by Tom Fort
One afternoon, sensing my boredom, Csaba suggested a river trip. The omens were not encouraging as the sky was darkening rapidly in the east and dispatching a steady stream of swollen black clouds in our direction. But I took the view that anything would be better than a further vigil beside my rod pondering aspects of nothingness, so off we went. There was a murmur of thunder as we swung across the current. The clouds came together and filled the sky, threading it with lightning. The thunder became louder. When the rain came, it was as if someone had switched on a power shower. The surface of the river was lashed into a hissing maelstrom. Csaba did some more grinning and steered us into a little inlet where three tents were grouped under a big willow. The campers, two couples and half-a-dozen children, stood around in dripping oilskins.
An awning was stretched between two of the tents, under which a blackened pot was suspended over a fire. A pungent fishy smell came from it. A bowl was produced, filled and handed to me. It contained a dark stew with gobbets of pale flesh, firm and slightly gelatinous. I asked what it was.
Hungarian lad with head of catfish
‘Harcsa’, they said with enthusiasm, pronouncing it ‘horcha’ with plenty of rolling of the ‘r’. One of the boys beckoned me to follow him. He led the way along the bank to a post on which was jammed the head of a fish. Its mouth was almost as wide as its head. Above the mouth protruded two feelers, eight or ten inches long. Four smaller barbels hung from the lower jaw. The eyes, like little black beads, were positioned high on the sloping skull. The mouth was equipped, not with teeth, but with two bars, top and bottom, like hardened sandpaper, for grinding and pulverising. The skin over the head was mottled green, paling beneath the gills to jelly-fish white. Had the body been present, it would have been almost eel-like, tapering from the head to a fleshy, muscular tail, the whole glistening with a thick coat of slime.
I had never seen one in the flesh before, but I knew what this was. In Hungarian, harcsa; in German, wels; in English catfish; in Latin, Silurus glanis; in whatever language unchallengeably the most repellent looking freshwater fish that swims.
I longed to catch one, and began to dream about them. But it wasn’t going to happen at Hajas’s camp. The Tisza needed to drop, and the weather needed to settle. Fortunately Mr Csákó’s programme came to the rescue. It had allocated me a slot about a week later a little way up the Tisza, at Tiszafüred, which was how I first came to meet Gábor Hegedüs and his wife Márta.
Gábor knew Tamás Hajas a little, disliked him thoroughly, and disapproved strongly of his maverick operation. But, although he entirely lacked Hajas’s high-octane ambition, he had also, in his own way, been affected by entrepreneurial urges. As well as issuing licences and organising affairs on behalf of the Anglers’ Federation, Gábor had set up a small operation catering for visiting German and Austrian anglers. This had received a huge boost the previous season with the capture by an Austrian client of a catfish of 54 kilos, and the subsequent appearance of this whiskery monstrosity on the cover of Germany’s leading angling magazine in the arms of its joyful captor.
The publicity had inspired a rush of catfish fanatics whose expectations had put considerable pressure on Gábor. I had never met a man who looked more permanently worried. He had thinning blond hair, a drooping, straw-coloured moustache and blue eyes forever clouded with anxieties. Luckily for him, his wife was both a partner and a pillar. Márta was a strong, solid woman with a handsome, high-cheekboned face, and a serious, almost stern expression which lit easily into a wide, generous smile.
As a teenager, nearly 20 years before, she had spent a month with an English pen-friend and her family at Telford in Shropshire. The experience had left her with an easy command of English and an abiding warmth towards English people, English ways and English culture. The reverse side of her Anglophilia was a fierce Teutophobia. She did the accounts and attended to the office side of Gábor’s enterprise, but had as little as possible to do with his clients. I was once sitting under a vine-covered trellis in their garden when a group of German anglers turned up. Gábor was out so I called Márta. She came out on to the verandah, looked with evident distaste at the BMW and Mercedes outside her gate, and greeted the Germans frostily. She could speak German perfectly well but made no effort to engage with them. After the last in a succession of chilly silences they left. She laughed and brought me a cold beer.
