The Danube Page 4

  In the 1950s, communism brought rapid, crude industrialisation to half of Europe still dozing in a semi-feudal slumber. The village of Pentele in Hungary became first Sztálinváros (Stalintown), then Dunaújváros (Danube New Town). Cities swelled on the banks of the rivers as babies boomed and people moved from the countryside to housing estates, which resembled the battlements of medieval castles. All human, chemical and animal waste flowed back into the river, which processed and cleaned what it could in the reed beds and root systems of its remaining wetland flood plains, and spat out what it could not digest into the Black Sea. In the early 1990s, hundreds of giant communist era industrial plants along the Danube banks went bankrupt and closed down. When state subsidies and the vast bureaucratic energy of the totalitarian state were withdrawn, they stood little chance of survival.

  The story with the farms was a little different. Huge state farms and cooperatives, from the Austrian border with Hungary all the way to the delta, turned the fields of the Middle and Lower Danube basin into food machines. Grain harvests grew year by year, with the soil pumped full of chemical fertilisers. Chemical factories lined the river, producing fertilisers and explosives. The factories flushed their waste into the river, while barges carried their products to market. Grain was transported down to Constanța for shipment across the oceans of the world, or upriver to Austria and Germany to feed the capitalist masses. When communism collapsed, the Danube breathed a massive sigh of relief.15 The pollutant stream in the drainage ditches from pig farms slowed from a flood to a trickle. Gypsies stripped the metal from the closed industries on the shores, to be sold as scrap, carried across the seas, and melted into iron girders to reinforce the concrete of the building boom in China and India. State farms were broken up into small units and peasants got back land, or compensation for it, which had been stolen from them in the great wave of nationalisations in the late 1940s. For a decade there was a dearth of tractors small enough to plough the small plots, with the Soviet and East German monsters rusting in the weeds. In the twenty-first century there is still a dearth of capital in the countryside. Some agribusinesses have been resurrected, often with foreign capital. There is a steady concentration of land in ever fewer hands, as the sons and daughters of the peasants who got back their patrimony decide they do not want to work it and sell it off. The food industry and breweries of Romania and Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia were snapped up by foreign companies in the first wave of privatisations in the 1990s. Big supermarkets and hypermarkets have partly replaced the traditional open-air markets where people used to buy their fruit and vegetables and freshly slaughtered hens direct from the producers, but many markets still survive, because the food tastes better, you can see who grew it, and the tomato on your plate can only gain from not having travelled two thousand kilometres from the plant which produced it.

  Some factories have resumed work, with tighter laws on discharges into the river. Big European Union-backed projects to build state-of-the-art sewage works for cities such as Vienna and Budapest have helped clean up the waters. Now one of the biggest pollutants is plastic bottles, which float down on the current, bereft of messages, save that someone upstream was careless enough to leave them on the shore. Washed out into the Black Sea, they eventually disintegrate into a poisonous sludge on the sea bed that will be there for all time.

  The task of the Biosphere Authority is to protect the delta after the depredations of the Ceauşescu years, and to help local communities make a living. Unfortunately, however, the two tasks do not always sit comfortably side by side. Local farmers and fishermen resent what they see as the interference of ‘the ecologists’, as they call employees of the Biosphere Authority. High unemployment in the 1990s left men in the delta with nothing to do except fish. Some use nets with illegally small mesh. Others attach electrodes to a car battery and plunge them into the water, which kills everything within a wide radius. Upstream in Serbia, hand grenades made plentiful by the wars of the 1990s are used to blow fish out of the water. In 2006 Romania banned sturgeon fishing. This was a good move to save the fish from extinction, but a heavy blow to the dedicated band of fishermen, especially in the delta, for whom sturgeon was by far the most valuable prize. Creative ways have been sought to help fishermen make a living. One idea Grigore Baboianu supports is for fishermen to be allowed one week in the year when they can fish for sturgeon. But that would be difficult to introduce just when Bulgaria, Serbia and Ukraine, after years of Romanian pressure, have brought in a general ban on sturgeon fishing in their own sections of the river. Another idea is aquaculture, that is breeding sturgeon artificially and reintroducing them to the river. There are already two sturgeon farms in Romania, one at Isaccea on the Danube, another near Bucharest. The Norwegian–Romanian project plans to introduce ‘sturgeon tours’ of the Danube.16

