A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  At New Bridge, leading into the heart of the city, we passed a curious observation tower, part retro with its brutalist Communist architecture, part futuristic with its UFO-shaped viewing platform. Across the river, Bratislava’s castle gleamed white on the hillside in the watery sunshine. We cycled into the old town, the cobbled bricks in the pedestrianised streets shifting below the wheels of my bike with the rainwater that had oozed through the cracks, and on past a bronze figure pulling himself from a manhole. It felt like Bratislava was at sea.

  In keeping with the watery Bratislava, we booked ourselves into the Botel – an old cruising ship anchored on the Danube that looked like it hadn’t been renovated since the seventies. It was filled with swirly carpets and moth-eaten curtains, and stank of stale cigarettes and cheap coffee, but we liked the feel of the water beneath our cabin beds and the open decks overlooking the river. More than that, it was cheap – a fraction of the price of our modern hotel in Vienna.

  *

  We were lost. On the other side of the city’s railway bridge that spanned the dual carriageway, the diversion signs for the Danube cycle route had run out. For once, Jamie was disorientated. We backtracked over the bridge and started again, but still we couldn’t find our way out of the city to the Danube. Eventually, I saw a middle-aged man at the side of the road having a pee. I held back and waited until he was finished, then approached him for help.

  ‘English?’

  ‘No. No English.’

  ‘Deutsch?’

  ‘Ja, Deutsch.’

  This was the first time, but by no means the last, that I would find German useful in Eastern Europe. I asked the stranger for directions to the river. After a series of complicated instructions, the man noted the look of confusion on my face and said he would show us the way, swinging his bike around to lead us through the city. After ten minutes or so, we came to a spaghetti junction of overpasses with still no sign of the river. Our rescuer got off his bike and pushed it under the knot of overpasses, along a worn grassy track and up onto a bank. I started to feel uneasy, but followed behind, pushing my bike up an incline and out onto a path. And there it was, our old friend the Danube, stretched out in front of us.

  The man gestured to the river, climbed back on his bicycle and disappeared off into the city from where we’d found him. I thought of the warnings from the Alsatian e-bikers, Ingrid and Sabine, and how this stranger had taken half an hour out of his day to cycle in the wrong direction in order to help two foreigners. I wondered, too, about the perceived need of human beings to define themselves, even justify their superiority, through the ‘othering’ of those outside their own culture, race, ideology, language and home. The physical borders of Europe may have been long gone, but the psychological frontiers remained.

  Back on the Danube our bikes sped along the riverbank almost of their own accord. Our bodies had become sails, pushed along by the wind. It was exhilarating.

  Just west of the little settlement of Čunovo, the borders of Austria, Hungary and Slovakia meet in a group hug. Following a straight-line northeast, an artificial arm stretches into the Danube: part of the Gabčíkovo hydroelectric power plant and dam engineering. It had started out as a joint project between Hungary and Slovakia but had ended in acrimony when Hungary backed away from the project – the two countries fighting it out in the International Court of Law. While the Slovaks continued the project on their side, the Hungarians refused to follow though the agreement.

  We pushed against the wind out onto the dam. The ghostly clang of metal on yachts rang around a marina. Ahead, a low-slung contemporary building of glass and concrete sat on a peninsula, dotted with colourful sculptures. We dropped our bikes to explore this unexpected museum of modern art in the middle of nowhere, and spent a couple of delightful hours viewing the contemporary paintings and a quirky exhibition of comical creatures created from shells, bones, feathers and other bits and pieces from nature.

  From the museum, we cycled along the sliver of land that separates the Danube and Hungary from Slovakia and the dam until we came to the village of Gabčíkovo. Google had earlier revealed cheap rooms with bathrooms here, for less than ten euros per person in an ugly Communist-era building – much better value than the cost of a pitch in the Austrian campsites. It fitted our dwindling budget. I could live with the brutalist high-rise at that price. And we’d be looking out, not in.

