The Danube (10 page)

As we enter the forest, the sounds change suddenly. The horse's hooves and the wheels of the cart rustle over dry leaves, then strain silently through thick sand and splash loudly through deep water as the horse stumbles to find the track in the mud. One particular bird calls repeatedly. Bogdan cannot name it, in Romanian or Ukrainian, but produces an excellent imitation of its cry. The Kneeling Oak, the goal of our journey, rises majestically at the edge of a clearing. Two great branches rest their knees, or elbows, in the grass, then rise again from the ground, straight in front of it. This is the first big tree of my journey, and its girth reminds me of the lighthouse in Sulina. ‘The Kneeling Oak’ would make an excellent name for a pub in England. The previous evening in Crisan, Mihai Tericleanu had told me how it got its name. During Turkish times, according to legend, a young shepherd's wedding was rudely interrupted by Turkish soldiers who rode into the middle of the festivities, seized the bride and rode off. Outraged, the lads of the village, led by the furious bridegroom, rode after them, and thanks to their better knowledge of the area, headed them off. They rescued the girl and killed the Turks. The oak tree grew on that very place, and obligingly knelt down on the ground where the Turks are buried – to keep them down there, explained the teacher, ‘and make sure they don't come up again to give us any more trouble!’ The oak tree has been a local landmark ever since. Bogdan came to celebrate his eighteenth birthday here, and spent the night under its branches, ‘with plenty of beer and girls’. There's also a well, dug in 1989 beside the tree. ‘Good people,’ reads the plaque, ‘we found out that at the kneeling oak tree in this faraway forest there was no water. So the decision was taken to dig this well.’ The plaque bears four names, Paul Stama, Ion Fotescu, Ilie Fotescu and Marin Sultan, ‘lovers of animals, people and nature’.

On our way back, Marcel, the horse, stops frequently to drink. ‘He's not really thirsty, he's just tired, so he pretends to drink to give himself an excuse to stop,’ Bogdan laughs. He bursts into a melancholy song which rises and dips like our progress out of the woods, about an impoverished girl who resists the attentions of a rich man. ‘Don't you want to be rich like me?’ runs the refrain. In the end she gives up her resistance and marries him. ‘And was she very unhappy?’ I ask. Certainly not; they both lived happily ever after, sings Bogdan.

In the village, an elderly couple invite us into their yard to talk about the old days. As we sit in their porch, under an arbour of vines, they scale and gut a whole bucketful of freshly caught carp, to keep their grandson Alexander going during the week in Tulcea where he goes to university. The grandfather came here from Odessa, further around the Black Sea coast. When he arrived there were barely a dozen houses. Apart from two years in the army in Transylvania, where he learnt to read, write and speak Romanian, he has lived his whole life here. They always spoke Ukrainian at home. There was never enough time for school; he spent his childhood looking after several hundred sheep his father owned. In those days there were three mills in the village, for corn, wheat and oats, and all you could buy in the shops were sugar, vinegar and rice. He remembers the Russian soldiers coming at the end of the war. ‘At first we welcomed them, we embraced them like long lost brothers – we spoke almost the same language. They came to our house because someone told them we were rich – because my father owned sheep. But when they saw that he slept on a pallet on the hard ground, they laughed and left us in peace, “we have thousands like him in Russia!” they said.’ He also remembers, with bitterness, the nationalisation of property in the late 1940s, and how the peasants pleaded in vain to keep their land. As a child he used to take the sheep to the Kneeling Oak. ‘They liked to rub their backs under one of its knees, but the other knee was too high in those days – only my donkey was tall enough for that one!’

The homemade wine is red and potent, and Alexander refills my glass too often. ‘The grapes didn't ripen quite enough, so we added a little saccharine …’ I sip it a little more cautiously after that. ‘Life was better under communism,’ he says. ‘Everyone had animals, and work. There were three thousand head of sheep in the village then – now there are less than fifty. People had more children then too – between five and ten in a family.’
He and his wife make a quick calculation to count how many children there are today in the ten houses between their own and the church. Only three.

‘Is nothing better now?’ I ask. He shakes his head for a while, then cheers up. ‘Just one thing,’ he says. ‘Under communism, the police would sometimes come to the village and beat us. They don't do that any more. They've been
democratised
!’ He uses the word with deep irony.

