A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  Our bike book had dropped any positive spin when it came to the Romanian plains, bluntly calling them ‘monotonous’ and reiterating its advice to jump on a train. I was glad now we’d paid no heed, as the richness of our encounters with the Romanian people more than made up for the lack of geographical diversity.

  Across the flatlands of the Danube valley each village seemed to have its preferred choice of greeting, and everyone everywhere called out and waved at us as we cycled through. The passengers of the ubiquitous horse and cart would sit bolt upright, their faces breaking into wide grins as we passed. Back in Hungary, the Syrian refugees were not being made so welcome. Prime Minister Orbán had started to erect the ‘wall’ Eszter had talked about, a razor-wire fence along the border with Serbia. I read my newsfeed with a saddened heart as we sailed through borders. Despite all the warnings regarding Eastern Europe, the further east we travelled the bigger the welcome. Here, almost every village had its own magazin, an old-fashioned grocery store with outside seating, serving coffee, beer and spirits. No hour was deemed too early for the male villagers to congregate at the store for a beer or a swig of homemade rakia straight from the hipflask. The men would try to engage with us as we sipped on our coffee, dredging up any word we might recognise – ‘Chelsea’, or once, to my surprise, ‘Margaret Thatcher’. Sitting with our hot drinks, we watched the village world wander in and out of our line of vision: scarved and aproned women carrying sacks of greens and youths balancing gas canisters on ancient bicycles.

  I saw these villages were poor in material wealth but rich in community life. The predominance of horse and cart, bicycle and walker meant that people stopped frequently to talk to each other, and I realised the car back home had broken down communities. In the UK, people lived behind walls and stepped straight from the front door to their vehicle – brick, stone and metal separating them from the outside world.

  During two sub-zero winters in the Peak District, the snow had lain so deep in my adopted town we had to abandon our cars for days on end. Suddenly the streets were filled with people lugging heavy bags of shopping along icy roads. I talked to more of my neighbours in those wintery weeks than I had the rest of the year. I thought of my mother, setting off to walk into our town with her cloth bags, my hand in hers. Returning home was a test of endurance for a small child, not much interested in tittle-tattle as my mother stopped to talk to neighbours and acquaintances. I hopped from foot to foot while the women stood deep in conversation. From town to home, she not only collected bundles of shopping tied up in string, but armfuls of gossip and neighbourly connection. My father’s grocery business was also a point of contact for country folk living in isolated country cottages and farmsteads: the delivered goods exchanged with cups of tea, garden produce and a lingering chat.

  Romania was a window into our loss.

  *

  On the edge of one of these villages I saw two cyclists far ahead of us. I peered into the heat haze, wondering if it were possible that they could be tourers, as we had not seen any long-distance cyclists since Serbia.

  ‘Jamie, I think they are touring cyclists!’ It was as if I’d spotted a rare and endangered species. ‘Yes! I think I see panniers!’

  Jamie smiled at my excitement.

  I quickened the crank of my pedals until I’d caught up with the couple ahead – an American called Tom and his Dutch girlfriend, Cindy. I cycled alongside the bear-like American for a while as he told me his story. Tom was one of the United States’ top climate-change scientists who’d gone into semi-retirement and had cycled across the world and criss-crossed North America in all seasons. He didn’t think anything of cycling in deep snow. Once he caused a major incident when he chained his expensive bike bag to a rack outside a New England airport – he had no room for it in his panniers and cycled away, oddly expecting to find it still there on his return. The airport authorities, fearing a terrorist incident, blew the bag up. When a lorry crushed him and his bicycle, causing multiple injuries that nearly killed him, Tom got back on his bike, relearning to ride a bicycle with debilitating injuries. On top of that he had Huntington’s disease.

