The Danube (12 page)

Thin, tentative threads tie distant Albania and Bosnia to the Danube. The Drina river turns its back on the White and Black Drin rivers and the Neretva, which all flow westwards to the Adriatic. The Drina flows north and east into the Morava, which meets the Danube before Belgrade. Sari Saltuq has seven tombs in all and is said to have been buried in each of them, so no one knows where his body really lies. ‘Through tolerance and piety … Sari Saltuq influenced the non-Muslims and contributed a great deal to the spreading of the Islamic religion in the Balkans. He won the non-Muslims’ affection, maintaining open lines of communication with them, and thus for centuries Muslims and non-Muslims have been living in peace and harmony in Dobrogea,’ reads the information booklet, available at the mosque. The mosque itself has another tomb, just behind the main building, of Gazi Ali Pasha, who was the governor of Buda in the early seventeenth century.

The snowdrops of Babadag, Memnune tells me sternly, have the most beautiful scent. ‘But what do they
actually
smell of?’ I ask her, casting aside a lifetime of certainty that while snowdrops may have many other qualities, they are certainly odourless. ‘Freshly laundered linen on a winter's day,’ she says, confidently.

Memnune serves cups of strong black Turkish coffee as we sit in her neat, middle-class living room discussing Sari Saltuq. I asked in the street of the town who could tell me about the saint and was directed straight
here. She is a matronly woman, with intelligent brown eyes and a passion for flowers and history. Sari Saltuq's grave disappeared for a while, she tells me, only to be rediscovered by a man called Koyun Baba, while walking with his sheep. Koyun means ‘sheep’ in Turkish. Babadag was once threatened by a huge flood, pouring from a hole in the ground, but Koyun Baba saved the community by pushing barrow-loads of cotton into the hole. The British orientalist F. W. Hasluck mentions another Bektashi saint, Pambuk Baba, ‘who seems to have succeeded, or to be identical with the Bektashi saint Koyun Baba’.
⁶
Pambuk means ‘cotton’ in Turkish. Both men were disciples, like Sari Saltuq, of Hajji Bektash, the founder of the Bektashi order of dervishes, the mystical order most closely associated with the janissaries, the elite of the Ottoman armies. There are still Bektashi strongholds in Albania and Macedonia. Miskin Baba, from the island of Ada Kaleh in the Danube, and Gül Baba, still honoured upstream in Budapest, were also Bektashis. The Danube carried the Islamic faith upriver into Europe. The track up the mountain is steep and well worn, through young woods of oak and acacia, sprouting out of a carpet of bluebells. As the path levels at the top of the hill, the bushes are tied with strips of coloured rags, like man-made blossom impatient for spring. Koyun Baba's grave is rather humble, with a crescent moon at its head, set in crude granite. He didn't actually want a grave at all – unlike Sari Saltuq – and each time the villagers made one for him, the story goes, he scattered the rocks, which came to resemble sheep on the meadows around the mountain. On his latest grave, not yet self-vandalised, stands a single candle. The rags on the bushes were tied by Muslim Gypsies, Memnune told me, who make pilgrimages and picnics here every year on 6 May, Saint George's Day according to the Gregorian calendar. A single robin hops curiously from branch to branch, watching me closely. A battered tin sign admonishes visitors, in Romanian and Turkish, that it is a sin to ask for anything from the dead, a warning defied by every strip of rag tied to the branches. From far below this pudding-shaped hill come the barking of dogs and the shouts of men engaged in some sporting activity. Rain starts to fall lightly on Koyun Baba's grave. Before leaving, I pick a small handful of snowdrops. Delicate, but fully scented, just like fresh linen sheets, plucked, stiff to the touch, from a washing line on a cold winter's day.

When we meet again Memnune is so pleased to hear that I have taken the trouble to visit Koyun Baba, she tells me her dream. Some years earlier, on the night before the Muslim feast of Bayram, she dreamt that she should sacrifice a white ram on the right side of the courtyard of the mosque in Babadag. Muslims do sacrifice rams during Bayram, but this would normally be done in one's own yard. The strangest feature of her dream was that the gardens and yard of the mosque were laid out in a different pattern to how they really were at the time. She obeyed the dream and, with her brother-in-law's help, found an animal and sacrificed it in the place she had been told. Some time later, with funds from Turkey, the land around the mosque was re-landscaped and now corresponds exactly to the way she saw it in her dream. Across eastern Europe, the former empires quietly nurse what is left of their heritage, the Turks their mosques, the Russians their war memorials.

