On the Road to Babadag (14 page)

I tried to imagine. We were sitting in a pleasant bar in the bowels of an old fortress overlooking the city. We drank white wine. Rigels greeted acquaintances. Nearby, teenage boys were drinking beer and talking about girls, and I tried to picture how five years ago kids their age had drilled the air with Kalashnikov rounds in a moment of joy because justice and truth were finally theirs. A few, from windows, shot neighbors they had never liked. I pictured this reckless revolution of people who had been robbed blind. Revolt in Gjirokastër and Vlora, in the south, while Berisha was north. The geographic divide so strong historically, it spelled civil war. The president in the north ordered the armories opened, in the hope that his compatriots would launch a crusade to crush the rebellious south.

"But it soon became apparent that the north-south civil war was not going to happen. Anarchy took its place. The Albanians—some of them—followed orders; others followed their old dream of getting a rifle; some, fearing the future or just copying others, broke into the armories and took whatever they could put their hands on, mines and radioactive material included. Later they shot into the air—in celebration, joy, terror, or simply to try out their new weapons. Armed people went to the prisons and released 1,500 prisoners, 700 of whom had been convicted for murder. On that day [March 10, 1997], more than 200 died, mainly from the bullets shot into the air, and thousands were wounded. Marauding thieves began their work, and no one knew whether these were Berisha people or just bandits. It got to the point that railroad tracks were taken apart, so that the individual rails could be sold as scrap in Montenegro."

I can't help seeing a resemblance between the slogans in stone and the suicidal shooting into the air. Both gestures are absurd, yet in a way they constitute a challenge to reality. The citizens of the collapsed government, having been chained by Hoxha's totalitarian vision and having embraced anarchy, behaved as if the world would perish with them. At the same time, Enver was as confident of his immortality as the rebellious mob. Both he and they lived entirely in the present. Hoxha probably believed that everything depended on his will, so no limits existed for him. The men shooting into the air felt that nothing depended on them, therefore they could do anything.

"Shqiperia" is "Albania." Even its true name, in a sense, means isolation, because outside the Balkans hardly anyone knows it. For two weeks I listened to Albanian spoken in the street, on buses, on the radio, and I don't think I heard once the word
Albania.
It was always
Shqiperia,
Shqiptar,
shqiperise
...

The word comes from the verb
shqiptoj,
which is simply "to talk," "to speak." In a tongue that no one else understands.

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300 kilometers at its longest and 130 at its widest. The entry at Leuşeni is all gray concrete and deserted. A woman in a uniform takes your passport and disappears for fifteen minutes. Only Moldovans and Romanians cross here, and probably not one of them comes for pleasure. After that, to the right, is a village on a slope. Several houses atilt; the rest have fallen. The earth sank and took a few dozen farms with it. On an untouched scrap of ground is a church outlined against the sky. The hills are long, low, green. In an occasional valley you can see a village, which at a distance resembles a camp: the houses all the same size, shape, and color, and all topped with the same asbestos tile. They look like tents of bleached canvas. Nothing stands apart; they are all of them together. Then you have nothing until the next village. Endless green, a gray blotch of cramped habitations, more green, more green, and again a clump of cement squares kept in place by an invisible perimeter.

The average salary here: twenty-five dollars. A dollar is about thirteen Moldovan lei. Moldovan bills are small and faded. Stephen the Great is on every one of them, with some official landmark on the back, a church or monastery. In Moldova there are 130 official landmarks. The list fits on one nine-by-twelve-inch page of the Moldovan atlas I bought in Chişinău. Half go back only to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The bills are generally threadbare. I spent not a little time wondering how the ATMs dealt with them. The machines gave me stacks of crumpled, limp, greasy, torn banknotes, but the sum was always correct. Until then I had thought that an ATM could count new bills only, or nearly new—or at least those that were still a little crisp. There are also coins, though few people use them. The fifty-bani piece is quite pretty: small, a matte gold color, with clumps of grapes on the back, in a lame attempt to convey prosperity. The cheapest cigarettes, Astras, cost two lei; the most expensive, Marlboros, sixteen.

