On the Road to Babadag

Pitching One's Tent in a New Place

IT'S THE MIDDLE of November, and still no snow. For two months I've been preparing for Hungary but am not yet prepared. I think of the northeast, of driving to Szabolcs-Szatmár, because winter must come eventually. I recall the road in Hidasnémeti and how almost a year ago on the day before New Year's Eve we crossed the border in rain. A wet December covered Zemplén like a curtain. Hungary was naked; the black trees hid nothing. Perhaps that is why we were constantly getting lost — in Gönc, Telkibánya, Bózsva, Pálháza, Hollóháza, Kéked, Füzér. The semitransparent land a labyrinth. In the summer this seemed a region of endless noon, even at night. Streetlights in the towns and villages burned long tunnels through the dark. Behind the fences, in muggy gardens among the leaves of walnut and apricot trees, flickered the pale fire from television screens. Now an aqueous light filled all the places that in the summer had lain in shadow. Tokaj was as empty and flat as an old stage set. The Bodrog and the Tisa had lost their smell. Calmly and ruthlessly the weather had taken over. Actually, little had changed since the time when there were no houses here, no cities, and no names. The weather, like the oldest religion, then reigned equally over Beskid, Zemplén, the swamp below the Tisa, ErdŐhát, Maramureş, the Transylvanian Hills, and all the other locations in which I spent months in the vain hope of seeing them as they really were. Rain in Mátészalka, rain in Nagykálló, rain in Nyírbátor. Soggy yards with deep hoofprints of hogs; stripped plots; gardens glistening like glass; houses lower and lower, as if pulled into the soft soil. In Cigánd or Dombrád, on both sides of the road, a chain of puddles looked like flat scraps of gray sky. But that could have been in Gönc as well, or anywhere in Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine. And not a soul in sight. As in a dream, long streets with single-story buildings on either side and no business, no pedestrians, vehicles, or dogs.

The scraps of sky were probably in Abaújszántó, on the main road, a blue house to the left, a church to the right. A little farther on stood a yellow house with bay windows and a green gate in a low surrounding wall. Several willows there too. But this, I think now, was on the way back, on New Year's Eve. It was in that unpopulated town, at a deserted cross street leading to a windy valley below the massif of Szokolya, that we found a pub, an italbolt, because we wanted to get rid of the rest of our forints. Cigarette smoke and talk hung in the air, and some kind of sedentary holiday was being observed, in which you didn't leave your chair, only raised your voice, made slow gestures, had shining eyes. Through the cloud of tobacco, it seemed that absolute silence had to be maintained on the street and that only in this dark room did the rule not apply. All these citizens sitting at tables had left their homes to make some noble, far-reaching plans, as if an enemy had come or an epidemic, and, unable to endure the solitude any longer, they huddled together here like chickens. But then the cigarette haze parted a little, and I saw a few Gypsies in black leather jackets, and two Gypsy women who had dyed their hair blond.

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."