Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  ‘Funny how you always expect other countries to look instantly different,’ I mused, out loud, looking at the far bank.

  ‘Ah, but it is different,’ said Tamas. ‘Over there, ten years ago, they had a war.’

  In celebration of our arrival he took Sandor off for a gallop through the Drava’s shallows, but Laguna wasn’t having any. She hadn’t come all this way without getting her feet wet in order to surrender herself at the end. Tamas suggested I give her a bit of clip round the rump with the stick, but I demurred. I hadn’t hit her once the whole week, and I wasn’t about to start now. She had, after all, completed her part of the bargain. She’d carried an incompetent horseman across half the country without losing him once, which was a pretty good result. I feared that forcing her into the water might have pushed her good nature a step too far, and that if I so much as suggested it, then I would have been the one who ended up splashing around unwillingly in the shallows. I was under no illusions, because even after all those days in the saddle I was not, and never had been, anything more than a passenger.

  15

  Serbia: the Argo Gets New Crew

  Antar and Marko were watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on a foggy TV screen when the storm rolled over. It hit the steel decking over our heads with the sound of a thousand rebellious schoolchildren drumming their heels at going-home time, and zapped the would-be millionaires into a zillion green dots.

  ‘Ach, there it goes again,’ said Marko, slapping a meaty palm on the table with a chuckle. ‘It’ll be back in a minute. Serves us right for watching Croatian TV. Coffee? It’s Turkish.’

  I nodded, rose from the bench seat and climbed the steps to poke my head out into the deluge beyond the cabin door, into a scene that was straight out of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It was dark, way past midnight, but still hot and humid. I was on a de-commissioned lighter that dated back to the early 1900s, chained to pilings on the Serbian side of the surging Danube. The river itself, churned with rain and the colour of greasy caramel, was only visible where it appeared in the yellow light cast from the cabin window. Apart from the empty flit boat moored alongside the lighter, we were all alone on the water. Gloomy shadows of trees crowded the bank in either direction above us, tossing restlessly under a relentless assault from the darkness above. But beyond that I could see nothing; the rain had effectively isolated the lighter in its own little world. Or it had until a fork of lightning illuminated the distant Croatian shore and revealed just how much river there was out there.

  My eye was pulled back to the bank above me by the flickering arc of a spent cigarette butt as it glowed briefly and died. I knew there was a border policeman sitting up there, in a windowless watchhouse between the trees. If I listened hard I could just about hear the jingle of his transistor radio above the surge of rain. Apart from his cigarettes, it was the only entertainment he had to last him through the night.

  I pulled my head in and climbed back down the stairs, returning to a welcoming fug of hot gas, sweet coffee, nicotine and unwashed men.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Antar grinned a chipped grin that spoke of a boisterous past. ‘Be patient, my friend. Another hour, mebbe two. You need to learn how to wait on the Danube. You’re lucky it’s Attila, he’s fast. Wid a Ukrainain, you could be three or four hours more.’

  ‘Ah-ha!’ interrupted Marko, triumphantly. He’d been working on the TV set, and now a green, ghostly image of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was beginning to reappear as the old valves staged a recovery.

  ‘Dey summer storms,’ explained Antar, ‘dey only last few minutes.’ And it was true, the outside noise was already beginning to relent.

  I told myself to relax. After all, twelve hours earlier I had plodded into Serbia with only a vague idea what might happen next, and now here I was with a long boat journey within my grasp. Antar was right, I had been very lucky. Again.

  I had always wanted to do part of my journey on the water, but I’d long since abandoned the idea of having my own boat. After what I’d seen of them upriver, I’d also discounted joining one of the passenger cruisers which worked the Danube, fattening their human cargo for the grave. So the only other option was to hitch a ride on a freight barge, and with that in mind I’d called up a few companies who ran barge fleets, but my explanations had usually been interrupted mid-flow as the person on the other end hung up. I couldn’t blame them. What earthly benefit could it be to a freight-barge company to have a travel writer on board?

