The Danube Read online

  We thank her and stand up to go, turning down a chance to buy some holy water. Milenko walks me through Lom and points out shops which are owned by the better-off Roma families. One selling fancy clothes for special occasions, another selling children's toys and bicycles – one family alone owns six or seven shops in the centre, and employs twenty people. We're on our way to a café with a Roma waitress, to meet Mladenka, a twenty-three-year-old Roma girl who is studying at medical university in Sofia. She's sitting there already when we arrive, a mass of lush, dark hair framing a pretty face, with black earrings, and deep brown eyes. She's wearing a Snob Cat T-shirt, and is a little bleary from the previous evening's revelry – a night dancing with her friends and relatives, celebrating her younger sister Pavlinka's graduation. She only finished school herself aged twenty, because the whole family went to the Czech Republic for several years to work in an air-conditioning factory. There she saved enough money to pay for her first year at university in Sofia. For the second year, she won a scholarship for students of Roma origin, from the Roma Education Fund in Budapest. She wants to come back to Lom when she finishes her course, to work in the hospital – to help her people, she says. Most of all, she would love to become a doctor, but does not know if she will be good enough, or will be able to find the money and time to study. Her words suggest that it is high time she started contributing to the family coffers. Her parents were aghast when she first mentioned she had won a place at university, but have slowly come round to the idea. She has never had a problem at school or university because of her ethnicity and is proud of her Roma identity. She does not hide it as many do when they start to make progress away from the ghetto. All her classmates from high school are already married with children, but her younger sister is following in her footsteps – sort of. She wants to study bakery and cake-making at the University of Plovdiv. Her older sister is in Lom, aged twenty-seven and married with two children. As for Mladenka, she will have her hands full with local health problems. There is something known as ‘Lom disease’, a kind of muscular dystrophy of the arms and legs, caused by a missing chromosome that affects the Roma in particular.23 ‘And the Danube?’ I ask. ‘I can't swim!’ she confesses, though she likes to walk beside it with her friends when she comes home from her long sojourns in the capital.

  On Saturday afternoon I sit with Milenko to watch the famous Karbovski show. It's one of the most popular on Bulgarian television, almost a national institution, and an example of the mockery, according to Roma leaders, of the everyday racism which they feel the Roma are exposed to. ‘Karbovski carefully chooses the most ridiculous, the most awful cases, and thus reinforces this stereotype of the Roma as weird, lazy, parasites.’ Martin Karbovski looks the ideal TV chat show host: neatly ironed blue shirt, braces, short-cropped hair, intellectual-looking glasses and a little neat, carefully cultivated beard on his chin. His show is so popular, Milenko explains, because he asks direct questions – unlike most Bulgarian journalists. This week's Roma theme is a Romeo and Juliet story, a love affair between a Roma boy and a non-Roma girl – Danielle. The non-Roma family reacts violently to their daughter going out with a Roma. ‘Why did you hit your own daughter?’ Martin Karbovski asks her father. ‘I don't have a daughter,’ he replies, pointedly – in other words, no girl of mine would ever go out with one of ‘them’. ‘We're honest, working people,’ the father concludes – making clear that no Roma, in his estimation, could be like that.

  Milenko puts on a recorded copy of an earlier show, about Roma transvestites working as prostitutes. The triple strangeness – of Roma, transgender, and paid sex – are the perfect ingredients for a Karbovski interview. ‘We don't need millions, we just need a normal life,’ says a man dressed as a woman, his dark face fragile and hurt above his large breasts. ‘I just want to be a healthy person … and help other people.’

  ‘Oh come off it!’ says the host. ‘You – help other people?’

  ‘I cannot eat if someone else is hungry and looks me in the eyes,’ says Tonsu the Roma.

  ‘Do you know that we live in the European Union?’ asks Karbovski.

  ‘Yes. That's why every Bulgarian goes abroad to work.’

  ‘Would you leave?’ asks the host – in a way that suggests he would like him to.

  ‘Yes. If I find a way.’

  ‘And would you work abroad as a prostitute?’

