The Danube (34 page)

In Baja I find a small hotel for the night, proud of my progress. Only thirty-two kilometres from Mohács, my legs and back ache, and my eyes are dazzled by the sun and wind. After a shower, I walk gingerly through the town to Petőfi Island in search of supper. From the terrace of the Vizafogó (Sturgeon Catcher's) restaurant, overlooking the Sugovica, I watch the orange lights of the town come on, and the stars grow brighter over the Danube. Through the glass window, on television, Hungary is playing Moldova at soccer. The waiter brings regular reports of the score, with each glass of wine or plate. The final tally is 2–0 to Hungary, a great victory.

The hero of Baja is István Türr, just as the heroine of Mohács was Dorottya Kanizsai. Down on the Danube shore, the István Türr lookout tower boasts a plaque at the entrance. ‘This stone is dedicated to István Türr; the Austrian army officer sentenced to death; commander of the Hungarian Piedmont legion; the volunteer in the Baden, Turkish and scout wars; one of the immortal one thousand of Marsalai; Garibaldi's general; the general of the governor of Naples Victor Emmanuel; the brave soldier in every battle. Who fought on foreign fields, under foreign flags, for the honour of the Hungarian sword, and for the glory of the town of his birth.’ A second stone table extols Türr's other peacetime virtues: the initiator of the Ferenc József and Baja canals, ‘champion of the idea of the Panama canal, champion of public education, and of peace between nations’. Something of an all-rounder, then. At the top of the tower, hundreds of padlocks, engraved with the names of lovers and sometimes whole families, have been attached to the railings, and their keys thrown into the Danube. Valerie and Ludovic, Márti and Laci, Fernanda and Tamás, all linked with hand-carved hearts. The bottom of the river here must be thick with keys, the sediment of love.

The next morning Éva Kis shows me round the István Türr museum, which is dedicated to fishing and other Danube-based pursuits. The nets are fine and delicate, like the lingerie of a river goddess. As nubile as Danubia? Why did the Romans insist on the whiskery Danubius?

The
csontos kece
is a three-part net ringed with cow bones, designed to be hauled along the riverbed. The bones are just right for this purpose, strong, yet light enough to bounce over the obstacles and scrape through the gravel on the bottom of the river without getting heavy and waterlogged, like wood. There are mirror nets, now banned for animal rights reasons as the fish suffer so much in them when they are caught; huge nets resembling women skirts, requiring great strength and skill to throw out into the water. And a black-and-white photograph of a young man doing so, watched with uninhibited interest by three girls who have paused from their task of cleaning fish. A large beluga sturgeon, about three metres long and preserved in a case, is in a place of honour near the entrance, its four huge whiskers poking down from below its nose like skewers, its face viewed from the side strangely human, like a caricature of a whiskery man with a carnival nose. On the wall is a medieval illustration explaining how sturgeon were caught – not with the
garda
, the fences of the Lower Danube, but with a stout rope, held right across the river bed, from bank to bank, with wicked-looking hooks dangling from it, each weighed down with a lead ball. As the sturgeon migrated upriver, staying close to the bottom, these hooks would catch in their sides and, when the rope was hauled up, the fish could be caught and eventually landed. In this picture, the fish is several times longer than the boat. ‘When the children see this one,’ says my guide, pointing to the great preserved fish, ‘they think it's a shark.’ Big barbed hooks are displayed along the wall, and there's a price list from 1746: twelve forints for sturgeon, two forints for catfish, one and a half for carp. The sturgeon catch for six parishes in the Kalocsa bishopric is listed for the same year: 10,000 kilos in the spring, 11,000 kilos in the autumn.

Another part of the exhibition deals with the traditional water mills on the Danube. Baja was especially favoured because of the strong current, close to six kilometres per hour. There are scale models and drawings of the mills, which were made from two boats, moored together like the hulls of a catamaran, one substantially larger than the other. Between the two, a
large water wheel with paddles is suspended that was turned by the current where the boat was moored, to turn the mill in the larger of the two boats. There are also models of the grain boats that were pulled upriver along the tow path by teams of horses, to take grain to the mill-boats. Each is decorated with bowsprits, which resemble neither the goddesses of the Greeks nor the dragons of the Chinese, but the head of the chello of the Hungarians – ever a musical nation.

