by Tom Fort
In the past 20 years the delta has been dragged back from the brink. Water quality in the channels and lakes is generally adequate. The backwaters and lagoons swarm with shoals of fry, and although fishermen bemoan poor catches, fishermen usually do. The dynamics of fish populations are at the mercy of many factors, of which water quality is just one. Out at sea the water is clearer, the incidence of algal blooms is down, and the abundance of the phytoplanktons, phytobenthos and macrozoobenthos at the bottom of the food chain is slowly improving.
But while the delta may have its health back, it will never regain its lost innocence. That would require total protection from pollution, engineering and other obvious forms of abuse, and from us. It is not going to happen. It is already not happening. The delta is too valuable. While the scientists and ecologists appeal for human intrusion to be restrained, beady-eyed politicians, administrators, regional developers and deal-makers have gone to work. In the age of cheap travel, expanded leisure time and ready money, the delta has been transformed from wilderness into investment opportunity.
The accessible sections are under occupation. Hotels and pensions have sprung up on every spit of dry land. Redundant steamers have been spruced up and transformed into floating pleasure palaces. Villages like Crişan and Mila 23 have doubled in population, and each has its waterside petrol station. In the summer season the power boats snarl up and down the waterways all day long, filling the air with the whine of engines and the smell of benzene. The hallmark big birds – the pelicans, egrets, herons and cormorants – spend the daylight hours hiding or fleeing from grotesquely over-powered craft steered by paunchy men in swimming trunks and baseball caps, with one hand on the wheel and the other cupping the inevitable mobile phone. They are not there to fish or paint or enjoy the beauties of nature, but to sweep at maximum speed wherever they are allowed to go, their wash slicing the water and slapping against the reedbeds. Those areas of the delta not designated as reserves are now a free-for-all.
The old way of life was in headlong retreat, but not every vestige had yet been erased. Occasionally we would pass one of the traditional slim, black rowing boats piled with nets or reeds, being pulled along by an old man under a straw hat, and leave it bouncing in our wake. Grigore and Toti were much too delighted with their new toy to be bothered about noise or disturbance to wildlife. From their point of view, the boat simply expanded their horizons, gave them freedom. Grigore said there were proposals to impose stricter speed limits and require the use of much quieter electric engines away from the main channels and canals. In the meantime everyone’s first impulse was to open the throttle.
From the abandoned glass factory at Caraorman we took a narrow cut into a big, triangular lake, Puiu. There was another lake, Lumina, immediately to the north, and the map indicated there was a channel between the lakes. Grigore and Toti seemed to have convinced each other that Lumina must be where all the fish had retreated. Two or three years before, Grigore related, the doctor had had a great day there fishing for pike. In the evening, however, he found that the creek he had taken to get in had closed behind him (a familiar delta phenomenon as the rafts of reed shift position in the wind). In fading light he had searched in vain for another exit before resigning himself to a troubled night with only the mosquitoes, the nightingales and the frogs for company. Overnight the breeze dropped and in the morning the creek was open again.
This tale struck me as reason enough to leave Lumina alone. But the questing spirit of the brothers was aroused. We nosed our way around the northern shore of Puiu, looking for a break in the reeds. At length we found one that opened into a twisting channel squeezed between willows. Grigore cut the engine and we paddled. A convoy of carp ghosted beneath us, grey silhouttes against the black mud. The way ahead narrowed so that it became impossible even to paddle, and we had to pull ourselves along by grabbing at overhanging branches. Eventually we ran gently aground 20 yards short of the open water of Lumina.
Ignoring Ada’s protests, Toti, determined to drag us through, seized the rope and jumped sideways for the bank. He sank up to his knees in the mud, took two floundering steps, and was up to his waist. Ada and Grigore yanked him back on board, his lower half plastered in black ooze. We retreated, and soon the reassuring throaty chug of the motor asserted itself again.
Only at such moments does the delta provide a reminder of its epic indifference to the specks of humanity buzzing around it, and cause to remember that this is a world where we really do not belong. It may tolerate us, or it may turn against us and swallow us into its moist, quaking being. We reflect that it would take us a lifetime just to be on terms with it, and then only if we had access to the wisdom and experience of the generations that came before us. We may sigh regretfully at the invasion of the motorboats, but we would not care to be out here on our own, in a rowing boat, trying to find our way home with bad weather brewing.
