The Danube (11 page)

Back in the village we sit in a café, though he refuses a drink. He's in a hurry; it's the height of the Danube herring season, and he wants to get back to his nets by his hut on the far side of the river. Radu Suciu in Tulcea gave me Tudor's name, as a former sturgeon fisherman involved in the Norwegian–Romanian sturgeon sustainability project. Once they travelled to Norway together. What impressed Tudor most was how organised the Norwegian fishermen were. ‘We have an association of fishermen here too, but we need a proper trade union,’ he says. The lone fishing company in the delta uses its monopoly position to keep the prices paid to fishermen low. Yet they are obliged by law to sell all their fish to it. Why doesn't he organise a trade union himself? ‘I tried once, in 2005, to get fishing rights for us in several lakes in the delta. And they threw me out. I wouldn't want to be seen as a trouble-maker.’

Tudor has spent his whole life here. His first memories of the Danube are of stealing his father's boat as a child, and trying to row out to sea. His father had to rescue him. He has no romantic nostalgia for the Romania of his childhood. ‘Everything is easier now than it used to be. In those days, everyone rowed. There were no engines before the 1989 revolution. That was very hard.’ He regrets the ban on sturgeon fishing, but says it must be respected. His main contempt is reserved for those of his colleagues who use illegal methods to fish, such as electrodes attached to car batteries. ‘They ought to be electrocuted themselves!’ he says, and I don't think he's joking. Sturgeon was always the hardest fish to catch. ‘First we had to sharpen the hooks. Then we had to know exactly where to lay them.’ The best beluga sturgeon Tudor ever caught was a 280 kilo female, with forty kilos of caviar. ‘Where did you sell it?’ ‘To the fish collecting point. We had no choice …’ He's impatient to go back to his fish, but I persuade him to tell one last story. ‘We fear the fog here in the mouth of the Danube more than any other weather. It comes down suddenly, out of nowhere. There were a lot of us out on the river, fishing one day, when that happened. It was so thick, you could hardly see your own hands, let alone the end of the boat. The women and children came out on the shore when they realised we were lost, and beat pots and pans together to guide us back to the village. But it was no good. The sounds seemed to come from all sides. It took me hours to find my way to the shore.’

Tudor's wife Maria is planting onions in the small garden in front of her house. We talk in her kitchen. ‘Life is better here than in other parts of
Romania, because we have fish. Even if my husband doesn't catch enough to sell, he always brings some home to eat.’ She likes all kinds. ‘We cook them in the same ways we cook meat – fried, baked, boiled, in breadcrumbs or as fishballs.’ She gives me her fishball recipe. ‘First remove the backbone, then put the whole fish through a grinder. Add the onion, garlic, two eggs, breadcrumbs, a grated raw potato, cover them in a light dusting of flour and fry them till they're ready. Then eat them with tomato sauce, or put them in a sandwich – they're healthier than salami!’ Living here at the fraying edge of the Danube, she watches the climate change and worries how it might affect their precarious existence between a sinking river and a rising sea. Her birthday is in a few days time, on 29 March. ‘Each year, my mother used to go and look under the snow, to find the first few snowdrops to pick for my birthday. Now look at the thermometer! Its twenty degrees at the end of March!’ There were years when the Danube was still frozen solid here on 15 March. She misses the spring and autumn most. ‘Nowadays we pass straight from cold to hot.’

Sorin is a different kettle of fish to Tudor Avramov. I meet him near the harbour, near his Chinese-made boat, the ‘King of Rubbish’. ‘Rubbish’ appears to be a mistranslation of ‘junk’ – in homage to his craft's Far Eastern origins. Sorin is as talkative as Tudor was quiet. He swiftly fleeces me of a handful of small denomination
lei
notes, and talks me into a fish dinner at his house and an all-night fishing trip afterwards. He is a fountain of stories or legends about his years as a soldier and a fisherman. He served in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, he says, and came home in the end because he could not bear to live without the Danube. He has a high forehead, round jaw, blue eyes, alternately fierce with anger or wet with tears, big biceps and an anchor tattooed on his forearm. The day he was released from the army he rang his father to get his rowing boat ready. When he stepped off the ferry from Tulcea, he climbed straight down into his own boat, without a word to his relatives, and set off alone into the familiar labyrinths of the delta. For three days and nights he fished and slept and fished, cleansing himself of a life of war and obedience to authority. In his outhouse, his young girlfriend remains almost mute as Sorin cleans and fries small crucian carp. His best tales are about his grandfather. Born around 1907, he fought on both sides in the Second World War, eventually opting for the Germans because they treated their soldiers
better. ‘I got both brandy and chocolate,’ he told his grandson. The Russians treated him even worse as a prisoner of war than as their own soldier. Captured on the Eastern Front in 1943, he spent nine years in a prison camp in Siberia. Potato peelings were a rare luxury. Released in 1952, he made his way back as far as Izmail. Just across the river from the city, he could see the sparse lights of Romania, glittering like beads along the shore. He asked about a boat to get him across, but was told that none existed. When he announced his intention to swim instead, he was told he would be shot. One night he went downriver to Vlkovo, where the Danube is wider still, but there were fewer border guards and swam several miles across to the Romanian side. Nowadays Vlkovo is treasured by Ukrainians for its early strawberries, which you can buy in the marketplace in Odessa.

