The Danube Read online

  ‘The “Nationale” were even worse!’ Mioara chimes in. ‘We made them with the leftover tobacco! That was when I started to smoke …’ she adds. In the book of photographs of Ada Kaleh, recently published in Bucharest, there are pictures of the tins in which the cigarettes were sold – proudly proclaiming where they were made. ‘The sweets, the Turkish delight, and the fig jam were the best,’ she remembers. She shuffles off and returns with a jar of her own fig jam from the fruit in her yard. It is sweet as treacle, and the seeds have a pleasant crunching sensation between the teeth. ‘You peel the figs, and stand them in limestone water for half a day. Then you add sugar and water, and boil them all together for two or three hours on a small flame. You should put them in jars while the mixture is still hot.’ There was also a refreshing, almost non-alcoholic drink, called bragă in Romanian, and made from hops. It is still sold in the marketplace in Turnu Severin.

  The destruction of the island was long in the planning and quick in the execution. Ahmed worked in the mid-1960s as a waiter in Turnu Severin. He remembers a meeting of top Romanian and Yugoslav communist officials, and how, just as he was bringing them their after-lunch coffee, one of the Yugoslav comrades asked what would happen if the people refused to move from the island. ‘Then we will just flood it anyway, and they will run like rats,’ said the Romanian minister, gleefully. He managed to go back to the island only once, on a military boat on which the soldiers travelled, to lay dynamite around the buildings. He was on the shore in Orşova drinking brandy when they lit the fuse. ‘It was as though they declared war on the island. On nature itself.’ The minaret fell only half way, and stayed at an angle of forty-five degrees. Two beautiful, tall thin cypresses from the graveyard were chopped down. One by one the old buildings were blown up or bulldozed. Local people were promised that once the dam was built they would enjoy free electricity. In fact, forty years after it was built, there are still frequent power shortages. On the street in front of Ahmed's house is a great pile of logs, waiting to be split – mostly beech from the mountains nearby. ‘We always heat with wood, its cheaper, and more reliable.’

  Mioara worked in a bank in Turnu Severin. The original plan was for the inhabitants to move to the island of Simian. When they refused they were given a choice – to leave for Turkey or to go somewhere else in Romania. ‘Many went to Turkey, but most soon came back … they didn't like the climate, or the conditions,’ she says. The Sultan's carpet, fifteen metres long and nine metres wide, which once covered the floor of the mosque, was split. Half is in the Iron Gates museum in Turnu Severin, the other half is on the floor of the main mosque in Constanța, on the Black Sea coast. In Babadag, the woman who showed me round the tomb of Sari Saltuq5 was born and raised on Ada Kaleh.

  Down by the harbour in Orşova, with Ahmed's help I track down Erwin Osman, his best friend's son and the grandson of the imam. Erwin is repainting the hull of his boat for the tourist season. He takes groups up and down the river all summer, but never across. Romania has been in the European Union since 2007; Serbia might join if lucky in 2020. Borders divide people, but in borderlands people can wander, and meet. Both have been present in the fate of the Danube – yesterday's barbarians are today's or tomorrow's allies.

  Every now and then, Erwin takes a visitor out who used to live on Ada Kaleh. They travel into midstream and cut the engines in the exact place where the island once stood. ‘Do they throw flowers?’ I ask.

  ‘I've never seen that …’ he admits. ‘Mostly they just lean quietly over the railings, gazing down into the water.’

  On the shore there's a statue of a woman throwing a wreath of flowers into the waters, in memory of the island.

  Erwin's grandfather was the imam of Ada Kaleh, and spent thirteen years in prison. He was convicted as a spy and enemy of the communist state on the sole evidence of possession of a Romanian-English dictionary. When he came back from prison, Ahmed remembers, ‘he was always the first to proclaim “Long Live the Socialist Republic of Romania” at public meetings. What they must have done to him in prison to make him do that!’ His wife shudders.

  The first Iron Gates dam, between Orşova and Turnu Severin, was completed in 1971. Éva Hajdú remembers passing the island in the early summer of that year, on a cruise to Ruse on a ship which belonged to the Hungarian Interior Ministry. ‘On the way back, the island had completely vanished beneath the waters. It was so sad,’ she told me, overlooking the shore of Lake Balaton, Hungary's inland sea.6 During those same weeks, there was an attempt at resistance by some of the older inhabitants of Orşova, who sat on their beds and refused to leave their homes. They were dragged out by police and soldiers.

