The Danube (24 page)

Ahmed attended primary school on the island till he was aged eleven, then went to boarding school in Orşova, just across the straits. When his father died, the family could no longer afford the cost of boarding; he tried another school, then left. ‘If you can't study, you'd better learn to row, because there will always be work on an island for those who can row,’ they told him. So that was his first job, rowing the children to the school he no longer attended in the mornings, and back home in the afternoons. ‘It took about ten minutes – more when the water was high. The key was to stay as close as possible to the bank, then cross at the shortest point.’ With his friend the son of the imam, he converted a rowing boat into the island's first sailing boat – just for fun. ‘We travelled between the island and the shore, or just up and down the Romanian side, because of the border guards.’ Yugoslavia was on uneasy terms with the rest of the socialist bloc, and freedom to move was severely restricted. ‘We were guarded like in a camp, so that we wouldn't try to leave Romania,’ Mioara remembers. They had to be back on the island by eight o'clock in the evening. She remembers barbed wire along the shore and soldiers with guns. Each time they crossed to the island, they had to write down their names in the register of the border -police.

When Ahmed finished his schooling in Turnu Severin, his first serious job was in the cigarette factory on Ada Kaleh. ‘My job was to take the
tobacco from one part of the factory to the other. The tobacco came from the mainland. There was no space on the island to grow tobacco!’ ‘We used to roll them by hand at first. Then we got a machine. “Musilmane” they were called – terrible cigarettes – with no filter!’

‘The “Nationale” were even worse!’ Mioara chimes in. ‘We made them with the leftover tobacco! That was when I started to smoke …’ she adds. In the book of photographs of Ada Kaleh, recently published in Bucharest, there are pictures of the tins in which the cigarettes were sold – proudly proclaiming where they were made. ‘The sweets, the Turkish delight, and the fig jam were the best,’ she remembers. She shuffles off and returns with a jar of her own fig jam from the fruit in her yard. It is sweet as treacle, and the seeds have a pleasant crunching sensation between the teeth. ‘You peel the figs, and stand them in limestone water for half a day. Then you add sugar and water, and boil them all together for two or three hours on a small flame. You should put them in jars while the mixture is still hot.’ There was also a refreshing, almost non-alcoholic drink, called
bragă
in Romanian, and made from hops. It is still sold in the marketplace in Turnu Severin.

The destruction of the island was long in the planning and quick in the execution. Ahmed worked in the mid-1960s as a waiter in Turnu Severin. He remembers a meeting of top Romanian and Yugoslav communist officials, and how, just as he was bringing them their after-lunch coffee, one of the Yugoslav comrades asked what would happen if the people refused to move from the island. ‘Then we will just flood it anyway, and they will run like rats,’ said the Romanian minister, gleefully. He managed to go back to the island only once, on a military boat on which the soldiers travelled, to lay dynamite around the buildings. He was on the shore in Orşova drinking brandy when they lit the fuse. ‘It was as though they declared war on the island. On nature itself.’ The minaret fell only half way, and stayed at an angle of forty-five degrees. Two beautiful, tall thin cypresses from the graveyard were chopped down. One by one the old buildings were blown up or bulldozed. Local people were promised that once the dam was built they would enjoy free electricity. In fact, forty years after it was built, there are still frequent power shortages. On the street in front of Ahmed's house is a great pile of logs, waiting to be split – mostly beech from the mountains nearby. ‘We always heat with wood, its cheaper, and more reliable.’

Mioara worked in a bank in Turnu Severin. The original plan was for the inhabitants to move to the island of Simian. When they refused they were given a choice – to leave for Turkey or to go somewhere else in Romania. ‘Many went to Turkey, but most soon came back … they didn't like the climate, or the conditions,’ she says. The Sultan's carpet, fifteen metres long and nine metres wide, which once covered the floor of the mosque, was split. Half is in the Iron Gates museum in Turnu Severin, the other half is on the floor of the main mosque in Constanța, on the Black Sea coast. In Babadag, the woman who showed me round the tomb of Sari Saltuq
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was born and raised on Ada Kaleh.

Down by the harbour in Orşova, with Ahmed's help I track down Erwin Osman, his best friend's son and the grandson of the imam. Erwin is repainting the hull of his boat for the tourist season. He takes groups up and down the river all summer, but never across. Romania has been in the European Union since 2007; Serbia might join if lucky in 2020. Borders divide people, but in borderlands people can wander, and meet. Both have been present in the fate of the Danube – yesterday's barbarians are today's or tomorrow's allies.

