The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  I turned into a rough little taverna on the other side of the village. Here I walked in on a group of burly boar-hunters who were so far gone on schnapps that they seemed to think I was one of their party and plied me with hunks of roasted boar and schnapps while calling me Vlad. The taverna owner kept winking at me as if to say, ‘Just humour them, they’re always like this, and besides they’ve got knives,’ so I did, and retired to my dinghy that night replete.

  My third day in Golubac was spent listening to a breathless, five-hour lecture on Serbian history by a young piano player called Alen, who clearly had been waiting seventeen years to try out his English on someone. His English was flawless, his delivery engaging in its sheer enthusiasm, and the subject matter fascinating, though readers will forgive me if I do not recall it all here and now.

  Alen had come to Golubac to play the piano in his Serbian folk band; there was to be a big dinner dance that evening in the hotel, and he asked me along. The night featured folk-dancing in full costume, including a lovely moment when the dancers stood in a line, arms linked, and suddenly all stiffly leaned to one side in perfect synchronisation, like painted peg dolls on a line. In among the feasting and the drinking, the jazz solos and the slow waltzes, the band-leader stood up and announced the news: NATO was going to bombard the country in twenty-four hours unless Milosevic capitulated. Immediately the band to whom Alen had introduced me gathered around and expressed their concern … for me. Was I alright? Couldn’t I perhaps leave the little boat here in Golubac and flee the country before the bombing started? The saxophonist had a van – he could have me to Bulgaria by the next morning if we left now. Surely I wanted to ring home at least.

  Their country in ruins, maligned by the world, under threat of immediate attack by Britain and the States, nevertheless they were busy worrying about the safety of a chance traveller from those very countries threatening them. I was astonished and moved.

  * By the next morning the gale had blown itself out, the lake was a blue dream, and the Iron Gates stood to welcome me across the water.

  High craggy precipices of white limestone rose straight out of water as deep green as bottle-glass. At times the sky was nothing but a thin blue ribbon far overhead against which occasionally an eagle could be seen soaring. Often I could see no more than a hundred yards ahead, the view blocked by yet another crumbling buttress of the gorge wall or a free-standing pinnacle of rock in mid-stream.

  The current was not as fierce as I had been expecting. Had I been doing this trip fifty years earlier, I would have been swept down through the Gorge on a turbulent mill-race of white water, which would have been rather fun, if fatal, but a huge hydro-electric dam at the far end had turned the torrent into one long and serpentine lake, allowing the safe passage of river boats in both directions.

  At times the gorge would widen into pockets of Swiss-style scenery: hay-ricks in shaven meadows backed by steep pine-woods, and little red-roofed farmsteads, all held between the white knuckles of savage limestone rising to the sky. Then around another bend and the echoing stone would close in and the cold shadows lie across my shoulders. Sometimes around a particularly tight bend, the breeze would grow skittish and I would have to watch for sudden sideswipes, but on the whole Jack and I were laughing our way through.

  Let us roll all our strength and all

  Our sweetness up into one ball,

  And tear our pleasures with rough strife

  Thorough the Iron Gates of Life

  I misquoted merrily to Jack as we bowled along, children in a giant’s kingdom.

  Towards dusk, after a long stretch through a broader section of woods and gentler slopes, we entered a further section of canyon. Again the walls closed in, and again I felt that I was entering some story of adventure. Round a bend we came across a place where the river ran between two sheer cliffs of stone and the current quickened. On the left-hand bank stood out a great column of stone, a natural tower some four storeys high, and this had been carved into a great brooding face, like the Mount Rushmore Presidents. This face, however, was no George Washington or Lincoln. It was a monstrous Apache face, hawk-nosed, heavy-browed, primitive and watchful.