  Erwin and I study my book about Ada Kaleh which includes many photographs from his own collection. One, from 1945, shows the imam and two priests, one Orthodox and one Catholic, blessing the Romanian troops in front of the main theatre in Turnu Severin as they set out to occupy Transylvania.7 There is no Jewish rabbi present, Erwin points out, for obvious reasons. His maternal grandfather, he tells me, was not a critic of the regime but a victim of it. He was made into a scapegoat at a time when the authorities needed scapegoats. After he was released from prison he was chosen as a representative of minorities in parliament in Bucharest, and took part in delegations to the Arab world when Ceauşescu was cultivating such friendships. His paternal grandfather was a sweet-seller on both the island and the mainland. ‘I am a Muslim but I don't go to the mosque, as the nearest one is 350 kilometres away in Bucharest. I have a copy of the Koran. A tiny one, in my wallet, and another one at home. I can't read it, though, as it's in Arabic. My sister has my grandfather's copy. My mother died five years ago. She's buried in Istanbul. These photographs were very important for her.’

  Professor Constantin Juan lives in a long housing estate down near the shore-line, in one of the blocks of flats built for those rehoused from old Orşova. Aged ninety-three he still lives alone, but is looked after by his children and grandchildren. He remembers Ada Kaleh well from his many visits, and from his later work as an ethnographer. ‘The first time – I must have only been four or five – I was struck by the fact that everyone still dressed in the oriental fashion.’ Bloomers for the women, fezes for the men. I move him gently on to some of the yawning gaps in my research on the island, especially the legendary figure of Miskin Baba, a Muslim saint whose house and tomb were on the island. ‘Miskin Baba was the king of Bukhara in central Asia. One night he dreamt of an island in the middle of a river where the people needed him. So he travelled and travelled, asking all the way where such an island might be found, until he reached Belgrade. There he found an island, but he knew that was not the place. So he asked a group of fishermen, “Where could you find a lot of fish – as many as Jesus Christ found?” because he knew the fishermen were Christians. And they told him the way to Ada Kaleh. He lived there for many years, and helped the people a lot, just as he had dreamt. And when he died he was buried there. Even after his death he continued to defend the island … Once a young man dreamt that he should tidy up his grave, because if he did so, another man would come and help the islanders. That was in 1931, and he obeyed the dream. A year later the King of Romania, Carol II, visited the island, and did much for the people.’ A society was established to help the poor, run by a local businessman called Ali Kadri who married a Jewish woman from Orşova. But in 1940 he left for Istanbul.’ Without his wife, the story goes. Professor Juan has other stories of the more eccentric inhabitants on the eve of the Second World War. A Hungarian called Bicsárdi, for example, a naturist who refused to wear clothes.8

  Local people did not believe that everything would be destroyed. It was very hard for them. He remembers in particular the two, massive cypress trees in the Turkish graveyard, cut down when the mosque was destroyed. Even Miskin Baba could not withstand the final attack by the combined comrades of Yugoslavia and Romania. His tomb was moved, like the others, to Simian Island. But no one knows where it is any more. ‘Many times I have dre
amt that the Danube went back, and I walked through the streets of Old Orşova, looking for the place where my house was, that I could go back inside and live there again. I dreamt that many times.’

  Târgu Jiu lies in the hills, an hour's drive north of Turnu Severin. It seems a long way from the Danube, but it is not hard to justify the detour. Ever since I came to live in eastern Europe, half a lifetime ago, I have wanted to see the birthplace of Constantin Brâncuşi.

