A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  After our drink, we headed down to the Danube with Bager Lake behind it, a place where locals went to swim, boat, fish, barbecue and camp – or just hang out.

  ‘There are no hotels here. It’s not developed, but maybe that’s a good thing,’ Doc mused as we walked along the river path. Across the Danube, the red roofs of Ilok shone in the evening sun, the light playing on the Danube below it. It was a beautiful place.

  Doc pointed over to Croatia. ‘The war’s over. We’ve moved on. I’ve nothing against the Croats. We cross over to Ilok all the time. No point dwelling on the past.’

  There was a youthful arrogance to his remarks. I thought of our guesthouse owner back in Vukovar, still angry and hurting from the war. For Doc, dismissal was easy: he hadn’t experienced the ethnic cleansing across the border. He’d not seen the children and women lined up to be shot at random. He’d not witnessed the shovelling of Croat bodies into mass graves. He didn’t have a daily reminder of the war in the bullet-riddled houses, damaged gables and broken roofs. Here, a few miles away in Serbia, there was no sign of any past conflict. His crass dismissal would have offended many Croats, and yet he was right: the countries of the former Yugoslavia had to put the past behind them and move forward. It was just that forgiveness isn’t always easy. I knew that on a personal level.

  My parents had fumed at the Peace Agreement in Northern Ireland. Not at the idea of peace, for they were tired of the years of destruction like everyone else, but angry that terrorists were being released from prison as a trade-off in the negotiations.

  ‘How can they?’ they raged. ‘These prisoners are murderers!’

  ‘I know it’s a bitter pill to swallow,’ I agreed. ‘But it’s the only way we can move on from the Troubles and stop the killings.’

  My father bristled at my argument. Northern Irish Unionism had been built on principle – or intransigence – and compromise didn’t sit easily with its followers. No surrender was Paisley’s rallying war cry, but even he came to realise that war without end was destroying his much-loved province.

  Unionism had always been about supremacy – not unlike the politics of South Africa. The minority group were a threat to be suppressed. If you believed that Catholics and Nationalists were inferior, the task was easier. The narrative of staunch Unionists was always the same: Catholics were lazy and untrustworthy – and murderers – even though they patently weren’t. It was the age-old racist (or sectarian) argument: pin the deeds of terrorists on an entire religious or cultural group. Getting beyond that point of view was not easy. I, of course, as a Protestant did not hear the bigotry expressed on the other side.

  Sashka, though young, had also been affected by the war. As a small child, she had lived on the Istrian Peninsula on the Mediterranean – an idyllic life by the sea. She had Croatian friends, but with the uncertainty of war, her father had pulled them from their Istrian home and taken them to the Serbian stronghold of Vojvodina.

  Now, many former Yugoslavs look back on the Republic with nostalgia, in the same way the East Germans regard the old GDR with affection. Its authoritarian leadership had held its people together. With its collapse, the region had fallen into civil war.

  ‘Under Tito, the country was strong,’ one Bosnian pointed out to me. ‘Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Albanians: we all lived side-by-side in harmony. Catholic, Orthodox or Muslim – no one cared – for everyone had a job and security.’

  ‘My neighbours and friends were Muslim and Orthodox,’ another Croat told me. ‘We were all getting along fine. It was the politicians and generals who divided us.’

  *

  In the morning, we lingered over breakfast with Sashka and her family as Novi Sad, our goal for the day, was a short twenty-five miles away, along Route 12. When we finally cycled out of town, we found the Novi Sad road busy with lorries. Their drivers had even less regard for cyclists than the Hungarian lorry drivers back on the road to Esztergom. I was relieved when Jamie swung right down a tree-lined road at Čelarevo, happy to be under the shade of the poplars in the rising heat of the morning, and to escape the dust and noise of traffic. We slipped onto the dyke, the path stony and uneven beneath the tyres. I gripped the handlebars, telling myself it was better than facing death-by-lorry on the smooth tarmac of the trunk road.