For obvious reasons, very little is heard in travellers’ accounts of the delta’s darker moods: the dreadful storms that sweep in from the Black Sea, flattening the reeds and churning the waters into foaming yellow seas; the raging floods swamping villages and washing people and livestock away; the Crivat, the vicious wind from Ukraine, that drives snowstorms across the ice. The lives of the delta people are a closed book, more or less. Mrs Pantazzi observed complacently that the region was ‘the refuge of the homeless, the fugitive, the victims of religious persecution … an immense puzzle of nationalities’, and sailed on. Sacheverell Sitwell sketched a quick impression of the ‘quivering lagoon that glittered and trembled in the heat’; but instead of lingering with the Lipovan fishermen, he was much more interested in Galati and its community of Skoptzi, the weird sect of self-castrators who believed that Christ was mutilated rather than baptised by John, and that the way to paradise lay in ecstatic prayer and the excision of the sexual organs.
Claudio Magris is the best of an unsatisfactory bunch of guides. As his boat ‘wanders like an animal’ among the branches of the river, he at least acknowledges the complex narratives vested in the reed-thatched houses, the ramshackle villages, the blackened boats; even though he hasn’t the time to pause and unravel them. A story by one of the giants of twentieth-century Romanian fiction, Mihail Sadoveanu, gives a glimpse of the untold story. Entitled A Fishery, it describes a visit in driving rain to a fish-processing centre on the Sulina channel. Sadoveanu observes the Lipovan fishermen:
… with faces made harsh by rain, wind and sun … bareheaded, with matted hair; their trousers were rolled up to the knees; their clothes were nothing but tatters, braided jackets smeared with scales and grease, breeches smeared with scales, grease and mud … rain and Danube water was streaming from the tops of their heads into every last seam of their clothing …
Inside the building, sturgeon, carp, perch and other fish have been sorted into heaps. Cleaners with razor-sharp knives cut and gut. Outside, more boats laden with fish arrive. Some of the fishermen squat in a corner tearing chunks from a loaf of black bread and swigging from a bottle of tuicǎ. Shouts in Russian are heard from an approaching boat. The master of the fishery, a Greek, says the boatman is Nechita, a ne’er-do-well notorious for poaching and suspected of darker deeds, including murder. ‘The administration, mayor, sub-prefect, gendarmes have no existence here,’ the Greek says. ‘No one can penetrate these wilds.’ Later they pass Nechita’s boat again, moored near his house on a raised sandbank. They see a tall, slender young woman come out to greet him. He knocks her down and beats her with his fists. They leave.
In the late 1990s a group of Romanian ethnologists began a two-year project to try to find out how the fishing communities of the delta had adapted to the new order introduced after Ceauşescu’s overthrow and the award of UNESCO biosphere status. They found that a cultural chasm had opened between the fishermen, with their inherited understanding of the delta and traditions of exploiting it, and the ecologists from outside, who were empowered to use force, if need be, to impose their conservationist
regime. In the jargon of ethnology, the coercive methods of the authorities and the lack of communication with villagers had engendered ‘a self-victimising mentality on the part of the delta people which does nothing but register failures, frustrations and subversive techniques’.
At a deeper level, the researchers found that the delta people had lost, or were fast losing, their inherited ‘mental maps’ of their homeland. Traditionally the delta was their territory, in that they belonged there. But by its nature it could not be the property of anyone, and thus no one could be excluded from it. Over time their mental maps of the important places – where fish spawned or wild boar retreated – had blurred into copies of the tourist maps. The reference points had become the places tourists were interested in. The territory had become biosphere, reservation, property; patrolled by guards in fast motor-boats. Faced with dispossession and exclusion, the delta people could drink, moan, emigrate or dream of emigrating (they favoured comparably watery destinations like Canada), seek factory jobs outside the delta, turn to serious (often violent) poaching, or enlist in the tourist service industry.
The Delta Biosphere Declaration of 1993 stated that the right of the people ‘to preserve their specific customs and traditional economic activities is guaranteed’. No more. Now the Reserve Administration ‘makes proposals for paying compensation … in case of economic contraction or the suspension of traditional activities as caused by restrictive management measures’. In other words, step aside, fishermen of the delta. Your day is done.
