On the Road to Babadag

The Country in Which the War Began

AT 5:30 IN THE MORNING it was still completely dark. I went out to Prešernovo Nabreǽje, Prešeren Quay, and turned right, northwest. The water was black-blue and smooth. In the light of the streetlamps, the beach stones gleamed after yesterday's rain. I had traveled here to see the western edge of Slavic Europe.

From the narrow inlets between the stones came the stink of cat piss. The lighthouse beacon at the promontory delivered its last flashes into the night; in half an hour it would go off. At its base, a solitary red Renault was parked. It looked rundown; you could see the lighthouse keepers here didn't have it so good. Passing it, I reached the other side of the peninsula. The sea was heavier here, louder, more in motion. A few dozen meters from the shore, the water merged with the dark, yet I saw, in the distance, white clouds. Brighter there.

The waterfront stopped, but I went on, hopping from stone to stone. To the right, a vertical cliff of slate. Someone had put up the sign that you proceeded at your own risk.

I came for only three days and was ready for anything. Less than twenty kilometers to the northeast lay Trieste; Venice was eighty to the west. The only thought that entered my head: the air there is just as cold and damp. From the port, the putter of diesel engines. Soon I saw the first fishing boat, small and indistinct on the dark mirror of the water. The motor died. The man at the stern sat as if waiting for the dawn to begin in earnest.

Correction: those were not clouds. An hour later I stood in the courtyard of the Saint George Cathedral and from that height could see the bay, the white peaks of the Julian Alps, and, who knows, maybe even Triglav itself. Because what are a hundred kilometers on a morning like this, when the sun shines as bright as on an afternoon in July and objects cast shadows as dark as night? The mountains burned red, orange, dimmed to violet, then dun, as the light slid down the ridges and valleys. This crystal air rendered distance null and void. The fishing boats seemed to float in the bay, only to become stuck, in an hour, in half an hour, in foothills. I had to leave the vista; it was too unreal.

Bells ringing at Saint Steven, Saint Francis, and the Immaculate Mother of God. The red rooftops of the homes arranged in an intricate mosaic. From the chimneys, vertical columns of sky-blue smoke. The smell of resin and incense, logs burning in stoves. No doubt an illusion, but I could have sworn there was also a whiff of ground and steamed coffee. Among the geometry of the tiled surfaces, the green daubs of gardens. Not one scrap of free space in this town; nothing wild, nothing abandoned or in disrepair, no space simply as space. That's why there were so few dogs here, despite those occasional containers with a picture of Fido taking a dump. This was a town of cats. Looking down, I saw them coming out of their nooks and crannies to find a warm patch of sun. Dozens of toms and tabbies in a hundred different colors and shades. Singly, in pairs, chasing down, sidling up to, courting, ignoring, tails lifted as they tensely patrolled the perimeter of their territory, gamboling, enjoying a morning stretch. They were small, medium, and as large as an ordinary dog. In thirty minutes in one spot I counted fifty cats. They rubbed against chimneys, licked themselves, jumped from their place and back to it. A veritable feline kingdom. It was the only movement I could observe from the high walls of Saint George. All to the accompaniment of the bells of the Immaculate Mother of God.

It is good to come to a country you know practically nothing about. Your thoughts grow still, useless. Everything must be rebuilt. In a country you know nothing about, there is no reference point. You struggle to associate colors, smells, dim memories. You live a little like a child, or an animal. Objects and events may bring things to mind, but in the end they remain no more than what they are in fact. They begin only when we experience them, vanish when others follow. So they truly have no significance. They are made of that primal substance that touches our senses but is too light, too evanescent, to teach us anything.

When I returned to the waterfront, the day was well under way. The pubs were open, the cars were maneuvering on the narrow boulevard, guys in overalls were skillfully hoisting buckets on scaffolds, garbagemen were removing furniture that had been put out but looked perfectly fine, women in high heels were stepping around what was left of puddles, and stewed onions filled the air. A man in a sweater, old boots, and track pants went to the water's edge and cast his spinning rod. After the fifth or sixth cast, he reeled in a fish. He struck it against a stone slab and disappeared with his stunned prize down a small street. Children with backpacks walked to school, and pairs of elderly ladies took their strolls in mincing steps. At the port marina, fishermen in wool caps worked on their boats. One of them threw fish guts on the shore. A black cat immediately appeared. A moment later, a dog ran up, but the cat sent it packing. Under the arcades of the open market facing the port stood young men with tired faces, traditionally waiting for the day to bring an opportunity or surprise.

