On the Road to Babadag

I HAVE COUNTED THE stamp marks in my passport. In seven years, 167, but there ought to be more, because some of the officials were too lazy to lift a finger. They waved me past in Oradea, for example. A couple of days later, I returned through Satu Mare; no one else at the crossing, noon, but they said, "Pull over, leave your car." Nodding for me to follow into a glass hangar, a hothouse, fifty degrees Celsius, Amazonia. A door, another, then finally the control center, ten dead computers, a guy with his feet on the desk and a pile of sunflower seeds. He gnawed the entire time. He did take his feet off the desk. We were alone; the others had left, no doubt to the sentry box, lest someone dangerous sneak through. I understood a little—Cinde? unde? intrare, ştampila—but played dumb. He inspected my passport from every angle, from the back, from the front, upside down, my driver's license too, my registration, my carte verde, and finally told me to go out in the corridor. I watched him through the glass door. Again the feet up on the desk, and more sunflower seeds. He was waiting for me to soften in this oven, to confess to spying, smuggling, having plastic surgery done, and to be willing to wipe away these crimes with the help of a few dollars. I leaned against the wall, shut my eyes, and pretended to sleep on my feet. After half an hour he called me back and again said something, but I answered in Polish that it wasn't my fucking fault if his colleagues in Oradea had failed to do their job. In this vein we conversed. At last he threw me a look of reproach, handed me my documents, and waved me away.

So they don't always stamp, but neither do they always give you a hard time if you didn't get stamped. There's no rule. The Hungarians sometimes won't stamp but then won't fuss, they just make this slow, heavy gesture, my favorite, which means, Screw the lot of you. Generally I like Hungarian border guards. Particularly at Sátoraljaújhely in the summer. They're lazy, a bit unbuttoned-unbuckled, holsters hanging carelessly, but they move with dignity, as if to say, Once this was all ours, but you wanted Trianon, so now you have to stand in this stupid line. I say "jo napot" to them, and they let me by. This jo napot I owe to a border guard on a train at a crossing at LŐkösháza. I was returning then from Sibiu, and it was something like five in the morning. The man appeared at the end of a corridor, and my heart sank. He was two and a half meters high, had a head shaved bald, wore a field jacket much too small for him, and carried an enormous gun at his side. A dog of war, a mutant mercenary. I sat in my compartment, put my hands on my knees, and held my breath. Then the door opened, I saw a big smile, and heard, in Polish, "Hello, your humble servant—is that how you say it? Any drugs, weapons, pornography, Semtex? No? Thank you. Toodle-oo—is that how you say it?" And he was gone.

But the Romanians are no worse. Or the Ukrainians, or the Slovaks. Even Austrians can be cool. Occasionally someone slips a cog—like the Slovenian at the border in Hodoš who insisted on knowing how many dinars we were bringing in, because he had forgotten that for the past ten years his country was part of Yugoslavia. Occasionally someone draws a blank—like the Greek at Corfu who couldn't believe that we had spent two weeks in Albania for pleasure and who looked at our dirty underwear under a strong light to find the answer to the mystery.

Yes, 167 stamps, and if you include the stamps not made, a good 200. Red, violet, green, black; smeared, with a word or initial added in ballpoint pen, with pictures of antique locomotives, automobiles, with childlike outlines of planes and ships, because it is all childishness, a game of tag, blindman's buff, hide-and-seek, a pointless amusement that, once set into motion, cannot stop. Some stamps are indistinct, as if a carved potato were used, an amateur printing kit, or even as if I had made the mark myself with chalk or a fountain pen, as a joke.

I wonder what the stamp of Moldavia is like. That is to say, the Republic of Moldova, east of the Prut, its capital Chişinău. I must find out. I hope it's green. That's how I picture the country: green hills, with a forest now and then. Gardens and plots in the sun. Watermelon, paprikas, and grapevines growing. In the side streets of old Chişinău, the shade of chestnut trees. The cuisine, I understand, is rich, hard to digest, but delicious. The only problem: no vodka on the menu; instead, a sweetish, heavy brandy. According to one German newspaper, the most important thing in the Moldovan economy is the trade in human organs. Generally they sell their own, but sometimes those of foreigners. I'll go in the summer. I love traveling to little-known countries. Then I return, consult books, ask people, and gather a mountain of facts to determine where I actually was. It's hopeless, because in time everything becomes stranger, resembling a dream within a dream. I have to look at my passport to verify that those countries even exist. Because what sort of countries are they anyway? Memories of a dead past, projects for a dim future, vague potentials, promises, and "We'll show you yet." I ought to cross a true border, to a place where women walk in snakeskin boots and nothing reminds you of anything, where life is suddenly interrupted and carnival begins—or some kind of trauma, or transgression. My 167 stamps aren't worth a rat's ass; I always return as clueless as when I left. Everywhere guys stand at street corners and wait for something to happen, everywhere seats on trains have holes from cigarette burns, and people putter and watch calmly while history presses the gas pedal to the floor. I'm wasting my time and my money. I might as well not leave my house; I have everything here.

Wherever I go, I see Gypsies. In Prekmurje, I used a tank of gas in search of them, because I was fed up with that buttoned-down country and with the Slovenians, traitors all to the Slavic pigsty, but I found not one Gypsy, though I had read they were definitely there. Hiding, most likely, having smelled me from a hundred kilometers away, me with my love of disintegration, my sentimental fondness for whatever doesn't look the way it should. They smelled me even as I left my house, and back in Slovakia, when I passed their slums outside Zborov, a place by the road, on a hill, an ad hoc, slapped-together thumbing of the nose at the charms of order and plenty. It never fails to thrill my soul that one can say fuck you to the world and practice the ancient art of rag picking in the midst of the postmodern and postindustrial. The women carry tied bundles of twigs, the men drag carts heaped with scrap metal, the kids pull bottles from garbage. In front of plywood huts stand cars without wheels, carpets are drying, and plastic bags flutter everywhere. Basically these people are doing what we all do: trying to get by. Yet they don't pride themselves, don't write down their history, preferring their legends, folktales, fables passed from generation to generation, their "once upon a time" instead of, say, "on the thirteenth of December of the aforesaid year in Copenhagen." And so wherever I go, I look for them, for that living image of Mediterranean-Christian civilization, that nation without land, those people who, the moment something is built, must discard it, burn it for fun or in despair, and move their portable kingdom to a place where the white European horde heaves a little less with hatred of them. I look for the Gypsies—as in Slovenian Prekmurje—and am disappointed when I don't see them, feel that I've strayed too far and it's time to go back. I am related to them, in an illegitimate way: I learned how to put words together, and my words survive somewhere, and yet I cannot create a credible account. My nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech all detach from the world, fall off like old plaster, and I return to legend, fable, ballad, to things that truly happened yet are lies, rubbish, metaphoric claptrap. The existence of what I wrote was simply too brief to take on meaning. Or it lived on only in my brain.

Once, in Okęcie, an official at a control booth inspected my passport from every side, flipped through it, gave me a look, again glanced at the worn pages, until I thought, not a chance, I wasn't going anywhere, but finally he slid a glass panel open and asked, "Sir, what's the point of all this?" Fifty times I had traveled from here, going south, my heart in my mouth, feeling the delicious fear of what awaited, and he was oblivious, though his counterparts at my destinations sat and stamped with the same spring-loaded, handheld devices. There, everything begins for me: happy young men on the Slovak side selling five-liter bottles of juice—red, yellow, orange, green—the sun shining through and making them gleam like Ali Baba's treasure; selling vodka, beer by the case, the hardiest buying red Modranské wine, horribly dry but only five złoty a bottle; the women selling sacks of sugar, flour, rice; and three duty-free shops in an open field, by a forest, rocking like boats, like ships filled with emigrants crossing the ocean a hundred years ago, carrying the same mob, the same faces—even the cloaks and caps haven't changed that much. An abundance of cheap crap swaying among the gentle green of the Beskids, and a chance of getting something knocked down to half price animates my village, Konieczna, like the prospect of the Promised Land. I stand in line under the pretext of buying dark Thirsty Monk beer or bitter Demänovka herb liqueur, but in fact I am imagining that in "Na Colnicy," in this shop begins the south that leads to the Ionian Sea and the shore of the Peloponnesian peninsula, and along that shore, like birds on a wire, sit folks no different from those here. Their bags full of stuff, their heads full of schemes for getting by, with their own shabby, red-haired, bespectacled customs officials, and always with too little cash, so they must keep moving, dodging, to trick reality and come out on top by the close of day. Košice, Tokaj, Arad, Timişoara, and Skopje are the bright beads on this southern thread. From the shop called U Pufiho is a great view of the Kamenec valley. Peasants drink beer and look south. The light in that direction is better, more distinct, so there's more to see. Košice, Tokaj, Arad, Timişoara, Skopje ... Yes, you could transport Poles from Małastów, Zdynia, Gorlice, and place them in front of a shop in Hidasnémeti, where the last forints are available at the border, or at the marketplace in Suceava, or in Sfântu Gheorghe, where the Danube in swampy mist feeds into the Black Sea, or even in Tirana, when a fume-heavy dusk hangs over Skanderbeg Square and the harmony of the world is undisturbed. No one would know that they are foreigners. At least, not until they opened their mouths.

Not long ago I was wandering at night in Grójec, looking for the road to Końskie, and I had much the same feeling as I did once in the town of Abrud in Transylvania. The same darkness and doubtful light, the same uncertainty of human presence. Space not altogether wiped clean, still carrying the primordial gloom from which it was scraped. It's that way with these guys: begun but not completed. As if they had stopped to wait for the next step in evolution or creation, for events to unfold; as if they dwelled in an endless present endlessly turning into the past. The future is a fiction. It will come, of course, we hear about it all the time, but the old wisdom knows that only what is, and what was, exists. The rest does not, because no one ever saw it or touched it. And so at U Pufiho I too gaze south and plan trips into a present mixed half-and-half with the past. I cannot think ahead without looking back. Sometimes it seems to me that things hold together only thanks to the borders, that the true identity of these lands and peoples is the shape of their territories in an atlas. It's a stupid thought, but I can't shake it.

"To sum up, Romanian folk culture is one of the richest and most complex in Europe." Once, in Milan, I asked Francesco, "What are the Romanians—Romance brothers to the average Italian?" He answered, "To the average Italian, all Romanians are Gypsies." In Sibiu, I was looking for music in a record shop near Nicolae Bălcescu Avenue. The saleswoman asked where I was from. When I said Poland, she began to recite, U lukomorya dub zyelony ( "By the bay, a green oak stands"). "You have it all wrong, ma' am," I said with a sigh. In a Kraków pub, Jabłoński, trying to impress two Slovak women, spoke to them in Czech for three hours, and they looked at him with diminishing interest. At last Kamil, who knew the women, entered and told Jabłoński, "They're Slovenian and have no idea what you're saying." The English are familiar with the name Czesław Miłosz but think he's the guy who did Hair. And so it goes, in a circle, and I'm fine with that. It's good to live in a nonobvious land, one whose borders contain more locations than any geography indicates: the vastness of the unknown, the expanse of guesswork, the retreating horizon of puzzlement, the sweet mirage of prejudices that no reality will correct.

One summer, for a week, I wended my way through eastern Hungary along the Romanian border and pictured what lay on the other side. I went through Szabolcs-Szatmár, sandy villages, the sticks, air stifling with pig shit, somewhere between Mátészalka, Nyírbátor, and Nagykálló, and imagined a Romania I knew not a blessed thing about, yet my imagination soared, I walked in a waking dream, dreamt without agenda, without form, touched by the unreal that everyone knows is more real than what is real. Then, at Záhony, I crossed over to Ukraine and, along the Tisa, took a slow train east, again with Romania on my right, at arm's length, and it was only when I got to Sighetu Marmaţiei that I turned north and could free myself of this illness. A year later I went to Romania in earnest, but that "in earnest" was a repetition of the old dream, of my hallucination on the border, and it lasts to this day, despite the successive stamps in my passport, because you cannot stamp hallucinations that are larger and more permanent than any border or boundary in the world.

I know something about stamps. A hundred and sixty-plus over seven years, and the greater part of them in "the belt of mixed population," in a region where B follows A without logic or any consideration for the bigger picture, where vampires and werewolves still mate and the mind finds no peace, because only it can do battle with the chaos of what, though invisible and impalpable, is confirmed by misfortune. South, southeast ... Everything here reminds you of freedom and childhood. As if you are traveling back in time and have an unlimited number of paths to choose from. In Konieczna, oblivion hangs in the air, and in the Zborov district a man begins to lose his identity. It dwindles with each kilometer, just as, proceeding back to infancy, you finally part with yourself as something different from the rest of the world.

On the way to Hungary, as you pass through Slovenské Nové Mesto, at the intersection of the road with Route 55, begins a ten-kilometer stretch on which you can see what your car can do. If it's spring, the Zemplén Hills are yellow with blooming rapeseed. The place is so empty, you're not sure whether you're looking at a landscape or a diorama. The road climbs hill after hill, descends, and runs straight, as if someone had tossed a ball of gray ribbon. For those ten kilometers, I felt that I had found at last the seam of existence; it was like beholding the world from the other side: everything the same as before yet different. At Čerhov I slowed down for a railroad crossing, and things gradually returned to their places, probably to allow me to feel that I had survived, to allow me to weave these tales that provide a break from a reality I don't understand and don't particularly care to. I know that at the Slovnaft gas station I should go straight—not right, as I usually do—to see the village Borša, the birthplace of Francis II Rákóczi, hero of an episode from the French series entitled Great Escapes and leader of the Hungarian popular uprising against the Hapsburgs in 1703. I know I should take the straight path, to face reality at least once in my life, but instead, like Dyzio the Dreamer, I flee into sweet fantasy, and if it isn't a railroad crossing that distracts me, in another ten minutes I'll be driving into the shade of old trees growing on the main street of Sátoraljaújhely. This shade, it gives me no peace. Its contrast with the green semidesert of the final Slovak kilometers: the perfect scenery versus the perfect town, where venerable trees block the facades with such cunning that you can't distinguish the moving patches of sunlight from the lichen on the stucco. It's the same in Satu Mare in the main square, the trees obscuring the light-blue signs, so you drive in circles looking for the road to Cluj or Sighetu or Oradea or Baia Mare, until finally you park—anywhere—and sit on a bench in the green shade, cursing Romanian vegetation and waiting for autumn, when the leaves will fall and reveal the world's directions.

And it's the same in Chernivtsi: the ancient light and shade trying to break down the walls, the stucco, to smooth away the complicated surfaces, get rid of all the cornices, pilasters, balconies, oriels. But my memory of Chernivtsi is hazy, because Sashko, in his indescribable hospitality, set such a pace that the next day was like being in a furnace, albeit an inviting furnace. At the bus station, heavyset cabdrivers said that nothing today was going to Suceava. They swung their key rings: car keys, house keys, keys to basements, gates, safes, mailboxes, God knows what else. They rattled this metal and were put out that no one believed them, that no one was willing to go with them to Siret for a lousy fifty, and they stood—or rather, fidgeted and paced—and peered above the crowd, because cabdrivers in that part of the world, even when they are runts, see farther than anyone. It's rough for a guy with wheels who can't give anyone a ride. Ditto in Gorlice, Kolomyia, Delatyn, and Gjirokastër in Albania: they charge as much to take you one kilometer as in Berlin, in these places where the gross national product is $1,500 per capita. They sit in their twenty-year-old Mercedes wrecks, in a line, and no, sorry, German prices only. Zero negotiation.

Heat beat from the sky, no shade, horses digging with their hoofs through overturned garbage cans, men picking their noses, balling the snot, and flicking it into the dust of the street, exactly as our Polish cabdrivers do at their eternal stands. But I had to go to Erind, where the road ended and the Lunxherise massif loomed, unpopulated, a long piece of moon embedded in the wild and lovely body of Albania. They must have seen the need in my eyes, must have sensed it with their seventh cabdriver sense. I got into a green 200, its rear practically touching the ground, and off we went. I had to make it to Erind, so I could understand. We crept uphill—in second gear, second, sometimes in third—the tailpipe clanging on the stones. "There was no shade along the road. Travelers slogged through the dust as if it were mud and gazed at the withered yellow slopes on either side, slopes from which flooding, strong winds and the sun had taken everything that a hungry wretch might grasp at." A fair description. Then the rubble that was Erind. Houses like caves, heat-resistant greenery, and a few kids among white walls, the rest of the people no doubt gone to plantations in Greece. No dogs, not even a chicken, only a monument at the very end, in a small burning square, to fallen partisans, with tombstone photographs in porcelain frames. One of the fallen was Misto Mame, another Mihal Duri—twenty-one and twenty-four, respectively. The cabdriver stood there and waited for me to take it in. He thought I had come for this, because what else was here? To hell with the German prices, I thought to myself as I saluted. The guy had shown me what they valued most in this place. He might not get a passenger here for another two years, so the money divided over that time amounted to nothing.