  Here on the riverside, there was little life but for the buzz of insects. The air was humid already. We cycled past a couple of the Danube charda fish restaurants the tourist information assistant had recommended. Sashka had told me how the charda in Baĉka Palanka had prepared the biggest fish stew ever in an outsized vat with 1,700kg of fish in an attempt to enter the Guinness Book of Records in 2001. I was sorry not to have experienced the Serbian charda, but Jamie hated fish.

  By mid-afternoon, we’d reached Novi Sad and found the bungalow apartment we’d booked for the night. With two bedrooms, a kitchen, a terrace and the garden, it wasn’t a bad place to be holed up, and even less so when the landlord’s wife came home from work, chattering in English while pouring freshly picked raspberries into our hands.

  In the morning, we pondered our options. Our Danube bike guide warned against cycling to Belgrade: Due to the heavy traffic on the exit from Novi Sad and the entry into Belgrade, we suggest taking the train for this last section. Although it is not permitted to take bicycles on the trains, experience suggests that it is possible. I remembered the thundering lorries on the edge of Bačka Palanka. If the road was dangerous between the two towns, what would it be like cycling into the capital? We decided to risk the train, despite the conflicting information about taking bikes. I didn’t like the idea of not cycling part of our route: it seemed a cop-out, but the thought of the monstrous lorries bearing down on us sealed the decision. We headed for the railway station.

  *

  8. From Belgrade to Bela Crkva

  It was just after eight in the morning when we wheeled the bicycles out of the bungalow’s garden. It was the first of July. We had been on the road two months exactly and this was our eighth country, not including our coffee break in France. After a few false starts on the Upper Rhine and on the Inn river, summer had finally settled in with a hot, breathy bluster. The heat was intense in the cities, but we were able to cheat the worst of Serbia’s fierce summer temperatures on our bikes with the cooling breezes we created.

  We pedalled slowly to the city centre. There was no hurry, I imagined. Surely there would be plenty of trains travelling between the two cities, just over fifty miles apart. After weaving through the morning commuters, we pushed our bikes into the cavernous space of the station, our eyes adjusting to the darkness. There were four or five ticket windows in one corner.

  I approached one, only to be dismissed ‘No English. My colleague speak English.’

  I moved into the queue for the next counter and waited.

  ‘No English.’

  And from the next, another stony face: ‘No English.’

  I was surprised after the easy fluency of Sashka, Doc and their friends. You’d think there would be at least one English-speaker in a major railway station. But no. In the end, I grabbed a student and begged her to translate for us. We successfully bought our tickets, only to discover the next train didn’t leave until late morning. With hours to fill before our train departure, we found a terrace café on the boulevard and settled down for the long wait.

  The next obstacle was getting the bicycles onto the platform. There was a steep flight of stairs and no lift, and when the train arrived we had to manhandle the bikes into the carriage high above the platform. Another student came to our aid, helping us lift the bikes to the back of the carriage, where we stashed them between seats.

  Now I knew what the guidebook meant when it said it was ‘possible’ to take bikes on trains.

  When I saw the train attendant approaching, I fretted he would tell us we couldn’t take our bikes, not least because they were blocking four passenger seats. But the attendant nodded nonchalantly and produced a ticket with a picture of a la
rge piece of post-war styled luggage, what looked like an oversized woven basket and a heavy sit-up-and beg bicycle exactly like my own. He drew a line through the suitcase and basket and circled the bicycle, then scribbled down the additional cost of the bikes, the equivalent of a few pennies in dinar. So officially it was possible to travel with bikes by train. Practically, it was less than easy.

  I settled down on the sticky seat, breathing in stale air laced with the smell of urine and sugary drinks. The train lurched forward then crept out of the station like an injured beast, rolling from side to side. It groaned as it pushed to pick up speed.

  The journey felt interminable, and it was a relief when the train’s brakes squealed to a halt in Belgrade station. There was no one to help us with the bicycles this time. I lifted mine over the seats and wheeled it to the door, easing it down to the platform a couple of feet below me, but the weight of my bike, combined with gravity, dragged me down with it. A railway official watched on as I tumbled to the track below, the bicycle landing on top of me before he sauntered over to have a closer look. As I picked myself up off the track, knees grazed, I wondered if it would not have been easier to have cycled to Belgrade after all.

