On the Road to Babadag

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IT'S POSSIBLE THAT everything I've written so far began with this photograph. The year is 1921, in a small Hungarian town, Abony, seven kilometers west of Szolnok. A blind violinist crosses the street, playing. He is led by a barefoot boy wearing a visored cap, a boy in his early teens. The shoes on the musician's feet are worn, broken. His right foot at the moment rests on a narrow track made by a cart's iron wheel. The street is unpaved. The ground must be dry: the boy's feet are not muddy, and the tracks are not deep. The tracks arc gracefully to the right and disappear into the blurry depths of the photograph. Along the street, a wooden fence, and part of a house is visible — a reflection of sky in its window. Farther on stands a white chapel. Trees grow behind the fence. The musician's eyes are shut. He walks and plays, for himself and for the unseen space around him. Besides these two pedestrians on the street is a child of a few years. He is turned toward them but looks beyond, as if there is something of greater interest following them outside the frame. It's a cloudy day, because neither people nor things cast a sharp shadow. On the violinist's right arm (so he's left-handed) hangs a cane, and on the guide's arm what appears to be a small blanket. Only a few steps separate the two from the edge of the photograph. They'll be gone in a moment, and the music with them. Leaving only the toddler, the road, and the wheel tracks.

For four years I have been haunted by this picture. Wherever I go, I seek its three-dimensional, color equivalent, and often seem to find it. That's how it was in Podoliniec; in the side streets of Lewoczy; in white-hot Gönc, where I was looking for a train station, which turned out to be an empty, ruined building, and no train departed until the evening. That's how it was in Vilmány, on an empty platform amid vast fields melting in the heat; how it was at the marketplace in Delatyn, where old women sold tobacco; how it was in Kwasy, when the train had already left and there was not a soul in sight, though the houses stood close together. And in Solotvino, among the dead mine shafts covered with salt dust, and in Dukla, when a heavy, tedious wind blew from the mountain pass. In all these spots, in 1921, André Kertész put his stamp on the transparent screen of space, as if time had halted then and the present was revealed to be a misunderstanding, joke, or betrayal, as if my appearance in these various locations was an embarrassing anachronism, because I came from the future, but was no wiser for that, only more afraid. The space of this photograph hypnotizes me, and all my traveling has had only one purpose: to find, at long last, the secret passage into its interior.