  Opposite this great guardian of stone was something smaller but more remarkable. Set into the cliff, just above the level of the river, was a plaque of white marble, beginning to gleam in the faint moonlight that was now suff using the blue dusk. This was the Tab-ula Trajana, cut by the Emperor Trajan himself almost two thousand years ago and set here to stamp the presence of Rome even in this, the wildest part of the wild East. Here it still stood; no road or path passed it by, no buses of tourists crowded from their coaches to snap photographs. Even the great busy barges hurried by, I suspect, keeping to the safer northern bank, and never close enough to read it. I might have been the first to read those ancient words in a thousand years, there in the twilit dusk.

  Guardian of the Iron Gates

  Since my Union Jacks had been slashed in Veliko Gradiste, I had flown as a flag my beloved red-and-white spotty handkerchief. That night it saved my life; that and the fact that I had read Swallows and Amazons. Soon after sailing away from the Tabula Trajana, the breeze died to nothing and I rowed on for another two hours in deepening darkness. The moon rose over the high cliff y hills, a single perfect puff of cloud sculptured in silver and blue shadow by the moon, and a solitary star, very bright and clear, hung at the moon’s ear. Under such a sky, I came in sight of the lights of Tekja, a small town on the right-hand side of the valley, and pulled hard for the distant twinkle that spoke of warmth and company and a place to tie up for the night. Even as I pulled hard at the oars, one of them slipped, sending the rowlock tumbling into the darkened bottom of the dinghy amid the debris of ropes and sponge and bailer. I cursed, turned around and bent to grope for it. Boating at night is something I had learnt in the past to be a foolish thing to do – it is impossible to see what you are doing, impossible to judge distances, difficult to make out what lights are on land and what are those of shipping, and you yourself are well-nigh invisible to others unless you have proper navigation lights. I had none of these. And as I scrabbled around for the invisible rowlock, I realised that the lights twinkling across the black water ahead were not those of the pier or the town, but of a moving vessel, and one that was a good deal closer than I had thought. It was one of the barges, an iron monster churning silently through the darkness, only about thirty yards away and heading straight for me. The lights told me that last fact; I could see three in a row – green, white and red from left to right – and even I, who am spatially dyslexic, could work out in three agonised seconds what that meant. Unable to row out of the way and without showing a light, I had no chance at all. My torch was still handy, and grabbing it and yelling into the darkness I shone it straight at the wheelhouse of the barge.

  But hang on! A boat showing only a single white light is a mystery to another vessel. If anything, it is the stern light of a retreating vessel and therefore no cause for altering course. I should be showing a red light, a port light to show that I was directly ahead but moving across their bows to their left, warning them to steer to starboard with all speed. I was, in fact, in precisely the same predicament in which the Swallows found themselves in We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea when they were adrift in a yacht on the North Sea and about to be run down by a liner. There the resourceful children had shone a torch straight through a red Woolworth’s plate and avoided disaster. I had no Woolworth’s plate, nothing red except – my hanky. There it hung, limply drooping from the port stay. I lunged across the dinghy, jammed the torch into its folds and shone the now reddened light at the great hulk of the barge, now only yards away. Would it see it? Would it respond? Still the green-white-red pattern showed, doubly reflected in the curling black bow-wave of the approaching monster. It wasn’t working. I would be run down in about fifteen seconds. There was no time to find that bloody rowlock, no time to don a life-jacket.

  But then … ah, at last … the gree
n winked out and left only the white and red lights dancing, and then just the red. The skipper had automatically steered to starboard at the sight of a red light, and the great barge thundered by less than ten feet away. I was safe.

  Even so, the passing wake knocked me off my feet and into the bottom of the dinghy, and from the barge, a hastily activated searchlight swivelled and pin-pointed me like a moth on a board. Someone on a megaphone shouted something incomprehensible but clearly apoplectic out of the darkness and I was for a moment glad that I did not speak Romanian, or whatever it was. But I lay there sloshing in the bottom of the dinghy blessing the hanky and the Swallows over and over again before re-fixing my oar and rowing to the safety of the shore.

