Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  My temporary home was a couple of streets back from the river. It was square and had high piggy-eyed windows covered in rugs to stop the sunlight getting in. The stairwell was streaked with rust, stank of stale cigarettes and its walls were studded with nails, bolts and other embedded bits of metal, the shrapnel of Romanian utilities. My temporary home was up on the third floor, where it had two bedrooms, a small concrete balcony for the drying of family laundry, a bathroom and a tiny kitchen whose only tap I could never quite turn off. The only other occupants of the block lived directly above me, and their wastepipe ran straight down through my main bedroom, so that whenever they took a shit during the night, it passed within a few inches of my head. It would be in the Black Sea before I was.

  That apart, I liked having the anonymity of my own front door, and pretending to be a local, pretending that I could abandon all my responsibilities and stay here for ever, where no one would ever find me. I felt as the Lipovans must have done when they first went to ground in the Delta; where better to hide oneself than a little island of decayed civilization on the edge of the known world? Sulina was a backwater of backwaters, the last resort of European sediment, where the European shit came to rest. It was the bung in Europe’s stern, the pimple on the arse end of the continent, wedged between one kind of watery wilderness, the Delta, and another, the Black Sea.

  It was a crazy place to try to build a town. The urbanization had been assembled around two long quays, like extra-long railway platforms, facing each other across the channel. The view from one side to the other created the illusion of a metropolis, whereas the reality was little more than a façade, like one of those cowboy ghost towns put together for the cinema. And as in a cinematic cowboy town, it didn’t take much to penetrate through the façade and out into the sand on the other side, except here that sand quickly became a brackish swamp which was neither river nor sea, but somewhere in between.

  Nevertheless, the township put up a good show of solidity. The far bank was populated by (empty) warehouses of some size and substance. Between them stood (empty) merchants’ accounting houses in the style of late-nineteenth-century colonial bungalows, and a Chantier Naval that hadn’t been doing any chantiering for some decades. The near bank had the empty streets, the desultory handful of shops, the cinema that had been closed for years, the empty market and the packs of feral dogs. The roads were dirt, and the occasional vehicle – for there were one or two – would kick up a dust cloud that settled on everything, turning it all the same drab beige. But this was no shanty town; it had once had real gravitas. Some of the larger waterside buildings carried memories of grandeur in the fanlights above their doors, the fancy scrolls and decorative columns around their windows, their French shutters, ironwork balconies and brick chimneys, suggesting ambitious and wealthy residents. These days, however, they were rarely lived in above the ground floor.

  In its appearance Sulina didn’t belong to anywhere else on the river, certainly not to anywhere in Romania, which anyway had only taken possession of it in the 1930s. It could have been a colonial trading settlement on a river mouth in Africa, or in Asia, and even more plausibly a river mouth in literature, straight out of Joseph Conrad. Except that in Conrad such settlements were always sophisticated and busy while the wilderness was inland, in the continent’s dark and lonely heart. Here, the opposite was true: the heart of the continent, upstream, was the sophisticated and busy end, while the river mouth was the former outpost of progress that had since regressed into a monument to forlorn hope. It looked like a filmset created for some long-forgotten epic which never quite made it to the global cinema, and I was happy that it was so. It would have been a bugger to have ended my journey in a shed on the bypass.

  It was nearly a century since Sulina had had its moment in the limelight. Originally a Byzantine, Genoese and then Ottoman naval toehold, its grandest flowering came in the nineteenth century, when it became the focus for an ambitious multinational scheme of the sort that has since become commonplace EU fodder but in those days was something truly revolutionary. The focus of that scheme stood at the top end of the town quay, its grandest, most pompous building, the occupants of which had been charged with turning dreams into reality. This was the echoingly empty head office of the very first Danube Commission, or the Administralia Fluviala Dunari de Jos, according to the lettering above the entrance. It was established by the Treaty of Paris of 1856, a treaty which settled the Crimean War and made the Black Sea neutral territory, and which set about opening up the river as an international waterway. Sulina was designated its gateway port.

