The Danube (9 page)

I climb the spiral staircase to the top of the chunky white tower, pausing for breath and to gaze out of the three round portholes that run up the front of the tower like black buttons on a white dinner jacket. Then I step out through a low iron door on to a rickety balcony. If I shut my eyes, I can see all the way upriver to Germany, 2,860 kilometres upstream. Sulina lounges in the spring sunshine beneath me – old ships rusting apart into the marshes, streets of single-storey homes laid out, higgledy-piggledy towards the reed banks, the onion-domed towers of churches in the town centre. Through my binoculars the Ukrainian church looks the most frail and the most beautiful, its pale blue wooden panels framing an icon that might be Saint Demetrius. The lighthouse has a rather quaint glasshouse in the middle, with a tiled roof and a weather vane on the top. There are no light bulbs, but the original French crystal, which once refracted the beam far out to sea, is still in place, in rings around the sockets like dragonfly wings. Downstairs, a brass plaque in French at the entrance states that its construction was agreed at the Treaty of Paris at the same time that the European Commission was established there, on 30 March 1856, to improve the navigability of the mouths of the Danube. It was completed in November 1870 and would not look out of place on the shores of the English Channel.

Maria Sinescu is the custodian. She was born and bred in Sulina, left for a few years, then came back to look after her elderly parents. The level of the Black Sea is rising as a result of global warming. The great sandy beaches of Romania and Bulgaria are rapidly disappearing. In fifty years time, they will be gone completely if no way is found to save them. ‘Might that not restore the importance of her lighthouse, now stranded so far inland?’ I ask. ‘Certainly not,’ she insists, ‘the sand will continue to pile up
at the river mouth, and more houses are under construction between the graveyard and the sea.’ In fact, the opposite is happening: the lighthouse is still moving towards the town centre.

And might Sulina blossom again?

‘I cannot guarantee that it will; I can only hope. History always works in cycles.’

That evening in a restaurant on the river shore, I order grilled sturgeon from a blonde waitress, who flits between the tables like a goldfish. Innocently I ask her where my fish comes from, neglecting to mention that sturgeon fishing has been banned in Romanian waters since 2006. She shrugs her pretty shoulders, but tells me where to find her husband's grandmother, Aunty Nicolina, who knows everything there is to know about fish. My dinner arrives, rather small, but with an exquisite taste, like wild salmon. I drink a glass of the white wine of the Măcin hills, dry as granite.

Nicolina is not at home the next morning, but her husband Simion is. I find his house easily, the only one with a horse and cart tethered outside. Simion is seventy-two, his eyes barely opening on a face beaten by Danube winters and scorched by Sulina summers. He wears two grey jumpers over his shirt and a black Cossack hat which looks as though he never takes it off. We talk outside in the street as he gets his horse ready for a trip to his vegetable patch. The horse is expensive to keep, but worth having because he can plough his land with it and carry his crops home. The winter has been long, and the hay he cut the previous summer has run out. He has just bought oats – the sacks I saw unloaded from the boat I arrived on – to keep his horse going until the grass grows again. He needs five kilos a day. His winter wood supply is also exhausted, and the nights are still cold. He came here from Tulcea originally, to work on the dykes under construction in communist times, and met his future wife at a wedding. He asked her to dance, and that was it. He likes the peace and quiet of Sulina, and the fact that there are no thieves – no one bothers to lock their homes. As we speak a trader, a Roma from the mainland, comes down the road, selling clothes. Simion farms a swathe of land on the edge of the town, and grows potatoes, tomatoes and cabbages. The soil is poor, because of the salt so close to the sea, but it can be improved with plenty of manure, which he gets from his cows. But he can't tell me anything about fishing: ‘I can't stand the taste of fish, never could,’ he explains. He's a cheese and milk
man, and keeps five cows to make sure of his supplies. For his wife, on the other hand, ‘a day without fish to eat is a sad day indeed!’

Inside the house, a thirteen-year-old boy, Simion's grandson, does not look up from the computer screen. His mother has been working in Spain for three years, and left her three children at home with the grandparents. At least the youngest likes books. But none of them helps him with the animals. Soon there will be no cattle in the delta, he says, because the young have no interest in working with them and his generation will die out.

