We started from the railway station with its six trains a day to Mezöhegyes. Past the two largest old houses in the village, one built for railway officials, past the little round shut-up kiosk, past The Joker, its door open, two men and a girl in white jeans and t-shirt playing pool and turned towards the dirt track at the edge of the village, on one side some of the poorest homes in the place, crooked gates, barking dogs, bare earth yards, pecking hens, no verandas, on the other side maize fields already harvested. We come to the fork, an asphalted road back to the centre and a track leading from the village, a green frontier police car parked there, border guards sitting and squatting beside it, they ignore us and we take the right fork away from them. A dog emerges from a sunflower field, we pick up stones, but the dog, thrown out or runaway, is warier than we are and plunges back into the field. We hear it as we continue along the track, staying level with us for a while, making more noise between the dry, crackling stalks and leaves than the birds fluttering up out of the vegetation by the ditch. At the wayside a stork’s wing, spread, splayed out as if waiting to be painted by a Dutch or German old master. We pass the abandoned house with the yellow-painted socialist-era iron gate, the overpowering smell of the unharvested, rotting, fermenting plums lying in the garden. Ahead of us the metal sign on a pole, a disk in the national colours, two words and a number, Hatar/Frontiera 100 meters, the border line otherwise unmarked. Another field of blackened sunflowers, heads hanging, all facing the same way, marching soldiers, stopped dead in their tracks by some sunflower catastrophe; a rusting, wheel less van.
On the way back, in the clear sunset light, all of Battonya’s towers are spread out above the trees from shadowy right to pale left, as if in a line, as in an 18th century town view, a vedute. The twin towers of the Catholic church, the baroque spires of the Serbian Orthodox and Romanian Orthodox churches, the small pointed Protestant church, the rounded shiny-topped tower of the art nouveau town hall and, as in every village in the Banat, the water tower. To our left the fierce red orb of the sun subsides in shades of grey and rose.
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