Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  Attila’s mood had much changed when he returned from the harbourmaster’s office.

  ‘Bandit,’ he muttered through clenched teeth, tossing his briefcase into the galley. ‘All he wants is money. I fuck his mother.’ We stayed clear of him as he stomped up to the bridge and called his wife on his mobile phone.

  A couple of minutes later the second skipper slipped apologetically aboard, a wiry, self-effacing figure clutching a suitcase. He had a hunched, hawkish and wily look about him, and eyebrows that nearly met in the middle. And although he shook us all by the hand and told us his name was Milia, he didn’t make much attempt at starting any further conversation. He spoke a little German, he agreed, but Russian was the language of the lower river; did I speak Russian? I had to confess I did not. Vlado gave him a tour of the boat, and afterwards he disappeared into the bridge with Attila.

  For the next few hours I kept out of the way. We exited Belgrade through air laced with the smells of industrial chemistry. Creeks led off the main river towards various unidentifiable installations, most of them with a chimney emitting wisps of lurid-coloured smoke. Fleets of barges were anchored in the shallows, the empty ones high in the water, looking paradoxically far more substantial than the laden (and therefore low-slung). They behaved differently, too; the empty ones were far more susceptible to wind, and would swing back and forth alluringly in front of the motionless full ones, as if to say, ‘I’m free, I’m empty, come and make me full.’ But the full ones ignored them, not moving, not even winking, giving nothing away.

  I’d sensed a change in atmosphere on the Argo the moment Milia had stepped aboard, but the first sign that all was not well on board was over dinner. It was catfish again, and just Vlado, Ivica and me. I was curious as to whether we’d be pushing on through the night, now that we had two skippers, but Vlado shrugged.

  ‘We haven’t been told.’

  I’d seen him and Ivica talking in low voices, steering clear of the bridge, so I enquired whether there was some problem.

  Again, Vlado shrugged. ‘It’s the cigarettes. Milia smokes, but Attila doesn’t.’

  ‘So can’t he just step outside when he wants a cigarette?’

  I’d assumed that Vlado and Ivica would automatically be on Attila’s side, but it wasn’t the case. ‘We need to take care of Milia. He knows the way.’

  With watches still unallocated, we pushed on well beyond nightfall, through inky darkness where you had to strain your eyes for the silhouettes of marker buoys and the shapes of fishing boats. And then suddenly the engine was idling, and bright lights were close by on the starboard side. It was the Serbian town of Veliko Gradite, with a floodlit football ground and a promenade with flowerbeds right alongside the quay. The Argo slunk into the pools of soft light like an apologetic dog, aware that it was trespassing but desperate for warmth and company. Suddenly there were new smells in the air, smells that I realized I’d missed, of trees and flowers, and even of perfume. For although it was past midnight, there were women amongst the strollers on the quay, fascinatingly feminine, and I found myself latching on to them with the unhealthy interest of someone already too long in a world of men, diesel and cigarettes. I began to understand why seamen could be so desperate for female company on the rare occasions they came ashore.

  The Argo quivered fearfully as we touched the stonework, and the incessant beat of the engine was cut. In the ensuing silence the noise of arguing boys on the football ground sounded delightful, mixed with the bewitching click of high heels on the prom.

  It was into this silence that Attila dropped his bombshell. He was leaving the ship. He was tired; he’d been on the Argo for five weeks; he’d had enough; everything was basically shipshape, and now we had a captain who knew the way. This was his last opportunity to get off on Serbian soil and return to his wife and children. He’d be off early in the morning.

  It all sounded very plausible, but that didn’t make it feel right. Vlado and Ivica looked astonished.

  ‘He knows this ship, we are his crew,’ muttered Vlado. ‘He called us up especially to join him.’ But Attila had become emphatic in a way that brooked no contradiction, and he plainly wasn’t willing to enter into a discussion. He certainly didn’t want any talk about the real reasons for abandoning his ship, which I suspected were more to do with a personality clash between him and the new arrival – particularly over the question of cigarettes on the bridge; to smoke or not to smoke.