The delta region is as rich in Russians and Ukrainians as it once was in Turks and Greeks. Like the Serbs, they celebrate Christmas two weeks later than the Romanians, according to the old rite. But Easter is marked at the same time as by Romanian Orthodox and Catholic believers. The one year they held Easter later, a terrible hailstorm decimated their crops, and the villagers took it as a sign that they should leave Easter where it was. For all their physical and cultural similarities, there's an uneasy rivalry between Ukrainians and Russians. ‘They keep their traditions too, but they don't raise cattle like us.’

‘Fishermen came here from Volkovo in Ukraine to fish for sturgeon, and we learnt some songs from them,’ says his wife. She remembers one from school, and sings it to us, pausing first to wipe the fish scales off her hands. Even the cockerels fall quiet to listen. Old fishing nets hang on the wire fence, dreaming fitfully of fish. ‘The song is about a girl, harvesting in the fields,’ she says. ‘A young man rides by, and offers to help. “No,” she says, “because if you help me, all the boys in the village will want to too.”’

To reach Mahmoudia by motorboat from Karaorman is several hours ride, and we've dawdled too long to easily intercept the ferry from Tulcea to Sfântu Gheorghe. Adrian guns the engine through narrow channels over wide expanses of lake. We pass the first tourists of the year, barbecuing fish on the shore, and silent anglers like cormorants, wrapped up in their thoughts. A young couple paddle by in a canoe with a tent and rucksacks, hardy explorers in the late March cold. The water is shallow here, only a metre and a half in places. The wind whips up the waves and the boat skims over them like a stone. We make it to Mahmoudia with only five minutes to spare before the afternoon catamaran appears around a headland in the river. The
Delta Express
is twin-hulled, with a single, Cyclopean eye in the middle from which the crew steer the boat. Adrian sets out back north, all the way home to Crisan, standing in his seashell of a craft,
bouncing across the waves. I set out for Sfântu Gheorghe to start my journey up the Danube again, this time from the southernmost tip of the delta.

Sfântu Gheorghe, unlike Sulina, has no pretensions to be a town. This is a remote fishing village, with its back to the land, its face to the sea, and its shoulder to the river. It seems to belong here among the sand dunes and the birds and the sea-horses, much more than to the interior of the continent. In summer it boasts a film festival, and its internet pages brim with images of tented youths silhouetted against the sunset.
¹⁰
For the rest of the year the wind, the water and the fruits of the deep provide the main entertainment.

High on an outside wall of the church, facing west, away from the predations of the winds, are paintings of Christ as a fisher of men in the Sea of Galilee. In an alcove by the gate is an icon of a youthful Saint George, hardly old enough to be a patron saint, spearing a monster of the deeps. An oil lamp flickers in front of him. The alcove is designed to protect the flame, whatever the strength of the winds off the sea or the river. Inside the church, people kneel in a semi-circle round the priest, their eyes tight shut, singing with him in a service in memory of the dead – all the dead, not just the recently departed. People mostly stand in Orthodox churches; few sit or kneel. In another Orthodox country, Greece, I have seen old ladies struggling up steep hills or wandering far from their villages in the last light of day, to light a candle or an oil lamp in front of a shrine. There is still an instinctive, blind faith in God in eastern Europe, from Finland to Greece, which neither the material faiths of capitalism or communism have quite managed to erase. There is a stubborn insistence on contemplating the mystery of one's own existence and its conclusion. In the words of the Bosnian poet Mak Dizdar: ‘And in the deepest depths of death the colours will be clearer then.’
¹¹

The beach in March is a great bow of sand, embedded with millions of shells, on to which huge trunks of trees have washed up like heads, some still wearing strange horned helmets. This southern mouth of the Danube is more tangible, simpler than the one in Sulina and uncluttered by piers or lighthouses. Offshore, the sweet waters of the Danube merge boisterously with the salt waters of the Black Sea, like a rugby scrum first making progress against a bigger adversary by the sheer energy of their charge, then
finally slowing to a halt as the home team digs in its heels, flexes its muscles, and drives them back. The most spectacular floods over the centuries have been caused by wind and tide combining to block the river, and then the Danube shrugs its vast shoulders on to the lands instead and drowns the villages.

