Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  With the first reason for coming to Donaueschingen resolved, it was time to get on with the second: the Danube spring.

  It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I’d arrived in the town completely ignorant of the source of the Danube debate. The official line is that the Danube starts at a spring in the town because the Romans said so, but Italian scholar Claudio Magris, in his book on the river, turns the whole issue into a preamble of Tristram Shandy-like proportions on the exact definition of source, possible whereabouts of said source, or even the need to find a source, which takes him forty-odd pages. I’d had Magris’ book recommended to me again and again before I set out on this journey – it is the only relatively contemporary socio-historical account of the Danube – but found it almost impenetrably scholarly. The great man exercised his synapses through four hundred pages, displaying immense erudition, leaping between intellectual rooftops and poking his nose down the chimney stacks of downriver nations like a PhD chimney sweep from Mary Poppins. For my part, my synapses jumped through a few hoops and did a couple of short sprints to try to keep up, but after a while they were all tuckered out so they lay down and looked at the sky, and short of poking them with a sharp stick there was nothing much I could do about it.

  Magris spends his first chapter striding (mainly metaphorically, I assume, because he didn’t strike me as a strider) around the Black Forest hills from possible source to possible source, and I can imagine him with some of Donaueschingen’s vitamin-filled pensioners in tow, seemingly attentive and impressed by the great man’s digressions, but with their synapses even more tuckered out than mine.

  He was by no means the first to have furrowed his brow over the Danube’s origins. The German poet Heinrich Heine wandered over the source territory in the 1880s, and although he came to no definitive conclusion he clearly felt sympathy for the victimized B rivers. As he wrote in a letter to Karl Marx, ‘clearly it would be easy to adhere to the thesis that there is no Danube at all, only Breg and Brigach. Thus the Danube becomes a fiction.’ A fiction? It’d be a bugger for me and my book if it did.

  Fortunately, local lore has a glib solution for us non-scholars: to find the source of the Danube, so they say, all you have to do is to find a river that could reasonably be the Danube and stroll up and down its banks mumbling continually, ‘This is the Danube, this is the Danube,’ and hey presto, the river exists.

  In Donaueschingen itself, whose very name depends on the Danube, there was no room for debate. ‘Hier entspringt die Donau’ (literally, ‘Here springs the Danube’) declared a categorical noticeboard between the Fürstenberg Palace and the Bohemian baroque St John’s Church. ‘And the Romans counted it a very important site.’ I detected the hand of the burgermeister at work in invoking the Romans, because, being the architects of modern civilization, they would have known what they were talking about. So there.

  Alongside the sign, a circle of balustrades opened to permit the visitor down to a wrought-iron fence. The fence surrounded a basin of clear water disturbed only by jelly-jewel bubbles of air rising to the surface, and the occasional plop of a coin going in the other direction as another visitor’s wish sank into the depths. This was the Donauquelle, or the Danube Spring, and looming over it was the allegorical figure of Mother Baar pointing towards the Black Sea, telling the infant river where to go. From the air, what with the iron fence and the encircling stone balustrade, the translucence of the water and the glimmering of coins on the spring bed, it must have looked like an ornamental brooch pinned to the side of the palace’s park. Or a turquoise rivet, if you were up at 35,000 feet.

  On an adjacent wall, Donaueschingen’s ‘Hier entspringt die Donau’ proclamation was corroborated by a show of solidarity from all the countries that lie along the river’s length. They demonstrated that solidarity through plaques which acted as multi-governmental witness statements to banish all doubts from the spectator’s mind, because the Danube must start here if both the Romans and all these governments say so. Forget the Breg and Brigach, was the subtext to all these messages: they’re history. In the making of a great river, somebody had to get hurt.

