On the Road to Babadag

Our Leader

BUT THAT'S WHAT it's like: any moment you take the wrong turn, stumble, get lost— geography's no help — and forget the objective eye. Nothing is as it first appears; splinters of meaning lurk everywhere, and your mind catches on them like pants on barbed wire. You can't simply write, for example, that we crossed the border at Siret at night on foot, and the Romanian guards, who kept in check the entire passageway and five buses carrying dozens of tons of contraband, let us through with a gruff but friendly laugh. On the other side, there was only the night. We waited for something to come from Ukraine and take us, but nothing came, no old Lada, no Dacia. It's strange finding yourself in a foreign land when the only scenery is the dark. Off to a side, crawling shadows beyond the glass, so we went in their direction, because at that hour a man is like a moth, drawn to any light. In the border tavern, two guys sat at a small table playing a game resembling dominoes. We ordered coffee. The bartender made it in a saucepan on a hot plate. It was good, strong. Hearing us speak Polish, he tried too, but we understood only babka ("grandmother") and Wrocław. We asked about the bus or whatever, but he spread his arms and said something like "dimineaŢă tîrg in Suceava." In that blue, breath-humid light I drank Bihor palinka for the first time. It was worse than any Hungarian brandy, but it warmed, and I wanted something more than coffee since this fellow had a grandmother in Wrocław.

We went back to the road, but nothing had changed. A glow above the border; the darkness to the south, like India ink drying. An hour before dawn, cars began to assemble in front of the tavern. They stopped and waited for those buses that had been imprisoned between barriers; they were waiting for merchandise. A Dacia arrived, its tail scraping the asphalt. Four men inside. The driver got out and said, "Suceava zece dolar." He grabbed our knapsacks, threw them on the roof of the car, and tried tying them down. I asked him how the hell he thought this could work, pointing at the guys packed inside. He smiled and patted his knees: we'd fit somehow, one on top of the other. He was in a wonderful mood, and you could smell the drink on him. M. shouted no, she didn't care to end up a statistic without seeing even a little of verdant Bukovina. So we untied the cords and pulled our stuff down. The driver made a sad face and said, "Cinci dolar." M. replied, "Eu nu merg"; then we were alone in the cold wind blowing from Chernivtsi.

When the sky had turned to dark blue, a red Passat Kombi drove up and a man said, "Cincisprezece dolar," and we didn't object, because this conveyance was empty, spacious, and warm. Cincisprezece is not much for fifty kilometers after a sleepless night. We took off like a bat out of hell. Ahead of us, mist. The man chattered, mixing Romanian, Russian, and German. He attempted Polish. He had done Europe, including Warsaw. He said he would take us, then come back here, because the buses with the goods would be let through eventually, and the wheeling and dealing would start up just past the barriers. They always let the buses in, and he would fill his Passat to the top with bicycle wheels, tires, boxes of laundry detergent, chocolate bars, earflap hats in the middle of summer because they were cheaper now, and all the other riches of the Ukrainian land. He would take us, then return, and go back again to Suceava, to the big market not far from a factory that stank of sulfuric acid, a field covered with tented booths to the horizon. He went on and on, and in his headlights now and then we saw the gleaming eyes of horses pulling unseen wagons with sleeping drivers. He talked, but I kept dozing off. T. turned and remarked, "Look at that steering wheel." Again we passed a mysterious vehicle, and the man made a full half-turn of the wheel before the car responded. Our speedometer was broken, but I was certain he had the gas pedal to the floor. So I opened my eyes and listened to the map of Europe: Berlin, Frankfurt, Kiev, Budapest, Vienna…

Suceava was a shadow in ultramarine. We tore across a viaduct. The main station was under repair, so we went to Gara Suceava Nord, wanting to continue south, without stopping, along the Siret River and turn west only around Adjud, leave Moldova, and get to Transylvania. That was our plan. To keep going and sleep on the trains, which would all come at our convenience and take us where we wanted to go.

