Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  All was not quite shipshape elsewhere in the crew accommodation, either, nor in the debris of rubbish, wires and broken winches stacked behind the bridge. Apparently it had been far, far worse at the start of the journey, and as we waited for new crew at Bezdan, Attila explained that the Argo was a recent purchase by a Serb shipping company from a Dutch owner-skipper who’d gutted it of everything, but who’d left carpets deeply ingrained with the smell of his old, fat, nearly dead Alsatians. In Rotterdam, where Attila had loaded the china clay, he had torn out the carpets and invested in several cans of cloyingly sweet air-freshener, but now, three weeks later, the smell of decaying dog was still all-pervading. The rest he was trying to sort out as he went along.

  ‘Boat OK, engine OK, navigation equipment OK, but all this’ – Attila swept his arm to encompass the crew accommodation – ‘bullshit. Owner must change the floor. You know how old this boat? Over a hundred years. Too many dead dogs.’ He must have seen my expression, because he added quickly, ‘Don’t worry, a hundred years old but still good at floating. If not, we can always sell it to the Romanians.’

  I found the captain eminently likeable, but he was also a perfectionist, and the inadequacies of the Argo were physically painful for him. His patience had snapped with the previous crew (‘talk too much, work too little’) and his first action on reaching Serbian soil had been to send them packing. It had been their departing footsteps I’d heard on the lighter’s deck the previous night. But a particular aggravation that would always follow him round was his personal need for cleanliness and clean air: he’d insist on a clean tea-towel every time anyone did any washing-up, but more awkwardly he was an ardent non-smoker, which was highly unusual in the world of Danube shipping. It was a passionate stand that was to cause problems later on.

  He was, though, more than happy to see his replacement crew, Vladimir and Ivica, who stepped on to the Argo just after breakfast, and even happier once we were under way an hour later. He was back up in the bridge, overseeing a satisfactory downstream progression of 15 knots. ‘Here we are,’ he smiled to me, ‘you write this in your book, Mr Andrew. Me, Captain Attila, a Hungarian Serb, first mate Vlado, a Serb Serb, and engineer Ivica, a Croatian. Hungarian, Serb, Croatian work together no problem. One happy family, see?’

  Certainly he looked far happier than he had been on land. He was wedged into his swivel chair on the far corner of the bridge, with Radio Croatia playing something jaunty above his head and the crew he wanted around him. On the desk in front of him were the screens for radar and satellite navigation, and the small tiller lever was nestled neatly under his hand. The echo sounder was, unfortunately, defunct, but that didn’t seem to worry him unduly, even though I’d heard the river’s course became increasingly treacherous as it broadened out. Shifting currents created sandbars that altered their position from one year to the next, and it was very easy to go aground.

  ‘I’ve hit the sandbars before, but now I’m driving where I haven’t hit them,’ laughed the captain. ‘And besides, how would you ever learn the course if you didn’t hit a few?’

  This was a far less organized Danube than it had been back in Captain Fenzl’s territory, where the approved navigation channel was clearly marked specifically so you couldn’t hit anything. Here the buoys were few and far between. The Serb authorities preferred to let captains make their own mistakes.

  Even though I shared the forward accommodation with him, I saw little of the engineer on that first day of the journey. Ivica was tousle-haired and had the expressive face of a boy who’d never quite grown up – a face which let him down repeatedly by clouding with anxiety at the slightest provocation. If he wasn’t down below in the engine room, squatting immobile with the torrent of noise raining on his back, he’d pop up occasionally like a rabbit out of a hole anywhere on the Argo where there was a machine room or a pumping station. Attila had also given him the responsibility for the one main meal a day, a task he carried out well, albeit reluctantly, so he’d also pop up in the galley, his oily overalls hidden under an apron bearing the legend ‘Has anyone kissed the cook today?’ Happily, nobody explained to him what that meant, as it would only have caused a tsunami of blushing, and I certainly wasn’t going to do so. He was awkward and shy, and were he ever to find himself in female company I’d be prepared to bet he would sit silently and take the first opportunity to slink away. He and I barely communicated, partly because of his shyness and partly because I spoke no Croat and he spoke no English or German. Later on in the journey I did occasionally discover him in the cabin staring morosely at a German–Croat dictionary, because in order to progress up the Danube hierarchy he needed to be able to cope outside the Serbo-Croat world. However, I never heard a German word pass his lips.

