On the Road to Babadag by Andrzej Stasiuk Read Free Book Online

the evening in Cluj, where it poured as it is pouring now. I have to invent, because days cannot sink into a past filled only with landscape, with inert, unchanging matter that finally shakes us from our corporeality, brushes off and away all these little incidents, faces, existences that last no longer than a glimpse. So the old man returned and dozed, though we had hoped he would wash before he returned, not before bedtime. Perhaps one travels for the purpose of preserving facts, keeping alive their brief, flickering light.
    In Cluj it poured. In front of a pizza parlor by the station, guys in leather jackets did some business while their girls gossiped. And as happens everywhere, two grabbed a third by the arms and dragged him into the dark. The station in Cluj: again a crowd, dim yellow light, the stink of bodies and cigarettes. We had to get our tickets stamped for the next day. A boy spotted us in the crush, saw that we were not local, standing there like calves, unsure where to go. He took the old-fashioned cardboard from us, and in five minutes the stamping was done. He said, "Drum bun," and disappeared in the crowd like a guardian angel in worn Adidas.
    The next morning, Horea Street gleamed in the sun. The synagogue, not far from the bridge on the Şomes, had four towers topped with gilded cupolas. It resembled the one in the Gypsy quarter of SpiÅ¡ské Podhradie but was larger. For lunch we had the usual,
ciorba de burta,
Romanian tripe soup, with a roll and paprika. Somewhere in the vicinity, Hungarian lords had burned Gheorghe Doja at the stake, then quartered his remains and hung them on the gates of Buda, Pest, Alba Iulia, and Oradea. Szeged got the head. The typical end, this, of "peasant kings." Even when an army of tens of thousands stands behind them and the pope gives his blessing for a final albeit failed crusade against the Turks. I sat at a pub on the street named after Doja, drank coffee, and in a couple of hours would be looking, from the windows of a train, at the grassy waste of Transylvania, where five hundred years ago Doja's peasant divisions marched. In the compartment of the train was that Japanese man who collected women's folk costumes. According to T., he put them on in front of a mirror in his home in Tokyo or Kyoto.
    His tour guide had said that Ceauşescu united the Romanian people, making everyone equally guilty, and anyone claiming not to have taken part in it was lying. But I gazed at the scorched hills and tried to picture the divisions of light cavalry, dark moving points on the horizon appearing and disappearing with the rhythm of the hills. I tried to imagine this death-dealing procession of beggars. For the first and last time as free people they measured their land. In clothes and weapons taken from their masters, on horses taken from their masters, they marched to Cluj, to Timişoara, to fall at last in defeat under the July sun. Fifty thousand cut down, hanged, left to the birds and thrown to the dogs. Ravens drawn from the Carpathians, the Hungarian Lowlands, from Moldavia and Wallachia. The heat hastens decay, erases the traces. Nothing is left of these rebel poor. Doja was burned on a mock throne with a mock scepter in his hand. So writes Sándor PetŐfi.
    On the train I looked out the window and imagined the tattered and ecstatic army of shepherds, swineherds, peasants who attempted, if only for a moment, to grasp for themselves the life of their masters—that is, to be free, to seize the wealth of others, and to rule by force. A few months earlier, I had sought out the grave of Jakub Szela in Bukovina. I asked here and there, my excuse for traveling to the end of the world. Some said he lay in Clit; others, near the Ukrainian border, in Vicşani.
    I believed them both. I even began to think that the Austrians dealt with him somewhat as the Hungarian lords had dealt with Doja: dismembering the memory of him, a memory that at any moment might prove