Sometimes I think that this is how it should be: the entire world's treasury, all the dough of the Frankfurt banks, the vaults of the Bank of England, the virtual funds of corporations circulating in electronic space, the contents of the multilevel underground coffers on Bahnstrasse in Zurich, all the paper, all the ore, the rows of digits coursing through the icy bloodstream of fiber-optic cables, should be thrown out, should lose its value, should be exchanged for zeroes in such loci as Erind, Vicşani, Sfântu Gheorghe, Rozput, Tiszaszalka, Palota, Bajram Curri, Podoliniec, the square in front of the church in Jabłonna Lacka, the train station in Vilmány, the train station in Delatyn at dawn, the grocery store in Livezile, the grocery store in Spišská Belá, the pub in Biertan, the rain in Mediaş, and a thousand others, because the map I look at is a fishnet, a star-studded night sky, an old T-shirt or torn bedsheet, and through all those spots that I visited shines a light stronger than the failing light of simple geography, stronger than the ominous glow of political geography and the moribund glow of economic geography. And nothing will sew up those holes. The future will pass through them like food through a duck, will sift through them like sand through fingers. No big ideas or big fortunes or degenerate time will disturb these places, these rips in the gist and foundation, these traces of my presence. Yes, I know, my attitude is benighted, backward. It's January 11, a quarter after two in the morning, and I'm aware that I'm dreaming of building a reservation of sorts here and that the citizens of the above-mentioned towns and villages, if they got wind of it, would boot me in the ass. But it's unlikely, especially in Erind, that anyone will ever read this. Indeed, a reservation, an open-air museum bathed in everlasting light, that's how I imagine it, desire it, because my heart sinks whenever something disappears from view, with a bend in the road or in growing darkness, and I cannot free myself of the thought that it has disappeared forever and I am the only one who witnessed it and now must tell, tell—assuming that anyone will want to listen. Moreover, all these places are falling apart, totally wrecked, hardly one stone upon another, the remnants of former glory, so this fear of mine is no figment: if I return to where I once was, I may find nothing. It's a characteristic of my part of the world, this continual disappearance mixed half-and-half with progress, this crafty undevelopment that makes people wait for everything, this unwillingness to be the subject of an experiment, this perpetual halfheartedness that lets you hop out of the flow of time and substitute contemplation for action. Whatever is new here is bogus; only when it ages and becomes a ruin does it take on meaning. Boys from Kisvárda, Gorlice, Preszów, and Oradea with their baseball caps on backward imitate black brothers in slums across the ocean, because there's nothing to imitate here. Everything new is a movie that has no connection with the past. And so I prefer the old and choose decay, whose continuity cannot be undermined. In Elbasan on the main street I saw great piles of rags. Commerce, apparently, but it looked like a dump. Women poked through the garbage, which went on for many meters, and spread it out on the pavement, as if seeking the bodies of relatives after a catastrophe. They put rags on, took them off, dug for something better. Two truckloads, and God knows where it came from. Greece, Italy, in any case from a place where it was no longer needed. Ideas and concepts arrive here in the same secondhand condition, particularly those made ad hoc for a distant situation. This is a realm of recycling, and the realm itself will be, in the end, recycled.

Such thoughts afflict me in the evening. The wind blows from the northwest, and the white semicircular edges of snowdrifts lie across the road leading to Konieczna. I should invent a graceful story that begins and ends there, provide a first-aid kit that cleverly soothes the mind, alleviates anxiety, and stills hunger. In the darknesses of life I should come up with one piece of evidence that miraculously points the way to what can be followed, what consoles. But no, not a prayer: the world is here and now and doesn't give a flying fuck about stories. When I attempt to recall one thing, others surface. Romania crawls out from under my childhood, Albania from under my visits to grandparents, and now that I am, as it were, an adult, I end up in a region filled with the earliest scenes of my life. I am over forty, yet it's the same randomness, the same hen houses, coal bins, bins for everything—as if someone were showing slides from the time we played cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. Snow falls on Konieczna, Zdynia, the whole parish of Uście Gorlickie, once called Uście Ruskie. In the monochromatic landscape are shovels of many colors: red, green, blue, yellow. People trying to get to their bins, storage shacks, buildings, outbuildings, where animals and old cars are waiting. Drifts grow at the pass, and no one heads out for the Slovak side. Here too, now, is one of those booths, the size of a kiosk selling magazines: a store, a bar, a currency exchange rolled into one—so says the sign in the window. But there is no one here today, other than the lieutenant in the balaclava, who tells me with a smile that the Slovaks have it better, their snowplows make the rounds every two hours. He is disappointed, I think, when I say that I don't drive, that I came only to watch the snow attempt to eradicate the border, bury the map, and level the Carpathian water gap. A man appears from nowhere with a blue shovel on his shoulder and says, sighing, "Looks like I'll need a tractor." I return to the snow-filled parking lot and think that in a year all this may be gone: the red-and-white crossing gate, the flashing lights, the rubber stamps, the suspense, and the questions: "Anything to declare?" "Destination?" And the dog sniffing for amphetamines and Semtex. And the small talk, the flicker of risk, the usual "Here's how you get to Konieczna ..." I will take no delight in their passing.

I collect, putting aside black-and-gold hundred-crown notes with the Madonna of Master Paul on the front and, on the back, Levoča; green twenties with Pribin on the front and, on the back, Nitra; and violet thousands with Andrej Hlinka on the front and, on the back, the Mother of God. I also collect Czech fifties, hundreds, and two hundreds, with Saint Agnes, Karol IV, and Jan Amos Komenskû (Comenius), all in pastels and faded, like the wrapping for old-fashioned candies. The Hungarian forints, however, have a fierceness about them. Especially the light-blue thousand note showing King Hunyadi Mátyás (Matthias Corvinus), who was a Renaissance connoisseur of art and science but on this money looks like a man who could live on raw meat if he had to. More than twenty years younger, Francis II Rákóczi gazes from the five-hundred note more mildly, yet a sneer plays on his lips: a magnificent barbarian's contempt for the entire civilized West, for the Hapsburgs in particular. True, he introduced the fashion for the Transylvanian minuet at Versailles, yet his five-hundred-forint visage resembles less a Louis Bourbon than Bohdan Khmelnytsky on the twenty-hryvnia note or our Jan Sobieski. Yes, I love the Hungarian banknotes, because they don't mince words: they say, "Shove Trianon," and they pine for the day when the horses of the Huns swam the Adriatic. But my favorite banknote of all is the Slovenian fifty tolars. On the front is Jurij Vega ( 1754–1802), who unfortunately is passed over silently in the Polish PWN Encyclopedia. The design of the note suggests that Vega was an astronomer. His features: a young Beethoven, a Germanized General Kościuszko. But the reverse side is even better: three-quarters of the note is an intense blue, like the sky over Piran in January. A blue that, like a kindergarten drawing, makes no compromises. Only the Romanian two thousand lei, all in plastic and the national colors and with a transparent window, can compete with it. This last was released on the occasion of a full eclipse of the sun in 1999: "Doua mii lei, eclipsa totala de soare." It will all be gone someday, so I am collecting, for a private museum, to have a few memories in my old age.

On a shelf I keep a black canister for a liter flask of Absolut, and in it there are at least ten kilograms of loose change. When I am low, I dump it out on a table, to revisit all the pubs, shops, bus and train stations, gas stations, and cabs in which I obtained them. The coins remind me of things and places: the street stalls in Saranda, the lane stanchions on the Slovenian highway A1, the ferries on the Tisa, the parking meters on the Szentháromság tér, Holy Trinity Square, in Baja, the enormous yellow barrels of beer on the streets of Stanislavov, cigarettes, shot glasses, goblets, music boxes, the talking machine for tourists at Saint Jacob's Church in Levoča ... Whenever I come home, my pockets are full of change, and I can never discard these coins, believing as I do in the lovable bumpkin magic that will lead me back to those places so that I can finally spend them. But what can you buy with a hundred lei that bears the head of Michael the Brave? Not a thing. You could drill a hole in this substantial disk and hang it around your neck like a medal for valor in battle. Even worthless, this treasure lifts my spirits on bad days. I can picture all the hands it passed through, imagine the routes it took from town to town, from village to village. I see the men drinking in taverns, the women shopping in marketplaces, the children buying candy at kiosks. Who knows how many times my hundred lei with the hole in it went through Transylvania, Moldova and Wallachia, Mutenia, Oltenia, Dobruja and the Delta before it lost all its value? Into this heavy disk, as into a computer hard drive, has been inscribed the history of wealth, poverty, desires, profit, loss, market ups and down and arounds, but I cannot read it, I can only save it. I let the coins dribble from my fist and feel how time and space go by, society, economy, human lives, how the Carpathians, the Czech-Moravian Heights, the Great Hungarian Plain, the Romanian Lowlands, Transylvania, and a part of the Balkans all convert into a soft clink.

Once, on Route 19, a few kilometers beyond Satu Mare, we saw a Gypsy camp in the red light of a setting sun. Three, four carts standing on the side of the road, dirt poverty, gaunt horses, and torn plastic spread over movable goods. Inside were sheets, blankets, mattresses, women, kids, pots, human existence as shit hole, but in the sun it blazed, as if it might be gone any moment, ascending to heaven like a multiplied Prophet Elijah, and the men, adjusting things in a hopeless tangle of harnesses, were darker than their own long shadows. "I must get that," Piotrek said and stopped the car right there. He grabbed his camera, ran out, began negotiating, but the miracle of the light would be over in a matter of minutes, so he waved for me to come and handle the financial end. I dug out of my pocket kronas, forints, lei—according to the route we had taken—and explained in pantomime that we were willing to pay but it had to be within reason. The thin, veiny leader, in a white undershirt, looked at the change, of which the forints amounted to two dollars at least (we were not far from the Hungarian border), finally grimaced and waved with contempt and said, "Nu, ţigari." I gave him all the cigarettes I had: a pack of Snags, the few Marlboros left, the few Carpati. He accepted them, went to his people, and distributed. Then the sun went down, and they set off for Satu Mare. The three, four tattered carts became darkness, nothingness, not having belonged to this world in the first place. They did not belong seven hundred years before, when on the Peloponnesian peninsula European memory first made note of their presence, nor on May 4, 2000, when a man resembling his own shadow said to me, "Nu, ţigari," because money seemed to him more trouble than it was worth.

A year later I was at a traffic light somewhere past Sibiu—or it might have been Cristian, or Miercurea Sibiului. Roadwork was being done, and our side and the opposite side got the green light in turns. Two children took advantage of this forced wait. They ran up to the cars and put on a little show that combined comedy and begging. I gave one a bill, but the other grabbed it from his hand, and the first kid started bawling. I consoled the bawler with a second bill. Then I saw them both in the rearview mirror, how in perfect harmony they were enjoying, together, the spoils of their performance.

I dribble the change from my fist, I leaf through my banknotes, and it's like touching photography in Braille, because my fingers can feel the things that happened and my nose can smell the places. The small but heavy hundred-forint coin will forever be for me the emblem of the green hills of Zemplén. It was the price, that year, for a glass of palinka in the village taverns. In Gönc, Telkibánya, Vilmány. The worn thousand-lei note with Eminescu on it will always evoke Transylvania and the tiny dark shops in Biertan, Roandola, Copşa Mare, Floreşti, which were cool caves dug into the Transylvanian heat, and when I bought bottle after bottle of wine, the change I got was wads and stacks of these rags heavy with sweat and dirt. What is memory, anyway, if not the endless exchange of currency, a continual allotting and distributing, a counting in the hope that the total will be right, that what once was will return with no shortage, whole, untouched, and perhaps even with interest, through love and longing? What is travel, anyway, if not spending, then reckoning what's left and turning your pockets inside out? The Gypsies, the money, the passport stamps, the tickets, the stone from the bank of the Mát, the cow's horn smoothed by the Danube current in the Delta, blok na pokutu, the fine in Slovakia, račun parkiranja, the parking ticket in Piran, nota de plata, the bill at the pub in Sulina: two fried catfish, two salads, a carafe of wine, one Silva beer, in all 85,700 ...

This was off Deltea Avenue. You entered from the street, into a room with four small tables. Upstairs was a small hotel. Behind the counter stood a willowy young woman with short hair, her face delicate and sad. She did the cooking herself, wiped the glasses, served the food, a moving shadow. Men came in stinking of fish and diesel fuel. The chairs creaked beneath them as they drank their beer, smoked, muttered, and returned to the shore, to the rusting barges and tugboats, iron in scummy water, to a river that in despair had opened its arteries. The young woman cleaned the ashtrays and bottles and went back to the counter to insert a tape cassette, a medley of stuff in English: Elton John, Gilbert and Sullivan, the Carpenters, the seventies, the eighties. A bony black horse outside the window was hitched to a cart on rubber tires behind a blackened wood house. A beanpole cop for the seventh or twelfth time that day paced the length of the sandy walkway. A little farther on, at a wire fence, a man in striped pajamas stared into space. The building seemed abandoned, but the sign said it was a hospital. On the driveway to the Hotel Sulina, uncut grass. The continent ended here, and events too had run their course, but the grass quietly waited for something that would happen nevertheless. With a barely noticeable smile, she brought us the check, then returned to her world.

And this parkovaci preukaz, parking permit, at the small hotel in Ruǽomberok ... We ended up there late one evening after an entire day on the road. The town stank from a cellulose factory. The black silhouette of mountains darkened against the sky. In the center of town, everything was cheap and throwaway. Things normally made from solid material here were all plastic. Walls, doors, and furniture pretending to be bona fide. In the pub, the owner and his family were being entertained. Two musicians in shirts and cherry vests on the bandstand adjusted the Yamahas and microphone. The singer held a notebook stuffed with songs. One of the musicians improvised. Seven, eight people danced. Two little girls watched the stars: they were the boss's granddaughters. A fifty-year-old character—wooden face, gold watch, gold chain—tried to preserve his dignity on the dance floor. Everyone moved frugally and stiffly, as if afraid of bumping into something, though there was plenty of room. An imposed task for them, this, or a game they were still learning, or a rehearsal for completely new roles. The lightbulbs, dim and melancholy, were as tentative as the guests. The women had high hairdos and trouble with their high heels. The boss took off his jacket, wore a gray vest and white shirt. Moved his massive body as if hearing music for the first time in his life. Three or four more people entered, led by an enormous guy in a black suit, shaved bald, with dark glasses. Making exactly the impression he wanted to make. Someone behind him held a bouquet. They stood there waiting to be greeted, but there was no greeting, so they slowly made their way into the lifeless party, and only the enormous one, his neck thicker than his bare skull, remained at the entrance and surveyed the room as if it belonged to him. These folks must have watched all three parts of The Godfather, especially the party scenes, and now they were trying to reenact it among plastic chandeliers, artificial flowers, and beet-red leatherette upholstery, to the rhythm of the indomitable hit "Comme Ci, Comme Ça."

I keep all these events in a shoebox. Sometimes I take out one or another, like a parrot plucking a slip in a lottery drawing. Valabil-2 Calatoria, a thin strip in green, red, and orange, and a tram ticket, punched twice, from Sibiu to Răinari. The tram shuttles between the city and the village. Even my most detailed maps don't show its route, yet I took it at least twice and drove along its tracks four times. From this scrap of paper you could segue to a few good stories: about Emil Cioran's insomnia in Sibiu; about the Păltiniş madness of Constantin Noica, who wanted to breed Romanian geniuses; or Lucian Blaga, who in the summer months in Gura Râului attempted to establish a Mioritic ontology ... All three men had to take this tram that harks back to the Austro-Hungarian time. The shoebox works exactly that way, my brain like the parrot plucking slips in a lottery. The metal canister for Absolut vodka works that way, too, a magic lantern of coincidence, accident, and adventure making a story that goes in all directions and cannot go otherwise, because it involves memory and space, both of which can commence at any point, both of which never end. You can see this just by driving to Konieczna. By driving there and returning after a week or two, to find that time is dead, or was waiting for us to come back, not accompanying us at all, and everything that happened on our trip happened simultaneously, without sequence or consequence, and we did not age one minute. It's a kind of illusion of immortality when the red-and-white crossing gate is raised, a cunning version of tai chi, meditation in motion, and ultimately— let's be honest—a most ordinary escape.