  At the great dam-wall of Derdap I had to wait for several hours the next morning before the first of two locks was operated. I whiled away the time by washing all my clothes in the river and spreading them to dry in the warm sunshine. A young security guard called Nenad, as graceful as a deer, came and chatted to me all the while, telling me facts he thought might be of interest. During Ceaucescu’s dictatorship in Romania just across the river, many hundreds had tried to flee the country; the most obvious route was here across the Dunav to Yugoslavia where the river was narrow and isolated. Many Romanians had attempted to swim the gorge unaided and had been shot by the border-patrols from the cliff -tops as they floundered in the water. Their bodies had drifted down and fetched up where I had been washing my socks. The Romanians disclaimed any knowledge of the pitiful corpses, and they had been buried in the little graveyard full of unmarked tombs up the hill from where we sat. Ceaucescu had in his later days of power, Nenad told me, decreed an edict banning curtains in restaurants, so paranoid was he that people might be plotting against him in public places. I couldn’t help thinking that if you need to make laws like that, you should know you’re getting something wrong.

  The last run of a hundred miles to the border took three days, the chief feature of which was hunger. I spent the last two dining on nothing but honey from the large jar given to me by Branko’s mother and the small clove of garlic. This I peeled carefully, piece by piece, and munched raw. With the honey it was not too bad. This was, after all, Transylvania, though vampires seemed thin on the ground. The Romanian pastures were wide and empty, with occasional scenes recalling a Children’s Illustrated Bible: shepherd boys tending flocks, wicked-eyed goats, dry cliffs where the sand-martins breed, the occasional tall moustachioed patriarch with a black crook. In the final two days, the weather came in, a thick chilling murk so that I could barely see the passing landscape. Hatless and freezing, I took my red-and-white spotty handkerchief and tied it tightly over my head as a scarf, in the manner of headmasters’ wives standing on the touchline of a House Rugby Tournament. In my moment of deepest misery, I remembered the little clinking package given to me in Vienna. It was somewhere tucked away in the fore-locker. When I unwrapped it with numb fingers, I discovered five little bottles of something called Barenliquor, or Bear’s Mead. It was wonderfully warming and reviving, burning into my veins and fingertips and restoring my feeble spirits as though made by Loki himself.

  My last night in old Yugoslavia was at Prahavo, a dismal dead-end of almost disused railway-sidings, a container port, some big factories and a solitary grimy bar. There I went, starving and wet and cold, and for the first time brought myself to beg for a little bread. Here at the most miserable spot in the country, two factory workers pooled their funds and bought me a bowl of paprika soup. I squirrelled some of the bread away for later. I slept that night in a deserted waiting-room in the railway station just by the river – it was too cold and wet for sleeping aboard – and kept stirring uneasily in my sleep at strange, furtive rustlings and whisperings. They seemed to be emanating impossibly from beneath my very head, propped on my little knapsack as a pillow, and I put them down as delusions caused by fatigue and an overdose of paprika. It was only on the following day when I went to fetch out the bread-rolls I had stored there that I discovered there was nothing left but a few gnawed crumbs and a large rat-nibbled hole right through the bottom of the knapsack. Judging by the size of the hole, they were the size of dachshunds. I was very glad that I had not woken fully in the night.

  And so at last a final day of headwind slogging, revived faintly by the last of the Barenliquor and the honey, and over into Bulgaria. I was stopped at the border by a grey patrol boat that shot out from behind the river-bank bushes and accosted me in mid-stream. I was not worried. The Australian Consulate in Vienna had assured me that I did not need a visa for Bulgaria. The border-guards saw it differently. I could not enter.

  ‘I cannot go back,’ I pointed out, too exhausted and wet to be diplomatic.

  ‘You have no visa.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where have you come from?’ they asked, guns cocked.

  ‘England.’

  ‘No, no, where have you come from in this boat?’

  ‘England,’ I repeated, and showed them my map.

  There was some discussion.

  ‘You may continue to Vidin, twenty miles down the river. There you must report immediately to the police. Do you understand?

  Immediately.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And they put their guns away and roared off .

  Welcome to Bulgaria.

