A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  ‘Klezmer,’ Jamie said with a grin, referring to the traditional Jewish music of Eastern Europe.

  My sons were talented musicians: Jamie had learned violin, while Patrick had taken up the cello. They were fortunate to have been part of one of the best youth orchestras in the UK. By the time the boys had left school, Patrick had taught himself double bass for the school folk group and Jamie was running scales through the songs, confident enough to play against the main tune of the piece. They’d idly taught themselves the basics of other instruments too: guitar, ukulele and keyboard – and the piano I’d had shipped to England from my parent’s house.

  Growing up in the Brethren, only sacred songs were heard in my home to begin with – usually my father singing with a forced but tuneful voice. He whistled hymns, too, that cheerfully vibrated around our house. It was the sound of comfort – as much as the smell of my mother’s soda-bread charring on the griddle. My father bought a bulky record cabinet and a handful of 78s – again, mostly hymns, but one record intrigued me: a mournful voice singing Don’t Sell Daddy Any More Whiskey. It was the only secular record I could remember in my father’s collection.

  My mother would sit at the piano – the one that she would later ship to me – playing badly and singing out of tune. It was painful to listen to and yet it was good to see my mother doing something that didn’t involve cooking or cleaning and caring for her children. Although the Brethren assembly hall, with its solemn a cappella singing, rarely permitted instruments, my mother felt it important that my father paid for all his daughters (not sons) to learn piano. Perhaps it was something she felt young women should do, like the women in a Jane Austen novel, to entertain guests and visiting preachers. Later, as my older siblings reached adulthood, more secular music entered our house, introducing me to pop music that made my blood pulse with excitement: The Beach Boys and The Beatles. My parents disapproved of the new music. ‘Like cats wailing,’ my father said disparagingly.

  I ran downstairs behind Jamie to see the terrace outside the bar filled with locals, cursing myself for spending all our dinar. I would have loved to sit on the terrace, wrapped in the warm velvet of the night sky while listening to this wild music, with a glass of wine in my hand. Instead I lurked in the shadows as a local woman shouted to the band in a voice that sounded aggressive, not sure if she was hurling abuse or adoration. It appeared to be the latter as she thumped the arm of the man at her side, who threw a dinar note on top of the accordion. As the tune progressed, the woman shouted louder and the music became more demented. The instruments clashed in full battle mode – the runs of voice, guitar, mandolin and accordion weaving through each other furiously.

  It was breathless and awful and brilliant.

  That evening, the Klezmer music unleashed something in me – despite the lack of wine. Jamie and I talked long into the night, laughing hysterically at our journey along the rivers. ‘Do you remember …?’ And we’d set off into another round of giggles. Everything about our cycle trip was inexplicably, belly-achingly funny: Asher and his Noah’s Ark, The German in his underpants, Iris and Brian’s magical Mary Poppins pannier, our torturous coffin tents, Sabine with her cartoon sound effects, the crazy tree-wrapping Bobo, and Tarzan in the bar behind us. But in truth, our hysterical laughter was less to do with the humour of our encounters and more to do with the sheer joy of the journey and the frenzied Klezmer music playing outside the window. Finally, the music died away in the darkness, and our laughter with it, and we fell to sleep with aching mouths and sides.

  In the morning, I felt stone-cold sober. Despite our newly acquired paperwork, I worried the border officials would refuse us entry into Romania, turning us back. At customs I nervously handed over our passports with their single stamps from Bela Crkva. The border official took the papers with a curt nod and stared at them for an inconceivably long time – then waved us through. We wheeled the bikes over the line that divided the two countries. I glanced back one last time at Serbia and thought, I am not crying because it’s over, but smiling because it happened.

  ROMANIA AND BULGARIA

  1. Into Romania

  Was this the last time I heard my father’s voice in the call of the birds with any clarity? I am not sure. Somewhere across Europe the symphony of birdsong, with all its tempos and moods – largo, lento, adagio, andante, moderato, allegro, vivace and presto, its staccato and sustained notes, sweet and rasping, sorrowful and joyous – died away to a single voice. At times, falling into silence.