But it's great, in the middle of winter, to say, "Fuck this, I'm going to Abony, that hole in the center of the Hungarian Lowlands near Szolnok, I'm going from one nowhere to another." And only because six years ago, I saw a picture that André Kertész took on June 19, 1921, and that I can't get out of my head: a blind fiddler crossing a sandy village road as he plays, led by a teenage kid. It hasn't rained for a while, because the road is dry—the kid's feet are not muddy, and the thin tracks made by the metal wheels of a cart are not deep. They curve to the left and leave the frame, blurring first. In the washy background sit two figures by the curb. The two white daubs near them are probably geese. There is also a toddler standing midway between the focus and the rim of the photograph. He looks to the side, as if not hearing the music, or perhaps the appearance of these two pedestrians is an everyday thing. Because of this, I went to Abony in the dead of winter. And found nothing there. I filled my tank on leaving Budapest but in four minutes had driven through the town. A woman hanging up laundry, then there were no more houses. I was not really looking for anything, because, after all, nothing could have lasted; it all remained in the photograph. I turned toward the Tisza. A reddening dusk over the Puszta. A few scattered houses, groves of poplar, two children walking to the horizon over naked earth, black and empty stork nests, all this beneath a limitless, blazing sky. Darkness fell somewhere after Tisaalpár.

The next day, in the photography museum in Kecskemét, I bought an album of Kertész, to discover that the blind fiddler is not left-handed: the picture I had at home was flipped. I needed to drive to Abony in January, pass through it without stopping, to discover, a few dozen kilometers farther, that the boy leading the musician was his son. This information is of no use to me. I cannot know, can only imagine, their life, unfold that day beyond the frame of the picture, fill that ancient space with their fragile presence. The father's shoes are worn, falling apart. He wears a dark jacket, but over his right shoulder he has thrown another covering, which resembles a torn blanket. The son also carries something like a blanket or towel. They are prepared for bad weather and the cold. The boy holds in his hand a small bundle. Under the brim of the fiddler's hat is a crushed white cigarette. At least I think so. I must gather what facts I can, to flesh out that day. On June 19, the sun rose at 3:14, and an hour or two later the heat of the Puszta set in. There is no shade here. It's far from one town to another. The roads to isolated homes beyond the horizon are straight and scarlike. It's fourteen kilometers to ûÚjszász, fourteen to ûjszilvás, ten to Törtel and KŐröstetétlen, seventeen to Tószeg. The air is still and smells of manure. When the breeze comes from the east, it brings the swamp reek of the Tisza. You can hear the birds over the bogs. A trained ear distinguishes even the dry whistling beat of their wings. Sometimes a heavy team of gray, big-horned oxen passes, or a clattering carriage. Then you get a whiff of tobacco, untanned leather, and horse sweat. These conveyances, passing, grow silent, are gone, leaving only dust.

This is my Hungary; I cannot help it. I realize that it all belongs to the past and may not actually have ever taken place. I realize that eighty-five kilometers farther and eighty-two years later is Budapest, then Esztergom, et cetera, and the glory and the power and everything that gets collected over the centuries in minds that want to live beyond their allotted time. But my Hungary is in Abony, where I didn't even stop. No doubt because the blind musician could show up in any of those places that no one knows and where no one ever goes, places never mentioned but that make the world what it is. Only a miracle saved him and his son from oblivion. "I took the picture on a Sunday. The music woke me. That blind musician played so wonderfully, I hear him to this day" (André Kertész).

I can take my Hungary with me wherever I go, and it will lose none of its vividness. It's a negative, or a slide through which I shine the light of memory. In Tornyosnémeti, two men emerged from the dark and began to play. One had a harmonica, the other a guitar with a dull sound. It was freezing cold and foggy. The waiting tour buses formed a black wall. The guitarist's fingers must have hurt. The music, numb, could barely leave the instruments. I didn't make out the melody, only a hurried, nervous beat. A string broke, but they played on, with sad eyes and the stubbornness typical of hopeless enterprises. Then we tried conversing, in a borderland mix of Hungarian and Slovak. It wasn't money they wanted but to change it. They had a handful of Polish coins, tens, twenties, fifties, collected no doubt from our truckers. They sold them to me for forints. We said good-bye, and they were gone. They might have been from Gönc. The younger man, the harmonica player, could have been one of the two kids whom three years ago the bartender refused to serve at the pub next to the Hussite House. I'd ask, if I could, how that skinny one is doing, the one with the homespun coat over his bare back, the one I arm-wrestled that summer and drank with to the health of Franz Josef. If the musicians were from Gönc, they would know him. And know the man who was brown as chocolate, round as a ball, and naked to the waist, who every day went down the main street in a small horse-drawn two-wheel cart. I can still hear the muffled clop of horseshoes on asphalt softened by the heat.

It's winter now, and I need such sounds. From my window I see a two-horse team and, on the cart, four men bundled up. The horses, though shod, step uncertainly on the ice. They all appear out of the mist and in a moment are gone again. If only it were summer—then, instead of returning to their Pętna or Małastów they could head for Konieczna and there by some miracle get around the guards and rules and make it to the Slovak side. And, in Zborov, say, they could blend in with the locals, being exactly like them in style, dress, expression, general appearance. May would be a good time; there's grass for the horses and only occasionally a touch of frost in the morning. I'd go with them, to look at the passing world and at their faces, so different and so familiar. I'd sit to the side like a ghost and listen to their words. Probably they would talk about how things change as they travel, but not so that a person feels at any point the bump of a border. Slovak names would imperceptibly become Hungarian, then Romanian, Serbian, Macedonian, finally Albanian—assuming that we keep more or less to country lanes that go along the twenty-first line of longitude. I'd sit to the side and drink with them all the varieties of alcohol that change with the changing land: borowiczka, körte palinka, cujka, rakija, and eventually, around Lake Ohrid, Albanian raki. No one would stop us, and no one would stare as we rested at a place off the thoroughfare. That region is full of forgotten roads. Turn down one, and time slackens, as if it has evaded someone's supervising eye. Time wears away gradually, like the clothes of the men traveling by cart. What seems ready for discarding persists as it degrades and fades, until the silent end, the moment when existence shifts invisibly to nonexistence. My mind in this way wandered after they vanished into the mist. I see them cross the Hungarian Lowlands, Transylvania, the Banat, as if they were born there and returning home from the marketplace, from a visit, from work in the field or in the woods. Time parts before them like the air and closes again as they pass.

Whenever I come home from Romania in the summer, the undercarriage of the car is crusted with cow shit. One evening, as I was descending the switchbacks from Păltiniş and found myself among the first buildings of Răinari, I heard under my wheels a series of sharp, loud splashes. The entire road was covered with green diarrhea. Moments before, a herd had come down from its pasture. I could see the last of the cattle finding their paddocks. They stood under the gates with lifted tails and shat. Had I braked, I would have slid as on ice in winter. Cows and steers turned this crossing into a skating rink. Completely filled with crap, a route that Sibiu society would usually take to their vacation dachas in the mountains. Crap from one shoulder to the other. Crap drying in the last rays of the setting sun. People on motorcycles had the worst of it. The animal world had invaded the heart of the human world, which was fitting. Now whenever I drive at dusk through villages in Transylvania, the Puszta, or my own Pogórze, I think of that splashing, think that we have not been altogether abandoned.

Another time, before Oradea, I turned off Highway 76 and got lost in a tangle of village roads. It might have been' Tăad, or Drăgeşti, I don't remember. In any case, in the distant east you could see the gentle cones of the mountains the Hungarians call Királyerdö, the Romanians Pădurea Craiului, and we Poles the Royal Forest. It was late afternoon, and the slanting light threw gold on everything and lengthened shadows. In an hour I was to leave Transylvania and enter the Great Hungarian Plain, so I wanted to have a last look. And ended up in this village. The houses, side by side, were arranged in a wide ring. In the center was a commons overgrown with young birches. A village, but it was like driving through a grove. The slender trees shone like honey. Here and there the gleam of a white wall, but no person in sight, only heavy pink pigs trotting through the scenery. Maybe ten of them. They sniffed, their snouts to the ground, looking for prey, as if they reigned here and were tracking down a foe. In the golden light, their hundred-kilogram hulks were an exquisite blasphemy. Clean, as if they didn't live in a sty. Under the dull and bristled skin, flesh swollen with pulsing blood. I will go back someday, to learn the name of that village. Without a name, it is too much like a vision, and I need real things to have faith in.

Last summer I took a bus to Saranda. The bus, an old crate of a Mercedes, barely made it up the Muzinës pass. Below, at the bottom of the cliff, rusted chassis of vans and sedans that would lie there until Judgment Day. On the other side of the Gjëre Mountains, near Delvine, we drove into a cloudburst and entered Saranda in pouring rain. Two men—they looked like father and son—unloaded from the bus bundles, bags, sacks, packs, parcels tied, parcels taped; it could have been a lifetime's accumulation of possessions. A sad, sodden move someone was making. Finally they pulled from the bus's cavernous luggage bay a scruffy mutt. The little animal was added to the baggage, as if that was now its home. Then the bus took off, and the curtain of rain closed on them.

I recall all the animals and see them as clearly as I see the people. The horses grazing untethered in Chornohora, the big-horned cattle of the Puszta, the cows belly-deep in the muddy current of the Delta, the Bucharest dogs, loose, moving freely, seeking food in a world that draws no borders between man and beast. In Sfântu Gheorghe, at dawn, I went to an outhouse in the backyard. The shed was so low, you dropped your pants before you entered, because inside you had to bend in half. And you stepped out to pull your pants up. Precisely then I was attacked by a red rooster, its beak aimed at the very thing I wished to conceal. The hens stopped scrabbling for a moment to look at him with admiration while I ran across plots to the protection of the house door. The rooster was no longer in pursuit, yet I still felt fear, because of this momentary crack in the world. In Përmet, or maybe it was in Kosinë, a woman rode a donkey on a side path. She was so ancient, so burned by the sun, and so wrinkled and shriveled, that if it hadn't been for her clothes, you could have mistaken her for part of the animal. In the dust and heat, the two had passed this way hundreds of times. Their shadows on the white stone of the path fused into a single shadow, just as their fates were fused into one.

My four men on the cart, I see them always at the same hour, trying to get home before nightfall, exhausted after a day in the woods, in melting snow and mud, and the horses too are exhausted, heads lowered, hoofs sloshing, the same heaviness in their movement as in the men sitting slumped, heads nodding. Enfolded in the mist, the human and the animal cannot be separated. I watch them pass, I smell them in the chill air: horse sweat, damp clothes, shirts that stick to backs, the worked leather of the harnesses. The odor of monotonous labor chained for centuries to matter. That's how the two shepherds smelled in the German pub in şpring, how the plots smelled in Nagykálló, how the train smelled, the Red Ruta leaving Delatyn at dawn for Kwasy, how the old houses smelled in Sulina. I stayed in one of them, south of the river. In the middle of the day I entered and saw a dark interior. People lay on a large mattress, three, four, more. In the mingling of half-naked bodies I could make out the narrow shoulders of a child, and feet sticking out from under a cover. Possibly an entire family, men and women, deep in sleep. They had taken shelter from the merciless white sky, but the heat had pursued them, or the heat came from them. Their skin was almost black against the sheets. I had entered someone's home and saw strange people in the moment of their greatest vulnerability. They made no attempt to conceal themselves, as pets sleep openly before us. I went to my room and never saw them again. I remember only dark bodies saturated with materiality and so heavy, it seemed they would never get up again.

Clearly I am drawn to decline, decay, to everything that is not as it could or should be. Whatever stops in half stride because it lacks the strength or will or imagination to continue. Whatever gives in, gives up, does not last, and leaves no trace. Whatever in its passing stirs no regret or reminiscence. The present imperfect. Histories that live no longer than the relating of them, objects that are only when someone regards them. This is what haunts me—this extra being that everyone can do without, this superfluity that is not wealth, this hiddenness that no one explores, secrets that, ignored, are lost forever, memory that consumes itself. March draws to a close, and I hear the snow slipping off the mountains in the dark. The world like a snake sloughing another skin. The same feeling each year, and it deepens with each year: the true face of my region, of my corner of the continent—precisely this changing that changes nothing, this movement that expends itself. Some spring, not only will the snow melt, everything else will melt, too. The brown-gray water will wash away towns and villages, it will wash away animals, people, everything, down to the naked skeleton of the earth. Meteorology and geology will join forces, ruling in a dubious coalition with history and geography. The permanent will seize the transitory by the throat. The elements will resume their places on Mendeleev's eternal table, and no more tales, no more narratives will be needed to interpret existence.

On the shore of Lalëzit Bay, around Jubë, I saw a military encampment. Tents and occasional barbed wire. Faded canvas torn and sagging. The jutting bare feet of soldiers asleep on cots. It was Sunday. A little farther on were people from Tirana sunbathing. The barbed-wire fence served no dividing purpose: neither side had anything. Each side could gather all it possessed and leave. If you folded up the tents and beach umbrellas, the shore would look as it had looked before. Only the bunkers of a previous era would remain, of no use to anyone, and they were now slowly becoming part of the natural landscape.

People soak up time like sponges. They steep themselves in it, amass it like those who stockpile a thing they fear will run out. Sometimes I get into a car and drive a few hours, thirty, forty kilometers from home. I enter a maze of highways, lanes, shortcuts across meadows or through groves, because I saw on the map a hamlet called Lower Gaul or Bethlehem, or three huts given the name Ukraine or Siberia. I'm not making this up. Check The Lower Beskids and Foothills, the Eugeniusz Romer State Agency of Cartographic Publishers, Warsaw-Wrocław, fifth edition, it's all in the upper left corner. But along the way I forget my destination. All I need do is turn off the main road, and space thickens, resists, deigning to grace these homes and farms, the miserable little patches behind fences, the vegetation that has barely emerged from the ground, barely raised itself above the surface, and is now attempting to survive. This surviving is done day by day, without hope; fatalism alone holds things together. Concrete, bricks, steel, and wood combine in random proportions, as if waxing and waning can reach no final agreement. The old looks bedraggled, cast off, impotent; the new struts and challenges, wanting to overcome both the shame of the past and the fear of the future. Everything is temporary, ad hoc, a verb whose action is never completed. This could all disappear in a second, and space would accept the gap, fill it in, and smooth it over as if not a thing had happened. An introduction to what never begins; a periphery that has no center; a suburb that stretches to the horizon without ever reaching the city. The landscape devours, and space patches up the holes, because these backwaters that I drive through and love with my despairing love are emptied in the very act of their becoming, their sense drained in their very struggle to be. They are so like nature that on a misty day in early spring they can scarcely be distinguished from their surroundings. In a moment the low sky closes like a door, and everything is gone. That's why I rush to make these trips, why I'm so avid for details that will soon vanish and need to be re-created out of words. I don't know why all this is, and I lost the hope, long ago, that I would find an answer. Therefore, to be safe, I write down everything as it happens, substituting consistency for justice and meaning.

A few days ago I drove through Duląbka. The shadow of Cieklin Mountain filled the valley. Up the clay slope climbed a horse harnessed to a plow held by a bent man. Behind them, a woman, doubled over as she tossed plowed-up stones to the side. A scene of biblical poignancy. The wind blew, and through the clouds on occasion came the slanting rays of early evening. The three silhouettes on the hill stood out so sharply, they seemed not of this world. Duląbka a few days ago, Turza a few days before that, and in a week from now some other nowhere town in Moldova or Macedonia. But if you wrote, "I was driving through Golden Prague" or "Once in Budapest" or "In Kraków one day" or "In Sosnowiec," that wouldn't work either, there's nothing there, no key or legend to use, no metaphor, no language that will travel beyond the gates of the city. "One day in Warsaw" makes no sense. Cities in this neck of the continent arise on the spur of the moment, by coincidence. No good reason for them to be there. Try navigating Budapest during rush hour. There's no way to get around it: it sits like a spider in the middle of its web of streets. Or try making it through Warsaw, through Bucharest. A city on a trip is a disaster. Especially in countries that are like large villages. Villagers don't know how to build a city. They end up with totems to foreign gods. The downtown area takes a stab at copying something, while the suburbs invariably resemble an aborted farm. The hypertrophy of storefronts with the melancholy of lost illusions. Whenever I am driving along and suddenly an edifice looms in the center of a small town, I am stunned, because nothing prepares for or explains it. At every opportunity I skirt such centers, taking bypasses, trying roads barely visible on the map, going way out of my way to miss the long shadows of downtown towers and high-rises. Any place with a population over 100,000, I cross it off my list: Go ahead, build in the hope that someday it will completely block the view of where you come from.

