by James Prosek
While Ida stayed behind to walk on the beach, Johannes led me through more devastated villages to a beautiful river called the Krka. I wanted to fly-fish but decided to dive with Johannes instead, as the cold clear water looked inviting and Johannes encouraged it. “It is my favorite river for diving,” he said.
I dressed in all the cumbersome gear, wet suit, weight belt, fins, snorkel, mask, and lowered myself into the river. My wet suit immediately filled with cold water and my body began to warm it. Johannes had already been in the river for ten minutes before I made my first pass down the long clear pool.
I saw many trout, but was distracted by the shiny brass artillery shells that littered the bottom, and an old refrigerator. I came up to Johannes under the bridge, where he was sticking his head inside the body of a sunken automobile. He led me by hand signal to the fish that he had chased there and indicated with his hands that it was a very big trout.
When I peered into the passenger-side window the biggest trout I’d ever seen, more like a salmon, was looking back at me, its eye gleaming like a quarter. There was no way to catch it so we took turns sticking our heads in the car body to look and then coming up for air.
“It’s a meter long,” Johannes said when we surfaced. “A softmouth trout too. Too bad she is so far inside, otherwise I could catch her.”
This was not only a trout but a veteran of war.
We arrived in Sankt Veit, Austria, that evening at the small apartment over the bakery where their children, Benedikt and Mariela, watched television.
THE SECRET DEN
During the day I was the prisoner of Johannes’s son, Benedikt, who was two years younger than me. He had recruited me as his opponent in playing murderous blood-spilling computer games that I thought were a waste of time. I escaped to my room, which was Mariela’s room, to take a nap.
The second evening we were home, Ida had a friend to the house to do her hair, a handsome blond woman named Rika. The woman dyed the gray roots from Ida’s hair and brushed it straight, complementing Ida on its fullness.
Johannes had been out all day and returned while Ida and Rika were having coffee in the kitchen. His month’s worth of reddish beard had been shaved, what hair was left on his head trimmed, and he was visibly drunk. Ida yelled at him for not telling her where he was going, and for not spending time with me. I felt, I believe, as Johannes did, that more than anything I wanted time to myself.
Beyond the door to Mariela’s room was another small room in Johannes’s apartment that was always closed. The next morning the door to this room was ajar and, as no one was home, I saw that as my invitation to enter and snoop. As I slowly pushed open the door I saw an entire wall of stuffed trout hanging with labels beneath each, describing what they were and where they were from. There were perhaps thirty of them, taxidermied skin mounts, well executed and museum quality, collected from all the places Johannes had been. At a glance I saw fish from Morocco, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.
There was also a whole wall of books, a library of information about trout in Italian, Russian, German, and French. On a desk in the corner was an inkwell and a pen and some paper. He was writing a letter to a biologist at the university in Barcelona, Spain, and beside the letter were large detailed topographic maps of Turkey that I had never seen.
During our trip I had thought Johannes was following a simple road map, while the reality was that for months he had been studying detailed maps and memorizing the locations he wanted to visit. When I saw the maps I immediately realized why he had not brought them; they were Turkish military maps, and if we had been caught with them they may have raised suspicion with the soldiers about our purpose. I had underestimated Johannes’s preparedness, the care he had taken, and I had greater respect for him.
I don’t know how long I was in Johannes’s secret trout den, but while I was there he returned from work and found me. He did not seem surprised, he just stood in the doorway, holding a leather pouch like a purse. He let me speak first.
“These fish are amazing,” I said, pointing at the trout on the wall.
“Yes,” he replied, “but I wished I had the trout from the Tigris.” He paused. “Do you want to go with me to the bank?” he asked.
He had collected the monies from the three family-run Schöffmann bakeries in town and was on his way to deposit them.
I joined him and on our way back we stopped at a bar for a beer, then another bar for another beer. When we returned to his apartment Ida was cooking dinner, a goulash with meat, local forest mushrooms (Eierschwamm), and fresh Knödel. Johannes sat me down with another beer in the living room and then went to fetch a few things to show me.
