On the Road to Babadag

Ţara Secuilor, Székelyföld, Szeklerland

MEANWHILE I PIECED my old map back together with tape. It had torn and cracked from being constantly folded and unfolded in the wind, across my knees, on the hood of the car. I bought it long ago in Miercurea-Ciuc, 150 kilometers to the east. No maps are for sale here, though the land between Sachsenbach, Magyarcserged, and Roşia de Secaş is like an illustration out of the oldest geography book: treeless undulation. The hills collapsing under their own weight, the enormous sky bearing down. In this limitless monotony of ground, the flocks of sheep are nearly invisible. The animals are the color of sunburned grass.

It's an oven every time I come here. I consult my map and notice that on the field path from Cergău two men are pushing bicycles. They mount when they reach asphalt and ride along a desolate hollow. They roll like black pebbles on the edge between sky and bleached grass. Soon I can make out the fluttering of their open jackets. When the road sinks a little, they don't need to pedal. The first passes me and takes a hairpin turn down toward Rothkirch. The second brakes, approaches, stands. He is tattered and dirty. The clothes and old-fashioned bicycle are both coming apart. Of what he says, I understand only foc and fuma, so I take out my lighter as he digs in his pockets and finds a pack of Carpat i. I light his cigarette; he inhales, thanks me, and takes off again on his squeaking bicycle, whose rust has eaten the grease in every mechanical part. The cloud of smoke and the body odor he leaves behind dissipate in the air, which in turn fills with ubiquitous sheep dung and trampled herbs. The wind again lifts his black jacket, then the man is gone forever. I consult the map and try to determine if he is headed toward Székásveresegyháza, Tău, or Ohaba, villages that resemble muddy turtle shells lying in a depression. Seen from above: the walls a dusty, dingy bile-yellow, the roofs covered with bronze scales.

It's the same at Şpring, a ground-floor town. The houses run like walls along either side of the road. Squat and heavy houses, whose canopied gateways lead to cramped yards, but that's just my guess, because the gates are all shut and seem permanently locked, in fear of the vastness above the bare hills.

Desertum— that's what this region was called when King Bela III brought settlers from Flanders and from the Rhine and Mosel regions. In those days, a distance of 1,500 kilometers meant for the common man that he would not have the strength to return. Clumsy carts on huge wheels, yoked oxen across the Brabant, up the Rhine. Through Moguntia, the narrow valleys of the Black Forest, with cattle blatting-bellowing all about, in mud, then near Freiburg they had to find the thin thread of the Danube, then endure rain at stops between Augsburg and Ratisbon, campfires made from wet logs, the smoke blackening earthen pots, the continent tilting gently to the east, but what suffices for the flow of a river is small comfort for people who are mired and dread a future that mingles with and is mistaken for open space.

I stopped at şpring, for coffee. But it easily could have been in Gergeschdorf. The pub had iron chairs and tables. A hot and filthy place. Two men sat in a corner, reeking of sheep, looking as if they had emerged from a primeval time: black, thickset, with beard and matted hair tangled into one. Beside them, a dilapidated pinball machine. They had obviously just left their animals: the pants at the knees gleamed with the grease that covers wool. Despite the heat they wore sweaters and cloaks. They drank their Ciuc beer without a word, staring, to each side, at the room, which must have been too small for them, confining, so they drank gulp after gulp, to get back outside as soon as possible.

The bartender had a white, puffy face. I spoke a few words in Romanian, but he only took my money, gave me change, and returned to his dreary kingdom of a couple of bottles of Bihor palinka, Carpati cigarettes, and capped, potbellied flasks of wine cheaper than Coke or Fanta. There was also an enamel pot and a percolator covered with charred brown — a veteran of hundreds of boiled coffees.

I took my coffee and sat by the window to gaze out at the Transylvanian swelter. The two men now had produced, from somewhere, 1.5-liter plastic jugs and were waiting at the counter for them to be filled with beer. Then I saw them walking down the baked street, their silhouettes as dark as their shadows, their movements quick, minimal, efficient, like those of animals.