  The Table of Silence stands in the town park, near the Jiu river. Twelve symmetrical stools, like half melons, surround a simple, round stone table. Like all of Brâncuşi's work, there is something both ancient and radically modern about it. The number twelve, the distance of the stools from the table, and the name of the work invite contemplation. It's already summer in the park: the buzz of the birds and the chatter of the townsfolk are loud. I photograph a young couple sitting on one of the stools, the girl in the boy's lap. He wears sunglasses and a green T-shirt; she has shoulder-length, dark-brown hair, turns her face away from the camera, and cups his chin in her hand. As I study the photograph later, I notice both have identical bracelets, giving the impression that they are actually one person with four hands. Brâncuşi would have liked this. A policeman stands guard in the background, in a light blue shirt in the summer heat, arms folded. Then an older woman arrives, on high-heeled shoes, from her body language the boy's mother, rather than the girl's. They sit on three stools, the mother in the middle. The table radiates silence. Beyond are a line of willows, and steps that lead up to the embankment of the River Jiu.

  Down an alleyway of trees stands the Gate of the Kiss. The kiss, highly stylised, represents that between a soldier and his sweetheart, and the soldier and his child as he sets out to war, and was intended as a war memorial to the Romanian defenders of the city in a battle with German troops in the First World War.

  ‘Here are my pictures of the Temple du Baiser,’ Brâncuşi wrote in a letter to Doina Tǎtǎrescu, the wife of the Romanian Prime Minister Gheorghe Tǎtǎrescu.9

  ‘Through this doorway one will enter a garden … Do you recognize the patterns on the stone? … these columns are the result of years of searching. First came this group of two, interlaced, seated figures in stone … then the symbol of the egg, then the thought grew into this gateway to a beyond …’ The patterns he refers to resemble the wooden tiles on the roofs of peasant houses. The ‘egg’ on each side of the top of the columns is split down the middle, in the centre of another ring of stone. There are no features on the two faces, but the intimacy lost by the absence of lips and eyes and chins is regained by the sheer proximity of the two halves of the stone. The whole face rubs against the other for the last time before they part forever. The circle of stone around them is the cocoon of their love. And the world beyond the gate, as Brâncuşi writes, is the other world where they will be reunited. ‘Don't you see these eyes? The outlines of the two eyes? These hemispheres represent love. What is left in memory after one's death? The remembrance of the eyes, of the gaze which voiced one's love for people, for mankind.’10

  Hobița, the village where Brâncuşi was born and grew up, tending his father's sheep, is half an hour's drive from Târgu Jiu. His own birth-house burned down, but another wooden house built by his father, a carpenter, was put in its place, and is said to closely resemble the original. The wooden tiles on the steeply sloping roof are individually carved – just like the vertical shapes on the Gate of the Kiss. The house is made of big, solid beams, and has just three rooms and a long front porch. The whole structure is raised from the ground, with geraniums in a tray along the terrace. The room on the right has a dirt floor, a hearth with earthenware and iron pots and pans and cooking implements arranged around it, and a small spinning wheel. In the far room on the left is a writing desk, with flowers on the table and black-and-white pictures of Brâncuşi at work in his atelier in Paris. The picture from 1935 – when Brâncuşi was forty-eight – shows a vigorous, bearded, determined-looking man, his hair still dark but his beard already grey, with a cigarette between his fingers and his arms resting on his knees. In the picture from 1938 he looks awkward in a suit and tie, presumably at the opening of an exhibition, but his big hands rest on top of each other, as though impatient to get back to work. In the picture from 1946 he has aged a lot, seems exhausted with the world, leans back with his eyes shut, a peculiar domed hat on his head, though there is still a sculptor's mallet in his hand. There are simple, painted icons on the white-washed walls, and a story printed out above his desk.

  ‘Long, long ago there lived a master carver, whose skill was beyond anything known in the world …’ the story begins. Commissioned by the gods to build a stairway to heaven, the master obliges, and the stairway becomes the wonder of the world. ‘When his last hour arrived, the master mounted the stairway and climbed to heaven, where he has been watching over his heritage on the earth ever since.’

  The years passed and evil people came, and began demolishing his stairway, and locked it away in a place where no light could penetrate, and set about building a different one of their own.

  ‘The anger of the gods was so great, they wept tears of fire, and set fire to the whole earth. Heaven and Earth mourned for a long time, until the gods granted grace to new masters.

  ‘Early one fine autumn morning, the masters broke the locks on the old stairway, and set it in its old place, now covered with golden tears. When the sun rose, the gods and the people saw the staircase, and marvelled at its beauty.