  We cycled past a crumbling building on the edge of the settlement that looked like a half-abandoned factory, but couldn’t see our ‘hotel’. In the village, a woman tried to rent us a room for fifty euros, but with a room for less than twenty somewhere down the road, I was determined to find our bargain. As I walked away, the furious B&B owner snatched back the piece of paper on which she had written her offer and ripped it in two. With the help from the seller at the kiosk across the road, we cycled out of the village again and found the elusive bargain … back at the ‘crumbling factory’.

  Inside, the receptionist behind the glass stared down her sharpened nose at us, shaking a hatchet head at all language offers. She wrote the cost down on a piece of paper with an angry flourish, along with the room number, and sent us off to grope our way down dark corridors. We wheeled our bikes into a minimalist room with an en-suite that included something that was half-bath, half-shower, the ceramic chipped under a copper showerhead. Outside on the balcony I leaned over the rusty iron-railings to a car park of Ladas and cracked cement pushing up weeds. But the room was clean and cheap, and that was all that mattered. It was only later, when I read the information board in the foyer, I realised we’d booked into university accommodation available for the summer recess.

  *

  It was our second day in Slovakia and we were learning to negotiate the sudden bumps and cracked pavements of the cycle paths, obstacles that hadn’t existed in Western Europe. Just as I felt we had left the solid prosperity of Bavaria and Austria behind, we entered a small village to find a coffee house advertising German and Austrian beers. A coffee house! So far from Vienna! I gazed at it longingly then turned to look for a grassy slope on the dyke for our picnic lunch. As we ate our sandwiches, sand martins flittered on the banks of the river.

  I couldn’t remember watching sand martins with my father, but I remember a long hot July and August in my childhood when a corncrake had taken up residence in the ditch across the road from our house on Wood Lane. My father was full of excitement – to my bemusement, not realising that these once fairly common birds were beginning to disappear from our fields and ditches. At night, I lay in bed and listened to the corncrake’s rasping sound, like someone running a fingernail over a metal comb – crex, crex, which also happened to be its scientific name. In retrospect, it was a thing of beauty, a dying call from a disappearing world. I could still hear the crex, crex here on the banks of the Danube, mingling with the real-time chirrup of the sand martins. But when I tried to remember my father’s face or voice, they were as indistinct as the darting martins.

  How easily we disregard the worlds we live in until they disappear. I’d walked away from Wood Lane, never to return. I removed myself so thoroughly from my father on an emotional level that any interaction with him had become cold and functional on my part. Why had he behaved so coldly, so indifferently, indeed so cruelly that night in our kitchen? The anger and resentment I felt towards him had become a metal-cold wedge between us. Now when I tried to remember my childhood conversations with him, they remained elusive. I wracked my brain for even the smallest shared dialogues, but there was nothing. How come they evaded me when the map of our evening walks was sharp with detail? And I felt a sorrow for the lost soundscape of our shared lives.

  When we’d finished our sandwiches, we headed into the coffee house for a caffeine shot. Inside, I settled into one of the benches that wrapped around the dining table, covered in a red gingham tablecloth so typical of Austrian houses. A heavy chandelier lit the shadowy room of wood and stone. The sense of displacement was heightened by the Austri
an paraphernalia cluttering every wall and surface. Crests, medals, crosses and flags hung from the ceilings and packed glass cabinets, along with wartime photographs, tankards and heavy oil paintings romantically depicting the Austrian Alps. At first, I thought I’d entered a Nazi shrine; then I realised the crosses and medals were from the Austrian Red Cross, not from Hitler’s National Socialist Party. I breathed a sigh of relief and wallowed in this little piece of Austria – a two-day cycle from Vienna.

  In the middle of the afternoon, exhausted from battling the loose gravel of a dyke that had been like cycling though quicksand, we reached the town of Komárno with its sister Komárom across the bridge in Hungary. We hesitated, wondering whether we should stay in Slovakia a little longer or cross over the Danube into our sixth country, then decided on the latter and headed over the bridge into Hungary.

