The Danube

by Nick Thorpe

  ‘Do the young people today respect the traditions?’ I ask Recep's mother-in-law.

  ‘The young do not respect us. Many used to wear baggy trousers – a traditional item of dress among Muslim women – now they only wear them occasionally.’

  The number of Roma is hard to calculate. Recep estimates 3,500 in Babadag, but ‘many are on the road, travelling from place to place’. A sizeable number – several hundred, he believes – are in Portugal, but he cannot remember where. Like Roma throughout eastern Europe, they establish an unofficial twinning system with one particular place, often the suburb of a small or larger town. Those with a foothold abroad help more to come, and the income they make becomes a significant lifeline for the families back home. The bright yellow Western Union sign has become as important a landmark in Romania as the local post office. Outside in the street, we stop to talk to some girls of about twelve or thirteen years. Why aren't you at school? ‘Our parents need us at home, to take care of our brothers and sisters.’ What do you sing to them? A burst of laughter, then a somewhat raucous rendition of a lullaby, sure to wake up any baby for miles around. More children come running from neighbouring streets, to hear Regina and Sibella sing to the strangers. ‘And anyway,’ Regina adds, ‘if we stayed at school, the boys would steal us.’

  The road out of Tulcea to the east leads past vineyards, brown and bedraggled in the spring rain, along the southern shore of the Danube. Ukraine, on the far bank, looks uninhabited. There are no watchtowers, and the barges at anchor near Isaccea are nationless and motionless; no flags stain the morning. Izmail, the port city where Sorin's grandfather could not find a boat and where Sorin bought whole heads of cheese to sell in Romania, is somewhere on the far side. The two half-brothers, Ishmael and Isaac, face each other across the Danube. Isaccea is a small, dozy village, with a war memorial, a mosque with a slim, green capped minaret, and a stone quarry set on a hill, its gaze always downwards towards the river.

  Under the heading ‘dead’, thirty-four names are listed on the war memorial, from 1916 to 1919, and four are still classified as ‘missing’. It was a hard war to cost a place as small as this thirty-eight of its young men. Some of the first and last names are the same: Ion Ion; Emin Emin … The mayor of Vǎcǎreni, Stelicǎ Gherghișan, is not at home as we pass through, but I will nevertheless tell his story. In 1999 when work ran out at the fish farm where he was employed, he turned his hand to fishing for wild sturgeon. The regular sturgeon fishermen jealously guarded the stretch of river they had occupied, so he was forced further downstream. He landed a 450-kilo female, with 82 kilos of caviar. That fish changed his life. The caviar can fetch up to ten thousand dollars a kilo in New York. Sterian bought a house, then another house. A car, then another car. In no time he was elected mayor. And since then he has been re-elected several times. Romanians, like everybody else, are impressed by success. The loss of those eggs was another disaster for the diminishing sturgeon stocks in the Danube, however.

  In Tulcea I tried in vain to find a boat that would take me across to Izmail. One former fisherman might take me, illegally, I was told, ‘but he costs a lot’. A name and phone number were scribbled down on a scrap of paper, but I never rang the number. While half of Asia and Africa hammers on the doors of western Europe, was I really going to pay to smuggle myself into Ukraine? A small, unsignposted road leads off the Tulcea to Galați road. After several kilometres skidding in and out of potholes I come to a gate with a large sign: ‘Tichileşti Hospital, Leprosarium.’

