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

dangerous. Finally Szela, according to Ludwik Dębicki, "pretended to be a mystic and sectarian in a peasant's cloak." Of all possible places of concealment I liked Vicşani best, unlikely as it was: lost among fields, far from everything, godforsaken. Beyond it, nothing, nothing in any direction. The great expanse of treeless land, which nevertheless someone tilled here and there, was a breathtaking contradiction of the pathetic little village where the only machine I saw was one bicycle. Our automobile here was a monstrosity, a challenge. In this piece of upland between RădăuŢi and Suceava, small horse-drawn carts moved among endless folded fields. The black earth, newly plowed, joined the sky, and those tiny figures—thin, veined horses—were practically invisible in their insignificance. If they stopped moving, there would no longer be a reason for their existence. A whim: to set little toys in a vast landscape, to enjoy the helplessness of figurines out of a Christmas crèche.
    The village smelled of manure and spring. Orchards bloomed behind fences. The cooperative store was located in a brick building. A peasant clad in black told us they had beer there. We found a girl with keys at the farm next door. She opened it for us. We asked about Szela, said to have been buried around there, but she didn't know, didn't even seem to know the name, though she was Polish. A few small tables, and a peculiar jumble, as if someone had been building sets for a film. The interior a gray-green. Wooden boxes on the floor, the sort once used to transport siphons for seltzer, except they were filled with liter-and-a-half bottles of wine. Two kinds of beer, two kinds of cigarettes, ashtrays full of butts as if after a reception. Propaganda posters on the wall, and a window that opened to a yard in which pink piglets wandered. That was it. Yet these few objects, pieces of furniture, and commodities together created an extraordinary chaos, as if things had been tossed here in the middle of their use, dropped, as if in this very spot the energy of the world had run out. We drank a beer each.
    The girl was silent but finally said she would take us to the old cemetery outside the village; maybe Szela was there. But only clumps of thorny plants were there—no gravestones, crosses, or markers. A pity, I thought, for him to have to lie here—and someday be resurrected here, of all places. Little imagination was needed to see him enter the cooperative store: it would come as no surprise, because immobility, sorrow, and abandonment do not change in time or space. It must have been the same in the tavern of the Jew Semek in Siedliska on February 20, 1846. Snow lay on the fields; it was cold and dim inside, full of the stink of heated, unwashed bodies. "Get to work, boys, and hurry, for time passes." Szela wore his black cassock, held in his hand the saber taken at Bogusze and tapped the ground with it like a walking stick. In the courtyard, blood seeped into the snow. You could smell the vodka from broken kegs. The Austrians had made him king of the peasants for twenty-four hours, and the day was drawing to a close. "Get to work, boys, and hurry, for time passes." The cursed blood of the lords seeping into the snow, the taken saber, the peasants with ducats clinking in their pockets, but the dimness and the stink were unalleviated. The village elder Breinl told him in Tarnów, "The Archduke Ferdinand is number one, but in Galicia you are second in command." Some say Szela planned to take the ten-year-old Zosia Boguszówna for his wife. Peasant blood would mix with noble blood and give rise to a race that would inherit the reborn land. It's possible that he had no faith in his strength, that the blueprint for a new world would repeat the gestures of the lords in an empty, abstract reality that puts up no resistance.
    So he could rise from the grave and enter the cooperative store in Vicşani, and it would be as if