Memnune calls a friend to take me to Sari Saltuq's tomb. It is a simple, handsome affair, with the traditional green-draped coffin in the centre of the room and an arched, beehive-shaped roof made of thin, white-washed bricks. The brickwork is like the roof of the Bajrakli mosque in Belgrade. The floor is paved with stone. Memnune used to come here as a child with her grandmother every Friday to light candles, ‘to honour the heroes’, she explains. And to make wishes, one with each candle. They always lit white candles, she stresses, not the thin, yellow beeswax ones favoured by the Orthodox Christians. Opposite Sari Saltuq's tomb is a spring famous for the healing qualities of its waters. A young Gypsy girl, perhaps fourteen years old with a cigarette dangling from her lips, arrives with her younger brother on a horse and cart. They smile sweetly at us, then wrestle a big blue plastic container down off the cart and start filling it. There is no running water in most houses in the Roma district.

In his front room on a low hill on the far side of the town, Recep Lupu, the unofficial head of Babadag's Roma community, talks about the pride and the shame of his people. ‘We don't have a language of our own, it's more like a dialect,’ he says, sitting with his wife and mother-in-law in their living room, just off the steep, unmade road that is the Gypsy high street. On the wall hangs a huge carpet depicting the ‘Abduction of the Seraj’. His wife sits cross-legged on the bed, mythically beautiful in the
traditional, bright long skirts and headscarf of her people. Her mother sits beside her, a picture of stern, silent dignity. ‘We speak a mixture of words …’ Recep continues, ‘Bulgarian, Russian, Romanian, Gypsy and Turkish – it changes all the time – we shift between them. We are too ashamed to speak our own language.’

Unlike most of the Roma in Babadag, Recep and his family are Pentecostalists. He has a very earthly explanation for giving up Islam. ‘If you are a Muslim, you have to marry a fellow Muslim. In the Pentecostalist church, you can marry who you wish!’ I look over at his wife, who smiles, shyly. ‘All her family are Christians too …’ The evangelical Protestants arrived in the Dobrogea region at the end of the twentieth century, and have launched an aggressive recruitment drive among the Muslim Gypsies to ‘save their souls’. The community has a parallel justice system, accepted by the Romanian state in disputes where only Roma are involved. Instead of punishment or retribution for crimes, the emphasis is on respect, honour and repairing the torn fabric of the community. The council of elders sits to hear all sides in the dispute, then issues a verdict designed to satisfy the injured party. The offender must pay compensation, or find other ways to make up for the harm generated by his act.

Recep and his wife have only two children. That is unusual. ‘Most have five or six, occasionally ten or eleven. For myself, two is enough … but if God wants us to have one more …’ He exchanges another gentle smile with his wife. His youngest son accepts the gift of my pencil and sits down to draw.

‘The biggest problem here is poverty and the lack of education,’ his wife explains. ‘The boys just go to school to get a driving licence.’ You have to have finished eight grades of school in Romania to apply for a licence. ‘The girls finish four grades or even less. They have to stay at home to take care of the little ones because their parents go to work in other villages. The children get married very young. It used to be at eleven or twelve, now more often at fourteen or fifteen.’ Their main work is trade. ‘We buy clothes, cutlery, dishes, or animals in the wholesale market, then take them from village to village, to sell.’ Few Roma, if any, own land.

‘Do the young people today respect the traditions?’ I ask Recep's mother-in-law.

‘The young do not respect us. Many used to wear baggy trousers – a traditional item of dress among Muslim women – now they only wear them occasionally.’

The number of Roma is hard to calculate. Recep estimates 3,500 in Babadag, but ‘many are on the road, travelling from place to place’. A sizeable number – several hundred, he believes – are in Portugal, but he cannot remember where. Like Roma throughout eastern Europe, they establish an unofficial twinning system with one particular place, often the suburb of a small or larger town. Those with a foothold abroad help more to come, and the income they make becomes a significant lifeline for the families back home. The bright yellow Western Union sign has become as important a landmark in Romania as the local post office. Outside in the street, we stop to talk to some girls of about twelve or thirteen years. Why aren't you at school? ‘Our parents need us at home, to take care of our brothers and sisters.’ What do you sing to them? A burst of laughter, then a somewhat raucous rendition of a lullaby, sure to wake up any baby for miles around. More children come running from neighbouring streets, to hear Regina and Sibella sing to the strangers. ‘And anyway,’ Regina adds, ‘if we stayed at school, the boys would steal us.’

