Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. His journeys take him from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and the Ukraine. By car,
train, bus, ferry. To small towns and villages with unfamiliar-sounding yet strangely evocative names. "The heart of my Europe," he tells us, "beats in Sokolow, Podlaski and in Husi, not in
Vienna." Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin, he wonders, as he is being driven at break-neck speed in a hundred-year-old Audi—loose wires hanging from the dashboard—by a driver in
shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. In Comrat a funeral procession moves slowly down the main street, the open coffin on a pick-up truck, an old woman dressed in black
brushing away the flies above the face of the deceased. On to Soroca, a baroque-Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampment, to meet gypsies. And all the way to Babadag, between the Baltic Coast and
the Black Sea, where Stasiuk sees his first minaret, "simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky."
