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Authors: Nick Thorpe

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BOOK: The Danube
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T
HE
B
OAT
from Tulcea down the Sulina arm of the Danube delta is packed with people and goods. Sacks of oats for the horses of Sulina, nappies for its babies, Greek oranges, Spanish tomatoes, Bolivian bananas, but above all people. Ladies with flowered headscarves, anchored to the deck with shopping bags, two narrow-hipped teenage girls on their way to visit their grandmother, middle-aged lovers making a new start, gazing into the wake of the boat, but most of all an army of chiselled-faced men, brooding over the stern in their Baltic-blue workers’ jackets, smoking in silent clusters on the deck.

Willows line the riverbanks, the old men of the river, their gnarled and twisted roots reaching down to the water for one last drink. Fast-growing Canadian poplars crowd behind them, like teenagers trying to get into a party. In one place a whole forest of them has been massacred, levelled to the ground. The Danube smells like the sea I grew up beside, in southern England, but greener, more pungent, unsalted. There are seagulls, though,
and cormorants. Black, hook-necked, then straight-backed as soldiers with yellow noses, slow and dignified in their movements as surgeons, perched on driftwood on the banks of the river, diving gracefully as arrows into the water. Lone herons, cranes, storks and egrets. Only ducks and geese fly together in groups. All the others fish by themselves, with a wary eye on their fellow birds, or human interference with the life of the riverbank.

The ferry takes four and a half hours from Tulcea to Sulina, sixty kilo-metres east, on the Black Sea coast. There are no roads, just a labyrinth of creeks and marshes. The delta has the biggest concentration of reed banks on earth. The Black Sea into which the yellow-brown Danube pours is an inland lake, isolated from the Atlantic Ocean by the long, lazy body of the Mediterranean. Bold sailors passing through the straits of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus must have wondered if they would ever see the Bay of Biscay again. In places, sand-dunes and soil have settled long enough to allow a village to spring up. Milea 23 is named after ‘Mile 23’ from the Danube mouth. C. A. Rosetti, on the Chilia arm, is a cluster of villages named after a nineteenth-century Romanian novelist, though the settlement was actually created by shepherds whose sheep found just enough dry land to lead them on towards the beckoning surf. Constantin Rosetti was also a politician, whose support for the 1848 revolution nearly led him to the gallows. Rescued by the pleas of his English wife, Mary, the sister of the British consul in Bucharest, he later served as Minister of Police.
2

I go out on deck into the grey afternoon. The Danube is grey, the sky is grey, even the forests on each side of the river are shades of grey. The scene is brightened only by the occasional splash of colour of the peasant houses and the sea-stained hulls of passing ships. Upriver they carry bauxite ore from Russia or Brazil to the aluminium works in Tulcea. Other ships are empty, high in the water, on their way to fetch laminated sheets from the steel mills of Galați; the
Belfin
, and the
Burhan Dizman
, registered in Istanbul, the
Ayane
from Valletta.
3
Like rare birds, lone sailors stand gazing down from the gangways at our crowded river ferry into a world in which families and friends still travel together. If my children were with me, we would wave. Instead, I sweep their decks with my binoculars, trying to catch a glimpse of the man at the wheel, his face set against the dying day.

There are a few villages beside the river, spreadeagled along the shore on either side as though the river were the main street. Tidy stacks of cut reed
are piled high beside houses with thatched or tin roofs. Rowing boats with black-tarred hulls are moored by wooden jetties, or turned upside down like seashells by the path. The houses are wooden, their window frames painted blue, or white or green. Cockerels call from the shore. White-coated geese waddle self-importantly, like doctors on a tour of a hospital ward. Fishermen, always in pairs, cast off in their black boats. One man rows while the other patiently feeds the floats of a net out between his fingers.

There is not a bare head to be seen in the river world. The men wear Cossack-style hats, flat caps or baseball caps; the older women scarves or knitted woollen hats. Even the birds seem to be wearing hats, the tufted plumes of their feathers. The river is wide, ten to fourteen metres deep, and there is plenty of space for all manner of craft to pass. The blue, yellow and red Romanian ensign, the blue and yellow of Ukraine, and the Dutch tricolour are stiff in the afternoon breeze.