  Cindy was also a fearless cyclist, who was conquering the world country by country with her bike. Now, she and Tom were doing a ‘soft’ trip across Europe – not too far from her parents who needed her support. She stopped frequently to photograph the street urchins who lined the road: small faces smeared with dirt; slight girls in thin summer dresses and flip-flops; boys in ragged shorts and ill-fitting T-shirts – all with cheeky grins and sun-darkened arms from outdoor living. One boy on a scrappy bicycle, several sizes too big for him, began to tailgate Jamie. Jamie raced away from the boy but he was no match for the Romanian child who slammed his front wheel into the back of Jamie’s bike. Jamie skidded to a halt: he’d had enough. But Tom raced off instead, glancing back at the boy in invitation. The two sped away until they were specks at the other end of the village.

  I thought of my bike book and its disparaging ‘monotonous’ and smiled: there was more to a bike trip than a landscape.

  The touring cyclists were important to me. It was not that I didn’t enjoy mingling with local people –they were a deeply enriching part of our journey – but it is natural also to search out like-minded people, our ‘own kind’. It is as if they give us validation of who we are.

  In Eastern Europe we were meeting people who had cycled around the world and looked on a trip along the Danube as a short hop across Europe. I realised that we were meeting a new breed of long-distance cyclist, and it made me feel somewhat inadequate. From Rotterdam to Budapest we’d primarily met leisure tourers, usually individuals who had taken a few weeks off from work to cycle the Rhine or a section of the Danube. The cyclists east of Budapest were hardcore. We crossed paths with a father and son from Newcastle who were packing in 100 to 150 miles a day across Europe. I felt like a dawdler in comparison. They paused to speak to us before speeding off on their bikes, still fifty miles or so in front of them even though it was late afternoon.

  One pair we met – a Londoner and his French companion – were cycling in the opposite direction to us. While Jamie and I had been pushed along by the eastbound Danube winds, these two were struggling west and north, and despite their extended cycle through far-flung countries such as India, they seemed, like us, to be struggling with the heat. As we did, they rose at dawn to catch the cool of the day, but unlike us, they set up camp by the banks of the river – when the sun was at its highest – to sleep away the heat of the day, setting out again in the coolness of early evening. They thought nothing of wild camping, and were living on around five euros a day.

  ‘What about the mosquitoes when you’re camping by the river?’ I asked.

  ‘Ha, I’m the world’s greatest mosquito killer,’ the Brit said, pulling a fly-basher from his pannier and manically thrashing the air.

  My fellow Brit seemed to have a cycling disease common to many long-distance bicyclists. Unable to settle in one place, he was already planning his next cycling trip before he’d even reached the threshold of his London home. It was difficult for me to imagine living out of panniers for years, but I understood why touring cyclists found it hard to stop: the freedom of the road, the open air, the soothing rhythm of turning wheels, the anticipation of something new every day.

  At the hotel-cum-hostel in Bechet, we’d spent the evening with an Englishman, Graham, and his German companion, Stefan. Jamie and I continued to bump into the Anglo-German duo: we found them in one of the villages, taking a large bag of ripened beef tomatoes from a man who’d emerged from his garden to offer his gift – because he had grown more than he could use, and no he didn’t want any money for them.

  We caught up with them again in Turnu Măgurele, where they were hunting down a place for the night like us. We had already tried the one Communist-era hotel in town, where a hatched-faced woman at the reception desk had refused to haggle. In fact, she’d looked decidedly unhappy at the mere suggestion. Fi
nally, she’d offered me a tiny reduction on the room price, but would drop no further. At that point I’d walked out, determined to find somewhere else – not knowing it was the only accommodation option in town. No wonder she’d smiled to herself as I left: she knew we’d be back.

  ‘No worries,’ said Stefan when I told him about the overpriced hotel. ‘I’ll bargain her down. You stay here – it’s better that way. I’ll deal with her.’

  He came out of the hotel with a large smile spread across his face. ‘I told her there were four of us and got us a great deal.’

  I didn’t have the heart to tell Stefan she’d made us exactly the same offer an hour earlier.

  That night the four of us dined in the empty hotel restaurant. Our voices echoed around the room, and Graham, angry when the hotel only offered expensive beers rather than the local brew as advertised on the menu, fumed with barely contained anger. The waiter brought Stefan, Jamie and I our dishes – leaving Graham still waiting long after we’d finished. No longer able to contain his fury, he’d gone to the kitchen to shout at the chef. It was an uncomfortable evening – far removed from the pleasant tale-swapping in the courtyard of the Bechet ho(s)tel the evening before – and I felt on edge by the violent undercurrent that filled the room, and the surly waiter who hovered nervously at our table.