  ‘Vlado, you will look after the paperwork,’ announced the new, I-brook-no-questions Attila. ‘So come, we will study it together.’

  Ivica and I were left looking at each other, while Ivica’s face flushed and flushed again. But there was nothing we could do, or even say. And as for Milia, he was nowhere to be seen. So I went to bed.

  By the time I woke next day, at around 6 a.m., we were already under way. Attila had gone, and I hadn’t had the chance to say a proper goodbye.

  I had very mixed feelings about the change of regime. Attila had been the skipper, but also the boat’s moral compass. The Argo had been his project, and he had set the standards and the routines by which it was run. And although he was the boss, he didn’t set himself apart from the rest of us; he wore his heart on his sleeve. Most importantly for me, he had been the person who had agreed that I could come aboard his boat in the first place. For that I was very, very grateful, and I had missed my chance to express that gratitude fully.

  Milia, on the other hand, was unfathomable, the sort of character who could be harbouring a deep and nasty secret. I couldn’t imagine asking him what he’d done in the war. He didn’t attempt to get involved with the rest of the crew, and as soon as he came on board he’d wedged himself into the far corner of the bridge behind the tiller, the furthest away he could get from other people, from where he never came down, not even for meals. Whereas Attila had been happy to hand over to Vlado so he could take a break occasionally, Milia was not. Steering was what he did, and he could go on doing it for hour after hour, day after day, hiding away behind a curtain of cigarette smoke. And even though Vlado and Ivica would sit up on the bridge with him, he rarely spoke. When he did, it was usually over the radio, and as we progressed downriver, it was usually in Russian. It was hard to connect with him, and crucially I had no idea what he had been told about my presence on board what was now his ship, or what he thought about it. But I was still there, and the Argo had officially left Serbian waters with my name on the crew list, which to some extent guaranteed my passage. If for some reason I wasn’t on board at the next customs check, men in uniform would want to know what had happened to me. In the end I thought it best to continue as if nothing had changed. It was easily enough done, because Captain Milia seemed equally keen to avoid me, but then he also avoided contact with everyone else.

  There was a big attraction that day to keep us all entertained. The Iron Gate. Until relatively recently its name alone had been enough to silence even the most talkative of Danube skippers, because this was where their skills were tested to the utmost, where the land rose up in standing waves of stone and refused to let any but the most resolute pass. The name referred to the meeting point of the southern Balkan mountains with the Carpathians, a giant scimitar of a range that carved through Central and Eastern Europe. Between them, these two groups of mountains represent an almost impassable barrier, but the Danube, having traipsed 1,800 kilometres across Europe, wasn’t going to turn round and sneak shamefacedly back to join its fellow north–southers. Finding a cleft between the two ranges – the Iron Gate – it slims itself down into a vigorous tree-climbing-boy of a river and squirms through a set of gorges and canyons to get out on to the flatlands beyond. There it returns to its lazy, fatso self, and ultimately merges with the Black Sea.

  The Romans were the first to follow the river through the Iron Gate, carving a roadway into the steep edges of the gorges and canyons and building a bridge across the angry flood. They used this route to invade, and subdue, what was called Dacia, now Ro
mania, but they were on foot. Waterborne traffic took one look at the rock-strewn cataracts and opted for mule trains instead.

  The Iron Gate became properly navigable only after 1890, when an 80-metre-wide channel was cut through the most difficult stretch, but even in this channel the currents were so strong that, for the next eighty years, ships had to be dragged upstream by locomotive. Leigh Fermor travelled down through the ‘hardly believable chasm’ in 1933, and talked of rolling gravel singing audibly through the muffled flood, of boulders bounding along troughs, of the weight and force of the river ‘tearing off huge fragments of rock and trundling them along in the dark and slowly grinding them down to pebbles, then gravel, then grit and finally sand’.

