On the Road to Babadag

The Ferry to Galaţi

SO, SPACE IS just a kind of eternal present. The cold air from Ukraine and Russia descends on Romania. My Bucharest friend says in the receiver, in English, "Very, very cold." I try to imagine a naked Danube Delta, blue ice covering the canals, but it's not easy; first I have to cross, mentally, the space that separates me from Sfântu Gheorghe and Sulina: šariš, Zemplén, Szabolcs-Szatmár, Maramureş, Transylvania, Baraganul, Dobruja… I have to imagine chill entering all those places I knew in spring and summer. I have to shake off their heat as a dog shakes off water, because I can't believe that it's freezing now between Samova and NiculiŢel, that the pigs aren't rolling in the dust of the concrete-hard clay yards behind cane fences, and that snow now lies on the thatched roofs of the mud huts along the curved pavement from which you can see Ukraine and the white ships sailing the Chilia arm of the Danube. It is hard to imagine hot dust not rising from the floor of the bus, hard to imagine the poplar grove by the ferry to GalaŢi leafless, empty, devoid of characters drinking vodka at 15,000 lei a flask, purchased in a store sided with sheet metal and hot as an oven. It seems impossible that Bratianu now is completely different, that the drunks have most definitely all gone away, and the dogs too, the pack of scruffy mongrels near the ferry that looked like the younger brothers of the drunks, man and dog equally sad and withered by the sun.

I lack the imagination. For that reason I have to pack, stuff into my pockets odds and ends, passport, money, and go see what it's really like. Whenever the time of year or the weather changes, I have to pack up whatever I can't do without and visit all those places I've been before, to make sure they still exist.

And the ferry to GalaŢi, embarking from the low shore, where gaunt horses once grazed on faded fields? Onboard, among a few newly washed cars, came a faded Dacia pickup carrying a huge sow that stank to high heaven. They must have come a long way, because the animal was covered with shit. I took in the foulness with pleasure as I leaned against the back fender of a black Mercedes in which a clean-shaven guy wearing mirror glasses was sitting with a blonde, gold on her ears, and I looked to the far bank of the Danube, at the big rusty cranes of the port. This was my Romania — this momentary brotherhood of Mercedes, gold, reeking pig, and industrialization whose tragic abandonment was on the same grand scale as its size. In five minutes the sow, the limos, and my group parted company forever.

It gives me no rest, my wish to know the fate of all these scenes that entered my eyes and have remained in my thoughts. What happens to them when I am no longer there? Unless I have taken them with me, immobilized them for all time in my mind, and they will be with me until the end, untouched by the change of seasons and the weather.

What will become of those two characters in dark trousers, white shirts, ties, and shoes that gleamed as if just polished? They extricated me from the middle of Tecuci, a flat and dusty town, took me out for a few kilometers' spin, and with a fountain pen on a scrap of paper wrote "Bacau" so I could have something to wave in the face of the drivers. In the stifling Moldovan dusk, they looked like angels. I didn't ask them for help; they simply appeared because I was tired and lost. Nor were these Orthodox angels. Later I read what was on the reverse side of the makeshift flier they handed me — this sentence among others: "Creaza o buna imagino publica Bisericii Adventiste." My angels were Seventh-Day Adventists and understood me, because in Tecuci they were just as lost as I was.

Now it all seems so simple. Events intersect free of any logic of sequence; they cover space and time in an even, translucent layer. Memory re-creates them from the back, from the front, or sideways, but to them it makes no difference. This is the only way in which meaning will not trip us up, not knock from our hands the thing we were grasping for. Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin? No doubt somewhere along Route 120, somewhere near a place called Tasca, the transition began. I was picked up by a hundred-year-old Audi. Inside, everything hung, peeled, fell apart. Loose wires from the dashboard, strips of upholstery from the ceiling, wind and dust from the floor. The man behind the steering wheel sat in shorts and an undershirt. A gold chain around his neck, yellow flip-flops on his feet. He was brown from the sun; only a little white showed from under his broad watchband. On the rotaries the engine would sputter, so he kept his foot on the gas and didn't slow down when he should have. We were to cross the deepest ravine in Europe. We tried conversing. He was from Satu Mare and hated Hungarians. To show me how much he hated them, he passed, with his wreck, spotless Passats and Cordobas that had Hungarian license plates. The road was not the best for passing, full of curves. He passed uphill, his head out the window to see a meter or two farther. I was afraid but I had a flask of Romanian brandy on me.

