The Danube (35 page)

My drinking partners and their wives are full of the joys of their cruise. They flew to Bucharest and took a bus to Ruse, where they boarded ship. They can't tell me which was the best place they visited, but the organisers have clearly gone to some lengths to give them a taste of local life. A Serbian man and his wife gave them an excellent dinner near Osijek – ‘very critical of the government,’ one man remembers. In Vukovar they praise the excellent meal cooked for them by a Croatian family. Wasn't it strange to be travelling above water after so many years? Far from it! they chortle in chorus. Some of them have known each other for fifty years. ‘The worse times under the ocean, in the nuclear submarines, were the first week, and the last,’ says one man, whose record was eighty-three days under water. ‘And what of the dangers of the job?’ I ask. They look at each other a little sheepishly, to check that none of their wives are listening. ‘The girls in the ports,’ one explains. ‘We were lucky that those were the years before AIDS. But there would be mornings …’ he pauses for effect, ‘when you woke to see whose head lay on your arm on the pillow, and you wanted to gnaw your arm off!’

I've had a few drinks by this time and the sun is sinking fast above the far bank. I abandon my plan of sleeping in Kalocsa and start to enquire among the small cluster of houses if there's anywhere I can find a bed for the night. Tamás Klopcsek is caretaker for several buildings belonging to the local council and finds me a comfortable bed in one of them. He had a thriving car-repair garage in Kalocsa during the communist era, repairing Western makes of cars such as Rovers and Fords. He needed good contacts
in western Europe to buy parts, which drew him to the attention of the authorities. As a suspected spy, the state took everything from him, though he was not sent to prison. Instead, he got a job as a long-distance truck driver, and did that for twenty-three years. As we talk, his large alsatian, Nero, takes a particular interest in the tyres of my bike, no doubt detecting traces of the mongrels who tried to bite through them. From the mobile home in which he sleeps, Tamás produces a certificate which shows his two million miles without an accident, printed in Geneva. Now he enjoys a semi-retirement, growing and bottling fruit. The council has plans to restart the ferry service, which will bring more visitors.

I eat alone at sunset in the restaurant on the shore, and taste the white wine of Szekszárd – a region best known for its red wines, but which clearly has something more to offer. I wake soon after midnight, to hear the engines of the
River Adagio
churning the water – casting off to get my submariner friends to Budapest in time for breakfast. In the early morning, I swim upriver in the chilly green waters, barely making any progress against the flow. Somewhere upstream, not far away, is the nuclear power station at Paks, which cools its turbines with river water and pumps it back out much warmer, like the power station at Cernavodǎ. But I cannot travel the Danube without getting my chin wet. And I nearly survived the Third World War, after all.

The Paprika Museum in Kalocsa is the only one of its kind in the world, and as I come through the door I understand why – the magnificent smell of the scarlet red powder hurts my eyes and burns my nostrils. The Turks brought paprika to Hungary after the battle of Mohács, and it has turned into the national spice, livening up dishes from goulash to paprika mushrooms, and the ubiquitous fish soup. I have seen Hungarians put paprika on scrambled eggs, and use it to control greenfly on roses. Known first as ‘Indian pepper’ or ‘Turkish pepper’ in the great medieval herbals, Kalocsa and Szeged emerged in the eighteenth century as the best paprika-growing districts. There are black-and-white pictures of paprika in great sacks in 1956, at the time of the great flood in Baja. Part of the museum is dedicated to the work of the Hungarian Nobel Prize winner for chemistry Albert Szent-Györgyi and his discovery of ascorbic acid, later known as Vitamin C. This he first extracted, not from citrus fruits, which have relatively small amounts, but from paprika. ‘For some unknown reason nature
has made the Hungarian red paprika the most miraculous storage for ascorbic acid,’ he wrote in 1937, well on his way to his discovery.
¹⁴

For the first time since Mohács the day is overcast when I set out and the clouds make cycling easier. I cut inland from the dyke, and the road takes me through field after field of glorious red paprika, contrasting with the dark green of the stem and leaves. Keen to uncover some of the secrets of this miraculous plant, I hail a line of women harvesting it. The headgear of each is different – a straw hat, a headscarf, a baseball cap.