  In the years before the Commission had set to work, Sulina had been a wide, open seaboard strewn with sandbanks and wrecks, whose hulls and masts were used by mariners as a guide to where the deepest channel was to be found (provided of course they had managed to avoid the prowling navies of the Ottomans and the Russians). At times of high water, nearly all dry land completely disappeared here, leaving only a few wretched hovels built on piles on narrow patches of European sediment. This pale landfall provided only the flimsiest shelter from wind or tide, so any transhipment of cargo from seagoing to rivergoing ships could only take place in calm conditions. But it was still busy, despite these hazards: in a storm in 1855, twenty-four sailing ships and sixty lighters were blown ashore here and three hundred people died.

  The Commission changed all that. It was an amalgamation of national representatives, the ancestor of other, more familiar European bodies. Its first board, some of whom had full diplomatic status, were an English noble, a Turkish Pasha, a French civil servant, an Austrian ex-army officer, a Prussian bureaucrat, a Russian baron and a Sardinian marquis, and they didn’t have any one language in common. The Turk spoke German and Turkish; the Prussian, Austrian and the Russian spoke Russian, German and French; the Frenchman spoke no language but his own, but could read German; and the Englishman spoke nothing with any skill, but claimed he could understand most of the rest. It must have made for interesting meetings.

  Undeterred by these Babel-like complications, the Commission leapt into action like polyglot plumbers whose instant task was to unblock Europe’s main drain. With the priorities of shipping in mind, they built two long moles out into the Black Sea to mark and protect the channel, dredged out the middle and erected lighthouses to assist navigation. To the inland ends of the two moles they added the town jetties, those long railway platforms parked on the swamp, around which the new town of Sulina took shape.

  The result was an overnight success. Unfettered by any one national interest, and with no vindictive warships to dodge, Sulina became a reliable transhipment port across whose wharves Black Sea freighters could offload into Danube barges at any time of the day or night. There was a sudden demand for manpower as shipping lines and freight agencies of many nationalities – including large numbers of Greeks – set up branches here. Merchants followed, along with consuls and ambassadorial representatives, and in their wake came rabbis, imams and priests to look after everyone’s spiritual needs. Soon there was a mosque, a synagogue, and three churches: an Armenian, a Catholic and an Orthodox, in architectural styles that straddled East and West. The swelling community of children was educated in two Romanian schools, two Greek and one Jewish, and there was a French academy for young ladies, along with a ballroom for the elite to socialize and a casino for gentlemanly recreation. In short, a Hong Kong on the Black Sea.

  And like Hong Kong, this gathering of multinational, multicultural commercial interests must have created an interestingly exotic society in that isolated community, which at that time was still two days’ journey from proper dry land. I could imagine the dinner parties, hosted by the Greek consul and his lovely daughter, where the guests would pretend to be delighted at the prospect of eating yet more caviar (here virtually the staple diet). The guests of honour would have been a couple of the higher-profile representatives from the Commission – the Russian Baron d’Offenberg, perhaps, or the Sardinian Marquis d’Aste – and
the remainder of the guests drawn from the collection of has-beens who’d been given a posting that no one else had wanted to the furthest end of Europe. Along with the baron or the marquis there’d be the doctor who’d fled here after making some dreadful medical mistake, the sallow Jewish merchant whose commercial power everyone feared, the tubby cleric with a weakness for young boys, and the lean and caddish Austrian soldier who’d been sent here to spy. And making up the numbers would be a couple of keen young shipping agents, split between desperation to move on and desperation to catch the consul’s daughter’s attention. And they all would have spoken French, albeit pretty badly.