Gara Suceava Nord was as big as a mountainside and dark. Like entering a cave. The yellow light barely dispersed the gloom. We made our way through a crowd. A crowd at four in the morning is a curious thing: a meeting in a madhouse. Those who stood or moved had their eyes open but seemed asleep, under a spell, the effect of that insomniac light, which trickled out from who knows where. It could have come from the ceiling, from the walls, or maybe from people's bodies. Not enough of it, in any case, for us to believe in the reality of all these tableaux vivants, in fitful slow motion, in the belly of the station. Someone here wasn't real: either we or they.

At any rate, there were no trains heading south at that hour, and we didn't have the strength to wait. We went outside. Taxis in a row, their drivers chatting and smoking. Mainly Dacias, and two ancient Mercedes. Instead of going by rail, I thought we could take a car across the Petru Vodă Pass, the Bicaz Gorge, the Bicaz and Bucin Passes, in this way crossing the main ridge of the Carpathians to reach at last the heart of Transylvania. But the keepers of meters went wide-eyed when they heard "Tîrgu Mureş," and they shook their heads when they heard "Sighiş oara." It was only three hundred kilometers, we said, but they opened their arms and kicked the tires of their automobiles, because they didn't believe that any of them could climb so high and return in one piece. Only one, who drove an old green boxy Mercedes, put his hands in his pockets, spat, and said, "Două sute dolar." We realized then that they took us for lunatics.

A young, slender boy said he would drive us to a hotel, so we could sleep. Like children, we let ourselves be packed into a red Dacia. We were powerless. Hotel Socim, we said. He didn't advise that. But we were stupidly stubborn, thinking the kid wanted to fleece us. He smiled, as if to say, "Lord Jesus has forsaken you," but he helped us with our bags and drove us into the dawning city. He took what was on the meter, no more, and promised that if we phoned, he would come for us.

And what an awakening that was on Jean Bart Street 24… The ceiling so low, it was hard to sit on the bed. To be safe, I didn't get up, only listened to one big truck after another right at the window. They passed by like a train, without pause. You couldn't close the window, either, because it was an oven inside. An oven at the window too. The room had only the bed and a dresser. I was afraid to open it. Odd noises came from the corridor. I was afraid to go out. But I finally did, in search of a toilet. From a window in the corridor I saw laundry on a line, an apartment building, sheds, a white horse grazing. In the bathroom, a cleaning woman yelped with fright at the sight of me, overturning a bucket of dirty water. It didn't matter, because there was a wooden grating on the floor, as in barracks and prisons. The bathroom was cool, quiet.

We slept no more than three hours. It was just as stifling in the street as it was inside. Dust hung in the still air. Toddlers sitting in the shade of concrete stairs watched us pass. From a bar on the corner came the smell of food. We had sour tripe soup, with a roll and hot green paprika, which made us break into a sweat. We phoned, and the driver actually came for us. Again he was all energy and happy to help. We asked him if he had slept. He said no. He looked at the door of Hotel Socim but was tactful and said nothing. We told him we needed to buy train tickets, to change money, to be in Cluj that evening. To everything he said, "No problem." He put our bags in the trunk, but it wouldn't close, so he tied it with wire, and we were off, leaving Jean Bart Street 24 forever. In fact everything for him was no problem. He found an exchange office that gave the best rate. At the window counter, he took the wad of bills from me and carefully counted them; only then did we leave. At the Romanian Orbis, the line had been there two hours and was hardly moving. The computer screen at the cashier's desk was blank. When someone reserved a seat, the woman phoned all the stations and made the reservation. We didn't want to wait. Our train would leave in half an hour, and it didn't matter to us whether we boarded with or without a ticket, as long as we left baking Suceava. Our taxi driver, however, said something like "Take it easy" in Romanian and stood at the head of the line, delivering a speech to the people there. Ten minutes later we were rushing through the city, our pockets full of small brown-and-green tickets in antique cardboard. Everyone honked at us, and we honked at everyone. The red Dacia took the turns like a fire engine. Our new friend drove with one hand, looking for music on the radio with the other. We were at the Gara de Nord five minutes before departure. We wanted to run to make the train, but he said the trip was long and we had nothing to eat or drink. The line at the station kiosk was long, almost half that for the tickets, but he entered the glass stand, asked us through the window how many beers we wanted, mineral water, and what on our sandwiches, as he hugged and kissed the girl working in a white cap behind the counter. That's how it was, I'm not making this up. The girl took our money, gave us change, and we were at the platform on the dot, with just time enough to say goodbye and shake hands. The kid took what was on the meter, no more.