He brought me his first passport. I saw from the date beside his portrait as a young man that it was issued when he was twenty. Its pages showed, like a map of his itinerary, his trips to Colombia, where he had apprenticed as a master pastry chef in Bogotá, and other travels, mostly to Africa. There were frequent visits made to Croatia and Slovenia, each border crossing marked by a colorful stamp. The young man in the photo had more hair and his face was leaner and longer, but it was unmistakably the face of the man I knew with the mustache, the sly smirk, and the monomania for trout.
Next Johannes brought out maps of Italy and the neighboring islands of Sardinia and Corsica and showed me his plan for an expedition there in search of trout. He wanted to make it in September and asked if I would join him. Among other things it happened to be on my parallel; of course I would.
Early the next morning I found outside my room that Ida had washed and folded all my dirty clothes from the trip. She had begun calling me hijo, her son, and I felt equally close to her. They had invited me into their home as a kind of permanent houseguest, and because they were so pleasant I did not feel like I was imposing.
When I walked into the living room I saw that Ida had placed a framed photograph of a beautiful, young, and slender woman on the television set. On closer view I saw that it was herself as a girl of maybe seventeen. I knew the photo had not been there the day before and suspected she had put it there for me to see. Later that day reading Dante I encountered the following passage.
Within that land there was a mountain blessed
With leaves and waters, and they called it Ida;
But it is withered now like some old thing.
(Inferno, XIV 1.97)
In the afternoon Johannes and I went to the local swimming hole, a lake where young women lay out topless on long sun-exposed docks. Ida did not like it when Johannes went to Längsee, but he did nearly every day, to nap and swim after his long morning of work in the bakery. Johannes and I swam out nearly to the other side of the lake and then swam back and fell asleep in the sun.
On the way back to Sankt Veit, Johannes and I stopped for a beer at a bar called Sonnhof.
“Prost,” Johannes said, raising his glass to mine.
“Prost,” I repeated, drinking the cold beer.
As we drank, Johannes reminded me of the organization of illegal fishermen we had founded, the Schwarzfischers, at the Gostilna?
Zvikar in Slovenia before we’d left on our long trip. “We will have to be Schwarzfischers on our next trip especially,” Johannes said. “You cannot just fish anywhere in Italy like we did in Turkey, there are rules, private water, and wardens. We have to be more careful, more like Schwarzfischers.”
Being a Schwarzfischer was a complex duty. A Schwarzfischer fished wherever he wanted, regardless of the signs posted on the tree, but carried an obligation to be purposeful while doing so. We felt that our cause, or our individual causes at least (mine being to document the trout of the world in watercolors), transcended governments, borders, regulations, and treaties; an arrogant assumption, but, we felt, a justified one. We took our cue and purpose from the last line in Tortonese’s paper:
Further researches are badly needed for a better knowledge of morphology, variation, habits and distribution of the Trouts of Europe and Asia.
ITA
LY—ON THE ROAD TO THE HOME OF ENRICO TORTONESE
One September morning, sans Ida, Johannes and I left for Italy and the Mediterranean coast for a two-week trout-hunting expedition. It was not long before we were drinking Rosso d’Astura (cheap but good wine, three dollars a bottle) and eating thin-crust mushroom pizza in the town of Civitavecchia on edge of the mild sea.
“Specimen collection differs from sportfishing,” I said to him. “A sportfisherman can enjoy himself without catching anything, but a specimen collector who has caught nothing has failed. I will enjoy myself on this trip even if we see little.”
At dark we caught a ferry to Golfo di Aranci, Sardinia.
The night was warm and it was refreshing and curing to smell the salt air again. Johannes had brought some biological papers concerning trout for me to look through. I read by the light of a small low-watt bulb in the cabin we had rented for the overnight trip.
