A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  We left the monastery garden and fetched our bikes. Jamie checked the bike book for the next stage of our journey across Constanța County. While the Bible was my father’s road map, the bike books were our guide across Europe – a cartographical bible, pointing the way ahead. From Rotterdam, we had worked our way through two Rhine books, five Danube books and hundreds of maps. The information we sought from the maps was always the same: How many miles were we cycling that day? What condition were the roads in? What was the weight of traffic? Where were the settlements? Did they have shops or cafés? Where could we find somewhere to sleep? And were there any significant hills?

  Here in Constanța County, Jamie and I didn’t have to worry about the roads: they were in good condition, yet almost devoid of traffic. Neither did we have to worry about finding food – every village had at least one magazin, sometimes more. Accommodation was another matter. Our last book told us there was nowhere until the city of Constanța on the coast, a distance of almost 100 miles. Could we cover that distance in one day? The answer was no – not least because we were about to face the biggest hills of our journey yet. Could I steady my nerves then, and my fear of wild animals and imagined hatchet-wielding men, to camp out wild in the woods? Well, if I had no other choice … Then we heard from Stefan, several days ahead of us, who’d found a place on the edge of Ion Corvin. The day was saved by our German scout.

  Other than my preoccupation with finding somewhere to sleep, my biggest map obsession was those insignificant-looking arrows on the roads. Those tiny little arrowheads meant big hills – and Jamie and I counted thirteen on the way to Ion Corvin. But somehow we made it to the pensiunea. Shattered, I crashed down on the bed and consulted the map for the next day ahead. There were fifty miles to conquer and the same number of arrows – only this time some of the arrows were double-headed and in heavy black. We had, in my mind, mountains to climb.

  That evening, we pulled out our little camping stove to cook pasta on the veranda of the motel-style rooms. The owners knew they had a monopoly out here in this Romanian hinterland – and dared to suggest prices for food and drinks that Romanians would have laughed at, knowing the tired and hungry Western Europeans would agree to whatever they asked. There was no interest in the foreign cyclists, no connection. We were just leu signs on a piece of wheeled metal.

  The next day was a helter-skelter of hills and valleys, of sweeping curves and rolling plateaus and painful ascents through crumbling limestone banks and shrub-covered slopes. On top of Constanța County, the open spaces were intoxicating – a patchwork blanket of land that spread out in folds of faded summer colour to big skies. We followed the lines of the contours, circling ploughed fields of brown corduroy, ink-green squares of woodland and the paler ribbed-greens of crop that lay between the spread of buttery grasslands.

  Then the downhills: the long curves, folding this way and that, the wind in our face, our bikes leaning into the land. But each new hill rose higher and more steeply than the one before. We pushed our bikes up through villages perched on escarpments, only stopping to buy chilled water and ice-lollies when the heat became too much. Once we paused to watch children gathered round a fountain, splashing through muddy puddles in bare feet. ‘Drink! Drink! Water very good. Very good!’ And they formed a ring round us in order to watch us fill our bottles as if we were some alien species.

  Between the open land and ribbon villages, the road was swallowed by chestnut trees, their bases painted white against bugs and disease. Sporadic red and white road markers on the verges told us we still had far to go. Towards the end of the afternoon we crossed the motorway and dropped down to the coastal plain where the road followed the edge of the woods in a ruler straight line. We were cycling through a buffer zone between deepest rural Romania and the coastal city. Young women teetered in high heels on the kerbside between forest and road, skirts and tops barely covering their breasts and bottoms. They were the ladies of the night, touting for business in broad daylight, and their brothel was the woodland.

  From the junction at Murfatlar, we crept through suburbia, the noise of the trunk road into the city disconcerting after the quiet of the countryside, the fumes and weight of traffic unpleasant. Traffic lights, roundabouts, multi-lanes, slip roads, bridges, tower blocks, cranes all spun around me in a confusing mess. I was struggling to deal with the sensory overload.