  I first met Grigore in 2000 when I came to film pelicans in the delta. He gave us the use of a boat and a guide, while we paid the diesel for the outboard motor. The Authority was so short of funds its rangers could hardly patrol the vast, semi-wilderness of the delta to prevent poaching. The trick with pelicans, our guide explained, is to behave like them. As such enormous birds themselves, they are not easily alarmed by other large creatures, such as humans, drifting down towards them on the current. We were almost among them before the more nervous birds identified us as short-beaked aliens, while the wiser, older birds, or perhaps just those who had been filmed so many times, remained tranquil on the calm waters among the reeds. The financial situation has not improved much since then, Grigore confesses, though the border police are better equipped, better funded, and in a much better position to protect the delta. Nets are confiscated, and those who fish during spawning periods when a ban is in force are punished. Only the humble pike can be caught in April and May.

  On a Sunday morning in Tulcea, I go in search of the imam at the mosque a little way up the hill towards the museum. He's rushing to a funeral, but will be back later, and we can talk then, God-willing. But God has other plans for him, and at the appointed time there's no one in sight. After a brief wait in the cold of a March evening, I ring the doorbell at the Turkish–Romanian Friendship Association opposite, a low town house of just a single storey. The Turks governed Dobrogea for nearly five hundred years, and only lost their territories here in the 1870s. The remaining Turks have been transformed from rulers to an ethnographic oddity, but they have kept some of their treasures intact. A woman comes to the door and welcomes me inside like a prodigal son. A Turkish women's group has gathered for their weekly singing session: Vezza Sadula, Sabis Mahmet and Sabiha Ali lead the troupe. Some of the songs they have learnt on their annual trips to the Turkish heartlands, which they perform at folk festivals. But the best are old Turkish ballads from Dobrogea, about the Danube.

  I saw a Romanian girl down by the Danube shore …

  With no father or mother, her hands bound by strangers,

  ‘– Romanian girl, tell me the truth –

  Where is your mother?’

  ‘I have neither mother nor father,

  I'm alone in the world, orphaned and alone’

  – ‘You an orphan, me a poor fellow

  Let us be married!’

  ‘Marry you?’ she replied,

  ‘And wrap us both in this land of homesickness?’17

  Why a Romanian lass would feel homesick beside the Danube, and where the Turkish lad arrived from, remain hidden in the mists of time. Tulcea was always a town for people in transit. It looks out towards the sea, and back up the Danube.

  After four or five songs, the ladies are tiring, and one has lost her mobile phone. Soon the whole group is hunting high and low for it, and even the final chorus falls victim to the disappearance of new technology. Back in the small hotel in the harbour, I eat another perch then have an early night, lulled to sleep by the sound of waves lapping against the harbour and the cries of gulls.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Kneeling Oak

  The crew o
ur companions, were good lads

  unchanging in the changing days

  they did not grumble at the labour

  the thirsts, the night frosts

  like trees, like waves

  they accepted the wind, the rain

  the night cold, the heat of the sun …

  GEORGE SEFERIS, ‘Argonauts’1

  THE BOAT from Tulcea down the Sulina arm of the Danube delta is packed with people and goods. Sacks of oats for the horses of Sulina, nappies for its babies, Greek oranges, Spanish tomatoes, Bolivian bananas, but above all people. Ladies with flowered headscarves, anchored to the deck with shopping bags, two narrow-hipped teenage girls on their way to visit their grandmother, middle-aged lovers making a new start, gazing into the wake of the boat, but most of all an army of chiselled-faced men, brooding over the stern in their Baltic-blue workers’ jackets, smoking in silent clusters on the deck.

  Willows line the riverbanks, the old men of the river, their gnarled and twisted roots reaching down to the water for one last drink. Fast-growing Canadian poplars crowd behind them, like teenagers trying to get into a party. In one place a whole forest of them has been massacred, levelled to the ground. The Danube smells like the sea I grew up beside, in southern England, but greener, more pungent, unsalted. There are seagulls, though, and cormorants. Black, hook-necked, then straight-backed as soldiers with yellow noses, slow and dignified in their movements as surgeons, perched on driftwood on the banks of the river, diving gracefully as arrows into the water. Lone herons, cranes, storks and egrets. Only ducks and geese fly together in groups. All the others fish by themselves, with a wary eye on their fellow birds, or human interference with the life of the riverbank.