Grigore and Toti were not in the least interested in any of this. Their view was that times changed, and you either changed with them or suffered the consequences. Wallowing in regret for the passing of a way of life was an indulgence strictly for romantics or EU-funded researchers who would recoil from actually living that hard, uncomfortable life. It was as pointless as bemoaning the disappearance of the scythe and the horse-drawn plough.
Picnic in the delta – Grigore, Toti, Ada
On the whole we were a relaxed, happy party. The bond between the brothers was close, and they took evident delight in being together. Language obstacles meant that Toti and I hardly communicated at all, and I found out very little about his youth or his time in Bucharest before leaving for Germany. I’m not sure I would have got far even had I been able to speak German or Romanian. Toti was shy and reserved, and did not give the impression of being a ready sharer of confidences.
Ada was six years old when the family left. Before this trip she had been back to Romania just once and, although she spoke Romanian to her father and uncle, she regarded herself as entirely German. She seemed embarrassed by her origins; or maybe this was a defensive posture adopted to deal with German prejudice against Romanians, whose reputation elsewhere in Europe does not stand high.
Ada’s English was good and she seemed to like talking to me as well as rolling my cigarettes, which she did with a deftness I could not emulate. She was 30 and had just qualified as a doctor, having previously spent several years at university studying chemistry. She had never had a job, and Grigore enjoyed contrasting what he regarded as her mollycoddled upbringing with the worldly progress of young Grigore, who’d recently been in Alma Ata negotiating a possible export link with Kazakhstan.
She had a boyfriend who was also a doctor. On their holidays they went rock-climbing together, and she told me that she found the flatness of the delta oppressive rather than intriguing. Ada said she was glad she had come, but did not think she would be doing so again. As for fishing, she regarded it as an existential mystery not worth the trouble of studying. While we stood casting our spinners, she would sit reading, making notes in a little notebook, taking occasional pictures and peering through the binoculars at the birds.
On our last afternoon the crushing heat and lack of fish action drove us back to the pension in Crişan, and thence to the bar up the one road. While we sat there drinking cold beer and discussing for the umpteenth time where the pike might be hiding, the sun vanished. When we came out, the sky to the north was heavy with thundercloud, darkening by the minute. A hot, moist breeze huffed spasmodically, silvering the willows. Threatening rumbles were audible from the direction of Ukraine.
The brothers decided the fishing omens were favourable. Ada said she would give the proposed outing a miss and stay in her room to read. I didn’t like the look of the sky, or the noises coming from it, but I didn’t want to be thought a wimp so I hopped into the boat.
We roared off down the canal towards Caraorman then cut off somewhere else, I wasn’t sure where. We anchored and immediately began catching barsch. Daggers of lightning stabbed down from the heavens, which had assumed the colour of granite. The brothers were not at all daunted by the pyrotechnics or the timpani rolls of thunder or the rain, which was soon descending like a cataract. They shouted and laughed and swigged from their bottle of tuicǎ, swallowing as they cast, the water streaming down their happy faces. Their delight was infectious. Each time one of our rods bent, and one or other of us felt the familiar, jagging resistance of a perch, we would chorus ‘Barsch!’ and watch for the flash of the pearly belly in the water, and the twist of the striped olive-green flank and red fins.
The weather cleared overnight and the sun was shining again as we made our way back upstream to Tulcea.
Evening sun on the delta
When I recall the delta now, I cannot help thinking of the mysteries and secrets I never touched, of the many meanings that eluded me. I can hear noises: frogs at night, cuckoos at dawn, reeds whispering at any time (even when I could not feel a breath of wind on my cheek), herons beating their wings, water lapping against the sides of the boat, our spinners plopping into it, the buzz of our reels. Most of all, the din of the engine.
Chapter 21
Lost world
EVERYONE KNEW THE Countess, Grigore said. She had always been there: back in the days of the King, before Ceauşescu, during Ceauşescu. Now she had survived Ceauşescu. I asked if she was a real countess. Of course a real countess. But she sold flowers. He told me where to find her.