  But then one German ship-owner made a suggestion. I should wait at a downriver customs point, he said, where all boats have to do their cross-border paperwork, and speak to the captains directly, because it would be their decision whether or not to take on a passenger. And it was he who suggested I do it in Serbia, on the basis that it was outside the EU, cowboy country, and ‘anything could happen there’.

  And so I’d left Tamas and Laguna waiting by the Drava for a horsebox to take them home, and headed east to cross the Danube into this ‘cowboy country’, walking into it across one of the most godforsaken no-man’s-lands in Europe. This was the frontier between southern Hungary and the part of Serbia called Vojvodina, one of two troublesome provinces (the other being Kosovo) of the former Yugoslavia. It was midday, but the heat was already so intense that the air above the road rippled and swirled, and by the time I came abreast of the border guard in his cabin I was lacquered with sweat.

  He took his time leafing through my passport. Border crossings were infrequent here, crossings on foot were rare, and British passports practically extinct. All three together were plainly worthy of special consideration.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Bezdan.’

  His eyebrows climbed towards his hairline and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Bezdan?’

  I agreed, not sure whether to be dismayed at his intonation or grateful that he made it sound so close. He shrugged and handed my passport back. There was no reason to detain me any longer, despite the unlikely destination. As I walked on into Serbia I remembered back to Ulm and to Franz Flock’s description of how he and his family had been forced to camp out, at the end of the Second World War, after border guards refused to let them back into the country of their birth. It had been this very same crossing, and it hadn’t got much friendlier.

  During the break up of Yugoslavia, Vojvodina had come to be regarded as a potential liability by Belgrade. Its ethnic mix, with six official languages (Serbian, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, Croatian and Macedonian) was a hangover from the days before empire was split into nations, and its uneasy relationship with the rest of Serbia meant that it was a prime candidate for secession. Large numbers of Serbian troops had been garrisoned here to stamp on any separatist tendencies.

  Belgrade had good reason to want to hang on to it, because the province is hugely fertile country, so fertile that Empress Maria Theresa – she who’d initiated that Swabian migration from Ulm – had ordered the construction of a massive canal system for easier access to its grain fields, a canal system that had been part designed by Gustav Eiffel’s office in Paris. In more recent years, before the Balkan war, the Danube riverbank in Vojvodina had been a place where Serbs would come to stay in holiday cottages, eat fish paprika soup and muck about in boats on the canals. But now those canals were sadly dilapidated, massively overgrown and largely unnavigable, with broken lock gates, defunct shipyards and crumbled wharves. It was a green, watery ruin that would have had great tourism potential if it had been almost anywhere else in Europe, but here it had been left to rot.

  A shipping agent called Branko who spoke good German had picked me up from the village and taken me down to the shore, pointing out the careless damage the Serb tanks had done to the shoreline tracks and buildings. They’d knocked corners off houses, destroyed trees and churned up hardcore tracks like badly behaved joyriders. There was no money to fix any of it, even if there’d been any official desire to do so, so it all remained just as the ar
my had left it, with only nature trying to cover the worst of the scars.

  Bezdan’s ‘port’ comprised a solitary pier with the old lighter attached, a half-ruined policeman’s watchhouse and the brick-built customs house, which had started life as a pumping station for the canals. In theory there was a twenty-four-hour shop and twenty-four-hour petrol supply here, too, but all had closed at the start of the war and not reopened. Now you couldn’t even get fresh water.

  ‘Captains get what they want at Mohács,’ shrugged Branko, the Yugo-agent. ‘They have to wait there anyway.’ Branko chain-smoked, looked as if he hadn’t slept for days and had a big scab at the centre of his forehead. I didn’t dare ask him what he’d done to himself, but from his demeanour it looked as if it was still giving him a splitting headache.

