The Danube (27 page)

Far below on the river, the Osijek barge from Croatia pushes its rusting brown load downstream. One stone not on display here, the most interesting find of all, is wrapped in tissue in the vaults of the Serbian National Bank in Belgrade, pending the completion of more than a decade of renovation. A brownish, spherical stone, with holes drilled at either end, it is inscribed with letters resembling Ks, Xs, Vs and Ys. According to the Italian archaeologist Marco Merlini, ‘the possible usage of this object includes use in divination or for keeping records relating to important cyclical events. If the signs inscribed on the stone from Lepenski Vir were used for divination, they are perhaps the oldest example of writing used for this purpose.’
³⁵
Merlini's database for the Danube script contains over four thousand signs, taken from more than eight hundred objects
– figurines, clay pots, utensils and stones. The area where they were found covers parts of eleven modern countries, from Hungary to Greece. All appear to have been produced between six and eight thousand years ago. Whether or not they constitute a writing system is bitterly disputed by experts, and no one has yet advanced an attempt at translation. This leaves everyone who comes into contact with them the space to dream. And Marija Gimbutas's dream is the boldest so far – the mythical city of Atlantis, an advanced civilisation that slipped away without trace into the ocean, might instead refer to the civilisation of the Lower Danube. If so the remarkable Minoan culture found on the island of Crete was actually an outpost of Danubian civilisation.
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CHAPTER 8

River of Fire

T
HE
M
USCULAR
fortress of Golubac squats on the Danube shore, the pride of kings and sultans, its ten towers crumbling into oblivion. The castles at Golubac, Ram and Smederevo are like studs on the soldier's belt of the Danube below Belgrade. In wealthier, better organised countries, these would be jewels to which domestic and foreign tourists would flock for a taste of worlds gone by. Instead, the Danube shore in Serbia is neglected, the glory of ageing anglers, kids swimming in their underpants, and locals who either cannot afford to follow the caravan to the Adriatic coast each summer – or who have fallen so deeply in love with the secret folds and fronds of this inland river that they cannot imagine a day or night away from her. There are exceptions: the annual catfish competition in Tekija, the sailing regatta each August on the Danube at Golubac, and the handsome site of Viminacium above the river, where the Roman forces massed to march through the Danube gorge to defeat Decebal in the year
AD
101, all draw the crowds.

Golubac gets its name from the Serbian word
golub
or the Hungarian
galamb
, meaning ‘dove’. ‘Dove-house’ is an unexpectedly peaceful name for
a town with such a martial history. The association with doves goes back to the very beginnings, in the sixth century
AD
when the Byzantine emperors rebuilt a Roman stronghold to protect themselves from the raids of the Huns and Goths.
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Most of the ten towers of the main fortress are square, built before the age of firearms made rounded towers necessary. The lower, octagonal tower, the most recent, was built by the Turks in 1480, against the Hungarian armies, which developed a habit of re-taking their own castles. The tower appears low because most of it is underwater – the river level here is raised by the Iron Gates dam. The Babakaj rock protrudes from the mid-stream of the river. Medieval garrisons used to tie a heavy chain from the ramparts to Babakaj both to prevent hostile ships passing and to extract customs duties from friendly ones.

The main road beside the Danube passes through a tunnel drilled in the sheer rock, in at the southern end and out again at the north. A family with lots of children is shepherded through, girls in hot pants pose for photographs on the rough walls, and Zawisza Czarny – the Black Knight – oversees the fountain dedicated to his memory at the far end. A Polish soldier and diplomat, he first served King Władysław II, then King Sigismund of Hungary, and his name became a byword for bravery and reliability. The ‘Black’ in his name comes from his long black hair and black armour, neither of which is done justice by his bronze plaque, which shows him in profile, instead emphasising the fine jut of his beard and the ornate plumes sprouting from his helmet.
³
After a glorious career winning tournaments against the most renowned knights of Europe, he was killed in battle against the Turks at Golubac, protecting the retreat of Sigismund's forces by boat across the Danube when he ignored the king's order to save himself. ‘In Golubac, his life was taken by the Turks in 1428, the famous Polish knight,’ reads the inscription, in Polish and Serbian, ‘the symbol of courage and honour, Zawisza the Black. Glory to the hero!’ In her own humorous way, Nature pays tribute to him, raining a constant supply of juicy black mulberries onto the monument. The water from the spring is cool and metallic on the tongue. We fill our bottles and carry them down for a picnic on the shore. The Black Knight's armour is still preserved at the Jasna Góra monastery in Poland, where the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, her face scarred, bestows blessings on her pilgrims.