  As for the wording on the plaques, it was pompous, sententious and bland. The Danube ‘connects us with the great family of European nations’ declared the Croats. Bulgaria soliloquized about being linked to the heart of Europe (i.e. please let us be one of the gang). Hungary quoted its suicidal tragi-poet József Attila about the Danube being a wonder of nature (so let’s all jump in and drown), the Romanians declared that they were watching over the Delta on behalf of everyone (it’s ours, don’t even think about interfering), while the Ukrainians burbled on about how the Danube’s water carries the hopes and prayers of millions of Europeans (the Russians told us to write that) and the Serbs declared that the great river brought ‘something that man is lacking’ (has anyone got a packet of fags?).

  For a while I sat by the source in the sun, waiting to see if any Magris-like profundity would descend on my shoulders, too, but all I could think of was the fate of the poor B rivers. Then I began to be concerned about the possible impact of the slow rain of wish-impregnated coins down into the bed of the Donauquelle, blocking the flow. Presumably those same dungaree-clad council workers had the honour of stepping over the ironwork at regular intervals, to plunge into the hallowed water to remove the silver, or else the Danube would be in danger of becoming gummed up with loose change before it even started. That in itself was a novel idea. Could the B rivers suddenly be gifted a second chance? And what then if the council workers were summoned, with their plungers? Would the unblocking, the sudden shifting of silverware, have any consequences downriver? Surely if the butterfly-flapping-its-wings theory of climate was correct, then the removal of a single one-euro coin in Donaueschingen had the potential to produce a tidal wave in Novi Sad?

  Anyway, as this was the official starting point of my journey, I felt the need to mark my departure with some kind of ceremony, and just flipping another coin into the water wasn’t going to be enough. So when a desultory pair of tourists had drifted away, leaving me there on my own, I circled the spring, pumping my new bicycle pump, and muttering ‘Drum bun, drum bun, drum bun,’ which is actually Romanian for ‘good journey’. Warming to my task, I improvised a halting dance, like a Red Indian preparing for war. ‘Drum bun, drum bun, Ma Baar.’ And then, with a last look at the plaque indicating that there were 2,840 kilometres to go, and at the allegorical figure of Mother Baar pointing me on my way, I mounted my 20-euro set of wheels and headed for Budapest.

  The idea of a journey down the Danube was more of an accumulation than an inspiration. It all started a long, long time ago when, as a recent graduate, flying out to Asia, I remember looking down out of the aircraft window at a land that was russet-brown, wrinkled, veined and as bristly as the hide of a camel – Romania, according to the flight plan – and wondering what on earth it could be like down there, behind the Iron Curtain. It might have been a different planet. Then I promptly forgot all about it, because south-east Asia became all the rage. For many years Thailand was far more interesting than Transylvania, and destinations right under our noses, part of our own continent, remained far more foreign to us than many places halfway round the globe.

  Then the Wall came down, and the West started to wrap its warm hands around the chilly East, and new airline routes started to stir the pot. Over succeeding years I dipped my toe into this new territory with journeys to Poland, to Bulgaria, to Romania, to Czechoslovakia and to the former Yugoslavia. But a lot of it made little lasting impression; the landscape was often neglected, the cities devastated by war and then badly mauled by peace. The architecture was unrewarding, the food forgettable, the history unknown and the languages unrelated to anything I had learned at school. The British press had lost interest in the region once the communist-overthrow stories were done, apart from a flurry of excitement over Romanian orphanages. It was hard to get a handle on the place.

  But then it started to
force itself on our attention. Eastern Europeans started arriving in the West, particularly once their home countries joined the EU, to do our plumbing and our loft conversions. Early in the new millennium I recall having a conversation with a typical British builder who complained that he didn’t have any problem with the blacks and the Asians; he knew a bit about the British Empire and slavery, and he could see where these different ethnicities had come from and why they were in Britain. They were easy to pick out in a crowd and he knew what they were like and how to handle them.