  Vladimir, the first mate, was a completely different personality. Shaven-headed, hard-chinned, earringed and vigorous, he was forthright, nationalistic, piratical and a good person to have on your side. Where Attila’s moods were expressed in his choice of words and the hunching of his shoulders, Vlado put his whole body into his conversations, and initially he was confrontational towards me. He spoke good English, having once served in the Dutch merchant navy, and accordingly he took it as his task to lead a short interrogation about what exactly I was up to.

  Remembering a British politician’s recent description of ‘The wounded carcass of Serbian pride sprawled across the Danube’, I trod carefully with my answers, running through my habitual explanation about the river journey and the book. Vlado, however, assumed I was spinning him some kind of cover story.

  ‘You are a spy,’ he declared.

  ‘Honestly, I’m not.’

  I tried again, but there were several things in my explanation he found hard to understand, not least of which was the whole concept of a travel book. Then he couldn’t understand why anyone would find a boat journey through Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania remotely interesting when they had London and Paris on their doorsteps, and that they would choose a hundred-year-old barge with blocked toilets and a lingering aroma of dying dogs when they could afford to travel by five-star river cruiser with twenty-four-hour room service and the chance to create your own doilies. And finally he couldn’t understand that I was there under my own steam, that I wasn’t being paid and that no one had sent me.

  ‘So if we throw you overboard, who will know?’

  ‘Only my wife,’ I said slowly. It was a sobering thought. There wasn’t a lot she would be able to do on receiving a text that read ‘HELP, BEING MADE TO WALK THE PLANK’.

  ‘Are you going to do that? Throw me in the Danube?’

  ‘We’ll have to see.’

  That power to throw me overboard (and I had no doubt that he both could and would, if he had thought it necessary) must have in some way reassured him that I was no threat, because after that conversation Vlado relaxed, eventually becoming my chief ally on board. A couple of days into the journey he returned to the subject of the book once more to request that Serbia and the Serbs be portrayed fairly, ‘not like terrorists’, and to ask if the crew were going to be in it under their real names.

  ‘Do you want to be?’

  They consulted each other and agreed they did, so they are.

  Not long after leaving Bezdan the town of Apatin slipped by on the Serbian shore, its domed Orthodox church looking like an old-fashioned musical box, and then we passed the mouth of the river Drava, on whose banks I had so recently stood with Laguna. Appropriately, the previous night’s rain returned as we approached Vukovar, looming out of the Croatian bank. The town had been the focal point of one of the worst examples of ethnic cleansing in the whole Balkan crisis, when the murder of 200 civilian prisoners had been followed by a brutal eighty-seven-day siege which had killed upwards of 3,000 people and destroyed virtually every standing building. From the river the town was only partly visible and it looked only part-rehabilitated, the church still a ruin and the gaunt watertower standing like a shell-ravaged chalice. All three crew of t
he Argo – the Serb, the Croat and the Hungarian – were in the bridge as we came abreast of the ruin, and they deliberately avoided looking at it or commenting on it, gazing downriver instead. The tension could have just been my imagination, but Attila had an uncharacteristically testy radio exchange with the captain of a Croatian sand-dredger shortly afterwards.

  I went to sit in the bows on my own, far away from the noise of the engine. Even here you could still tell that the Argo was working hard, because the bows vibrated with the pistons’ beat like the tail wagging the dog. Wash from passing craft, however, made not the slightest impression on the boat’s motion; the Argo’s 1,400 tons smashed through it without so much as sniffing, and not for the last time I found my mind straying on to those century-old steel plates and the century-old rivets that held them in place.