We sleep in a rudimentary campsite on the Danube shore near Brnjica. Sitting under a willow in the early morning, the wind suddenly picks up; sending dark cat's-paws spinning across the water. At seven in the morning the
Mercur 306
barge heads downstream, bound for Galați. A boy comes down to fish in the river while his girlfriend washes her hair with shampoo in the shallows. He speaks slowly, patiently to her, as though he is explaining the ancient art of fishing. I shut my eyes to hear the wind in the willows, the fizz of his line snaking through the air, the spin of his spool and the splash of the weight hitting the water, far out in the river. He opens a can of beer. She ties up her hair. Birds call to each other across the water. Even the patches on the Danube here look like a script.

I have two interpreters on this leg of the journey. Lola, a Bosnian Serb from Sarajevo, in whose battered, Bosnian registered car we are travelling, and Lacka, a Hungarian from Subotica, a maker and mender of violins, guitars and flutes. Silhouetted against the water, smoking his pipe, Lacka looks very much like Zawisza the Black – without the helmet.

One evening in a fish restaurant, Lola takes two sticks down from the wall and demonstrates how they are used to catch catfish. ‘You beat on the surface of the water like this …’ he says, drumming on the table and making the wine glasses and plates jump. The Hungarians have a special word for this stick, the
putyagató
, while the Serbs call it a
buchka
. The sound it makes in the water is an imitation of what large catfish do with their tails, to call to others to come and eat.

Both men were caught up in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, in rather different roles. By candlelight, sipping white wine, Lacka tells his story. ‘My grandfather taught me to repair fishing nets as a child, with a big needle. He lived in a little thatched house with an earth floor, with no electricity, just petroleum lamps. I remember going up into the attic of that house in July, in the heat. The dust rose slowly, through the shafts of sunlight. You had to tread carefully, as if you were on the bottom of the sea. I can still smell that attic, the dust, the dry wood, the wooden basins to wash clothes in, or mix bread. And the boxes with bars that we used to put into the river, like cages, to catch the fish. I can remember the creak of each of the wooden stairs … My grandfather married a girl from Zenta, on the Tisza [a tributary of the Danube that joins the river north of Belgrade] … My master, Lajos Dudás, was very strict, well -educated, very aware of his Hungarian national culture,
and he taught me to make musical instruments. On his deathbed I sat beside him. He opened his eyes, held my hand, and said, “Son, in you my thoughts will live on.” Those were his last words to me … I remember my first visits to the Danube as a child, at Bezdan, near Apatin. It was so huge, so wide, for me it was more impressive than the sea.’

In May 1991 when the troubles began in Croatia, Lacka, married by then, with a four-year-old daughter, was teaching at a school in Subotica. His call-up papers to report for duty as a reservist in the Yugoslav army arrived, but he just ignored them. ‘The thought of war was so remote, so impossible. But then the brother of a friend came back from Croatia, badly wounded. He said Hungarians were fighting other Hungarians – on the Croatian side. Only then did I start to get frightened. Then I heard other stories, that our own army killed those of its own soldiers who didn't want to fight … I was happy when I watched the big demonstrations in Bosnia, against war. The people of Bosnia were the most peaceful in the whole of Yugoslavia. Then another letter came, a reminder. I was just coming down the stairs at the school where I taught one day, when I saw two military police in uniforms with white bands round them. I heard voices and my name mentioned, and the secretary of the school saying I had gone. I climbed out of a ground floor window and got away. I didn't tell anyone, not even my wife and daughter. I packed my tools and a few clothes, and started cycling towards the Hungarian border. The green border seemed a bad idea, and so did the nearest crossing, Tompa, because it was too quiet. So I cycled to Röszke, about thirty kilometres away. That was good because I knew there was not a big distance between the Yugoslav and Hungarian border posts, unlike at Tompa – in case they tried to shoot me. Then I got lucky. I handed my passport to the border guard, through a little window. He started searching to see if my name was on the list of those called up who were banned from leaving the country. Just at that moment another policeman came into the office, and they got into a big argument with each other. So they didn't see me put my hand through the window, take back my passport, and start cycling for dear life towards Hungary, until it was too late [to stop me].’ Apart from his tools, he carried two books, the Bible and
Lord of the Rings
. He cycled all the way to Budapest and bought himself a map with the last of his money in Tobacco Street, behind the big synagogue. Within a few days he found work with a violin maker.

