The Danube (25 page)

‘Long, long ago there lived a master carver, whose skill was beyond anything known in the world …’ the story begins. Commissioned by the gods to build a stairway to heaven, the master obliges, and the stairway becomes the wonder of the world. ‘When his last hour arrived, the master mounted the stairway and climbed to heaven, where he has been watching over his heritage on the earth ever since.’

The years passed and evil people came, and began demolishing his stairway, and locked it away in a place where no light could penetrate, and set about building a different one of their own.

‘The anger of the gods was so great, they wept tears of fire, and set fire to the whole earth. Heaven and Earth mourned for a long time, until the gods granted grace to new masters.

‘Early one fine autumn morning, the masters broke the locks on the old stairway, and set it in its old place, now covered with golden tears. When the sun rose, the gods and the people saw the staircase, and marvelled at its beauty.

‘
Nobody knows the masters’ names or saw their faces; they disappeared as mysteriously as they appeared. They silently returned to the work from which they were interrupted by the gods.

‘According to the legend, fire will burn any evil man who tries to lay hands on the staircase, and will light the way of the good man.’

‘I was told this story by an old man, seated on a bench, close to the staircase of the gods, on a moonlit night. People who go to see the staircase meet the man and listen to his story. Could it be that the man is the Master himself?’

Brâncuşi's garden is as tranquil as one of his sculptures, but wild and abundant in a different way. The small red and yellow plums are just ripe, overhanging a wooden outhouse lined with farming tools. The wooden columns are carved in upward spirals. Brâncuşi learnt to carve wood with a sharp knife as he tended the sheep. The stone walls are overgrown with lichen, the well is deep and cool, and I haul up a wooden bucketful of water to parch my thirst and wash my face.

In the graveyard up the road, resting peacefully in the summer shade, his parents' graves are marked by a simple wooden cross: Nicolae Radu Brâncuşi, 1831–1884, and Maria Brâncuşi 1851–1919. The cross has a little roof, and the graves have a small fence around them, each fence post topped by a carved wooden star. The whole graveyard is deep in purple clover. In the last years of Constantin's life in his Parisian exile, he immersed himself once again in his own language and culture, and made several efforts to come home to Romania, or at least to bequeath his work to his home country. But the communist authorities perceived him to be a decadent artist, and wanted nothing to do with him, so he became a French citizen, and instead gave his work to France. His workshop is still preserved in the Pompidou centre in Paris, and he is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery where a version of his monumental sculpture ‘the Kiss’ stands on the grave of his friend Tania Rachevskaia.
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This kiss is undoubtedly one exchanged between lovers. The lips, arms and feet meet and merge hungrily with one another.

Brâncuşi never married.

On the road back from his village to Târgu Jiu, I stop to drink home-made lemonade with Ovidiu Popescu, the man in charge of Brâncuşi's
work in the county. He remembers the change in the attitude of the communist authorities. ‘It all began when they rebuilt the memorial house to him in Hobița … in 1967.’ Ironically, the same regime that carried out the death sentence on Ada Kaleh, Old Orşova and other settlements along the river, began at the same time to rehabilitate one of Romania's greatest sons. But the story is not so strange – communism survived so long through its flexibility, the cruelty but also the generosity of its protagonists; by giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Only when it became brittle, and incapable of subtlety, did it collapse. ‘Should Brâncuşi's remains be exhumed from Montparnasse and brought home to be buried beside his family in Hobița, as some Romanians would like?’ I ask Ovidiu. ‘I think he was deeply sad in his heart, as he lay dying in France. But I don't think he would like to be buried in Romania. He accepted that fact, he bought his grave there …’ In a park on the northern edge of Târgu Jiu, the third and most remarkable of Brâncuşi's works in his hometown points to the sky. The Endless Column ends rather abruptly – sixteen and a half hollow rhomboid shapes, made of laminated steel, painted with ship's varnish, like the hulls of the barges on the Danube, to protect them from the wind and water, the sun and ice. Inspired by the carved pillars which held up the porches of his childhood village, and the tree at the centre of the world of dreams and fairy-tales, it was also inspired by the turning of a simple screw. It contains ‘little material and much thought’, as a Croatian architect once said to me about the fifteenth-century bridge in Mostar.
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Brâncuşi grappled all his life with the problem of how to approach and express the infinite. The column, to be endless, cannot be too tall. ‘If it was too big, it would resemble the Tower of Babel.’ It has no base or capital, so it has no beginning, and no end.
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‘Nature creates plants that grow up straight and strong from the ground,’ Brâncuşi wrote, on the eve of the inauguration of the column in the park in Târgu Jiu. ‘Here is my column. It is in the garden of a friend in Romania. Its forms are the same from the ground to the top. It has no need of pedestal or base to support it, the wind will not destroy it, it stands by its own strength … It is thirty metres high, and you know that my friend there once told me that he had never been aware of the great beauty of his garden until he had placed my column there. It had opened his eyes.’
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I stand beside it in the park, and its long shadow of rhomboid shapes stretches out across fresh mown grass, past a short policeman.