  The ferry takes four and a half hours from Tulcea to Sulina, sixty kilo-metres east, on the Black Sea coast. There are no roads, just a labyrinth of creeks and marshes. The delta has the biggest concentration of reed banks on earth. The Black Sea into which the yellow-brown Danube pours is an inland lake, isolated from the Atlantic Ocean by the long, lazy body of the Mediterranean. Bold sailors passing through the straits of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus must have wondered if they would ever see the Bay of Biscay again. In places, sand-dunes and soil have settled long enough to allow a village to spring up. Milea 23 is named after ‘Mile 23’ from the Danube mouth. C. A. Rosetti, on the Chilia arm, is a cluster of villages named after a nineteenth-century Romanian novelist, though the settlement was actually created by shepherds whose sheep found just enough dry land to lead them on towards the beckoning surf. Constantin Rosetti was also a politician, whose support for the 1848 revolution nearly led him to the gallows. Rescued by the pleas of his English wife, Mary, the sister of the British consul in Bucharest, he later served as Minister of Police.2

  I go out on deck into the grey afternoon. The Danube is grey, the sky is grey, even the forests on each side of the river are shades of grey. The scene is brightened only by the occasional splash of colour of the peasant houses and the sea-stained hulls of passing ships. Upriver they carry bauxite ore from Russia or Brazil to the aluminium works in Tulcea. Other ships are empty, high in the water, on their way to fetch laminated sheets from the steel mills of Galați; the Belfin, and the Burhan Dizman, registered in Istanbul, the Ayane from Valletta.3 Like rare birds, lone sailors stand gazing down from the gangways at our crowded river ferry into a world in which families and friends still travel together. If my children were with me, we would wave. Instead, I sweep their decks with my binoculars, trying to catch a glimpse of the man at the wheel, his face set against the dying day.

  There are a few villages beside the river, spreadeagled along the shore on either side as though the river were the main street. Tidy stacks of cut reed are piled high beside houses with thatched or tin roofs. Rowing boats with black-tarred hulls are moored by wooden jetties, or turned upside down like seashells by the path. The houses are wooden, their window frames painted blue, or white or green. Cockerels call from the shore. White-coated geese waddle self-importantly, like doctors on a tour of a hospital ward. Fishermen, always in pairs, cast off in their black boats. One man rows while the other patiently feeds the floats of a net out between his fingers.

  There is not a bare head to be seen in the river world. The men wear Cossack-style hats, flat caps or baseball caps; the older women scarves or knitted woollen hats. Even the birds seem to be wearing hats, the tufted plumes of their feathers. The river is wide, ten to fourteen metres deep, and there is plenty of space for all manner of craft to pass. The blue, yellow and red Romanian ensign, the blue and yellow of Ukraine, and the Dutch tricolour are stiff in the afternoon breeze.

  Our boat arrives in Sulina right on time at five-thirty. A crowd of people and a horse and cart are waiting on the quay. The gangplank clatters down and thick wire ropes are looped around the stanchions. A bubble of laughter bursts as relatives fall into each other's arms, elderly couples peck each other on the cheeks, then reach for their bags. Much of the rest of the town, with no one in particular to meet, has wandered down to the shore to watch the new arrivals. Cut off from the rest of the world by water and reed banks, the visit of the daily boat from Tulcea is a landmark in their lives.

  I book into the Hotel Jean Bart, just along the shore from the ferry landing. It has a Wild West feel, with heavy, wooden panelling in the dining room and hibernating geraniums on the window ledge of my high-ceilinged bedroom, smelling of black pepper. From the outside, the hotel is striped dark red and white like a raspberry ripple. I'm in a rush to reach the Black Sea before darkness falls.

  On the unmade road east to the sea beyond Sulina is the town graveyard. A young couple are just leaving as I reach the gate. Their eyes are not graveyard red, but their lips are fresh from kissing. There's a little chapel with a wooden tower and a weather vane, and just behind it is the British section of the cemetery. The English names seem particularly desolate beside the Danube, so far from the Tyne and the Thames, the Mersey and the Medway.

