The Danube (19 page)

Early the next morning I go down to the Danube in fog so thick it obscures the top half of the hotel. A big cruise liner, the
Viktoria
, is just docking, and through the misty windows I can see passengers finishing their breakfasts in time to explore the town. In front of the
Viktoria
, the
Amadeus Diamond
is already moored, a seemingly identical ship, but flying the German ensign and registered in Passau. The flags of the tour operators dangle in the fog on the quay, and a line of coaches waits for the passengers. Back to the Riga for an early breakfast. A big television screen above the tables inhibits conversation. There's been an earthquake somewhere, but I can't quite work out where.

I was given Nikolai Nenov's name by Marian Neagu in Cǎlǎraşi. As director of the Regional History Museum, with a new exhibition just opening, he's eager to get back to work, but he's proud of his town and his museum and we talk over cups of strong coffee. A tell or raised mound excavated at Ruse gives the layout of the original settlement, on a hill overlooking the river. In Neolithic and Copper Age graves excavated on both banks, the dead are buried on their sides. The Romans valued Ruse above all for its winter harbour, so-called because it never froze over. They built two fortresses, at Sexaginta Prista and Ialtus. Sexaginta is named after the sixty galleys that fitted into the harbour, their entire Lower Danube fleet.
⁷
The remains of a Thracian settlement have also been found where the Lom flows into the Danube, with shards of pots that have been traced to the island of Rhodes in Greece. The Slavs and Bulgars sent the Romans packing, and the Bulgarians founded their first kingdom here in the seventh century
AD
. Unlike the Romanians, they draw a clear line between themselves and the Romans, just as they do with the Soviet empire. As in the Danube delta, the townsfolk developed a special affinity with Saint George. Giurgiu on the far bank was called ‘Little Georgetown’, and Ruse ‘Big Georgetown’.

All conversations in Ruse inevitably lead to Elias Canetti, a son of Ruse and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. He wrote of its people and their adventures at the height of their cosmopolitan glory at the turn of the nineteenth century. ‘Ruschuk was an old port on the Danube, which made it fairly significant. As a port, it had attracted people from all over, and the Danube was a constant topic of discussion. There were stories about the extraordinary years when the Danube froze over; about sleigh rides all the way across the Danube to Romania; about starving wolves at the heels of the sleigh horses … Wolves were the first wild animals I heard about. In the fairy tales the Bulgarian peasant girls told me, there were werewolves, and one night my father terrorized me with a wolf mask on his face.’
⁸

Ruse had the first bank, the first brewery and the first railway in Bulgaria, and its citizens also enjoyed the first electricity supply. Canetti's family, like that of Eliezer Papo in Silistra, were Sephardic Jews, expelled from Spain in 1492, who took refuge in the Ottoman empire. Though he left Ruse with his family in 1911 at the age of six, lived for most of his life
in Austria and Switzerland, wrote in German, and is buried in Zurich, his autobiographical writings about Ruse have done much to put the town on the literary map of the world, and his town is deeply grateful.

In the main exhibition hall of the museum, Nikolai Nenov's colleague Eskren Velikov shows me a boomerang, the only one of its kind in Europe. Fashioned from bone in around 4500
BC
, it was probably used to hunt birds. There are gold bracelets from the same period as the treasure in Varna, and bone amulets, carved in the shape of a woman, with holes for her breasts and eyes. Set in the floor is ‘Ernestina’, the skeleton of a teenage girl, buried on her left side in the hocker position, her head to the north-east. The pit in which she was found was burned, to cleanse it before her body was placed inside. Archaeologists have found traces of red ochre and coal, to symbolise her blood and decorate her eyes in the next life. There is also a musical stone, with a hole carved in the centre, carefully designed to produce a monotonous sound if it is swung round and round in the air. The relief of a Thracian horseman, carved in a cliff, is portrayed in a faded photograph. There is also a single gold coin from the time of the Roman emperor Trajan. It was found in the stomach of a ram that swallowed it while grazing in the fields near the old Roman town. There are Thracian helmets, worn either by children or by people who had much narrower heads than we do today. And seven Hunnish swords.
⁹

Eskren feigns a historian's interest in prehistory and medieval times, but gets into his stride when we reach his own period, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Midhat Pasha became governor of the Danubian Principalities of Bulgaria in 1864 and oversaw the arrival of the first railway in the town.
¹⁰
The track from Varna, two hundred kilometres away on the Black Sea coast, brought goods from the sea port, which were then shipped up the Danube on barges to Vienna and beyond. When the Turks left after the Treaty of St Stefano in 1878, their officials handed over the keys to the city, then took the train home – to Varna, then the boat to Constantinople.