No one else entered. The guy behind the bar killed time with the help of little activities that invariably slowed and stopped. Pale and massive, he absorbed time like a sponge. Moved something, wiped something, adjusted something, but the future never came. His ancestors arrived here eight hundred years ago on carts drawn by oxen. They built cities, villages, and fortified churches on hilltops. They established hospitals and homes for the elderly. They chose their own priests and judges. They answered to the king alone and were exempt from paying taxes. They only had to provide the Royal Hungarian Army with five hundred mounted soldiers. They brought with them, in their heads, images of their homes and shrines left along the Rhine, to re-create them here in the same shape and proportions. A Gothic of brick and stone thus materialized among the hills of this desert. Clocks on four-sided towers were wound and began marking the hours, which before had passed in an uninterrupted flow.

Nothing happening outside the window. From over the dry hills the heat came, floated in through the open door, filled the interior, all the crap and clutter, dirt, notched glasses, greasy steins, cloudy bottles, cadaverous plastic. The heat settled in stifling waves on the broken furniture, pressed against the walls, against the flyspecked panes, swept this entire dumping ground of remnants pretending to be useful, resolutely playing out a comedy of survival. The Transylvanian desert entered the pub in Gergeschdorf and made itself at home.

I took my cup to the counter. The man didn't even look up. Only when I said, "Danke, auf wiedersehen," did he look, as if seeing me for the first time. He tried to do something with his heavy face, but I was no longer there.

That same day I drove to Roşia, a village forty kilometers southeast. I wanted to see the place where the pastor lived who wrote books and was a prison chaplain. He wasn't at home, had gone to Budapest. Or that's what the man said who opened the church for me. Inside, it was cramped and bare. Cushions on the benches. In that space of stone, all the fittings were random and flimsy, as if somebody had attempted to put furniture in an ancient cave. From the motto on the black pennant, I could recall only “… so will ich dir die Krone des Lebens geben." Six-armed candelabras, red tapers. The pews held no more than a dozen people. I had read that the parishioners were mostly Gypsies. The smell of sacred antiquity had permeated the walls, and now the walls exuded it, but as a feeble, reproachful scent, attenuated by many years of damp and cold, as in the house of old people whom no one ever visits. Or in a dollhouse long outgrown by its owner. Afterward, I went to the edge of the village, to look at the Oltu valley. On the northern slopes of the Negoiu and Moldoveanu lay snow. A swarthy family in a small cart rattled down a yellow stone road, and the children yelled at me in greeting: "Buna ziua! Buna ziua!"

On the way back to my car, I noticed the little shop. A few steps up to the entrance; inside, room enough only to stand and turn around. A narrow counter divided the tiny area in two. Over it, a few shelves on the wall. The merchandise was like that in other shops in this Romanian province: a bit of this and that, everything faded and humble. The jars, bags, bottles looked as if they had been there forever and would stay to the end, until a time of some graceful evaporation. But the pity of this insignificance, this reminder of the necessities — sugar, rice, matches, Carpati cigarettes — created in that dark and close interior an aura of the heroic. Everything was in order, tidy without compromise. The shelves were lined with clean paper, the various objects placed at distances from each other measured precisely. A world that was gone, passed on, yet it would take with it to the grave its considered and purposeful style.

From a narrow door leading to a supply room, a little old woman emerged. I didn't need anything but asked for something to drink. She moved like a wizened ghost: slow, noiseless, careful not to disturb the still of the shop. She smiled and said she had to go down to the basement, which served as her icebox. She returned with a cool bottle of some kind of juice. She gave me my change slowly, counting the money with great care.

I went out and sat on the steps. The late afternoon smelled of manure and resignation. From the high walls around the houses no sound reached me. The burning shadow of eternal siesta filled the lanes and weakened time in the village of Roşia. No doubt there were clocks in the homes, but their hands turned to no purpose.

The next day I was in Iacobeni, forty kilometers to the northeast. Unable to extricate myself from the Siebenbürgen labyrinth. Leaving Hortobágyfalva, I ended up on the Härwesdorf turnpike. I drove into AlŢina, drove out of Alzen. What began as Agnita ended up Szentágota. Everything took much longer than any calculation of kilometers and hours would have indicated. Traveling through a multiplied land, I went twice, three times as slowly.