  2. Into Hungary

  At our spa hotel in Komárom, we ran into Geoffrey and Leone, an older Australian couple we’d first encountered back in Hainburg on the Austrian border. Geoffrey had white feathery hair, surprised-round eyes and a pencil moustache that made him look like something between a retired colonel and a snowy owl. Leone had the kind of sharp features that could have been chiselled from rock, and her hair was cropped close to her head. Her leathery, weather-beaten face was as tough and grooved as an elephant’s bottom, and she wore cheap jewellery – dangly earrings, heavy chains and thick bracelets the colour of Cheetos that seemed at odds with her skin-tight lycra.

  ‘I wear all the jewellery because I look quite masculine otherwise,’ she admitted.

  ‘I can tell you, when we’re in bed together, there’s no question she’s a girl,’ Geoffrey said, his eyes coming to life.

  Geoffrey and Leone were also touring cyclists and recommended returning to the north bank and Slovakia: ‘There’s a new path with a good surface.’

  But Jamie, remembering the quicksand gravel of the previous day, opted for the Hungarian south bank with its tarmac roads. They came with their own challenges, however – namely the Hungarian lorries that rolled and tipped past us like drunken killer whales just inches from our bicycles. With relief, we turned off Route 1 and onto the quieter 10. We were pleased to see a sign forbidding lorries, but our sense of well-being was soon destroyed as the heavy artics followed us with no regard for rules and regulations, crashing along the narrow pot-holed road while driving perilously close to our bicycles. When yet another lorry threatened to throw me into the ditch, I shook my fist at the driver, shouting angrily at him.

  ‘Move out! Do you want to kill us?’

  I took to holding my arm out to force the drivers out.

  ‘Not sure that’s a good idea,’ Jamie said drily. ‘They could take your arm off.’

  Still we cycled on, my knuckles white on the handlebars, lips tight and body tensing when the rumble of lorry approached from behind. The road tipped and rolled above the Danube flood plains, leading us from one settlement to the next. They had strange, unpronounceable names: Dunaalmás, Neszmély, Süttő, Lábatlan and Nyergesújfalu. And every village was shaped by the same low-lying buildings of crumbling render and rough rooftiles, mixed in with the smoothly plastered and custard paint of newer buildings. The streets reeked of diesel and dust, and of frying pork. I began to think of the engulfing gravel paths from the previous day with nostalgia. So it was a relief when we turned off onto the flat, rod-straight road that would lead us, no-nonsense-like, into the heart of Esztergom.

  Once again I relaxed and retreated into my inner world. Through my secondary school education, I had clung to my faith. It was what defined my life, my home, even my ‘social life’ of morning meetings, Sunday school, gospel and youth meetings – sometimes four in one day. If I abandoned my faith to rewrite the narrative of my belief systems, I would lose my identity. But my life was already stripped of certainties because I had seen there were alternative worlds out there.

  At the after-school Scripture Union of my secondary school, a pupil returned to the subject of hell: ‘So, what is it?’

  Our religious education teacher hesitated, then said, ‘It’s not so much about physical punishment or hell fire; it’s more about being separated from those you love forever.’

  By the time I reached adulthood I had a guilty secret: I was no longer a believer. And with that came the knowledge there was a gulf between me and my family that couldn’t be bridged. I didn’t need to die to feel the pain of separation; I had chosen it in life. I longed to be open and honest with my parents and siblings, but I could only imagine the disappointment in my father’s face and the sad shake of his head. I couldn’t bear the idea of being judged and condemned, being called the black sheep of the family. Neither could I bear the idea of hurting my family or causing them pain. So I held on to my secret through the long decades, knowing I was fooling no one.

  Being in the closet was damaging to my mental health. I wished that my family could accept my own beliefs but that wasn’t possible because their faith wasn’t pragmatic, it was absolute. There was no diverging from a faith they held so deeply and was the very fabric of their lives. There was no way out of that separation since I couldn’t lie to myself or compromise on intellectual rationality. It was a problem without a solution. And at times it felt like it was killing me.

