The Danube Read online

  I cross the green iron bridge to Dunaföldvár at four thirty in the afternoon, my first visit to the right bank of the river since Mohács. The town's name means ‘Danube hill fort’, and after booking into a room overlooking the shore I climb the hill to explore the castle. The museum is shut, but in a shop nearby a woman called Eszter sells her pottery. We chat until her partner arrives. Imre hitchhiked to England for the legendary Isle of Wight rock festival in August 1970. It took him a whole week to get there, and a week to get back, but he said it was all worthwhile. It was the last time Jimi Hendrix played – he died two weeks after the festival. Imre and I walk down to the lower town to eat a fish soup together in a restaurant. Eszter meets us there, and they walk me back to my room. She talks about the birth of her child, how she nearly died in childbirth, and how scary it was ‘on the other side’. A full moon hangs over the sandy cliffs above my temporary home. I sometimes find myself invited deeper into people's lives than either I or they expect.

  I get up very early and cycle up the hill to see the cliff-top that gave this town its name – earth fort – and to listen to the seven o'clock bells. Inside a wine cellar at the end of a cobbled street an elderly man turns the big metal wheel on a green-painted wine press. He offers me a glass of fresh must, which I am glad to accept for my breakfast. Then I help him crush his grapes, while he drops armfuls of them into the centre from a loaded wheelbarrow. Uncle Feri has two kinds of grapes – ezerjó and another one I can't quite understand. But it doesn't matter. The grape -juice is pinky-orange in the early September morning light, and sweeter than wine.

  On a rock in the castle grounds is a bronze statue of László Magyar, one of Hungary's greatest explorers, emerging through the shape of Africa, his hat tied on his back, a parchment map unrolled in his hands.15 The illegitimate son of a big landowner, he went to elementary school in Dunaföldvár, enrolled as a cadet in the Austrian merchant navy, and served on the slave boats between Madagascar and the Caribbean. He stayed in touch with his homeland and applied for a research grant from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to explore South America. When this was turned down he tried his luck in Africa instead. In May 1848, as his fellow countrymen embarked on their war of liberation from Habsburg Austria, he discovered the source of the Congo river, sailing the last stretch upriver with six Cabindan sailors from Angola. In his diaries, he describes the arrival of the river in the Atlantic: ‘This huge river, six nautical miles wide at the mouth, flows with great force from east to west, pouring its yellow, troubled waters into the ocean with such awesome power, that the yellow colour of its waters, and their sweet taste, can still be experienced, three nautical miles out to sea.’ He took the name Enganna Komo and settled down in the coastal town of Benguela with his many wives, including the fourteen-year-old Ina-Kullu-Ozoro, the daughter of a local chieftain. When he closed his eyes at night, with the sound of the Atlantic Ocean resounding along the shore, did he ever dream of the Danube at Dunaföldvár?

  In the grounds of the castle there is a massive millstone, worn down not by the wheat but by the golden grains of the sun and the silver rain. I bought an old iron wood-burning stove in this town once, made in the town of Nadrág, meaning ‘trousers’, in Transylvania.

  I cycle back across the bridge and take a detour down to the gravel works, in search of recent treasures dredged up from the river. But the men are busy and none too helpful. The roar of the machinery drowns out my attempts at conversation, so I turn my bicycle and wobble away northwards. Some lads stay at home, watching the gravel of the Danube flow through their fingers. Other strike out for foreign parts.

  Dunaegyháza, Apostag, Dunavecse, Szalkszentmárton … I cycle like the wind upriver, like a hound now with the smell of home, Budapest, in my nostrils. I make sandwiches near the dyke at Tass, then miss the left turn across the dam on to Csepel Island. So I keep up along the Soroksári branch of the Danube, the junior branch of the river. The main shipping lane continues further west, on the far side of Csepel Island. This is an angler's world. The weekend cottages are crowded with fishermen perched, big-bellied on little pontoons, or dozing in rowing boats awash with empty beer bottles. The mottled afternoon light sharpens the edges, the fronds of the water, half reed, half willow, a mosaic of deep shade and blinding sunlight. There are bars with a few chairs outside and a jug of wine on the table, replenished from a barrel in the cellar.