  It didn’t last. Eventually even the society of misfits unravelled as the Danube Commission progressed its grand bit of plumbing, deepening the river inland and improving navigation to such an extent that the Black Sea shipping no longer needed to stop at Sulina, but could travel upriver to Tulcea and Galati and unload where there was proper industry, roads, railways and dry land. Meanwhile the Commission, having done its job at Sulina, abandoned its offices and moved inland too, taking with it most of the community’s glamour, and a lot of its commerce. Sulina eventually lost its freeport status, becoming officially part of the Romanian mainland.

  Since then there’d been various schemes to try to keep the settlement alive, and the communists had briefly been keen on Sulina’s strategic significance, creating barracks and radar installations and sealing off the outer moles to casual visitors. But even that was being wound down, and now the only intermittent pulse that showed that sleeping Sulina was still alive came from the arrival of the ferries from Tulcea, which brought handfuls of tourists, curious to see what happened at this arse end of the European world.

  I sat amongst them in a coffee shop by the water which was little more than a minute from the apartment, enjoying being smiled at by a nice waitress, who seemed to understand my semi-catatonic state. From here I looked out at the river with new respect. It may have looked like a dirty ditch straitjacketed between the Commission’s two quays, but I knew from personal experience that it was far from being a spent force, and still had a savage integrity that man’s attempt at replumbing it hadn’t managed to extract. Here, at the very end of my journey, it had managed to produce its wildest, most extravagant display.

  And now, contrary to the main-drain impression given by quayside Sulina, only 16 per cent of the Danube made its final exit here. The rest of it was happily consummating its union with the Black Sea along a 150-kilometre front, witnessed only by the occasional passing fisherman, having evaded man’s last attempt at control. After 2,840 kilometres of barriers and abuse, it was finally breaking free. If man wanted to claim that he’d sheathed and fettered it by building two platforms on a swamp, then the river wasn’t going to deny it, but you needed only to climb one of those Danube Commission lighthouses to see how big the delusion, and how insignificant the town.

  Once I’d recovered sufficiently from my unexpectedly gruelling bit of rowing, I ranged further away from the apartment, busying myself like an addict trying to feed his addiction. I didn’t want to admit my journey was at an end.

  I wandered out into the wasteground beyond the town, where rusting turn-of-the-century steamships had been marooned by epic tides alongside cabin cruisers whose cabins had tipped forward into their hulls, burying their faces in their hands.

  I mooched along the prom amongst the old men in their habitual positions on the sea wall. Speaking a dialect that blended Russian with Romanian, they were telling each other things that each of them already knew, the same things they said last year, and the year before.

  I peered down into the river water hunting for well-travelled litter that might connect me with the river of my 20-euro bicycle, of the Danubian aristocracy, of a horse called Laguna, of a barge called the Argo, and of a floating green bathtub, but I found none.

  I discovered the demilitarized zone, now reduced to empty foundations, where feral puppies played in the burnt-out shell of the car where they’d been born, and where they’d grow up and die. Theirs was going to be a short life in a strictly proscribed world, but they nevertheless practised being fierce at the stranger walking by.

  I browsed around the graveyard, where the Greeks had the most ostentatious monuments but were massively outnumbered by the Ukrainians. There were a few Germans, a couple of Italians, an Englishman, and a separate cemetery where Muslims and Jews had been interred within the same walls, the unlikeliest of bedfellows. Their graves, and Sulina’s architecture, were all that remained of the port’s big moment on the European stage.

  And finally I ended up at the beach, where the Black Sea speculatively put its elbows up on the bar at the back end of the town and belched a gentle froth, like an old regular with a Guinness moustache. It wasn’t a particularly impressive sea, as seas go, and it wasn’t black, it was brown – but I wasn’t going to blame it for that. My blue river hadn’t been blue.

  In the distance the sea had a proper maritime horizon with occasional smudgy ships, but close at hand it didn’t make a big song and dance about being any different from the land. The shore was flat and featureless, the waves short and stuttering, the sand more like silky silt than sand, and weed in the shallows laced itself round my ankles in a feeble attempt to stop me wading out. But a sea is a sea, and I’d spent a long time getting to this one, so I knew what had to be done.

