Andrzej Stasiuk

Fado

About the book

RUDŇANY

This is a tale from Slovakia.
You have to get to Spiska Nowa Wies and then continue on another ten kilometres into the mountains. En route, you pass Markušowiec and the rococo palace of the noble Hungarian family of Máriássy. Its fabulous outline, standing out from the surrounding decrepit buildings, makes a somewhat surreal impression. At the foot of this building, gypsies are pulling carts loaded with firewood. On the other side of the palace park stands a small summer castle built by a member of the Máriassy family in the latter part of the 18th century for Kaiser Joseph II. The emperor was to arrive on a visit and a suitable abode was required for His Majesty. But he never arrived. Now, from this miniature castle's restored windows one may look out on the road and the river, in which gypsy women are washing their colourful carpets, and swarthy children play, sending up silver splashes of water.
But it is still some way to go to Rudňany. One enters a valley that gets darker and darker. Some ruined buildings stand on the right-hand side of the road, great concrete blocks with dozens of smashed windows. This has been dead and cold a long time now – or so it looks. Abandoned railway tracks run past this place and one can see the remains of rolling stock and the rusting structures of loading platforms and gantries. Just past this industrial wasteland, green mountains rise up and if one were determined, one could follow the forests, paths and tourist trails to arrive within two or three days at the Hungarian border in the south. But this time Rudňany must suffice as our destination and when the valley narrows even more, one can perceive that people actually live in this lunar landscape. Smoke rises from brick ruins that may have once been a railway station and blackens the temporary roofs thrown together from scraps of rusty sheet metal. Dark-skinned children frolic among smouldering heaps of rubbish. It is hard to judge whether they are simply playing or trying to scavenge something from the heaps of garbage. The ground here smokes, emits a stench and one gets the impression that these children's skin is blackened by the smoke. If it weren't for their gambolling and gaiety, one might think on entering Rudňany that one was arriving in hell.

But Rudňany is a mining settlement next to an inoperative mine. For seven hundred years silver, mercury, copper and iron were extracted here. Now it is all dying. There is nothing beautiful here. The town's brown-grey buildings remain, squeezed onto the right-hand slope of this narrow valley. The road winds up the mountain in a series of hairpin bends. And its plain to see that over the centuries someone hollowed out the inside of the mountain, removing the rock and ore and leaving an enormous hole in the ground. Gypsies live at the bottom of this pit. Their shanties, neither proper shelters nor mud huts, sit in this abyss as if dropped there at the whim of some malicious demiurge. The day here starts later and lasts more briefly. The rock walls rise vertically to a height of several dozen metres. There can be no doubt – this is what hell must look like. Hell that someone has populated and is trying to inhabit. These thousand-odd gypsies have built a settlement here reminiscent of some miracle of improvisation. Their sheds, mud huts and lean-tos look as if at any moment they could be blown away by the wind or washed away by the rain. People owning nothing but the clothes on their backs have taken up residence in a pit from which all wealth has long ago been carted away, leaving only barren ground. And so those who have nothing live where there is nothing to be found.

The misery of this sight has changed into some kind of metaphor. I have never seen a place so damned, in which at the same time a perfectly normal life is going on. Next to the road, a few dozen metres higher up, at normal ground level so to speak, there was a great concrete square and several rundown grey buildings looking like the remains of the mine's offices buildings. Hundreds of people were strolling around on this square, standing around and idly chatting. They had nothing else to occupy themselves with and so were simply spending time together. It reminded one of some allegory of Sunday or in any case an allegory of a holiday. The crowd was lively, dressed up, colourful and at the same time idle. Nobody needed them and so they were free to take things into their own hands. Together they killed time.
I looked at them and imagined the future of the world with this growing number of people, who will be told that they are simply superfluous. Because there is no work for them, no room, no opportunities and actually the plant is just closing down and will never be reactivated. And those who are not included will have to stop working, stroll around and chat for the rest of their time on earth, or maybe even eternity, on some concrete square.  

But their number will be so great that the world may be divided into two parts, one of which will have to be sealed tight against the other. Because when we think about it, is Africa for example really needed by anyone? Probably only by the dogs of war, the Foreign Legion and diamond traders. And maybe a few cranks who in childhood dreamt of distant expeditions. For the rest, Africa might as well not exist, just like the gypsies of Rudňany with their ahistoric existence, illiteracy and statelessness. With the latter issue however there is no foregone conclusion: demographers claim that if their population continues its present growth, in fifty years time these people will constitute the majority, not only in Rudňany but the whole of Slovakia. Thus Poland has a chance of having the first Gypsy state in history as its southern neighbour.

Translated by Richard Biały