Free On the Road to Babadag by Andrzej Stasiuk Page B

Chop."
    At the station in Chop, the unloading took time. Washers, refrigerators, halves and quarters of cars were lifted and passed over people's heads. The two skinheads, in perfect amity, carried a television set together. We saw our guard in the crowd. He gestured for us with a tired look. We followed him, and now I remembered where I had hidden the hundred dollars. He led us, like convicts, through the hall for arrivals. Now and then he nodded at someone. We passed the customs table, the passport window, pushed through the crowd, and were suddenly on the other side. Then our cicerone gave us our stamped passports and said, "I didn't want you to have to stand in those lines. You have hryvnias?" "Only dollars," I blurted, idiot that I was. He looked around the hall and waved over a short guy who held a plastic bag. The guy approached. The guard said, "Exchange money for them, but at a decent rate." The bag was full of hryvnias in bundles tied with rubber bands. The guard asked us if we needed anything else, wished us a pleasant trip, and we were again alone.

Baia Mare
    A N Y W A Y , I S A W Baia Mare in the rays of the sun sinking westward on the Great Hungarian Plain. Remnants of rain still hung in the air, and a rainbow rose over the valley of the Lăpuş River. Damp golden dust billowed up from the plain, the road, the bridge, pastures, from the white clouds of trees in bloom, from the world: the whole province of Maramureş. Light like that occurs only after a storm, when space fills with electricity. It's possible, however, that this light emanated from deep within the earth, from hidden veins of mountain ore. Baia Mare, Nagybánya, the Great Mine, lodes of gold, a Transylvanian El Dorado 250 kilometers from my home—these were my thoughts as I crossed the Lăpuş. To the north, Ignis Mountain, still in shade, its peaks a wet dark blue. The storm preceded us and now was moving along the Black Tisa above Chornohora and Świdowiec.
    I saw Baia Mare from a distance, not wanting to drive into the town. Ahead, a bypass to Sighetu and Cluj wove through industrial suburbs. There was not one car or person in sight. The flat field was choked with rusting metal, pieces of concrete, abandoned plastic. Landfill smoldered sleepily, reeking. The sun shone on red-brown construction beams, on the broken windows of factories, on gutted warehouses, on lifeless cranes, on corroded steel, and on eroded brick. Pylons, silos, cranes, and chimneys cast long black shadows. As far as the eye could see, a tangle of wires in the sky, a web of rails on the ground. Mounds of black sludge—some kind of chemical waste—gave way to mounds of containers: polymer, cardboard, glass. Tin cans, rubber hoses, radioactive mud, cyanides from gold mines, lead and zinc, rags and nylon, acids and bases, asphalt, ponds of oil, soot, smoke, the final decadence of industry, all under a bright sky.
    Among these ruins and dumps, cows grazed on patches of maltreated grass. In the shadow of a giant steel chimney trotted a flock of sheep. In Baia Mare, time circled. Animals walked between inert machines. These seemingly frail, soft, and defenseless creatures had endured since the beginning of the world and now were quietly triumphant. It was the same in Oradea: cows sunning themselves at railroad junctions, and the train cars off on the sidings had the reddish brown color of the animals but were cold, dead, spent. It was the same outside Satu Mare, where sheep wandered down the center of Route 19, and in Suceava, where a white horse grazed in the heart of town, and again in Oradea, where horses, in a maze of rails and bypasses, among endless hangars and rolling trucks—bays, piebalds, grays, dapples—cropped on the toxic grass. It looked as if they had fed there forever.

    A few days later in the Banat, Valiu told us about the first Romanian locomotive. It was built in the town of ReşiÅ¢a in the year 1872, and the people wanted to