So we traveled southwest: Gura Humorului, Cîmpulung Moldovenesc, Vatra Dornei, in the heart of green Bukovina, among the mountains. I remember nothing in particular of that trip, so I must invent it from scratch. A heavyset man in our compartment took up a seat and a half and didn't like us. He was about sixty, well fed, and no doubt remembered better days, when there was order in his country and foreign riffraff didn't wander in at will and drink Ursus beer on trains. At any rate he made that sort of face. Now I reconstruct: his gray suit and the purple shirt he removed before Vatra Dornei. The light-blue towel he hung around his neck. He went to the toilet in a white undershirt, his arms flabby and hairless. Anyway, I have to make up these details because something must have happened that long day before the evening in Cluj, where it poured as it is pouring now. I have to invent, because days cannot sink into a past filled only with landscape, with inert, unchanging matter that finally shakes us from our corporeality, brushes off and away all these little incidents, faces, existences that last no longer than a glimpse. So the old man returned and dozed, though we had hoped he would wash before he returned, not before bedtime. Perhaps one travels for the purpose of preserving facts, keeping alive their brief, flickering light.

In Cluj it poured. In front of a pizza parlor by the station, guys in leather jackets did some business while their girls gossiped. And as happens everywhere, two grabbed a third by the arms and dragged him into the dark. The station in Cluj: again a crowd, dim yellow light, the stink of bodies and cigarettes. We had to get our tickets stamped for the next day. A boy spotted us in the crush, saw that we were not local, standing there like calves, unsure where to go. He took the old-fashioned cardboard from us, and in five minutes the stamping was done. He said, "Drum bun," and disappeared in the crowd like a guardian angel in worn Adidas.

The next morning, Horea Street gleamed in the sun. The synagogue, not far from the bridge on the Şomes, had four towers topped with gilded cupolas. It resembled the one in the Gypsy quarter of Spišské Podhradie but was larger. For lunch we had the usual, ciorba de burta, Romanian tripe soup, with a roll and paprika. Somewhere in the vicinity, Hungarian lords had burned Gheorghe Doja at the stake, then quartered his remains and hung them on the gates of Buda, Pest, Alba Iulia, and Oradea. Szeged got the head. The typical end, this, of "peasant kings." Even when an army of tens of thousands stands behind them and the pope gives his blessing for a final albeit failed crusade against the Turks. I sat at a pub on the street named after Doja, drank coffee, and in a couple of hours would be looking, from the windows of a train, at the grassy waste of Transylvania, where five hundred years ago Doja's peasant divisions marched. In the compartment of the train was that Japanese man who collected women's folk costumes. According to T., he put them on in front of a mirror in his home in Tokyo or Kyoto.

His tour guide had said that Ceauşescu united the Romanian people, making everyone equally guilty, and anyone claiming not to have taken part in it was lying. But I gazed at the scorched hills and tried to picture the divisions of light cavalry, dark moving points on the horizon appearing and disappearing with the rhythm of the hills. I tried to imagine this death-dealing procession of beggars. For the first and last time as free people they measured their land. In clothes and weapons taken from their masters, on horses taken from their masters, they marched to Cluj, to Timişoara, to fall at last in defeat under the July sun. Fifty thousand cut down, hanged, left to the birds and thrown to the dogs. Ravens drawn from the Carpathians, the Hungarian Lowlands, from Moldavia and Wallachia. The heat hastens decay, erases the traces. Nothing is left of these rebel poor. Doja was burned on a mock throne with a mock scepter in his hand. So writes Sándor PetŐfi.

On the train I looked out the window and imagined the tattered and ecstatic army of shepherds, swineherds, peasants who attempted, if only for a moment, to grasp for themselves the life of their masters — that is, to be free, to seize the wealth of others, and to rule by force. A few months earlier, I had sought out the grave of Jakub Szela in Bukovina. I asked here and there, my excuse for traveling to the end of the world. Some said he lay in Clit; others, near the Ukrainian border, in Vicşani.