Sorin is very proud of his grandfather. ‘He was one of twelve brothers, and he went out to fish at the age of nine, to help feed the family – they lived only from fishing.’ Even now, he says, there are people who come up to Sorin in the street, and tell him how his grandfather saved them when their boats capsized. His family were Don Cossacks, offered land by Catherine the Great in the Crimea. But the Crimean Tatars pushed them southwards, all the way to the Danube. Sorin used to go to Izmail by boat in the 1990s, to bring food and alcohol back to sell in Romania. ‘Everything was so cheap there – you could buy a whole head of cheese, big as a wheel, for almost nothing!’ He now makes a living from the tourist trade in summer, and from fishing. The winds in the delta each have a name. The south wind is called the
moriana
, and fishermen say that when it blows you just have to put your nets in the water and they fill with fish. The north wind, the
crivǎțs
, comes from Russia, and brings us nothing, he says. It is so strong it makes currents in the water, and breaks nets thicker than his thumb. He holds it up, for dramatic effect, still covered in the entrails of the fish he is gutting for our supper. ‘But the wind is fickle, it can turn around from one moment to the next, and blow a squall from the other direction.’ I remember the British graves in Sulina and all the deaths from collisions and drownings. His fried carp are tasty and plentiful, but full of bones. They might have been better suited to Maria Avramov's fish balls. The level in the two-litre plastic bottle of wine he picked up from a ramshackle bar with the money I gave him plunges downwards dangerously. We part company after supper, and he says he will pick me up in an hour from my
hotel for our fishing trip. The hours pass, and by the time he arrives roaring drunk after midnight I have gone off the plan altogether.

The next morning, to make sure that no feelings are hurt on either side, and to lessen the danger that I will ask for the money back, he takes me by boat to the fish-collecting centre. There is a floating platform with a metal shed at the back, where fish are stacked to the ceiling in plastic crates. The man in charge is busy on his mobile phone. At first he is suspicious of me. This is nowhere near the tourist season and my story about writing a book about the Danube sounds far-fetched. Reluctantly, he answers my questions. The herring come in from the sea when the Danube reaches 6 or 7 degrees centigrade. The migration takes place every five years. They take forty-five days to swim upriver, as far as the Iron Gates dam that blocks their way. There they spawn, before swimming back to the sea, which takes only fifteen days downstream. He pays five to six
lei
per kilo for the fish (under two dollars) and sells them wholesale to the shops. The fish will go for four times that price in the markets of Constanța and Bucharest.

I decline a lift back to town with Sorin, and set out on foot down a street of neat peasant houses, wood panelled, painted pastel shades of blue and green. Black rowing boats that will never again go to sea are beached in back gardens and yards, keel up, elegant as musical instruments in their final resting places. Hens roost in some, children play in others.

Ilie Sidurenko and his wife are in their front garden, pruning the vines. ‘So you're going upriver, like the sturgeon!’ he remarks with delight, when I tell him about my journey. ‘The sturgeon is a smart fish, if he smells nets, you can't catch him … The best time is when the bed of the river or the sea is muddy, and he gets confused. We used to lay hooks, three, five, seven kilometres out to sea. Only the older fishermen knew the secret, and now it is not passed on, it will be lost.’ He hardly interrupts his work, methodically tying his vines as we speak. The biggest sturgeon he ever caught was a male, 400 kilos, ‘not a long fish, but a fat one!’ Then in December 2004, just before Christmas, he was alone on the Danube – a rare event, as the fishermen always fish in pairs. He landed a female, 209 kilos, with 35 kilos of caviar. ‘I sold it to the fish-collecting centre in the village,’ says Ilie, showing no emotion. ‘I don't care what they did with it.’