  Then in the distance I saw the Black Sea – the colour somewhere between charcoal and blue rather than black – and I realised we’d made it. Just to the south of us was Istanbul and Asia. I felt my eyes prickle and wasn’t sure if it was the city dust, petrol fumes, exhaustion or joy. Perhaps it was a mix of all four.

  We would have a rest in Constanța and then leave the waterways and sea behind for a while to head into the interior of Bulgaria and Turkey. But, for now, we would dip our feet in the ocean.

  6. Into Bulgaria

  The Black Sea was an important milestone, a body of water surrounded by lands exotic and unknown: Ukraine, Georgia and Turkey. It was the buffer zone between East and West, and between ancient and modern. In my mind, the Black Sea symbolised the merging worlds of Europe and the Orient. From here we’d cross the Balkan Mountains and it would be downhill all the way to the Sea of Marmara and Istanbul. I was wrong.

  That night we slept on the outer edges of Constanța – the sea still several miles away. With anticipation we rode our bikes down to the ocean the next morning, landing at an old casino that jutted out on a promontory like an encrusted limpet on the shore. At first sight, it was an impressive building of magnificent proportions on the skyline, all arches and balustrades and massive shell-shaped windows, a mix of unrestrained baroque and the simpler curves of art nouveau. But, on drawing closer, I could see some windows boarded up, rusting ironwork and the detail in the masonry crumbling away.

  Later, I found out it had been commissioned by King Carol I in Constanța’s heyday at the turn of the twentieth century, when royals and nobles would travel across Europe to stay at the fashionable seaside resort. It was to be a symbol of the city’s wealth and prosperity – no expense spared. Now, the Romanian government finds it too expensive to maintain and has left it to the rats and pigeons, and the stray cats that feed off them. Photos show a place of abandoned glamour and beauty – of intricate wall murals, stained-glass windows and art deco railings. Broken glass and fallen masonry lie on the floors beneath great chandeliers. It is achingly tragic to see so much art and beauty left to collapse and decay.

  I took a photo of Jamie in front of the casino before we turned around to look for a promenade café to order a celebration breakfast. We stretched out our legs under the table and enjoyed the sunshine, happy in the knowledge that we wouldn’t be cycling anywhere for a while. We moved down the coast to Eforie Nord and booked ourselves into a boutique hotel for a few days. There was no hurry – we weren’t due to cross into Turkey until the beginning of August and it was only 20 July.

  The Black Sea was not as I had imagined in my daydreams as we’d crossed Constanța County. The bay was filled with noisy speedboats and plastic debris, the air heavy with the smell of diesel fumes and the fat and sugar of doughnuts. The sand was all but obscured beneath the rows of deckchairs. We could have been sitting on concrete, for all I knew. Beyond the strands, the coastline was indeed covered in concrete: hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops. Jamie and I briefly swam in the syrupy water before picking our way through the blubbery bodies of Romanians and Russians – leather-faced women with rolls of fat hanging over bikini bottoms and men with swollen bellies obscuring tiny Speedos – back to the quiet sanity of our air-conditioned room. There was a sense of decay here that reminded me of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

  ‘I think I’ll die if I stay here any longer,’ I said to Jamie.

  ‘Let’s go, then.’

  So we packed our panniers and rode out of town, following the long, straight E675 inland and across the plains to the Bulgarian border.

  *

/>   As I’d cycled further east and south through Europe, the sense of displacement had grown. In Germany, Switzerland and Austria, the familiarity of language and culture and old friendships were the stitches holding past and present together. Those familiar places and faces along the way reminded me of who I was and where I’d come from. And so I never truly felt any sense of alienation until we reached Bratislava. In Hungary, Tom and Patrick had dropped back into our lives like a calendar reminder of a forgotten appointment as wife, mother and home-contributor. My completed family reminded me they were the fabric of my life – the warp and weft that wove us together, sewn imperfectly into a family unit, making the person I had become, at least in part. In Hungary and Serbia, after Tom and Patrick had departed, kind hosts had beckoned Jamie and me into their homes and communities, and allowed us to fix a few more stitches in the fabric of our journey.

