The Danube (17 page)

We spend one night in Medgidia, in this canal port, before returning to the river. I eat catfish in a restaurant, then find a quiet hotel, with windows that look out on to the main square, and cakes in a display case in the main entrance that you can eat, day or night. A group of young, rather rowdy, Germans is watching Germany play the Netherlands in the European Championship on the television in the common room. They're winning, and the empty bottles of Ursus, a rather drinkable Romanian beer brewed in Cluj with a bear on the label, are piling up around their ankles. ‘Germans,’ whispers the waitress, with a hint of pride in her voice because they have chosen her establishment, ‘they're with the windmills …’

At exactly the same time that Saligny and his men were building their bridge, a team of Romanian archaeologists was working just up the road from Cernavodǎ on another, very different, monument to Romanian pride: a Roman ruin. A monument, not to man's ingenuity, but to his raw power. There is no one in the little glass booth at Adamclisi to sell us tickets, but a lone guard dog, a brown-and-white-faced animal with wolf-like eyes, bounds up to greet us instead, and leads us down a cobbled avenue to what looks like a round stone fortress, a carbuncle growing on Romania's unblemished face.

The Dacians were ‘the noblest as well as the most just of all the Thracian tribes’, according to Herodotus.
¹²
Their totem was a wolf's head, carried on their banners into battle. The strange look of the mongrel at the gate was no accident. The Romanian historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, has proposed that the name ‘Dacia’ may come from the Phrygian
daos
meaning ‘wolf’. Another etymology suggests the word means ‘the enemy’.

The Roman emperor Trajan marched through the Iron Gates gorge on a treacherous path carved into the sheer cliffs above the River Danube, to crush the Dacians twice, first in
AD
101, then again in 106. The monument is a fat cylinder, thirty metres tall and forty metres in diameter, built to celebrate Trajan's final victory. Friezes around it – copies of the much eroded originals – depict bloody scenes from the Roman triumph: full-bearded Dacian tribesmen in leggings, trampled under the hooves of the Roman cavalry, or squewered on their lances, their own curved swords rendered useless by the superior reach of the clean-shaven invaders. The Romans shun trousers in favour of short, chain-mail skirts in the battle fashion of the second century after Christ. Above the pictures of the fighting is another row of friezes showing Dacian prisoners being led away in chains. When Sarmizegetusa fell, and Decebal committed suicide rather than face capture, the entire population was taken away into slavery, according to Roman historians. Instead of mourning such a cataclysmic defeat, the Romanians celebrate it as the ‘birth certificate’ of their nation – the marriage in the heat of battle of the Dacians and Romans. Copies were made of the original friezes in the 1970s, and the monument has a rather suspicious, socialist-realist look, as though the Roman statues on top were the prototypes of the ‘new man’ of the socialist era. Only one or two rather beautiful carvings of sheep soften the austere and violent depiction of war. There is a mound that contains the remains of four thousand Roman soldiers who fell in battle, but no record of the Dacian losses. Few traces of the Dacian language remain, but place names ending in
-dava
, such as Moldava, the Drava river, and possibly Plovdiv in Bulgaria, are believed to be among the last such.
¹³

In
AD
117 Trajan died and was succeeded by Trajan. In Marguerite Yourcenar's
Memoirs of Hadrian
, published in 1951, the Roman emperor Hadrian reminisces on his deathbed.
¹⁴
He describes a secret ritual performed by Roman soldiers, an initiation into the rites of the cult of the god Mithras. The cult, Yourcenar has Hadrian say, ‘won me over temporarily by the rigours of its stark asceticism, which drew taut the bowstring of the will, and by its obsession with death, blood, and iron, which elevated the routine harshness of our military lives to the level of a symbol of universal struggle’.

‘My initiation took place in a turret constructed of wood and reeds on the banks of the Danube … I remember that the weight of the bull in its
death throes nearly brought down the latticed floor beneath which I lay to receive the bloody aspersion.’

‘Each of us believed that he was escaping from the narrow limits of his human state, feeling himself to be at the same time himself and his own enemy, at one with the god who seems to be both the animal victim and the human slayer. Victory and defeat were mixed like rays of the same sun.’