All this in blinding sun along the land's very edge. The interior of the town was dark, humid, labyrinthine. The houses grew one out of the other, leaned on one another, parted to a width of outstretched arms, and the dirty little cobblestone streets took paths in a way that bordered on the perverse. A hair separated neighbor from neighbor. Sometimes a door opened directly on the street, and you could see a neat row of boots, clothes on hangers, a mirror a person had quickly consulted before leaving. Wandering through the center of town, even when there was no one around, was like wandering through an invisible crowd. Voices on the other side of walls, conversations, tables placed under lit lamps, the smell of food, the sound of water in bathrooms, arguments, gestures, the entire intimacy of life in reach of your eyes, ears, nose. The town was one big house, a thousand rooms connected by cold, dark corridors — or a comfortable prison where each inmate could engage in his favorite activity. Piran: a monastery for the laity.

Such cities were possible, I thought, only by the sea or in the desert. In a locked landscape, the inhabitants might go mad. Here, only a few dozen steps were needed to take you off the human termitarium, this creation half architectural, half geological, to where limitless sea and air began, bounded only by the indistinct line of the horizon.

At eight in the morning I sipped coffee and watched the white ferry leave Pula for Venice. The waitress wiped the raindrops off my table. From a pub wafted Buena Vista Social Club. A little dog ran inside, lifted its leg to the leg of a chair, pissed, calmly departed. It was dim within, all wood, like an old ship, but I preferred to sit outside and see the air brighten. The delivery vans busy around the marina. The masts of yachts moving like uncertain needles on dials. A couple of old women chatting in Italian. More and more cats. They warmed themselves on the boulders along the beach. A quiet, unreal place, this, resembling no other, bringing to mind nothing but the abstract idea of harmony. Eight in the morning, sun, coffee, a white ferry, and Cuban music: an eclectic dream come to life.

Except I was here to see the country in which the last Balkan war began. It lasted ten days and claimed sixty-six lives. It's possible that the Yugoslav army departed in such haste because the Serbs felt that they were in a truly foreign land. Having no graves here, no memories, they confronted their deprivation. The invading of small, peripheral peoples is by necessity a provincial matter. You acquire territory that in some way reminds you of home, of the village you grew up in. Foreignness is a problem for the conqueror: it undermines his identity. Tiny Slovenia turned out to be too big for Greater Serbia. What could the Serbs do in this tidy, well-ordered land like some Hapsburg dream of the empire's mission to civilize? War must have a common language, some shared meaning, and bloody deeds are like all deeds, in that they cannot exist in a vacuum.

"I do not wish to defend the Balkan peoples, but neither do I wish to ignore their merits. The love of devastation, of internal disorder, the world like a brothel in flames, the sardonic view of cataclysms both past and future, the sourness, the sweet inactivity of those who cannot sleep or those who murder… They alone, the primitives of Europe, give Europe the fillip she needs, but she invariably considers it the ultimate humiliation. Because if the Southeast were nothing but an abomination, why should she feel, abandoning it and turning to these lands, as if she were falling — however magnificent the fall — into desert?"

At 8:15 I sat over my empty cup and ruminated on these words of Emil Cioran. And tried to situate the southeast and the Balkans.

I took home promotional material from some roadside inn near the Croatian border. The colorful brochure contained, in addition to ads for pubs, hotels, and camping grounds, a small map of Europe. Spain had its Madrid, France its Paris, Switzerland Zurich, Austria Vienna, and so on. But to the east and south of Prague and Budapest lay a terra incognita: countries without capitals, and some countries weren't even there. No Slovakia. Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus all evaporated in the dried-up sea of old empire. Yet the map was quite new, because the borders of the post-Yugoslav nations were clearly marked. The only city that had been preserved in the enigmatic southeast was Athens, apparently old enough to assume the role of fossil. Sofia, Bucharest, Belgrade, Warsaw, and Bratislava were gone, swallowed by a primordial void that one could point to but not name or describe. Which made sense, because what could come from that region other than inchoateness and weather reports? Names organized nothing, having no fixed, established, verifiable meaning.