  *

  Belgrade revealed itself as a heaving, cosmopolitan city, its station surrounded by peeling baroque buildings, brutalist high-rises from the Communist era and slick twenty-first-century offices of glass.

  We headed up the hill into an up-and-coming bohemian quarter, liberally sprinkled with trendy coffee bars, delicatessens and street cafés. Our B&B was hidden down one of the narrow side streets that criss-crossed this leafy part of the city, set in amongst elegant buildings of decorative arched wrought-iron gates and sculpted masonry. We pushed the gate open to the hotel and restaurant and found ourselves in a cobbled courtyard shaded with fruit trees. There was the hum of quiet voices and clink of glass and cutlery as Belgradians tucked into Parmesan and rocket salads and sipped on cocktails. The restaurant garden was an oasis of calm away from the city noise. Upstairs, the attic rooms had a New England vibe, while the reception rooms downstairs had a retro, vintage look. I flung myself on to the bed, happy we had found this chic little boutique hotel for a handful of euros; happy that we had a day off to explore the city – our first rest day since Budapest.

  We spent the next day walking the parks and the historic quarter, finding our feet again. It was as if we’d been at sea on our bicycles, and it took a while to adjust to our land legs, the pounding of our feet on pavement feeling strangely heavy.

  Our bike book tempted us again with the train out of Belgrade, warning of heavy city traffic. But after our experience of the Novi Sad train, I preferred to battle the roads. Jamie plotted a route through back streets until we were forced onto the main artery that led to Pančevački Most – the bridge that would take us out of the city and straight onto quiet dykes on the north bank of the Danube.

  The last section of city was surprisingly short. We rode the pavements when they were not busy with pedestrians and delivery vans, and soon came to a large roundabout that swept us onto the dual carriageway and the treacherous bridge. I gritted my teeth and went for it, feeling the suck of air from the lorries that thundered through. On the other side of the bridge, we left the road almost immediately and followed the dirt and gravel path alongside the river – glad that the weather was dry enough to make it passable.

  There was little in the way of purpose-made cycle paths on the Serbian section of the Danube Route 6. We had to make do with rough dyke paths, broken asphalt roads and the occasional town cycle path that was often cracked and uneven. In Pančevo the front wheel of my bike almost lunged into a large, uncovered manhole. The open manholes would be a frequent hazard in Serbia. Occasionally someone would have the foresight to stick a tall branch into the hole as a way of warning. We were grateful.

  What the route through Serbia lacked in terms of cycle paths was made up for by its signage, which offered words of wisdom and encouragement. It was as if the authorities had come together and said: Well, we can’t afford to build cycle paths, but hell, we’ll put all our money into the best signage the entire length of the Danube. The Austrians may have made state-of-the-art mini-roads for bicycles across their country, but we are going to create poetry with our signs. And so they did.

  The signs were fascinating, and, at the same time, frustrating: I wanted to stop at each and every one to read the words of inspiration, but our journey would have been one of stop-starts the width of the country, for the Serbs had not only produced wonderful signs but placed them at every significant junction.

  I’d encountered the first sign as we’d crossed over the border from Croatia, consoling those leaving Serbia with the words: So you are about to leave Serbia. Don’t cry because it is over – smile because it happened. Now, just across the bridge on the outskirts of Belgrade, the sign gifted me Goethe: We always have enough time, if we use it the right way. A few miles on, advice was offered from Walter Bagehot, the British businessman and essayist: The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot.

  I smiled at Goethe and saluted Bagehot. I’d taken ownership of my time, ignoring the puzzled frowns when I’d shared my plans – shrugging off the unspoken words that hung in the air, the sharp intakes of breath and the polite smiles that said, What a strange thing to want to do.

