O Twilit Town of a Sunken Coast

The Piatravan press writes about the town now and then: “Derelict Hopes, Forgotten Harbor,” “Twilit Town of a Sunken Coast.” A writerly Englishman journeyed through and described the people. He found them modern enough; they had lights and roads, like anyone in today’s Piatrava. But they didn’t have jobs; the place was and is bereft that way. So the people there look back almost a century, to when the commission presided, and for them those are the bright years.

Diryunou sits on the western coast of the Black Sea, placing it about as far east as the European Union goes. The commission made the town modern, the one corner of Piatrava back then that belonged to Europe—the real Europe, Europe full-fledged, western Europe. The town was also located farther from western Europe than any other spot in Piatrava, which is typical of that puzzled, distracted nation.

Being so far east, Diryunou is near Russia; and Russia, being so large, tends to have the West’s attention. Halfway through the 19th century, differences between Russia and the West came to a head. They involved the Black Sea, and by the time they’d been resolved the Western powers had a recognized outpost there. Piatrava received a subsidy and signed a paper, and the port town of Diryunou passed to the jurisdiction of the European Diryunou Commission for a contractual 100 years.

The Russians, when they’d been running the place, had ruts in the mud. Now there were docks, a school, roads; then a hospital, steam power, electricity. Under the commission, little Diryunou became a stranded, miniature piece of the West. Nothing seemed familiar to anyone there who wasn’t foreign. The locals appreciated dying in fewer numbers, they liked dry shoes and being able to read. But they wondered what had hit them.

A classic novel was written about life in the town—a modernist, riddling sort of novel, to go with the town’s status. I gather that it presents various inner lives, each of them a festival of sore points and frayed spots. The town’s inhabitants eat at themselves and we listen to them. They come out with monologues, and these monologues add up to the life of that wrong-footed little town. The book is a classic of Piatravan literature, by which I mean that it’s forgotten. It came out a bit after Ulysses and made educated Piatravans sit up. They could appreciate the glamour of their country’s European town, now adorned with the same sort of quizzical, complicated, unhappy text as the big novel that the Irishman had written in Paris. But at some point they sat down again.

There was the war, of course. The Reich. The European Diryunou Commission had no more Europe behind it. Piatrava took over the town and triumphantly joined it to the national government, which itself was handed to the Russians a few years later.

Four decades or so of communism. The whole country got ironed flat, Diryunou included. From here it was no longer the most anything in Piatrava.

A city down the coast, near the railway from the coal hills, won the Russians’ favor as base of naval operations. Then the Russians fell, the European Union arrived. All Piatrava became European, though a grizzled, chewed-over version of Europe. One without all that many jobs, as it turned out, and few of those in neglected towns on the upper Black Sea coast.

The novel was The Dunantiad—I found the page in my old textbook. Diryunou had one apartment building, and we listen to what the tenants of the building have to say. In the book, at least, the building’s called the Dunant. I don’t know if a novel would use the name of the real building; probably not. Google says Henry Dunant founded the Red Cross, and maybe some other international humanitarian provided the name for the original.

I’ve seen the author’s statue. Elinu Dreybu, a thin, long-nosed, nervous young man. He signed himself Elinu, just that, like a French cartoonist. The statue has him with one knee over the other, his legs wound tight, a floppy wing of hair on either side of his unhappy nose. Cast in bronze he looks over Diryunou harbor; nearby lies the section of track preserved from the tramway left by the commission and uprooted by the People’s work teams. The dying sun touches the two neglected tourist attractions, and I think about being special when no one else cares, and then I think about the thousand miles behind my back and how far I am from where things matter.