On the Road to Babadag (10 page)

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.

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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.