Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  The man himself, Paul-Phillipe Hohenzollern, turned out to be small and dapper, bushy-eyebrowed with a twinkling, birdlike (rather than badgerlike) gait and a manner of speaking which involved unburdening himself of achievements and perceived injustices all at once, and in no particular order. No time for niceties or chitchat; straight on with the matter in hand. After barely more than a minute in his company I felt that I had been dumped right into the middle of a conversation which had been running on a loop for some while, and it would have helped me a great deal to understand it if only I’d been there at the beginning. I think the princess appreciated my predicament, for several times she stopped her husband in his tracks, or sent him off to ferret around in a back room to find the letter from the Pope, from the King of Morocco, or from Clarence House (all of which basically seemed to me to be just acknowledgements of his own letters to them, and all nicely presented in a folder complete with their envelopes, like trophies), while she patiently unravelled what had just been said.

  The essence of the whole conversation was that Prince Paul saw himself as the legitimate heir – the ‘first line of succession’ as he put it – to the throne of Romania. And he saw me as somebody who needed persuading towards his view of that fact. There was no doubt that his lineage went right back to Karl Hohenzollern, the twenty-seven-year-old who’d been invited by the Romanian government to travel down the Danube from Sigmaringen in the latter part of the nineteenth century to become the first Romanian king. But Paul’s problems started with his grandfather, King Carol II, who’d married aristocrat Zizi Lambrino without his father’s approval while still just the heir to the throne. The marriage was later annulled by the Romanian government and declared morganatic – i.e. a marriage between two persons of unequal rank whose offspring would therefore not inherit any parental titles or privileges. His grandfather had meekly accepted the annulment and remarried someone more in keeping with his status – Princess Helen of Greece – but not before he’d fathered a son with Zizi: Carol Mircea, Paul’s father.

  Although he was the eldest son of the man who became king, this Carol Mircea was excluded from the line of succession by the annulment, so the spotlight shifted across to his half-brother, now King Michael. Michael is an old man living mainly in Switzerland, and it is his offspring who are back in Romania, living in the royal palaces; they are accepted as the legitimate line, even though they are all girls, a gender which would have disqualified them in the past.

  Carol Mircea never seriously took issue with the annulment of his parents’ marriage, and never attempted to reclaim the throne, although he did go through the European courts to assert his entitlement to use the family name Hohenzollern and to his share of his father’s assets. Meanwhile King Carol II doesn’t seem to have taken any further interest in his firstborn, proceeding with his life as if his first marriage had never taken place.

  ‘It was Magda Lupescu,’ chipped in Princess Lia, ‘his mistress. She made sure he never saw his son.’

  Carol Mircea’s apparent lack of interest in the throne was frustrating for Paul, but the inheritance ruling in the European courts was pivotal to his case. Combined with the ‘illegal’ annulment of his grandparents’ marriage, he saw it as proof that his claim to the throne was legitimate, and I could see his point. It meant that whenever the monarchy was restored in Romania, his would be the first line of succession – no matter that any such restoration was highly unlikely, and that he was sixty and that Princess Lia was not far behind (fifty-nine, I reckoned), and they didn’t have any offspring to hand anything on to, rendering the whole obsession pointless. But when I dropped this observation into the mix the prince became momentarily frosty.

  ‘The princess and I hope to have children.’

  His case was not helped by a personality that I can’t help but feel lacks noblesse oblige, despite the battalions of photographs on the piano, the folders of celebrity letters and the drifts of newspaper cuttings. Evidently he didn’t cut much of a dash in Romanian society, either; in fact, I’d been warned off seeing him by some. Nor does he appear to be particularly popular at grassroots level, for when he tried to run for president, back in 2000, he’d won only 0.49 per cent of the vote.

  He was justifiably proud of being the first royal to return to Romanian soil, scurrying off into a back room and coming back brandishing the front page of the Daily Telegraph from 11 January 1990, showing him on the tarmac at Bucharest airport, smiling manfully and tightly clutching his bag of duty free. His biggest moment.

