The Danube Read online

  Unlike in Mohács, where I ate fish soup waiting for the ferry, dunked with big chunks of crusty white bread, the tradition in Baja is to cook pasta in the soup. Éva explains why. By law, the millers were obliged to feed their employees. Fish were classified by the church as ‘fasting-food’, suitable to be eaten on Fridays and during Lent. As a result, the millers' boys complained that fish soup was not ‘real food’, and that the millers were not treating them properly. The millers' wives solved the problem by mixing home-made noodles, made from the plentiful flour and eggs, into the soup, to make it more substantial, and so satisfy both the hard-working lads' hunger and the stipulations of the law.

  According to a cookbook published in 1622 by István Galgóczi, there are nineteen ways to prepare sturgeon. According to another, published in Kolozsvár-Cluj in 1695, ‘Salt the fish and leave to stand for a little. Then cook it in wine with white bread. Add pepper, saffron, ginger, honey and vinegar and cook well. Serve hot.’9

  There is also a tall wooden statue of St John Nepomuk, the patron saint of millers and sailors. As confessor to the family of the King of Bohemia, friction arose between him and the monarch. When John maintained the secrecy of the confessional, and refused to disclose to the king what the queen had told him in confidence, the king had him tortured, his hands chopped off, and he was thrown from the Charles Bridge in Prague into the River Vltava. As he hit the water, the story goes, the surface rose, full of stars, and bore him to safety. Each year on 15 May the people of Baja carry his statue by boat down the Sugovica branch of the Danube and parade it through the town. A large barrel of wine is broached for the occasion, and the townspeople can drink their fill in honour of their saint's miraculous survival.

  The final exhibit in the museum is a closed wooden boat drilled with holes. This was for the fishermen to load their catch into and pull behind their boats like a submarine, all the way back to the town to sell the still fresh fish. The wealthier fishermen pinned a gold fish over their gates, while the poorer ones lived with their families in shacks on the shore from spring to autumn. Each poor family owned a single copper cauldron and ate their fish soup from spoons made from river shells. A seventeenth-century map on the wall, from Count Marsigli's famous guide to the Danube published in Amsterdam in 1726, shows the river as an unruly dragon, curling and curving across the landscape, before it was tamed and straightened into its present straitjacket in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.10

  Oh Fiery River

  Flow out over the land.

  Men have destroyed the roads of wonder,

  And their cities squat like black toads

  In the orchards of life.11

  Cycling upriver from Baja, I take a detour into the city river port. In Marsigli's day, even to reach the port I would have had to cross one or two meanders of the river, but now the path is smooth, out through the suburbs, past schools, houses and István Türr's tower in the unseasonal heat. The docks are a sparse clutter of tall cranes and railway tracks, grain silos with German-sounding names, and trucks turning.

  László Nagy is director of the port, which is still owned by the state. Nine barges can moor at one time here and pay for the privilege. It's one of the busiest ports in Hungary, he says, handling 600,000 to 900,000 tonnes of goods a year, about a tenth of all the freight that passes through Hungary on the river, and which actually touches the shore. Later, I check in my Statistical Handbook of Hungarian Shipping 1945–1968 for the corresponding figure from the communist era.12 Just a little lower for Baja – 500,000 tonnes that year. Stone and gravel were the single biggest items then, followed by mineral oil, iron and manganese ore, coal and coke, fertiliser, timber, and finally grain. ‘Soya comes upstream, mostly from Brazil. Boats load local wheat, barley, sunflower seed, maize and oilseed rape for the Austrian market. This year trade has been weak.’

  The blockage of the Danube from 1999 to 2003 still casts a strong shadow over business, which has never recovered, László says. Low levels of water are a constant problem, with ships forced to unload goods and send them on, more expensively, by train. The general state of Hungarian agriculture is another theme. ‘This used to be a country of ten million pigs – now there are less than three million!’ In the summer of 2012, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán promised to double that number to six million. There are also positive sides to László Nagy's tale – a new brand name has just been launched – Kincses Bácska – the Treasures of Bácska County – to advertise local produce. ‘Its success depends on three things: the persistence and willpower of the people, the good example of investors, and the good will of the state.’

