The Danube Read online

  The fall in the ground water-level, on both sides of the river, but especially the Slovak side, is much more alarming. Hungarian engineers and policy-makers faced up to the fait accompli of the Slovak diversion of the river early on, he said. The only agreement ever reached between Hungary and Slovakia about the Danube was the construction of an underwater weir in the old bed of the Danube near Dunakiliti. This allows a small lake to build up from the remaining waters in the river, which is then carefully redistributed through the region via a system of natural and man-made streams and canals. This helps to keep the water level up, and prevents the complete drying out of the area which the diversion would otherwise have caused. On the Slovak side the situation is much worse, according to Jaromír, because the Slovak authorities refuse to do anything at all about the problem. ‘The official policy of Slovakia is that the 1977 treaty is still valid, and we should behave accordingly. This means that we should use whatever means we have to force the Hungarians to complete not only this part of the original project, but also to complete Nagymaros. So if we take any steps that were not envisaged in the original project, we would be implicitly agreeing that the Hungarians were right when they stepped out of the treaty. And this would weaken our position in an eventual future legal dispute. This is the main political problem which we have not overcome for the past twenty years.’

  In 1997, the Court of Justice in Luxembourg found both countries guilty of breaking the 1977 treaty, Hungary for stepping out of it unilaterally and Slovakia for pressing ahead with the C-variant.28 It ordered both to reach agreement over the division of the Danube waters, of which Slovakia now takes 80 per cent. No agreement has been reached and none seems likely.

  In Bratislava, the level of the Danube has risen half a metre as a result of the storage lake, adding to the flood threat during periods of high water. No studies have ever been published comparing the cost of construction and maintenance of the dams and managing the vast sediments in the storage lake with the value of electricity gained. Broz focuses its efforts on smaller projects, to improve or restore the natural balance of the river and the lands beside it: on Petržalka, the part of the city on the right bank of the river, dominated by vast housing estates, and on restoring traditional animal grazing on the banks near Bratislava and downstream at Komárno. Before the communists took over, the willow forests along the shore of the Slovak Danube were pruned by local people for firewood and grazed by their animals. After fifty years of neglect the Broz project enabled people to gather firewood again, and their animals drove back the many invasive species that had harmed the willows.

  Before leaving Slovakia, I drive northwards to visit the castle and cliffs at Devin, overlooking the Danube. This is where the Carpathian Mountains start, and where the Old Europe of Marija Gimbutas ends – the westernmost point that the Copper Age civilisations reached. The castle stands on a steep cliff, overlooking the point where the Morava river flows into the Danube. The Romans dislodged the Celts from here, as from castle hill overlooking Bratislava. Devin is named after deva, the Slavic word for maiden. It was an important fortress on the corner of the Greater Moravian empire, as well as for the Hungarians. Following their defeat at the battle of Mohács in 1526, Hungarian kings were crowned in St Stephen's Church in Bratislava from 1536 onwards. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Slovak poet Lud'ovit Stur, after whom the town of Štúrovo, opposite Esztergom, is named, gathered his friends together to plot the birth of the Slovak nation, attracted by the rugged beauty and historic importance of the place. That was only forty years after Napoleon's retreating forces blew large parts of it up – the ruins made it even more attractive to the Romantic imagination.

  At the foot of the cliffs beside the river, a concrete arch stands riddled with bullet holes, a memorial to all those who died trying to swim the Morava river to the Austrian side to escape Czechoslovakia. On the back are the names of more than a hundred people who met that fate on this heavily guarded section of the border.