This is the time of year, just before Easter, of the ‘howling’. It starts up like an orchestra rehearsing, a straining of strings and a gurgling and a crying and a longing, mingled together. Local people say it is the herring, tempting fishermen to follow them, further and further out to sea, never to return. Out over the sea a line of cormorants and a single pelican fish together. The pelican's long, humorous beak gives it a leisurely air, which makes even the movement of the cormorants seem hurried. Over the southern lip of the delta a single column of black smoke rises from burning reeds. I walk barefoot in the seawater for a while, then turn inland, upriver again.

According to Greek legend, Jason and the Argonauts, in their ship the
Argo
, sailed up the Danube to flee the wrath of King Aeëtes of Colchis at the far, eastern end of the Black Sea, in what is now Georgia. The Argonauts stole the Golden Fleece with the help of the King's daughter Medea.
¹²
‘There are two ways back to Greece,’ Phrixus’ son Cytisorus told them. ‘One is the route by which you came. The other is via the Danube, a great, broad river we can sail up till we come to another sea, which will take us round to the Aegean in the West.’ Notwithstanding the dubious geography of the proposal, the journey was made, and the
Argo
must have sailed past this very headland.

There is also a Romanian folk story according to which Helios, the Sun, wanted to get married, but could find no bride more beautiful or desirable than his own sister Ileana Cosinzeana.
¹³
For nine years he travelled around the world in search of a bride, pulled in his chariot by nine horses, then came back and told his sister to prepare for her wedding. His mission had failed, and now he was determined to marry her. He found her in a shady glade, weaving at her loom in an
argea
, a hut used by the women to work in and give birth, half buried in the soil. The bashful girl protested that the union of brother and sister was unheard of, but in vain, and eventually she gave in. But she made the Sun promise that they would be married in a wax church, attended by a wax priest, at the far end of a
wax bridge. Nothing was too difficult for the Sun, and soon all was prepared. But as they walked towards the white church, the bridge beneath them melted, and they fell into the water. God took pity and rescued them, placing the sun on one side of the sky and the moon on the other, so they can always see one another but never meet. One of Ileana's names was Diana, another was Luna, and a third was Selina, or Sulina. The green, shady glade was somewhere in the Danube delta, and the island to which they were walking to be wed might have been Sacalin Island just off the Black Sea coast. The story was told by the late nineteenth-century ethnologist Nicolae Densusianu in his epic work
Prehistoric Dacia
.
¹⁴
One of his most extraordinary claims is that the Dacians founded ancient Rome, and that Latin is actually a dialect of Dacian.

The map near the quay in Sfântu Gheorghe, which I consulted before setting out for the sea shore, also has a rather legendary quality. As I walk wearily beside the river, there is no sign of the footpath which was clearly marked on it. So I follow the river itself, skirting round low, overhanging branches by venturing deeper into the water, up to my knees. The river is cold and there is not a boat in sight, just the roar of the surf behind me, the call of sea and river birds in my ears. The smoke from the burning reeds on the far side is diluted and almost disappears into the grey sky. Suddenly to my side, I hear a whistle, then another. My heart misses a beat, expecting bandits to leap out of the marshes and overpower me. Then I discover the culprit: a single reed, taught to whistle by short blasts of the wind through its dry stem. A wall of reeds blocks my path, too thick and marshy to go through, and the water is too deep in the main channel to walk around. I have to cut inland, into a thorny thicket. I find a path which leads to an abandoned house. There once must have been an easy route for those who lived here into the village, but if there was, it's gone now, and there is nothing but bogland and the low, square concrete hulk of a bunker, overgrown with moss, built by the Germans during the Second World War. Surely the efficient Germans must also have had a road? But even to reach their fortifications, I would have to swim across a deep, narrow channel. I don't want to retrace my steps all the way back to the mouth of the river, so I ring the fisherman I'm due to meet: Tudor Avramov. Twenty minutes later his small boat purrs round the headland and I wade out to it. This is a part of the world where water transport still trumps the land routes.