Unlike in Mohács, where I ate fish soup waiting for the ferry, dunked with big chunks of crusty white bread, the tradition in Baja is to cook pasta in the soup. Éva explains why. By law, the millers were obliged to feed their employees. Fish were classified by the church as ‘fasting-food’, suitable to be eaten on Fridays and during Lent. As a result, the millers' boys complained that fish soup was not ‘real food’, and that the millers were not treating them properly. The millers' wives solved the problem by mixing home-made noodles, made from the plentiful flour and eggs, into the soup, to make it more substantial, and so satisfy both the hard-working lads' hunger and the stipulations of the law.

According to a cookbook published in 1622 by István Galgóczi, there are nineteen ways to prepare sturgeon. According to another, published in Kolozsvár-Cluj in 1695, ‘Salt the fish and leave to stand for a little. Then cook it in wine with white bread. Add pepper, saffron, ginger, honey and vinegar and cook well. Serve hot.’
⁹

There is also a tall wooden statue of St John Nepomuk, the patron saint of millers and sailors. As confessor to the family of the King of Bohemia, friction arose between him and the monarch. When John maintained the secrecy of the confessional, and refused to disclose to the king what the queen had told him in confidence, the king had him tortured, his hands chopped off, and he was thrown from the Charles Bridge in Prague into the River Vltava. As he hit the water, the story goes, the surface rose, full of stars, and bore him to safety. Each year on 15 May the people of Baja carry his statue by boat down the Sugovica branch of the Danube and parade it through the town. A large barrel of wine is broached for the occasion, and the townspeople can drink their fill in honour of their saint's miraculous survival.

The final exhibit in the museum is a closed wooden boat drilled with holes. This was for the fishermen to load their catch into and pull behind
their boats like a submarine, all the way back to the town to sell the still fresh fish. The wealthier fishermen pinned a gold fish over their gates, while the poorer ones lived with their families in shacks on the shore from spring to autumn. Each poor family owned a single copper cauldron and ate their fish soup from spoons made from river shells. A seventeenth-century map on the wall, from Count Marsigli's famous guide to the Danube published in Amsterdam in 1726, shows the river as an unruly dragon, curling and curving across the landscape, before it was tamed and straightened into its present straitjacket in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
¹⁰

Cycling upriver from Baja, I take a detour into the city river port. In Marsigli's day, even to reach the port I would have had to cross one or two meanders of the river, but now the path is smooth, out through the suburbs, past schools, houses and István Türr's tower in the unseasonal heat. The docks are a sparse clutter of tall cranes and railway tracks, grain silos with German-sounding names, and trucks turning.

László Nagy is director of the port, which is still owned by the state. Nine barges can moor at one time here and pay for the privilege. It's one of the busiest ports in Hungary, he says, handling 600,000 to 900,000 tonnes of goods a year, about a tenth of all the freight that passes through Hungary on the river, and which actually touches the shore. Later, I check in my
Statistical Handbook of Hungarian Shipping 1945–1968
for the corresponding figure from the communist era.
¹²
Just a little lower for Baja – 500,000 tonnes that year. Stone and gravel were the single biggest items then, followed by mineral oil, iron and manganese ore, coal and coke, fertiliser, timber, and finally grain. ‘Soya comes upstream, mostly from Brazil. Boats load local wheat, barley, sunflower seed, maize and oilseed rape for the Austrian market. This year trade has been weak.’

The blockage of the Danube from 1999 to 2003 still casts a strong shadow over business, which has never recovered, László says. Low levels of
water are a constant problem, with ships forced to unload goods and send them on, more expensively, by train. The general state of Hungarian agriculture is another theme. ‘This used to be a country of ten million pigs – now there are less than three million!’ In the summer of 2012, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán promised to double that number to six million. There are also positive sides to László Nagy's tale – a new brand name has just been launched – Kincses Bácska – the Treasures of Bácska County – to advertise local produce. ‘Its success depends on three things: the persistence and willpower of the people, the good example of investors, and the good will of the state.’