  ‘Sacred to the memory of Thomas Rutherford of Houdon Pans, England, Chief Engineer of the Steam Ship Kepler of North Shields, who departed this life on the 26th day of July 1875 at Sulina, aged 36 years.’ This is followed by a quote from Psalm 39: ‘Thou makest my days as a handbreath, and my years are as nothing before thee.’ James Mason, of the Phoenician of Sunderland, died at Sulina on 3 October 1852, aged twenty years. William Simpson died at Sulina on 28 July 1870 aged forty-six years. His stone was erected by the European Commission of the Danube, ‘by whom Mr Simpson was employed for 13 years as foreman of the works’. I wonder if old Charles Hartley attended the funeral, exposed his bowed head to the burning August sun as they lowered Bill Simpson into the ground. There are four names on the next stone, seamen from HBMS Recruit, all drowned in the Danube between 1859 and 1861. How could a ship be careless enough to lose four sailors in just two years? ‘And also for Peter Gregor, stoker, who died from the effects of climate.’

  The wrecks marked on shipping charts, on either side of the Danube mouth, are proof that this is not always such a placid river.

  Finally, with a beautifully carved olive branch at the top of the stone: ‘In loving memory of Isabella Jane Robinson, eldest and dearly beloved daughter of E. A. and E. D. S. Robinson of South Shields, aged 28, who drowned off Sulina on 27 September 1896, by the foundering through collision of the S/S Kylemoor.’

  Near the entrance of the graveyard, I see the freshest grave of all. A low shoulder of hard sand and a bunch of flowers. Ion Valentin, it says on his simple wooden cross, born 2011, died 2011.

  Sulina is a town founded by pirates, made famous by consuls, which survives on an uneasy diet of fish and foreigners. It was first mentioned by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII in a long letter to his fourteen-year-old son in AD 950, about the tribes he might expect to have to deal with when he inherited the throne. ‘The Russians come down the Dnieper river to the Black Sea each year in dug-out boats,’ Constantine wrote, ‘past the Danube mouth to the
Selinas (Sulina) river, and are constantly harried by the tribe of Pechenegs, who pick off any boats that stray from the rest, all the way down the coast to Constantinople.’4

  The far gate of the graveyard is already locked for the night, so I clamber over the fence and press on towards a sea I can no longer see but can hear more clearly, resounding off new houses, poised in the sand like crabs beyond the cemetery. Seabirds call from close at hand among the whispering reeds, their preparations for sleep disturbed by my intrusion. Then the sand is suddenly soft beneath my bare feet, followed by the painful crackle of shells, and I see the white lines of the waves on a dark canvas. For once, the Black Sea is really black. A lighthouse pulses white at the end of a long jetty. I walk for a long time, alone along the shore.

  The sun rises next morning over the sea. I lean out from my wrought iron balcony at the Jean Bart, straining to catch the first rays on my face. A single seagull perches on the top of each lamp post with a similar plan to my own, and the tops of the willow trees on the shore turn to gold. There is a bustle of people rushing for the six-thirty boat back to Tulcea, boys pushing bicycles, and women with three or four shopping bags in each hand.

  Over morning coffee in the wood-panelled bar, the owner of the hotel, Aurel Bajenaru, tells me his story. He came here aged twenty, and is now fifty-two. When he arrived there were fifteen thousand inhabitants employed in the fisheries, at the fish-canning factory, the big ship repair yard or the naval barracks. Now there are only four thousand and the factories have gone. ‘I used to like it here, but democracy has changed it, harmed it,’ he says. His three daughters have grown up and left, and he would leave too, if he were twenty years younger. He thinks the only chance for the town is tourism, but everything he tries to do is weighed down by bureaucracy, and by the incapacity of the townsfolk to work together. On the television behind his head, set high in the wooden panelling, I see a black-and-white film of a man and woman in passionate embrace. The news has just broken that the actress Elizabeth Taylor has died.5 Until the previous December, immune to the rise and fall of the stars of the silver screen, each family was allowed to catch three kilos of silvery fish a week for their own consumption. That was abolished because the authorities believed people were exceeding their quota, and it was impossible to police. In order to buy fish to serve in the hotel restaurant, Aurel now has to take his boat once a week to Tulcea to buy from the main fish company, to whom local fishermen are obliged to sell their catch. People have to pay three separate taxes: to the town hall, the biosphere authority, and the state. Outside his hotel it is hard to tell which parts of the town are being built up and which are falling down. Bulldozers dig through the back-streets, turning the soil beneath the torn-up tarmac to mud. There is no central heating in the newer, four-storey blocks of flats which sprang up along the shore in communist times. Such is the anarchy of capitalist Romania, one flat is heated by wood, another by gas, another by electricity. The town hospital is so short of funds it may close down.