  I think I last heard the cuckoo on the hill out of Bela Crkva – its voice just discernible in the hum of summer air, carried towards me on the surf of the breeze before being snatched away again. I strained my ears to hear its gentle two-note through the rumble of tyre on asphalt. Towards the crest of the hill, the sound of the cuckoo was overtaken by that of the skylark, the song and bird dipping and rising with the undulating meadows of wheat, sunflower and corn. It too faded out, leaving only the sound of my rasping lungs pulling at the air as I struggled up the long hill.

  Across the border, we had a decision to make: we could head due south over the Banat Mountains to Pojejena on the Danube, or we could backtrack along the border on the Romanian side, cycling parallel to the road we’d climbed out of Bela Crkva, before heading south to the river and then east again along the Danube. The valley route was more than double the mountain route, but with the slow ascent out of Bela Crkva fresh in our memories, the thought of the mountain climb held little appeal. We chose the flatter route.

  At first, the road running along the Nera River valley was flat and pleasantly bucolic. A group of Romanians were camped out on the banks of the river below us, some splashing in the Nera, others sunbathing on its grassy verge. But soon, the patched tarmac began to rise and fall with the contours of the land. We passed through empty villages, each one looking very much like the last with cracked render and exposed brick. Paint was peeling off garage doors and gates, and fences were flaying with rust. Stray dogs lay in the shadows of trees.

  Between Párneaura and Câmpia, Jamie pointed to Bela Crkva, just a few miles to the north of us, on the other side of the border. We’d spent a good part of the morning heading east out of Bela Crkva before turning 180° to run parallel to the Serbian road in the opposite direction. I wondered about the wisdom of our decision.

  At Socol the road made a wide sweep to the south where it hit the Danube. We stopped our bikes and took in the bulge of the river that opened out a pale blue to the south before continuing its journey east. It was a glorious view. Various signs on a wide, grassy bank at the head of the swollen Danube extolled the virtues of the river and region. It would probably have been covered in picnic tables or a café if it had been in Germany or Austria. Not here though – there was no one except a solitary shepherd on the side of the road, sheltering beneath the sagging thatch of a wattle and daub hut that leaned into the hillside.

  Ahead, the road followed the curves of the river, now running parallel to the Neva valley north of us, forming the last loop of our meandering, backward ‘S’. By and by, we came to Pojejena, the village that lay at the foot of the mountain road that cut straight south from the border. It was late morning and we’d lost a great deal of time with our snaking route. We needed to push on downstream towards Moldova Veche.

  I’d seen on the map the spread of villages along the Danube – Baziaș, Divici, Belobreșca, Șușca and Măcești – and imagined there would be plenty of opportunity to stop at shoreline cafés. But there were only fishermen with their folding tables and picnic chairs and lines of rods surrounded by litter, and the odd family emerging from modest single-storied houses to cross the road in swimming costumes and flip-flops. At last in Moldova Veche we found a cafe blasting out dance music with a brashness and volume that we would soon learn was typical of Romania. The idyll of the Nera valley seemed far away. We negotiated the unmade roads and begging Roma children at the south end of the village and peddled on to Coronini, our goal for the day.<
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  *

  As we cycled on through the country, I was taken by surprise: no one had prepared us for the beauty of the Romanian Danube. On the Rhine, we had been told of the delights of the German Danube awaiting us, more spectacular than the Mittelrhein. On the German Danube, we were told the Austrian section of the river was even more beautiful. In Austria, Sabine’s eyes had shone with passion as she’d spoken about Slovakia’s Bratislava and Hungary’s Budapest. But no one mentioned Romania – including its Serbian neighbours. Even the Romanians seemed to have turned their backs on the beauty of their own stretch of Danube (a third of the entire river’s length), preferring the concrete-covered Black Sea and the mountains of Transylvania.