It was late afternoon when I crossed the border at Hodoš. The winter light gave objects an extra sharpness. The customs officer asked me how many dinars I had, though for more than ten years now purchases had been made only in tolars. He took a second look in my trunk, said "Hvala," then I was driving between the rotten yellow hills of Prekmurje. At that time of the year, you always see more, because the bare landscape collects what has been dropped by human beings and reveals the vulnerability of matter left to itself. This time, however, nothing of the sort: the country seemed completely finished, done with care, polished. I could find no cracks in the scenery that imagination might slip into. Nothing here recalled the places from which I had come. Everything was secondhand yet at the same time respectably new. As far as the eye could see, no sign of decay or growth or ostentation. Sturdy gray walls, gabled roofs, dead gardens, and vineyards left for the winter in the best condition — you took it all in at a glance, but nothing claimed your attention. This country was made in imitation of the perfect country. Stuck in the corner of Europe, between Germanic Austria, Romance Italy, Finno-Ugric Hungary, and Slavic Croatia, it endured by mimicking a universal ideal. As I was getting ready to come here, my acquaintances said, "Go, it's one of the prettiest spots on the Continent." Immediately pleasing to the eye. Nothing superfluous anywhere. Quiet villages lay at the bottom of valleys. White churches on hilltops stood watch over such good fortune. In the towns, a Hapsburg Baroque drew refined shapes against a dark sky. Murska Sobota, Ljutomir, Ptuj, Majsperk, Rogatec, Rogaška Slatina. I couldn't stop, constantly feeling that there would be a sudden reversal, that the land — for my benefit alone — would do a salto mortale, but no, it remained on good terms with itself. I was a barbarian from the unwashed, unfinished east. There was no contrast here, no chaos, no trap to put my wits to the test. Accustomed to discontinuity, to losing the thread, to plot twists dreamlike and in bad taste, I could not deal with a space arranged in so irrevocable a way.

I slept in Prelasko. The inn was empty. At the bar sat two locals. Not particularly different from our locals who worked on a slightly better class of farm. They drank Laško beer and some kind of clear liquor in turn. Smoked cigarettes, conversed in low voices. Wore dirty clothes, looked like beggars. Unshaven, rumpled, and evidently not worried about the day's division between work and rest. They were the kind who could get into bed as they were. They had another round, but I saw no change in them. They drank calmly, as if performing a duty. In their words and gestures, not a trace of the impatience so common where I came from. They were stolid and solemn in their drinking, without inebriation or male neurosis. Both drank "internally." The peace and melancholy of their conversation didn't go at all with the four or five fifties they drank in the course of an hour or hour and a half. Not to mention all the beer. Finally they rose, shuffled in their rubber boots, and left, and the innkeeper didn't even come out from behind the bar to see if the right money had been left on the table. I was alone with my wine. The boss got into a black Mercedes with double exhaust pipes and took off. I went out to the driveway to look at the Slovenian night. Frost had settled on last year's grass. The round moon silvered the long mountain ridge. In the distance, a lone dog was barking.

"He sensed and at the same time knew: this is the home of devils, depressed and morose… Here among the alpine valleys and a little farther, on the plains of Panonia. They are in the wind, in the air; you cannot hide from them. In the lakes and among the hills, in the roots of trees, in the fens, among the rocky cliffs. They are in the village taverns and on the city streets empty on a Sunday. They are in children, men, old men… Everyone here is steeped in death. Death in the likeness of a lovely landscape, autumnal and cold, vernal and warm. In the fall, Gothic; in the spring, Baroque. They are strewn, as the churches are, throughout the country; as thick as gravestones — which the people here love to decorate with flowers, candles, angels… On Sunday afternoons, when foreigners and immigrants wander the abandoned streets, surprised at the emptiness — on Sunday afternoons it does not seem out of place that a man will open a window on the fourth floor, where every window is shuttered, and throw himself out with a rope around his neck."

The next day I drove across Kočevski Rog, a stretch of mountains to the south, near the border with Croatia. For thirty-five kilometers I saw no other car. The gravel road ran through a forest and climbed the main peak, Visoki Rog. I was on snowy, icy switchbacks, doing no more than thirty kph. Not a soul. This was one of the most beautiful roads I had ever seen. The sun a golden mist floating among the fir trees. Snow melting in the warmth, and sometimes, when I stopped, I could hear, in the stillness of the high forest, the whisper of a thousand drops joining to make a stream. Light and shadow intermingled endlessly, and though it was a bright day, everything seemed submerged in green water. The southern side of the peak steamed. I saw birds I couldn't name. This was neither Gothic nor Baroque. Kočevski Rog suggested an architecture that would never come to pass, because the simplicity of its beauty would throw into question the whole point of an imagination.