  By the time Jamie and I approached Giurgiu, we’d had enough of the Communist-style hotels. We crossed the bridge into Bulgaria for just two nights, to escape the similar hotels of Romania, and booked ourselves into a small boutique hotel with a little courtyard that served good food. We were due another rest day.

  5. To the Black Sea

  After our sojourn into Bulgaria, we returned over the border to Romania. The character of the land changed again after Giurgiu as we climbed into the hills high above the Danube. The road was punctuated with villages and hamlets – Pietrele, Puleni, Prundu – the names and settlements interchangeable. Soon fields of crops, shrubland and sandy cliffs gave way to vineyards that striped the hillsides like an egg slicer. We were cycling the roof of Giurgiu County.

  I focused on climbing each rise in the heat, enjoying the fan of air as we freewheeled down the other side. Between the climbs on the long straight roads across the plateau, Jamie and I began to dream about our two weeks in Turkey after reaching Istanbul. There’d be sleep-ins and long leisurely breakfasts – and even longer lunches of olives, juicy tomatoes and freshly baked bread with Tom and Patrick and my sister, Maggie, and her husband. In the heat we dreamed of the clear, cool water of the Turkish Mediterranean. We would cycle nowhere.

  And now the end point was tangible. We sensed the Black Sea was within our reach: less than 180 miles away. I could almost smell the ozone of ocean in my nostrils, taste sea-salt on my tongue, feel the sea breeze on my skin.

  Just one month today and we will be welcoming you in Istanbul, my sister wrote. She had been following our route closely in her atlas. On the page with the Black Sea now, she added. Getting there! And my heart flip-flopped.

  The feeling of progress was heady as we ate the miles from Oltenița through the ribbon villages of Ulmeni, Spanţov and Chiselet. But as we reached the end of Mănăstirea village we heard a bang. Jamie’s bike did a sort of horse shudder, almost throwing him off. It lurched forward as the front wheel sank into the ground. This time it wasn’t a spoke, but a shredded tyre. We looked at the rubber – scarred and sliced as if Jamie had ridden over spiked metal. The tear was too deep for the slime to do its job. We would need a new tyre.

  Once again, I asked myself where we’d find a bike shop: we’d seen plenty of little grocery stores in the villages we’d just cycled through, but nothing resembling a bicycle store. We sat down on the steps that led down to Galatui reservoir and tried to work out our options.

  ‘We just cycled past a garage,’ said Jamie. ‘It had lots of car tyres out the front. Maybe they have bicycle tyres as well.’ He took the wheel off his bike and we headed back to the garage. The mechanic shook his head when I asked him if he had any bike tyres. But he told me in basic English where I could find one.

  ‘Hurry – I shut two. I go home and eat.’

  While Jamie stayed at the garage, I cycled around the village, the old tyre slung over my shoulder, trying to find the elusive shop selling tyres. At last, I found it, but the tyres were all too small for his wheel.

  ‘There is another place,’ the shopkeeper said, and he gave me instructions on how to get there.

  Frantically, I cycled around the village again in search of the second store, all too aware that 2pm was fast approaching. In the end, a youth cycled to the shop with me. I was in luck: the shopkeeper had a tyre big enough for Jamie’s large bike frame.

  A new tyre on the bicycle – albeit a road tyre that was narrower than the original hybrid one – we headed for the reservoir again. The heat of the day had built up to an oppressive soupy thickness of air. Down in the dip of the dam head, I could see a Roma woman sheltering from the glare of the sun under a piece of faded canvas, held aloft by four sticks. She lay on a mattress, surrounded by her possessions – pots and pans, a gas cylinder and a pile of clothing – while a couple of goats nibbled on yellowed grass behind the tent.