‘Those Dacian footsoldiers whom I crushed under my horse's hoofs, those Sarmatian cavalrymen overthrown in the close combat of later years when our rearing horses tore at each other's chests, were all struck down the more easily if I identified myself with them.’

The name of the bow, Heraclitus wrote, is life. It's work is death.
¹⁵

I lie down in the long grass behind the monument, on the tomb of a Roman officer. The birds are deafening – swallows flitting above a sea of wheat and corn, pigeons perched high on Roman soldiers’ heads, and cuckoos asking questions of each other in the scrub-like trees around the column. All around are the rolling plains where Hadrian defeated his enemy. A horse and cart passes along the edge of the field, ridden like a motorbike by two teenage lads with hoods on their heads, looking neither left nor right, as though on their way to a murder.

I drive through sparse, deserted villages which feel as though they have been unpopulated since the Romans withdrew, and reach the Danube in time to watch a blood-red sun sink through vineyards among the forested islands of the river. The monastery at Dervent rears up out of the gathering gloom like the warhorse of an ally, and offers a bed for the night. Outside, an agile fellow with a long stick is dislodging fragments of swallows’ nests from the high rafters above the entrance to the church, as agitated swallows fly in all directions. I suppress a Franciscan cry of outrage. ‘We try to keep just this one area free, so that people going into or coming out of church don't get shat on,’ explains the monk with the stick. A rapid glance around the eaves of the rest of the quadrangle confirms his story. The monastery is a city of swallows, their undisturbed nests packed into every conceivable space. The birds swarm like biblical locusts. There are so many swallows, it seems the monks themselves might be just rare, seasonal visitors.

I go into the church. A group of monks, some of almost Old Testament age, are gathered at the front, near the iconostasis. Some sing the lead,
others the refrain. The older monks sing with their eyes shut. The younger men sing from an enormous old Bible, leaning earnestly over each other's shoulders to read the words. There are also one or two men in civilian clothes and younger women as well in the church, keeping a respectful distance. It is lit only by candlelight. The icons are glorious, reds and golds, silver and deep blue.

After the service I find a monk who speaks English. Father Atal is young, perhaps in his early thirties, and a little reticent. He has duties to perform, but sits down with me in a small courtyard by the wall, looking down on the silvery Danube below. There are ancient anchors beside us, a little covered pagoda, and various rocks – perhaps from the river as well, and carefully tended flower-pots. He agrees to talk on condition that it doesn't take long. And of course I can stay the night. The monastery has guest rooms. Another monk will show me to my quarters when we are finished. There is no charge, but I am welcome to make a contribution to the monastery. First I ask about the Danube. It's the right question. He gives a long sigh, then speaks about the river with a religious passion. ‘My first memory of the Danube is when my father threw me into it to learn to swim. I must have been four or five …’ He learnt his lesson, though, and has been swimming in its waters ever since. When the visitors to the monastery, with all their troubles, get too much, he takes a small rowing boat across to the island in the middle of the river, Pacuiul de Soare. The boat belongs to the archaeologists. They're excavating the Roman and Byzantine ruins on the island, and have already found the remains of a flourishing ship-building yard and a ninth-century cathedral. ‘I go to the island when I need a break. Sometimes I swim, and I enter into communion with the river. This is how I have felt since I was a child. I saw people swimming in the Danube, and realised they didn't know how to use the Danube, because the river has currents and helps you to get to the shore. Likewise in life, some people do not know how to use whatever God gives them, how to live life to the highest intensity.’