That evening we sleep on the balcony of a guest-house in Vinci, opposite the island of Moldova Veche. The Danube flows directly from north to south here. The house is in a pine-wood at the end of a sandy road. The smell of the pines, their scent melting in the summer night, is the smell of the south, but the sight of the trees is of the north, a foretaste of the pines of the Black Forest at the end of my journey.

Before Veliko Gradište the Danube bends again, to flow from west to east. The road runs along an embankment, built for flood protection. I stop to talk to an old woman, sitting on a stool in a little shelter built of branches, keeping a watchful eye on a herd of black-and-white cows grazing on the floodplain. She has a blue and grey headscarf, a face so brown and wrinkled I'm not sure if her eyes are open or not, and wears an old green jumper despite the July heat. The man who owned the cows has died, she says, in a matter-of-fact way. His funeral is taking place that very day. She volunteered to look after his cows until the family decides what to do with them.

A barge passes upstream with a load of new cars from the Dacia-Renault factory at Piteşti near Bucharest. Black cormorants sit hook-necked on the wrecks of whole trees left bald by the Danube floods, or flap their heavy wings, flying in straight lines low over the water. Beside them even the seagulls seem small and peaceful. In Hungarian the word for cormorant is
kárókatona. Katona
means soldier, and
káró
may come from the Turkish word for black, as in Karaorman, the village in the Danube delta, or
Karadeniz
, the Black Sea. The Serbian bank here is flat, but the last corner of Romania, on the far side of the Danube, is rich with light green hills, dotted with dark patches of trees.

Radislav Stokić has been working on the Danube for fifty-five years, and he's not yet finished. He wears a straw hat with a green rim and a green band, and a chequered shirt with a black collar. The boat he has just bought sits silently in the harbour at Ram. It's a barge with a black hull, dark blue amidships, a bridge bristling with aerials, speakers and spotlights, and bright white cabins in the stern, and no name. She is eighty-five metres long and ten metres across. In his seventieth year, Radislav is starting a new line: a gas station, for ships up and down the river between Zemun and Borča. ‘This is the biggest boat I've ever bought. All she needs now is a name, and some
fuel tanks.’ He's found a niche in the river fuel market, he reckons. ‘We'll have a crew of three or four, moor her on the side of the river, and get down to business. At the moment there are only three places to fill up on the whole 240 kilometre Serbian stretch of the river, at Belgrade, Novi Sad and Kladovo. His boat is going to fill that niche. He has worked all his life on barges, going up and down river, except for three years in Libya. First with his father, then alone. He knows everything about machinery, about stone quarrying, and about boats. He can't imagine any other life. When the Iron Gates dam was being built, he used to ship stone for it from the quarry at Golubac. ‘We carried the stone for the roads on the shore, and for the dam. We built everything …’ he says. Didn't the dam do a lot of damage? It did, he admits. Especially on the far shore, at Stara Palanka. The river level used to be six metres lower here. A lot of good agricultural land was lost. He and his son are involved in bridge repairs and building now. After NATO bombed the Serbian bridges in the spring of 1999, he got a lot of work rebuilding them. He has two boats with cranes that he hires out, ‘the biggest in Serbia,’ he says proudly. One is 419 tonnes, and especially designed for building bridges. ‘Now we look to the Chinese. Just yesterday I signed a contract with them, for the new terminal in Kostolac.’ The Chinese also have a plan to build a new bridge, right over the Danube. Another firm is bidding for the same work, but he's confident he can win the contract.