  In Ráckeve I cross a small bridge over the Soroksári Danube branch to climb the fireman's tower with the librarian from the children's library, whose other job is to take strangers out onto her perch, overlooking the river. The view is magnificent in all directions. I can see the hills of Buda, still forty kilometres away, in the far distance. Down on the Danube shore at Ráckeve I see my first Danubian water mill, lovingly restored. Before 1950, there were six of them on the main river here. Each spring they were pulled by hand by the men along the towpath, on 15 March, the national holiday, all the way down the Soroksári branch to the main river, then up the other side of Csepel Island. Then back again each autumn, on 30 November, unless the ice and cold on the main river forced them back beforehand. The mill can grind more than a hundred kilos of flour an hour. There's a label on each bag declaring it to be ‘unfit for human consumption’, which is not true, I'm told, but the mill cannot get official approval according to European Union requirements. I would buy a bag and taste it myself, but there's enough ballast in my saddlebags already. The men running the museum ply me with apples, and recommend ‘the last miller’, eighty-two-year-old Márton Reimer, who lives just along the towpath.

  ‘I was nine when I started work on my father's mill,’ says Márton. He's pleased to have a visitor, even though he's told his story a thousand times. His wife slips away discreetly to make fresh lemonade. We sit in the garden. He wears no shirt, and his hairy chest is white in the sun. ‘My job was to carry sacks of flour, forty to fifty kilos, on to the boats, then row them across to the mill, with my father's apprentice. Sometimes I rowed, sometimes I steered.’ He worked all through the summer holidays, till ten in the evening, while his father was away at the front, and then when he came back as well. By the end of the war, Márton had grown into a tall, muscular lad, he tells me proudly, and weighed seventy-two kilos. But the communists didn't like men such as his father, who owned two water mills. ‘Kulaks’ they were called, and their property was confiscated by the state. At first the young Márton got work at a nationalised mill at Adony, close to where his father used to moor the family mill, just offshore where the Danube current is strongest. Then in 1950 the authorities decided to smash up the last four remaining water mills that had survived the war and the fighting on the Danube between the Red Army and the Germans. Why did they destroy the mills? ‘That was the point of communism – to take away everything from everybody, and destroy it,’ the man on the restored mill told me at Ráckeve. Through the creaking of the planks on the water, I heard Karl Marx turn in his watery grave.

  Márton Reimer is surprisingly unnostalgic about those days. ‘The life we had then will never come back. It was very hard work. By the end I was carrying sacks of grain and flour weighing up to a hundred kilos. Then I got a job in the car factory in Csepel. Working in a factory with a screwdriver, a hammer and a spanner in my hand was child's play after that!’ His other great passion is angling. ‘Turn that thing off,’ he gesticulates at my tape recorder, and leads me by the elbow inside his house to see his trophy case. It looks like the collection of an old soldier – a forest of medals. Large silver coins with images of lone fishermen or lone fish, and ribbons in the national colours. What does it take to be a good angler? ‘Good hands, good eyes, and a bit of biology, to know the temperament of the fish.’ But there are fewer fish in the river than there were. In the individual championships, he used to catch ten to fourteen kilos in the competition time of three hours. Now people are happy if they catch five to six kilos.

  His first memory of the Danube is of being out with his uncle. ‘I must have
been five or six. “Look, Uncle, look!” I shouted. There was an empty canoe, floating down on the current. We caught it. There was no one in it, just a bamboo rod, a real beauty. Well, we took it to the shore, looked after it, and told the gendarmerie, of course. It was several weeks before anyone came to claim it. Unfortunately, they took away that bamboo rod as well. I was catching so many fish with it!’ Before and after the rod he used to make his own from sticks and fishing line, buy hooks for two fillers (the smallest unit of the forint currency), catch crickets, strip their wings off, and pierce the hook through their bodies. ‘That was our youth – now life is different. They spend millions on equipment for a competition. Angling is becoming a sport for the rich.’ He remembers two big spills of phenol from the Csepel paper factory: in 1954 and 1964. Almost all the fish in the Soroksári Danube were wiped out, and not a few in the main river. ‘One of the accidents happened in winter. The phenol got under the ice and killed all the best fish. The corpses they collected filled eighteen wagons – pikeperch, carp, catfish.’ Even the cyanide spill in the Tisza in January 2000, which wiped out most fish life for several hundred kilometres, was not as bad as these, he says.

  We drink homemade lemonade. He puts his shirt on for a photograph, and the waves of a passing ship laps peacefully against the towpath, all overgrown.