She sat in the shade, on a wooden chair next to her barrow. On the barrow were pots of tulips, daffodils and roses, bundles of herbs and lavender, little bunches of dried flowers in baskets. She wore a cheap print dress, a far cry from the silks and chiffons of her youth. Her old face, tanned and lined by age and the outdoor life, was dominated by a jutting beak of a nose and narrow, clear blue eyes. Her snow-white hair was gathered into a wispy bun. There was something about her, an air of distinction.
I introduced myself in bumbling French, on the assumption that if we had a language in common that would be it. She was clearly nonplussed for a moment, then answered in English.
‘You are not French, I think?’ I admitted it. ‘You are English.’ I admitted that as well. ‘I prefer to speak in English, if you would be so kind. My French is very bad. Yes, I am the Countess Teleki.’ She corrected herself. ‘I am a Countess Teleki. There are many Telekis. But here in Romania, I am the only Teleki, I think.’
The name is a thread through 400 years of Hungarian and Transylvanian history. Generally speaking, they were a brainy, bookish lot, prone to eccentricity, neuroticism and attacks of typical Magyar melancholy. As was expected of their class, they offered themselves in the service of their country, but tended to make their mark – if they made one at all – in other spheres.
For example, Count Sámuel Teleki served as Chancellor of Transylvania towards the end of the eighteenth century, and seems to have performed his official duties conscientiously enough. But his passion, energy and wealth were expended on rampant bibliomania. He hunted down the rarest manuscripts, incunabula and early printed books – among them the fourteenth-century Bible known as the Koncz-codex, the Liber de Homine printed in Bologna in 1475, Erasmus’s edition of the New Testament printed in Basel in 1519, and a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence. The Count displayed his treasures in his baroque mansion in Marosvásárhely, now t
he Teleki Library in Târgu Mureş, outside whose gates the Countess set up her flower stall.
A later Count Sámuel Teleki forsook his government post and life of ease to become an African explorer. He led the expedition that discovered the Jade Sea, and named it after his ill-starred friend, the Archduke Rudolf. (Much later Lake Rudolf was renamed Lake Turkana.) A cousin, Count László Teleki, was the erratic representative of Kossuth’s short-lived revolutionary government in Paris, where he fought duels, conducted love affairs and wrote forgettable plays, eventually returning to Hungary where he committed suicide in despair at the re-imposition of Habsburg tyranny.
Susceptibility to despair was a family trait. In Hungary’s darkest hour – darker even than the crushing of the Revolution of 1848 – the last of the Telekis to hold public office retired to his rooms in Budapest and wrote a letter dated 2 April 1941 which he addressed to Hungary’s quasi-fascist dictator, Admiral Horthy. The previous day Horthy had acceded to Hitler’s demand that Hungary join an unprovoked invasion of Yugoslavia, despite the opposition of his Prime Minister, Count Pál Teleki.
‘We have become word-breakers out of cowardice,’ Teleki wrote. ‘We have sided with the villains. We will be the most miserable of nations. I did not hold you back. I am guilty.’ He signed his name and then put a bullet through his brain.
Count Pál Teleki makes a fleeting appearance in Between the Woods and the Water, the second volume in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s uncompleted trilogy about his walk from Holland to Constantinople in the 1930s. Leigh Fermor met him in Budapest, and Teleki – whose preferred calling was not politics at all but geography and cartography – was soon charting the Englishman’s way into Transylvania, suggesting routes and offering introductions among the web of Teleki cousins.
It is characteristic of Leigh Fermor that he places the most generous possible interpretation on Teleki’s suicide, and makes no mention of his less sympathetic side – for instance, his enthusiasm for eugenics, his vigorous, private anti-semitism, and above all his disastrous obsession with reclaiming Transylvania (the carrot dangled by Hitler). All the aristocrats who crop up in Leigh Fermor’s narrative, and there are many, are of the same stamp. The young counts are handsome (or at least striking in looks) and their countesses beautiful and accomplished, the old counts interestingly eccentric and their countesses exquisitely dressed and immensely charming. Everyone is intelligent, sensitive, humorous and steeped in history and culture. They dance beautifully, shoot unerringly, have impeccable manners, and talk brilliantly. There are no acts of meanness or cruelty. Nothing is said of their idleness or the chasm separating them from their downtrodden retainers, who – when they do appear – are cast in the roles of devoted servants or happy, singing, dancing, fiddle-playing rustics.