I ask for just five minutes of their time, and they tease me that they can only spare three. ‘
Nem győztem az angolokat várni, várni, bekellet a, bekellet a TSZCS-be állni …
’ sings Eszter Boldizsár, when she finds out my nationality. ‘I couldn't wait any more for the English, so I had to join the Co-operative …’ – a song from the end of the Second World War, when the dreams that British and American troops would rescue Hungary from communism evaporated. I apologise for the delay, on behalf of the entire British people. The paprika look red and rude, erect on the plants or curled up in the white buckets. The sound of them landing in the buckets as the women throw them from nearby is like the patter of rain at the start of a summer shower. How can one tell if the paprika is ripe? ‘Just from the colour; those over there aren't ready yet. We call them smoky … They grow best here because there's more sunshine. That means the colour is better, and there's more vitamin C in them.’ Eszter has grown paprika and tended them all her life. The plants require a lot of input, ‘precise work – the hoeing, spraying, watering, picking, the tying into strings, the grinding into powder’. And what does she like most about the work? ‘The work itself! Whoever likes to work finds their pleasure in it. Those who don't like labour won't find pleasure in anything, anyway!’ Its seasonal labour, and the women pick through the year – poppy seed, maize, peas, beans, whatever they're paid for.

‘Paprika is a plant with a memory,’ says another woman, Irén. ‘If you start watering it at the beginning, when it's small, you have to water it all the way through. Its roots go downwards. If they find enough water, they feed from their smaller roots, near the surface, and never grow a strong, central root. Look at these ones here – they've never really been watered, and look how beautiful they are! It's going to be a good year.’ The previous year it rained all through August, and the paprika harvest was worthless.
‘The sun is the god of the paprika plant!’ And how do you tell which are sweet and which are spicy? ‘You must never plant the two kinds near one another, because then you get plants which are both at the same time. And you can't sell them,’ says Irén. She used to decorate plates by hand at the porcelain factory in Kalocsa, but the workforce has dropped from a hundred and twenty, to just four. ‘That's how I became a peasant!’

My three minutes are up, though the women didn't stop working for a moment as we talked, and they each present me with a paprika, to dry at home and plant out for my own crop next spring.

At Ordas I stop to read the plaque on the massive, pollarded trunk of an oak. ‘Here the bloody flag of freedom flew,’ reads the text. ‘Ferenc Rákóczi II camped under this tree from 30th April to 26th May 1704.’ Soon after the Austrian Habsburgs drove the Turks from Buda and the third of the country they had ruled for 160 years, a new conflict broke out between the Hungarian nobility, which had mostly converted to Protestantism during the Reformation, and the Austrians who were determined to reimpose Catholicism on their new dominions. Starvation and oppression in the countryside provoked the peasants to join the rebellion led by Rákóczi, in the hope of an end to serfdom. For once, noble and peasant marched under the same ‘bloody banner of freedom’. The armies of Charles VI defeated the Hungarians in the field, but the Austrian emperor thought it wise in the Treaty of Szatmár in 1711 to confirm the privileges of the nobles and grant them autonomy. The peasants got nothing.

Near Dunapataj, another shepherd in this country of shepherds, János, walks two hundred sheep towards me along the dyke, a bleating wave, thickening and thinning at the edges, cream-grey on green. János has a flat hat and a curved staff and an equally curvy moustache. The profession of shepherding survives, he says, thanks to the hunger of Italians for lamb. Few are eaten in Hungary, but ‘if you have more than five hundred, its worth milking them for their cheese’.

I cross the green iron bridge to Dunaföldvár at four thirty in the afternoon, my first visit to the right bank of the river since Mohács. The town's name means ‘Danube hill fort’, and after booking into a room overlooking the shore I climb the hill to explore the castle. The museum is shut, but in a shop nearby a woman called Eszter sells her pottery. We chat until her
partner arrives. Imre hitchhiked to England for the legendary Isle of Wight rock festival in August 1970. It took him a whole week to get there, and a week to get back, but he said it was all worthwhile. It was the last time Jimi Hendrix played – he died two weeks after the festival. Imre and I walk down to the lower town to eat a fish soup together in a restaurant. Eszter meets us there, and they walk me back to my room. She talks about the birth of her child, how she nearly died in childbirth, and how scary it was ‘on the other side’. A full moon hangs over the sandy cliffs above my temporary home. I sometimes find myself invited deeper into people's lives than either I or they expect.