  Before I get back on my bike and cycle past his giant cranes, the conversation strays inevitably to recipes for fish soup. ‘One kilo of fish, ideally carp,’ he suggests, ‘a litre of water, a head of onion, and a spoonful of paprika, and cook together for three to four hours.’ On the second weekend of July, at the annual Baja fish-soup festival, up to two thousand cauldrons of soup compete for the prize – ‘and no two soups are ever the same!’ Wine must be drunk with the soup, he insists, because according to a local saying, ‘fish must never swim three times in water – once in the river and once in the pot is enough – there shouldn't be water in the stomach as well!’

  Sustained by such advice and more, I wobble back up the dyke. Under the bridge over the Danube, a black plaque with gold lettering is mounted by a small road. ‘At this point on 1st November 1921, Charles IV the rightful King of Hungary boarded ship and left the country to escape his enemies. In remembrance of this, Hungarians, learn to love your country better than you hate one another.’13 It is a brusque but important message for a people always generous to strangers but rough on one another.

  In the shade of a forest to the right of the dyke, one of István Magony's five hundred sheep has just given birth. We approach very slowly and stop at a good distance so as not to disturb the ewe, who is peacefully nibbling at the green weeds among the dry, yellow grass, while her little black and white lamb, already standing unsteadily, tugs anxiously at her udders. István lives alone in a shack further up the dyke, ‘across the stream, between two sets of bee-hives’. His wife left him, unable to bear the loneliness of a shepherd's life. Another lamb was born last night. He needed to help with that one, but this ewe managed all on her own. His boss, the owner of the sheep, will drive out in his Mercedes to take the mother and lamb away from the flock for a while. István earns 30,000 forints a month in cash – about 150 dollars, with all his food and tobacco paid for. He knows other shepherds who earn 80,000 forints, but have to pay for their own keep, and he's happy with this arrangement as it is – he could easily spend a thousand forints a month on cigarettes, two packets a day. The sheep graze on the parlagfű, a weed with gentle green fronds that has spread widely across central Europe and is blamed for hay fever and all the school and workdays lost each September. The sheep love it, he says, and proves it by hunting for a stem of the weed to show me, where the sheep have been grazing since this morning. We have trouble finding a single leaf. He gets up at five-thirty each morning and sets out at six. He walks with his flock till ten, then rests with his sheep in the shade till three, then sets out back, about ten to twenty kilometres a day. He gets home at seven, and it is dark, at this time of year, by eight.

  I feel I'm just beginning to uncover the secrets of a countryside I have passed through for years. Just further on up the dyke, Tibor cares for forty-two cows and a bull – ‘Look at him, poor bloke, he can hardly walk, with so many women to please!’ He lives in a caravan further upriver, and, like everyone else, grumbles about the drought and the scarcity of grass for his animals. As the maize is cut and harvested, the farmers allow him to take the cows into the fields to taste the leftovers – ‘but not for long, too much is not good for them’.

  I stop for a fröccs, the Hungarian name for a drink of half wine and half carbonated water, then get chased by dogs as I come down to the ferry crossing to Gerjen. I pedal like the wind, thinking
of my fellow English folk already exposed to the horrors of the Romanian hounds I had dismissed so lightly. I attribute my own miraculous escape to the timely intercession of a painting of a blue-cloaked Madonna, baring her breast to reveal a heart struck through with a dagger. In her right hand she holds a white flower. ‘Roadside Mary, Pray for us we beg’ reads the inscription, and the date 1947, a year when Hungary, that lost so much in the war, was being twisted to fit the iron grip of the Communist Party and its Russian masters.