  ‘Maybe. But I can do other things …’

  ‘What is the Roma word for prostitute?’

  ‘Hangeli.’

  ‘Do you feel ashamed of what you do?’

  ‘I can't be ashamed of myself. We are how God creates us. If God had given me horns on my head, then I would have to live with them too, wouldn't I?’

  ‘Do you vote in elections?’ Karbovski asks – this is his style, to ask totally unrelated, provocative questions, to keep his viewers glued to the screen.

  ‘I vote for the party I'm paid to vote for. They give us twenty, thirty leva …’

  ‘What's the matter with your mouth?’ Tonsu is grimacing, painfully.

  ‘My tooth hurts.’

  ‘Why don't you go to the dentist?’

  ‘Because the dentist would charge me twenty-five leva, and then I wouldn't have any money left to feed my children. It's cheaper to take a painkiller. That only costs two leva.’

  ‘Do you feel happy?’ Karbovski asks, finally.

  ‘Just look at me. Do you think I look like a happy person?’

  The gravel beach at Lom is the scene of a short story by the contemporary Bulgarian author Emil Andreev. In ‘The Return of Teddy Braun’24 a small boy listens entranced to the drunkard Teddy Braun, whose real name is possibly Todor, but might even be Mladen, as he spins a yarn about his origins. He's the son of a Red Indian father and an Irish mother, born on the shore of the Mississippi, he says – a river that makes the wide Danube at Lom look more like a stream. The child drinks up every word, and drinks down each lemonade Teddy buys him, while the man's drinking partners mock and insult him at every turn. Eventually Teddy sets out to fulfil his boast to swim the Danube, right across to the Romanian shore. The reader is left with the impression that he probably drowns. Many years later the boy, now grown up, finds himself in Lom again and wanders down to the shore. The Seagull restaurant they sat in together has been burgled and smashed up, the sandstone wall is broken and the beach a wasteland. Suddenly he hears a voice in English behind him. ‘Come on, Ted, we'll miss the ferry. Granny Ramona is too old to wait …’

  The drunkard, it seems, was telling the truth, or a part of the truth, after all.

  Half an hour's drive from Lom, a steep road leads down into the city of Vidin, the regional capital. For only the second time on my journey, on this Saturday afternoon there are prostitutes lining the main road. The big, empty office blocks beside the road have signs in the windows – ‘Office space to rent, 23 Euros a cubic metre.’ This is the town where Momi does not like to bring his travelling circus. Poised on the south-westward shore of a great zig-zag in the river, Vidin is like a guard post, a citadel at the top of the Danubian plain.

  I check into the Hotel Bononia, against the better advice of my guidebook, and wander down on to the promenade along the Danube shore. A park of shady trees, playgrounds and ice-cream stalls stretches all the way to the Baba Vidin fortress. A young woman in a long, flamingo pink dress has just got married and stands beside her elegant bridegroom for a photograph before rejoining the guests at the restaurant behind her. Each large Bulgarian city seems blessed with one particular kind of tree. In Silistra and in Ruse it was the horse chestnut; in Vidin it is the sweet-scented acacia. There is also a constant drift of white cotton on the breeze from the hybrid poplar, Stalin's favourite tree. In addition there are Islamic tombstones, laid out in the grass with beautifully carved grapes and pomegranates. And a black-rimmed poster mourning the death of an angler. ‘To mark the passing of forty days without our beloved Tsvetan Iliev Tsokov – Fisherman’, reads the text, and there is a b
lack-and-white photograph of the man himself, sat quietly beside his rods in a little harbour. The poster has already been fixed here for three months, and Tsvetan himself has almost faded from the picture, while the black outline of the boats is as strong as ever. The magic figure of forty has lingered on in the popular culture of south-eastern Europe longer than elsewhere on the continent. ‘In the religious lore of both Christian and Mohammedan the same number constantly recurs,’ wrote R. W. Hasluck.25 ‘The great fasts of the Christians are of forty days, dervishes of the Khalveti order likewise practise fasting and mortification for periods of forty days … there are forty traditions of Mohammed … forty ogres, forty jinns and numerous groups of forty saints.’