  Georg Frank comes out of his castle to welcome me. He's younger than I expect, too young to have taken part in the 1984 protest movement against the Hainburg dam, which made this park and his job possible. As manager of the Donauauen national park, he oversees the water levels, the trees and beavers, the fish and owls and frogs and little creeks of this stretch of woodland.29 He drives me down half overgrown tracks in a red park-authority jeep into the restricted area of the woodlands. Then we walk for a while together, two grown men in a sea of snowdrops. I pick a handful to sniff. They do have a faint scent, but nothing like the full-blooded linen of Babadag. These ones are made to delight the eyes, not the nose. Next time we stop the car we hear the woodpeckers straightaway. Each plays a different, rattling note on the tree, depending on the hollowness of the wood, the hardness of the trunk, and the power of its beak. Georg lists all the woodpeckers of this wood. The Balkan, black, white and red, the greater-spotted, green and, more elegant, the lesser-spotted, the rarer of the three, and several others; closer, or further away – turning the wood into an echo chamber, a carpenter's workshop.

  He takes me to see one tree in particular, with all the reverence of a visit to the queen of the forest. The black poplar only grows on land that is regularly flooded. It gets its name from the darkness of its trunk, which it keeps even in the brightest sunlight. The trunk of this one is surrounded by fallen wood, and there is a lighter brown wound in the back – the work of beavers. The beavers diligently make a ring around the trunk, then saw deeper and deeper with their teeth until the tree falls. There's no danger of that happening with this one, Georg says, though he is impressed by their boldness – attacking one of the oldest trees of this forest. ‘It's too far from the water – they have easier prey along the banks.’ We wander down to the shore of a wide creek and scare two young boar, who crash away through the undergrowth. Since this became a national park, there has been no forestry here – but there are signs of the old forestry in every hybrid poplar, growing tall and thin and disappointing in their uniformity, compared to all the other kinds of poplars. The park authority has decided not to chop down the planted poplars in this section, but to allow the beavers to do the job themselves. And on the far shore, it's clear they are fulfilling their ecological duty with a passion – five or six tall poplars, their bark all gone, on the brink of falling.

  Then we go down to the Uferhaus, the River Bank-house, an old restaurant on the shore. The Danube seems male again here, manly, a weight-lifter. The flow is swift – swift enough to attract the dam-builders thirty years ago – and the barges labour upstream, groaning and whispering and grumbling against the current. We choose a table outside and order pikeperch fillets with a pat of garlic butter on each. Not from the Danube, Georg sighs. From ponds in Hungary or Slovakia. There's not enough fish in the main river.

  Georg calls Josef, the chief forester. He turns down all offers of food and drink to tell his story. ‘I was born in December 1944. My father was a Sudeten German, my mother a local girl. When the Russians came, he was expelled. My mother and I stayed here. We were very poor. My mother got work looking after the cows for a local landowner, on the far shore, at Haslau. We had a couple of goats of our own, so we could always drink goat's milk. I remember as a child, how much I longed for cow's milk. Now I find out that goat's milk is better for you anyway! … The Russian soldiers used to come down to the shore to catch fish. They were always very kind to us, even shared their bread with us. I remember it was black, very different to ours, and had a funny taste. They had a very crude way of catching fish. They would throw a couple of hand-grenades into the water, and the explosions killed lots of fish and brought them floating to the surface. Then they would gather them in big boxes, load them into the back of their trucks, and drive away again. What the Russians didn't realise was that the bigger fish, that were just stunned by the explosions, only floated to the surface an hour or so later. So we children would take those home. Or take them to the restaurants to sell!’

 
; His first income, at seven years old, was from selling fish to the restaurant outside which we now sat. Then he got a job in forestry, on the same estate as before, which in the meantime had been nationalised. ‘As a forester?’ I ask. ‘A wood-hacker, rather!’ he grins – the lowest of the low. He learnt to plant fast-growing trees in straight lines, and was even sent to Novi Sad and the forestry school in Osijek, to learn how to grow trees even faster, even straighter. ‘The speed was all that mattered. Plant them, watch them grow, bulldoze them all down, plant new ones.’