  Mohács was the customs port upriver, on the Hungarian side of the border. By all accounts it was a log-jam of a place for freight barges, where pompous customs officers enforced the letter of EU law to the minutest degree, aware that they were the new defenders of the European Community. During the break-up of Yugoslavia, Mohács customs had gone through boats with a fine-tooth comb to check that nothing was on board that broke the sanctions imposed on Serbia, a process called, innocently, REVISION. The name had stuck, and now Bezdan called its process REVISION too, although it was nothing like the Mohács operation. Captains hated the bureaucracy and the delay of the Hungarian port, said Branko, so he and his team did their best to make Bezdan’s REVISION a far more pleasant experience.

  When I described my own uncomfortable crossing of the border, he frowned. ‘I am a Hungarian. When I was a child this area was all Hungarian and German. The Germans, of course, have gone and now I need a visa to go to Hungary, even though I’m Hungarian. It’s crazy. And when I go, the Hungarians treat me like shit because they think I want to live there. I don’t. Why should I? I am happy here.’ He didn’t make it sound very convincing.

  He had all sorts of plans for the port at Bezdan. He wanted to create a restaurant, a café and a food shop for all those yachts that would be coming downriver now that Europe was becoming one continent again. But by the time skippers had finally completed the infuriating paperwork at Mohács they were champing at the bit to get on, and all they wanted from Bezdan was an official stamp and a pat on the back to send them on their way, as quickly as possible.

  ‘Do the skippers’ logs get checked?’ I asked, remembering Captain Fenzl’s talk of safety and the need to regulate a captain’s hours.

  Branko flicked his cigarette away and shook his head. ‘A captain is responsible for his own safety,’ he growled. ‘It’s no business of ours.’

  ‘And do you think one would take me on?’

  ‘In Serbia everything is possible. We’ll have to speak to them for you. But you must be patient. Sometimes we have no ships for hours and hours. In this business, there is a lot of sitting around.’

  Which was how I had ended up with Antar and Marko on the lighter. They were Branko’s flit-boat crew, and nearing the end of a two-day shift they were high on sleep deprivation, Turkish coffee and strong cigarettes. Their job was to listen in on radio exchanges between river traffic and the harbourmaster and then sally out on the flit boat to meet incoming vessels to expedite the whole customs procedure in return for an agent’s fee. I’d watched them do a couple of runs during the afternoon, followed by the stately procession of uniformed officials – the harbourmaster, the customs officer and the border policeman – who’d troop aboard the subject boat, disappear below and then reappear half an hour later clutching carrier bags, their REVISION complete.

  ‘A present,’ said Antar, vaguely, in answer to my question about the carrier bags. ‘Everybody gives presents on the Danube.’

  Branko had reappeared again after dark. I’d seen him a couple of times in the course of the day and each time he’d shaken his head wearily, asking me to be patient. But now he had news, and it was good.

  ‘Attila is coming. Attila Munkas on the Argo. He’s my friend, he says he will take you. Come, we need to get you some food.’

  And he’d taken me into Bezdan where I’d bought armfuls of pasta and a bottle of brandy. So now I was waiting with Antar and Marko, and trying to be patient.

  Not that it was dull on the old lighter. The two Serbs were almost as excited at the prospect of my long river journey as I was, and they’d set out to be entertaining, trying to translate some of the questions on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? for my benefit.

  Antar was the most unlikely of flit-boat captains, despite looking the part with a chest like a barrel and hands like meatsafes. He crackled with energy, speaking an eccentric colloquial English which he said he’d learned in the ‘arts undieworld’ when he was trying to be a ‘jetset music-man’. He winked at me. ‘Busking,’ he whispered. He was a chain-smoking vegetarian, and when he got fed up with the TV he would turn it off with a flourish of disgust, sit up on the bench in the cabin in the lotus position and describe the recipe for the ‘happy bean stew’ he was going to make when he got home. He queried me on my favourite rock guitarist, the age I liked my women (‘I prefer dem at three hundred months’) and even tried to initiate a conversation about religion. Not going to church meant nothing, he said.

  ‘I believe in God. God know what I do. I don’t need to go his house to tell him so. No?’