  Bad Times in Bulgaria

  When I sally forth to seek my prey,

  I help myself in a royal way:

  I sink a few more ships, it’s true,

  Than a well-bred monarch ought to do …

  For I am a Pirate King!

  Hurrah! Hurrah! For our Pirate King!

  And it is, it is a glorious thing

  To be a Pirate King!

  —W.S. G,ILBERT, The Pirates of Penzance

  There was no way I was going to report immediately to the police. I arrived in Vidin after dark, cold, damp, starving and exhausted. The last thing I was going to do was sit in a draughty police-station for a couple of hours, only to be told at the end of it that I must leave Bulgaria immediately. I needed a hot shower, a square meal and a good night’s rest, preferably without rats banqueting in my pillow as I slept. And for all this I needed money.

  I slept. And for all this I needed money.

  And that meant finding a cash-machine.

  I found one soon enough. It was right next door to the police-station. Right.

  Right!

  I put on my large shapeless cagoule without putting my arms in the sleeves, pulled out my red-and-white spotty handkerchief, tied it in a headscarf over my head, persuaded myself that I looked just like a Bulgarian peasant woman out doing some late-night shopping, and marched up to the machine under the eye of an idle policeman. There I gave him what I hoped was a coquettish wink and extracted a great wad of glorious money. Then I marched into the nicest hotel I could find and proceeded to spend it all.

  Next morning I mailed letters, phoned England, phoned Australia, did a ton of laundry, went back to bed until midday, and did all those things that are not possible to do while being deported for not having a visa. Having got that out of the way, I marched off to see the police, a winning smile on my lips. Four hours later I was being granted a visa. It was simple after all; they just needed a lot of money for the paperwork. And it needed to be in US dollars. Unmarked. In a brown paper bag.

  Back I went to the bank and discovered the first of the many things about Bulgaria that are designed to baffle or repel visitors. See if you can work it out.

  Me: (walking up to the bank teller, a girl behind a grille) Do you speak English?

  Her: Yiss, of course.

  Me: Super. Can I change some money into US dollars here?

  Her: (she nods) Me: (highly relieved) Oh, thank goodness, you’ve no idea what it’s been like. I’ve been living on raw garlic for a week now, sorry about the smell. Now, I’d like to change this to dollars then. There’s about four hundred and … Her: Ne, ees problema. Ees ne okay. Ne.

  Me: (s
omewhat taken aback) Oh. Well, can I change less? Two hundred leva, yes?

  Her: (nod, nod)

  Me: Here you go then. (I push it across to her. She doesn’t take it.)

  Sorry, is there a problem?

  Her: (she shakes her head)

  Me: Oh, that’s a relief. I need it quite desperately, you see. Isn’t it a lovely day outside?

  Her: (she shakes her head again)

  Me: Ah. Right. Right. Sorry. Yes, bring back the rain, that’s what I say. None of this ghastly sunshine, no indeed! … Er, you do understand me, don’t you?

  Her: (shake, shake)

  Me: I’m sorry, I thought you said you spoke English. Do you?

  Her: (shake, shake)

  Me: Oh. Is there anyone else who does? Sprechen zie Englisch?

  Parlez el Anglais? Speaky Engleski?

  Her: (nod, nod)

  Me: Could I see him? Her? Speak to someone who speaks English? Please? Before one of us dies?

  Her: I tell you, I speak the English. It is good I speak. There is no one else.

  Me: So you do speak English?

  Her: (shake, shake)

  … and so on.

  Can you work it out? It took me three more days. In Bulgaria alone of all the nations of the earth, a nod of the head means ‘no’ and a shake of the head means ‘yes.’ Over the next week I found this unique trait of the Bulgarian people incredibly frustrating, even when I had tumbled to it. The visual signal of a nod or shake is so much stronger than the verbal cue that I was often left baffled by the simplest exchanges. ‘Can I buy some bread?’ I’d enquire, and at the shop-keeper’s shake of the head I’d be out of the shop and down the road sadly looking for another place before I remembered that I’d just been told ‘yes.’