  When the protests against the planned Hainburg dam broke out in the early 1980s, and the Austrian prime minister granted a ten years' pause for reflection, Josef was suddenly out of work. He and his colleagues would have had the job of clearing all the forests on both sides of the river, to make way for construction – the same trees which the young Austrian environmentalists were climbing and chaining themselves to, to stop the bulldozers. So Josef started commuting to Vienna, where he got a job in a bread factory. In the meantime at Orth, 110,000 people pooled their savings to buy the forest to create the national park. One day Josef got a phone call from the director. Would he meet him for a drink? Over a cup of coffee, in middle age he was offered the task of undoing his life's work, of helping the forest return to something like its natural state, of overseeing the removal of artificial barriers, the natural reflooding of the forest and the destruction of the straight lines of his youth. The one thing he, as forestry manager, was no longer allowed to do, was to plant or cut down trees. ‘It was strange at first, very strange. You have to look at trees in a very different way … letting them grow by themselves, fall by themselves, slowly rot into the forest floor. And the most amazing thing was, as we let this happen, how all the wildlife re-appeared in the forest.’

  Another man cycles by and Georg calls him over. Martin has long hair, partly hidden in a woolly hat. He's on his way home after a hard day's work, but spares us some minutes. Martin and his wife have just finished restoring a water mill, now moored on a creek a few kilometres upstream. How had they done it? With passion, he says. And madness!

  While we talk, Georg is feverishly tapping the keyboard of his mobile phone. ‘She says yes!’ he suddenly announces, excitedly. He has just arranged for me to go owl-spotting with the girls tonight. So as darkness falls I find myself in the pleasant but rather unexpected company of Christina, who is writing her PhD on owl behaviour, and a Latvian student on work experience, bouncing down a dark track, ever deeper into the forest. At one point a whole herd of deer – I count at least eight – is scattered by our approach, leaping lightly away down the sides of the grassy dyke, some to the left, some the right. We stop, watch them regroup cautiously, then walk peacefully away into the forest. A little while later we take a right turn, down into the forest again, until we reach a clearing which Christina reconnoitred earlier. There she sets up her own recording and broadcasting equipment. The plan is to play the calls of different kinds of owl, so that real owls living in the wood will assume their territory has been infringed upon and will come to examine the intruders. It's a starry night, but only a small pool of stars is visible above the ring of trees. First Christina plays the sound of a male tawny owl. The cry is long and mournful, the recording one of her own. It echoes through the forest, like ripples in water. I imagine the ears of the entire forest twitching in response, including fellow owls and their prey. But there is no reply. Next she tries the call of an eagle owl, a bigger, fiercer bird. Almost immediately, a long, low hoot comes in response – but of a different note. ‘It's a tawny!’ she whispers. Now she turns on the recording equipment, which looks like a small, curving satellite dish. Soon it is calling, closer and closer to us, though its wing beats are completely silent. As it approaches, we hear the higher pitch of a female tawny, following the male through the forest. Then the two of them settle, effortlessly, in the tree next to us. We can see them clearly outlined against the starry sky. A few nights earlier, on a similar expedition, an eagle owl flew so close over her head she had to duck down, she says.

  Every owl, not just every kind of owl, has its own voice, and she has trained her ear to recognise individual birds, Christina explains. She makes careful notes in a log book, complete with GPS coordinates, and the sounds which attracted each owl in turn, with the light of a spotlight attached to her forehead. A thin, pretty girl, humorous … birdlike. We make some more owl sounds, record some more. While waiting for the owls, our eyes peeled on the heavens, we identify the constellations. The tawnies we saw were just under Gemini, twin stars blinking in the darkness. The girls will stay out all night in the forest, going from place to place, but I should press on, to Vienna. They drive me back to my car in the village of Stopfenreuth. ‘How did you get interested in owls?’ I ask. ‘I am an owl,’ Christina says simply, with only a trace of a smile around her mouth. ‘I don't need to sleep at all at night; I like to sleep till midday …

  We bid one another birdlike farewells; the girls go back to their dark wood and their birds of prey, and I plunge across the Danube bridge towards the highway and the bright lights of the Austrian capital.

  4. The Upper Danube from the castle at Devin to the source of the river in the Black Forest.

  CHAPTER 12

  Danube Fairytales

  ‘Man, a god when he dreams, barely more than a beggar when he thinks.’

  FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN1

  THE NASCH market in Vienna is a double line of stalls, like the floats of a fisherman's net, but the net itself is lost in the depths of the River Wien which gave the city its name, then disappeared beneath its streets. There's the Theater an der Wien on the corner, to remind market-goers that they are walking on water. The market, like most of Vienna, is far from the Danube, which bypasses the city like a cruise ship in the night. It was named after the ash wood containers in which the milk once sold here was stored. It boasts an elegant fish market, though none of the fish here actually come from the river. The Wien river survives, just about, in its concrete tunnel, and funnels out into the Danube canal.

  Each fish on display carries a neat tag with its country or region of origin, like a Miss World contest. There are Saibling – char – from Mariazell, carp bits for fish soup from the Gut Dornau in Lower Austria, Hecht – pike – from the Neusiedler lake on the border with Hungary and trout from Salzburg. Everything else is imported from other seas: salted cod and Coquilles St Jaques and Venus mussels from the north-east Atlantic, eight different kinds of caviar, including sturgeon eggs from the Caspian, and even deep-frozen pikeperch – an authentic Danube fish – from Kazakhstan. At the downmarket end of the fish-stalls, a young man from Negotin in eastern Serbia stands over a green tub in which six muddy and rather lost-looking carp swim to and fro – from the Czech Republic, he says, as though that explains their demeanour. Negotin is a town not far from Miroč, to which Marko Kraljević pursued the fairy who killed his friend Miloš. The man has been in Vienna for twenty-three years, which must mean he was almost born here – his parents wisely got out of Serbia soon after Slobodan Milošević came to power. A pointy-faced man with blue eyes and an unshaven chin sells Wanderbrot – Dick Whittington food – delicious, compacted dried fruit, ideal for long journeys. I buy a big chunk for the road. ‘I'm from the Soviet Union,’ the man announces, a country which, according to my calculations, has not existed for more than twenty years. When I gently point this out, he confesses that his homeland is actually Uzbekistan – ‘but no one here has ever heard of it.’ If I came from the legendary city of Samarkand, I tease him, I would proudly tell the whole world about it at every opportunity, and thereby win extra custom for my stall.

  An elderly Austrian man sells red wine from Montenegro and white wine from Mostar, where the River Neretva flows deep and turquoise beneath the single arch of the repaired bridge, even when the sky is the dullest shade of grey. The stall has been in the family since his father bought it in 1965. And how's business? He frowns. ‘Euro-teuro …’ – a mocki
ng reference to the European currency which has made everything more teurig (expensive). He grumbles about the gentrification of the market, the little cafés springing up everywhere. Just above his head I spot chai tou vounou – Greek mountain tea, in its traditional plastic bag – and snap up a couple of packets. I used to buy it by the armful in the marketplace in Istiea in northern Euboea, but apart from rare finds like this, it remains one of Greece's best kept secrets, or worst-marketed treasures.

  Then along the Franz Lehár alleyway to the Café Sperl.2 The ghost of Franz Lehár sits at a table near the entrance, putting the final touches to the score for the ‘Merry Widow’, fated to become one of Hitler's favourite light operas, to its composer's misfortune. What did the German dictator think as he sat listening in the dark of the concert hall; what passed behind his closed eyes? Lehár was born on the north bank of the Danube in what is now Komárno in Slovakia. In 1902 he became conductor at the Theater an der Wien, and the Sperl was the nearest place to retire for a quiet drink to compose his next work. His wife Sophie was of Jewish origin; she converted to Catholicism but nonetheless drew the hostility of the Nazis. Hitler is said to have intervened personally to end the machinations of those who wanted her deported to the death camps, because he was so fond of her husband's music. Another ghost at the Sperl tables is Lehár's fellow Hungarian Emmerich – or Imre – Kálmán. A talented pianist and composer, he worked closely with Lehár, then escaped the Nazis in 1938, first to Paris, then the United States. Hungary has furnished western Europe with so many exiles.