  ‘The first royal to return to any East European country. And ours was the first royal wedding in Eastern Europe.’

  In fact he’d spent much of his life in the UK, where he’d gone through the public-school system. It wasn’t clear how fluent his Romanian actually was, and he put me in mind of another returning royal I’d visited in Serbia a couple of years before – Crown Prince Alexander, who was back in his palace in Belgrade, waiting for restoration of the monarchy there. Alexander, too, had grown up in the UK and his Serbian was basic, or so said the bodyguard who’d driven me back into town after the interview. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, continued the bodyguard, because when the crown prince went walkabout he couldn’t understand what was being shouted at him from the back of the crowd. I wondered if the same happened with Prince Paul.

  He was a perfectly nice man, I reflected, as I tried to juggle the papers he fed me with the china cup and saucer on my knee, which a solicitous Princess Lia regularly replenished with cold coffee. But that line about him and Lia having children was slightly optimistic, and I had my doubts about his judgement, too. He had, for example, declared his uncle, King Michael, responsible for the deportation and killing of Jews during the Second World War, and asked that he be shot as a war criminal. Although they didn’t want him back as a monarch, Michael was respected by the Romanian people, so this looked misguided at best. When I asked Prince Paul about it, he didn’t deny it, but he gave his reasons.

  ‘There was a massacre of Jews just after his visit to Iai [Romania’s third city], and my point was he should have made a declaration denouncing it. To be honest, the press got it a bit wrong. I said “The chap should be shot”, you know how they say it in England, you know “That chap should be shot”. I didn’t mean he deserved to be executed.’

  Ho hum.

  ‘How do you get on with King Michael’s children, the princesses? They’re here, aren’t they?’

  ‘We try to avoid each other,’ said the prince, bluntly.

  What a mess: two families circulating at the top end of Bucharest society trying to pretend the other didn’t exist. It must have been a minefield of protocol for charities looking for patrons and for high-profile overseas visitors looking for somewhere to pay their respects. But Prince Paul did seem to have just cause for avoiding Prince Radu, the husband of King Michael’s eldest daughter and designated heir, Margaret – a woman who also had the odd distinction of being an early girlfriend of the young Gordon Brown while they were both at Edinburgh University. Anyway, it seemed from certification and clippings in the prince’s possession that this Radu had been using the title ‘Prinz von Hohenzollern-Veringen’, and had even faked a document purporting to be from the Hohenzollerns of Sigmaringen, bestowing that title on him. Paul had a copy of a (genuine) letter from Sigmaringen decrying this ‘illegal behaviour’ and threatening Radu with court action if he didn’t desist from using the family name.

  ‘My cousins the Hohenzollerns’, Paul said, ‘were very scrupulous about such things.’

  After ninety minutes of these and related outpourings, punctuated by the more soothing voice of Princess Lia, during which the prince would flicker rapidly across the back of the room from one antechamber to the other like a character from a bedroom farce in search of his trousers, my audience with this particular branch of Romanian royalty was adjudged to be at an end. The princess would drop me back, she said, and once we were in the Range Rover again she asked the driver to take a
detour around the city centre so she could show me the sights.

  To be honest I’d already seen what I wanted to of central Bucharest, but it’s not every day you get invited by a princess to tour a city centre, and I was intrigued by Lia and how she’d come into Prince Paul’s life. Amongst the images on the piano I’d spotted a much more youthful (and quite stunning) image of her meeting the Dalai Lama, suggesting some kind of high-falutin previous existence. So as she showed me Ceauescu’s massive folly, the Palace of Parliament, the second-largest building in the world after the Pentagon, I established that she’d had a Romanian family background herself (Arad, where I’d stayed with Julia), although she’d been born in Michigan and had grown up in California. She said she’d been an aide in the White House during the Carter years, but most of her activities seemed to be charity-fundraising related, and she’d met Prince Paul at a UNICEF do in London.