  Just outside of Kovin, the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry asked: How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

  It was Saint-Exupéry’s question that stayed with me as our bikes trundled downstream with the flowing Danube: How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? I was fifty-three years of age and still working out my place in the world: retracing the route back to the beginning; unfolding the sections of the map to work out where to go next. I was figuring out the journey from my sheltered Brethren childhood in the sixties and seventies to the vast unchartered space of adulthood.

  My father was still here with me on this journey, but his voice, heard in the songbirds, was growing weaker, just as the cuckoo was fading out with the Serbian summer. His image was blurry, far away on my northern island – an old man bent over his walking frame in the care home, his hands covered in liver spots, looking slightly ridiculous in his hoody and joggers like a geriatric delinquent. This was my father who had dressed in a suit and tie for the beach, and carried a large Bible on the dashboard of his car.

  Sometimes I felt that I was travelling away from him, in order to put distance between us. But, at other times, I was sure I was travelling towards him – towards some kind of absolution, towards some kind of acceptance of the past. There was plenty of time to think on the long days on the bike. And yet, and yet, there was a still that hardening of heart and that stubborn set of the jaw that I’d loathed in my father. How much of my father did I carry within me? The burden weighed me down the length of the Rhine and now on the Danube. And I realised the absurdity of the repeated history: I could not forgive my father any more than he was able to ask my mother for forgiveness that night so very long ago in our kitchen. And knowing, regardless of what had happened, that without forgiveness there would be no peace. I had held on to my own bitterness, my own intransience, which had irretrievably damaged my relationship with my father. Was he even aware of my coldness towards him in the dulled, shadowy lands of his depression? It was difficult to know.

  But I was still on the journey and there was some way to go; still studying that map; still not sure who I was and what I could be: the drops of water not yet seen as a river.

  I would carry on.

  9. Tarzan on the Serbian Border

  ‘Welcome, welcome, welcome,’ the bear of a bartender said, grabbing my panniers with a yank. I watched with dismay as one of the straps partially gave.

  ‘I like Tarzan – not speak much English. Welcome in Bela Crkva. Please! Come!’

  Our last night in Serbia would be spent in this ramshackle border town next to a series
of flooded gravel pits. The artificial lakes had gleamed a summer blue as we’d cycled towards the town earlier that afternoon and we’d been unable to resist stopping at one of the lakeside cafés for a much-needed drink.

  ‘God’s own country,’ the waiter said. ‘There’s nowhere more beautiful on this Earth.’

  But the crumbling town centre and the impatient horn blasts from a blocked-in delivery van suggested otherwise. And now, as Tarzan flung open the door to a dusty attic room, I could smell stale cigarettes and mildew. Jamie and I picked at the balls of dust from the bed under the skylight, but on inspecting the bedsheets more closely, decided they were clean. The place would do.

  Having settled in, there was an urgent thud on the door. It was Tarzan again.

  ‘Please. Your passports. Give here. I bring police. You need stamp. You need paper from leaving town.’

  I handed over our passports, wondering if we would see them again.

  Back in Bačka Palanka the police had said we needed a stamp for every town we stayed in. Sashka had consulted a lawyer friend, who told her we didn’t need a police report from anywhere we were staying in for less than twenty-four hours. Our landlady in Novi Sad told us the same as she offered us raspberries from her garden. I still wondered about the record book the police said we must buy. Had it just been a money-making scam? Now Tarzan was telling us something different. The conflicting advice was confusing.

  I was relieved when Tarzan returned with our passports along with the required papers to leave the country. We could relax. Jamie and I bought dinner at the bar, leaving just enough for a coffee in the morning: we didn’t want to fill our panniers with unwanted change.

  Returning to the attic room, we settled down for the night, knowing we needed to rise early to tackle the hill that led to the border with Romania before the heat of the day. But just as I closed my eyes, a band struck up on the bar terrace below. At first, there was just the tortured warble of a single voice. Then the accordion player joined in with his own jabbing cascading runs that clashed with the singer’s. The guitarist and mandolin players leapt in with their own manic meandering tunes – adding to the menagerie of sounds, now undercut by the throb of the double bass.