  Down by the water I watch a party of tourists coming ashore from one of the huge, gleaming Danube passenger ships, the River Adagio. They're all Americans, and as open and friendly to a stray English cyclist as if I had shown up on their own porch on the Mississippi. We sit drinking beer from plastic mugs in the shade of a little bar set up by some enterprising Hungarian who must have a copy of the ships' timetables. As my luck would have it, they're retired nuclear submariners who served for years under the polar icecaps, waiting to push the button to wipe out the Soviet Union and start the Third World War. The tattoo on the forearm of one man shows a wide expanse with a rocket soaring up through the ice, and the slogan – ‘North Pole, August 1960’. I was six months old then. If the war had broken out, I would not have had much of a life, irradiated in the cellar of the house I was born in by the River Medway, just south of the incinerated remains of London.

  My drinking partners and their wives are full of the joys of their cruise. They flew to Bucharest and took a bus to Ruse, where they boarded ship. They can't tell me which was the best place they visited, but the organisers have clearly gone to some lengths to give them a taste of local life. A Serbian man and his wife gave them an excellent dinner near Osijek – ‘very critical of the government,’ one man remembers. In Vukovar they praise the excellent meal cooked for them by a Croatian family. Wasn't it strange to be travelling above water after so many years? Far from it! they chortle in chorus. Some of them have known each other for fifty years. ‘The worse times under the ocean, in the nuclear submarines, were the first week, and the last,’ says one man, whose record was eighty-three days under water. ‘And what of the dangers of the job?’ I ask. They look at each other a little sheepishly, to check that none of their wives are listening. ‘The girls in the ports,’ one explains. ‘We were lucky that those were the years before AIDS. But there would be mornings …’ he pauses for effect, ‘when you woke to see whose head lay on your arm on the pillow, and you wanted to gnaw your arm off!’

  I've had a few drinks by this time and the sun is sinking fast above the far bank. I abandon my plan of sleeping in Kalocsa and start to enquire among the small cluster of houses if there's anywhere I can find a bed for the night. Tamás Klopcsek is caretaker for several buildings belonging to the local council and finds me a comfortable bed in one of them. He had a thriving car-repair garage in Kalocsa during the communist era, repairing Western makes of cars such as Rovers and Fords. He needed good contacts in western Europe to buy parts, which drew him to the attention of the authorities. As a suspected spy, the state took everything from him, though he was not sent to prison. Instead, he got a job as a long-distance truck driver, and did that for twenty-three years. As we talk, his large alsatian, Nero, takes a particular interest in the tyres of my bike, no doubt detecting traces of the mongrels who tried to bite through them. From the mobile home in which he sleeps, Tamás produces a certificate which shows his two million miles without an accident, printed in Geneva. Now he enjoys a semi-retirement, growing and bottling fruit. The council has plans to restart the ferry service, which will bring more visitors.

  I eat alone at sunset in the restaurant on the shore, and taste the white wine of Szekszárd – a region best known for its red wines, but which clearly has something more to offer. I wake soon after midnight, to hear the engines of the River Adagio churning the water – casting off to get my submariner friends to Budapest in time for breakfast. In the early morning, I swim upriver in the chilly green waters, barely making any progress against the flow. Somewhere upstream, not far away, is the nuclear power station at Paks, which cools its turbines with river water and pumps it back out much warmer, like the power station at Cernavodǎ. But I cannot travel the Danube without getting my chin wet. And I nearly survived the Third World War, after all.

  The Paprika Museum in Kalocsa is the only one of its kind in the world, and as I come through the door I understand why – the magnificent smell of the scarlet red powder hurts my eyes and burns my nostrils. The Turks brought paprika to Hungary after the battle of Mohács, and it has turned into the national spice, livening up dishes from goulash to paprika mushrooms, and the ubiquitous fish soup. I have seen Hungarians put paprika on scrambled eggs, and use it to control greenfly on roses. Known first as ‘Indian pepper’ or ‘Turkish pepper’ in the great medieval herbals, Kalocsa and Szeged emerged in the eighteenth century as the best paprika-growing districts. There are black-and-white pictures of paprika in great sacks in 1956, at the time of the great flood in Baja. Part of the museum is dedicated to the work of the Hungarian Nobel Prize winner for chemistry Albert Szent-Györgyi and his discovery of ascorbic acid, later known as Vitamin C. This he first extracted, not from citrus fruits, which have relatively small amounts, but from paprika. ‘For some unknown reason nature has made the Hungarian red paprika the most miraculous storage for ascorbic acid,’ he wrote in 1937, well on his way to his discovery.14

  For the first time since Mohács the day is overcast when I set out and the clouds make cycling easier. I cut inland from the dyke, and the road takes me through field after field of glorious red paprika, contrasting with the dark green of the stem and leaves. Keen to uncover some of the secrets of this miraculous plant, I hail a line of women harvesting it. The headgear of each is different – a straw hat, a headscarf, a baseball cap.