Thus goes my litany in the swirl of ring roads, overpasses, throughways, as I squint at road signs and route numbers, my map spread across the steering wheel, with honking behind me as I glance in the rearview mirror, as I sit in the stinking shadows of trucks, at dawn in Duląbka, in the evening in Bratislava, and on to the knot of Viennese arteries, breaking through to the other side of the enormous imperial capital, then south to reach a sleepy village in the middle of the night, by the Zala River, then to Bajánsenye by the Slovenian border, where the fifty-year-old Mr. Geza runs a pension in an old watermill, and at two in the morning, over red wine and bacon and eggs, he repeats, "Budapest is different now. People don't talk to each other anymore." If January has no snow, the willows and reeds in the early sun are the color of faded wrapping paper. The soil is always wet. Or else the sky is low, unusually low even for Hungary, and its weight squeezes the moisture from the earth.

Twenty-two kilometers from Mr. Geza is where Danilo Kiš lived during World War II. His father made mad travels through this region and drank "handcrafted Tokay from Lendava" in its taverns. Lendava is now a border town on the Slovenian side. And Uncle Otton rode here on a bicycle. The uncle's left leg, frozen, hung while the right foot, tied to the pedal with a belt, pedaled. He took the dusty clay roads to Zalaegerszeg, to oversee his complicated business affairs. If Kiš's father was a character out of Bruno Schulz, his uncle was straight out of Beckett— that's how I see them when I read Kiš's Garden, Ashes in a black-green cover that by some strange twist of fate or accident has the photograph of a dark-brown clay bird on it. Two years before, in the winter, in that region, in Magyarszombatfa, I bought two clay angels of exactly that color. It's a place of potters, but the publisher, Marabut, was probably unaware of it. So this is a sign for me to go there once more, to find the Count's Forest and all the other topographic features scattered throughout the text, because a story should defy time and logic, just as our imagination separates itself from events. There should be a to-be-continued, which may have nothing to do with the beginning, so long as the story is nourished by the same substance, so long as it breathes the same (albeit somewhat stale) air. I tell myself it doesn't matter if I find nothing.

On the map I see the blue vein of a river. It's called the Kerka. In the underbrush along the bank, an eight- or nine-year-old boy, living in the memory or imagination of the grown Danilo Kiš, crawls on all fours, chews the leaves of wild sorrel, and suddenly sees, in the sky, God's image. "He stood on the edge of a cloud, dangerously leaning over, maintaining an inhuman, superhuman balance, with a burned wreath around his head. He appeared unexpectedly, and just as quickly and unexpectedly disappeared, like a falling star." Even if nothing remains of those days, the river is still there, and the underbrush, and the clouds in the sky. Theophany needs nothing more, just like eternity, which never comes to our cities, because such a visit would put them on an equal footing with the earth ...

So Kiš finally arrived. "To travel means to live," he wrote in 1958, quoting Hans Christian Andersen but giving the words an altogether new meaning. A Schedule for Buses, Ships, Trains, and Planes, his father's project, in its full and perfected version would describe—more, would duplicate—the whole world in units of time and space. Empty places between hours of departure and between distances would be filled with accumulated knowledge of continents, bodies of water, culture and civilization, history and geography—information taken from every field, from alchemy to zoology. If such a book were published, all travel would become pointless, would be replaced by reading. I wouldn't need to make the trek from Duląbka to Bajánsenye, then go another twenty kilometers down to the Kerka. I could sit at home, knowing that whatever I saw as a traveler would be no more than a copy, a pale reflection of such and such a chapter and paragraph in the Universal Schedule. I wouldn't bother to pick up a pen, because the road from Duląbka and all other roads would exist in a pristine and ideal state untouched by human foot or vehicle wheel. The bus to Jasło would stay forever in its shed, the bus to Kraków also, and the 22:40 international to Budapest, and so on, to every corner of the planet, and no matter where people went, they would find evidence of the presence of the mad genius of the Schedule. Unfortunately this magnum opus was never completed, and the initial sketches, notes, and diagrams, on typescript covered with scrawled corrections, were lost in the 1940s somewhere by the Zala River.

It is for this reason, among other reasons, that my passport looks the way it does. Without a schedule, a guide, a plan, and abandoned to chance, I try to find out things on my own, and always have to start from square one. I go to Baia Mare, let's say, as if no one had ever been there before. Or, at noon in the middle of the summer, to Dukla, where your shadow contracts to a small patch at your feet and the solitude at Market Square thickens as if Judgment Day might come at any moment. Or I cross Pusztaradvány and climb the high barrens toward Slovakia in January, to see how dead the borderland there is and how the rows of hills appear untouched by human eyes, and how at Buzica the red-and-white crossing gate and the guard suggest a vigil for the repentant souls of smugglers. I went there one day in order to bypass Budapest, drove up the northern slopes of the Bukovec Mountains and Mátra in the hope that in a few hours I would reach, by some miracle, the Danube's bend, at Esztergom, where one August on a side street near the intersection of Pázmány and Batthyany I discovered a pub that inside was like a village cabin done up for a wedding reception: a few simple tables covered with checkered cloth, a few chairs, and that was it. A fat man in suspenders appeared and brought a menu on which the dishes, only a few, were written in longhand. The writing quaint, calligraphic. The room was cold, quiet, empty. I felt like a party guest who had come too early. I ordered gombaleves, mushroom soup. Suspenders brought it and placed it before me as one puts food before a person who just got off work. I could eat with my elbows on the table, even slurp, no one would care, though not far from here, more than a thousand years ago, Saint Stephen was baptized, making all Hungary Christian in one fell swoop.

It was August, and Basilica Hill shimmered like a mirage in the heat. I no longer recall where I had arrived from, but right after the green bridge over the Danube, Slovakia began, sleepy Slovakia, with its tranquil peasant waiting for what should come but might not. Cement-gray plaster and villages that ended abruptly; potbellied men in white undershirts drinking beer and sitting on plastic chairs in front of a hostinec, in shoes without socks, as if they hadn't left their yard, as if their home encompassed the entire village, the entire region, the rest of the world as far even as two, three bus stops away. Sometimes women would be standing beside them in dressing gowns and slippers—not sitting down, just there to exchange a few words.

Sleepy Slovakia, a deepening afternoon, with only the Gypsies astir and getting into things, turning in the swelter like scattered black rosary beads. It's five, six, and the Košice and Prešov beltways are as empty as dawn on a Sunday. In Medzilaborce, too, not a soul, but in a dark-gray pub at the exit to Zborov, where the only ATM in town stands, someone's hand holds a shot glass. Except that was another time. I was driving to Ubl'a, due east, above the Ukrainian border, because someone called Potok had had adventures there, a couple of times barely escaping with his life, and for weeks at a dusty border marketplace he drank the cheapest and vilest booze in that part of Europe, losing over and over again the pistol that he had stolen and that held only one bullet, kept for the darkest hour. I went to check all this out, in particular to find that fucked-up international bazaar at which the Moldovans spread out on the ground all the treasures of Transnistria in the hope of exchanging them for the riches of Transcarpathia, the jewels of Szabolcs-Szatmár, the inexhaustible goods of Maramureş. I wanted to take it all in, hear the Babylonian cacophony of tongues, Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Romance, see the eastern hodgepodge of tents, pubs of canvas and plywood, old buses turned into brothels on wheels. I wanted to smell Gypsy camps stocked with marvels that no woman or man could resist, because they came from a realm no one yet had reached or—more to the point—no one had returned from. Thus I set out for Ubl'a, east of the volcanic mountains of Vihorlat, mountains no one in his right mind would venture into, as they are haunted by the ghosts of field officers and front-line soldiers of the Warsaw Pact, and by pallid ghouls, deserters, who sell arms and uniforms as souvenirs. I drove through the town of Snina, where among weeping willows stood two-story garrison buildings with red roofs, all looking as if they had been thrown together that same day and had aged and fallen apart just as quickly. On benches in doorways sat women with children. Soldiers' wives, widows of the officer ghosts? Snina was a dream dreamt at the edge of a country that had lost all its enemies.

I drove to Ubl'a, through Stakčín, Kolonica, Ladomirov, in the shadow of the Bukovec divide, through Transcarpathian Rus, because a few years before, Potok gave voice, supposedly, to the spirit of these lands and times, because the genius loci of this corner of the continent spoke in tongues, as if in a kind of early capitalist Pentecost. Somewhere around there, perhaps a little to the south, was the square, the commons, the market to which the cursed of the earth were drawn as soon as the crossing gates lifted. The miracle of liberty, of the free exchange of commodities in dust, dirt, an open field, a city rising from nothing and unlike anything the world had seen. Because it had to be as it was once: caravans, troops on the march, migration. The supernatural reality of different prices, different currency drawing entire families from their homes, entire tribes, and making them walk an uncertain path, as once it drew people to the farthest seas, to the ever-retreating horizon of adventurers and discoverers. So I went to Ubl'a, beyond which lay Vyšne Nemecké and Čierna nad Tisou, not unlike traveling between the Tigris and the Euphrates to a new Nineveh. Not two rivers met here but three borders, like three currents carrying the fertile sediment of smuggled riches, cunning, greed, fake vodka, pipes for which no excise tax was paid, Siberian skins, exotic parrots and turtles, bullets for Makarov pistols, and Hungarian pornography. Three borders like three rivers, each gathering the best from the depths of each land. I imagined that somewhere between Čierna, Chop, and Záhony a city would grow from the naked soil like a hallucination of the damned, with twenty-four-hour commerce, unlimited supply and demand, and that consumption and capital expenditure would be joined forever in mystical marriage. Such thoughts accompanied me.

But there was nothing in Ubl'a. Only two rows of tidy houses, one on either side of the road. A Slovak cop stopping an old Ukrainian Mercedes driven by some bald bozo. Nothing happening aside from that. You drive and drive, and suddenly the country ends, for no reason, it seems, almost as if it simply got bored and quit. The uniform waved; the Ukrainian slowly continued on his way. Two girls emerged from between houses and were gone in a moment, swallowed by the international wasteland. In this wasteland, odd thoughts occur. We think that on the other side of the border we will be someone else. Meanwhile it is May 26 today, tonight, and to the south, above the Republic of Slovakia, the sky brightens now and then from soundless lightning. I returned from Ubl'a, and nothing had changed. Back to square one. Which is where everything should begin. That's what it depends on, on the imagination, which draws no conclusions. Memory, meteorology, visions.

Should it rain tomorrow, I'll reconstruct that day when in a small town we boarded a ferry to take us across a lake. Sheets of gray rain passed over the water. No one was at the pier. Dun reeds, a solitary purveyor of souvenirs in a shop, and faded signs for ice cream from a season long gone. Hard to believe it ever got hot here. The greasy overalls of the crew were soaked. For the thousandth time they released the anchor, raised the plank, started up the rumbling diesel, but there was no escape: these inlets could accommodate at most a child's boat of cork, a raft of twigs. To ease the dreariness of inland sailing, I pretended we were at the end of a long transatlantic voyage and heading for the coast of a country mentioned only in mist-shrouded legend. The border of the real world lay nearby. Up ahead, everything seemed familiar and authentic, yet only the natives could believe that their land existed, that it wasn't a reflection, shadow, mirage, or parody of an actual land. Raindrops fell on the deck. On the faces of the crew, boredom competed with indifference. Meanwhile I imagined we were now entering a strait in which space loses its thread, matter its concentration. I leaned against the railing, lit a cigarette, and played the stranger who has ventured into questionable territory without a guide, preconceived notions, or proud knowledge. It was the end of April, and the air, landscape, and whole day were filled with spring. Humidity wafted like gray smoke. We passed boarded-up houses. On the other shore now, the dingy mirror of water still in view, we drove through lethargically expectant country. The entire region idle. It would all change in a month, maybe even in a week, when the sun rose on a Saturday or Sunday, because this was an area of health resorts, a vacation spot, which right now was waiting, dozing, conserving its breath and energy, only half alive. It would endure strangers with their brief excitement, immoderate activity, carnival prodigality, then stillness would settle once again and life return to the old and tested ways, leading to a relatively painless end.

Later, we left the lake and found another, much smaller one, known for not freezing even in the bitterest winter, and smelling as if it were fed by an underground stream from Hades. The rain continued. Wooden pavilions and footbridges stood in murky water and were rotting from both the water and the heat. The white bodies of old men floated on childish inner tubes. Walkways on slippery boards. The men were mostly German or Austrian retirees, but also some spoke Slovak, and some Hungarian. Steam descended from structures on stilts, the structures thick with blindingly white bodies. When naked and crammed together, people seem dead, even when they move. An ominous scene: the stink of swamp decay and sulfur mixed with the smell of steaming flesh. I went inside one structure for a moment, then left. I recall it now as a persistent vision, or as something one only reads about. Nothing remains; Ubl'a, Heviz, Lendava, Babadag, Leskovik, et cetera, leave no evidence that quantity eventually becomes quality, that one meshes with the other and like the gears of a marvelous machine begins to produce sense.

Two days before, I was back in Gönc. A candy store the color of lilac appeared to be closed. A padlock hung at the door, and through the dusty windows I could see black, empty oven pans. Each time I come here, there is less of Gönc. One day I will come and find no Gönc at all. The town will have disappeared from the map, and only I will know what it looked like, only I will remember the man with the checkered hat and fishing rod waiting for the yellow bus that went to the other side of the green Zemplén Hills. But all places are wearing out, wearing away. Almost as if they were already in my head only, as outlines, fading colors, shapes blurring at the edges. I drank coffee, looked at the street, and felt oblivion encroach on every side, from the air, the walls, the sidewalk, from the vastnesses of the past and future. A man in a green shirt passed my little table. I saw his back: old, worn cloth that someone had carefully repaired, preserved, with white thread.

It was Sunday, and I met no other car all the way to Tornyosnémeti. Nothing afterward either: thirty kilometers in total solitude. It was only on the approach to Košice that an occasional car moved on this absurdly many-laned blank. I took Road 547 and at the edge of Rudohorie, the Ore Mountains, turned northwest. As usual, I saw Gypsies, their desperate liveliness in the slumbering monotony of Slovak towns and villages. As if everyone, exhausted by the everyday, was taking a nap, hidden behind curtains, behind rambling roses in gardens, behind the windows of furtive cars, in the stuffy interiors of gray homes, and only these dark-skinned and cursed people were surrendering themselves to life, making use of the world and their few minutes in it like a winning ticket. So I always keep an eye out for red, rusting roofs and blue wisps of pine smoke. And for patches of bare clayey soil on which not a thing can grow, because the Gypsies are constantly on the move, stepping, visiting, going to endless parties under the open sky, passing stories from mouth to mouth, and peering into every corner, for the earth belongs to no one, and no one has the right to claim it for himself.

In Krompachy, their settlement rose. To the left of the road, on an almost vertical incline, house grew atop house, and the highest jutted into the boundless blue. Structures resting insanely on empty space. Jagged, exposed to wind and rain, hanging in defiance of gravity, they brought to mind bird nests perched on rock. Protruding, sagging, as if at any moment something would fall into the road—poles, pieces of sheet metal, sticks, parts of old houses hauled from who knows where, houses no one wanted to live in anymore, with mud and moss in the chinks between boards, scraps of tar paper pressed with stones. Everything had been found and made use of with paranoid cunning. From discarded matter, the magic of a domicile. It seemed that it all fluttered in the wind, that in a moment it would take to the air, fly away, and no sign of this aerial town would remain. I imagined the Gypsies sailing skyward like a tattered cloud, a great patchwork raft carrying a mountain of possessions, the whole dump and scrap heap of things nobody needed and only the Gypsies could put to use. I saw them fly over Rudohorie, over šariš and Spiš, over the entire world, in the nebular wealth of their poverty, the shreds and shards from which they had cobbled—pointedly without dignity—an ordinary life.

Then a small town and the usual industrial shit in a valley of the Hornád, to the right. Rust, the wretchedness of inert metal, the despair of outdated technology. Tanks, stacks, conduits, conveyor belts, sidings, hangars with broken windows, and pustules of installation among the greenery. Granted, it was a Sunday, but nothing suggested that by some miracle this equipment would return to life on Monday. Or ascend to heaven. It would have to sit here for all eternity, unless the Gypsies took pity and disassembled it and sold the parts for cigarettes, alcohol, ornaments for their women and sweets for their children, or built out of the parts vehicles not of this world, in which to travel through Europe, exciting among the local population—as they have done before—superstitious dread mixed with envy and admiration. Once people asked an old Gypsy why Gypsies didn't have their own country. "If a country was a good thing, the Gypsies too would have one, for sure," was his answer. So a united Europe is for them an improvement, making it easier for a person to move and live than any single nation can.