  But in the years that had passed since then, man had finally outwitted and outmuscled nature, even in a defiantly hostile arena like this. The Iron Gate dam had been completed in 1972, and slowly the water level rose, neutering the floods, drowning the rocks, emasculating the cataracts. In places it rose as much as 35 metres, covering everything the Romans had created, and submerging whole villages, too. Around 17,000 people had to be relocated as their houses disappeared under water. The freeport island of Ada Kaleh, famous for its thousand twisting alleys and distinctive Turkish community, abandoned by the Ottomans and much relished by Leigh Fermor, was lost for ever under rising waters.

  At the beginning of the chasm the Argo slid past the remains of the fourteenth-century fortress of Golubac, which had been built as a defence against Ottoman forces. Its towers still sat atop a formidable rock, but the new raised height of the water meant that you could row across its massive curtain walls in a puny dinghy and paddle around the lower fortifications, singing nursery rhymes. To add insult to injury, the modern road breached another part of the wall, but Golubac’s towers kept on staring resolutely into the distance, declaring themselves on guard against the old enemy, too proud to acknowledge that they had been mortally breached.

  Before the chasm, the Danube had been at least a kilometre wide, but now it closed in on the Argo to a couple of hundred metres across, and the water’s surface was marked with fault lines where it had been folded together, like curds making cheese. Given the drama of the explosions of rock taking place all around us, there was something disappointing about the placidity of the river, which obeyed the bullying shore with barely a murmur of complaint. The Argo slid along between buttresses of rock, veering sideways into corridors whose walls rose over 1,000 feet, but there was no sense of fighting to stay on course against a maniacal current. The gorge was also strangely silent, as if we were moving along a corridor of slumbering elephants’ rear ends and it was our task to do so as quietly as possible, or else the elephants would hear us and turn, and then we’d have their tusks to contend with.

  Of other life on the land there was practically no sign, apart from a defunct power station with a Romanian navy gunboat tied up alongside. Man may have turned the water into a navigable highway, but he hadn’t succeeded in harnessing the chasm for human use in any other way, or he hadn’t until we reached the first Kazan, or cauldron, where the river relaxed into a giant scoop in the mountains and we had a brief sight of houses, fields and cars attempting to pursue a normal life. Then it was back into the chasm again, amongst shoulders of land that folded away repeatedly into the mist. As they drew nearer, someone coloured those shoulders in, first roughly, and then with a finer hand, until eventually they were alongside, and you could examine every nuance of rock and scrub. High up on the blank face of the southern mountains a modern road had been cut, but at key places the engineers had been forced to retreat inside the cliff face. The cost of the road must have been huge, and judging by the very intermittent traffic, it hadn’t really been worthwhile.

  Below the first Kazan we entered a long, narrow stretch where a signal station was perched on an outcrop of rock, its ‘signal’ a large metal puffball that could be either raised or lowered.

  ‘Not used now,’ said Vlado, dismissively. ‘We have radio.’

  ‘So what’s the rule here?’

  ‘One way at a time. The upcoming boat must wait. Because the downriver boat cannot stop.’

  Cannot stop? There was no sign of any rip-roaring current on the surface, but parts of the river here were 90 metres deep, so the disturbance created by the underwater strata of schist and quartz sent towers of super-cold water soaring upwards, where they hit the surface in flawless grafts of new skin, yet to be wrinkled by the wind. In such circumstances, steering could be unpredictable.

  Eventually the cliffs released their grip on the river and started to recede. We passed Trajan’s monument, a stone plaque from ad 101 which had been moved to safety up the cliff. It celebrated the emperor’s achievement in building a road, which was now several fathoms deep, where it was used unwittingly by Danubian suicides and admired only by the occasional passing fish.

  Then came the first substantial town on the Romanian shore, Orova, where Romanian barges used to dispose of all the goods they’d picked up from the scrap heap of Western Europe to be sold on to traders on the shore. This used to be the crews’ little foray into private enterprise, and they’d pile the decks with old refrigerators, cocktail cabinets, bathtubs, bicycles, pieces of carpet, and sometimes even cars. Much of it was rowed ashore in battered dinghies for recycling into the East, but the coming of the European Union had knocked a hole in the bottom of that informal, watery bazaar, and the Argo passed Orova without checking her stride.