The road out of Tulcea to the east leads past vineyards, brown and bedraggled in the spring rain, along the southern shore of the Danube. Ukraine, on the far bank, looks uninhabited. There are no watchtowers, and the barges at anchor near Isaccea are nationless and motionless; no flags stain the morning. Izmail, the port city where Sorin's grandfather could not find a boat and where Sorin bought whole heads of cheese to sell in Romania, is somewhere on the far side. The two half-brothers, Ishmael and Isaac, face each other across the Danube. Isaccea is a small, dozy village, with a war memorial, a mosque with a slim, green capped minaret, and a stone quarry set on a hill, its gaze always downwards towards the river.

Under the heading ‘dead’, thirty-four names are listed on the war memorial, from 1916 to 1919, and four are still classified as ‘missing’. It was a hard war to cost a place as small as this thirty-eight of its young men. Some of the first and last names are the same: Ion Ion; Emin Emin … The mayor of Vǎcǎreni, Stelicǎ Gherghișan, is not at home as we pass through, but I
will nevertheless tell his story. In 1999 when work ran out at the fish farm where he was employed, he turned his hand to fishing for wild sturgeon. The regular sturgeon fishermen jealously guarded the stretch of river they had occupied, so he was forced further downstream. He landed a 450-kilo female, with 82 kilos of caviar. That fish changed his life. The caviar can fetch up to ten thousand dollars a kilo in New York. Sterian bought a house, then another house. A car, then another car. In no time he was elected mayor. And since then he has been re-elected several times. Romanians, like everybody else, are impressed by success. The loss of those eggs was another disaster for the diminishing sturgeon stocks in the Danube, however.

In Tulcea I tried in vain to find a boat that would take me across to Izmail. One former fisherman might take me, illegally, I was told, ‘but he costs a lot’. A name and phone number were scribbled down on a scrap of paper, but I never rang the number. While half of Asia and Africa hammers on the doors of western Europe, was I really going to pay to smuggle myself into Ukraine? A small, unsignposted road leads off the Tulcea to Galați road. After several kilometres skidding in and out of potholes I come to a gate with a large sign: ‘Tichileşti Hospital, Leprosarium.’

The rain stops and a damp-eyed sun tries to negotiate a passage between the clouds. Vasile Olescu is pruning his vines up on the slopes of this protected valley. His father taught him to prune when he was twelve, he says, though his father had no legs. He would be carried or wheeled, or sometimes drag himself out to the edge of the vineyard. But his hands were strong, and he could practise the right way to grip the cutters in his son's small hands and call to him which branches of the untidy tangle of vines to cut, or which rare stem should be allowed to stay and how many knots along it should be severed. Vasile was born at the lepers’ colony in 1955. Now he is one of the youngest patients. Both his parents were lepers. His mother was sent here when she was fourteen, his father when he was eighteen. They fell in love. Leprosy is an illness which can be both inherited and caught from others, so to be born to leper parents surrounded by other leprosy cases is a poor start in life, though there is a hope for each child that she or he will not develop the disease. Vasile grew up in a bubble of hope, helping his parents and the other patients. In all, fifteen children were born here. As long as they remained healthy, they seemed miraculous, the perfect red grapes produced by diseased vines. When they grew up they
were sent away ‘to freedom’ as Vasile puts it, making it sound like exile. When Vasile was given a clean bill of health he was sent out into the world to earn his fortune. In communist Romania, where work was compulsory, that was not too difficult. He got a bed in a worker's hostel in Constanța and a job in the shipyards, unloading the ships of all the world. He worked for two years before he realised he was ill. The same fate befell most of the other children born at Tichileşti. One by one they developed the tell-tale signs of the illness – a wound that would not heal, the loss of feeling in first one toe, then another. Then the gradual flaking and rotting of the flesh. He is a man who likes to get things done, not to speak of them. As we talk, crouched side by side among his vines, he works fast, cutting and tying and tidying the piles, hardly pausing for a moment to think or to rest.