further extracts from road to babadag by andrzej stasiuk

The night filled the room in the attic. amd he could recall his life without obstacle, because insomnia, just as many years ago in Sibiu, has taken the place of eternity for him. On Brazilor Avenue and Father Bratu Avenue and Episcopei Avenue And Andrei Saguna Avenue and Ilarie Mitrea Avenue the animals sleep. In the dim, close barns the cows lie and chew as they sleep. The horses stand with lowered heads at their empty cribs. As it ought to have been and in fact is. The heat departs from him forever and over Rasinari joins the heat of the livestock. Then it lifts into the black sky above the Carpathians and flows towards the cold stars like a vision of the soul, a vision he couldn't stand because it kept him awake.

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The loneliness of a liberated mind is as great as the sky over Transylvania.

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Travel is no more than a relatively healthy form of narcotic, after all.

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Time, approaching from afar, is like the air that someone else has already breathed.

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Kocevski Rog suggested an architecture that would never come to pass, because the simplicity of its beauty would throw into question the whole point of an imagination.

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It gives me no rest, my wish to know the fate of all these scenes that entered my eyes and have remained in my thoughts. What happens to them when I am no longer there? Unless I have taken them with me, immobilised them for all time in my mind, and they will be with me until the end, untouched by the change of seasons and the weather.

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From across the bleached, shaggy dunes, the sound of waves crashing, as old as the world and as monotonous.

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For almost an hour I saw him come and go, in a constant rush, trousers bagging as he did battle with dirt and dust, a Buster Keaton of the Delta trying to stem the chaos of volatile substances and defend Sfantu Gheorghe against the rain of particles from outer space.

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From inland would come mirages of distant cities. Between the mirror of the water and the clouds, Bucharest might appear, Berlin might float, Prague, London, Istanbul, and, with the right combination of light and convection currents, a fusion of New York and Montevideo, Tokyo and Montreal.

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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.

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Any place with a population of over 100,000 I cross off my list: Go ahead, build, in the hope that some day it will completely block the view of where you came from.

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Freed from the workings of time, they are indifferent to the nothingness that will claim Gonc 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.

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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.

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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 slowy 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 liberte, egalite and fraternite of matter.

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