By Bicaz-Chei it was almost dark. The walls of the ravine were several hundred meters and we drove as if through a giant cave. I was in awe of this wonder of nature but at the same time wouldn't have missed the moment of our crash for anything. My driver muttered curses and punched the steering wheel when he lacked power and for several dozen meters had to stare at the silver rear of a Seat Ibiza with a Budapest license plate. At the mountain pass were stalls with handmade goods for tourists. Then we descended. After one curve, a herd of horses on the asphalt. Some with bells. We swerved left, directly into the path of an oncoming bus. Both we and the bus managed to stop athwart the road. Apparently this was normal, because my driver made the sign of the cross only three times, and we continued at the previous speed. But now he crossed himself each time he passed. I got out on the main street in Gheorgheni. Two men got into the car, both like the driver, only less brown and with thicker chains. I saw him give them large packs of bills, ten-thousand-lei notes, which throughout our drive had rolled back and forth in the backseat.

And that was all. Part two might have taken place in the evening, in Slovakia somewhere. In a roadside pub, let's say, between šariš and Zemplén, where two truck drivers ate potato pancakes with braised liver and onions. They drank tea and looked at a dripping faucet topped by a gold pheasant. From the small room by the bar, every now and then, a dark-haired young woman came out. She ordered four borovičkas and disappeared with the shot glasses behind a wood partition from which wafted cigarette smoke and male laughter. Each time she appeared for a new round, she whispered with the barmaid at length, as if wanting to put off the moment of her return. Only when voices were raised through the flimsy wall did she break off her nervous, rapid chatter. I couldn't figure out if the drinks on the tray belonged to her, or why she was serving those loud, invisible men. Coaxing them to commit a crime — or perform a good deed? Because she paid for each and every round, pulling from the tight pocket of her jeans rolls of red hundreds. All this happened in a place and season different from those I'm trying to summon now. Most likely it was between Nemecká and Predajná, on the road to Banská, and it was winter.

With events that have passed there is no problem, provided we don't attempt to be wiser than they are, provided we don't use them to further our own ends. If we let them be, they turn into a marvelous solution, a magical acid that dissolves time and space, eats calendars and atlases, and turns the coordinates of action into sweet nothingness. What is the meaning of the riddle? What is the use to anyone of chronology, sister of death?

At midnight in Kisvárda, bass speakers rumbled, and boys revved up and made their tires squeal, to stop ten meters further on. In the sultry night at the border, their shaved skulls glowed like milky lightbulbs. We were seeking a place to sleep, but this town had insomnia. The proximity of the border drove away sleep. In suburbs, the hedges of gaudy villas built in a month or a week. Vampire pistachio, rabid rose, venomous yellow. Downtown was old, hidden among trees full of deep shadows that swallowed up alleyways. But the crowd at Krucsay Marton Street, insect-like in its movements yet also lethargic, brought to mind a party of conquistadors at an aborted conquest. Or a herd of animals that found itself in the city but could derive no benefit from it. The young men shifted here and there, engaged, sniffed each other, parted, and again approached, joined by unseen threads of business, fear, need. They circled in the light like moths. The neurosis of the border: swift victory, swift defeat. Twenty kilometers farther on was Záhony, the only way from Hungary to Ukraine, so everything here budded, swelled, inflated, gathered strength. At the Hotel Bastya, a huge bleach blonde from another time wouldn't take dollars or marks, only forints, which we didn't have.

The hotel outside the city had Paris in its name, or Paradise. It looked like a set for a local remake of Caligula: plaster fountains, statues, plush, drapery. In the parking lot, the black gleaming fat asses of BMWs and Mercedes. A guy whose eyes were both empty and sensitive told us there were no rooms. But he took forints from his pocket and sold them to us at a relatively decent rate of exchange. We asked him who was staying here, Hungarians only or Ukrainians too? He regarded us as if we were children. "Ukrainians?" he replied in English. "They aren't European people."

We drove in the direction of Vásárosnamény and suddenly found ourselves in darkness and silence. Passing Ilk and Anarcs, we could hear the sound of sleepers breathing behind wooden shades in the windows of the low houses, and we could smell the nocturnal damp rising from the gardens. In the town we knocked long at a hotel door before a sleepy porter in carpet slippers opened for us. On the lobby walls were trophies: a zebra skin, the stuffed head of an antelope, exotic antlers. In the dimness of a side corridor, a spotted thing that could have been a leopard. Aside from the woman who finally turned on the lights in the kitchen and this porter, there was not a soul in the hotel.

Sometimes I get up before sunrise to watch the way the dark thins out and objects slowly reveal themselves, the trees, the rest of the landscape. You can hear the river below and roosters in the village. The light of dawn, cold and blue, gradually fills the world, and it's the same in every place I've been. The dark pales into the district of Sękowa, in the town of Sulina, on the edge of the Danube Delta — and everywhere time is made of night and day. I drink coffee and picture the light of another place.