  Coming out of Ráckeve, there's a poem by János Arany, the nineteenth-century Hungarian poet and translator of Shakespeare, engraved on the wall of a building.16

  Duna vizén lefele viszik a ladik, a ladik …

  The Danube carries a young woman downstream in a rowing boat from Szentendre with a load of red apples to sell in the market in Kevi. How many lovers that red face deserves, beneath that tight headscarf! The poet ponders. Then the plot thickens. Jovan (John) is waiting in the market in Kevi with a bloodied knife. And there are worms in the red apples the young woman carries.

  From Ráckeve, it is just eleven kilometres to Tököl, on a fast, straight road, past a young offenders' prison. Csepel Island is flat, rural at the southern end, heavily industrialised in the north, with communist-era housing estates, factories and docks. An Irish friend, Donal, cycles out to meet me with his daughters, a welcoming committee.

  The next morning I leave at six thirty, pass the old military airport which the British bombed in the Second World War, and am in the suburbs of Csepel by eight.17 Only five kilometres till home. My bicycle map offers few clues as to how to navigate the busy, rush hour traffic, so I stop to ask a man for the least congested street. He suggests one, and I set out slowly down it, hemmed in by the first heavy traffic since I left Mohács.

  Suddenly a car swings round from my left, to enter the side street I am just passing in front of. I start to shout but there's no time to get out of his way. He sees me at the last moment, just as his bonnet smashes into my side, and brakes hard. I go flying through the air and, as I fly, I instinctively curl up in a ball, landing on my lower back in the road. He jumps out to apologise. ‘… No harm done? I'm so sorry … where do you live? I'll drive you home …’ The traffic stops. Everyone stares. I half stand up, but there's a dull pain in my back, getting worse all the time. Two passers-by help me into the recovery position on the dry grass on the kerb. I hear sirens. The police arrive and breathalyse first me, then the driver. The most important question seems to be if either of us has been drinking, rather than my physical condition. Then the ambulance pulls up. I'm put into a vacuum mattress and gently placed in the back. I'm thinking all the time: just a bruise, can't be anything worse. Then I overhear the medics talking. ‘Where shall we take him?’ ‘Spine injury, looks bad. Lets take him to the Merényi.’ I have never heard of it, and mistake the word ‘merényi’ for ‘merénylet’ – assassination attempt. In the midst of the pain I almost laugh. Surely they don't think the driver was trying to kill me?

  I'm wheeled into casualty, overtaking all the hopeless cases who have to queue. The X-ray machine breaks down while I'm lying on it. The driver of the car, Károly, a professor of Homeland Security, has followed me in his car, with my twisted bike in the back, and all my possessions. He comes in to check on me so often the nurses assume that he is my relative. Eventually the X-ray machine is fixed. I'm curled up in the waiting area on a trolley. A young doctor comes over, waving the X-ray and some papers. ‘Bad news I'm afraid. You've got a broken vertebra.’ Visions of a life in a wheelchair swim before me. I want to ring my wife, want to see my children, want them to know, want them not to know, want to have taken another road, want to have got up earlier, want to have left the house in Tököl later, anything, anything but this.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Wind in the Willows

  Contrary to our expectations, the wind did not go down with the sun. It seemed to increase with the darkness, howling overhead and shaking the willows round us like straws. Curious sounds accompanied it sometimes, like the explosion of heavy guns, and it fell upon the water and the island in great flat blows of immense power. It made me think of the sounds a planet must make, could we only hear it, driving along through space.

  ALGERNON BLACKWOOD, ‘The Willows’1

  MY BACK takes a long time to heal. My daydream of finishing the journey by bicycle all the way to Donaueschingen has to be abandoned. All the men in my hospital ward have back injuries, and are in a much worse condition than I am. Three were in bike accidents, one fell off a ladder. Each day we hear the helicopter, bringing spinal injury cases from all over the country. Every evening the nurses bring our painkillers. It's a Darwinist democracy – the most able man in each ward gets to hobble out, and plead with the nurses on behalf of a fellow-victim. The best and worst moment each day is the ‘big visit’, when the top doctors and their acolytes tour the wards. They alone have the information which we, the patients, need: the latest analysis of our condition, the experts' opinion on our future lives.

  On the third day ‘the white-haired one’ as the nurses have dubbed him, as his name is unpronounceable, appears beaming at my bedside. ‘Where's the American?’ I hear him say – and hope he is better at biology than geography. ‘Good news!’ he booms. The crack in my vertebra could be better described as a fracture. It will probably heal completely in three months. I can go home that evening! I feel hot tears of gratitude, of laughter, rolling down my cheeks.