Iacobeni was empty. In the center of a big square grew several old trees. A grassy parade ground was rimmed by buildings close together. Most of the houses looked abandoned. The rest of the village too gave that appearance. The sun was at its zenith, so possibly everyone was asleep, yet no one could have been that tired, to leave both square and houses to their own devices. Overgrown, crumbling, tilted, full of cracks, returning to the soil. Paint fell from boards, plaster from walls. Unsupervised, matter was collapsing under its own weight. I stood in the shade of a tree.

Then, out of nowhere, five kids. The oldest could have been ten. They were incredibly alive in that dead afternoon landscape. As if the sun gave them strength. They surrounded me in a circle and one after the other tried to start a conversation, in several languages at once: Romanian, German, an indeterminate Slavic tongue — Russian? Slovak? — inserting the occasional English word and, who knows, Hungarian. At the center of this verbal vortex, I could only laugh. At last I understood: they wanted to show the ignorant wanderer their village — that is, Saxon curiosities in the form of ruins of a fortified church. I clearly wasn't the first or last. I went with them but had not the least interest in venerable monuments. I watched these young Gypsies. The whole village belonged to them. Most likely they hadn't been born here. Their parents occupied homes of Germans who had returned to the old country. Everything here was in Gypsy possession now. This village of several hundred years had become an encampment. What had seemed immutable was now temporary, practically nonexistent. The kids showed me a medieval church that they hadn't built, gave me pears from roadside trees that they hadn't planted, and spoke in languages that were not their own. They arrived two hundred years or more after the Saxons, and no one had invited them. They did not bring with them, in their heads, images of a homeland, pictures of residences or shrines that they could reproduce. Their memory held no history, only tales and fables — forms that by our criteria belong to children and are not worth preserving. As for artifacts, they had only those that would disappear with them and leave no trace.

They showed me the house in which the local priest or pastor lived. They called him pater. Through the closed and grated gate, not much could be seen: a cared-for yard, a grapevine shielding the house, and something like a pool. In comparison with the rest of the village, it seemed absurd. I rang, but no one appeared. I asked if the priest was all right: "Bun pater?" They shook their heads: "Nu bun, nu…”

I considered this decaying village, the trash in the center of the square, the rectory and pool all fearfully gated and locked, and decided that it was the Gypsies' victory. Since the year 1322, when Europe first noted their presence on the Peloponnesian peninsula, they had not changed. Europe brought into being nations, kingdoms, empires, and governments, which rose and fell. Focused on progress, expansion, growth, it could not imagine that life might be lived outside time, outside history. Meanwhile the Gypsies with a sardonic smile regarded the paroxysms of our civilization, and if they took anything for themselves, it was the rubbish, the garbage, the ruined homes, and alms. As if all the rest were of no value.

Now Saxon Iacobeni had fallen to them. Among the walls that had absorbed centuries of effort, thrift, tradition, and all such virtues that maintain the continuity of civilization, they simply set up camp, exactly as one sets up camp in an open field, as if no one had been there before them.

We left the locked rectory in peace. The kids pulled me down various lanes. Chattering nonstop, singing, whirling about me, until finally our procession à la Breughel reached a shop, because that had been their purpose all along. It was completely unlike the one in Roşia: a dark cubbyhole sort of depot-shack. Black-market stuff, soap, jam, everything in jumbled heaps and piles, thrown here and forgotten, covered with dust and waiting for a buyer to take pity. I bought several bottles of some kind of carbonated beverage, a bag of candy, and we went outside. I gave it all to them, and in an instant they had divided the booty according to a complex system but one that followed the basic principle that the strongest and oldest get the most. Engaged in eating and stuffing into pockets, they no longer paid attention to me. They returned to their world, and I stayed in mine. That's how it had to be, how it had been since 1322.

On my old taped map the place-names are in Romanian, Hungarian, and German. ţara Secuilor, Székelyföld, Szeklerland. No one thought to write them also in Romany. I think that the Gypsies themselves are the least interested in this. Their geography is mobile and elusive. It very likely will outlast ours.