Eskren was born in 1984 and finished school in 2003. ‘Pop music didn't just reach Ruse over the radio waves, it also came down the Danube.’ Bulgarian sailors smuggled vinyl records into the city, despite the best efforts of the communist authorities to protect Bulgarian youth from such ‘corruption’. Eskren has interviewed disc-jockeys from the 1970s and 1980s for an oral-history project. ‘The Twist’ was the first dance which the
regime tried to ban, as an ‘unhealthy’ activity, on the grounds that it was ‘bad for the knees’. Then, in an attempt to keep up with the times, the ‘Disco Decree’ was passed in 1985, which stated that discos would be permitted provided they played 50 per cent Bulgarian music, 25 per cent from other socialist countries, and the remaining 25 per cent from the West. I imagine sour-faced secret agents, scowling beside the dance floor, jotting the statistics down in grubby notebooks. Western music was not completely banned, just frowned on. One DJ played a Nazareth song at full blast through the loudspeakers of his secondary school and was slapped hard in the face by the school principal. Other music fans, caught trying to bring records across the Bridge of Friendship from Romania, watched in horror as zealous border guards smashed their records and tossed the pieces into the Danube, sixty metres below.

Eskren tells another good tale about the bridge. According to the original plans created by a Ukrainian sculptor, the bridge should have been flanked by huge stone eagles. They were left out at the last moment because they resembled Roman eagles, which had been especially favoured by the Third Reich. One was actually made, but never put in place. He cannot say in which yard or cliff top it now rests.

I set out through the town in search of the remnants of Elias Canetti's cosmopolitan Ruse. I find it in the central park, built on the site of an old Muslim mosque and graveyard, with palm trees, banana trees and cactuses, and in the so-called ‘Profit-Yielding Building’, designed by Viennese architects, in the theatre, library and casino, and in the Teteven Grand Hotel. But I want to find it in the people, too.

I see the camels of the Koloseum Circus first, then the big tent as I speed past on the main road. Their great mocking faces are outlined against the housing blocks of communist Ruse, in supreme contempt. I slam on the brakes, park the car, and ask for the boss. The receptionist directs me to Momcilo – ‘everyone calls me Momi’ – Kolev, who is also the circus clown. He's only twenty-six, was born into the circus, and loves his trailer as his home, though he has a flat in Sofia as well, for the long winter months when it's too cold to tour. But nine months of the year he travels the roads of Bulgaria with his band of twenty-six performers, two camels and a clutter of ponies and goats. ‘We have acrobats, good ones, we have a flying
trapeze, excellent acts, but what do the children ask when they queue with their parents to buy tickets? What animals do you have? So we reply that we have two camels, the pony, the horse, the goats, the birds … And? they ask. It's a big problem.’ Increasingly strict European Union rules against cruelty to animals have made it harder for circuses to keep live animals. ‘In my childhood we had bears, lions, tigers, monkeys …’ Momi laments, ‘but the show must go on!’ The show lasts two hours, is put on every evening, and costs five Euros for adults, three Euros for children. ‘We cannot charge more. Bulgaria is a poor country.’

Momi Kolev admits he doesn't like Gypsies. He's had bad experiences with them, he says – though there are exceptions, such as the three he employs himself. He tried working in America for a while, where his mother and his cousins are in the circus, but didn't like it and came home. ‘Life in America is no good. Work-home-work-home-work-home. If you try and persuade someone to come to the movies with you, they say they can't because they have to work tomorrow! … In Bulgaria I love my friends. We drink coffee, watch films, watch football – we enjoy life!’