  When does a journey like this finally end? There is no fat lady who sings. No banner that welcomes, no official delegation that pins a rosette. Nobody waves a flag, stops a watch or fires a gun. I didn’t have to ring in to report to anyone – no one knew where I was – and I didn’t bump into the Greek consul’s daughter or even granddaughter; they’d long since gone to heaven. I’d come to a stop at sullen Sulina simply because there was nowhere further to go.

  Looking back upstream, I could visualize my own route compared to that of the Danube, and the adventure we’d enjoyed together right across Europe’s midriff to where I now stood. From this perspective, looking back from the beach, it looked like a drunken, emotional, lover’s journey, with both parties setting out inseparable, kissing and canoodling as we’d weaved erratically across the first 1,000 kilometres, too wrapped up in each other to be paying much attention to where we were going. Then came the first tiff and trial separation, followed by a more cautious reunion as the relationship changed gear, and as both parties came to understand the other was more complicated than each had previously thought. Each had had its own needs; the Danube had a Mother Baar to obey, a sea to get to, and gravity as its lord and master, while I had had all sorts of ideas tugging me this way and that. It was my course that had been the more fickle of the two. I hadn’t stuck faithfully to the riverbed, but instead had veered away, surging, tumbling and stalling, like an unreliable tributary. Like the Danube, I too had brushed the sediment off bits of history, tugged at the roots of a handful of cultures, and toppled a few overhanging preconceptions of prejudice. And then the two of us had come together at the end, finally reunited in the Delta, like a couple of careworn old lovers who knew that the spark had long since died between us, but who’d resolved to meet again in order to part.

  Overall, I reflected, I was the one who’d got the most out of our three-month relationship, but then I’d been the one who’d been the most naïve at the outset and had had the most to learn. Thanks to the Danube, I’d been touched by moments of beauty, rewarded with flashes of insight and carried onward by a sense of adventure, while the Danube had just been going through the motions, as it had always done, and as it always will.

  Thanks to the river I now understood a great deal more about the downriver half of my continent. I’d discovered that Europe is not just the bit between the North Sea and the Mediterranean, that it has a horizontal dimension as well as a vertical one, an East to go with its West, and a whole new slice of history lurking up its sleeves. I’d discovered that Europe was a joined-up place after all.

  As for the river which had sh
owed me all this, it had variously been fêted, abused, imprisoned and ignored along its length, but now it was free. It had completed its journey, done its duty, and accordingly it terminated our relationship there and then, without so much as a backward glance. At Sulina it discarded its identity and left me on the shore with my memories, like a femme fatale who’d allowed me to dabble with her awhile, but had dropped me as soon as she had caught sight of bigger and better things.

  I regretted the river’s passing, but I’d known this moment was coming ever since I started out, 2,840 kilometres ago, so it wasn’t as if I’d come unprepared. I dug into my bag, burrowing past the socks I’d worn to meet Karl-Friedrich Hohenzollern, the waterproofs I’d worn on the cyclepath, the Dazzer that had discouraged the Transylvanian dogs, and the trousers I’d worn to meet the Romanian prince, finally to lay my hands on the swimming shorts that had last seen action in the spas of Budapest.

  And ten minutes later, emerging exhilarated and dripping, I could finally say that the river and I were even. I’d baptized myself in the Black Sea, and now I too was free.

  The Danube rises in Donaueschingen, in Germany’s Black Forest, 2,480km from the Black Sea.

  The Danube cyclepath was delightful in the spring sunshine, but I was sweaty and smelly for my first encounter with Danube aristocracy, the Hohenzollerns of Sigmaringen.

  Blaubeuren, source of the river Blau, where 32,000 litres of blueness emerge every second from a vertical cave.

  Sigmaringen’s Prince Karl-Friedrich Emich Meinrad Benedikt Fidelis Maria Michael Gerold von Hohenzollern, aka Charly, as in Charly and the Jivemates.