Father Atal first visited the monastery by chance, with no intention of becoming a monk. ‘It was February 2002. I had already done my military service, and was studying engineering at university in Bucharest. I don't know what happened to me. I just knew I had to come here.’ So he sold all his books, spent two weeks tying up all the loose strands of his life, and
moved to Dervent. ‘I like the autumn the most, the range of colours, from raw green to dark brown. I also like the sunlight in summer, in August, when it casts a special colour … which foresees the fall.’ The hardest time, he says, is between January and mid-March when no visitors come at all. If he closes his eyes, I ask, what colour does he see the Danube? Blue he says, to my surprise. On my own travels, I haven't often seen the river blue. Mostly dark green … or silver. ‘Once some monks found an old anchor in the mud, and dragged it up here.’ It stands to one side of the courtyard, a double anchor with four hooks – the archaeologists would be interested. ‘The anchor is like our belief, our faith … There was also a crucifix found on the island. The figure of Christ on it is dressed as a monk. On the back there are the waves of the Danube; it's a unique piece, there is nothing quite like it in the world.’

The monastery also owes its existence to another miracle – the discovery of an ancient stone cross, washed ashore in 1936. Father Atal takes me to see it in a little chapel next to the church. It is a large chunky piece, polished by the fingers of the faithful, softened by their beeswax.
¹⁶
Another time we could have drunk some of the monastery's excellent wine together, he says, but now it is Lent, and he has chores to attend to. We take our leave, and I drive into the next village to buy bread and wine for my supper. I eat a simple meal overlooking the darkening river, turning slowly silver beneath a full moon.

Early the next morning I walk down the track to the healing spring. I have a slight limp from a footballing injury. I check there's no one around to offend with my nakedness, then undress and bathe my bad knee in the chill waters. Then I walk back to the church for the start of the early morning service. There are snail tracks in the dust, transparent in the dawn.

CHAPTER
5

The Dogs of Giurgiu

O
N A
wide meadow, a headland overlooking a sweeping bend in the Danube, just before the Romanian–Bulgarian border at Silistra, I catch sight of a man striding purposefully beside a line of blue and yellow beehives, evenly spaced like floats on a net across the river. From a distance he looks like a giant. As I walk towards him, he seems to shrink to only a little more than my own height. Standing in front of him, shaking his hand, I notice that he has two or three bee-stings on his face.

‘Our first child was born about the time of the revolution,’ Vasile Brici tells me. He has broad, muscular shoulders, and a stripy, Breton T-shirt. ‘I was working in the dockyards in Constanța at that time, loading ships. My wife ran out of breast milk to feed the baby, so we decided to move to the countryside, to buy a cow to replace the missing milk. I had to find a new job, and tried my hand at bee-keeping. I got hooked! … It's like a game of chess. There are twenty frames in each hive. When I open a hive, I have to decide if there is enough wood in each frame, if the queen is old and should be replaced, when the hive needs cleaning, and when the frames should be changed …’

He has 160 hives, twenty thousand bees in each, and follows the flowers each spring. As each new flower comes into bloom he arrives with his bees. He travels in a large white truck, carefully designed for his hives. ‘They don't enjoy the travelling, but after two days in a new place they settle down and find the flowers they need.’ Now they are busy with the oil-seed rape which paints the meadows above the Danube an intense, fluorescent yellow. Soon the acacia will start – I have been watching its overhanging branches breaking into blossom as I drive down long avenues of trees. ‘Acacia is the best. I can get half as much again for acacia honey – up to six dollars a kilo.’ He earns about ten thousand dollars a year from the honey, he says – by Romanian standards, a living wage. Over more than twenty years, spending seven months a year living with the bees, he has noticed the climate change. ‘The acacia should be over by now, but it hasn't even started.’ The winter was mild, but too long. Before he moves to a new area, he contacts the local farmers’ association to check the crops haven't been sprayed recently; if they have, he avoids the place, to minimise the risk to his bees’ health.

The daughter he moved to the country for has grown up and left home. Now she lives in Italy. His wife is content in their village. And he is happy out here by the Danube, playing chess with his bees.

It's still early morning at the ferry crossing from Silistra to Cǎlǎraşi on the left bank. I need a coffee and something to eat, but the girl behind the counter in a wooden shack is sullen; her coffee is lukewarm and tastes burnt. There are no fresh pastries, just soggy croissants in plastic wrapping. Behind her in the shop, packets of biscuits and snacks from all over the world line the walls. But if there ever was a baker in this part of town, he has gone. There are just a few shrivelled apples and peppers in a cardboard box in front of her shop.