I close my eyes and see the Gypsies from Gjirokastër leaving their drafty huts assembled on the rooftops of concrete communal buildings, in which they couldn't endure the poor air and the heat. Those from Krujë leave their lime ovens; those from Iacobeni leave their scattered Saxon houses; those from Porumbacu and Sâmbăta de Sus leave their clay hovels; those from Vlachy leave their log cabins; those from Podgrodzie leave their single-story houses in a former Jewish district; those from Miskolc leave their slums, which barely rise above the ground along the road to Encs; those from Zborov leave their white barracks cut out of the mountainside; and the Gypsies leave all the thousand other places, the list and description of which I promise myself I will put together someday. A Europe without borders is a Gypsy dream, there is no denying it. White folk, lazy, rooted, fearful, stay in their homes, as one does on a Slovak Sunday. You see only the Gypsies, walking in their solitude, in twos and threes, on the roadsides from village to village, and the green countryside closes after them like water. It's as if they could not live without space. Freed from the workings of time, they are indifferent to the nothingness that will claim Gönc and all the other places we have given names to, because only by naming can we grasp the world, even as we condemn it to destruction.

By an empty field before Brezovička, a swarthy ten-year-old boy was doing push-ups in the middle of the road. He was naked. At the sight of my car, he stood, covered his genitals, and dove into nearby bushes, where three of his buddies, dressed, were laughing their heads off.

Old women carrying brushwood on their backs, men gathered around the open hoods of old cars, a boy in Podgrodzie cradling a puppy in his arms. A cart in Transylvania hitched to two horses, and in the cart a frightened foal, a couple of weeks old, its legs splayed, a child embracing its neck affectionately, face in the brown fur, as if the child had found a creature smaller than itself and more defenseless. Red Kalderash petticoats on the road to Mount Moldoveanu, bare feet covered with yellow dust. A smoldering dump in ErdŐhát; small, slender figures plucking metal, plastic, and glass from the smoking rubbish. A dump in Tiszacsécse, by the road that winds above the river, where an old man with a pipe in his mouth pulls long pieces of wood out of the hills of junk; he ties them in bundles and sets them beside a relic bicycle ... I should create a catalog, an encyclopedia of these scenes and places, write a history in which time plays no part, a history of Gypsy eternity, because it is more enduring, and wiser, than our governments and cities, than our entire world, which trembles at the imminence of its demise.

Yes, Gypsies are my obsession, also the border wasteland, and the river ferries in eastern Hungary. The ferries in particular. The ferry on the Tisa ten kilometers beyond Sárospatak was a veritable Noah's ark. Hay wagons, tractors, cattle and sheep tethered, men in rubber boots and baseball caps; rakes, pitchforks, bottles of beer; as if these people were leaving their land, because it bored them or had gone barren, and were seeking a new one. Houses were the only thing missing on the wooden deck eaten away by the water and the sun and covered with cow shit. Mr. Ferenc Lenart of GávavencsellŐ was the owner of the boat—this fact was recorded on the blue ticket costing 290 forints. Living by the Tisa is like living on an island. You're constantly crossing. The river winds, turns back, can't make up its mind, oozes to the sides, pulls swampily away from the land, and Szabolcs-Szatmár and ErdŐhát float uncertainly, unmoored from the earth by a semiaqueous layer: bogs, quicksand, reeds, the sweet stink of rot and standing water cooked in the sun, houses on stilts and levees erected a kilometer from the main current so the spring waters from the Gorgany, Chornohora, and Maramureş have somewhere to go. Two hundred and ninety forints is nothing for a drowsy excursion across the flowing green on the back of this beautiful and strange device that like a weaver's shuttle joins the torn fabric of roads. Its wake immediately seals up, and everything is as it was before. In Szamossályi the price is even less, only twenty a head, or thirty and change.

Where the high bank descends was an enclosure filled with goats and sheep; on the other side were a small house and a board with laughably low prices for crossing. Black roof, yellow walls. The ferry trying to leave the opposite bank. It was the motorless variety, moved only by the river. Connected to two pulleys, long lines stretched across the current, it had to wait for the water to take it. Drawing in a cable with two winches, now this one, now that, it went back and forth like the simplest, earliest machine, barely conscious of the law of gravitation. The sole passenger a woman with a bicycle. The engineer cranked, shoved off from the bank with a pole, all without effort, without haste, submitting to the will of the river. Sometimes he left the wheel and oars to chat with the woman, who was sitting hunched on a bench. I saw it all from above: two small figures on a rectangular deck of thick planks the color of the sandy shore, waiting for this strip of land to detach itself from the Great Hungarian Plain and, like a much-burdened flying carpet, bear them to the other side of the Szamos. It was maybe fifteen kilometers to the Romanian border, and again I felt time subsiding, growing still, yielding the field to pure space—it was that way in Ubl'a; that way in Hidasnémeti, where immobile trains baked beneath the high heaven like grass snakes; that way also in stricken Buzica and in my own Konieczna. But eventually the ferry moved, drifted, arrived, and now I could drive down to the platform. I looked upstream and tried to remember when and where I saw this river last.

Most likely a year ago, in Satu Mare, when I was on my way to Păltiniş, but only for a moment. The bridge was in the center of town, and as usual I was seeking a detour, reading the rusted sky-blue road signs, so this didn't count. Two years earlier, I spent a whole day wandering along the river. I had come from Carei and wasn't sure whether I wanted to continue on to Cluj or to Oradea, whether to go southeast or west—or anywhere. On the 1F to Bobota was truck hell: tank trucks, dump trucks full of gravel and earth, honking. Transylvania was a possibility, but I wasn't quite up to the Balkan method of driving after a long Hungarian night of pear brandy and Kadarka wine from Szekszárd. I checked out Crişeni on the map and headed there, north, and in Jibou entered a valley of the Szamos. Except I remember nothing of that drive, other than the coffee in some godforsaken place and a hailstorm among green hills. It is only Baia Mare that I remember clearly, hallucination that it was. Conveyor belts like black viaducts, mining cars for gold hanging lifeless above the earth, and the hopelessness of a suburb where people milled before worker compounds that looked like gutted ruins. The town had chewed its way into the mountains in search of ore, but the rust of poverty in turn eroded El Dorado. Baia Sprie perished in the same way, a victim of its own greed.

To the gap at Gutîi it was ten kilometers. There, at 987 meters, the world fell in two. Nearly a kilometer above sea level, continuity ended, chaos celebrated. The mocking memento of Baia lay at our back, and on the other side, along the northern peaks, lay, amazingly, the past. Deseşti, Hărniceşti, Giuleşti were dreams carved out of wood. In the sculpting of the homes, gates, and fences was an unending abundance of time: the eternity required to chisel and cut and shape and free all this from the elements. The miracle of patience had to have been performed in some other age, because ours could not accommodate each and every separate motion-gesture needed to fashion this Arcadia of wood. No minute or hour of ours could have contained the birth of this calm insanity of forms. Almost as if it simply grew, the next stage in the slow development of tree rings and branches, nature abandoning its previous designs to try something in the vein of human habitation. Insanity indeed, this Maramureş thousand and one nights, this Sagrada Familia of xylem, all the way to Sighetu, where the Pietri peak cut the sunset off from the rest of the world.

In the morning, I walked along the Tisa. On the Ukrainian side lay Solotvino, where two years before, I got off a train to take a chance at Stanislavov.

And again Babadag, exactly as two years ago: the bus sits for ten minutes, the driver's gone, kids beg without conviction in the southern swelter—nothing has changed. The thousand-lei notes with Eminescu have disappeared, replaced by aluminum disks featuring Constantin Brancoveanu. It's easier to identify them in your pocket, take them out, and press them into an outstretched hand. Thirty-seven of these aluminum coins equal one euro. As I ride to the city, I see three women in dresses that trail on the ground—Dobrujan Turks, no doubt. They look pretty but strange among the crumbling walls, the houses falling apart before they have aged. Babadag is weariness and isolation. People get off the bus and stand, with small shadows at their feet. A white minaret like a finger points at the empty blue. I distribute some of my change. The little beggars take the coins indifferently, without a word, not lifting their eyes. I am riding from Tulcea to Constanţa, the opposite direction from two years ago. Everything is the same, except that the bills are now plastic.

Babadag: twice in my life, twice for ten minutes. The world is made from such fragments, pieces of burning dream, mirage, bus fever. The tickets remain. From Tulcea to Constanţa it's 120,000 lei. Păstraţi biletul pentru control. Gara de Sud, the South Station area in Constanţa, is the shame of the Balkans, a black web of cables over streets, crap, horns, dogs, flies, food stands all jumbled. Tinfoil, lighters, cellophane, trash, a vortex of throwaway stuff, the reek of fried fat, smoke, men in uniform, fast operators without work but in constant motion, gold chains, flip-flops, a holstered pistol—civilian—barely covered by a shirt, watermelon rinds, a kaleidoscope of color, high heels, mascara, an anthill greenmarket camp. You can only list; description is impossible, since there is nothing here that lasts but weariness, weakness, decomposition, and frenetic toil under a sky bleached by the heat.

From Constanţa you pass through Valu lui Traian, Trajan's Bank, a village of dirt-floor huts, thin donkeys, old women in black gazing with wise eyes at the dust and emptiness. If you got out here, you wouldn't have the strength to leave. The present reigns in this place, as it always has. Hence all the names of heroes, rebels, leaders, governers, politicians: Nicolae Bălcescu, Mihail Kogălniceanu, Cuza Vodă, Vlad ţepeş, Mircea Vodă, ştefan cel Mare, Dragoş Vodă, ştefan Vodă, Alexandru Odobescu, and there's Independenţa and Unirea (Independence and Unity), Valea Dacilor (Valley of the Dacians). Not a thing to be seen, just villages scattered in the steppe along Road 3A or a little to the side. In this flat land they are hardly visible over the horizon. Goats, corn, horse harnesses, people stooped in fields, the same movements made a hundred, two hundred years ago, a thousand, forever, movements as unchanging as those of animals. The names are meant to give inert time a sense and direction.

A couple of days later I was driving northeast. I crossed the Seretu valley and in Tecuci recognized the crossroads and the fence where two years earlier I had spent an hour or two taking in the sight of the other end of the Carpathians. This time I kept the mountains on my left, and the landscape flattened. Delivery vans carrying melons. Fruit piled along the road. In the fields, cornstalk sheds. No trees, so the men were waiting out the afternoon heat in these rustling lean-tos. After Crasna, the hills began again—long, sleepy ridges of the Moldovan Highland. An old and crumbling plateau excavated by the river and enervated by the sun. Grassy slopes, white scree, sickly crests of groves presented a kind of geologic metaphor for the acceptance of one's fate, of erosion and decline. The earth showed its bones here.

Then Huşi, where in 1899 Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was born. I should have stopped there but didn't. The town appeared for a moment, then was gone, like a hundred other Romanian towns I had driven through. It was in no way different: low to the ground and pitiful. Gardens hid the decay. I should have stopped. Codreanu was half Polish, half German, but considered himself more Romanian than the Romanians. He thought of himself as a Romanian messiah. God the Father, Christ, and the archangel Michael were constantly included in his plans. In some photographs he appears in folk dress: a white linen shirt to the knees and white breeches. Under short trouser legs are stylish city shoes. He greets the crowds with a gesture like Hitler's heil, but it denotes a purely Roman legacy, unsullied by any connection with the barbaric Germans. On a white horse, he visits Moldovan and Bessarabian villages. The peasants listen and nod, because he tells them that all the evil comes from outside.

I drove through Huşi in minutes. It was twenty kilometers to the Prut and the border. Sheep grazed on the hills. At dusk they returned to their enclosure in the waste, a few fences with few crossbars. Nearby were the huts of the shepherds, with bulrush roofs. One could erect them practically without tools. They were part of the landscape in every respect. If all this vanished, it would be without a trace: no ruins, no lingering memories. Inside the huts there must have been objects—a bucket, a knife, an ax—but on the outside all was vegetation and ageless. Composed of the most basic elements: wood, grass, reeds. A few animals, sheep dung.

Before Codreanu on his gray mare, an icon of the archangel Michael was carried, they say. It is not hard to imagine the procession precisely here, among these low hills and huts, or a little farther on, in Valea Grecului with its single church, cow field, and a green speckled with white geese. That's where I felt sure that I was beholding the immutable "it was always thus" or, in any case, a past that could never become the future, because from the very beginning its purpose was to endure.

Codreanu in his knee-length shirt and with his procession through miserable towns and villages brought the good news that nothing would change, that what had been would continue, having achieved perfect form long ago. It merely needed cleansing of the scum borne by the wave of modernity, cleansing of the slime of democracy, the dirt of liberalism, the contagion of the Jews. Poverty and impotence were ennobled by their heroic heritage. Codreanu's comrades wore amulets containing soil from battlefields in which their forefathers had resisted the Romans, Goths, Huns, Slavs, Tatars, Hungarians, Turks, and Russians. Magic, ancestor worship, and Christianity were treated as a tribal religion, an occult science to save the people. These few lines from Codreanu's text are essentially a howl: "Wars were won by those able to summon invisible forces from the beyond and enlist their help. These mysterious forces were the souls of the dead, the souls of our forefathers, who were tied to this land, to our fields and forests, having fallen in its defense. Today they are summoned by us, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, because we remember them. And above the souls of the dead stands Christ."

Anyone who was born in Huşi and spent his youth there is entitled not to believe in the future. I assume Codreanu visited Valea Grecului too; he was a young man on the move. He hated the Communists, who believed in the future, as much as the Jews. His dull, provincial mind probably had trouble telling them apart. Basically, he never stopped being a prophet from the sticks. The world was divided into Romania and the rest, and the rest had no value because it wasn't Romania, let alone Huşi.

During his studies in Berlin, he wears Romanian folk dress. At the same time, poverty forces him into trade. He buys salt pork and butter in the villages, sells them at a profit in the city. His Berlin life becomes a parody of the life of a Moldovan peasant. He is now no different from his conception of a Jew. In Grenoble, to survive, he and his wife sew Romanian folk costumes and sell them. Little enters his head other than Romania and folk merchandise. In a courtroom (he also tried his hand at lawyering), he pulls out a pistol and shoots the chief of police. His comrades murder "traitors" and despicable politicians, then surrender to the cops, as an act of Christian martyrdom. "Love is the key to the peace that our Savior offered to the peoples of the world ... But love does not release us from the duty of discipline, the duty of carrying out our orders," he ranted in 1936.

Parody and delirium. One must be born in Huşi to smell the poison of melancholy that eats into mind and soul. One must be born in Huşi, where even the crows turn back, to grasp this dream of glory of the native land, to understand this nightmare. Madness is left, because only in madness can one overturn, if for a moment, the order of a world that gives not a damn for Huşi, for Valea Dacilor, or even for the village of Decebal, cursed with its Gypsy multitude on every corner. Huşi dismissed, Huşi scorned, Huşi half asleep and dragging its feet, Huşi scratched by chickens and stuck like a broken cane in a crevice of time forever and ever amen. The train terminates there. To come into the world in Huşi is to live in eternity made flesh.

So thought Corneliu Codreanu. Because the past was sacred, it had to last forever, had to be resurrected constantly, driving off the specter of the future. The future always came from outside, was foreign, like an invader. The future was a violation of the perfection of enduring, which constituted the sense, the essence, the deepest mystery of Huşi and its environs.

I really should have stopped in Huşi. Now I must imagine myself going back. Autumn would be the best time, when the leaves are falling, for me to find confirmation of my ideas, to probe the cracking, the rotting, the mold that quietly, imperceptibly enters stone and wood and Sunday outfits kept on shelves. Microorganisms, gravity, humidity—these are the fundamental components of my part of the continent. They should be listed on the ingredients label, should appear on the coat of arms. Whoever thinks otherwise is in for a rude awakening. Codreanu's paroxysm resulted from his complete misunderstanding of the genius loci, which he wanted so much to change. Possessed by the need for his people to be great, he fell into the absurdity of imitating a foreign destiny. All that he bequeathed, then, was counterfeit.

