We bend toward the east to outline Romania. The sun comes out; vine-covered hills appear; the Tibiscus River valley begins, and the most legendary of the Danube’s tributaries appears, solitary and wild, under the southern slope of the Carpathians. Meanwhile, I discover that the train has no toilets. “It’s logical,” the ticket checker explains, “it’s a train for people who get on and off for short rides, like a bus.” At Khust, we discover that the train ends there, because the old Austrian line goes only about thirty miles on the Romanian side of the river. The fragmentation of the old Soviet world and then the wall of fortress Europe have destroyed most of the old transnational connections. Nobody will ever persuade me to abandon the conviction that Europe was more European a century ago, when my grandmother traveled by train in one day from Trieste to Transylvania.
In Khust there’s nothing that can’t be bought and sold. The main square is a little bazaar. To continue on our way, we can choose a bus or a car with a driver, which comes at a more reasonable rate than in Belarus—€80 ($110) as far as Rakhiv, sixty miles. Our driver for the trip is Mikhail, a former building engineer with years of emigration behind him. He sings as he drives, loves his country, and has no intention of emigrating. He drives us through a magnificent valley dotted with the houses of emigrants who have prospered, but their houses are nightmare concoctions: medieval-style castles with towers topped with blue plastic roof tiles. The aesthetic model of independent Ukraine is Disneyland.
Moscow may be even farther away than it was, and at ticket windows, they may speak only Ukrainian, but nevertheless the centuries-old knowledge of building materials has been lost and the identity of place along with it.
Unreachable on the opposite shore, the Romanian side, is the much more authentic beauty of Maramureş, which I saw years ago, with its wooden churches and its cemeteries adorned with paintings of laughing angels. Beyond the river and the trees, I see the bell tower of Săpânța, one of the jewels of old Europe. It would be magnificent to go over there, but it’s not possible. The border crossing at Teresva has been closed for two years. But it’s all show—“reklama [advertisement],” Mikhail says more precisely—because here, too, smugglers come and go as they please. “Plus, for three thousand euros (five thousand dollars) you can buy a Schengen visa with no problems.” I take a good look at the river. Swimming across it would be a joke. I don’t understand. Why is there an eighteen-mile “cordon” on the border with Poland, and here there’s nothing? What a put-on, this frontier. Mikhail confirms that during the Cold War, it was worse. No sense of Communist brotherhood; if you swam across, Ceauşescu’s Romanians filled you with lead. We turn north. Now both banks are in Ukraine.
Tributaries of the Tibiscus flow down the slopes swollen with clear water between fields of corn and tobacco. Grape arbors in front of the houses, heaps of watermelons for sale under the linden trees, rafts for rent for whitewater river excursions. Then the valley narrows, and right there, treacherously outside the borders of the European Union, an old Austrian plaque marks what late-eighteenth-century geographers identified as the center of Europe—as if to say that the heart of the continent beat in the old empire much more than it does in the European Union.
I find a place to stay in Rakhiv, in a cabin on the river, while in a nearby house, they’re slaughtering a pig, and the poor thing’s squeals are echoing up and down the whole valley. Above us is the roof of the Carpathians, Mount Hoverla, 6,760 feet. I look up at the slopes of the mountains. They’re full of people going up and down. It’s a world that you can discover only on foot. The mountains are populated, high up and on the high meadows, even at dusk; it’s a constant up and down of farmhands at work with hay and herds. There’s a farmhand who’s piling up hay in a typical Carpathian hayrack. “Working on the klatki, you age well,” he tells me, referring to the scaffolding. He has ten children, twenty grandchildren, and he’s as slim as a herring. In the immense silence of the evening, I drink a beer with my feet soaking in the river and a dog by the name of Uaciata sitting next to me, come down to greet me from the house next door. Her name, so tender, means “sketch.”
Stars. Dinner of cured ham and cheese by the hearth in the inn. Above it, the room looks out on the river; that’s the only sound I can hear. The ideal place for a good rest, but I can’t get to sleep. Monika is sleeping so deeply, it seems she’s on another planet. I, on the other hand, suddenly feel crushed under the weight of all the things we’ve seen. Too many. I have no idea why this is happening to me here and now, at the center of the continent. It’s as though all the notes I’ve taken in the last month have fallen on me at once. A month as long as a year. Six full notebooks. How will I manage to decipher them after all this time? I’ve never made a journey so dense with encounters, and all that lived experience turns into weight, ballast. I’ve been working meticulously, maybe too much, like a botanist or an entomologist, gathering, recording, reproducing, investigating with a magnifying glass.
Just before six, just to pass the time, I start rummaging through my pack and discover that my rigid blue notebook that I’ve been filling with drawings isn’t there. I look again; nothing. Nothing, nothing. A month’s work up in smoke. I’d drawn the little Belarusian houses, Lithuanian beer labels, Norwegian road signs, the Cyrillic menus from the inns in Murmansk. I curse, dripping with sweat. The idea of going back up into the mountains above Lviv without a car is simply crazy; plus, I don’t have enough time left for such a long detour. I’m desperate. But just as I’m getting ready to resign myself, out comes the damn thing from a side pocket as dark as night, and for a second, its seventy drawings seem to shine in the semidarkness like the figures of a magic lantern.
12. DNIESTER
“LA-LA-LAAA, / It won’t bring us luck / This stolen night….”
The descent from the Carpathians to the plains stretching south to the Black Sea begins on a bus full of sleeping peasants and angelic children, with OUR FATHER printed large in Cyrillic on top of the first aid kit and a Slavic sound track capable of killing you with a fatal attack of nostalgia.
“You can’t build / Your happiness / On the suffering of others….”
Behind the wheel is a stocky driver in a muscle shirt who identifies me right away as Italian and tells me that he picked fruit in the fields of the Po Valley near Brescia.
“Did they pay you well?”
“So-so. Four euros (six dollars) an hour. Lot of work, not a lot of pay.”
“And now?”
“Now, driver. Now also not a lot of pay… but at least I’m home.”
We start into a series of shallow, parallel valleys, made from the slightest of rising slopes and separated by small rivers, where the dominant colors are the yellow of the wheat and the red of the poppies. In the scorching-hot clouds of dust, the bus stations turn into caravanserais. The one in Kolomyia looks like the round heart of a daisy whose petals are the shelters, shooting buses out in every direction. The food kiosks are the European outposts of the bazaar, with an irresistible aroma of burek, the thin, flaky pastry filled with cheese that I discovered in the Balkans. My gluttony won’t allow me not to bring back on board a greasy paper bag full of them, and good manners oblige me to share them with my neighbors.