  In Romania, that essential sense of shared humanity – the tacks that held this part of the journey together – felt more fleeting and fragile: the smiling faces on horse carts as we cycled by; the children stretching out grubby hands in villages; the man reaching out with the beef tomatoes from his garden, a holding of gaze and a nod of silent communication that connected us as humans. There were other brief encounters in shops, cafés, hotels and guesthouses: a brush of skin when money and goods were exchanged, a moment’s eye contact and a smattering of essential words that linked us briefly to strangers – salut, mulţumesc, mersi. Without them, we didn’t exist.

  In the end it hadn’t been the dogs or the Roma or even fear of sickness or accident that had caused anxiety – but the sense of disorientation. I began to wonder if I was travelling to find myself or to lose myself, to lose my father or to find him again. I realised that tuning into the sights, sounds and smells of the journey gave me a peace my father had also found in nature. But I was also slowly coming to the realisation that living in the moment was only a solution so long as I was locked into my surroundings, engaging all my senses. At other times as I cycled along, I found myself slipping into the past, my childhood memories threading through the present journey. My father was present, first in the birds, and then in the time-frozen countryside. But still I locked down on the darker memories and thoughts, as if unlocking that door would release something unbearable. I would have to work through the past, I acknowledged, with all its light and shade, and come to the peace of acceptance – accepting others for what they were and accepting myself too. It was a revelation. Now I just needed the courage to reject that stubborn part of my brain that wouldn’t let go of something that had happened a long time ago and forgive.

  *

  In the border town of Negru Vodă we lingered for a while. I climbed chipped concrete steps to the bank to exchange the last of my leu for Bulgarian lev, but the bank teller laughed at me as if I had asked for Mongolian tögrög rather than the currency of a place that lay a couple of miles away.

  Negru Vodă had nothing going for it, just a few high-rise flats in a state of disrepair, the bank and a couple of mini-markets. It was a hick town that came to a full stop on the border. I bought some food for a picnic lunch and went outside to discover a group of Roma children circling Jamie in the hope of a few coins. We made our escape.

  Apart from the twist in the road at Negru Vodă, the straight diagonal artery slashed across Romania to the border and continued on in the same fashion through Bulgaria to Dobrich. There was an inevitable pattern to the ride: fields of sunflowers followed by fields of crops and weedy burdock, followed by weedy village. At the Romanian border town, we’d still only completed the first half of our day’s journey. We aimed to cycle on to the large town of Dobrich before stopping – another thirty miles ahead – but the heat was bearing down on us, making cycling exhausting.

  At the border, I looked back at Romania one last time. It had taken us two weeks to cross the country. Romania, I thought, had been like the plucking of a daisy: I love you; I love you not. I’d liked Romania as soon as we’d entered the tranquil Nera Valley, but my positive feelings had turned to horror when I saw the rubbish-lined Danube. I’d loved the unexpected beauty of the fjord-like Iron Gates, but not the stuck-in-the-past, ‘do-as-we-bid’ Communist tourist hotels of the Danube towns. I loved the exuberant horse-cart owners and ragamuffin kids who made us feel like royalty; the small villages alive with community, and the haystacks and brightly coloured beehives; the painted flowers and patterns of Romanian folk-art that adorned the woodwork of doors and fountains. I didn’t love the gaudy Black Sea resort with its dance music pounding from showy cars and fast-food joints. My feelings shifted by the day, sometimes by the hour. But ultimately, I left Romania with warmth and affection.

  In General Toshevo, we found a bank to change our leu and lingered on to eat our picnic on a park bench.

  ‘Where are you heading?’ An old man with a stick stopped shuffling along the pavement and looked from us to our laden-down bicycles with open curiosity.

  ‘Istanbul.’

  With the Turkish border less than 250 miles away now, my answer didn’t seem quite as ridiculous as it had back in the Netherlands and Germany.

  ‘Don’t take the road to Dobrich. It’s not interesting. Take the left turn to the Black Sea and follow the coast into Turkey. It’s very nice.’