  The rain stops and a damp-eyed sun tries to negotiate a passage between the clouds. Vasile Olescu is pruning his vines up on the slopes of this protected valley. His father taught him to prune when he was twelve, he says, though his father had no legs. He would be carried or wheeled, or sometimes drag himself out to the edge of the vineyard. But his hands were strong, and he could practise the right way to grip the cutters in his son's small hands and call to him which branches of the untidy tangle of vines to cut, or which rare stem should be allowed to stay and how many knots along it should be severed. Vasile was born at the lepers’ colony in 1955. Now he is one of the youngest patients. Both his parents were lepers. His mother was sent here when she was fourteen, his father when he was eighteen. They fell in love. Leprosy is an illness which can be both inherited and caught from others, so to be born to leper parents surrounded by other leprosy cases is a poor start in life, though there is a hope for each child that she or he will not develop the disease. Vasile grew up in a bubble of hope, helping his parents and the other patients. In all, fifteen children were born here. As long as they remained healthy, they seemed miraculous, the perfect red grapes produced by diseased vines. When they grew up they were sent away ‘to freedom’ as Vasile puts it, making it sound like exile. When Vasile was given a clean bill of health he was sent out into the world to earn his fortune. In communist Romania, where work was compulsory, that was not too difficult. He got a bed in a worker's hostel in Constanța and a job in the shipyards, unloading the ships of all the world. He worked for two years before he realised he was ill. The same fate befell most of the other children born at Tichileşti. One by one they developed the tell-tale signs of the illness – a wound that would not heal, the loss of feeling in first one toe, then another. Then the gradual flaking and rotting of the flesh. He is a man who likes to get things done, not to speak of them. As we talk, crouched side by side among his vines, he works fast, cutting and tying and tidying the piles, hardly pausing for a moment to think or to rest.

  From a bacteriological point of view, leprosy is a curable disease, meaning that it is possible to prevent patients infecting others, says Alexe Vasiliu, the colony doctor. But little can be done to stop the evolution of the disease in a leper's own body. Each patient is afflicted in a slightly different way: some go blind; some lose fingers or toes. There has not been a new case of leprosy in Romania for more than thirty years. This is the only remaining colony of its kind in Europe, though there are several hospitals with leprosy patients in Spain, Italy and Turkey. It took a very long time to develop the complex of drugs to treat it, because laboratory animals cannot be infected. It is a disease carried exclusively by humans. Vasile is something of a hero to the other inmates at Tichileşti. He has lost all feeling in his hands, but he can still prune the vines because his father taught him the technique. He just has to watch his fingers closely, because he would not feel the pain if he cut into them with the sharp blades. But the wine he makes from the ‘pearl’ and ‘a thousand and one’ grape varieties keeps the whole colony, its medical staff and its visitors, going for the year. And it gives him a sense of purpose. Among the vines on the steep hillside, wires are hung with strips of rag and bells. In September, he explains, he sits all day at one side of his vineyard. He has built this elaborate system of wires and pullies to frighten the blackbirds away.

  Ioana Miscov is one of the oldest inmates in the colony, where many live to a ripe old age. Born in 1929, she has been here since 1948. She lets me help her feed her chickens, spooning cooked pasta from a bowl into the dirt. There are thirteen, and she calls out to each of them by name: ‘Pilpica, Scumpa, Gulerada …’ Scumpa means ‘the lame one’. Ioana herself is so tiny and fragile, perhaps the hens think she is one of their own. Clutching a small walking stick, she shuffles precariously over the paving stones that lead from her little two-roomed house. She has no toes on either foot, and no fingers on either hand. Her wrists are veined and polished stumps. But she still manages to crouch and chop grass for the chickens on a chopping board, gripping an almost blunt axe between her strong wrists. She giggles like a thirteen-year-old. One of the sadnesses of her life is that her husband never saw their daughter, who was born here in the colony. He went blind a month before she was born. Her daughter lives in Tulcea. She never became ill, worked for thirty years as a seamstress, and visits her mother often. Ioana bears her fate stoically. She delights in her daughter's visits, and in the progress of the little tomato and paprika pl
ants in yoghurt pots dotted along her window sill, each with six or eight leaves already. ‘Everyone admires my tomato plants every year – tell them, nurse!’ Then she takes me to see the little Baptist church. We walk side by side up the steps. I offer her my arm, but she's happier with her stick and the railing. There are two churches in the colony, one for the Baptists, one for the Orthodox. Even during the toughest years of communism, when the state denied that the colony existed and the Baptists were persecuted elsewhere in Romania, they were allowed to continue worshipping here. It is not hard to imagine the conversation between two Party officials.

  ‘What about the lepers’ church?’ asks one.

  ‘Ah … Let them keep it. They take so many other drugs – why not a little opium too?’7

  Ioana bought her house from the preacher. Before that, she recalls lying in a hospital ward, sharing a bed with her mother who was also sick. ‘I kept falling out of the bed!’ She remembers her mother reading from a Bible the preacher brought her. The preacher taught the children at the colony to read and write. ‘He was not afraid of us.’ She shows me the pictures on the wall of her room, especially those of her grandson's wedding. ‘I was there!’ she says proudly, ‘and I was not ashamed of myself. And my grandson was very pleased that I came.’