‘Look at them with their big stomachs and big cars,’ she said scornfully. ‘They have no good fishing in Germany so they come to poor Hungary to take ours and expect us to be grateful. They pay to come and shout, but I don’t have to listen, that is Gábor’s job.’
He was too preoccupied with administrative matters to spare time for fishing with me, so he arranged for me to be taken out by his boatman, who was called Zsolt and was younger, and a lot cleaner, than Csaba. I met him at the water’s edge soon after dawn. As we set off, the sun rose in a blaze of pink and gold behind the trees, but enough of the night chill remained to cast trails of mist over the dark water, and the seats were wet with dew. We went downstream, past a post recording that we were 415 kilometres away from the Tisza’s junction with the Danube. We passed other fishermen, still as herons in their boats. Some had been out all night. None reported any success.
Zsolt tied up to the trailing branch of a willow at a spot that looked to me no different from countless others. A deep chorus of frogs, like a badly out-of-tune wind band, came from the rushes behind us. Zsolt baited the hook with a fat worm and a large burrowing beetle-like creature which he kept in a jar of earth. Having studied tales of the catfish’s legendary voraciousness, I had expected something more substantial, like a freshly killed puppy or the whole stomach of a wild boar. I lobbed the cocktail out, propped the rod against the side of the boat, and settled down to wait. Time passed, slowly, then more slowly. The sun ascended. The frogs fell silent. The seat got harder. My longing for something, anything, to happen became steadily more intense, as did the conviction that it never would.
Then it did. Without any warning the rod tip was wrenched down. I did nothing apart from look at it. Zsolt sprang down the boat, grasped the rod and struck. ‘Harcsa,’ he cried, grinning, and handed the rod to me. I felt a solid, shuddering resistance, and pictured the wide head shaking in the depths, the muscle-packed tail searching for some root or sunken branch to twist around. But the tackle was strong and I hauled the fish in without much trouble. By catfish standards it was a tiddler, no more than six or seven pounds. Zsolt unhooked it and offered me a slippery handshake. I smiled. He smiled. We resumed the vigil.
It grew hotter and hotter. The swirls of feeding fish diminished, then ceased altogether. The silent water kept flowing while everything else seemed to sink into a state of suspension. After several more hours I was put ashore, hungry, thirsty, buttock-sore.
We ate my catfish for lunch the next day, made by Márta into a rich, tasty stew with paprika, onion and garlic. Eased by two bottles of white wine from somewhere near Balaton, Gábor’s English suddenly flowered. He insisted on taking me for an excursion. It was still very hot, but a big wind had got up, driving waves up the river, flattening the reedbeds and whirling dust around the picnickers. He took his boat through a channel into the lake. Yellow breakers foamed around the dead trees and dashed against the reeds. Using field glasses I was able to make out the same church steeple that I had seen with Hajas.
Gábor had no time for Hajas’s flouting of the regulations. ‘He thinks the Federation is stupid. He is right sometimes. But you must stop people doing what is bad for the river and the fishing, like putting in poison and netting too many fish and using … I don’t know English word …’ He raised his arm and made stabbing motions. ‘I don’t think you have this is England.’ I refrained from mentioning my spearing expedition with Csaba.
Gábor was worried about his business. ‘The Germans, they come and they drink and they drink, and they go fishing and they don’t feel so good and they don’t fish so good and then they
say the fishing is not good.’ He tugged his moustache and stared out over the lake. ‘I worry because I think maybe they are right. There are too many fishermen, not so many fish.’
In the evening, my last with them, they made a fire in the garden. Márta brought out bread, sliced onions and tomatoes, and slabs of pork fat. Gábor gave me a sharpened stick on which I stuck a piece of fat and held it in the flames until it began to run. I smeared it on the bread, added a layer of onions and tomatoes, and sprinkled paprika over it. Sparks rose into a purple sky as the wind dropped. The flames licked at the hissing fat. I watched Gábor and Márta and their two children, faces half-lit by the fire, chins glistening with grease.