You go to Cahul from the Sud-Vest Bus Station. It's at the edge of Chişinău, where the white apartment buildings end and the monotony of the hills begins. Under a metal overhang waits a solitary bus. The south is churchmouse-poor. The world ends there, and the best a person can do is move to Romanian GalaŢi.

Moldova is like an inland island. In order to get anywhere, the country recently obtained from Ukraine five hundred meters of Danube shoreline not far from Giurgiuleşti at the very south. But the big trucks still must grind through Ukraine and Poland to get to the Berlin and Frankfurt of their dreams. On the bus to Cahul, the passengers are all friendly. They share fruit. In exchange, they are glad for a slug of Ukrainian beer, Chernihiv, in a liter plastic bottle. They ask about everything and tell about themselves. They cannot fathom why someone would travel to Cahul or any other place. "But we have nothing there," they say.

On the day the Lord God distributed the earth to the human race, the Moldovan overslept. When he woke, it was too late. "And what about me, Lord?" he asked sadly. God looked down upon the sleepy, pitiful Moldovan and tried to think, but nothing came to Him. The earth had been divided up, and, being Lord God, He couldn't go back on His decisions, let alone start transplanting populations. Finally He waved a hand and said, "Too bad. Come on, then, you can stay with me in Paradise." So goes the legend.

When you travel to Cahul or any other place here, the legend rings true. The monotony suggests eternity. Continual green, continual fecundity, the land undulating, the horizon rising and falling, showing us only what we expect, as if not wishing to cause us the least unpleasantness. Grapes, sunflowers, corn, a few animals, grapes, sunflowers, corn, cows and sheep, on occasion a garden, and rows of nut trees always on either side of the road. No free space in this scenery, no sudden disjunction, and the imagination, encountering no ambush, soon dozes. Most likely events took place here a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago, but they left no trace. Life seeps into the soil, disperses into the air, burns calmly and evenly, as if confident that it will never burn out.

The stop in Cimişlia was the sort of place that is impossible to recall. Some kind of nothingness that for a moment attempted to be a bus station. A concrete apron open to the whistling wind at one end and closed off by a building at the other. Grayness, dust, and heat. The beer tap at the bar was a rubber hose wrapped with wire. Farther inside, everything was thrown together, layered haphazardly, by whim. Part dwelling, part rubbish heap; a dark, narrow, low area full of welded iron struts, pieces of sheet metal, laminated panels, all discarded from the start, to get the ruining over with early. The despair of objects despised. People sat, ate, drank, and waited, yet seemed naked, exposed to the wounding edges of all the junk.

A cart waiting at an intersection, hitched to a donkey. Nothing in the vicinity. It was only farther on and lower, where the cornfield ended, that the cement village appeared, gray. A woman got off the bus, pulling a cage thing on two wheels. A small bag was attached to it. Cage and bag were both homemade. A girl was waiting for her. They hugged, as if after a long separation. Then they climbed onto the cart. The two bigger, together, than the entire vehicle. The brown donkey made for the village. It seemed a game, because woman and girl hardly fit on what looked like something stolen from a child's merry-go-round.

What to say about Cahul? From there it's a couple of kilometers to the Romanian border, and then you're off to GalaŢi, by the Danube. On the main street in Cahul you felt the proximity of the border. Cars passed with a rumble, and in the pubs the melancholy kings of life warmed themselves in the air. They ordered Moldovan cognac, drank it by the glass, but their faces didn't move. They were able only to move their mouths, that was it; the rest was permanently frozen. They adjusted their gold chains and made sure people were looking. They even kept their cars running, so everyone would know that they had plenty of gas. Cahul at first glance: a hick town on the border, the nervous indolence of two-bit confidence men driving in circles to kill time.

In a park by a white church, a guy was renting out go-carts. He sat behind a desk in the shade of a tree and, using an hourglass, kept track of the time per ride. After him, the city imperceptibly became village. The trees were now taller than the houses. Goats cropped the grass at the foot of a partisan memorial, its cement heroes with big scars across their faces. In a nearby shop, a yellow light burned, though it was in the middle of the day. Three men entered, and a woman behind the counter poured vodka for them into shot glasses. A pub, I realized.