  And so we pedalled on along the near-empty Danube byway with little in the way of settlement or traffic, even though the road was surely one of Europe’s most beautiful. Back in the day, someone must have seen something of the river’s potential: picnic tables and benches, some with thatched shades, had been placed along the banks of the river. But they were now lying rotten with neglect, the ground around them scattered with rubbish and faeces.

  Beyond the laybys with their rubbish-strewn, rank-smelling picnic areas, the hills of Serbia on the opposite bank folded and enfolded into themselves in shades of grey-blue and green, like a Japanese watercolour, fading away to a block of cloudless sky. Occasionally, the river spread itself out into glassy bays, the sweep of watery curve smudging the steep-sided woodlands in its reflection. At other times, the Danube squeezed through the karst rock of the Carpathian Mountains, the road clinging so close to the water’s edge, it felt as if we were sailing the river.

  While the road surface had been improved in sections, and the eroding rockfaces stabilised, in other places it became increasingly churned up. Where rockfall had blocked one side of the road, the authorities simply left it, placing barriers and diversion signs around the obstruction. I prayed we wouldn’t find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time: I didn’t want to join the copious roadkill. Our scrap of metal and bike helmets gave us little protection. On the other hand, the variable road conditions meant we almost had the Romanian Danube to ourselves.

  At Cozia, we passed by the blackened shell of a factory, one of Ceauşescu’s ghosts. Weeds and trees were growing out of the cracked concrete, empty windows and broken rooftop. It was a strange sight in this isolated section of the Danube, where even villages had become an infrequent sight. It seemed a fitting image for Ceauşescu’s utopian dream turned dystopian – gone, yet ever present, like a gaping wound that wouldn’t heal.

  In the fjord-like bay at Dubova we rented a wooden cabin. It was late afternoon and a group of noisy youths were horseplaying in the swimming pool of the holiday home over the fence, their dance music pounding the air and bouncing off the bay. Ceauşescu would have turned in his grave at their hedonism. It was deafening. As the manager showed us the cabin, I pointed to the group and held my hands over my ears. The woman, speaking little English, said, ‘It okay. Not stop eleven, police come.’

  But the woman was long gone by eleven and the music continued until daylight. I didn’t sleep.

  At dawn, we wheeled our bikes to the gate. It was locked. I was furious: furious with lack of sleep; furious that we had been imprisoned in this sleep-deprivation torture chamber, somewhat ironically in the quiet beauty of this Danube bay; but most of all, furious at the woman’s lies. Then, I realised, if we wheeled the bikes around the back, the rough ground stretched to the road without fence or gate. As we took off down the road, the green of the bay glinted in the early morning light. It was hard to remain foul-tempered when cradled by hill and cliff and water, and embalmed by the soft light of the new day.

  Beyond the bay, the Danube narrowed again, forcing its path through the Carpathian cliffs. It felt as though I could reach out and touch the limestone on the opposite bank in Serbia, the rock taking on a pinkish hue with the rising sun. I could see the road on the other side also clung to the side of the Danube but dropped and fell with the contours of the hillside before plunging into countless tunnels. Our side remained level at the water’s edge: I was glad we had chosen to ride on the Romanian bank and through the Iron Gates Natural Park.

  When we turned a corner to see an onion-domed church teetering on the water’s edge, its white walls glowing in the sunlight, the sleepless night was forgotten. Just a little further on, we crossed a bridge where a Carpathian spring seeped into the Danube, to find a rock ogre with bulging squirrel-cheeks and a stock of electrified hair standing 140 feet high over the inlet. This was Decebalus, the last king of Dacia (though more comical than regal in appearance) who had fought off two Roman emperors to protect his country’s independence – the equivalent of modern-day Romania. It had taken a decade, from 1994 to 2004, for a Romanian industrialist to realise his larger-than-life vision of Decebalus Rex – from designing the rock sculpture, to blasting the rock and carving out the detail. However odd the king’s appearance, you couldn’t fail to be impressed with his magnitude on the hillside.

  Now, in the early morning with the roadside stalls shuttered and the laybys empty, we had Decebalus to ourselves and he looked across the inlet at us with pupil-less stony eyes, as if rolling them heavenward. His tight-lipped grimace seemed to say, Why have they turned me into a pillar of stone in this backwater of the Danube?

