the mountains.

Nothing in Telkibánya, a village that hadn't changed in a hundred years. Wide, scattered houses under fruit trees. The walls a sulfurous, bilious yellow, the wood carving deep brown, the door frames sculpted, the shutters and verandas enduring in perfect symbiosis with the heavy, Baroque abundance of the gardens. The metaphor of settling and taking root appeared to have taken shape here in an ideal way. Not one new house, yet also not one old house in need of repair or renovation. Although we were the only foreigners, we drew no stares. From the stop, in the course of the day, four buses departed. Time melted in the sunlight; around noon, it grew still. In the inn, men sat from the morning on and without haste sipped their palinka and beer in turn. The bartender immediately knew I was a Slav and said, pouring, "
dobre
" and
"na zdorovye.
" It was one of those places where you feel the need to stay but have no reason to. Everything exactly as it should be and no one raising a voice or making an unnecessarily abrupt movement. On a slope above the village, the white of a cemetery. From windows of homes, the smell of stewing onions. In market stalls, mounds of melons, paprikas. A woman emerged from a cellar with a glass jug filled with wine. But we left Telkibánya eventually, because nothing ends a utopia quicker than the desire to hold on to it.

The return trip to Gönc ran through forests and limitless fields of sunflowers. The driver of the white delivery van talked nonstop and didn't mind at all that we couldn't understand him. We too talked. He listened with care and answered in his own tongue. In Gönc he pulled up in front of the Hussite House, but we were less interested in museums, more in the old women sitting in front of the houses on the main street. Like lizards in the sun. Their black clothes stored the afternoon heat, and their eyes gazed on the world without motion and without surprise, because they had seen everything. The women sat in groups of three, four, and in utter silence observed the passage of time.

A shiny škoda Octavia drove up, with Slovak plates, and a family got out. They looked around with uncertainty, and the father, like a brood hen, pushed them together and cast suspicious glances to either side, because—as everyone knows—Slovaks and Hungarians hold mutual grievances. This time it probably had to do not with history but with intuition, instinct, because those newcomers were white and plump as raised dough, round as loaves of bread, dressed up in tourist smartness—shorts, knee-high socks, pocket flaps—while the main street in Gönc was swarthy, dark-haired, and sinewy-nimble even in the quiet of siesta. This was the sort of thing we wanted to see, not the Hussite House with its "curious wooden bed that pulls out like a drawer," as the guidebook said. What happened on the main street in Gönc was more interesting than what had become mere history. It drew us, because life is made of bits of the present that stay in the mind. The world itself, really, is made of that.

The Slovaks drove off, and I went into a liquor store, because it was August 18, the hundred-and-sixty-ninth anniversary of the birth of Franz Josef, and I was determined to celebrate it. When I was again seated on the low wall before the store, there appeared beside me a bearded man in a herringbone coat and nothing under it. Without a word he produced from an inside pocket an enamel mug and lifted it toward me. How could I refuse him, and on this day, the birthday of His Highness? Here I was, traveling through his country, and he granted audiences even to simple peasants and made no distinction between Serb and Slovak, between Pole and Romanian. So I took out the flask of pear brandy I had just purchased and shared it with my fellow man. He drank in silence and pointed at my pack of Kossuths. I gave him a cigarette. Some citizen came by and in the international language of gestures gave me to understand that I was dealing with a lunatic. I reflected that in the empire lunatics too had their place, and I refilled the mug. We drank to the health of Franz Josef. I told my new friend that I had always been partial to sovereigns and caesars, that I particularly missed them in these threadbare times, because democracy cannot satisfy the thirst for the aesthetic and mythic, and so people feel abandoned. My friend nodded emphatically and held out his mug. I poured and told him that the idea of democracy contains a fundamental contradiction, because true power cannot, by its nature, be immanent; it would in that case resemble the most ordinary anarchy, though without all the entertainments and pleasures of anarchy. Power must come from without; only then can we embrace it and revolt against it. "Igen," said my new friend, nodding. A small crowd had gathered around us and was listening to the discussion. People also nodded and said, "Igen, igen." Then my friend proposed that we arm-wrestle. He won twice; I won twice. The crowd kibitzed and cheered. When it was all over, men came up to me, clapped me on the back, and said, "Franz Josef, Franz Josef."

South of Gönc, the plain began. Fields of corn to the blue horizon. The green-gold sea licked the Zemplén foothills and returned in a wave of warm air. On the roads in the fields stood old private automobiles with trailers loaded with the first harvest. The sun shone from straight above, making our shadows no larger than a dog at heel. The roads joined, crossed, separated—from the sky it must have looked like the board of a gigantic game. Ignorant of the rules, we took the wrong turn. That is, we had been making wrong turns from the start, the whole point of our trip, but this time we went in circles. Everywhere—hot wind and the rustle of leaves baked dry. One cornstalk is like another, so we were in a labyrinth. It took us three hours to get out. In a straight line, we must have gone three kilometers.

In Göncruszka the sidewalks were violet from the plums. A swarm of wasps over the fruit, and not a soul in sight. We walked through a village. No sound from any yard. The windows all shuttered. Only Gypsies—they were having a fiesta instead of a siesta, drinking beer in the full sun before a roadside pub. An old Gypsy woman with the face of Ella Fitzgerald was telling her man to stand up. She had her hands on her hips and spoke in a voice that climbed to a scream, but he sat, answered her calmly, indifferently, punctuating his words with light gestures of his right hand. Apparently a scene that the couple had been repeating, with no variation, for God knows how many years. The woman stamped the ground, raising dust.

We walked on, beyond the village. The posts along the road were light blue, and each had painted on it a white infinity sign. Fifty meters apart, they went evenly up and down the hills, and we thought maybe they were a hallucination from the fierce heat, but when the Slovak van finally picked us up, they didn't vanish, they continued flickering past the window until Vilmány, where we got out to look for a railway station among the sunflowers. The station was simply one pair of rails and a patch of beaten earth—no board, no building, no sign or semaphore; we found it only because some people were gathered there, a couple of kids stretched out on dry grass and resigned, with an almost empty bottle of mineral water and a small backpack. There was no roof or tree to provide shade, but to the west lay a vast landscape that shimmered in lilac. The long ridges were indistinct in the heat, but you could make out the church spires in Hernádcéce, Fáj, Garadna, Novajidrány, Vizsoly, and who knows, the hot air may have carried apparitions from Miskolc and Eger all the way here to the Hornád valley. Anything was possible that day. Budapest itself could have sailed in, floating over our heads, and we wouldn't have been surprised.