I can't help it, I love this Balkan shambles. It begins right after Satu Mare. Everything half-assed and fucked up, and God only knows where the edge of the highway is, where the shoulder, plus the horse-drawn carts, and suddenly there is more dust in the air than there ever was in post-Hapsburg Hungary, and at every step you have to swerve because of something on the road, as if these Dacias and Aros were not properly tightened and lost parts or maybe had too many parts to begin with. Stocky Gypsies stand by Mercedes with open hoods, as if the radiator burst or a belt slipped, and desperately they wave at you to stop, then thrust gold or precious stones in your face at half price. The kids dart back and forth across the road, no doubt trained from the cradle in the famous Romanian indifference to death, in Geto-Dacian fatalism. No one uses directional signals, because times are tough and a person must conserve his strength. Horns, on the other hand, are heard constantly, because they don't wear out. It was that way in May 2000; it will be that way forever. I dwell on the memory as one dwells on one's childhood. It turns out that a man seeks only what he has seen before. It turns out that the Szatmár chaos, the empty lanes of Sulina and Giurgiu by the Danube recall my Sokołów Podlaski and Kałuszyn. The same material, the same improvisation desperately trying to be permanent. In the buses, the same smell of soap and milk when the villagers set out; on the rotting benches in the shady lanes, the same contemplation. The same carelessness with time, a watch no more than an ornament, like jewelry. Time, really, is just a piece of eternity you cut out for your own consumption.

Between Bozieni and Valea Parjei I saw two men by the road in the middle of a green field. For ten kilometers in one direction and fifteen in the other, there was nothing, no one. They sat in the shade of an Italian pine and played cards. They didn't even look up when the bus passed. A few days later I returned the same way and saw them again. They had moved maybe a kilometer, but the landscape was unchanged: a row of stone pines along the road, corn, and the men still immersed in their somnolent, monotonous game, as if their deck held a million cards. It's possible that night overtook them as they played and that they slept in the open field, to resume at dawn. Someone may have brought them here to do work, but when the hirer disappeared over a hill, they immediately began their game. They had not a thing with them, no tool, unless it was in a pocket. They sat as if they were at a table at home. Gray and crumpled, like most of the men in this region, yet unfazed by the overwhelming space and endless stretch of hours. The fragile abstraction of the game was their shield. At dusk, who knows, they might have lit a candle, or else the cards were marked and even in the dark their fingers could tell hearts from spades from clubs.

I love this Balkan shambles, Hungarian, Slovak, Polish, the amazing weight of things, the lovely slumber, the facts that make no difference, the calm and methodical drunkenness in the middle of the day, and those misty eyes that with no effort pierce reality and with no fear open to the void. I can't help it. The heart of my Europe beats in Sokołów Podlaski and in Huşi. It does not beat in Vienna. Or in Budapest. And most definitely not in Kraków. Those places are all aborted transplants. A mock-up, a mirror of what is elsewhere. Sokołów and Huşi imitate nothing; they follow their own destinies. My heart is in Sokołów, though I was there for ten hours altogether, at most. Usually during transfers from one Pekaes truck to another in the early 1970s, when I went to visit my uncle and his wife on vacations. But my memory is good. Single-story wooden houses in the center of town, lilac bushes, shutters, dogs asleep on the asphalt, leaning posts of bus stops with round yellow signs, frames and planks painted brown and green, sand in the sidewalk joints, an ice cream store that inside smells like a village cottage, sugar peas in glass tubes, everything only just sprouting from the ground, only just begun, and of course the rotting, the scraping, the dozing, life without pretension, trying to make things last, the squeaking floorboards, the silly heroism of a quotidian that snaps in two as easily as an ice cream wafer. I remember it all and could go on and on. It's in my blood. So though I drove through Huşi in five minutes, there being no reason to stop, my heart is in Huşi.

Which indicates that I need my own country. Where I can travel in a circle. A country without clear borders, a country unaware that it exists and doesn't care that someone invented it and entered it. A sleepy country with murky politics and a history like shifting sand. Its present breaking ice, its culture the Gypsy palaces of Soroca. Nothing would last here without running the risk of being ridiculous. But why a country, why not an empire with an unspecified number of provinces, an empire in motion, in progress, driven by the idea of expansion, but also sclerotic, unable to remember its lands, its peoples, its capitals, so every morning it would need to start over? That would suit me, since I have the same problem: I remember things and events but do not know what separates or connects them other than my accidental presence.

Three days ago I was in Bardejov. An afternoon mass had begun at Saint Egidius. Those of the faithful who were late squeezed in through the half-open door. The interior must have been full, because you could hear an echoing rumble of voices, yet new people kept arriving. In a long stream across the square, the faithful wore their best and were flushed in their haste, slowing only in the shadow of the sanctuary to give their movement a little decorum. A scene that has been repeated for five hundred years. The Bardejov square crossing, I thought, must be worn from the touch of feet. A space unable after so many years to keep healing. I walked uphill, in the opposite direction, away from the crowd. Louis the Great gave this city the right to hold eight fairs a year and to do beheadings, activities that must have required a bit of room, but now, without commerce and the functions of justice, the square seemed abandoned. I turned down Veterná, then down Stöcklova, to the right, to find myself in a narrow path between a barbican wall and the rest of the city. I saw some steps and went up. The wall, at least six hundred years old, was crumbling here and there. It looked its age. From my height now I could see yards, gardens, back doors, hutches, chicken coops, doghouses, all the things a small town hides from sight, confining its rusticity. A graceful, relaxed clutter here, the remnants of projects never completed, storage gradually turning into rubbish. Plastic bags, compost, fallen apples, weeds, beaten paths, an eternal present crouched in the shadow of walnut and cherry trees. The Gothic slowly disintegrated here, and its disintegration led to things that had no history, things that had use and significance for a moment only. The new joined the old in a just order, a liberté, égalité, and fraternité of matter.

I sense this equality everywhere. There is no need for deception. I am blind and deaf to all else. But as a rule there is no all else. It was that way a month and a half ago in Uzlina. We reached it by motorboat from Murighiol. Around us lay four thousand square kilometers of canals, lakes, dead tributaries, bogs, wetlands, and land as flat as the mirror of still water. You could go for several hours and nothing would change. A hot, undisturbed, motionless sleep. The expanse swallowing up all detail. Our path left no trace. The great river carries silt from the depths of the continent and with it sculpts a new, uncertain land. In a kind of genesis, the landscape gathers its strength to lift itself above the surface of the water. A trance, this trip against the current of time, toward primordial childhood.

But Uzlina came first. A hotel there rose four stories out of the marshy, the flat, and the ancient. It looked like a thing misplaced during a move. In a radius of a few dozen kilometers, there was nothing higher. At the driveway entrance waited a young woman in a miniskirt and stiletto heels. She held a tray with glasses of slivovitz, cujka, simple peasant brandy. An olive in each glass. In front of the hotel, a swimming pool, umbrellas, deck chairs. Our room in the annex was as God wanted it. The view from the window: laundry tubs, rubble, vegetable patches (private plots), dogs on chains barking to protect the cabbage. The first night, I was bitten by bedbugs and had no air to breathe. In the main building nearby, the air-conditioning chugged. All evening, the employees of Coty Cosmetics Romania entertained themselves around a bonfire to global hit parade music.

The next day Mitka appeared. He sat down at our table in a bar under umbrellas. He wore trousers from a hundred-year-old suit and rubber flip-flops. He was maybe sixty. He seemed to come straight from the swamp and reeds. He drank beer after beer, complaining that he could no longer have vodka, not after the doctors cut something out of him. He spoke to us in Russian but called the waitresses in Romanian. He drank at the hotel every evening and didn't pay, though sometimes he contributed a ram or piglet to the hotel kitchen. The owner tolerated this, wanting to buy land from Mitka, who was a neighbor, to expand his business. Mitka's cows and swine wandered through and around, dozens of them foraging untethered through the mud and sand along the Saint Egidius tributary.

At dusk we went to see his farm, which was large and flat. A labyrinth of pens, sties, plots, half-open barns, and huts with bulrush roofs. No light on anywhere. Above, the bright, phosphorescent sky; below, the thickened dark, redolent of animals and excrement. The pigs ran up to Mitka like dogs. In a corner something snorted, grunted, chewed, belched, huffed, followed by a pulse of body heat, as if in the cavern of this farm a great antediluvian beast were settling down for the night.

In Mitka's cabin, a weak bulb burned under a low ceiling. His long and narrow room contained nothing more than a bed, a cupboard with utensils, and a table. Mitka ducked into a small doorway and emerged with a double-barreled shotgun. An old gun, metal shining through the oxidized finish. He said we could shoot, if I paid for the ammunition. Night had fallen, and I thought shooting didn't make sense. Another time, I said. Disappointed, he laid the gun on the bed. On the wall hung a framed black-and-white photograph, grainy. The man in it reminded me of someone, but I wasn't certain. I asked Mitka. "Yes, it's Ceauş escu," he said with a smile, pleased that I had recognized the leader. Then, since the subject was photographs, he produced from a drawer a picture of his dead wife.

That was Mitka. He worshipped his dictator, remembered his wife, liked shooting into the dark. He lay down to sleep beside his shotgun. There was nothing near his farm, no houses or people. I'm not even sure all his animals returned at night. He may not have known how many he had, may not ever have counted them. Half a kilometer away, at the Coty party, were women in bikinis around the pool and men resembling gigolos in their white trousers. The old man, small and veiny, slept like a child. I imagined him dreaming of cows, pigs, chickens, and dogs, that they surrounded him in a close circle to protect him from the traps and treacheries of the world. The noisy hotel, beside this dark and foul-smelling farm, seemed a thing made of paper, which could ignite in a moment from a careless match.

It's the second half of October. The weather is changing; the first frosts have come, the first powdering of snow. Winter begins in two or three weeks. Yet again I'll have to imagine all those places I visited in the spring and summer. This imagining makes the world bigger. The continent increases. Rozpucie, Baurci, Ubl'a, Máriapócs, Erind, Huşi, Sokołów Podlaski, Hodoš, Zborov, Caraorman, Delatyn, Duląbka—they all want to be great. To see Lvov in the spring and then imagine it in the winter is like doubling Lvov, making it twice as lovely, but that's as it should be. The poor road leading through the heart of the Čergov massif begins there. It is closed to traffic, and a man drives it at his peril, because the Slovak soldiers have no sense of humor. In any case, a beautiful stretch through complete wilderness all the way to Majdan. But I digress ...

I was speaking of greatness and in praise of memory that, like a lit match, burns a hole in the map, sending places and things into an eternity that can be ended only by cosmic dementia (which eventually will happen) and thus expanding the continent to infinite size, bringing oblivion out into the light. Whoever was in Rozpucie, Baurci, or Caraorman knows what I'm saying. The dark soul of a peninsula smolders there, and matter slumbers, like bone marrow producing the dense black blood of unrealized desires. To be in Rozpucie, Baurci, or Caraorman is to see a past that has not yet harbored doubts about the future, because it is a past that has not yet got under way. And it may never get under way and share the fate of the rest of the world, whose destiny is to weep over its own demise. Neither Rozpucie nor Caraorman will be depleted unto death. They are old but will die young, are weary but will die in the fullness of their strength, in midstride, on a road whose purpose and destination are beyond their ken. It's October, a cold night rain falls, and the wet and dark engulf the villages and towns. Lying at the bottom of the waters, they have lost their names: great sleeping fish with houses, people, and roads in their bellies. People whisper in the dark, huddled, intent, waiting out the flood and guessing the future. Time hasn't yet started; there is no light, and you must squint for the dawn to come. No news, only promises and myths. The world is so distant that by the time an account of it reaches you, it may no longer be.

On such nights I reach for the plastic box with the photographs. There are about a thousand of them. Like an organ grinder's monkey, I pull out the first that comes to hand. Usually I have no idea when this or that one was taken, but I always know the place. There's nothing of consequence in the snapshots: horses grazing in a dump, a vegetable garden with a scraped wall, green hills, a village hut, a piece of mountain scenery, a black cat and a manhole, a tree in mist and tire tracks in snow, the facade of a house on an empty street, and so on, with no pattern or sequence or reason, a purely random collection of insignificant objects and meaningless moments, a child's game-experiment to see if the camera click really does freeze reality. But I remember everything and without the box can identify the geographic names, the countries, regions, and villages. The cat was in Lviv, the horses on the outskirts of Gjirokastër, the triangular corner facade in Chernivtsi, the garden in Tokaj, the mountains at Kočevski Rog. I'm not sure about the tire tracks in the snow. Definitely somewhere near Kecskemét, west of the city, where I got lost and was frantically looking for an exit, because by every indication the road was taking me to the Budapest highway, which I hated like poison. Finally I found an exit, saw above me the dark arch of a viaduct and the long bodies of trucks creeping north. I became entangled in a web of yellow roads. Mist clung to the ground. Through vertical breaks in it I saw the remains of what were probably Hungarian state farms—rusting tractors, collectivization breathing its last, huge barns and stables—then fog covered the scene, the whole world, and you could imagine whatever you liked, the Great Lowland, Alföld, flat and sodden earth joined with the sky by the thick and heavy air, endless marsh with no horizon, a kind of semimaterialization of nothingness. The tire tracks in snow were there, and yellow grass, somewhere outside Kecskemét, at Kiskun.

I hold on to this rubbish collection of snapshots to imagine what lies outside them, all that is hidden from the eye and memory. A deck of a thousand worn and worthless cards, the faience shine of Fuji and Kodak, the dull light of the literal—these are the photographs I take. Hardly any people in them. As if a neutron bomb had wiped away everything that moved, aside from the cat in Lviv and the Albanian horses. Maybe it's the Bushman fear that the camera will steal a person's soul. Or maybe it simply shows how unpopulated the land is, how solitary my life. It's good to arrive in a country in which you find no one. You can start from scratch. History becomes legend, then, and reality a personal vision. You cannot grasp, say, Voskopojë at best, you can imagine it. In the pictures from Voskopojë there is not a soul, only two donkeys nibbling among thistles and stones. I know that their driver, Jani, ought to be with them, drinking brandy and beer in turn, and Greczynka, the owner of the pub, and her silent husband, and Jani's friend, as broad as a barn and with a Slavic face, and the retarded kid we picked up on the road, but then the account would bog down and I would never extricate myself from the confusion of their lives. And so: only two donkeys, stones, and a slate-blue sky over the ruin of a monastery. Ah, but of course I should drive after that to Boboshticë, thirty-some kilometers to the southeast, because the village was founded, supposedly, by Polish knights on some crusade. The inhabitants still know a few Polish words, though they have no idea what they mean. I should go there instead of watching the donkeys, stones, and thistles, but frankly, as interesting as Boboshticë is, it's of no interest to me. I returned to Korçë and for hours looked out my hotel window at the square as if I were a camera without an owner. It was the same in Gjirokastër. Netting to keep out bugs blurred the minaret. And in Seregélyes, rain, an empty courtyard, the wet branches of chestnut trees, and the tinny gurgle of water in downspouts. In Prelasko, frost on the grass, a parking lot with one car, and a house collapsing on the other side of the street.

It's the same everywhere. You sharpen the focus to pierce the envelope of air, to cut through the skin of space. A window in a new place does the job. In Cahul, it was the market closed for the night and the shadows of dogs many times larger than the dogs. In Chişinău it rained too, and Vasile Alecsandri Avenue became a gray river. In the tropical downpour I had to close the window. Every morning at nine, a man opened an office on the ground floor across the way. I remember the finial on the gate, a shape like a snail, a wave of the sea, the horns of a ram. I remember little else. I watched the finial for hours and imagined the rest. I am doing the same now. I take my pictures out of the plastic box, my change out of the metal canister for Absolut vodka, my parking tickets and hotel bills out of the cardboard box, my banknotes out of the drawer—nothing more, ever, only this thousandfold multiplication of the everyday.

In Máriapócs in September, on the large, flat, windswept field outside town, merchandise lay on plastic bags on the ground. No treasures here: Chinese schlock, jeans, Adidas and Nike knockoffs. All displayed in neat rows and spanking new. The vendors stood motionless over their wares and waited. Each selling the same stuff, essentially. The grass dry and trampled. No one buying anything, no one even looking. An itinerant tribe from an old tale, which spreads out its wares at the city gates, and the next morning it is gone without a trace. A bit farther on, merry-go-rounds and shooting galleries, then more stalls with candy and wine, church booths with wonders, and gingerbread hearts, handicrafts, panpipes, weathervanes, and stands with religious literature. Among the trees, people had set up camp, put out food: hard-boiled eggs, bottles of beer, canapés. Some had removed their shoes and were dozing. There were several cars from Romania with SM on their license plates, which meant Satu Mare, and a few from Slovakia. Music issued from one of the speakers, but under the vast sky of the Hungarian Lowlands it sounded quiet and insignificant. Budapest television had set up its cameras before a Baroque basilica. The crowd was lost in this great, flat, sandy area, absorbed like water.