We wander out to see his camels, passing his father-in-law who is putting a pony through its paces under the big dome. ‘This is Sultan …’ Sultan is four years old and gets up reluctantly to be admired. As camels can live to eighty years old, he is a baby, and there's actually not a great deal to admire about him at the moment. He's in the middle of his spring moulting, and his coat looks like the floor of a barber's shop. Next to him is Emir, half a year younger. Momi paid a thousand Euros apiece for them in Kirgizistan. It took four months to bring them back to Bulgaria, across four countries, and the journey cost more than the price of the camel, there were so many documents to be filled in, and everyone demanding back-handers along the way. He prefers the two-humped, Central Asian camels to African ones. It might be easier to bring them to Bulgaria by ship from Tunis, but African camels can't stand the Bulgarian winters, he says. His circus is among the five largest in Bulgaria. He likes touring the bigger cities best – Sofia, Ruse, Plovdiv – places where they can stay for two weeks at a time and are guaranteed a full house every night. Smaller, poorer towns such as Vidin on the River Danube are less attractive as venues. People cannot afford the tickets, and it is a lot of work to put up the show, perform for only two nights, then take it all down again and move on. Camels are
stubborn, but more like cows than donkeys, Momi says. ‘They kick and jump and spit … you have to break them in slowly, like horses. Only then can you let the children take rides on them.’

Before I leave, we meet his wife and their one-year-old son in their caravan. She's stunningly beautiful, a sixth-generation circus performer, and has more important things to talk to her husband about than small talk for the benefit of foreigners. I leave them preparing for the night's show.

The road south east out of Ruse leads towards Červená Voda: red water. It won't be hard to find Todor Tsanev, they told me in Ruse, everybody knows him. I have no phone number for him, so my visit is completely unannounced. The first elderly couple I ask point me straight to his house, just off the main square, with pride that such a man lives in their village. All I know about him is that he was a former political prisoner at the notorious Belene prison camp, just upriver from Ruse, and that he served briefly as mayor of Ruse, thanks to his anti-communist credentials, after the return of democracy. His wife answers the door and waves me into their garden. Todor arrives looking frail but in good humour, and we sit down in a corner overhung with flowers while his wife rustles up coffee and plates overflowing with biscuits. ‘I got a paper saying I was in prison, but they never wrote down why! It might have been for stealing a chicken, or killing a man … but the fact was, I was a political prisoner. I was not happy with what the authorities did, how they handed the country over to the Russians. I had a democratic temperament, just like my father, and that's why they put us in prison together. I just couldn't stop myself speaking out about what they were doing to the country. But why resist them? Why bother? We could hardly have liberated the country from them. We simply had to stand up and show them that we opposed them, like the great Bulgarians of old stood up against the Turks.’

He was fourteen when the Second World War ended and Soviet troops occupied Bulgaria, to enforce the communist takeover of power.
¹¹
He was nineteen when he was arrested: ‘The National Agricultural Party of Nikolai Petkov showed the most steadfast resistance. There were always those who said communism could have a human face, but when they finally showed it, the Berlin Wall collapsed! If you rule with violence, you have to
maintain the violence, and if you don't the whole structure collapses, which is what actually happened … When I was arrested in 1951, there were so many trials, and not a few ended in death sentences. I got a twenty-year sentence for organising protests. I was in several prisons, but ended up at Belene in 1954. I served eleven years altogether. It was a tough prison, and very hard to escape from. Romania on one side, Bulgaria on the other, and there we were in the middle of the wide, fast-flowing Danube, with armed guards everywhere. In the early days a lot of people were shot trying to get away. I lost several of my friends like that. Then the prisoners realised that it was practically impossible, so they stopped trying. From the other prisons I was in, there were always a few who managed to escape. But not from Belene.’

‘The river to me was like a great force, which one could never overcome. There were two camps there, number one and number two. The prisoners in number one were those who hadn't been sentenced yet. They were proper concentration camps, like those Hitler built, or Stalin set up in Siberia. There were barbed wire fences, and a look-out tower every thirty or forty metres, manned by guards with machine guns. Beyond the barbed wire were ditches full of water. Even if they didn't shoot you there, you couldn't have got off the island. There were several islands. There were even women prisoners on one of them, but not where we were. There were lots of theatre people. Even a famous singer, Lea Ivanova. And because they wanted to maintain the lie that there were no political prisoners in Bulgaria, they invented all kinds of crimes that we were supposed to have committed. But it was all a lie. The Interior Ministry decided how long we would stay there.’