  I smiled and nodded. It was too complicated to explain we had sought out the flattest route into Turkey. True, most cycling tourists stayed with the Black Sea, just as our helpful stranger was suggesting, but after Eforie I wasn’t sure I would miss the coast buried under tower-block hotels and tarmac roads, no doubt jammed with Ladas, Fiats and Moskvitches and their pot-bellied owners, or new-money sports cars driven by peroxide blondes and muscle-and-medallion-bound men. I knew the coast road rose and fell with too much regularity before rising steeply to the Balkan Mountains. We’d puzzled for long enough over the problem of how to get the Tank through these mountains and we agreed that the pass between Asparuhovo and Aytos was by far the flattest route to the other side.

  Now the Balkans were drawing close. General Toshevo was one of the last level towns we would cycle through before climbing into the rolling foothills and mountains. As the administrative centre of the area, it had an air of prosperity with its scrubbed-down and freshly painted offices that lay behind neat, tree-lined verges dotted with planted flowers and tidy box-hedges.

  Just fifteen miles on, Dobrich was another matter. It was a city of brutalist high-rises, pushing up from the cracked concrete of roads and plazas, like straggly weeds trying to find daylight. The buildings – both futuristic and in a Cold War time warp – were squeezed into the confines of a ring-road; although ‘ring-road’ is too grand a name, really, for this pot-holed, patched lane that rose and dipped with the undulating landscape. From the bypass, minor roads climbed into the city. Hot and tired, I wondered when we would finally take one of them. At last, Jamie stopped, consulted his map, then took us up to a hotel sitting in the green of a park. I marvelled at the cheap room he had found for us with its balcony overlooking spreading trees and colourful flowerbeds. Below, we could see a swimming pool spanned by a little wooden bridge and a waterside restaurant. We had arrived in paradise. We decided to stay a second night in this oasis among the high-rises, but the hotel had other plans: it was fully booked for a wedding. There was nothing for it but to move on, deeper into the Bulgarian interior.

  7. House Martins

  They say that travelling broadens the mind, but in some ways the opposite is true. Travelling, by the very nature of its transience, narrows perceptions. It’s looking at unfamiliar places through the confines of a lens. True, our bikes slowed us down so that we could savour it more fully, but for all of that, we were always moving on, never stopping for long, not really getting to grips with a place. At best, we were gathering ephemeral, half-formed impressions and picking up fragments along the way: a field of waving corn, bright sunflower heads, a half smile in a shadowy doorway, a blur of bicycle, the clip-clop of hoof, the taste of w
ood smoke, the chirrup of cricket, the thrump of wood pigeon on the wing, or the fading out of birdsong. Our view of a country was formed by the thin strip of road that led through it, by the places we chose to pause in and by the strangers who wandered in and out of our line of vision.

  Travel is a fleeting response to fleeting moments. It’s not only a narrow lens, but also a filter. For me the Netherlands was orange-bright; Germany, a pastel rainbow; Switzerland, silver mists; Austria, gold; Slovakia, beige speckled with child-bold primaries; Hungary, paprika-red; Croatia, the colour of pain; Serbia, the yellow of heat; and Romania, the moss-green of folk-art and haycarts. Bulgaria was grey.

  Perhaps if we had taken a different route, travelled through at a different time of year, or stopped in a different place, the colour chosen for Bulgaria would have been brighter. As it was, Bulgaria had the same crumbling towns of grey concrete as Romania, with villages of rusting wrought-iron fencing and peeling paint. But here there were no waving horse-and-cart drivers, no grinning children lining rural streets, no villagers gathered round squares and greens or in front of shop windows. Even Dobrich was a ghost-city, with its higgledy-piggledy offices and shops that seemed to stagger on the hill with us, as we cranked our knees into action in the hazy start-of-day light.

  The ripples that had ebbed out across the land from Eforie on the Black Sea towards Dobrich became waves as we headed deeper into rural Bulgaria. There were long downhills and knee-twinging, lung-sanding uphills. There were villages of strangely empty streets. I thought it must be a Sunday, but then remembered it was Saturday. Where was everyone?