I had hoped to meet some famous Gypsies from Moldova, Baron Artur Cerari or Robert—it was a Gypsy holiday, after all—but I saw no BMW 700 or X5. On the lot were only pathetic Dacias, tired Ladas, stalwart Trabants, and reeking diesels from the Reich. The one ATM had no forints. So yes, Máriapócs seemed the last town at the edge of the inhabited earth. It was not hard to imagine a sudden gust of wind spraying everything with sand. In the churchyard, the Uniate liturgy was in progress. The Maramureş Gypsies were dressed with elegance and dignity: black hats, belts studded with silver, gold chains, cowboy boots. A few had beautiful faces. An ancient, unsettling beauty not encountered today. The women's heels sank in the sand. I had driven three hundred kilometers to see this, and nothing was happening. God knows what I had expected: a city of tents, horses neighing, sword swallowers? I always play the idiot, because reality wins, as usual. In addition I was broke. I could only go back. Máriapócs that afternoon was dust and waiting for the evening mass to begin. To the Romanian border it was thirty kilometers, the town of Nyírbátor and two small villages. People strolled and magnanimously wasted time. Practically no one rode on the merry-go-round. Everyone passed as in a dreamy carnival, and the knockoff running shoes, motionless in the dust, seemed to mock themselves. I could picture cattle coming from the Lowlands, large black swine rooting for genuine food in the schlock, nudging the piles of clothing with their wet snouts, tasting and spitting out the painted plastic, squealing, shitting on the logos of international companies, turning this whole fake market into a sty, and the stink would rise to heaven and drift over Máriapócs and Szabolcs-Szatmár, mingling with the sound of bells, wood smoke, the lowing of cows, and the dry wind, forever and ever amen.

Two days before, it was All Souls' Day. As every year, I bought a few candles and drove to cemeteries. A strong wind blew from the south, so it was hard to light them. But with tin protectors, the candles wouldn't go out. Occasionally someone preceded me and I'd find lamps burning. I always wondered, Who in this godforsaken place is remembering the Bosnian dead? the Croatian dead? the Hungarian? The Königliche Ungarische Landsturm Huzaren Regiment—in Hungarian, Honwedzi. Or the Tyroleans. The Tiroler Kaiser Jäger Regiment. Nothing there. You must make a special trip, and there isn't always a road. In Radocyna, the country simply comes to an end: the way for a horse-drawn cart or a four-by-four dissolves into meadow, vanishes in russet grass or scummy ponds two kilometers from Slovakia, and yet soldiers came. Four Austrians from the twenty-seventh regiment, infantry, and seventy-nine Ruthenians, also on foot. There were names: infanteria, the child's brigade, brats with bayonets, the slaughter of the innocent. Most didn't know where they were or why. The likeness of one emperor or another had to suffice—and did. There was no way out for them. Four Austrians, which means they could have been Slovenians or Slovaks, or Hungarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Poles. A cosmopolitan spot. They lie with a view of Wisłoki valley, Dębi Wierch (Oak Peak), and the border gap. So I light a candle for them and set it beside one already burning. The trees are bare, but the sun shines, and it's so still and empty, as if nothing ever happened here. It's all in the earth: metal buttons, buckles, bones.

At Długi, the same thing, except that they lie in a completely open field. No trees or bushes, so the lamp must be shielded by a flap of your jacket until the flame takes. Again, infantry and Feldjägers. Forty-five subjects of the emperor and 207 Russians. But in Czarny they rest more peacefully: trees were planted over the graves, and now there's shade and quiet. Even in summer the light is dim. The crowns of beeches meet, and in the center is such tranquillity, you could be in a cathedral. That's where they lie. Twenty-seven Austrians and 372 Russians. With the Russians it's the same as with the Austrians: half were Ukrainians, Poles, Kyrgyz, Finns, who knows what else—consult a map. No wind to speak of here, so I have no trouble lighting a candle and setting it on a stone pedestal with an inscription in German. Beneath it, the mortal remains of half of Europe and a piece of Asia. Strange to think of the Adriatic, palm trees, the campanile in Piran, mountaineer huts in Chornohora, the Finnish tundra, the steppes, Zaporoże, Crimean Tatars, the vineyards of Tokaj, Viennese decadence, Asiatic sands, the Prešov secession, Don Cossacks, the Transylvanian Gothic, yurts, camels, and all the rest of it lying here, a meter and a half under, tightly packed, mingled, seeping lower, joining sand, stone, clay, and the roots of the trees that for more than seventy years now have been feeding on the bodies of Estonians and Croats, in a corner of the world no one visits. So I light a candle, stand and watch, and say a prayer for the dead, because the important things take place only in the past. In these regions, the future doesn't exist until it is over.

The cold light of November falls on forest, road, and meadow, making everything too bright and hard, as if it must remain so for ages. They came far from home to die here, five hundred, seven hundred, a thousand kilometers. Manure of Europe. Without names or dates of birth. Complete oblivion, perfect community. I love to come here and walk on them. Beneath my feet I feel it all, the subterranean stream oozing, the rains washing minerals from bones, the water carrying them down into the valleys, to merge with rivulets and tributaries, and farther, finally to where the soldiers came from, because they were innocent at their death and do not need to wander like the damned. They enter their homes, the clocks begin to measure the minutes, and nothing has changed. Time has merely held its breath; it's 1914 again. Because they died once before, there will be no war, no sequence of events; the taut spring of history, rusting through, will snap.

Such was my reverie in November as I walked a meter and a half above their bodies. I picture their places of origin and am certain I visited some. The closed circle that this creates is a ceremony. Some of the fallen, like those in the Beskid Mountains, with a good rain can flow directly down the other side of the Carpathians, then, by the Kamenec, the Topl'a, the Latorica, the Ondava to the Bodrog, the Bodrog to the Tisa, and the Tisa to the Danube. They have a shorter route than those who must go by the Vistula and the sea. The Beskids are the Carpathian divide, and when it pours, the water justly parts in two, flowing north and south, taking the fallen with it. A hundred and sixty-eight Austrians and 135 Russians, all infantry. How much time does it take to flow to, say, Tiszalok, when you are a molecule, a speck of calcium or phosphorus?

Returning from the military cemeteries, I look through old Hungarian photographs to stir a little mourning, to feel a tie with the dead. I don't know why, but Hungarian photographs are the best at capturing the dead. In 1919, Rudolf Balogh took five pictures. A section of a wall, a gallows, five figures. The four men carrying out the sentence wear boots that gleam. The sun on them as on a mirror. The convicted man is calm. No despair or fear on his young face. Sorrow, perhaps, and gravity. The sleeves of his uniform are too long. The mast of the gallows is made of old timber. You can see the carpenter's marks on it. It could be a crossbeam from a ceiling, from a house torn down. The execution must have been painfully drawn out, because in the first photograph, in which the man stands alone by the mast and the three-step wooden footstool, he is accompanied by a shadow from the wall; in the next photograph, as they put the noose on him, he is completely in the sun. Yet no despair or fear. He has taken the three steps up, with still no change in his stance: his hands hang at his sides, his head slightly tilted. He'll be that way to the end. Only when two soldiers jerk the stool out from under his feet does his right arm lift. Then his body resumes its former peaceful position, and you can see that his sleeves are still too long. Whereas the executioners are in motion. As if they are eager to leave this place encircled by a wall, to escape in their polished boots. Their stride is soldierly, mustaches bristling, eyes lowered when it's over. Their shadows on the bare earth around the gallows make a complicated drawing.

The captions indicate no exact date or specific place. Only 1919, and in the narrow space above the wall is a leafy tree branch, so we're somewhere between April and October, it's the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and Béla Kun is writing his "To All!": "The workers no longer want to groan under the yoke of the big capitalists and landowners. Only socialism and communism can save the country from anarchy." In April the Romanians come from the east, the Czechs from the north. The Romanians take Szolnok and then must take Abony, because there is no other way to Budapest. Kerté sz's violinist, younger by two years, definitely hears them. In the evenings they rest in villages and burn bonfires under the open sky. They drink and sing, of course, because the amusements of soldiers haven't changed for centuries. They are sad and raucous. Two years earlier, they came this way in Hungarian uniforms, to die in Ożenna; now they wear Romanian uniforms, to conquer Budapest on August 3. The ones from Transylvania, at least. By every indication they are attacking their own country, and so they drink more and sing louder to drown the clamor of their time and of their own hearts, because it must be hard to be a Hungarian Romanian and then suddenly a Romanian Romanian and despise what you died for two years before. In any event, the violinist hears them, and his ear automatically records their melodies, so who knows, Kertész may have heard them that Sunday morning under his window. Heard something from the Carpathians, or a doina, the Romanian blues of illiterate shepherds, or a verbunk known to every Hungarian recruit and therefore to the hanged man as well.

These are my thoughts, more or less, around All Souls' Day. Still no snow. In the leafless trees you can see abandoned bird nests: irregular black spheres made of twigs. The light knows no pity. The thin shadows resemble skeletons. The day ends at four in the afternoon. The sun sinks behind the mountain. The rest of the road to take is hidden from view. Curious: hidden where usually I picture noon, Konieczna and everything else that lies on the other side of the Carpathians. It's evening here, while there the world is just beginning to burn in golden red. Bardejov charred, Spiš smoldering, Rudohorie and Mátra, and the Great Hungarian Plain, and the little town of MezŐkövesd, which has a museum of agricultural machinery. I stopped there twice in my life, once to find an ATM, once to buy something to eat and drink. Wine and salami, no doubt, and something else, and that evening I slept in Bakoński Woods, and the next day or rather night I ended up in Ankaran, at a campsite by the Adriatic, trying to hammer tent pegs into stony ground after midnight, with no success, so I had to curl up in a limp tent. In the morning I saw that among the tall pines all the vacationers who had gathered here to stay for weeks had built a kind of village. There were large, many-person tents, trailers, umbrellas, canvas shelters, field kitchens, and open dining areas. Some people had marked off their place with twine or strips of plastic bags. Laminates, plywood, sheet metal, and polyester formed ad hoc homesteads, garden plots, the only thing missing was wandering cattle, swine on holiday, cows touring, rams and goats taking a break. The town had come here to play at being in the country, a psychoanalytic return to the past. Spa cachet, gold sandals, baggy pants with palm trees and parrots, gag glasses, the smell of creams and lotions, suntanned tits and mostly bare asses all created a slightly off-kilter rusticity, complete with folksy looking into pots and gossiping at fences, people in close quarters carefully keeping their property separate. Badminton, soccer, sunburn, lathering backs, grilling, going for walks, activities to kill time and alleviate boredom and therefore very like activities in the true sticks. Ljubljana and Maribor relaxed, re-creating the life of their ancestors in a Microsoft version.

It's November, and I'm recalling thoughts and places from a year and a half ago. The past, locations—there is nothing else to describe. A perpetual All Souls' Day, with every fact an epitaph. We outlive events. That is all we have. From that campsite I drove to Trieste, but Trieste was not important and now lies elsewhere. So let me head southeast. Across the Balkans, down the shore, then through Cetinje and Podgorica to enter Albania at the border by the village of Hani Hotit and pass Shkodët, stopping only in Milot, since I had spent no more than an hour there once and remember practically nothing of it: low houses, a crowd in the street, horse harnesses, possibly a market day, old women in white harem pants sitting on benches in front of stone cottages— that's really all. Also: the front yard of a one-story house, a few tables in the shade of trees, beaten earth, a place to drink raki and coffee. A thirty-year-old woman entered, big-breasted and dressed in bright red, a wide black sash around her waist. She was covered with gold jewelry; her sweeping hair was navy blue; she wore high heels and tight pants and carried a glittering handbag. This was in Milot, among the horse harnesses and women in harem pants, where the Albanian north begins and the old times endure and "You may not enter someone's house without first calling from the fence" or "Bread and salt, a smile, a fire in the hearth, and bedding for guests at any time of day or night." The woman in red spoke to someone in a loud voice, gesticulating. This sleepy spot, gray from the heat and dust, seemed a flame that could ignite everything, and nothing would remain as it was.

Then the village Rreth-Baz, and at the home of Xhemal Cakoni I drank raki with curdled milk for the first time in my life. We sat barefoot at a low table. On the wall was a tapestry with a view of Mecca. We ate grapes. The women brought plates, returned to the kitchen, or stood in the doorway. We made a toast to success, to happiness, to health. Xhemal introduced his son with pride. A small guy, thin and shy. Worked in Germany. Just took off on his own. Xhemal reminisced with Illyet; they remembered the old days, when Illyet was a teacher in this region. He lived in an isolated house by the cemetery and feared vampires. I wondered about the lot of ghosts in the country of Enver Hoxha, who on April 29, 1967, proclaimed Albania to be the first atheist nation in the world. Almost as strange as the sight of Ceauş escu's grave, a year later, at the Ghencea Cemetery in Bucharest. The tombstone was more than a meter high and topped with a white cross. In the place where you would expect the head of Christ in a crown of thorns was a red, five-pointed star. Affected, I had to smoke. Around the grave, an iron fence. The paranoid shoemaker, even in death, was raving mad: the cross and the Commie star would light his way in the afterworld. Fear had eaten at him all his life, so in cowardly fashion he was armed with both, just in case. To weasel out of it somehow. No telling who would be dealing the cards on the other side. Most likely, however, he rotted altogether in his iron cage, rotted body and soul. There were stains of oil lamps there, wax from candles, so someone came to say a pitiful prayer for the dead. Secret emissaries from the English queen? She had, after all, driven him around London in her own carriage, had put him up for the night in Buckingham Palace. Who can fathom the people of the West, who can guess what they feel? In any case, I thought, a fitting punishment, for him to lie in an ordinary cemetery, not covered much, without marble, some two kilometers from the House of the People, that pyramid raised in shoemaker taste, its base measuring 250 by 250. To reach it, even by the most direct path, you'd have to walk a quarter of a kilometer across scorched and treeless pasture. Which I didn't do, observing it instead from a distance. I preferred to see his grave: more interesting.

At the entrance to the cemetery, we were stopped by a guard. He was large, a swarthy Rambo in military dress, with dozens of pockets and a walkie-talkie. He asked if we had someone here close to us. Roland answered in Romanian: absolutely, family, relatives. So the government was afraid and kept watch, lest he scramble out on a moonlit night, cross the avenue, and dig up Elena. They lay separately, some twenty meters between them. She had it much worse. Only an iron fence and an iron cross covered with black antirust paint. In the center, a patch of dry earth. Someone had planted something there, but it refused to grow. As if both husband and wife exuded a toxin that destroyed roots. All around, bushes, shrubs, ferns, saplings; here, nothing, as if the rhythm of vegetation had been interrupted by a defoliant. Their bodies did this, I thought. Deprived of voice, sight, motion, they sought to communicate through their decomposition, through corpse juices. Then I saw he had another stone, made of brown marble and standing beside the one with the red star. Much higher, topped with a cross, with a faience cemetery photograph that portrayed the shoemaker in a suit, white shirt, and tie. On the plinth was carved, "Olacrima pe mormitul tau din partea poporlui roman," which more or less means "The tear of the Romanian people on your grave." Nothing more, nothing less. Before this inscription, the Romanian people partied till they dropped and roared with laughter. Still another cross, the same kind as his wife's, black and iron. Someone had simply driven it into the ground next to the marble. The three made a dark parody of Golgotha. In a stone pot serving as an urn, a dried stalk. The base of the tombstone was covered with soot, smeared with yellow lamp oil, and there were burned-out lamps scattered on the ground—the melancholy of the makeshift, a cheap copy of eternal rest. Not far off, on a white slab stood a black dog watching, perhaps to make sure that the body would not dig itself out. As we left, the guard approached us and said, "I knew you had come to see him."

Today again the carters rode through. As yesterday and the day before, monotonously, slowly, in mist. Leaving horse shit on the white road. This time, only two of them. Heavy men, over forty. Both horses dun. At two thirty they come up from the valley. At three thirty it gets dark, and they're home. They unhitch the animals, lead them away, give them water and food. You hear straps hit the metal bucket. The horses shift from leg to leg, and the floorboards of the stable drum. It's humid and dark inside; it smells of manure and hay. The harnesses hang on rusty nails.