Adrian Oprisan has short, reddish fair hair, a firm handshake and a small, green fibreglass boat. He lives with his wife and small child right on the Danube at Crisan, half way between Sulina and Tulcea, and rents an island of reeds in the delta from the Danube Biosphere Authority. The reeds, cut in January and February, are nearly ready, and on my first journey upriver he takes me to see his harvest.

The Danube is milky-green beneath the soaring hull of his boat. Leaving Sulina, we load up with fuel from a floating filling station, then head upstream. Like cars, ships that are no longer in use rapidly lose their shine. A hydrofoil, the S.F.
Maria
, registered in Constanța, dozes fitfully on the right bank. A couple of mammoth grey-hulled hulks, straight out of a horror film, stretch against a crumbling concrete dock on the left. I imagine bats flitting in and out of the dark windows of the bridge. We leave Sulina far behind. Brown horses graze peaceably on the shore, flocks of ducks flee our approach, and our wash lifts and drops the car-tyres tied to makeshift jetties for boats to moor alongside. Only one cargo ship seems to be in use: the
Anglia
, flying the Maltese cross, registered at Batumi at the far end of the Black Sea in Georgia, moves ponderously upstream. Adrian swerves his boat into a side channel, south of the main stream and we enter another world, the real delta. Reeds encroach on all sides; willows overhang the water so low we have to duck not to lose our heads, and birds of all kinds, silent raptors, watch from the bigger trees. The reeds are thick with ducks, geese, egrets, and smaller birds, so light they can balance on a single stem. The channel gets narrower. Adrian turns off the engine and poles with a single oar. Solid ground turns out to be afloat, and he pushes the clumps of earth aside. Invading armies were once lured into this labyrinth and picked off one by one by the arrows of local tribesmen who alone knew exactly where to tread. Many of the reeds
grow on floating islands. The islands rise and fall with the tide, or the flood waters. When you cut reeds all day, the tree which seemed so tall in the early morning has shrunk to a bush by lunch time. What has happened is that the floating island on which you work has risen like a lift on the tide. Columns of grey-black smoke drift on the far horizon. When the reeds have been cut, farmers burn off the chaff to act as fire breaks. If fire breaks out accidentally elsewhere, there is less chance of it raging right through the delta. The delta stretches across nearly six thousand square kilometres, a large part of which is covered by reeds. Over the golden stems, rustling gently in the wind, the columns of smoke give an impression of homes burning in wartime.

A dark brown dog called Caesar bounds through the reeds and jumps with joy at Adrian's approach. Three men feed bundles of cut reeds through what looks like a giant red sewing machine. This produces reeds of uniform lengths for thatching or fence-making, and tidies them into neat bundles which are then stacked into wigwams. A clump of plastic soft-drink bottles is positioned to warn the workers of a hole in their island – a step there would plunge you into water four metres deep.

This will be a good year for the reeds, Adrian says. A winter cold enough but not too cold, long but not too damp. He needs thirty to forty good cutting days in the four months of winter. When it is too cold, or the snow is too damp and heavy on the reeds, they cannot be cut. Damp reeds turn dark brown. Reed is like gold, he says, but there is no great profit from it, because of the high cost of the cutting. He will make fifteen thousand bundles this year, graded according to quality and length. The breeze stirs the flowers at the top of the reeds, creating a whispering sound but quite unlike the wind in the leaves of trees.

On the way to Crisan, a cold wind sends cat's-paws, shadows like sudden shivers, over the water. A grey heron, then a purple one, lift effortlessly from the shore, then peel away to one side. Behind his house in Crisan Adrian shows me his combine harvester, specially built for the reeds, with four massive rubber tyres that float on the water, and a platform on the back where the newly cut reeds are stacked – up to a tonne per load. It looks like a moon-buggy or a
Starwars
Lego toy.

‘It's beautiful, in its way,’ I tell Adrian, but he will have none of it.

‘It's a working machine. It has nothing to do with beauty!’ A single tyre, made in Denmark, costs eighteen hundred dollars, and lasts five years. He
could buy them more cheaply in Budapest, but they might burst in their second season.

