TRAVEL: On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other EuropeBy Andrzej Stasiuk Translated by Michael Kandel Harvill Secker, 255pp. £14.99
I WAS once in Uzhgorod, a town in western Ukraine, the bit that sticks into central Europe, only two kilometres from Slovakia, and a short drive from Hungary, Romania and Poland. Uzghorod had been part of Czechoslavokia, Hungary, independent Ukraine, the capital of an independent Carpathian republic, the USSR and then Ukraine again. It is the sort of place the Polish writer, Andrzej Stasiuk, loves – a place of drifting identity, where languages clash, where borders are porous, and where it is difficult to tell the border guards and the smugglers apart.
Stasiuk travelled all around the border area of Ukraine, Romania and Slovakia and did visit many places like Uzhgorod, because he is drawn to places in “decline, decay” to everything that is not as it should be.
Stasiuk is a major writer in Eastern Europe. He is the author of about a dozen works, including a collection of short stories written following his imprisonment for deserting from the Polish army in the early 1980s. He and his wife also run a small publishing house.
On The Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europeis a work of philosophy, memory and exploration, an attempt to find the essence of eastern and south-eastern Europe. Using buses, cars, trains and ferries, he travels through the small towns and villages of Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, Ukraine and even strange little Transnistria, a slither of Moldova that has ceded and declared itself, all 200km long and 30km wide, to be an independent country, a group of states which is now almost a parody of the former Soviet Union. His description of the red and white pole at the border post leading to Ukraine in the middle of miles of wheat fields is a wonderful observation of hubris and folly.
The Europe he sees is changing and not necessarily always in a welcome way. There is the old man who is delighted when Stasiuk recognises Ceausescu in the photograph on the wall of his little farm house, as well as those who pine for the communist period. The heart of Stasiuk’s Europe, he says, “beats in Sokolow Podlaskie and Husi”. The first is a town in Poland and the second in Romania, but they could be any of the towns and villages he wanders through. It definitely does not beat in Vienna, Budapest or Krakow: “Those places are all aborted transplants. A mock-up, a mirror of what is elsewhere.”
Stasiuk travels incessantly. His passport, he tells us, has nearly 200 stamps. He glories in the ordinary, an old man in a bar, the cattle wandering the little roads and, above all, the Gypsies. Outside the town of Baia Mare, he describes an industrial suburb, or the rust belt that surrounds so many eastern European towns: “The flat field was choked with rusting metal, pieces of concrete, abandoned plastic. Landfill smouldered 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.” And on it goes. But then: “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”. The animals which had endured since the “beginning of the world” were now “quietly triumphant”.
In other places he writes of the little wooden houses covered in vines, of lovingly tended gardens, of hospitable people inviting him for a borovocka,a cujka, a rakija, a raki or a vodka, depending on the country.
The book probably needs more extensive notes. Writers, historical figures, thinkers are introduced or mentioned in passing without explanation, which might be confusing to some. However, for those who know something of the region it makes you want to go back and find some of those small towns and villages, where fields are still ploughed with horses and seeds scattered by hand.
Stasiuk has been compared to Jack Kerouac, which is a bit misleading; a better comparison might be with a fellow Pole, the literary journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski. There is a feeling of the “magic journalism” of Kapuscinski about Stasiuk’s work. But, where Kapuscinski wanted to translate one culture to another, mainly Africa to the West, Stasiuk is on a personal journey into the heart of that other Europe, balanced between its communist past and its uneasy relationship with its capitalist and global present and future.
Michael Foley lectures in journalism at DIT. For the past 15 years he has been involved in journalist education and training in eastern and south eastern Europe and the Caucasus