Every now and then, Erwin takes a visitor out who used to live on Ada Kaleh. They travel into midstream and cut the engines in the exact place where the island once stood. ‘Do they throw flowers?’ I ask.

‘I've never seen that …’ he admits. ‘Mostly they just lean quietly over the railings, gazing down into the water.’

On the shore there's a statue of a woman throwing a wreath of flowers into the waters, in memory of the island.

Erwin's grandfather was the imam of Ada Kaleh, and spent thirteen years in prison. He was convicted as a spy and enemy of the communist state on the sole evidence of possession of a Romanian-English dictionary. When he came back from prison, Ahmed remembers, ‘he was always the first to proclaim “Long Live the Socialist Republic of Romania” at public meetings. What they must have done to him in prison to make him do that!’ His wife shudders.

The first Iron Gates dam, between Orşova and Turnu Severin, was completed in 1971. Éva Hajdú remembers passing the island in the early summer of that year, on a cruise to Ruse on a ship which belonged to the Hungarian Interior Ministry. ‘On the way back, the island had completely
vanished beneath the waters. It was so sad,’ she told me, overlooking the shore of Lake Balaton, Hungary's inland sea.
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During those same weeks, there was an attempt at resistance by some of the older inhabitants of Orşova, who sat on their beds and refused to leave their homes. They were dragged out by police and soldiers.

Erwin and I study my book about Ada Kaleh which includes many photographs from his own collection. One, from 1945, shows the imam and two priests, one Orthodox and one Catholic, blessing the Romanian troops in front of the main theatre in Turnu Severin as they set out to occupy Transylvania.
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There is no Jewish rabbi present, Erwin points out, for obvious reasons. His maternal grandfather, he tells me, was not a critic of the regime but a victim of it. He was made into a scapegoat at a time when the authorities needed scapegoats. After he was released from prison he was chosen as a representative of minorities in parliament in Bucharest, and took part in delegations to the Arab world when Ceauşescu was cultivating such friendships. His paternal grandfather was a sweet-seller on both the island and the mainland. ‘I am a Muslim but I don't go to the mosque, as the nearest one is 350 kilometres away in Bucharest. I have a copy of the Koran. A tiny one, in my wallet, and another one at home. I can't read it, though, as it's in Arabic. My sister has my grandfather's copy. My mother died five years ago. She's buried in Istanbul. These photographs were very important for her.’

Professor Constantin Juan lives in a long housing estate down near the shore-line, in one of the blocks of flats built for those rehoused from old Orşova. Aged ninety-three he still lives alone, but is looked after by his children and grandchildren. He remembers Ada Kaleh well from his many visits, and from his later work as an ethnographer. ‘The first time – I must have only been four or five – I was struck by the fact that everyone still dressed in the oriental fashion.’ Bloomers for the women, fezes for the men. I move him gently on to some of the yawning gaps in my research on the island, especially the legendary figure of Miskin Baba, a Muslim saint whose house and tomb were on the island. ‘Miskin Baba was the king of Bukhara in central Asia. One night he dreamt of an island in the middle of a river where the people needed him. So he travelled and travelled, asking all the way where such an island might be found, until he reached Belgrade. There he found an island, but he knew that was not the place. So he asked
a group of fishermen, “Where could you find a lot of fish – as many as Jesus Christ found?” because he knew the fishermen were Christians. And they told him the way to Ada Kaleh. He lived there for many years, and helped the people a lot, just as he had dreamt. And when he died he was buried there. Even after his death he continued to defend the island … Once a young man dreamt that he should tidy up his grave, because if he did so, another man would come and help the islanders. That was in 1931, and he obeyed the dream. A year later the King of Romania, Carol II, visited the island, and did much for the people.’ A society was established to help the poor, run by a local businessman called Ali Kadri who married a Jewish woman from Orşova. But in 1940 he left for Istanbul.’ Without his wife, the story goes. Professor Juan has other stories of the more eccentric inhabitants on the eve of the Second World War. A Hungarian called Bicsárdi, for example, a naturist who refused to wear clothes.
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Local people did not believe that everything would be destroyed. It was very hard for them. He remembers in particular the two, massive cypress trees in the Turkish graveyard, cut down when the mosque was destroyed. Even Miskin Baba could not withstand the final attack by the combined comrades of Yugoslavia and Romania. His tomb was moved, like the others, to Simian Island. But no one knows where it is any more. ‘Many times I have dreamt that the Danube went back, and I walked through the streets of Old Orşova, looking for the place where my house was, that I could go back inside and live there again. I dreamt that many times.’