  ‘Nobody knows the masters’ names or saw their faces; they disappeared as mysteriously as they appeared. They silently returned to the work from which they were interrupted by the gods.

  ‘According to the legend, fire will burn any evil man who tries to lay hands on the staircase, and will light the way of the good man.’

  ‘I was told this story by an old man, seated on a bench, close to the staircase of the gods, on a moonlit night. People who go to see the staircase meet the man and listen to his story. Could it be that the man is the Master himself?’

  Brâncuşi's garden is as tranquil as one of his sculptures, but wild and abundant in a different way. The small red and yellow plums are just ripe, overhanging a wooden outhouse lined with farming tools. The wooden columns are carved in upward spirals. Brâncuşi learnt to carve wood with a sharp knife as he tended the sheep. The stone walls are overgrown with lichen, the well is deep and cool, and I haul up a wooden bucketful of water to parch my thirst and wash my face.

  In the graveyard up the road, resting peacefully in the summer shade, his parents' graves are marked by a simple wooden cross: Nicolae Radu Brâncuşi, 1831–1884, and Maria Brâncuşi 1851–1919. The cross has a little roof, and the graves have a small fence around them, each fence post topped by a carved wooden star. The whole graveyard is deep in purple clover. In the last years of Constantin's life in his Parisian exile, he immersed himself once again in his own language and culture, and made several efforts to come home to Romania, or at least to bequeath his work to his home country. But the communist authorities perceived him to be a decadent artist, and wanted nothing to do with him, so he became a French citizen, and instead gave his work to France. His workshop is still preserved in the Pompidou centre in Paris, and he is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery where a version of his monumental sculpture ‘the Kiss’ stands on the grave of his friend Tania Rachevskaia.11 This kiss is undoubtedly one exchanged between lovers. The lips, arms and feet meet and merge hungrily with one another.

  Brâncuşi never married.

  On the road back from his village to Târgu Jiu, I stop to drink home-made lemonade with Ovidiu Popescu, the man in charge of Brâncuşi's work in the county. He remembers the change in the attitude of the communist authorities. ‘It all began when they rebuilt the memorial house to him in Hobița … in 1967.’ Ironically, the same regime that carried out the death sentence on Ada Kaleh, Old Orşova and other settlements along the river, began at the same time to rehabilit
ate one of Romania's greatest sons. But the story is not so strange – communism survived so long through its flexibility, the cruelty but also the generosity of its protagonists; by giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Only when it became brittle, and incapable of subtlety, did it collapse. ‘Should Brâncuşi's remains be exhumed from Montparnasse and brought home to be buried beside his family in Hobița, as some Romanians would like?’ I ask Ovidiu. ‘I think he was deeply sad in his heart, as he lay dying in France. But I don't think he would like to be buried in Romania. He accepted that fact, he bought his grave there …’ In a park on the northern edge of Târgu Jiu, the third and most remarkable of Brâncuşi's works in his hometown points to the sky. The Endless Column ends rather abruptly – sixteen and a half hollow rhomboid shapes, made of laminated steel, painted with ship's varnish, like the hulls of the barges on the Danube, to protect them from the wind and water, the sun and ice. Inspired by the carved pillars which held up the porches of his childhood village, and the tree at the centre of the world of dreams and fairy-tales, it was also inspired by the turning of a simple screw. It contains ‘little material and much thought’, as a Croatian architect once said to me about the fifteenth-century bridge in Mostar.12

  Brâncuşi grappled all his life with the problem of how to approach and express the infinite. The column, to be endless, cannot be too tall. ‘If it was too big, it would resemble the Tower of Babel.’ It has no base or capital, so it has no beginning, and no end.13 ‘Nature creates plants that grow up straight and strong from the ground,’ Brâncuşi wrote, on the eve of the inauguration of the column in the park in Târgu Jiu. ‘Here is my column. It is in the garden of a friend in Romania. Its forms are the same from the ground to the top. It has no need of pedestal or base to support it, the wind will not destroy it, it stands by its own strength … It is thirty metres high, and you know that my friend there once told me that he had never been aware of the great beauty of his garden until he had placed my column there. It had opened his eyes.’14