  ‘I find Bucharest very elegant,’ she enthused, talking up the glum highlights of a rainsoaked city (the thunderstorm hadn’t completely moved away). ‘But of course she’s in need of brushing up. Like a lady who hasn’t washed her face for fifty years.’

  Frankly, that was kind. A lady who’d lost her teeth and most of her hair, more like, and her bodily hygiene left something to be desired, too.

  At this point Lia’s mobile phone rang and the princess greeted her caller with a cheery ‘Hi dearest,’ but then her smile froze, and I couldn’t help but hear the voice on the other end enter upon what sounded to me like a female’s hysterical rant. The princess quickly switched to emergency Romanian, before signing off as early as she could with a promise to ‘be there soon’; during all this the smile never left her face.

  ‘Of course, we’re not living in a fairy tale,’ she commented, more soberly, as the Range Rover swept down Ceauescu’s attempt to emulate the Champs-Elysées. I wasn’t sure whether this was an opening into a more confessional level of conversation, given what had just transpired, so I kept quiet. But it wasn’t to be; after a quick order to the driver, Lia embarked on an explanation of how the legal process of getting property back occupied a great deal of their time, although she had the generosity to add that she felt sorry for those who had only had small property holdings and had been unable to get anything back. Either they didn’t have enough money to pay a lawyer, or a lawyer wasn’t interested anyway because the deal wasn’t big enough, or else they still felt intimidated by the people in the system and therefore didn’t even dare try.

  And that’s as far as the conversation went, because I was suddenly back at the hotel. The Range Rover deposited me on the pavement outside, and the princess was gone, a perfumed silhouette with a rakish hat and a final black-gloved wave.

  That wasn’t quite the end of my Bucharest interlude. I was intrigued by the whole Paul–Lia dynamic, particularly by that near-hysterical phone call from a female voice the princess had addressed as ‘dearest’, so I stopped at an Internet café round the corner from the Athenee Palace and Googled Princess Lia of Romania, as one does.

  And what a cruel and deadly thing the Internet is! There she was, in her previous life as Lia Triff Belli, where Mr Belli – Mr Melvin Belli, aka the King of Torts – had been a celebrity lawyer, famous for defending the likes of Mae West, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Errol Flynn, Tony Curtis and even Jack Ruby after he shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Belli had been married five times. He was sixty-four, orotund and wealthy, loved public attention and was at the peak of his career when he first met the very pretty twenty-three-year-old Lia Triff, then a student at the University of Maryland, and was asked, ‘You’re a very famous lawyer, aren’t you?’ Their marriage lasted fifteen years, through numerous high-society parties, and produced one daughter, but ended with a typically public display of scandal and acrimony. Lia accused her husband of violence, and he accused her of sleeping with all and sundry. The net result was an estimated $15 million settlement for Lia, and a further $1,000 fine for Belli for supposedly throwing their pet dog and subject of their custody dispute, an Italian Greyhound named Whelldone Rumproast IV, off the Golden Gate Bridge. The fine was also for Belli famously calling his wife ‘El Trampo’, a nickname which still reverberates around the Internet, twenty years on.

  For a woman, ‘El Trampo’ is the kind of monicker that pursues you across the world, and across the decades, however much you change your life. For a travel writer, sitting in an Internet café in Bucharest, it made a recent encounter even more colourful, as well as a little bit more surreal.

  23

  The Danube Delta

  Twenty-four hours later I was in the Delta, a paying guest in the house of Barbaneagra Neculai, a man who had no aristocratic pedigree whatsoever but who strutted around his property as if he was Danubian royalty, ribbiting like a bullfrog. Blackbeard (for that was the literal translation of his name) had a face like a pug and a gut like a Buddha that he was happy to show to everyone, giving it a friendly slap every now and then to keep the flies off. He wanted to know everything about me, and repeated every morsel of information he acquired in a cracked, high-pitched voice, for the benefit of the neighbourhood. Our topics of conversation were necessarily limited, but that didn’t stop him giving me his opinion on everything under the sun, swelling up and up with increasing excitement as he did so. It was fortunate we didn’t have much of a language in common, or else he would have gone on swelling and swelling as the discussion developed until he finally burst. I’m glad he didn’t, because without Barbaneagra Neculai I wouldn’t have been able to finish my journey as I wanted to.