  The city of Esztergom pulled me out of the past and back to the present. We found ourselves in another baroque town – a Hungarian version of the immaculate Austrian towns, but with crumbling and chipped buildings like old china.

  Before the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, the Romans had come to this city, and before that the Celts. It’s a place oozing history from every crack. For hundreds and thousands of years it attracted the great and the good and everyone else in between. Hungary’s first king, St Stephen, was born in Esztergom and it remained the royal seat for over two centuries in the Middle Ages. It was also the seat of the Hungarian Catholic church for more than a thousand years.

  As we climbed the hill in search of a place to stay for the night, the basilica filled the skyline on Castle Hill, flanked by the city walls, while the stately buildings of the bishops gathered at the cathedral’s feet on the river’s banks. It was a stunning location. We found a room beneath the cupola of the great church. I flung open the little window and leaned out to gaze across the red roofs of the city’s Víziváros neighbourhood as the church bells rang out their single solemn note.

  As we headed down the stairs, we found Geoffrey and Leone in the courtyard – yet another accidental meeting with the pair. They were revelling in their day’s cycle and the excellent stretch of new cycle path on the Slovakian side of the river. Jamie had made the wrong decision. Still, his choice had been good practice for the road sections ahead of us.

  I asked Leone for advice on dealing with the murderous lorry drivers.

  ‘When you hear them approaching, move right out. Once you’ve forced their line onto the middle of the road, they can’t easily alter it, then you can move back in, creating a comfortable gap between yourself and the lorry.’

  It was sound advice from an experienced cyclist – and would work well for the busy road sections ahead.

  As the sun dropped, Jamie and I wandered the streets of Esztergom and observed the ordinary life taking place among the historic buildings. Children screamed through playparks, while parents huddled together in gossip. Youths smoked and horseplayed by the canal and on the slipway below the wrought-iron bridge spanning the Danube, their laughter reverberating in the evening air.

  Just two more nights and my own fractured family would come together again in Budapest. I missed my red-haired Patrick and his fiery passion. I missed Tom. And as I watched families with prams saunter through the tree-lined boulevard, my stomach flipped like a teenager in anticipation of our reunion.

  *

  The cycle from Esztergom to Szentendre is a skip and a hop – from left bank to right and back again, with another hop across a sideways arm of the Danube just north of the picturesque town.r />
  In Slovakia and Hungary, we’d not seen a single touring cyclist apart from Leone and Geoffrey. But that changed when we reached the ferry crossing to Szob on the north bank. The floating platform, pulled along by a little tugboat, was swarming with tourers and their bicycles. Leone and Geoffrey were there, and another Australian couple riding a tandem recumbent, a softer Australian version of the brash Leone and Geoffrey.

  We crossed the river again at Vác. Geoffrey had shown Jamie an alternative route to the busy main road leading into Szentendre that meant taking a little ferry crossing the Szentendre Danube, an arm of the Danube that diverged for twenty miles from the main river. When we reached the ferry slipway, we could see the boat sitting on the far side of the river. We waited. After an hour, it made its way across the water to us. At last, we would be on our way. But the boatman climbed out of the ferry, holding up four fingers to indicate we’d have to wait another hour – until 4pm – before he’d be crossing to the far side again. It was infuriating.

  ‘Right,’ said Jamie. ‘Let’s go. It’s faster to cycle round.’

  We raced along the top of the dyke, back up to the bridge at Káposztásmegyer and down the road to Szentendre. When we reached the ferry crossing point, the boat was still moored on the opposite bank. We laughed. Two wrong decisions in two consecutive days – based on information from the Australians. But what did it matter? We were in no hurry.

  We reached Szentendre campsite in the late afternoon, ignoring the hardened surface of the campground in favour of a rickety room with dodgy mattresses, worn bedclothes and its mass grave of dead flies. We spent the evening eating in the campsite restaurant with a demented keyboard player who caused Jamie and me to giggle into our stew.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep: my family, which I had rent in two, was to be reunited in the morning in the handsome city of Budapest.