  Down below Orova was the first of the two Iron Gate dams, so low in the water that it looked like the world’s biggest infinity pool. It was a double lock system which we squeezed through in tandem with a Ukrainian pushtug, the Kapitan Ilyushkin, home port Izmail, covered in crew laundry and looking as if someone had tried to hide it under gaudy Post-it notes. Once in the lock, Vlado handed out family-sized bottles of Coca-Cola to the lock-keepers ‘so they let us down slowly’. The drop in each lock must have been 30 metres, and as we descended between immense, weed-covered walls, water spurting alarmingly between the bricks, the climate seemed to change. It was like going down a mineshaft. By the time the mooring hooks had accompanied the Argo to the bottom of the pit, grumbling and moaning as they went, the air temperature had dropped a dozen degrees and a chill wind rifled across us from stem to stern.

  The second lock walls were covered in Cyrillic graffiti, the work of previous crew members who’d also been descending slowly, having handed over the requisite quantity of Coca-Cola. Vlado, who was looking after the bow moorings, admired it. There was a purity to Cyrillic, he said.

  ‘We always have one sound for one letter. It’s simple. Your language may be more useful in the world, but your letters are shit.’

  It took the Argo forty-eight hours to cover the last 360 kilometres of the journey. Forty-eight hours of nothing much at all, with Bulgaria unrolling on one side, Romania on the other. Forty-eight hours of flat, low-slung, tree-lined riverscape whose banks were so wide apart that most of the time it was impossible to pick out any detail barring the occasional wild horse. For all I knew the landscape could have been on a repeating loop, so similar did it all look. The unrelenting alley of poplar and willow was unbroken by any sign of human presence, and now that the Danube had been liberated from its last restraining barrage the towns and villages did the only sensible thing when living by an unpredictable watery giant. They kept well away.

  ‘I call it a desert,’ said Vlado, with a sweep of his arm. ‘What is there here? Only trees. Only river.’

  It was a strange idea, a river being a desert, but I could see what he meant. It was a vast, saturnine expanse of water moving sluggishly towards its fate, and it gave nothing back to the watchers on the bows. No feedback. No input. No detail. Supremely indifferent to our passing. This was where the sludge of Europe mooched towards the sea under a lid of khaki anaglypta.

  But it wasn’t sterile. There were skeins of geese, and sometimes there were solitary fishermen who supposedly even caught the
occasional sturgeon. And there were boats, although fewer than before. A tug-driven pontoon ferry crabbed across from one side to the other, now that the river was far too wide for bridges. Then there’d be a fleet of ancient engineless barges hanging on to each other at anchor, high out of the water and with a small shanty house on the stern, net curtains across the windows. Sometimes there’d be a crewman squatting on a hatch cover, briefed to keep watch until the next time the barges were needed. Weeks and weeks of waiting, of fishing and, of course, of endless cigarettes.

  At one point a water police launch came out from the Bulgarian side and sat alongside us, careful not to cross the river’s centre line, while one of the crew raked the Argo with his binoculars. I resolved not to crack under interrogation; I wouldn’t be the one to reveal the presence of those precious Ikea sofas.

  Upstream of Lom, Milia started to slalom the Argo from bank to bank, no doubt in accordance with some mental map of underwater sandbars and in demonstration of his expertise. Certainly there were shoals of sand visible, and some of them were turning rapidly into islands. For a while we sat line astern of a Ukrainian freighter, a tactic of which Vlado approved, because the Ukrainians were the main users of this part of the river and therefore knew it best. But just as Vlado was voicing that approval, Milia poked the Argo’s bows out and accelerated past, lest we should all start thinking he was happy just to tag along.

  Some of these sweeping turns took us close in to the shore, so close that we were almost tangling with the overhang, and I recalled those scenes in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness when the steamboat going to find Mr Kurtz is showered in arrows and spears from the encroaching jungle. But the only eyes I met on the riverbank belonged to three gypsies and their old nag, doing nothing in particular on the beach.