Puturosu Cave

Entry I — Arrival

I came to Bálványos for what the doctors called recovery and what I called, without telling anyone, a postponement.

Illness had not made me dramatic. I did not feel that I was fighting anything. Rather, I woke each morning with the impression that someone had moved the furniture inside me during the night. Things were still there, but I could no longer find their place. I breathed, walked, answered messages, ate soup, took pills. And yet something in me had withdrawn into a room without light.

The woman at the guesthouse told me about Puturosu Cave while she cleared the table. Her hands were red from the cold water, and she held a towel between her fingers.

“The earth breathes there,” she said. “Not like here.”

I thought it was one of those stories people use to give weight to a local attraction.

“Some come and feel better,” she continued. “Others come and no longer know why they came.”

Then she looked at me carefully.

“If you go up, do not go too far in. Stay as long as you feel you can, but do not be stubborn.”

I smiled, perhaps too politely. We had each read the warning differently. She was talking about the place. I was thinking about my lungs.

Entry II — First entry

I set out alone the following morning. It was the end of October. Wet leaves clung to my boots, and the spruce trunks were swollen with water. I could hear drops falling from the branches and, now and then, my own breathing.

At first I walked quickly, with the stubbornness of a man who wants to prove something to himself. After a few hundred metres, my lungs asked me to slow down. I leant against a tree and waited. In the city, the sound of my breathing had seemed shameful. Here it was only one faint noise among others.

I smelt it before I saw the cave. It was not merely the smell of rotten eggs. It had layers: sulphur, dampness, warm stone, something metallic and old, like a cellar where rusty tools and rotting apples had been kept. The air thickened as I went on. I could feel it on my tongue.

The entrance was modest. A dark opening in the rock, without grandeur. The stone around it was wet, stained yellow and grey. Vapour rose almost imperceptibly from ground level. I placed my palm against the wall. It was warm in a way that did not belong to the cold morning.

I had reread the warnings before leaving: gases gather low down; do not sit; do not lower your head; do not remain if symptoms appear. I went in a few steps and held myself upright, my chin lifting without my meaning it to.

The air inside seemed to have weight. Water ran down the walls in thin threads, and the stone was marked here and there with yellow stains. There was nothing spectacular to see. A hollow, a few rocks, little light.

I stayed perhaps ten minutes. Perhaps less. At one point I heard a very low, regular sound that seemed to come from the stone. I knew it could be my own blood in my ears or gas escaping through cracks.

Even so, after several breaths, I noticed that I was trying to breathe in the same rhythm.

I was frightened not by the cave, but by my own listening.

When I came out, my knees were weak. I descended slowly, and that evening I slept for almost twelve hours.

Towards morning, I dreamt of my mother’s kitchen, before she became ill. Outside, it was snowing. She was peeling potatoes and speaking to me without looking at me. I do not remember what she said. In the dream, the words did not matter, only that her hands were whole, quick, alive.

When I woke, the room smelt faintly of sulphur, although the window had been closed.

I blamed my clothes. My hair. My skin.

Entry III — The returns

Over the following days, I went up again. At first I told myself I was exercising. Then that I wanted to understand why people spoke more softly near the cave.

Some stopped at the edge, breathed in once, and left. A young woman came with her father and held him by the elbow while he stood at the entrance with his eyes closed. When they left, the man was crying.

He did not seem healed. Nor ruined. He seemed only to have remembered something he had not asked to remember.

I did not cry. I repeated that to myself with ridiculous satisfaction. I was not that man. I was not the kind of person who looked for signs.

On the fourth day, I noticed that before going in, I took my phone from my pocket and switched it off. Not because of the signal. Out of respect, the thought crossed my mind. Then I became angry with myself.

I began to record small things. A drop always fell from the same place, but sometimes its sound seemed farther away. My shadow thinned when clouds covered the sun, but once I had the impression that it lagged behind by a fraction of a second.

Light. Fatigue. Lack of oxygen. Suggestion.

I could explain every observation.

It was harder to explain why, after every visit, I felt less enraged.

Not better. Not healthier. The tests had not changed. The dull pain in my chest came and went according to its own schedule. But despair, which before had taken the shape of a room without doors, had begun to resemble a valley. Still enclosed, perhaps, but with sky above it.

One afternoon, the woman at the guesthouse asked whether I was going again.

“It is only a cave with gases,” I told her.

She was setting plates on the table. She stopped for a moment.

“Yes. And a man is only water and flesh, if you cut him down far enough.”

Then she continued laying out the cutlery.

That night I dreamt of my flat in Bucharest. It was empty, but all the lights were on. In the rooms, I found objects I had thrown away years before: a chipped mug, a green jumper, a notebook from university.

My medicine bottle stood on the table in the sitting room. In the dream, its cap rose and fell slowly, pushed from within by a breath.

I woke calm. That was the most troubling part.

Entry IV — Departure

On the final morning, the woman at the guesthouse found me dressed to leave.

“You are leaving today?”

“After I go up once more.”

She folded the towel she was holding.

“Then do not ask for anything.”

“I have not asked for anything so far.”

She looked at me with the same attentive eyes as on the first evening.

“Exactly.”

I went up alone.

The air was heavier than on the other days. Or perhaps I was more tired. The smell of sulphur filled my mouth, my nostrils, and my throat. The warm stone seemed to pulse beneath my palm. It was not a real pulse. My hand was trembling.

From the narrow depth of the cave came the slow breath I had recorded each time. The earth breathed without caring that I was listening.

I thought of the doctor who had spoken to me with professional gentleness, of my mother in the kitchen, of the messages I had not answered, of the mornings when I had wanted the day to pass before it began.

I waited for relief, fear, or revelation.

Nothing happened.

Only that, for the first time in many months, I no longer felt obliged to defend myself from my own life.

I remained until my knees weakened and the air became too dense in my chest. Then I went out.

On the way back, I noticed unimportant things: a broken mushroom beside the root of a spruce, an animal’s track in the mud, a thread of water crossing the path with a yellow leaf. I stopped to watch it. The leaf caught on a stone, trembled, then came free on its own.

I was not healed at Bálványos. It would be a lie, and disrespectful to the place, to say that. Nor was I miraculously changed. When I reached home, the same envelopes waited on the table, the same appointments in the calendar, the same body and the same fear.

But sometimes, especially in the morning before the city fills with noise, I have the sense that beneath the floor there is a slow breath. I do not hear it. It is only the memory of warmth rising from stone and of heavy air that promised nothing.

Then, for a few moments, I understand that not all places are made to save you.

Some only hold you still long enough to see what you brought with you.