Târgu Jiu lies in the hills, an hour's drive north of Turnu Severin. It seems a long way from the Danube, but it is not hard to justify the detour. Ever since I came to live in eastern Europe, half a lifetime ago, I have wanted to see the birthplace of Constantin Brâncuşi.

The Table of Silence stands in the town park, near the Jiu river. Twelve symmetrical stools, like half melons, surround a simple, round stone table. Like all of Brâncuşi's work, there is something both ancient and radically modern about it. The number twelve, the distance of the stools from the table, and the name of the work invite contemplation. It's already summer in the park: the buzz of the birds and the chatter of the townsfolk are loud. I photograph a young couple sitting on one of the stools, the girl in the boy's lap. He wears sunglasses and a green T-shirt; she has shoulder-length,
dark-brown hair, turns her face away from the camera, and cups his chin in her hand. As I study the photograph later, I notice both have identical bracelets, giving the impression that they are actually one person with four hands. Brâncuşi would have liked this. A policeman stands guard in the background, in a light blue shirt in the summer heat, arms folded. Then an older woman arrives, on high-heeled shoes, from her body language the boy's mother, rather than the girl's. They sit on three stools, the mother in the middle. The table radiates silence. Beyond are a line of willows, and steps that lead up to the embankment of the River Jiu.

Down an alleyway of trees stands the Gate of the Kiss. The kiss, highly stylised, represents that between a soldier and his sweetheart, and the soldier and his child as he sets out to war, and was intended as a war memorial to the Romanian defenders of the city in a battle with German troops in the First World War.

‘Here are my pictures of the Temple du Baiser,’ Brâncuşi wrote in a letter to Doina Tǎtǎrescu, the wife of the Romanian Prime Minister Gheorghe Tǎtǎrescu.
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‘Through this doorway one will enter a garden … Do you recognize the patterns on the stone? … these columns are the result of years of searching. First came this group of two, interlaced, seated figures in stone … then the symbol of the egg, then the thought grew into this gateway to a beyond …’ The patterns he refers to resemble the wooden tiles on the roofs of peasant houses. The ‘egg’ on each side of the top of the columns is split down the middle, in the centre of another ring of stone. There are no features on the two faces, but the intimacy lost by the absence of lips and eyes and chins is regained by the sheer proximity of the two halves of the stone. The whole face rubs against the other for the last time before they part forever. The circle of stone around them is the cocoon of their love. And the world beyond the gate, as Brâncuşi writes, is the other world where they will be reunited. ‘Don't you see these eyes? The outlines of the two eyes? These hemispheres represent love. What is left in memory after one's death? The remembrance of the eyes, of the gaze which voiced one's love for people, for mankind.’
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Hobița, the village where Brâncuşi was born and grew up, tending his father's sheep, is half an hour's drive from Târgu Jiu. His own birth-house burned down, but another wooden house built by his father, a carpenter,
was put in its place, and is said to closely resemble the original. The wooden tiles on the steeply sloping roof are individually carved – just like the vertical shapes on the Gate of the Kiss. The house is made of big, solid beams, and has just three rooms and a long front porch. The whole structure is raised from the ground, with geraniums in a tray along the terrace. The room on the right has a dirt floor, a hearth with earthenware and iron pots and pans and cooking implements arranged around it, and a small spinning wheel. In the far room on the left is a writing desk, with flowers on the table and black-and-white pictures of Brâncuşi at work in his atelier in Paris. The picture from 1935 – when Brâncuşi was forty-eight – shows a vigorous, bearded, determined-looking man, his hair still dark but his beard already grey, with a cigarette between his fingers and his arms resting on his knees. In the picture from 1938 he looks awkward in a suit and tie, presumably at the opening of an exhibition, but his big hands rest on top of each other, as though impatient to get back to work. In the picture from 1946 he has aged a lot, seems exhausted with the world, leans back with his eyes shut, a peculiar domed hat on his head, though there is still a sculptor's mallet in his hand. There are simple, painted icons on the white-washed walls, and a story printed out above his desk.