Our boat arrives in Sulina right on time at five-thirty. A crowd of people and a horse and cart are waiting on the quay. The gangplank clatters down and thick wire ropes are looped around the stanchions. A bubble of laughter bursts as relatives fall into each other's arms, elderly couples peck each other on the cheeks, then reach for their bags. Much of the rest of the town, with no one in particular to meet, has wandered down to the shore to watch the new arrivals. Cut off from the rest of the world by water and reed banks, the visit of the daily boat from Tulcea is a landmark in their lives.

I book into the Hotel Jean Bart, just along the shore from the ferry landing. It has a Wild West feel, with heavy, wooden panelling in the dining room and hibernating geraniums on the window ledge of my high-ceilinged bedroom, smelling of black pepper. From the outside, the hotel is striped dark red and white like a raspberry ripple. I'm in a rush to reach the Black Sea before darkness falls.

On the unmade road east to the sea beyond Sulina is the town graveyard. A young couple are just leaving as I reach the gate. Their eyes are not graveyard red, but their lips are fresh from kissing. There's a little chapel with a wooden tower and a weather vane, and just behind it is the British section of the cemetery. The English names seem particularly desolate beside the Danube, so far from the Tyne and the Thames, the Mersey and the Medway.

‘Sacred to the memory of Thomas Rutherford of Houdon Pans, England, Chief Engineer of the Steam Ship
Kepler
of North Shields, who
departed this life on the 26th day of July 1875 at Sulina, aged 36 years.’ This is followed by a quote from Psalm 39: ‘Thou makest my days as a handbreath, and my years are as nothing before thee.’ James Mason, of the
Phoenician
of Sunderland, died at Sulina on 3 October 1852, aged twenty years. William Simpson died at Sulina on 28 July 1870 aged forty-six years. His stone was erected by the European Commission of the Danube, ‘by whom Mr Simpson was employed for 13 years as foreman of the works’. I wonder if old Charles Hartley attended the funeral, exposed his bowed head to the burning August sun as they lowered Bill Simpson into the ground. There are four names on the next stone, seamen from HBMS
Recruit
, all drowned in the Danube between 1859 and 1861. How could a ship be careless enough to lose four sailors in just two years? ‘And also for Peter Gregor, stoker, who died from the effects of climate.’

The wrecks marked on shipping charts, on either side of the Danube mouth, are proof that this is not always such a placid river.

Finally, with a beautifully carved olive branch at the top of the stone: ‘In loving memory of Isabella Jane Robinson, eldest and dearly beloved daughter of E. A. and E. D. S. Robinson of South Shields, aged 28, who drowned off Sulina on 27 September 1896, by the foundering through collision of the S/S
Kylemoor
.’

Near the entrance of the graveyard, I see the freshest grave of all. A low shoulder of hard sand and a bunch of flowers. Ion Valentin, it says on his simple wooden cross, born 2011, died 2011.

Sulina is a town founded by pirates, made famous by consuls, which survives on an uneasy diet of fish and foreigners. It was first mentioned by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII in a long letter to his fourteen-year-old son in
AD
950, about the tribes he might expect to have to deal with when he inherited the throne. ‘The Russians come down the Dnieper river to the Black Sea each year in dug-out boats,’ Constantine wrote, ‘past the Danube mouth to the Selinas (Sulina) river, and are constantly harried by the tribe of Pechenegs, who pick off any boats that stray from the rest, all the way down the coast to Constantinople.’
4

The far gate of the graveyard is already locked for the night, so I clamber over the fence and press on towards a sea I can no longer see but can hear more clearly, resounding off new houses, poised in the sand like crabs beyond the cemetery. Seabirds call from close at hand among the
whispering reeds, their preparations for sleep disturbed by my intrusion. Then the sand is suddenly soft beneath my bare feet, followed by the painful crackle of shells, and I see the white lines of the waves on a dark canvas. For once, the Black Sea is really black. A lighthouse pulses white at the end of a long jetty. I walk for a long time, alone along the shore.

The sun rises next morning over the sea. I lean out from my wrought iron balcony at the Jean Bart, straining to catch the first rays on my face. A single seagull perches on the top of each lamp post with a similar plan to my own, and the tops of the willow trees on the shore turn to gold. There is a bustle of people rushing for the six-thirty boat back to Tulcea, boys pushing bicycles, and women with three or four shopping bags in each hand.