  As we rode on, the road remained quiet. The only burst of activity was at a roadside fountain, where men and boys filled up plastic containers of mountain water – moving aside to allow us foreigners to jump the queue. I drank the ice-cold water with appreciation. Here on the Romanian Danube, it was the simplest of pleasures that made me grateful.

  At Eșelnița, we made the long hard climb over the pass to Orșova, enjoying the equally long freewheel down into town, where we bought some supplies and ice cream as a reward for making it over the lip of the Carpathians. Ahead of us was a short, sharp cycle through heavy traffic to Drobeta-Turnu Severin, but we were on the home run with a rest day ahead. We’d be in Drobeta by early afternoon. We were feeling good as we pushed off out of town when we heard a sound we’d not heard since Vukovar in Croatia: a quiet ping.

  2. Spokes and Spirits

  If a spoke had to break, this was the place. Having cycled through the Iron Gates Natural Park with few villages or hamlets, never mind bicycle workshops, we had been fortunate: this large town would surely have a bike shop. I asked one man, then another, for help. They offered us Italian and French, but no English. On my third attempt I found a man who spoke German and offered to show us a place.

  And he turned his bicycle around and led us back up the hill from where we’d come. He stopped and pointed to a ramshackle building where deep-cut steps led into a long corridor lined with stalls and clothes that disappeared into the darkness. It didn’t seem very promising.

  Jamie hauled his bicycle up the steps, while I searched the indoor market for the elusive bicycle shop. There wasn’t one. No one spoke English or German, but eventually, after some wild gesticulation, a young girl led us through the stalls to a clothes shop. Just as I was beginning to despair, I noticed a stack of bicycle tyres in among the racks of jeans and T-shirts. Perhaps, just perhaps, the broken spoke could be fixed here.

  ‘Broken. Kaput,’ I said to the middle-aged shopkeeper, pointing to the spoke.

  ‘Da, da.’

  She didn’t look like a bike mechanic, with her coiffured hair and painted nails. At first she thought there was a problem with the tyre, but then she understood and went away and returned with pliers. She bent down …

  ‘No, please don’t cut the spoke,’ I pleaded. I didn’t like the way she was wielding the pliers. It looked like she might cut more than one spoke. And it certainly didn’t look as if she had either spokes or a tool to fix it.

  Jamie and I made our escape, wheeling our bikes down to the shore of the Danube, where we tried a hotel. But no one spoke English there either. I drew a rather pathetic picture of a bicycle wheel with
a broken spoke and it was finally established there was no repair shop in town. Jamie shrugged his shoulders and unclipped his back brake. He would have to cycle the last fifteen miles to Drobeta with just his front brake and hope for the best. It wasn’t a great option as we were about to face our most dangerous road of the journey so far.

  *

  Across the Danube promenade, we found ourselves swallowed up by the E70 – a dual carriageway thundering with lorries all the way to Drobeta-Turnu Severin. Our bike book had solemnly declared the road unsuitable for bicycles, then announced – without a trace of irony – that it wasn’t possible to take a train. There was nothing for it but to put our faith in the lorry drivers and hope they would spare us.

  The road into the city made the Esztergom trunk road in Hungary look like a quiet backwater. There was no hard shoulder here, and the articulated lorries passed by with inches to spare, almost sucking us under their wheels with the draw of air they created. Leone’s advice back in Hungary – to move out into the road and pull in when the lorries were parallel – was of little use: the two lanes were bumper-to-bumper with speeding traffic. Yet more frightening were the bridges that narrowed the road, forcing us even closer to the lorries. But the danger on the bridges paled into insignificance compared to the half dozen tunnels or so. We put on our reflective jackets and clipped on our cheap bike lights but were still barely visible in the tunnel. One lorry driver, not noticing my bike in the blackness of the tunnel, only became aware of my presence in the last minute as he bore down on me. The tunnel exploded with the sound of horn, almost causing me to fall off my bicycle.