  Costica Serban is a year younger than Ioana and is completely blind. He lies in his room on a couch beside a window he can no longer see out of, with the radio on, day and night. ‘It keeps me company,’ he says, ‘I couldn't sleep without it.’ He lost the sight of one eye in 1986, then the other one ‘during the revolution … it just exploded …’ He pauses for effect, as though he were out on the barricades himself, or storming the Bastille in Paris in 1789. There's just a space where that eye used to be. His first eye is simply white. ‘I remember the famine after the Second World War in Romania. I had no father or mother. I collected sunflower seeds in the fields, roasted them, then sold them at railway stations and pubs, mostly to the soldiers, coming back from the war …’ In 1947 he noticed the first signs of leprosy on his body, and was sent here to Tichileşti – ‘to get well’, the doctor said. He's been here ever since. The patients were tightly confined during the communist era. But since the revolution they can leave if they wish. Most have stayed. Those with relatives go on visits, to Tulcea or beyond, for several days at a time, but always return. ‘They like to be here, because of the sense of community,’ the doctor explains. ‘This is their home. And they get free medication …’

  I walk up into the little graveyard, on a hill near the main gate. There are small wooden or granite crosses, wrought iron fencing, names, dates, loving memory … the same as any village graveyard. In the Tichileşti booklet, there is a quotation from Psalm 139: ‘If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.’

  At its peak, the colony had nearly two hundred inmates. Most of them are here now, no longer any different from their fellow human beings, finally healed of their affliction by death. In the valley below, there are only twenty-one left alive. When they have gone, Dr Vasiliu plans to turn the institution into an old people's home. ‘It would be a shame if all this infrastructure, built up over nearly a hundred years, went to waste.’

  At Niculițel, a short distance up the road towards Galați, I turn off to the left, into a rather different vineyard. At first sight it feels like Goldilocks country, waiting for the arrival of the three bears. The wine showroom is open, the tables spread with bottles, ready to be opened. The cellar and the offices upstairs and downstairs are all open to unexpected visitors. I call out, but finding no one set out up the gently sloping hillside through young vines.

  ‘We are ten miles north of the 45th Parallel, just like Tokaj, Rioja and Bordeaux,’ Sorin Ignat, the technical manager of the vineyard explains when I finally track him down. He is a ruddy-faced man with an easy smile that hints at dark green bottles, readily uncorked, fine wine already drunk or still to be imbibed.

  Burebista, a Dacian king, grew vines here before the Romans arrived. The Greeks transported wine home to the Greek mainland by sea in the tall amphora on display in the entrance hall of the museum in Tulcea. Similar pots contained olive oil sent from the Greek mainland – no olive trees grow east of Thrace. Where the Danube flows due East, the Romanian vineyards face northwards, but that is not a problem. ‘The river creates its own microclimate,’ Sorin explains. ‘It diminishes the extremes of temperature and increases the humidity in the heat of summer.’ He produces a bunch of several hundred keys and opens the main warehouse. Crates are stacked high in the cavernous room, red wines made from Merlot and Romanian Feteasca Neagra grapes, whites from Aligote grapes, brought here from the Burgundy region of France in the 1950s, but rarely grown there any more. Soon Aligote will be a Romanian wine, Sorin predicts happily. It is not hard to imagine the joy of Romanian agricultural engineers, in their stiff, identical suits, boarding the plane from communist Romania to capitalist France at the height of the Cold War, on their strange mission to bring back some of the delights of the valley of the River Saoˆne to the valley of the Danube. But here the picture in my head grows fuzzy round the edges. Were secret police agents sent with them, to ensure they did not slander the Party or its leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, even as the second bottle was being uncorked? Did one of the younger engineers slip away from the main party, hand in hand with a French girl he had met the evening before, not to be allowed to return to his homeland until his poor father was dead, his younger brothers and sisters grown up, his old school buried under the ruins of the 1977 earthquake? Or was the whole situation reversed? Did French agricultural engineers follow our Romanian friends back to Niculițel to see how their cuttings were getting on in the thick limestone soil above the ancient granite seam of the Măcin mountains? Was one seduced by a raven-haired Securitate agent? And did he, perhaps, settle down in some Bucharest suburb, finding less and less consolation as the years passed in his dusty copies of Sartre, Camus and André Breton in the Editions du Seuil? I would need to spend many more weeks in Sorin Ignat's company, and drink much more of his excellent Aligote with its hint of stilled volcanoes to find out the truth.