Over morning coffee in the wood-panelled bar, the owner of the hotel, Aurel Bajenaru, tells me his story. He came here aged twenty, and is now fifty-two. When he arrived there were fifteen thousand inhabitants employed in the fisheries, at the fish-canning factory, the big ship repair yard or the naval barracks. Now there are only four thousand and the factories have gone. ‘I used to like it here, but democracy has changed it, harmed it,’ he says. His three daughters have grown up and left, and he would leave too, if he were twenty years younger. He thinks the only chance for the town is tourism, but everything he tries to do is weighed down by bureaucracy, and by the incapacity of the townsfolk to work together. On the television behind his head, set high in the wooden panelling, I see a black-and-white film of a man and woman in passionate embrace. The news has just broken that the actress Elizabeth Taylor has died.
5
Until the previous December, immune to the rise and fall of the stars of the silver screen, each family was allowed to catch three kilos of silvery fish a week for their own consumption. That was abolished because the authorities believed people were exceeding their quota, and it was impossible to police. In order to buy fish to serve in the hotel restaurant, Aurel now has to take his boat once a week to Tulcea to buy from the main fish company, to whom local fishermen are obliged to sell their catch. People have to pay three separate taxes: to the town hall, the biosphere authority, and the state. Outside his hotel it is hard to tell which parts of the town are being built up and which are falling down. Bulldozers dig
through the back-streets, turning the soil beneath the torn-up tarmac to mud. There is no central heating in the newer, four-storey blocks of flats which sprang up along the shore in communist times. Such is the anarchy of capitalist Romania, one flat is heated by wood, another by gas, another by electricity. The town hospital is so short of funds it may close down.

Aurel is happier talking about the former glory of Sulina. At the end of the Crimean War in 1856, the idea of a united Europe was born here. A European Commission was set up by the great powers: Great Britain, Russia, Austro-Hungary, Turkey, Prussia, France and Italy. The town became a thriving, cosmopolitan centre, where the common language was Greek. In 1900 there were twenty-three nationalities, easily led by the Greeks with 2,500, then 803 Romanians, 444 Armenians, 268 Turks and 173 Jews.
6
The sprinkling of nationalities at the bottom of the list is as interesting as that at the top – what did the five Ethiopians, ten Senegalese and twenty-four English people make of Sulina then? How did they spend the long summer days or the long winter nights? Aurel tells a Romeo and Juliet story of an Englishman and a beautiful cabaret dancer of mixed Greek and African parentage. The boy's parents bitterly opposed their marriage, and when she fell overboard from a boat in the midst of the drama he dived into the Danube to save her; they were both drowned. Their bodies were found entwined, the story goes, though I somehow missed their graves in the cemetery the previous evening.

The buildings of Sulina are an odd mix, each in a different architectural style. The Jean Bart Hotel had Maltese owners before the war, who got it back after the 1989 revolution and eventually sold it to him. Jean Bart was the pen-name of the writer Eugeniu Botez, whose novel
Europolis
(1958) is set in Sulina.
7
July and August are the only busy months in Sulina now. The hotel is frequented mostly by French and Germans, with a sprinkling of Italians who come for the hunting. For a long time water was a serious problem in the town, but that was finally solved by a generous visitor. When her Royal Highness Queen Emma of Holland stepped down from her ship in 1897, wiped her brow and asked for a glass of water, there was consternation on the quay. It took some minutes before one could be rustled up for her. Upset by the embarrassment her humble request caused, she paid for the construction of a water tower.
8
It stands there to this day, a sledge-hammer of a building on the western approaches to the town. But
Sulina's most important landmark is the lighthouse. This is where any journey up the Danube begins: mile, or kilometre zero. The Danube is measured upriver from the lighthouse, not downriver from the source like other rivers. My own progress upriver should be easy to measure. The three miles between the lighthouse and the sea are not counted in its official length – a kind of no-man's-land, the soft gums of the river mouth. They help contribute to the general confusion about just how long the river is. Some authors even refer to two different lengths in the same article. But because I start with the lighthouse and end with the pool in the gardens of the Furstenberg Palace in Donaueschingen, I am in no such danger.

BOOK: The Danube
3.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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