  He had a son at medical school in Belgrade and was keen that he should stay in Serbia when he’d qualified. In his view the European Union was just a dictatorship with more rules and regulations than communism had ever had, and as such its continued spread needed to be resisted. Serbia wasn’t bothered at being left on the outside, he claimed. For once the country was feeling good about itself, having just won the Eurovision Song Contest. ‘You know who give us max point? Croatia! Good old Cro-a-ti-a, how about! Our friends across da water! And now our tennis men are going to win Wimbly-don, you watch!’

  He too knew Attila Munkas, whom he said was a Hungarian Serb, coincidentally from this very village, and an excellent captain on a river that got increasingly difficult to navigate. It was my lucky day that Attila had happened along.

  Towards three o’clock in the morning the Argo finally loomed out of the darkness. She was a long, low barge typical of any European waterway, high in the prow, low in the water and with bridge and passenger accommodation right at the stern. She was carrying china clay, reported Antar, listening in to the radio talk, 1,359 tons of it, headed for Ruse, Bulgaria. ‘Dat mean in Bulgaria dey will be making shit-load of toilets! No?’

  The Argo clanged alongside but I was instructed to sit tight in the cabin of the lighter while voices and footsteps moved around above my head. Eventually a tall, tired-looking, casually dressed man in his late thirties stooped into the light of the cabin doorway and beckoned. ‘I am Captain Attila, please come,’ he said in German.

  As we crossed to the customs house I tried to stammer out my gratitude.

  ‘Can you cook?’ interrupted the captain, briskly. ‘I’m dying for some proper food.’

  For the next half-hour he left me alone in the dark customs-house hallway while he disappeared into the police office with my passport. When he eventually emerged he looked even more haggard. REVISION didn’t look like a pat on the back. ‘I will keep this,’ he said, slipping the passport into his briefcase. ‘We can’t take passengers. You are crew now.’

  It was with a great surge of light-headedness that I followed him back towards the river. I hadn’t dared to allow myself really to celebrate my good fortune until it was all sorted, and now I was on my way to Bulgaria, by barge! That was over 1,000 kilometres of river! I was steeling myself to ask how long it would take when the harbourmaster appeared in the doorway to the customs house and called the captain back. Attila cursed under his breath as he swivelled on his heel, but a minute later he was back holding a carrier bag of something heavy, looking pleased.

  ‘The harbourmaster caught us some fish.’

  A day later and the
Argo’s new deckhand had yet to do anything more onerous than make infrequent cups of coffee and do the occasional bit of washing-up.

  Coming aboard in the dark, the barge had looked to be reassuringly well equipped. In the main accommodation block beneath the bridge the neat Formica-finished galley with stove and basin opened out into a generous sitting room, which had doorways to the captain’s and first mate’s cabins. The sitting room’s main features were a TV and two leather-effect sofas freshly purchased from Ikea in Rotterdam, with the labels still attached, vouchsafing their authenticity, and there was a bathroom across the hallway from the galley.

  My cabin was an 80-metre walk forward to the bows, in a room next to the engineer’s. It contained a (non-Ikea) sofa for me to sleep on, the crew washing machine and several boxed garden swing-seats, also Ikea. The engineer and I shared the forward bathroom, although it proved unusable. The bath had a tell-tale inch of water in it that refused to go away, but the pièce de résistance was the toilet, impossibly mounted on a waist-high cabinet and with such limited clearance above it that urinating required mountaineering skills, tenacity and the ability to piss at an angle. If you wanted to do something more serious and sit on it you could only do so by clambering up and reversing backwards in a crouched position until your shoulders wedged under the ceiling. It certainly gave you something to push against.

  The toilet’s extra height was designed to make sure that drainage would continue to be effective even when the barge was sitting low in the water, as now, but the toilet was blocked anyway, no doubt because of the extreme duress one’s sphincters were put under by that unaccustomed crouched position. It was impossible to sit up there, shoulderblades against the ceiling, and have a delicate shit, just as it is impossible to take a full tube of toothpaste, stamp on it, remove the lid and avoid a substantial and immediate evacuation.