I believed them both. I even began to think that the Austrians dealt with him somewhat as the Hungarian lords had dealt with Doja: dismembering the memory of him, a memory that at any moment might prove dangerous. Finally Szela, according to Ludwik Dębicki, "pretended to be a mystic and sectarian in a peasant's cloak." Of all possible places of concealment I liked Vicşani best, unlikely as it was: lost among fields, far from everything, godforsaken. Beyond it, nothing, nothing in any direction. The great expanse of treeless land, which nevertheless someone tilled here and there, was a breathtaking contradiction of the pathetic little village where the only machine I saw was one bicycle. Our automobile here was a monstrosity, a challenge. In this piece of upland between RădăuŢi and Suceava, small horse-drawn carts moved among endless folded fields. The black earth, newly plowed, joined the sky, and those tiny figures — thin, veined horses — were practically invisible in their insignificance. If they stopped moving, there would no longer be a reason for their existence. A whim: to set little toys in a vast landscape, to enjoy the helplessness of figurines out of a Christmas crèche.

The village smelled of manure and spring. Orchards bloomed behind fences. The cooperative store was located in a brick building. A peasant clad in black told us they had beer there. We found a girl with keys at the farm next door. She opened it for us. We asked about Szela, said to have been buried around there, but she didn't know, didn't even seem to know the name, though she was Polish. A few small tables, and a peculiar jumble, as if someone had been building sets for a film. The interior a gray-green. Wooden boxes on the floor, the sort once used to transport siphons for seltzer, except they were filled with liter-and-a-half bottles of wine. Two kinds of beer, two kinds of cigarettes, ashtrays full of butts as if after a reception. Propaganda posters on the wall, and a window that opened to a yard in which pink piglets wandered. That was it. Yet these few objects, pieces of furniture, and commodities together created an extraordinary chaos, as if things had been tossed here in the middle of their use, dropped, as if in this very spot the energy of the world had run out. We drank a beer each.

The girl was silent but finally said she would take us to the old cemetery outside the village; maybe Szela was there. But only clumps of thorny plants were there — no gravestones, crosses, or markers. A pity, I thought, for him to have to lie here — and someday be resurrected here, of all places. Little imagination was needed to see him enter the cooperative store: it would come as no surprise, because immobility, sorrow, and abandonment do not change in time or space. It must have been the same in the tavern of the Jew Semek in Siedliska on February 20, 1846. Snow lay on the fields; it was cold and dim inside, full of the stink of heated, unwashed bodies. "Get to work, boys, and hurry, for time passes." Szela wore his black cassock, held in his hand the saber taken at Bogusze and tapped the ground with it like a walking stick. In the courtyard, blood seeped into the snow. You could smell the vodka from broken kegs. The Austrians had made him king of the peasants for twenty-four hours, and the day was drawing to a close. "Get to work, boys, and hurry, for time passes." The cursed blood of the lords seeping into the snow, the taken saber, the peasants with ducats clinking in their pockets, but the dimness and the stink were unalleviated. The village elder Breinl told him in Tarnów, "The Archduke Ferdinand is number one, but in Galicia you are second in command." Some say Szela planned to take the ten-year-old Zosia Boguszówna for his wife. Peasant blood would mix with noble blood and give rise to a race that would inherit the reborn land. It's possible that he had no faith in his strength, that the blueprint for a new world would repeat the gestures of the lords in an empty, abstract reality that puts up no resistance.