In the dark valleys lay 10,000 bodies. I was driving through the largest unmarked cemetery in Slovenia. In the summer of 1945, Tito's Communists murdered in this place, without a trial or witnesses, prisoners who had been handed over to them by armies of the Allies. These were partisans who had fought on the wrong side — the Croatian Home Guard, the Slovenian White Guard. Tito didn't brook competition. It's possible that the wolves, lynxes, and bears — more numerous then, definitely, than today — took care of the burial. Later the Marshal came here to hunt. Who knows, it might have occurred to him that he was killing the souls of traitors living on in the bodies of the animals.

At nine I left the blue coast and walked to Tartinijev Square to see some fifteenth-century Venetian Gothic architecture and the memorial to Tartini. He stood on a pedestal, in a wig, with a violin in his lowered hand, most likely bowing to the audience. I would have preferred to feel like a tourist but felt instead like a spy doing cursory reconnaissance. I could touch things but had no idea what they meant to those for whom they had been made. I remembered the golden light at Kočevski Rog and couldn't shake the thought that there were places, whole cities, whole countries, whose form and content defied description. Because if communism elsewhere was simply a crime, then here, in this land, it must have seemed a marriage of horror and imbecility. An idea conceived in empty heads fearing empty space was applied in a land that had ruled out the possibility of change. Marshal Tito in a white uniform among palm trees on a promenade in nearby Portoroǽ must have seemed an African chieftain. Communism, after all, had been the fruit of long, hopeless winters, when people began to go mad from boredom and from the fear of the self. It made sense, if it made sense at all, only on a flat, featureless plain where nothing happened and therefore anything could happen.

Small countries should be allowed to cut history class. They should be like islands off to the side of the main current of progress. That was my thought two days later, on the highway to Ljubljana. Near Postojna it suddenly turned cold and foggy. I considered this fairy-tale, utopian variant as I passed Croatian trucks. Small countries should be protected as childhood is protected. The citizens of hypertrophied powers should visit them to learn sense. A wasted effort, no doubt, but why not give people a chance to reflect on the many other ways to look at this best of all possible worlds? The existence of small countries of moderate temperament is simply a challenge to common ideas on such subjects as expansion, might, size, mission, and all those other collective axioms. As for me, I've always wanted to live in a smaller country — never, God forbid, in a larger one. It is much more difficult for negligibility to turn into a caricature of itself than for greatness to do so. And in any case it does less harm to its surroundings.

The Slovenian writer Edvard Kocbek, in his Parisian Notebook, wrote: "Our history is not marked by great passions; its poverty does not permit the assumption of any weighty mission. We can rely on no original declaration of faith, no communal character. The nature of our country is convex rather than concave; it has no true center of gravity, which would indicate a geographic as well as moral center. For this reason we lack thinkers of centripetal energy, souls who bear witness to our identity, souls of a crystallized fate… We never regarded our national borders as a test of quality, as trustworthy passage, as solution or inspiration — or as temptation, shame, and an opportunity for smuggling."

So again, that lack, that unfulfillment, that sigh for a life elsewhere. Greatness does not apply here. For sure something similar has been written by a Romanian from Romania's twenty million, by a Pole from Poland's forty million.

I circled Ljubljana's congested downtown area, looking for a place to park. On Congress Square I managed to squeeze in between a Land Rover and a BMW. On an ice rink with lanterns and music, children and an old man with a gray mustache were skating. It was Viennese-ish, except more cheerful. I heard laughter, a loud conversation on the street, and saw girls dressed in a way that was at once careless and refined. My first time here, yet I felt I knew this city. It was alive, charming. It gave the impression that it was exactly where it ought to be, not thinking about its destiny, not asking itself hard questions. Quite possibly it was utterly indifferent to, did not pine one bit for, the rest of the world. Mist shrouded the spires of the churches. At a bar not far from the fish market, I ate a sandwich and drank a small beer.

At night somewhere outside Maribor, I was stopped by the police for doing eighty in a residential area. They were in black leather and polite. I asked what would happen if I didn't pay. They told me that they would take my passport, let me go, and wait at the station for me to appear with the money. Twice as much as I would pay on the spot. They didn't look bribable. They gave me a pretty receipt with ornamental stamps, took practically everything that I had in their currency, and wished me a pleasant trip.

To get even, I decided to spend the night in Hungary.