  Towards evening the sun escaped from behind the lid of cloud that had sat on top of us all day and glared malevolently at the watchers on the bridge. The low light silhouetted the fish eagles, nonchalantly plucking from the water fish that no one else could see. It picked out passing herons heaving their bodies up and down as they flew, in a flight pattern that looked like laborious aerial press-ups. And it spotlit a wagtail that had settled on the cargo shutters, taking a breather between one shore and the other, not realizing that its supposed resting place was actually carrying it steadily further and further away from its wife and family, possibly never to return.

  As we passed a mid-river island a fisherman in a little wooden boat gunned his outboard alongside and started shouting something up at me. Vlado came forward, shouted something back, and the fisherman turned his bows away.

  ‘Catfish,’ said Vlado. ‘He wanted ten litres of diesel in exchange, but we don’t need.’

  He seemed inclined to stay, and explained how fishermen would use a short hollow stick to beat the water to attract the catfish and drive other unwanted fish species away.

  When we’d exhausted that topic I felt confident enough to ask him a difficult question.

  ‘So what did you do in the war?’

  ‘I was at sea. I wanted to come back and fight alongside my friends but my skipper wouldn’t release me. And when I did finally get off, I couldn’t get another job because of my Serb passport. Which is why I am here now, on a Serb ship.’

  ‘Did any of them die, your friends?’

  ‘No, they had fun! It was a real party time, particularly when the whole world turned against us. Nobody cared about anything, everybody was drinking.’

  ‘But many people died!’

  ‘Sure. When the NATO planes hit an oil refinery in Novi Sad, my mother felt the wave of heat from the explosion at home, forty kilometres away. The night became as bright as day.’

  ‘Were many killed?’

  Vlado shrugged, as if he was the tourist, not I, and the war wasn’t something he particularly cared about.

  I pursued the subject. ‘How about your father, did he get involved in the fighting?’

  Vlado laughed. ‘Not him. No, he left my mother when I was still small. Lives in Belgium now, where he’s got other kids.’ He seemed as dispassionate about his family breakup as he was about his country’s.

  ‘Oh. Sorry. I guess you don’t see him that often, then.’

  ‘I don’t see him at all. His children in Belgium don’t even know that I exist. They don’t know they’ve got a half-brother, and I don’t want to tell them until they are at least twenty years old. At that age they can make up their own minds what they want to do about it, but I’m not going to do any more damage than has already been done.’

  I was about to commend him for his incredibly mature approach, but Vlado stood up.

  ‘Come. I remember now, I came forward to tell you that Ivica has made us a fish stew.’

  16

  The Argo in Troubled Waters

  It took a couple of days to get to Belgrade. For the most part, the journey unrolled through featureless avenues of alder, willow and white and black poplar, unbroken by any kind of habitation, although there’d be the occasional speck of colour where a fisherman had percolated through the tree trunks and now sat at the water’s edge like a stray scrap of food caught in the Danube’s teeth.

  We’d passed through Novi Sad, the capital of Vojvodina, after dark, the street lights glistening on a newly created leisure park on the shore. Back in 1999 the city had been the scene of the worst act of government-sponsored vandalism in the modern era, when NATO warplanes had destroyed its three Danube bridges in an attempt to bring Serbia to heel. The debris had blocked the river for four years afterwards, bringing Danube shipping to a halt. A temporary bailey bridge, which opened to river traffic only a couple of hours a day, had recently been removed. And yet Novi Sad had already bounced back to become one of Central Europe’s most happening places with the EXIT music festival. Amongst young people, at least, it was burying its past faster than Linz had managed to do with the likes of the Pflasterspektakel.

  Up in the bridge Attila was alone, so I stood with him for a while in case he needed company. He was clearly very tired and at one point I thought he was in danger of nodding off, so I said something to that effect. The captain just laughed.

  ‘One eye may be sleeping, but the other is always awake. I sleep like a Dobermann. Always on guard.’

