On the Road to Babadag Read Online Free PDF

dark, and her high heels tap the pavement.
    So let's assume he heard it all and smelled the perfume through the foliage. The night filled the room in the attic, and he could recall his life without obstacle, because insomnia, just as many years ago in Sibiu, has again taken the place of eternity for him. On Brazilor Avenue and Father Bratu Avenue and Episcopei Avenue and Andrei Saguna Avenue and Ilarie Mitrea Avenue, the animals sleep. In the dim, close barns the cows lie and chew as they sleep. The horses stand with lowered heads at their empty cribs. As it ought to have been and as in fact it is. The heat departs from him forever and over Răinari joins the heat of the livestock. Then it lifts into the black sky above the Carpathians and flows toward the cold stars like a vision of the soul, a vision he couldn't stand, because it kept him awake.

    Three months later I was riding, at dusk, through the village Rozpucie at the feet of Słonne Góry, Brine Mountains. The cows were returning from the meadows and taking up the full width of the road. I had to brake, then come to a complete stop. They parted before the car like a lazy reddish wave. In the frosty air, steam puffed from their nostrils. Warm, swollen, indifferent, the animals stared straight ahead, into the distance, because neither objects nor landscape held meaning for them. They simply looked through everything. In Rozpucie too I felt the enormity and continuity of the world around me. At that same hour, in that same dying light, cattle were coming home: from Kiev, say, to Split, from my Rozpucie to Skopje, and the same in Stara Zagora. Scenery and architecture may change, and the breed, and the curve of horn or the color of mane, but the picture remains untouched: between two rows of houses moved a herd of sated cattle. They were accompanied by women in kerchiefs and worn boots, or by children. No isolated island of industrialization, no sleepless metropolis, no spiderweb of roads or railroad lines, could block out this image as old as the world. The human joined with the bestial to wait out the night together.
    There will be no miracle, I thought, putting the car in first gear. In the rearview mirror I saw swaying behinds. The tails hung unmoving, because there were no flies now. All this will have to perish in order to survive, if only in rudimentary form. The "worst and smallest" nations live with their animals, and would like to be saved with them. They would like to be respected with their livestock, because they have little else. The dark-blue abyss of a bovine eye is a mirror in which we see ourselves as animate flesh, yet flesh vouchsafed a certain grace.

    At the highway I turned left. I wanted to get free of the hairpin turns on the main summit of Brine Mountains before the sun went down. It was empty and cold. Not a soul on the road. In Tyrawa, mist blended with chimney smoke. Here the evening persisted with a will, but after five minutes the sky suddenly cracked and out poured a brilliant red. I left the car at a miserable roadside parking area and walked to the edge of the drop. The highway to Sanok—gray as ashes. In Zału ż, the first lights coming on: weak, barely visible, like pinpricks. The fog in the valley obscured the houses and farms, as if no one were there. On the other hand, the Carpathians were on fire. The western wound stretched across the horizon. The entire south was freshly cut meat, a dazzling slaughterhouse.
    I recalled the trip from Cluj to Sighişoara. We went by train. In our compartment sat a Japanese collector of folk costumes and his Romanian interpreter. After Apahida, the grassy plain began. I had never seen earth so naked. Gentle hills in a row in the distance. When the train climbed a little higher, you saw that beyond the horizon was another, and still another. The treeless, uninhabited expanse was a pale, desiccated yellow, the color of something waiting for a tremendous blaze, a single match. Nothing