That evening, after a fine catfish dinner, I meet his wife's grandparents. Mihai Tecliceanu is a former history teacher from Bucharest. His wife, Elena, is a Ukrainian from Karaorman, half an hour's journey through the reeds to the south. Mihai first visited the delta as a schools’ inspector in communist times. Motorboats were rare in those days, and most fishermen rowed or sailed. As Mihai arrived in the region to inspect the schools, a fisherman asked for a tow alongside his motorboat for the last few kilo-metres of the journey. ‘It was snowing, though it was only early November, and that man with his beard full of snow and his long boots made a very powerful impression on me,’ Mihai remembers. ‘I thought I had arrived in the land of the Eskimos!’ He found them so congenial that he decided to spend the rest of his life here.

Elena was born in 1947, at the time of the post-war famine. Karaorman is a largely Ukrainian village, though in the toughest communist years the inhabitants were not allowed to speak their own language. This came as something of a surprise to people who had welcomed the Russians after the war as fellow Slavs. But communism also had its good sides, Elena says. ‘People were more honest then … not so busy chasing after money.’ She is only three-quarters Ukrainian, she tells me proudly, because her great grand-father on her mother's side was a Romanian shepherd, and came from the Carpathian Mountains near Sibiu with his sheep. Transhumance, the custom of bringing the sheep down from the mountains for the winter to travel great distances with the flocks in search of pasture, is still practised in Romania.
⁹
Brindza, a delicious salty white sheep's cheese akin to Greek feta, is still made in Poiana Sibiului, the mountain region where Elena's ancestors came from, some 650 kilometres from Karaorman. On a visit there many years before, I met a shepherd who walked his flock each autumn as far as Satu Mare in north-eastern Romania, then back in time for Easter, when families celebrate the return of the men, and their wives and children go with them and the flocks up on to the high mountain pastures. The cheese is still made in large wooden barrels, notwithstanding the efforts of the hygiene inspectors to move the sheep folds closer to the road and mix the milk in stainless steel vats. ‘The cheese would not taste the same,’ they say in the mountains.

During Ottoman times, Romanian shepherds walked their flocks as far as the Crimea, and might be away for several years at a time. They carried wooden passports, recognised by the Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian empires, with the details of their flocks carved in the wood. It must have been on one of these trips that Elena's great grandfather fell in love with his future wife, and never returned to the mountains.

Mihai interrupts our conversation to go and round up his cows to milk them in the last light. They are wandering wild along the grassy dyke, but run away when they see me, a stranger. I have to hide behind the milking shed for Mihai to coax them inside. Back in her kitchen, Elena unscrews a tall plastic bottle of sour-tasting wine, which improves with each glass, and sings old Ukrainian songs.

Very early the next morning we eat a breakfast of fried eggs and brindza, with coffee. Elena watches us eat approvingly, her back to the woodburning stove, with all the pleasure of a woman who has spent her whole life making men food, and still delights in watching them eat it. Then we walk down the towpath, ankle-deep in bird feathers and the plastic flotsam and jetsam thrown up by the river, to Adrian's boat.

It's a religious holiday in Karaorman when we arrive, windblown from the journey across the lakes. The wide, unmade-up streets are almost empty. Every chimney wears a plume of smoke; the families are inside in the warm by their woodburning stoves, celebrating. Adrian asks around for someone who could take me to the forest – the strange expanse of oak and ash trees, growing on sand dunes, which gives Karaorman its name. The Danube does not just flow from the Black Forest to the Black Sea.
Karaorman
means ‘black forest’ in Turkish. The river flows from one black forest to another.

I'm up in the wooden belfry of the village church tower, inspecting a fine brass bell, when a man pulls up below with his horse and cart. The date ‘84’ is clearly visible on the bell, but I can't decide if it's 1884 or 1784. Through the fly-strewn window, I study the green-painted cart with red wheels, a worthy successor to Adrian's boat for the next leg of my journey. Bogdan is a broad-shouldered, red-faced fellow with a chequered jacket and a black woolly hat. He drives a hard bargain for a couple of hours ride to the forest and back, but I don't grudge it to him as I've torn him away
from his family. His horse, called Marcel, also has the air of an animal that until a few minutes ago had been looking forward to a well-deserved rest. I climb up beside Bogdan onto a wooden seat, and we set out at a steady pace on the waterlogged and rutted tracks out of the village. There are storks’ nests overhead, and the forest looms on the horizon, more dark brown than black, above an expanse of close-cropped yellow grass. White-tailed eagles and hooded crows nest in the tall trees, and rare flowers and mosses grow beneath them. There is a strong smell of horse and cow dung, and the cry of cockerels and the barking of dogs follow us from the village.