Entering the Upper Iza Valley by Peter Riley

 

Out of Sighet on the main road east, past the only new building, a hotel, clean concrete standing in weeds, full of water closets and entirely suitable for the new business and the new tourism and the new antique-dealers which are eventually going to erase these places.

The road runs up the valley of the river Viseu close to the edge of vast mountain forests which are the basis of the local economy. Somewhere along here there is still a steam rail-way which takes forest workers up into the mountains at seven o'clock every morning. Past, I'm told, sometimes, bears drinking in the streams, and the rare sighting of lynxes.

You've hardly left the town when the next "village" starts, a mass of one-storey houses, some in the old wooden construction, more of them breeze-block and tin roof, all of them poor. It's called Tisa, becoming Bocicoiu Mare, then Rona de Jos (lower) then Rona de Sus (upper) but for the most part you'd hardly notice, the houses rarely stop, the road gradually climbs, the great valley full of poor housing heads slowly for the Maramuresului Mountains.

The idea is to turn off onto a track through the village of Ruscova which leads to a remote mountain village, Poienile de Sub Munte, inhabited by Ukrainians and described as very beautiful. We do this: the track is a road, not an easy one but a road, full of holes, the village is endless. Kilometres pass and we are still among houses on a road, and it's past three in the afternoon. There's nothing "rural" in sight, neither is there any industrial concentration, any obvious factory or centre. There are big stacks of trunks and logs in spaces between the houses, many of which have transportable sawing frames parked outside them – people make a living by taking them to where they're needed, a house being built or repaired. And people walking, as always, men women and children everywhere, not in that concerted "going home from work / school" way I remember in the streets of northern England in the 1940s – the only thing around here to remind me of that is the daily return of the beasts from the pastures – but an unregimented movement in all directions, in no hurry, stopping and talking, sitting outside the bar... Not then industrial in the western hierarchic mode, but still industrial, still thronging, urban, hanging on money. Waiting, perhaps, for the new multinational presence which is going to rationalise this throng into unidirectional observance. Perhaps ready for that, in a form of poverty, a hanging-around with-out direction kind of poverty, which only that can offer to relieve. All the houses look in bad repair, the people's clothes look worn, the very air feels dusty and used.

After 10 km we have had enough of this. Progress is slow, the mountain village still far away, it's getting late. We abandon the idea and turn round, and go back slowly through the whole scene again for another hour – unchanged, everyone still on the move — back to the main road and on up the valley. We go on through similar places to Moisei, where we turn onto a minor road to the right curving up the valley side, which is not high, and over into the top of the Valley of the Iza, which runs parallel to the Viseu, to follow it back down towards Bîrsana and Ocna, and something happens.

Most of the terms for which seem wrong. Like saying we moved back in time, because quite possibly we moved forwards. Like saying we moved into a pastoral, because quite possibly we moved into a reality.

No more than glimpsed. The rich greens and whites of the vegetable garden, where the small river flows past the smallholding. The undertree light of the small orchards. The valley slopes covered in cultivation strips with tall lumpy haystacks standing all over them. Everywhere, clarity. People bending over the work of tending, women in wide black skirts and head scarves, men in white shirts. Wooden farms with decorated entrances to their yards, wooden churches on knolls. The very possibility of remaining self-sufficient, of just about managing, with very little help from the town, and that at a high rate, but in circles of light.

And on down the Iza Valley, which is, almost, a linear city of wooden houses 20 kilometres long. A linear city with the fields on either side reaching to its heart.

Poverty is a complicated thing. There are havens and chapels in it, as well as doors. There are rooms with pictorial walls, and yards where people sing and dance. There are pits of despair but also ceremonies of thanksgiving. And there is the working percept which is in tune with the human condition at its clearest, where the everyday habitation shows exactly what we are, wholesale and outright. And shows, in its physical motions its artefacts its trappings its earth-stained toil, what the business worker knows as an inward, concealed and incomprehensible melancholy, a despair for which there is no reason. Here the reason is carved on the door of the stockyard, and hung on the beams of the family space. And shines from the small river onto the vegetable patch, under the orchard trees, up to the mortal watershed.

Copyright © Peter Riley, 2003.

Taken from the book The Dance at Mociu by Peter Riley,
published by Shearsman Books in August 2003.