  Eastern Europeans, however, were a different matter, he said. Confusingly, they looked just like us, but he had no idea who they were or where they had come from. Nobody had taught him anything about them at school, there was never anything about their countries in the newspapers, there had never been anything about them on the TV, and now here they were, blending in and walking around as if they belonged. Some of them were even Muslim, whilst looking just like West Ham supporters. It was as if they were impostors who’d slipped in from Europe’s backyard. ‘Like having someone turn up on your doorstep claiming to be a brother, when you never knew you even had one,’ the builder said. He was quite incensed.

  The final catalyst for the book was a trip I made to Transylvania, where I stumbled into an almost medieval landscape that I never dreamed still existed in Europe, of scything farmers and their fruit-collecting children, of horses and carts, of wells in the villages, wolves in the woods and bears in the hills. The storybook detail was captivating. The storks on chimney stacks, clapping their beaks when their youngsters stood up. The chicks in home-made chicken runs on the roadside verges. The little smoking huts in every yard, breadmaking ovens for summer use. And the daily cow parade, when all the villagers’ cattle brought themselves back from the fields punctually at milking time and wandered down the main street until they reached their owners’ houses, where the gates would be standing open to welcome them home. Transylvania seemed a mythical place, one where you literally didn’t count your chickens until they hatched, and one where you made sure you made hay while the sun shone.

  The resident humanity was no less captivating. My host in this fairytale land turned out to be a Transylvanian count whose great-uncle had been the foreign minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who had Habsburg cousins, who knew the Prince of Wales, who was a Knight of Malta, who spoke many languages fluently, and who told me that most aristocrats of the region had once sent their children to British public schools. I thought such people only existed in stories.

  On that Transylvanian trip, standing in a clocktower looking down over an ornate, belfried hilltop town that confusingly had three names – Sighioara to the Romanians, Schässburg to the Germans and Segesvár to the Hungarians – I fell into conversation with a German tourist.

  ‘Look at it,’ he said, with a sweep of his hands over the red-tiled rooftops. ‘Don’t you recognize it?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ve never been here before.’

  ‘It’s Germany, don’t you see? It was built by Germans, lived in by Germans for hundreds of years, until they were all forced to leave. This should all be Germany. And Budapest – did you know about Budapest?’ I shrugged again. A jingoistic, imperialistic German is not a common experience in the modern world, and it wasn’t one I was enjoying.

  ‘It was all German-speaking, Budapest. In the 1820s there were two daily newspapers in German, none at all in Hungarian, and Hungarians were only a third of the population. Same in Prague, it was all Germans, hardly any Czechs there at all. You never heard of the Banat? The Danube Swabians? Empress Maria Theresa?’

  I had to shake my head again and again, and eventually the German despaired of teaching me any more.

  ‘Then you don’t know anything about European history,’ he said, with great finality.

  He was right, I didn’t. Despite an expensive education my knowledge of the geo-politically enlarging and reuniting European continent in which I lived was sketchy at best, and it barely lapped up against the former Iron Curtain, let alone spilled over to the other side. I was one of those who knew far more about Thailand than I did about Transylvania.

  The extent of that ignorance was driven home to me on the flight home, while running my eye over the map of Europe in the back of the inflight magazine. I found my eye following the route of the Danube. I knew approximately where it started, in southern Germany, and that it flowed through Austria and then through Hungary to Budapest, just like in the Strauss waltz:

  Danube so blue

  You flow straight through

  The meadows and dales …

  but after that it simply vanished off the edge of my mental map. So to see it running onwards, through Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, and with sideways nods to Moldova and the Ukraine before making its exit into the Black Sea, came as a surprise. This was a European equator I hadn’t realized existed, a European Amazon, far larger and longer than any other river in the region. It was a mighty liquid belt that held Europe’s trousers up, and yet all I knew about it was that it was supposed to be blue, which turned out to be complete tosh. How come we didn’t pay more attention to it at school?