I get up very early and cycle up the hill to see the cliff-top that gave this town its name – earth fort – and to listen to the seven o'clock bells. Inside a wine cellar at the end of a cobbled street an elderly man turns the big metal wheel on a green-painted wine press. He offers me a glass of fresh must, which I am glad to accept for my breakfast. Then I help him crush his grapes, while he drops armfuls of them into the centre from a loaded wheelbarrow. Uncle Feri has two kinds of grapes –
ezerjó
and another one I can't quite understand. But it doesn't matter. The grape -juice is pinky-orange in the early September morning light, and sweeter than wine.

On a rock in the castle grounds is a bronze statue of László Magyar, one of Hungary's greatest explorers, emerging through the shape of Africa, his hat tied on his back, a parchment map unrolled in his hands.
¹⁵
The illegitimate son of a big landowner, he went to elementary school in Dunaföldvár, enrolled as a cadet in the Austrian merchant navy, and served on the slave boats between Madagascar and the Caribbean. He stayed in touch with his homeland and applied for a research grant from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to explore South America. When this was turned down he tried his luck in Africa instead. In May 1848, as his fellow countrymen embarked on their war of liberation from Habsburg Austria, he discovered the source of the Congo river, sailing the last stretch upriver with six Cabindan sailors from Angola. In his diaries, he describes the arrival of the river in the Atlantic: ‘This huge river, six nautical miles wide at the mouth, flows with great force from east to west, pouring its yellow, troubled waters into the ocean with such awesome power, that the yellow colour of its waters, and their sweet taste, can still be experienced, three nautical miles out to sea.’ He took the name Enganna Komo and settled down in the coastal town of
Benguela with his many wives, including the fourteen-year-old Ina-Kullu-Ozoro, the daughter of a local chieftain. When he closed his eyes at night, with the sound of the Atlantic Ocean resounding along the shore, did he ever dream of the Danube at Dunaföldvár?

In the grounds of the castle there is a massive millstone, worn down not by the wheat but by the golden grains of the sun and the silver rain. I bought an old iron wood-burning stove in this town once, made in the town of Nadrág, meaning ‘trousers’, in Transylvania.

I cycle back across the bridge and take a detour down to the gravel works, in search of recent treasures dredged up from the river. But the men are busy and none too helpful. The roar of the machinery drowns out my attempts at conversation, so I turn my bicycle and wobble away northwards. Some lads stay at home, watching the gravel of the Danube flow through their fingers. Other strike out for foreign parts.

Dunaegyháza, Apostag, Dunavecse, Szalkszentmárton … I cycle like the wind upriver, like a hound now with the smell of home, Budapest, in my nostrils. I make sandwiches near the dyke at Tass, then miss the left turn across the dam on to Csepel Island. So I keep up along the Soroksári branch of the Danube, the junior branch of the river. The main shipping lane continues further west, on the far side of Csepel Island. This is an angler's world. The weekend cottages are crowded with fishermen perched, big-bellied on little pontoons, or dozing in rowing boats awash with empty beer bottles. The mottled afternoon light sharpens the edges, the fronds of the water, half reed, half willow, a mosaic of deep shade and blinding sunlight. There are bars with a few chairs outside and a jug of wine on the table, replenished from a barrel in the cellar.

In Ráckeve I cross a small bridge over the Soroksári Danube branch to climb the fireman's tower with the librarian from the children's library, whose other job is to take strangers out onto her perch, overlooking the river. The view is magnificent in all directions. I can see the hills of Buda, still forty kilometres away, in the far distance. Down on the Danube shore at Ráckeve I see my first Danubian water mill, lovingly restored. Before 1950, there were six of them on the main river here. Each spring they were pulled by hand by the men along the towpath, on 15 March, the national holiday, all the way down the Soroksári branch to the main river, then up
the other side of Csepel Island. Then back again each autumn, on 30 November, unless the ice and cold on the main river forced them back beforehand. The mill can grind more than a hundred kilos of flour an hour. There's a label on each bag declaring it to be ‘unfit for human consumption’, which is not true, I'm told, but the mill cannot get official approval according to European Union requirements. I would buy a bag and taste it myself, but there's enough ballast in my saddlebags already. The men running the museum ply me with apples, and recommend ‘the last miller’, eighty-two-year-old Márton Reimer, who lives just along the towpath.