After recording his scientific findings on excursions through Turkey, Enrico Tortonese returned in the autumn of 1952 to his post at the University of Torino’s Zoological Institute, in Torino, Italy. There he pondered the morphological differences of the fish he had caught and observed in drainages of the Black, Caspian, and Mediterranean seas. For comparison he added information on the trout of Sardinia, the localities of which I recorded in my journal.
The language and typography of the paper appealed to me. I thought, there is something very official in science, an order rarely encountered in other aspects of our lives. It sanitized my spirit to think that the infinite biodiversity of the trout could be formalized and placed into neat species and subspecies categories. Of course it could not. Nevertheless, I was excited to see what the trout of the islands of Sardinia and Corsica looked like.
Johannes was restless, and had trouble sleeping; he tossed and grunted in his small bunk as the ferry mildly pitched. It seemed he had not yet shed the hurried rhythms of the baker—rolling, kneading, folding, cutting, baking, cooling, all for a daybreak deadline—let alone the schedule of working in the wee hours of the morning and sleeping away part of the daylight hours. But on the ride in the car that day, I had noticed signs that he had begun his metamorphosis from baker to explorer.
At daybreak we made landfall in Golfo di Aranci. At the docks we watched fishermen bring in their overnight catches. Buyers met them with wads of paper lire at a kind of clandestine auction of Neptune’s bounty.
The fishermen held out trays of silver glinting sardines and innumerable other fish they’d dredged up in their nets, small red croaking ones and eel-like ones. Other fishermen shook debris from their nets as the soft rose light of dawn played through them, casting weblike shadows on the decks of their boats. Small fisher-boys with rods in their hands, their skin African black from the sun, gawked at the professionals from the docks and begged for scraps to use for bait on their lines.
When the selling had finished, the fishermen mended their nets with spools of thread. The docks smelled like fish, and cats ambled through the pilings. Dry lightning flashed over purple-colored hills to the south where Johannes and I were headed.
Johannes had showed some pause since we had hit land. He stopped at a nearby café and we had an espresso, and watched old men, each at his own table, crumpling the pages of the paper, il messaggero.
As we drank our coffee, Johannes explained that we were headed to the Fluminedda River, one of the streams Tortonese mentioned in his paper. Shortly we were back on the road.
Approaching the town of Òlbia the palm trees were no longer as blue as they had looked in the early-morning light. I could now see lime greens and cadmium yellows at the roots of the fronds and a light hazel brown on the trunks. Johannes said that our knowledge of Spanish would go a long way communicating with Sardinians. The country was under Spanish occupation in the sixteenth century and the language had been infected. “For instance,” said Johannes. “The Italian for river, fiume, in Sardinia it’s riu, more like the Spanish rio.” Ida could say what she wanted about Johannes being singularly minded, but the more time I spent with him the more I saw he had a penchant for languages.
When we had left Sankt Veit it had been raining and cold. Here, as the sun rose, the heat increased and our bodies and minds were tricked into thinking that summer had returned. We came into Orosei, a red-roofed village where elderly women wore black and young women did not appear to exist. We bought some sheep cheese, pecorino, two bottles of red wine, and a loaf of ciabatta. The town was encircled by a fortress of opuntia cacti that bore red, prickly fruit.
Just south of Orosei was the valley of the Fluminedda River, the first on our list of streams. In the dry heat of day we started up an unmarked road hoping that it might lead to a bridge where we could have a look at the river. Small dark grapes in tight clusters were hanging among yellowing leaves in the vineyards ready to be harvested.
We found the Fluminedda River and looked off three separate bridges. What we saw was a streambed of smooth stones that, although dry, gave off an aura of damp coolness. We wondered if Tortonese had led us astray until we reached the fourth bridge, where at last there was water, though it was not moving.
We started up a dirt road and pulled over when we thought we had gone far enough. We had parked beside another Land Rover, which had a sticker advertising the Italian Speleological Society (speleology is the study of caves). It seemed that other things besides native trout brought people here.