The Danube at Eselnița at dawn is calm as a millpond. This is more lake than river, and at thirty metres deep it is the inverse of Brâncuşi's tower. There are no coincidences in engineering, or in nature.

Doru Oniga's little hotel is built partly on the shore, partly on the river itself, with a floating landing stage. I lower myself slowly into the water of the Danube for the first time on this journey. It is summer now, but the water is cool. Swallows flit over my head, so close to the water their wings almost break the surface. And I swim slowly upstream, towards the Iron Gates. Wooded hills slope steeply down to the river, which narrows all the way to the gorge where the slopes turn to cliffs. There's a little church at the base, like the churches of Meteora in Greece, but at the base, not the top of a pinnacle of rock. The water reflects the clouds and only a thin line separates the identical halves. There are two smudged suns; the whole morning is like an egg, sculpted by Brâncuşi, with a double yoke. Back in my room I open a slim copy of the poems of George Seferis at the following verse:

After breakfast, Doru's son Nicolae takes me upriver by boat. We pass the church, built in the 1990s to replace ‘the church under the water’, lost when the dam was constructed. According to my
Guide to the Romanian Orthodox Monastic Establishments
, the original church was dedicated to the Prophet Elijah.
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‘Throughout its long-lasting history, the monastery suffered years of appalling hardships: ravages inflicted by a host of invaders, obsequious offerings required by dire circumstances, foreign autocratic domination, and, in the long run, the hostility of nature itself (it was
flooded by the waters of the Danube River).’ A perfect recipe, then, for a life devoted to prayer. Several winters' supply of firewood is stacked high as a wall beneath the church, and an icon is painted on the white wall facing the river, of Christ in a golden cloud blessing his disciples as he rises to heaven from a landscape of spruce trees. These give a rather Balkan, rather than Middle Eastern, flavour to the picture. Above the words ‘Manastirea Mracuna’, Romanian and European Union flags, divided by a large cross, are painted on the wall. The octagonal dome and the pointed roof, less than twenty years old, are already rusting. Hanging baskets of red, white and pink flowers line the terrace outside the monks' quarters. Perched at the end of the narrow straits of the Danube, the church blesses travellers on their way.

Upstream from the church, the bulbous features of Decebal, moustachioed and wide-eyed, have been carved into the rock face, forty metres high and twenty-five wide. The ancient Dacian leader stares across the river at the opposite cliff. The words
Decebalus Rex, Dragan Fecit
(Decebal the king, Dragan made it) are carved into the rock beneath his face.
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The cliff rising above his head into the wooded slope provides him with the illusion of a huge forehead, or a pointed wizard's hat. The Romanian businessman who commissioned the work in the early twentieth century, Iosif Constantin Dragan, tried to persuade the Serbs to sculpt the face of Hadrian, facing Decebal across the river, but the Serbs refused – they have their own, more recent heroes, and do not share that identification with Decebal which many Romanians profess. Even Decebal is unfinished – Iosif Dragan ran out of money.

Navigation through this stretch of the Danube was once the most treacherous on the whole river. As the Danube forced its way through these mountains over tens of thousands of years, it lined its bed with the jagged rocks it tore from the limestone cliffs in its path. The Danube falls by several metres over a short stretch of only a hundred kilometres, and the combined effect on the water of the rocks on the bed and the sharp gradient of the river came to be known as ‘the boilers’. If the journey downriver by boat was a helter-skelter race to dodge the rocks beneath and along the shore, the journey upriver was even more dangerous.
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Hadrian solved the problem by building a road, carved deep into the cliff face, to bring his
legions from Rome to confront the Dacians. The road was dug by slave labour, like Gheorgiu-Dej's canal to the Black Sea from Cernavodă. The road was used from the seventeenth century onwards by teams of horses, to pull ships loaded with salt or grain upriver – the first towpath on the Danube. Only with the advent of steam ships and paddle steamers in the 1830s could larger ships manoeuvre upriver with ease. How the
Argo
must have struggled through here, the men at the row-locks, worshipping and simultaneously hating Medea and Jason, the lovers in the bow, as they strained upriver, the golden fleece draped around the mast, the sails pulled down to prevent the sudden, strange winds of the gorge tugging the ship to its doom.