  The winter is a long one. Three months turn into six months. I can walk, stand, even sit a little, but not very much. I cannot run, or cycle, or play football with my youngest sons. Early each morning I travel one stop on the tram with the boys, to set them on their way to school. Other men wave at trains. I alone wave at trams, until the number 41 or number 19 to Batthyány Square turns the bend, out of sight.

  Count Lajos Batthyány was Hungary's first prime minister, in office for less than two hundred days, and was executed by the Austrians for his part in the failed revolution of 1848.2 He was born by the Danube, in Bratislava or, as the Hungarians have always known it, Pozsony, in 1807. One of his less well-known achievements was to plant fifty thousand mulberry trees on the estate of his manor house in Ikervár by the Rába river, a tributary of the Danube in western Hungary.3 The plan, hatched with fellow reformers such as István Széchenyi and Lajos Kossuth, was to build up a Hungarian silk industry. The trees still flourish in the grounds. For much of the twentieth century the house functioned as a children's home and the fruit was a consolation for orphans.

  Once my children are safely on their way to school, I walk along the Danube shore. Freedom Bridge crosses to Pest at this point. I walk down one stairway, cross a busy road, then climb another set of steep steps down to the water. In late January, as temperatures brush minus 20 Celsius, a procession of ice-floes appears in the waters, messengers from upriver. The level of the water is low, so I can walk along the narrow shore in the early morning gloom. I am rarely completely alone. A man called László in his early seventies discharged himself from hospital with a life-threatening condition. He comes and sits by the river to fish. Either the river will
heal him or the cold will finish him off, but he's not going back to that hospital, he says. Another man, Imre, in a rather expensive overcoat and good shoes, who carries his possessions in two large plastic bags, has been homeless for ten years since he returned from teaching in Cairo. He has a long-running court case against the person who occupied his flat while he was away, and although he could rent another place, this would lessen the pressure on the court to rule in his favour. I don't know how much of his story is true. I see him for several days in a row, eating his breakfast in a little park opposite the Gellért Hotel. His mind wanders as we speak, between the articles he reads voraciously in discarded newspapers, his memories of Egypt and Greece, his sense of injustice, and knowledge culled from a lifetime of reading and thinking. Our last conversation is about British princesses. Then he disappears.

  There is a place where waste water from the thermal springs beneath the Gellért Hotel flows out into the Danube. In the snow and ice, this becomes a favourite haunt of ducks, coots and seagulls. The seagulls fly to and fro through the rising steam, relishing the damp heat on their wings, then settle on the rocks close by. The ducks bathe and flutter importantly in the warm waters, like pashas in a Turkish bath. The colder the morning, the bigger the crowd of birds. They are nervous of my presence, but grow used to it after a while, the stranger with the walking stick, and a black box which clicks but does not flash. When the river is high, the steam outflow disappears beneath the swollen waters. Unable to go far, I get to know the river in one place, day after day. I notice how swiftly the level changes, in a matter of days or even in hours. I witness the constant changing of its colour, of its surface, and the skyline along the Pest bank, the churches and water towers, the strange whale-like structure over the old warehouses and marketplace, and I explore the half kilometre between the Danube and my home off Béla Bartok Street, and the people who frequent it. There is the young street-sweeper with a pony-tail, pushing a giant pram loaded with leaves, beer cans and old newspapers. After Christmas he plants a sprig of evergreen in the front left corner of his cart, his very own Christmas tree, bristling like his moustache. There are the women in the bakery that sells four different kinds of rye bread, and buttery French croissants if I am not there too early. Hungary is a nation of the kifli, a crescent-shaped white bread roll presumably inspired by the crescent moon on the mosques during the Turkish occupation. This particular bakery also boasts a long, straight salty ‘beer’ kifli – presumably to prove a Hungarian genius for taking the best from Ottoman times and bending it to their will. Just outside the bakery there is always a big man in a suit that fits awkwardly beneath his big anorak, with a small moustache perched like a cockroach on his upper lip, of which he seems inordinately proud. His black shoes are polished to a high gloss, and, like the street sweeper, there is always a cigarette in his left hand. While more fortunate peoples turn their backs on this ugly habit, the Hungarians still love their cigarettes. They wear them on their hands like medals from lost wars.