  I ask for just five minutes of their time, and they tease me that they can only spare three. ‘Nem győztem az angolokat várni, várni, bekellet a, bekellet a TSZCS-be állni …’ sings Eszter Boldizsár, when she finds out my nationality. ‘I couldn't wait any more for the English, so I had to join the Co-operative …’ – a song from the end of the Second World War, when the dreams that British and American troops would rescue Hungary from communism evaporated. I apologise for the delay, on behalf of the entire British people. The paprika look red and rude, erect on the plants or curled up in the white buckets. The sound of them landing in the buckets as the women throw them from nearby is like the patter of rain at the start of a summer shower. How can one tell if the paprika is ripe? ‘Just from the colour; those over there aren't ready yet. We call them smoky … They grow best here because there's more sunshine. That means the colour is better, and there's more vitamin C in them.’ Eszter has grown paprika and tended them all her life. The plants require a lot of input, ‘precise work – the hoeing, spraying, watering, picking, the tying into strings, the grinding into powder’. And what does she like most about the work? ‘The work itself! Whoever likes to work finds their pleasure in it. Those who don't like labour won't find pleasure in anything, anyway!’ Its seasonal labour, and the women pick through the year – poppy seed, maize, peas, beans, whatever they're paid for.

  ‘Paprika is a plant with a memory,’ says another woman, Irén. ‘If you start watering it at the beginning, when it's small, you have to water it all the way through. Its roots go downwards. If they find enough water, they feed from their smaller roots, near the surface, and never grow a strong, central root. Look at these ones here – they've never really been watered, and look how beautiful they are! It's going to be a good year.’ The previous year it rained all through August, and the paprika harvest was worthless. ‘The sun is the god of the paprika plant!’ And how do you tell which are sweet and which are spicy? ‘You must never plant the two kinds near one another, because then you get plants which are both at the same time. And you can't sell them,’ says Irén. She used to decorate plates by hand at the porcelain factory in Kalocsa, but the workforce has d
ropped from a hundred and twenty, to just four. ‘That's how I became a peasant!’

  My three minutes are up, though the women didn't stop working for a moment as we talked, and they each present me with a paprika, to dry at home and plant out for my own crop next spring.

  At Ordas I stop to read the plaque on the massive, pollarded trunk of an oak. ‘Here the bloody flag of freedom flew,’ reads the text. ‘Ferenc Rákóczi II camped under this tree from 30th April to 26th May 1704.’ Soon after the Austrian Habsburgs drove the Turks from Buda and the third of the country they had ruled for 160 years, a new conflict broke out between the Hungarian nobility, which had mostly converted to Protestantism during the Reformation, and the Austrians who were determined to reimpose Catholicism on their new dominions. Starvation and oppression in the countryside provoked the peasants to join the rebellion led by Rákóczi, in the hope of an end to serfdom. For once, noble and peasant marched under the same ‘bloody banner of freedom’. The armies of Charles VI defeated the Hungarians in the field, but the Austrian emperor thought it wise in the Treaty of Szatmár in 1711 to confirm the privileges of the nobles and grant them autonomy. The peasants got nothing.

  Near Dunapataj, another shepherd in this country of shepherds, János, walks two hundred sheep towards me along the dyke, a bleating wave, thickening and thinning at the edges, cream-grey on green. János has a flat hat and a curved staff and an equally curvy moustache. The profession of shepherding survives, he says, thanks to the hunger of Italians for lamb. Few are eaten in Hungary, but ‘if you have more than five hundred, its worth milking them for their cheese’.