  I’d come to the Delta hotfoot from Bucharest. In so doing I effectively missed out 400 kilometres of the 2,840-kilometre river, for which, dear reader, I apologize, but most of that 400 kilometres was hard to access from the land, and from talking to the crew of the Argo I knew it to be more of the same Danube that I’d seen at Ruse: the Danube of sluggish, torpid, turd-coloured Anaglypta, over a mile wide and only in motion because of its enthusiastic younger sibling pushing it from behind as you’d push a broken-down car, but from many hundreds of kilometres inland.

  This indolent Danube had been travelling for so long it had forgotten it even had a destination, and it couldn’t really be bothered with being a river any more. It wasn’t the Danube I wanted to remember, having been adulterated by wealthy countries upstream who should have known better, leaving it a cancerous waterway, murky, bloated, soulless and unrecognizable. It had lost its motivation, had had its living force extracted and turned into hydropower, and now that it had nothing more to give, it was shunned by the land it travelled through. The sooner it drowned itself in the Black Sea the better.

  The only thing I regretted not seeing in that missing 400 kilometres was the Black Sea Canal, the ‘Canalul Mortii’ or Canal of Death, whose first attempt at construction through a malarial swamp had resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of ‘undesirables’. The idea was to provide a shortcut for shipping in a serious hurry, but in reality it saw little traffic. Those deaths had been for nothing.

  The Delta, on the other hand, was abuzz with life. Water, reed, forest, dunes, in infinite combinations, strangled in lianas, vines, bulrushes and wild apple and pear trees, broken up by stands of poplar and groves of willow. A massive resurgence, a primordial natural wonder, an Everglades without the crocodiles, a UNESCO biosphere reserve. This was where the sorry river completed its last about-turn, threw out its arms in relief and sprawled like a teenager on the sofa over 6,264 square kilometres of land, some of it in the Ukraine, some in Moldova, but the vast majority in Romania. The resulting area of swampland and reed was the size of a substantial British county, and apparently pullulating with 160 species of fish (including sturgeon) and 325 species of birds, some of them very rare. Described by Claudio Magris as ‘a great dissolution’ and by Patrick Leigh Fermor as ‘the vast whispering labyrinth where the Danube falls to pieces’, it was where the Danube went into rehab and learned how to be living water again.

  It al
l sounded wonderful. I was expecting a place where tribal fishermen lived on islands, survived on fish and spoke in ancient languages as they lived out their ancient rituals. I saw it as a transplanted slice of Africa, or possibly Asia, or at the very least somewhere very exotic and far away, and a suitable climax for my journey.

  The reality was not quite so picturesque. The 160 species of fish were, not surprisingly, all but invisible, fish being fish, and the 325 species of birds did their darndest to do the same, birds being birds. The tribal fishermen didn’t look very tribal in their jeans, and as for the whispering labyrinth, it had three main channels, the Chilia, Sulina and Sfântu Gheorghe, with the Sulina – the most direct route to the sea – being a big, straight, stone-walled ditch. However, if you ventured away from any of the three, life could become devilishly tricky if you didn’t happen to be a bird or a fish, or have a satnav and a super-powerful outboard motor to blast through the soup of sedge.

  Faced by all this territory to conjure with, the Danube absented itself to play at being everything from lake to swamp, and mankind spent millions of man-hours cutting canals to try to track it down and bring it to heel, while extracting reeds, growing rice and catching fish at the same time. This is the sort of place you needed to float over in a hot-air balloon to get any sort of impression of its size and variety. In a boat you moved in man-made corridors from ghiol to ghiol – lake to lake – with little idea of what lay either side. Hopefully it was the Danube, learning to have fun.