Gábor and Márta Hegedüs, Tiszafüred, 2008
Eighteen years on, Gábor looked more anxious than ever. His hair had mostly gone and what was left was grey. The moustache drooped down over his mouth like a permanent comment on his situation. The clouded blue eyes were dragged down by the sagging skin on his cheekbones.
He met me at the railway station in Tiszafüred. He was driving a beaten-up van – 12 years old, he said, as if concerned I might think he was getting rich. He seemed pleased to see me, but not effusively so. I asked him how the marina business was doing. Not good, he said, puffing out his cheeks. Actually, as I found out later, it was not bad, but Gábor’s spirit seemed to have become shackled by chronic pessimism. He had only two moods: gloom, and a slightly fevered excitement that gripped him when he began to float his grand ideas for expanding the business and making some real money.
Márta was waiting at the marina, outside a wooden building with a verandah that served both as a bar for the customers and administrative centre for the business. She was a little wider, a little more solid, her hair – cut short in exactly the same style – now flecked with grey. But the smile was as I had remembered it.
I was surprised by how rusty her English had become. She apologised for this repeatedly, seeming genuinely troubled. She never had a chance to practise it, she said. She used to keep it up by reading children’s books in English to her son and daughter – Swallows and Amazons was a favourite – and reading novels herself. Now the children were grown up and she had lost the reading habit. One of the pleasures of my return visit was the joy she took in rediscovering the language she loved, like someone tasting good food and wine again after a long period of abstinence.
For some reason that I couldn’t fathom, I didn’t stay with them and never visited their house. They had arranged rooms for me a couple of streets away from the marina, with a young English-speaking couple who had noisy dogs and no children. The result was that I saw Gábor and Márta only at the marina, where they were both on duty from eight or nine in the morning until sundown seven days a week. It was as if they only existed there; or if they had an alternative life, it was not open to inspection. Each morning I had breakfast at a hotel across the road from the marina, eating my eggs and ham outside in the sun, watching the green Tisza slip by. In the evening I ate with them, very simply, at a table inside the bar/office.
Actually I quite liked the arrangement. Once I had been shown around the wooden self-catering cabins built for holiday lets, and had wandered along the lagoon past the cruisers and fishing boats, there was nothing for me to do at the marina except drink beer and chat with Gábor and Márta when they were not dealing with requests and complaints from customers, which they were most of the time. I kept asking Gábor if there was any chance of my getting out on the river, maybe borrowing some tackle and going after a catfish again. He would nod and rub his cheekbones and pull at his moustache and make vague promises.
I borrowed one of the bicycles they hired out to customers, and set off to follow a paved cycle path that had been laid along the top of the embankment beside the river. It was a pleasant ride, made less exciting than it might have been by the necessity of returning the same way; the alternative being to follow the 80-kilometre circuit of Lake Tisza, which I reckoned was beyond my powers. On one side of the embankment, beyond a strip of trees, fields of maize and sunflowers stretched away to a distant horizon. On the other, confined between its lines of willows, the river rolled south. Occasionally it turned away from the embankment, to leave reed-fringed, lily-carpeted lagoons with dead trees rising from them on which cormorants rested until hunger drove them off to hunt. The far bank was broken at various points to reveal glimpses of the lake.
This flat, tame landscape is man-made, its river subdued by generations of hydraulic engineers. The Tisza has kept its name, but is otherwise severed from its past. But I could not fish a river or cycle along it without needing to know its story.
It rises on the Ukrainian side of the Carpathians, close to the border with Romania. As a mountain stream, it flows through the south-easterly tip of that obscure and neglected corner of Europe known at various times as Carpatho-Ukraine, Carpathian Russia, TransCarpathia, and – most familiarly – Ruthenia. It descends from the forested hills to pass by the city of Khust, entering Hungary at Tiszabecs, the first of scores of towns and villages that take their names from it.