So he could rise from the grave and enter the cooperative store in Vicşani, and it would be as if he had never died, since no doubt there was little difference between that store and the tavern of the Jew Semek. He could simply start again after a hundred and fifty years, though without the Austrian blessing. So I reflected, standing in the noon sun. Having traveled several hundred kilometers, I had the right to these thoughts. In addition, I came from his native region. I looked in the direction of Moldova and wondered whose blood he would want to shed today, and with whose blood he would want to mix his own. The flies flew heavy and slow in the cooperative store. On the shelf were two kinds of cigarettes, the cheapest. No aristocracy nearby, yet the air inside had the same stuffy, impoverished taste. I thought: You sit here, Szela, drinking Ursus or Silva, and there's no one for you to go after. If you try, the world will part before you like a phantom, and your hands will clutch emptiness. You'll accomplish shit here. The most you could do is go to Suceava and like a postindustrial Luddite smash a sky-blue ATM. Nowadays you can't become another person through the simple transfer of goods or objects. Killing won't let you enter your victim's body and life. Wealth has become an elusive thing; it floats in the air, materializing now and then — here, there. Whereas poverty, abandonment, and ruin are concrete, tangible, and thus it will always be. All the treasures of the world are now the property of no one in particular, and no plunder will exalt you, no violence ennoble you. Left to you is only the ATM in Suceava as a physical emanation of the remote, all-powerful evil that will never permit the last to be first.

In this way I spoke to the spirit of Jakub Szela on the edge of Europe among the lanes of Vicşani. I was filled with left-wing sentiments but had no regard whatever for revolutionary fire. A kilometer on, in an open field by the road, sat a man reading a newspaper. Nothing as far as the eye could see, yet he hardly looked up at our car. We drove south, to the village of Clit, to check another possible resting place. Which made sense, because Clit lay a few kilometers from Solca. The Austrians sent Szela to Solca when it was all over. At an intersection after RădăuŢi stood a Romanian cop. He stood smack in the middle of the intersection. At the sight of our car, he turned his back pointedly and looked off into the distance. A friendly gesture, probably, pretending not to notice us, because we were a provocation.

In Clit, people spoke an odd tongue. Like Ukrainian, but I understood only every fifth word. I asked a woman in a kerchief if this was a Ukrainian village. My Ruskie, she replied: We are Russians. We asked about Szela, if she had heard such a name here or in the area. She shook her head, then said she would take us to the oldest man in the village. The road was dry and dusty. The wooden houses had white-and-green walls and shutters. On the ground lay pink and white petals from flowering apple trees. In the distance, the gleam of a pond. Geese walked in that direction, unattended. A man in faded jeans emerged from the shadows and dust. He didn't look so very old. He pondered awhile, asked that the name be repeated, then asked us himself, directly, if this Szela person… was that one of our "father leaders"? "Perhaps, in a way," we answered evasively. He finally gave up and said there was someone here, not old but worldly, just got back from Germany, who might be able to help. The old man called him out of a roadside bar. This person was about forty and dressed in overalls with a sewn-on Esso patch. P. remarked that Esso was practically Shell, so we might be close. We spoke in Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Polish, but it turned out that all they could do for us was show us where the cemetery was. They took us there, wished us luck, a pleasant trip, good health, and left us in the cool of the trees. The old man went down the hill slowly and carefully. Occasionally the younger man took his arm. They didn't have to accompany us; they could have pointed to the hill from a distance; but in that part of the world, looking for someone's grave is far more important than the usual tourism, and people treat it with respect. By entering their cemetery, apparently we became their guests.

Yes. Szela could have been lying in Clit. From the hill we had a view of a white, cupolaed Orthodox church and a neo-Gothic Catholic church. His native Smarzowa was also in the Pogórze range, though the valleys there were narrower and the peaks covered with forest. Here everything was naked, whether tilled or grassy. On the horizon, a ribbon of blue heat. There was no trace of our "father leader."

Nor could there be a trace, because as you travel, history constantly turns into legend. Too much is happening and in too big a space. No one can remember it all, let alone write it down. You can't devote attention to events that come out of nowhere and whose purpose and sense remain unclear to the end. No one will wrap things into a whole, cobble a finished tale. Neglect is the essence of this region. History, deeds, consequences, ideas, and plans dissolve into the landscape, into something considerably older and vaster than all the striving. Time gets the better of memory. Nothing can be remembered with certainty, because actions do not line up according to the principle of cause and effect. A long narrative about the spirit of the times in this place seems a project as pathetic as it is pretentious, like a novel written from the point of view of God. Paroxysm and tedium rule here in turn, and that is why this region is so human. "One of your father leaders?" Why not? I thought. In a sense, both ours and yours. Ultimately, in Szela was embodied the desire for violent change, a rejection of one's fate that at the same time suddenly turns into acceptance of what that fate brings.