For our hike up the river, Johannes took his mask and snorkel. I grabbed my fly rod and a chunk of ciabatta and we set off through a forest of large, prickly leafed oaks, meandering around their roots and trunks.
We walked up the dry creek bed as if it were a path and after a half mile or so we heard running water. At first the river ran only as fast as the sweat off our faces and we wondered, could trout live there? Then we reached a gurgling run and a small waterfall. I put my hand in the water and it was warm, like bathwater. I dipped a stream thermometer in the water. It was 83°F, a temperature that ordinarily was lethal to trout, though I knew of some trout in desert streams of Nevada that had evolved to live in such conditions.
We left the streambed and took to the oak forest for a good mile, listening for the sound of cascades. A few times I thought I saw the reflection of water through the filtered light on the forest floor, but then I realized it was sweat from my brow that had rolled into my eyes and blurred my vision.
The rushing sound of water became louder as we walked back toward the stream’s edge. The banks were no longer hard and dry but suddenly moist and the air was filled with the scent of lemony mint. Beyond the lush mint patch we saw a long pool reflecting the green leaves of a giant plane tree. As we looked beyond the reflection we saw a black shape dart across the pool and knew that if we had indeed seen it, the only thing it could be was a trout.
Johannes backed off from the pool and stripped to his swimsuit. He put on his mask and snorkel, grabbed his net, and eased into the water. He swam to the opposite bank and lodged himself between two large rocks, where he groped for several minutes under the roots of a plane tree that helped form an undercut bank. Finally he lifted up his net and in the bottom of it a dark, almost black creature wriggled.
“Bravo,” I said, clapping. Johannes walked to the bank where I stood and emptied the contents of his green net onto the lush mint. It was a stunning fish unlike any trout we’d seen, with tiny irregular speckles like cracked pepper on a yellow field. Why such a small fish would fill us with jubilation was beyond any evolutionary justification that I could surmise. I thought of the speleological fanatics floundering with torches in some area cave and wondered if a rare bat would bring them such pleasure. Such was the nature of a loucura no matter what the subject.
In other pools upstream we saw more trout, though I was not able to catch any with my fly rod, and then the water disappeared, like a snake retiring to its hole and we were standing on a dry riverbed again.
At Johannes’s frantic pace we made the southeast c
oast of the island in time for dinner. Women and young girls were line dancing to live music at the restaurant where we ate and we could still hear the music from where we camped on the beach in Santa Lucia.
The next morning we saw flamingos wading in the marshes along the road. The air quickly became Africa hot. I was astounded by the climatic change and how different it was from my home, though it was roughly on the same parallel, 41°N. After a breakfast of fresh bread and espresso, we drove to the interior toward the mountains.
We gained elevation and passed through a region called Terrasoli. The air became cooler. Thorny scrub grew to the very tops of the mountains, thick and seemingly impenetrable. Cork trees grew on the hillsides by the road, their bark recently harvested as high as human hands with knives could reach (incidentally, when the bark of the cork tree is harvested the tree does not die; the cork grows back).
In the valleys, chestnut trees grew tall with wide trunks and were hung with clusters of fruit protected by spikey husks. We passed no one on the roads for miles. I began to realize why they called this place Terrasoli, or lonely land. The only trace of humans we saw (besides the harvested cork) were signs posted to the trunks of trees: Divieto di Caccia, No Hunting. The sign we wanted to see was Divieto di Pesca, No Fishing, because then we at least would know that fish lived there.
Searching for trout on this trip was not like it had been in Turkey, where we recruited old local men to help us. Here Johannes wanted no one to know our business. We had to rely on the scant information we had and our own wits.
We were driving down a poor road along a dry streambed when the sky suddenly turned dark and dime-sized hail began pelting the car. We stopped the car under an oak tree to wait out the storm. When the clouds passed we stepped out of the car to see the ice accumulated on the ground. We heard running water but after several minutes of searching could not find out where it came from. Had we imagined it?