On the Road to Babadag

Baia Mare

ANYWAY, I SAW Baia Mare in the rays of the sun sinking westward on the Great Hungarian Plain. Remnants of rain still hung in the air, and a rainbow rose over the valley of the Lăpuş River. Damp golden dust billowed up from the plain, the road, the bridge, pastures, from the white clouds of trees in bloom, from the world: the whole province of Maramureş. Light like that occurs only after a storm, when space fills with electricity. It's possible, however, that this light emanated from deep within the earth, from hidden veins of mountain ore. Baia Mare, Nagybánya, the Great Mine, lodes of gold, a Transylvanian El Dorado 250 kilometers from my home — these were my thoughts as I crossed the Lăpuş. To the north, Ignis Mountain, still in shade, its peaks a wet dark blue. The storm preceded us and now was moving along the Black Tisa above Chornohora and Świdowiec.

I saw Baia Mare from a distance, not wanting to drive into the town. Ahead, a bypass to Sighetu and Cluj wove through industrial suburbs. There was not one car or person in sight. The flat field was choked with rusting metal, pieces of concrete, abandoned plastic. Landfill smoldered sleepily, reeking. The sun shone on red-brown construction beams, on the broken windows of factories, on gutted warehouses, on lifeless cranes, on corroded steel, and on eroded brick. Pylons, silos, cranes, and chimneys cast long black shadows. As far as the eye could see, a tangle of wires in the sky, a web of rails on the ground. Mounds of black sludge — some kind of chemical waste — gave way to mounds of containers: polymer, cardboard, glass. Tin cans, rubber hoses, radioactive mud, cyanides from gold mines, lead and zinc, rags and nylon, acids and bases, asphalt, ponds of oil, soot, smoke, the final decadence of industry, all under a bright sky.

Among these ruins and dumps, cows grazed on patches of maltreated grass. In the shadow of a giant steel chimney trotted a flock of sheep. In Baia Mare, time circled. Animals walked between inert machines. These seemingly frail, soft, and defenseless creatures had endured since the beginning of the world and now were quietly triumphant. It was the same in Oradea: cows sunning themselves at railroad junctions, and the train cars off on the sidings had the reddish brown color of the animals but were cold, dead, spent. It was the same outside Satu Mare, where sheep wandered down the center of Route 19, and in Suceava, where a white horse grazed in the heart of town, and again in Oradea, where horses, in a maze of rails and bypasses, among endless hangars and rolling trucks — bays, piebalds, grays, dapples — cropped on the toxic grass. It looked as if they had fed there forever.

A few days later in the Banat, Valiu told us about the first Romanian locomotive. It was built in the town of ReşiŢa in the year 1872, and the people wanted to show it to the emperor in Vienna, because the Universal Exhibition was fast approaching. Unfortunately there were as yet no train tracks in that region. So they hitched the steam engine to twelve pairs of oxen and pulled it toward the Danube, toward the Iron Gates, the port at Turnu-Severin or Orşova, in any case a good hundred kilometers across the green Banat Mountains. The heated bodies of the animals, gleaming with sweat, must have resembled steam engines themselves. Straps, chains, wooden yokes on necks, mud, squeaking, curses, the valley filled with the stink of golden piss mixed with the odors of people and beasts. Over the harnesses, flies swarmed to feed on cuts and scrapes. The black, oiled machine moved slowly, with dignity, and its red abdomen shone so bright that the Serbian and Romanian villagers it passed stood dazzled, made the sign of the cross, spat on the ground in disgust, fear, awe. They had never seen such a thing before and were convinced that the world was coming to an end. The riveted demon proceeded through the countryside to the crack of whips, and the wheels of the platform that carried the monster sliced the earth so deep, the marks would never heal. Fires were lit at the night bivouacs, soldiers stood guard, and the drivers drank themselves senseless, because their hearts were uneasy. Flames flickered in the dark-blue eyes of the oxen.

How long did this expedition take? Valiu, who knew everything about the Banat, didn't recall. Two weeks? Three? At the riverbank, the drivers unhitched the animals, received their pay, and with relief returned to the deep valley forest.

Yes, my Europe is full of animals. The huge muddy swine on the road between Tiszaörs and Nagyiván, the dogs in the beer gardens of Bucharest, the buffalo in Răinari, the horses set loose in Chornohora. I wake at five in the morning and hear the clank of sheep bells. Rain falls, and the mooing of cows is muffled, flattened, echoless. Once I asked a woman why there were so many cows on her farm if no one bought milk. "What do you mean, why?" she replied, puzzled. "We have to keep something, don't we?" It simply didn't occur to her that one could, you know, cut the ancient bond between beast and human being. "What are we if we don't have animals?" That was more or less the sense of her answer: fear of the loneliness of our species. Animals are our link to the rest of the world. We care for and eat our ancestors.

You can see this clearly here, as clearly as in Baia Mare, in the rubble of the industrial world, which lasted no more than a century, and even if someone rebuilds it, it will carry the seeds of its own destruction. Machines are zombies. They live on our lust after objects, on our greed, on our thirst for immortality. They live only as long as they are needed. We look away, and immediately they begin to fall apart, wither, and shake like vampires deprived of blood. Only a few reach a graceful old age. That ferry in Tiszatardos, for example: the creaking wooden platform, propelled by a small diesel engine, slowly and reluctantly crossing the green Tisa. Willows and poplars on both shores. No superstructure but a tin shack where pear brandy and strong coffee were served. The heat bringing the stink of fish and muck up from the river bottom. At one end of the run, a herd of black-and-white cattle belly-deep in the water. The honey sun slowing all motion and sound. In its light, the old boat like a dried leaf blown in from some remote autumn. The engineer as hoary as the boat. For the thousandth time gazing at the scenery, at the verdant mirror of the river. The diesel whirred, smelled of petroleum, blended into the picture. I could not conceive of its absence here. When the chill of fall came, the old man could warm himself beside it. During longer stops, when no customers waited on either shore, he must have tended to it, inspected it, wiped its dun chassis to make sure there was no fuel or oil leak. I think that both were lonely in that unending journey, which brought them neither close to nor far from anything. They were on a pendulum across the current of time.

The day after, I had to be in Baia Mare, which once was called Nagybánya. I had to sniff out that incessant once, which, where I live, is the present, because tomorrow never arrives; it remains in distant countries. Our tomorrow is seduced by their allure, bribed, or possibly just tired. Whatever is to come never gets here; it gets used up en route, flickers out like the light from a lantern too far away. A perpetual decline reigns here, and children are born exhausted. In the slanting light of late autumn, the gestures and bodies of people are more expressive the less meaning they have. Men stand on street corners staring at the emptiness of the day. They spit on the sidewalk and smoke cigarettes. That's the present. That's how it is in the town of Sabinov, in the town of Gorlice, Gönc, Caransebeş, in the whole region between the Black Sea and the Baltic. They stand and count the cigarettes in the packs and the change in their pockets. Time, approaching from afar, is like the air that someone else has already breathed.