Before I get back on my bike and cycle past his giant cranes, the conversation strays inevitably to recipes for fish soup. ‘One kilo of fish, ideally carp,’ he suggests, ‘a litre of water, a head of onion, and a spoonful of paprika, and cook together for three to four hours.’ On the second weekend of July, at the annual Baja fish-soup festival, up to two thousand cauldrons of soup compete for the prize – ‘and no two soups are ever the same!’ Wine must be drunk with the soup, he insists, because according to a local saying, ‘fish must never swim three times in water – once in the river and once in the pot is enough – there shouldn't be water in the stomach as well!’

Sustained by such advice and more, I wobble back up the dyke. Under the bridge over the Danube, a black plaque with gold lettering is mounted by a small road. ‘At this point on 1st November 1921, Charles IV the rightful King of Hungary boarded ship and left the country to escape his enemies. In remembrance of this, Hungarians, learn to love your country better than you hate one another.’
¹³
It is a brusque but important message for a people always generous to strangers but rough on one another.

In the shade of a forest to the right of the dyke, one of István Magony's five hundred sheep has just given birth. We approach very slowly and stop at a good distance so as not to disturb the ewe, who is peacefully nibbling at the green weeds among the dry, yellow grass, while her little black and white lamb, already standing unsteadily, tugs anxiously at her udders. István lives alone in a shack further up the dyke, ‘across the stream, between two sets of bee-hives’. His wife left him, unable to bear the loneliness of a shepherd's life. Another lamb was born last night. He needed to help with that one, but this ewe managed all on her own. His boss, the owner of the
sheep, will drive out in his Mercedes to take the mother and lamb away from the flock for a while. István earns 30,000 forints a month in cash – about 150 dollars, with all his food and tobacco paid for. He knows other shepherds who earn 80,000 forints, but have to pay for their own keep, and he's happy with this arrangement as it is – he could easily spend a thousand forints a month on cigarettes, two packets a day. The sheep graze on the
parlagfű
, a weed with gentle green fronds that has spread widely across central Europe and is blamed for hay fever and all the school and workdays lost each September. The sheep love it, he says, and proves it by hunting for a stem of the weed to show me, where the sheep have been grazing since this morning. We have trouble finding a single leaf. He gets up at five-thirty each morning and sets out at six. He walks with his flock till ten, then rests with his sheep in the shade till three, then sets out back, about ten to twenty kilometres a day. He gets home at seven, and it is dark, at this time of year, by eight.

I feel I'm just beginning to uncover the secrets of a countryside I have passed through for years. Just further on up the dyke, Tibor cares for forty-two cows and a bull – ‘Look at him, poor bloke, he can hardly walk, with so many women to please!’ He lives in a caravan further upriver, and, like everyone else, grumbles about the drought and the scarcity of grass for his animals. As the maize is cut and harvested, the farmers allow him to take the cows into the fields to taste the leftovers – ‘but not for long, too much is not good for them’.

I stop for a
fröccs
, the Hungarian name for a drink of half wine and half carbonated water, then get chased by dogs as I come down to the ferry crossing to Gerjen. I pedal like the wind, thinking of my fellow English folk already exposed to the horrors of the Romanian hounds I had dismissed so lightly. I attribute my own miraculous escape to the timely intercession of a painting of a blue-cloaked Madonna, baring her breast to reveal a heart struck through with a dagger. In her right hand she holds a white flower. ‘Roadside Mary, Pray for us we beg’ reads the inscription, and the date 1947, a year when Hungary, that lost so much in the war, was being twisted to fit the iron grip of the Communist Party and its Russian masters.

Down by the water I watch a party of tourists coming ashore from one of the huge, gleaming Danube passenger ships, the
River Adagio
. They're
all Americans, and as open and friendly to a stray English cyclist as if I had shown up on their own porch on the Mississippi. We sit drinking beer from plastic mugs in the shade of a little bar set up by some enterprising Hungarian who must have a copy of the ships' timetables. As my luck would have it, they're retired nuclear submariners who served for years under the polar icecaps, waiting to push the button to wipe out the Soviet Union and start the Third World War. The tattoo on the forearm of one man shows a wide expanse with a rocket soaring up through the ice, and the slogan – ‘North Pole, August 1960’. I was six months old then. If the war had broken out, I would not have had much of a life, irradiated in the cellar of the house I was born in by the River Medway, just south of the incinerated remains of London.