Several days ago I was in MezŐkövesd. There was rain and a sudden freeze. Ice coated everything. Sunday morning the Hungarians sold their wares in canvas stalls at the square. People skated, holding their bagged purchases. Ice covered the solemn holiday decorations. There was an ATM at King Matthias Street, the same King Matthias on the pale-blue thousand-forint banknote. I pulled out onto the highway. Three cars at the intersection like automotive phantoms in the haze and intensifying drizzle. I drove toward Miskolc. Everything gleamed: bare poplars, yellow grass, blue road signs. Jesus, how empty and plain the landscape. Nothing but a flat surface and once in a rare while a naked tree in the distance, like a comb. The air seemed to ring from this glassy ice. Near EmŐd, junctions, roads to Debrecen and Nyífregyháza. Glistening gray Möbius strips got lost in the void of the Great Lowlands, and it was hard to believe that all those cities, towns, and villages were there, with their houses, smoking chimneys, and life. I think it was near EmŐd, in the beginning of December, that infinity revealed itself to me for the first time. But only for a moment, as I thought of Esterházy and his Transporters. "They are coming! ... The transporters are coming! Their shouts rip the dawn—the distant, gray, threadbare dawn—the silence fragile and empty ... The reins flowed lightly, the tiny pieces of ice clinked under the rims of the wheels." I always wanted to write about Transporters. Twenty-five printed pages. The wet air, uncertain, parts, and it seems that they have stepped from a dream, a dream dreamt by one more powerful than we are, to appear on earth as messengers of temptation. Indistinguishable from their big animals, heated and sluggish, made completely of meat. "Their faces, almost all bearded, are broad, but they are not friendly, not at all! In the back of the cart you can hear their short, hoarse laughter. They understand one another, I see. They have powerful thighs; how tight their pants must be." Indeed, I saw them near EmŐd, on a bare plain, on a Sunday morning in December, in weather that evaded time. The world so slippery that even the air could not stick to it. They drove there at the same time of year, when the mud of the road finally hardens and autumn is done. The same trek for centuries. Salt transported from far away, and wine, let's say, from Eger to the south, to the other shore of the Tisa, to Timişoara, all as in a historical novel, action-packed, or a film, when over the flat horizon a horse-drawn cart appears, the music stops, and only the rattle of the axles, the clank of the wrought-iron rims, and the wheeze of the horses are heard. Those who cross the land always disturb its peace and incline it to evil, awakening fear mixed with need. After their passage, nothing is as it was. The horizon, cracked, will never heal.

Luckily the highway ended there, the road became crowded, and there was an end to philosophizing. A Hungarian maniac on the outskirts of Miskolc passed three cars at once with his Zafir. With the air a little warmer, ice fell from trees. On the other side of the city, by an exit, I saw a herd of cars gathered around a supermarket, their roofs the cold backs of cattle grazing on concrete pasture. After Encs the road emptied again: no one was driving out of the country. I was in a bit of a hurry, but as usual Gönc tempted, and I detoured a few kilometers. In a candy shop, an elderly man served at the counter. A woman with a small boy ordered a cappuccino to go in a Styrofoam cup. The two crossed Kossuth Street, to a bus stop, where a man waited with a silver tape recorder and two plastic shopping bags stuffed. He was short and smoked a cigarette, protecting it with his hand from large flakes of wet snow. Where were they going with the tape recorder and child, with the worn, much-used bags? They seemed poor, pitiful. A little family on the road two weeks before Christmas. Mother and son drank in silence, taking quick sips, as if they had no time, though the bus wasn't coming. The bus to Telkibánya, Pálháza, Sátoraljaújhely, across the Zemplén Mountains. The snow fell more heavily. Like people out of work, they didn't converse. Being out of work showed in their faces, in their gestures—I knew the signs, from home. Out of the main current of time, cast ashore, aside, left to their fate, a fate that no longer involved others. You wake one morning and the world is different, though nothing has changed. These were my thoughts in Gönc. But maybe they weren't out of work, maybe I invented that as a way not to leave with empty hands. The unemployed, like carters and transporters, are needed: a reason to go home.

This time I returned from Cres Island, sixty-eight kilometers long and with three thousand inhabitants. It takes twenty minutes by ferry from Brestova. Besides us there were only two trucks and an old Mercedes. Before we landed at Porozina, the driver of the Mercedes managed to down two brandies. From the deck, the island looked deserted. The ferry rumbled and stank of diesel. The bartender also appeared to have had one too many. Fifteen crossings a day, after all. The sky was overcast; the landscape took on weight. It all went together: the diesel ferry, the bartender, the inebriated driver, the dark, distinct water of the bay, the empty dock, the low sky, the sleepy movements of the crew, and the December light. A separate life. Cres, inland, was deserted indeed. The road went its length like a spine. White, treeless tract, stunted vegetation, wind. In one spot I saw a flock of sheep. They stood so still, it was hard to tell them from the rocks. They were the same color as the rocks. No one tended them. On the map, Cres looks like an old bone. The winter strips it of everything, and gusts from the sea fill the tiniest cracks. It was that way in the village of Lubenice at the top of a three-hundred-meter cliff. I never saw a human dwelling more exposed. A few dozen houses of old stone and a few scrawny, unprotected fig trees. The wind had access from every direction: endless air in every direction. In some places you feel you cannot go on, only go back, because reality has said the final word there. These houses were gray, I thought, because of the wind; the wind had wiped the color from the walls, color could persist only within. If Cres was an island, Lubenice was twice one, separated from land by water and air both. A gulf yawned behind this bedroom wall. Outside this kitchen window, seabirds rode air currents. Such was life here. At the cemetery, half the dead were named Muskardin. The cemetery lay at the edge of a rocky shelf. Death must have been a curse for the gravediggers. A grave wasn't dug but chiseled out. Everything said purgatory. No one would come here without a compelling reason. People driven by a sentence or by a fear, and once here, they hadn't the strength to leave.

I drove off the asphalt and down a field. A road was marked on the map, but in reality it was more a dry riverbed or broken steps leading to infinity. I covered a few dozen kilometers in first gear. All around, white rubble, rubble stretching to the sky, breaking off, falling off on the other side. Great birds soared above, seeking a living thing. But for us, people, everything was dead, cold, swept clean by the wind. Someone had divided this open area with stone walls. The walls went to the horizon, cutting rectangles out of the emptiness. A paranoid-meticulous marking off of property, I thought, but later people told me that this labyrinth of barriers was designed to prevent erosion of soil from the rain. The way was so narrow sometimes that I had to fold my side mirrors. In the carefully walled-off square patches of space there were only stones, no earth. An occasional twig grew between boulders. I passed a house with a collapsed roof, then another in equal disrepair, then there were no houses. I imagined summer in this place: blazing white, the lizards baking. As far as the eye could see, nothing that might throw a shadow. Then, high among the rocks, Lubenice. I could have reached it by the narrow asphalt ribbon from the other direction, from the sea, from Valun, but that would have been too simple, telling little of the truth about Cres Island, its hollow interior, where birds circled in search of prey.

Sometimes I imagine a map composed only of the places I'd like to see once more. A not so serious map, having nothing important on it: wet snow in Gönc, Zborov and its ruined church, Caraorman with its desert sand and rusted machines that were supposed to uncover gold in the waters of the Danube, the heat in Erind, Spišská Belá and a grocery store barely visible at dusk, dawn and the smell of cat piss in Piran, Răinari at evening and the aroma from a gingerbread factory, pigs not far from Oradea, hogs in Mátészalka, Delatyn and its train station on a dreary morning, Duląbka, Rozpucie and Jabłonna Lacka, Huşi and Sokołów, and back again to Lubenice. I close my eyes and draw the roads, rails, distances, and scenes between the wastes, between one insignificance and the next, and I try putting together an atlas that will carry all this on its flat back, to make it a little more permanent, a little more immortal.

A few days ago I rode to Kraków on the Košice express, taking the 10:11 from Stróże. Snow still lay on the fields. Grays and blacks emerging from beneath. And, God, the pathetic rubbish along the tracks, the wire fences, the strings of forgotten holiday lights burning in the dark blue of January, the naked trees in yards, piles of old lumber, scrap metal, broken bricks, all of it framed by linear geometry, a supernatural precision that suddenly bares the skeleton of the world. Bobowa, Ciężkowice, Tuchów, Pleśna—as if the tongue of frost has licked the human landscape to the bone, leaving only what is most important, what you can't do without, else nothingness takes over. Noon finally, but in some windows of homes near the track I saw the yellow glow of lightbulbs. The yards were obsessively neat. All cleaned and made pretty, like a body at a funeral. It was the snow, its thin layer outlining every object, that gave the form of the ideal to the poverty of the everyday. Noon finally, yet there was no one about. No reason for people to be about. The land was turning toward the abstract, so they preferred to stay indoors. I opened my window to smell the burning coal, thought of pans on hot stoves, skillful pokers stoking, moments when the fire escapes the iron grate, black smoke rises, and a red glow fills the kitchen. How many such homes on the way? Hundreds, thousands, and the same details in gray, the same sad order set against the chaos of the world.

The train car was Slovak. Its seats were upholstered in red fake leather. Before I got on, it had passed Prešov, Sabinov, Lipany. Things were the same there. The houses stood a little closer together and were more alike, but everything else was similar: the crouching provisionality, the uncertain fate, life as improvisation. What had there been in Sabinov two or three years back, in early spring? A hip roof, Gothic dome, church spire, tower clock; beside the church, a yellow building in the Renaissance style, its facade covered with soot, grillwork in the windows, then the remnants of defending walls, puddles reflecting the smoky sky, and a few chickens looking for dry ground to scratch. I'm sure I landed there by accident. I was probably investigating new roads on the Spiš and šariša border. Possibly I took a shortcut off Road 18 with the old idea that someday I'd get to the other side of the landscape and see everything I saw now but greatly magnified, a kind of ultra landscape that in some miraculous way would unite all scraps and fragments, every Lipany and Sabinov, which would all find their places, they and their chickens, mud, coal-fired kitchens, smoke, tidy desperation of yards, expectation, and become twice, no, a thousand times as large and never, ever again fret over their random, stopgap existence.

In Piotrków, equidistant between the junction to Kielce and the junction to Radom, is a narrow-gauge railway. Unused for many years. Two reddish threads here and there covered by the sandy earth, then reappearing on the right side of the pavement. My People's Atlas of Poland says that this line was built in 1904 and still operating in 1971. It was Saturday, February, the sun was shining, and I couldn't tear my eyes from what was left of those Lilliputian train tracks. In Uszczyn there was even a little station still standing. The red-brick structure tried to suggest the Gothic but instead looked like a building-block house. Its naive ornamentation had a puppet quality. The whole area seemed childishly miniaturized. The houses on either side of the road were almost all facade. Especially in Uszczyn, Przygłów, and the area around Sulejów. On these facades with neither age nor style would be a cornice sometimes, a circular window, a pilaster, something put there not for function but simply out of the longing to be a little more, a little better than average. Behind these walls was nothing but the wind. The poultry had their coops, the dogs their doghouses, but every effort had gone into the awful facades, this last defense against the form, so like formlessness, of the world. So instead of going to see a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey, I was drawn to Sulejów garden plots full of blue puddles, to atrophied little squares, yards, and balconies where old furniture accumulated, credenzas eaten by the weather, the mortal remains of human employment. On a thin column, like Simon Stylites, sat a local angel. He looked like the homes he protected. Cut from the same cloth, he would stay with them until the end. The Mother of God by the church on the hill had at least a shelter over her, made of L-square rulers and Plexiglas. The angel had nothing, just heaven. A little farther on stood a trash receptacle. Thirty kilometers due south lay the village of Wygwizdów. I was supposed to go and stay there. The sky over the plain that day was cold and bright. On the way I was likely to encounter three or four broken-down cars.

Only one Wygwizdów in the nation, but I had to go on, to reach Solec before nightfall. That was the plan. I had never been in Solec. I had only seen a photograph once; it was of a movie theater. The entrance overgrown with grass; in the poster marquee, tatters; a cloudy sky. In the background, an old wooden cottage. The theater was called simply Cinema; that was the word over the entrance. A willow grew nearby. They had shown nothing for years. Inside, in the dark, chairs rotted. I tried to imagine the surroundings. There are photographs and places that give you no peace, though nothing much is there. The movie theater in the photograph was from a time when direct names sufficed for things. The facade rose in a gentle arc to accommodate the simple letters. Solitude and desertion moved through the frame like a cold wind. That's why I drove there in the middle of February, patches of snow still on the fields. I had the strong feeling that somewhere between Sulejów, Wygwizdów, and Solec time had ground to a halt or simply evaporated or melted like a dream and no longer separated us from our childhood. Perhaps even no longer from the entire past. I left Road 777, turned right, and empty space began. The land lifted, like a plain gradually approaching the sky or like an oppressive dream in which you can neither reach your destination nor escape. I drove to Solec, through country that laughs at you, for one black-and-white photograph.

Solec was like Sokołów Podlaski thirty years ago, like Huşi eight months ago. It was yet another candidate for the capital of my part of the continent. I didn't want to stop, didn't want to get out, afraid that all this would disappear, so impermanent was it, so fragile and fundamentally fake. At the church on the hill everything ended, and I too turned back. Horses wandered free in this parish, their long manes matted by winter. I'll come here before I die, I thought, come here when I no longer want to live. No one here will notice that all my strength has left me. At night I'll sit in the movie theater and watch the ghosts of films of former years. Death should bear some resemblance to life. It should be like a dream or movie. Reality in this part of the continent has assumed the aspect of the afterlife—no doubt so that people will fear death less and die with less regret.

I stood before the movie theater. It was like the photograph: existing and not existing, neither dead nor alive. Matter in imitation of the beyond. Possibly the photograph had more life in it than this. Evening gathered, and I felt a chill in the air. In the theater's dark interior, frost would cut the transparent images on old reels. Yes, there are places in which we are certain that something lies behind, something is concealed, but we are helpless, too stupid or too timid or perhaps not old enough to know how to cross to the other side. I stood like a post, freezing, and imagined the crooked doors opening and me entering, and beheld the narrow passage we all have been seeking, where Solec begins, Wygwizdów, Sulejów, Huşi, Lubenice, and the rails running from Stróże to Tarnov, the red train cars from Košice, everything that is no more yet endures, indestructible and without end, even that Saturday a few years ago when we drove through Hornád valley, once more at the foot of the airborne Gypsy village, but this time the miracles take place on the ground, on the flat pasture between the ascending road and the river. There was a thaw, and all the kids had come out from the settlement. A great snow fort was falling under the merciless attack of its besiegers. Towers knocked over, walls breached, the defenders with nowhere to hide. But the scene held more than this concluding battle. On a meadow as large as a couple of soccer fields were enormous spheres of snow. The children rolled each ball till they could roll no longer, then began a new one. Some were a meter in diameter. Several dozen such balls, looking as if they had fallen from heaven. Beautiful and unreal. Among them, colorfully dressed children rolled tirelessly. There was nothing more animated in the neighborhood, which lay in the shadow of a steel mill. I drove to the mill. Several dozen men were leaving just then. They walked with a heavy, numb step, as gray as smoke, as sad as all Krompachy and the twilight of the proletariat. Meanwhile the Gypsy children converted their energy into spheres of snow that in a day or two the sun would dwindle and turn to water to feed the Hornád River, which flowed in a complex maze of tributaries and catchments to the Black Sea, to which the government of Slovakia had no access.

Later, farther on, somewhere in a village near Sabinov, hogs were being butchered in a stockyard. On a black wire fence hung meat. In that dirty-white landscape of winter thaw, the meat glowed like fire. The house, the road, the sky, the people bustling, the whole village with vigilant mongrels pacing—as far as the eye could see, it lay in mist, was without color; only from those pieces of meat did the light of cruelty shine. Through the glass of my car window I felt the heat of the red pieces. In the Slovak slumber and stillness and sad tranquillity of my part of the world, a slaughter was taking place. No one hid the shame of death. Dogs and children watched the quick knife move, the innards in bowls and buckets, the blood. All as it had been for a thousand years. Nothing changing. Then dusk.

A red light at the passage to Konieczna. I waited for several minutes. Someone moved in the dimness, walked to the counter where passports are stamped, pressed a button, the green light went on, the crossing gate lifted. Inside sat one of ours; the Slovaks didn't care who was leaving their country. "Where are you coming from?" "When did you leave the country?" "What's your destination?" I watched as the passport was slipped into the scanner. "I'm going there. I left today," I answered. The customs window opened a little. "Purchases." "All in order." I saw no face, just the gesture to drive on. I had no sense that I was returning from somewhere. Right after the turn, in the village, the mist began.