In the square before the hotel, dogs chewed at themselves all night. And howled. At dawn, cars began assembling with merchandise. It was a bazaar. Train cars without wheels served as stores. An insanely varied spectacle from my sixth floor. Everything sparkling and shimmering in the sun: foil, plastic, cellophane, glass, metal. Pickles, tomatoes, watermelons. I went down and saw that here was everything a person needed to live. Belts, golden corn, pickling jars, barrels for marinating. The music went in a loop. Women sat motionless over their wares, hands folded in laps, as if at home or on a bench by the front gate. I saw little gesturing, a lot of simple waiting.

The owner of a light-blue Renault refused my twenty euros. He said the roads were awful and the car would be destroyed. He wanted thirty, not including the gas. He was in light blue too, dapper. Next in the line, a Zhiguli. So old, I don't remember the color. The driver was big, fat, and unpleasant to look at. He said he'd take us, and his name was Misha. He was about fifty. We left Cahul. The road went up through rolling hills, vineyards, cornfields. The villages began suddenly and stopped as if cut off with a knife. Times were bad now, Misha told me. He brought up Stalin, though he was too young to remember him. Stalin was worth bringing up: he shot thieves. The problem with Moldova today, in Misha's opinion, was thievery. The whole country had been stolen from the ordinary people. In the Soviet days, when everything was communal and didn't belong to anyone, theft was not a problem. Like everything else, it was communal: everybody stole, and nobody lost. Now only the richest stole, and they made sure the poor couldn't, by inventing property. Property was an invention against ordinary people, who owned nothing. That was Misha, in Russian.

I wanted to go to Comrat, the capital of Gagauzia. It's not completely known who the Gagauz people are. In Moldova, they number 20,000. Their language is Turkic, their faith Orthodox Christianity, and they came to the Comrat area from Dobruja, when Russia annexed Moldova in 1812 and called it Bessarabia to erase the past. They could be Bulgarized Turks or Turkified Bulgars; no one is sure. And practically no one knows that they exist. So I went to Comrat, on roads as empty as landing strips.

It's hard to describe Comrat, because it's so easy to overlook. You ride through a city you can barely see. There are homes, streets, but they are all sketched in, a stopgap not thought through, the sadness of matter only half materialized, lacking the conviction to take full shape. A monument to Lenin had gold paint slapped on. A funeral procession went down the main street, its open coffin on a pickup truck. Beside the coffin, on a chair, sat an old woman in black. It was hot. Flies circled above the face of the deceased. The woman brushed them away with a green branch: a slow, tedious motion. Peculiar, these mourners walking in silence through the din of the everyday, between booths selling bread and vegetables, among bicycles, cars, and carts. Pushing their way against the current of life.

Before the Gagauzia Museum stood a statue in honor of the heroes of the war in Afghanistan. A kid with a rifle was painted silver. I thought I'd try the museum, and it seemed that the group inside was waiting just for me. A woman tour guide, accompanied by two other women, took a wood pointer and began to speak about the great migration of people from the heart of Asia. She tapped the map, and it turned out that the Gagauz were Turks after all, who instead of occupying the southern coast of the Black Sea strayed north. We proceeded from room to room, in chronological sequence. An old man appeared through a side door and told us he was a member of the Union of Sculptors of Gagauzia. He was born in 1935, in the village of świątkowa Wielka, not far from where I live. His name: Andrej Kopcza.

Misha kept getting lost. Fifty kilometers from his neighborhood, and his sense of direction left him. I showed him the map. He wouldn't trust roads he had never been on. They might be on the map, but he refused to believe in their existence. "Only Turks live there, so what's the point?" "Nothing but Bulgars there ..." He wouldn't get out of the car, refused coffee, said no to lunch. It was beyond him how someone could waste time and money like this, why someone would come here. What kind of destination was the village Albota de Sus? Or Sofievca? Misha stayed in the car and looked at the gray post-Soviet pocks and scars spread throughout the green landscape, and I looked at him, and our minds were mutually impenetrable. He pined for what had been and despised what was left. "I am Soviet man," he declared that morning. But how could anything other than this be left, if there had been nothing other than this in the first place? The poverty and misery of objects created ad hoc could do only what they had been created to do: eat away at reality. The whole region seemed abandoned. A tractor and cart on the empty road, a man tossing out fresh-cut greens with a pitchfork, a few clumps at each turn. Charity or some kind of payment?