Free On the Road to Babadag by Andrzej Stasiuk Page A

Budapest.

    And that, more or less, was our trip. Instead of following the path of Lajos Kossuth, we took the route of cheapest possible tobacco. Lajos Kossuth endures in the names of streets, squares, and boulevards, but those cigarettes in orange packs vanish along with the world that smokes them, just as the obscure country inns in which I felt so much at home vanish. I thought of my Europe as a place where, no matter what the distance covered and despite the borders and changing languages, a person feels he is merely going, say, from Gorlice to Sanok. Thus I reflected on the last decent myth or illusion to be applied like a bandage to the wounds and abrasions of homelessness in this ever more orphaned world. My thoughts were sentimental, yet I indulged in them on the road between Nagykálló and Mátészalka under the purple western sky. The purple I imagined as the glow from burning Vienna, which was treating its provinces and peripheries to one last spectacle, sacrificing in a gigantic auto-da-fé its spit-and-polish shops, Graben display windows, archetypal burghers walking their dogs in the morning, memories and deep sadness blowing like the wind between the Hofburg Palace and Maria Theresa Square. At most only the Café Havelka would be spared, and a night sausage stand on St. Stephen's Square. Thus I reflected between Nagykálló and Mátészalka, trying to stage a heroic, impressive end for a world dying naturally, of simple old age.
    ***
    "This route is known for robbery. Even the customs officers on the Ukrainian side will extort money from travelers or confiscate possessions that they want." So says the guidebook. Obviously that's the route we immediately chose. Not that there was another way to get from Hungary to Ukraine.
    Waiting for the border train at the station in Záhony, we took all the necessary precautions. First we hid, at the bottom of the backpack, the possession that they would want: a fifteen-year-old Praktica camera. Then we prepared ourselves for extortion, stuffing in various pockets bills of all the currencies we carried. A dollar here, two there, ten in another place in case a higher bribe was needed. Also Slovak crowns, forints, even Romanian lei, because who knew what those guys would want? For courage, we drank the last of our pear brandy, brushing aside the unpleasant thought that it might be our last in this life.
    The train pulled in: all of two cars, plus the locomotive. In the first car, young men and women loaded merchandise—washers, refrigerators, stoves, tires, halves and quarters of automobiles, and miscellaneous items of daily use. The second car was for us and a hundred other travelers. Besides our Polish, people spoke Hungarian, Ukrainian, Russian, Romany, and Romanian. A woman sitting opposite us had only her passport and a five-liter bottle of oil. The Hungarians checked our papers as the train crossed the border bridge over the Tisza. Then something happened in the passageway between the two cars. One skinhead kid hit another skinhead kid. The girls got into it, and so much was going on, you couldn't see a thing. Someone must have lost the fight, because one of the girls came to our compartment and asked for a bottle of water, for reviving the injured party. It seemed a completely internal disagreement, so we were calm and admired the scenery. A Ukrainian guard appeared with a customs officer. He nonchalantly looked at the passports and stamped them with no interest. Feverishly I tried to remember which pockets held which bills. Fear had driven it all out of my head, so there was a chance I might pull out, like an utter fool, a fifty. The border folk were approaching; in a panic I clutched five hundred Romanian lei in my hand—that is, enough to buy a box of matches in Bucharest. The guard finally came to us, and I handed him our passports. He barely looked at them, slipped them in his pocket, and said in Ukrainian, "See me at the station in