  That evening I eat fish on the deck of a restaurant moored to the shore and watch the river traffic as darkness falls. The Mercur 307, of the TTS line, its decks painted red, white and yellow, pushes a long barge of black coal upriver from Galați. There are two Romanian tricolours and a blue European Union flag, and the mounds of coal piled high on its decks look like a model of the peaks of the distant Carpathians. Along the railings of my restaurant, bulbous yellow lamps shine against the darkening sky like blobs of caviar. In the far distance, the half-completed Vidin to Calafat bridge is lit up across the river. Closer to hand, a fisherman struggles to start his outboard motor as his small blue boat, the Gloria, floats gloriously downstream. Then a huge Ukrainian ship, the Ruse, its name written in both Latin and Cyrillic script, roars downstream pushing no less than three barges, each the length of a football pitch – the biggest single craft I have seen on the river. The ship is black, with a square bow, and sailors in blue overalls walk along a dark-green deck. In the pitch darkness of the May night, as I pick over the bones of my supper, a Bulgarian ship registered in Lom, the Phoenix, pulls slowly upriver, looking for a berth for the night.

  I get up early the next morning to watch the sunrise, and make a small driftwood fire on the shore. I have watched the sun sink into the Danube many times on this journey, but this is the first time I watch it emerge out of waters upriver, a scarlet ball leaking red paint into the whole landscape. After breakfast that morning, in the village of Pokraina near Vidin I track down a family of Calderash Gypsies I met in the marketplace in Lom who make copper stills in which to distill rakia, plum brandy. Tseko Natovi is the grandfather. He sits and rests on a bench with cushions in the corner of the yard, and oversees the work with a critical eye. His sons Sasho and Eulogi do most of the work, while his third son, Mitko, translates for me. He is the only one of the family to try his hand at something different – he's studying to be an accountant in Bucharest. There is also a smaller boy, also called Tseko, aged about ten. The women flit through the yard like swallows – mothers, daughters and grandmothers – cleaning fish, hanging out washing, and smiling shyly while their men do the talking. One is Mitko's wife. They are only just married. Most of the work with the copper takes place under an old walnut tree in the yard. Sasho sits cross-legged on a piece of cardboard in the dust and takes a ring of copper, while his brother Eulogi prepares another circle of copper for the base, swiftly going round the edge with a pair of pliers, cutting and bending up little tabs in the soft metal. The base is then attached to the body of the vessel with the help of a strip of copper wire which goes between them as the tabs are each hammered down one by one. This is one of their smaller stills, designed for 150 litres of rakia. The largest they do is for five hundred litres. Despite the beauty of the piece, I cannot convince myself that it would get much use in my Budapest flat, so I opt instead for two copper bowls with big looped handles, like Gypsy earrings.

  Mitko's mother sets to work immediately, to melt a metal bar to coat the inside. There is a hearth built into the soil beneath the walnut tree. Mitko makes a fire in it with wood, then brings pieces of coal, while one of his brothers brings a vacuum cleaner, in which the flow of air has been reversed to turn it into an electric bellows. The fire blazes, and my copper pots, one at a time, are heated over the furnace by Mitko's mother, holding them in a pair of tongs as she squats in the dust. Apart from the hoover, it might be a scene of copper-smelting from any time in the past seven thousand years. The bar of zinc and lead – a modern luxury – is melted in the pot until molten silver drops fall from it, first green then bright translucent silver. When the whole inside of the pot has been coated, it is left to cool. Then the copper is re-polished.

  The men have finished the still and rakia is brought. Only the men drink, while the women clean the fish. Mitko's wife shyly puts on the gold, Austro-Hungarian sovereign, which she wears on a chain round her neck. On one side of the coin is the emperor Franz Josef, who sports a Bohemian beard and pony tail, though it may just be a head band, tied in a ribbon at the back, and the words FRANC IOS IDG AUSTRIAE IMPERATOR. On the front is the imperial double-headed eagle, with the Habsburg crest, and the words HUNGAR. BOHEM. GAL – for Hungary, Bohemia and Galicia, three of the Austrian realms, and the date 1915.26 She wears it outside an equally astonishing shirt depicting a long-haired, long-legged girl sitting back in a rather sultry style in a red chair. Her own single ponytail hangs dark over her shoulder. Standing next to Mitko, framed by the dense green foliage of the trees, the couple might have been married that morning.