Nicolae steers his motorboat under a cluster of acacia trees overhanging the water, and we step tentatively ashore, into the Veterans cave. The rock vaults overhead like the gateway of a cathedral, such as Salisbury or Cologne. A glorious ray of sunlight bursts like a spotlight through the roof. I sit on my dusty throne in brilliant sunlight, in the epicentre of the velvet darkness. It feels like the end of a journey. I could stay here forever. The cave got its name from the Austrian soldiers who set up camp here in the dying decades of the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century, to harry passing Ottoman ships – western pirates, attacking the galleys of the Empire of the East. A little further upriver is the Ponicova cave. There is a treacherous footpath down to this one from the road on the other side of the mountain. The Danube is only two hundred metres wide at this point, to Serbia on the far shore. In Ceauşescu's time this was famous as an escape route from communist Romania. So many men and women attempted the treacherous crossing that the Romanian authorities posted border -guards permanently in the cave. Some escapees were shot as they swam; others were caught by Yugoslav border guards when they made it to the far shore and returned to Romania to receive their punishment – several years' hard labour. Yet others escaped detection, or were fortunate with the border -guard they encountered, who let them quietly pass. Yugoslavia was a much more open country than Romania, and there was a good chance they could continue their journey to the West from there, especially if they had friends to help them. I met the owner of a pizzeria in Constanța once, who had escaped Romania from here in the early 1980s. He made his way to New York, and worked his way up from dish-washer to restaurant owner. After the revolution he returned to Constanța and now has his own business
empire.
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The
Tui Mozart
passenger cruiser, registered in Valletta, Malta, roars by downriver. I hope they have someone on board to tell the passengers the story of these caves.

The Iron Gates might actually be better named the Iron Gateway – there is no gate to block the way, just the sixty-kilometre passage from the plains of the Lower Danube behind me to those of Serbia, Croatia and Hungary ahead. Travelling through the gates, by road or boat, I have the sense of an umbilical cord. The river is very deep here – as deep as the ledges off the Black Sea coast at the Danube mouth. It is exhilarating to be trapped between cliffs, with so much water below and sky above. The richly wooded undergrowth of the slopes on either side of the river provides a special climate for all kinds of plants, and wildlife, especially for snakes, the most ancient symbol of the Danube.

On the pontoon of Doru's Danube Star Hotel, a former chief engineer in the Romanian merchant navy, Gabriel Florescu, a guest of the hotel, talks about his years at sea. Now he's the head of the harbour in Constanța, but often comes to Eselnița. He used to take cargoes of timber to Britain in the early 1990s when the forests of the Carpathians were being decimated for export. The propeller of his ship broke once, off Plymouth, on a wreck left from the Second World War. They limped all the way up the coast to North Shields to get it repaired. The
Meanogorsk
, flying a Ukrainian blue and yellow flag, goes upstream towards the boilers. Carrying grain, Gabriel says, or steel. The cargo is buried deep in the hold, and the hull is deep in the water as we watch through our binoculars. It slows at the approach to the ‘small boilers’, then takes the narrow channel close to the left bank. ‘It can rain in Orşova, but we don't feel a drop here,’ Doru says. ‘The wind blasts through the Gates, deflecting the rain up to Bǎile Herculane – the Baths of Hercules.’ It suddenly gets cool, at eight in the evening. It is hard to believe, sitting here watching it, that such a huge river can squeeze through such a narrow gap. Beneath the pontoon, the large head of a catfish hangs as a trophy. The fish was more than a hundred kilos in weight and nearly three metres long when Doru trapped it in the shallows beneath his hotel. He drives me up the valley to Bǎile Herculane. From here, there are daily trains to my home in Budapest. The town got its name from a myth relating to the Greek god Hercules, who slew a dragon in a cave nearby. The domed roof of the railway station is decorated
with enormous frescoes of the man in action. It was not an easy fight, even for a god, and Hercules was badly wounded in the encounter.
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Fortunately there were healing springs to hand. And that may be the main point of the story – not how Hercules slew the dragon, but how he was healed of his wounds. The thermal springs were also tapped by the Roman armies to heal their sore feet after their long march from Rome. The water pours out of the rock at 54 degrees Celsius, and has to be cooled to 37 degrees to be used. Like Karlovy Vary in Bohemia and Héviz in Hungary, the town developed as a fashionable holiday resort in the nineteenth century, made possible by the opening of the railway line through the mountains to Timişoara in 1878. The Cerna river flows steeply down through a thickly forested valley. The name means ‘black’ but the colour of the water is red, because of all the iron in the rocks. The forests, and the woods on either side of the Danube, are especially famous not only for their snakes but also for their turtles. ‘Poor turtles,’ wrote Brâncuşi, ‘they crawl along so close to the devil, but whenever they put their heads out of their shells, they risk being trodden on by God.’
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