It turns south at Tokaj, beneath the volcanic slopes where for a thousand years grapes have ripened and rotted before being made into sugary wine the colour of topaz. One river settlement follows another – Tiszanagyfalu, Tiszaladány, Tiszalök, Tiszadob, Tiszagyulaháza, Tiszatarján, Tiszadorogma – until Tiszafüred is reached. To the east of Tiszafüred is the Hortobágy, the last remaining significant expanse of the puszta (the word means ‘bare’ or ‘bereft’ and refers to the vast grassland steppe that once covered the whole of the Great Plain). To the west is the Jászag, where an assortment of unremarkable places with names like Jászfelsöszentgyörgy and Jászalsószentgyörgy recall the arrival in the thirteenth century of the nomadic Jász people from the Caucasus. The Tisza receives the last of its important tributaries, the Maros (Mureş in Romanian), at Szeged. Ten miles or so further on it crosses into Serbia, joining the Danube short of Belgrade.
Until the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire effected by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, the Tisza was entirely Hungarian. Symbolically and spiritually it still is: the liquid spine of the Alföld, the Great Plain, that semi-mythical wellspring of the Magyar imagination. But the self-image moulded by the plain and the river is rooted in the distant past, and has little or no connection with the geographical reality that has obtained for the past century or more.
Geographically, the dominant characteristic of the Tisza is determined by the remarkable flatness of the landscape through which it flows. Its floodplain extends from the Carpathians in the east almost to the Danube in the west. Left to itself, it traversed its plain in a succession of epic meanders in the course of which its flow deviated to all points of the compass. Life beside it, or anywhere near, was a precarious and highly specialised affair.
In early spring the melting of the Carpathian snows would send yellow floods churning down river. The low banks could not contain a rise of more than a foot or so, and in a single day or night thousands of square miles of marsh and low-lying land would be converted into a vast, turbid lake. A journey between Budapest and the important trading city of Debrecen, on the eastern flank of the Great Plain, could be interrupted for weeks until the Tisza ferry crossings reappeared.
To the few travellers who crossed the plain and recorded their impressions, its flatness and emptiness – a ‘great nothingness’, the novelist Mór Jókai called it – were overwhelming. Landmarks were as rare as objects floating in the ocean: a reed hut, a sheep pen, the long pole of a draw-well. Settlements were scattered far apart and incredibly isolated. Only in dry weather was it possible to travel easily between them along raised mudbanks. The people generally stayed where they were, poling or paddling about on necessary trips in flat-bottomed boats. Winters were savage. In the worst of them, packs of starving, green-eyed wolves came down from the snowbound mountains to range across the ice, harrying humans and livestock alike. Anyone foolhardy or desperate enough to at
tempt a journey took straw with them, which they burned to keep the wolves at bay.
Even by the standards of those times, the lives of the river people were hard. But the river did provide for them as well as make trouble. The floods spread silt across the fields on which, under the summer sun, crops sprang forth easily. Immense flocks of sheep and long-horned cattle grazed the grasslands. Geese, duck and lesser waterfowl abounded. And then there were the fish.
The Tisza was famous for sturgeon, carp, pike and catfish. Edward Browne, the doctor son of the celebrated Sir Thomas Browne, author of Religio Medici, passed through in 1669 and wrote of the ‘Tibiscus or Theiss’ being ‘esteemed the most Fishy river in Europe if not in the world, insomuch they have a common saying that it consisteth of two parts water and one part fish’. Such abundance encouraged tall piscine tales. ‘It is said,’ recorded the normally sober and sceptical John Paget in the 1840s, ‘that after an overflow the fish have been left in such quantities as to be used for feeding the pigs and manuring the ground.’
For the best part of ten centuries after the spread of the Magyars across the Great Plain, the Tisza was left to its wayward self. But in the 1840s a new generation of enlightened aristocratic reformers were making their mark in Budapest, and they determined to address the backwardness, lawlessness and inaccessibility that characterised eastern Hungary. Under the direction of the most celebrated of the reformers, the neurotically self-doubting, manically energetic Count István Széchenyi, the project to tame the Tisza began. It took 35 years to complete, by which time Széchenyi had long since blown out his brains in the asylum near Vienna where he was confined. More than 100 of the Tisza’s famously extravagant meanders were cut by new channels. Its length was reduced by more than 350 miles, and as a result many villages found themselves beside loops of ex-river, miles from the new course.