  By the late 1950s the Romanian Communist Party leadership was already rolling its eyes at the Soviet Union, and looking for ways to assert a little more independence. In 1958 Gheorghiu-Dej managed to persuade Nikita Krushchev to withdraw Soviet troops from Romania, which was a remarkable feat considering that the Red Army had only just re-invaded neighbouring Hungary to crush the revolution of October 1956, an action of which Gheorghiu-Dej warmly approved. The failure of the Hungarian revolution and Yugoslav defiance of Moscow both served the Romanian communist leadership very well. They won more elbow room within the Soviet bloc to counter Soviet plans to establish Comecon, a carbon copy of the European Union in western Europe. According to the Comecon blueprint, drawn up in Moscow, each Soviet ally was allotted a speciality: the Czechoslovaks would produce cars, the Hungarians buses, while the Romanians felt insulted to be told that they should supply the raw materials, the oil and food, for the Soviet empire. They wanted giant, prestige industries of their own. The iron and steel works up the river in Galați, my next overnight stop, became a symbol of their pride, and of their comradely tussle with the Kremlin.

  Surrounded by his wine, Sorin Ignat spells out the hopes and dreams of the vineyard. With European Union subsidies more vines will be planted, to increase its size from four to five hundred hectares. Production should increase gradually from one million to two or three million litres a year, while the quality of the wine should also improve. There are plans to build a small port to ship the wine upriver on the Danube. Perhaps one or two bottles of Aligote from Niculițel will one day reach Burgundy. According to the legend of the Argonauts, when the Argo could travel no further on the Danube, its powerful crew carried their ship on their shoulders to the Rhoˆne in France, and from there sailed back down to the open sea. The Greek chroniclers are silent on what beverages sustained them on
the marbled river after they left the wine-dark sea, but it seems reasonable to assume that a barrel or two of the wines of Niculițel would have found a space in the hold, to brighten their impossible journey.

  Before I leave, Sorin takes me out past a line of barking dogs to a circle of broken concrete, overgrown with weeds. This was the helicopter landing pad used by Gheorghiu-Dej's successor, Nicolae Ceauşescu, who came to power in 1965. He and his wife Elena liked the wines at Niculițel very much, perhaps as much as anything because of their name. He named his first son Nicu. When I applied for an interview with him in 1988 and began to imagine our encounter, I planned to begin the meeting with reference to the similarity of our names. But my application was politely refused. ‘The President is not in the habit of granting interviews in a cell at Otopeni airport,’ George Albuţ, the press secretary at the Romanian embassy in Budapest, told me. ‘Because that is as far as you will get, if you ever try to visit our country again.’ I remember my sense of relief that I would not, after all, have to shake the dictator's cold, clammy hand. At the ruined helipad Sorin points out a mound just visible on the horizon: a lookout point built in the Copper Age from which to guard against the arrival of Bronze Age invaders from the north, with their heavier, more lethal, spears.

  Weighed down with bottles, and promising to return, I set out to try to find the hump. A farm track leads into an orchard of apple trees, all recently pruned, with mountains of branches underneath. The sun has just set, so I have to hurry. The trees block my view in all directions, so I weave between the rows, searching for the last place I caught a glimpse of the hill. From the top the view is tremendous – the silver ribbon of the Danube, stretching back to the delta, and on, up into Europe. Smoke rises in columns from the slopes of the valley, with flashes of flame at the base, where peasants burn off the dry stems of winter. Down on the shore the silver spreads inland, remnants of early spring floods. Willows protrude from the waters near the river edge like shaving brushes. Further inland, sloping up to where I stand, the apple trees seem bare and amputated, so thorough was the pruner's saw. Other trees, not yet pruned, stand bushy beyond a certain line, like long-haired men queuing for the haircut that will qualify them to become soldiers. The hump itself is lined with paths – a large one made by visiting humans, and smaller, subtler lines, made by rabbits or foxes through the grass. There is no sign of the barbarians.