  That evening, we holed up in our last Romanian Communistera concrete tower. In the morning, we would cross the river by ferry, leaving the Danube behind for good to cut across the hills to Constanța – and the Black Sea.

  *

  At the ferry terminal we fell into conversation with two local men. I chatted enthusiastically about the friendliness of the people in Romania, the strength of the communities. But the men were more critical.

  ‘We have real problems with alcohol here. A lot of men start drinking from early morning.’

  I couldn’t argue with that; Jamie and I had seen it for ourselves in magazin after magazin. Unemployment was a problem. We had cycled through enough towns with streets scarred by Ceauşescu’s industrial ruins, the blackened factories quietly returning to nature. Stillgelegt is the German word – disused, closed down. There is something of eerie abandonment captured in the German that’s not expressed in English – a sense of silence and stillness, even ghostliness.

  In contrast, the village communities we had ridden through were vibrant, the streets filled with playing children and gossiping neighbours: women exchanging vegetables over garden walls; old men huddled in groups outside a shop; a horse and cart driver halting to speak to a friend on the roadside; cyclists stopping to shout across the road at each other. And almost every house had a bench outside the garden fence in the main street, where the owners would sit in the coolness of the evening, catching up with passing neighbours.

  On the other side of the Danube, our tyres rumbled over cobbled-stoned streets as we climbed out of the valley, the river now on our left. The land stretched out in waves of wheat, orchard and vine to a powder-blue sky. We had a hawk’s view of the silver snake Danube – the flash of shimmer appearing and disappearing with the curves of the road. I felt a heaviness, knowing the river would soon disappear from sight. It was like leaving a lover. We had stayed faithfully with the Danube from her beginnings at Donaueschingen way back in May. Now, almost two months later, the river was turning northeast towards the Danube delta while our road swung southeast then straight across the hills to the sea.

  Ahead, we could see the asphalt rising sharply, the metallic domes of Dervent Monastery flashing in the sunlight near the crest of the hill. The road sign warned of a seven per cent gradient, and we rasped our way to the monastic complex, dismounted from our bikes and entered the garden. Through the shadows of one of the buildings, I could see a black-robed monk polishing candles, the glint of gold catching the shafts of light in the entrance. Overhead a bird of prey hovered on the wing before curving off to ascend the skies. A kestrel?

  As with songbirds, my father was fascinated by raptors, recording numerous sightings in his diary: First time I’ve seen a hawk killing a bird at Wood Lane; back lawn, he squeezed
into the tiny space of his diary allotted to 14 August. There was only room for an asterisk to express his thrill at the killing in his own garden. He recorded other sightings of hawks later that year: at Kilmore, his townland of birth, no doubt while out in his grocery van; and in County Londonderry while visiting my brother. He also recorded sightings of kestrels: a single bird in one October and a pair a few weeks later. My father, when bright and interested, would have mourned the decline of the kestrel, so common in our Ulster landscape in the late eighties when he was writing his condensed entries.

  The kestrel, which Gerard Manley Hopkins called the ‘windhover’, was just as much my father as the heron: keen-eyed and able to home in on those who preyed on his mind with a ruthless, sharp-tongued killing. But he also had a kestrel’s stillness: watching quietly, at one with his own company, forever patient. The peace of his faith and love of nature gifted him quiet serenity in the outdoors, where he contemplated the world with love and devotion – in the country with my God, as he had written in his diary. Before the shutdown of his depression.

  I wandered through the garden of the monastery, enjoying the stillness of this place, my father by my side again. The birdsong had all but disappeared in the heat of the Romanian summer, apart from the waders at Gruia, but my father’s avian presence was with me again, circling the sky above my head.

  Below the raptor and the monastery, the land dropped away to the Danube on one side and Lake Bugeacului on the other. Dervent means ‘beyond the creek’, a place of tranquillity caught between the waters, a perfect spot for the monks’ quiet devotion. The monastery had been built just before World War Two, only to be closed down by the Communists a couple of decades later. It was taken over by a farming co-operative before the monks returned to restore the order in 1990. The sick and maimed come here to look for cures – and the touring cyclists, like us, in need of a rest before tackling the rest of the hill.