  We did, however, anchor for the night shortly afterwards.

  Daylight brought more variety as the southern shore rose up and revealed itself after a day of hiding away behind trees. Both banks were now Serbia, with Croatia consigned to the upriver Danube. Also finished was the Danube of castles and manor houses, which were now replaced by mean, low-slung lean-tos whose owners scratched a living from the land around them, little better off now than they had been at any time in the last five hundred years. The northern shore was flat and inhabited only by occasional herds of cows, their ankles wrinkling the water as they gathered in the shallows like groups of old ladies complaining about tired feet.

  Attila, on the other hand, was full of vigour after his night’s sleep. Too bad for Vlado and Ivica, who were despatched to various jobs around the Argo, including unblocking the forward toilet (‘My boss did a very strong shit,’ said Vlado). I settled on the cargo shutters in front of the bridge, to try to read and to keep out of the way, although in reality the excitement of actually being on the Argo still hadn’t finally abated and the novelty of my situation wouldn’t let me concentrate on my book.

  Towards late morning Attila throttled back the insistent put-putting of the jog-trotting engine and turned 180 degrees into the stream, dropping anchor just downriver from a cleft in the southern escarpment where wooden boats were drawn up on the shore.

  ‘Fishermen?’ I asked Vlado.

  ‘More like farmers with boats,’ he replied. ‘They have cattle on the other side.’

  It turned out we were expected, and it wasn’t long before some of these farmers-with-boats were swarming all over the Argo. They were muscular, deeply tanned, barefooted, gap-toothed and looked like sea gypsies as they leapt aboard, shouting greetings and exchanging spirited high fives. Alarmed, I thought we were being invaded, but Vlado plainly knew a couple of them, who disappeared up to the bridge with Attila. The others roamed the length of the boat, admiring everything, before eventually homing in on the forward cabin, my cabin. Anxious to protect my worldly goods, I hastened forward, only to be greeted by a garden swing-seat emerging from the forward hatch. It was one of the three boxes that had been in my cabin, and the other two quickly followed. They were transferred one by one to lie across the thwarts of two of the rough-hewn wooden boats, now drawn together to work as a catamaran. They were then shipped carefully across to the shore.

  ‘Boss. House.’ One of the men grunted at me, pointing inland.

  ‘Ah, the boss,’ I nodded, wisely, pretending I knew him. ‘The strong shit.’

  Once the boxes were off, Ivica disappeared into the engine room, and a cloud of soot emerged from the chimney as the Argo’s put-putte
ring started up again. The two remaining fishermen-farmers were padding across the cargo hatches making for their own boats when an elegant state-of-the-art river cruiser came abreast of us, heading for Belgrade, its elderly passengers lining the rails of the top deck taking photos. The men stopped, unbuckled their trousers, and the passengers had the full benefit of a two-bum salute.

  Captain Attila was in a good mood as we approached Belgrade, a mood that wasn’t to last. A second captain was going to come aboard, he said, to be the helmsman for the lower river into Bulgaria and Romania. He himself didn’t have the correct skipper’s papers for this Lower Danube, where the shifting sandbars could be notoriously difficult, so a specialist was needed. The new helmsman would be on test for the company as a potential new skipper, and for this trial journey he would help to reduce Attila’s own workload. ‘Two captains. Better than one,’ grinned Attila.

  As we neared Belgrade the high sandstone escarpment hid the gradual urbanization of the southern shore, but just occasionally a defile filled with cascades of rubbish indicated the growing pressure of people, in considerable numbers, living just out of sight. There would usually be seagulls around these impromptu tips, and I remarked on them to Vlado, because they were the first I’d seen on the Danube.

  ‘At sea we call them white brothers,’ he said. ‘We’re always pleased to see them because they’re never more than three days from land.’

  Skyscrapers began to materialize out of the mist while we were still 10 kilometres away, and then I could make out the crosses on Belgrade’s massive Orthodox cathedral, hauling their domes up out of the city dust.