  CHAPTER 7

  River of Dreams

  It is not birds I sculpt, it is flight

  CONSTANTIN BRĂNCUŞI1

  ‘Did you ever see the fairies yourself?’

  ‘Just once,’ he affirms, ‘in a dream. They were dancing round and round in an opening in the forest. And do you know what?’

  He pauses for effect.

  ‘They were all wearing beautiful blue dresses – like Gypsy girls!’

  MOMIR PLAVI, MIROČ2

  AHMED ENGUR was born on the island of Ada Kaleh, in the middle of the snakelike zig-zag the river performs after breaking through the confines of the Iron Gates. He fell in love and was married there in 1967 to an island girl, the year before the island was destroyed. His father came from Bosnia.

  ‘Ada Kaleh was a beautiful place. I remember the fruits best of all … and the floods; the streets were often under water in spring … Even now I dream I go to the island by boat, set foot on it, and walk there. The memories come back, walking up and down the island, just as it was, in my mind.’

  We talk in the yard of his house, while his wife Mioara makes Turkish coffee. The family are Turks, like almost all the former inhabitants of the island. Only the baker was Romanian. Ada Kaleh was a time bubble, with its mosque and minaret, its old fortress – the name means ‘the island of the fortress’ – and its protected status between the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian empires. Less than two kilometres long, and three to four hundred metres wide, it was in Turkish hands from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries for all but the twenty years from 1718 to 1739. That was long enough for the Austrians to rebuild and reinforce the handsome brick fortress, probably on the foundations of a Roman one, which allowed the Turkish garrison to control the river traffic in both directions. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, when Serbia won her independence, Bulgaria was prevented from emerging as a major Balkan state, Romania received northern Dobrogea, and the island was so tiny it was completely forgotten.3 It remained under Turkish rule even when the left bank returned to Romanian control. Eventually Romania took it over, but the island remained always special, with its own micro-climate, its figs and pomegranates. Trips there were especially popular with children for the pistachio-flavoured ice cream. Action films were made – Ahmed remembers having a brandy with one of the famous actors. ‘I drank one to his three.’ His task was to stand guard over the camera equipment while they were filming. ‘I was even paid!’4

  Ahmed attended primary school on the island till he was aged eleven, then went to boarding school in Orşova, just across the straits. When his father died, the family could no longer afford the cost of boarding; he tried another school, then left. ‘If you can't study, you'd better learn to row, bec
ause there will always be work on an island for those who can row,’ they told him. So that was his first job, rowing the children to the school he no longer attended in the mornings, and back home in the afternoons. ‘It took about ten minutes – more when the water was high. The key was to stay as close as possible to the bank, then cross at the shortest point.’ With his friend the son of the imam, he converted a rowing boat into the island's first sailing boat – just for fun. ‘We travelled between the island and the shore, or just up and down the Romanian side, because of the border guards.’ Yugoslavia was on uneasy terms with the rest of the socialist bloc, and freedom to move was severely restricted. ‘We were guarded like in a camp, so that we wouldn't try to leave Romania,’ Mioara remembers. They had to be back on the island by eight o'clock in the evening. She remembers barbed wire along the shore and soldiers with guns. Each time they crossed to the island, they had to write down their names in the register of the border -police.

  When Ahmed finished his schooling in Turnu Severin, his first serious job was in the cigarette factory on Ada Kaleh. ‘My job was to take the tobacco from one part of the factory to the other. The tobacco came from the mainland. There was no space on the island to grow tobacco!’ ‘We used to roll them by hand at first. Then we got a machine. “Musilmane” they were called – terrible cigarettes – with no filter!’