  So when I got back I looked it up. It was the European Union’s longest river, said my encyclopaedia, at 2,840 kilometres, and the ten Danube countries it ran through had a combined population of a hundred million, about whom we knew practically nothing. As well as being the longest river in continental Europe, it was the only one that flowed west to east, a crucial fact that had saved Europe’s bacon over the centuries. Had it flowed the other way, then the likes of Genghis Khan, the Almoravids and the Ottomans could have taken a watery conveyor belt right into the heart of the West, and the Western world would have ended up a very different place.

  But the Danube was more than that. Rivers have their own narratives, with a beginning, middle and end; they are not just water that moves. They rise and fall, tumble and stall, breed life and generate their own personality, accelerating and slowing, chattering and slumbering at will. They are more than just a physical presence, more than just wet stuff in queues. Animal life, and human life, gather around them, and always have done. In his unusually titled book, The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube), Hungarian author Peter Esterhazy writes that ‘The difference between water and a river is that the latter has a memory, a past, a history.’ And a river like the Danube has a lot more memory, past and history than most.

  Its potential as a storyteller intrigued me greatly. I found myself believing that a river that had its head in old Europe and its tail in new would inevitably share some of its experiences with me. It had flowed, mutely and immutably, through centuries of tremendous change, carrying messengers, fugitives, emigrants and evacuees as well as tourists. It had soaked away any blood that had been shed, helped in the building of nations on its shores, and absorbed all the effluent of supposed progress, without passing judgement. Now, surely, it could be coaxed to reveal all to someone journeying along its length. I could just see the headlines in Hello! magazine: ‘At home with the Danube; 50 years of war and peace and still smiling on.’

  More than that, I envisaged the river as a reassuring presence that could accompany me through the ups and downs of a long, ambitious journey along Europe’s watermark, the mark that authenticated Europe as truly European. It would always be there, an uncomplaining travel companion carrying me along in its slipstream right down to Europe’s back door. A companion, a mentor, a guide, an interpreter, ever reliable and ever present. A touch inscrutable, maybe, but incapable of guile.

  Logistically, too, it could help greatly with the process of the journey. The very concept of travelling along a river’s route had a pleasing inevitability to it, making the journey instantly and easily defined. By plonking myself down in Donaueschingen I was connecting myself in one metaphorical stroke both with the guts of my journey and with my final destination, and although it wasn’t quite like peering down a rifle barrel at the Black Sea, it did he
lp remove the vagaries of a traveller’s itinerary. I was plopping myself into Europe’s open mouth, submitting myself to the whims of its interior plumbing, and hoping to emerge unscathed from its rear end. I was at the start of a 2,840-kilometre voyage, and the countdown started right here. I would know exactly when I was halfway, and equally exactly when I had just 20 kilometres to go. If ever I left the river for a detour, then the Danube would always be there waiting on my return to tell me in which direction I should turn and to tell me a few stories on the way. If ever I ran out of inspiration or energy, then I could always just throw myself in and float. And, of course, if the journey turned out to be dull, I’d always have something to blame.

  Not that there’d be much danger of that, I hoped. The further it progressed in an easterly direction, the more there’d be to learn, because the more unknown, and undeveloped, would be the lands it passed through. The Donau became the Dunaj, the Duna, the Dunav, the Dunarea, and the Dunay, until finally it arrived at the Danube Delta, a wetland wilderness the size of Dorset, where Russian-speaking tribal fishermen lived in houses thatched with reeds and where colonies of Dalmatian pelicans gorged themselves on a hundred different species of fish. What could be better?

  It all sounded incredibly exotic for somewhere just a low-cost flight away. The more I learned, the more I became convinced that the river, like Theseus’s piece of string in his fight against the Minotaur, was a perfect vehicle for a journey into the labyrinth of the new Europe. An excuse for taking a literary swab of a newly united continent and colliding with the debris of the last seventy-five years of European history en route. A way of stumbling on broken dynasties and on people and places with gripping recent narratives of how their lives, and homelands, had changed.