CHAPTER
3

Mountains of the Fathers

S
OUTH OF
Tulcea on the road to Constanța is the town of Babadag. There are woods, unusual for the bare, rolling landscape of Dobrogea, fresh water springs, a hotel and restaurant with a rather Turkish feel, and the oldest mosque in Romania. The Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk got here before I did, and wrote a book called
The Road to Babadag
,
²
but his book is about his journey there, not his arrival.

In my suitcase I carry an old, red hardback copy of
The Travels of Ibn Battuta
, an Islamic traveller of the fourteenth century. He reached Babadag in 1332 and used his time to re-provision his caravan for the long journey south to Constantinople, still in the ‘territory of the Greeks’, before the Ottoman conquest of 1453. ‘A provision of water is laid in for this stage, and carried in large and small skins on the wagons. Since our entry into it was in the cold weather, we have no need of much water, and the Turks carry milk in large skins, mix it with cooked
dugi
and drink that so that they feel no thirst. At this city we made our preparations for the crossing of the wasteland.’

Babadag means ‘the mountain of the father’ in Turkish. Just a few kilometres inland from the Black Sea, its relationship to the Danube is hard to define. As a centre of miracles and a place of pilgrimage for devout Muslims, the small wooded hill towers over the surrounding landscape, guarding the southern approaches to the river. Nearby, the US military share a training ground with the Romanian army, to practise manoeuvres for the next wars in the Islamic heartlands as though hoping to tap some of its magic. Videos posted on the internet show spidermen in combat fatigues, weighed down with a paraphernalia of gadgets and weaponry, leaping from helicopters and taking cover behind tanks. The ‘father’ in the name is Sari Saltuq, who arrived here with forty warriors by flying carpet from Central Anatolia, according to one source, to convert Dobrogea to Islam. Many wonders are told about him, not least that he saved the daughter of the King of Dobrogea from a dragon and cut off its seven heads with his wooden Bektashi sword.
³
A peculiar variant of the story suggests that a Christian monk claimed credit for this feat, in order to win the hand in marriage of the King's daughter – the prize announced by her father for anyone who could rid him of the dragon. Sari Saltuq proposed to the monk an ordeal by fire, to find out which of them was telling the truth about the defeat of the dragon. They were both boiled alive in the same cauldron, suspended over the flames. The monk perished in agony, while Sari Saltuq emerged unscathed. In other legends he is paired with Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children.

At Blagaj in Bosnia, where the River Buna – ‘the good’ – flows fully formed out of a cliff face, a handsome dervish lodge clings to the cliff ledge beside it. Ancient stone steps lead down straight into the crystal clear water, where the dervishes used to come to wash before prayers. Up in the lodge the rooms hum with silence and devotion. Off one room is a domed stone roof, with star-shaped holes cut into it through which the rain can fall: an Islamic shower room. In a small shrine at the side of the building is one of the tombs of Sari Saltuq, royally clad in green and gold, with his rounded dervish hat at the raised end. During the 1992–95 war, Muslim refugees took shelter here, and the Croats who shelled Blagaj tried and failed to drop mortars on the roof. Each night Zijo, the self-appointed caretaker of the place, would put cups of water out beside the raised coffins. Each morning he would find the cups empty.
⁴
There is another, sadder story told about
Blagaj. Close to where the Buna emerges from the cliff are two restaurants, famous for their excellent trout, freshly caught from the river. The cliff above was once home to eagles. Just before the war, in the winter of 1991, the restaurant owner believed the eagles were stealing his hens, and put out the poisoned carcass of a sheep for them to eat. The eagles died. According to local legend, war would engulf Bosnia if the eagles ever disappear from Blagaj. The conflict began the following April. Another tomb of Sari Saltuq, at Krujë in Albania, resides high in the mountains looking down on to the Adriatic. Another small domed
turbe
, arched with thin, wafer-like bricks. Another fine, slanted coffin, dressed in green and gold cloth, mounted with a dervish mitre. Outside you can rest in the shade of tall mulberry trees and enjoy the sweet scent of fig trees baking in hot sunshine. Vines, honeysuckle and pomegranates grow from the cracks in the walls.
⁵