On the Road to Babadag Read Online Free PDF Page B

there. On occasion a far building flicked by, a cottage with a pigsty, a hayrick, then again a vastness of air and folded earth. Small flocks of sheep appeared. With them, always, a solitary man no larger than a pin. Under the burned sky, on the baked land, they seemed lost in a blinding afterlife. Going from somewhere to somewhere else. In the brittle grass lived only flies, birds, and lizards. The earth gave off heat and dust.
    Now it's a wet, snowless December, and the weather maps say December is in that place too. Like a sheet heavy with water, the sky hangs over Erdély, and the hills are covered with mud and rotting grass instead of dust, and I would like to be there and repeat my summer route, this time getting off at Boju-Catun with ten Romanian words in my head and five Hungarian. I don't remember the station, it was so small and hopeless. Possibly it is nothing more than a metal sign by the rails. But I would like to be there on December 14, with no plan in mind, because the future has not been of concern to me for a long time now and I am drawn increasingly to places that tell of a beginning or else where sadness has the power of fate. In a word, screw where we're headed, I'm interested only in where we came from. So ten words in Romanian, five in Hungarian, the Boju-Catun station, and, let's say, a million lei in small bills, to see the void between heaven and earth through which black buffalo wade. Five hundred kilometers to Vienna, 800 to Munich, 1,800 to Brussels, all of it more or less, approximately, as the crow flies. But the air cracks somewhere en route, parts like tectonic plates separating continents. Yes, a little money, good shoes, something for the rain, Bihor palinka in a plastic bottle, and I'll be fine, because I'm haunted by the vision of those hills; they gleam through all the landscapes I've seen since, because somewhere between Valea Florilor and Ploscoş I believed again that man was fashioned out of clay. Nothing else could have happened in that land, and man grieves only because his making cannot be repeated, ever.

    "My country! At all cost I desired to connect with it—but there was nothing to connect with. Neither in its present nor in its past did I find anything genuine ... My mad lover's rage had no object, you could say, because my country crumbled under the force of my gaze. I wished it were as powerful, immoderate, and wild as an evil power, a doom to shake the world, but it was small, modest, and without the qualities that make destiny." So wrote Emil Cioran in 1949, returning in his mind to his adventure in the Iron Guard.

    The cows have disappeared into the woods. They moo in the December dimness. Romania Mare, Greater Serbia, Poland from sea to sea ... The incredibly stupid fictions of those countries. A hopeless yearning for what never was, for what can never be, and an adolescent sulk over what is. Last year in Stará L'ubovňa, at the foot of a castle, I overheard the jabber of a Polish tour group. The leader was a forty-year-old moron in Gore-Tex and sunglasses. He knocked at the gate of the museum, which was closed at that hour. Finally he kicked the gate and told those assembled, "It should be ours again, or Hungarian. Then there would be some order!"
    Indeed. In this part of the world, everything should be other than it is. The discovery of maps came here too early, or too late.

    I drink strong coffee and think constantly about Emil Cioran's broken heart in the 1930s. About his insanity, his Romanian Dostoyevskianism. "Codreanu was in reality a Slav, a kind of Ukrainian hetman," he would say after forty years. Ah, these cruel thoughts. First they devastate the world like a fire or earthquake, and when everything has been consumed and dashed into tiny pieces of shit, when there is nothing around them but desert, wilderness, and the abyss before Creation, they throw away their self-won freedom and submit to a passionate faith in things that are hopeless and