The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  There was an awful lot to dislike about Bulgaria. I don’t wish to appear churlish, but my enthusiasm for foreign travel hit an all-time low in that sad, dark land, the Bowels of Europe. Perhaps it was the large bowl of stewed pig’s intestines, the speciality of the region, that I ordered one night by mistake. Perhaps it was the sultry, surly, gum-chewing girls in banks and shops who thought they ought to be parading the catwalks of Paris and not serving riff -raff like me.

  Perhaps it was the three separate attacks by small dogs, manic and filthy poodle-like creatures that hurtled out of open drains and sprang slavering at my ankles. Perhaps it was the patently crooked river-police who never missed an opportunity to demand a seventy-leva breathing tax at each place I came to. (I never paid, by the way.)

  The landscape was utterly flat and hazy with pollution. I sailed by Europe’s most dangerous nuclear reactor. I sailed past the notorious prison-island of Belene, a mosquito hell for political prisoners. I sailed past the chemical works at Nikopol, where the broad river turned a nitrous yellow-brown and dead fish floated in archipelagos on the surface amid cappuccino scum. I sailed past the entry of the river where a year later thousands of tons of cyanide and toxic waste would pour into the Danube, killing everything in it for hundreds of miles, all the way down the Delta. I looked forward to getting to a place called Lom, because I vaguely recalled a Saki short story in which a man on a park-bench talks lyrically of his home-town of Lom, far to the east. He talks of the almond-orchards in spring, the little wooden bridges arching over snow-melt streams tumbling down the hill-sides in white torrents, the apricots sunning against an old stone wall. I was looking forward to seeing it. When I got there and saw the usual cracked and filthy concrete, the yellow-eyed poodles, the sixties communist cement tower-blocks, I remembered several things: the village in the story was called Yom, not Lom; it was in Afghanistan, not Bulgaria; and the whole point of the story was that the narrator was a professional liar.

  My hatred of Bulgaria took on a new intensity.

  A few facts to consider. Even from antiquity, their neighbours have disliked the Bulgarians and attributed to them all sorts of unsavoury practices, a view I came to share after the third police interview. There were no children in Bulgaria, or at least none that I could see. All the way from Shropshire to Serbia I had been accustomed to urchins lining the river-banks, fishing, whistling, spitting, playing hooky, climbing trees, tormenting puppies and other healthy pursuits of the young, but not once in Bulgaria did I see anyone under the age of seventeen.

  In the midst of all this dreariness I was lucky to have a contact in Sofia, the country’s capital, two hundred miles from the river. Someone I knew worked as head of the Raff eisen Bank and had invited me to look him up, so I left Jack tucked up in the grimy river-port of Orjahovo and headed off on the bus. For a bizarre but comfortable few days I was translated from the primitive world of river-travel to the giddy life of high finance: a businessmen’s lunch with the new British Ambassador; a newspaper interview for the Sofia papers in the upholstered luxury of the Sheraton Hotel; a gypsy and his dancing bear with tiny sad eyes and blistered snout who revolved drearily for pennies in the Square; hot baths and washing machines in a comfortable flat, and a chance to explore the city.

  I learnt that of all the Eastern Bloc countries, Bulgaria had been the most fervently communist and the most reluctant to let the regime go. Stories abounded of poisoned umbrella assassinations, of the Security Police occupying secret headquarters in the great central dome of the city, of ex-agents and redundant spies still feeding the muscovy ducks in the damp parks and dreaming of carnations and catch-words. As I sat in the Sheraton tea-rooms writing letters, the music from Schindler’s List played and the rain came down in solid sheets outside. The sad, sad music; the never-ending rain; I remember Sofia entirely in old black-and-white.

  Then things improved. As I neared the eastern end of Bulgaria, my spirits revived, the people and the weather became sunnier, and I was attacked by pirates. For what more could one ask?

  I had spent a lazy few days sailing down the broad stretches of river, stopping in villages that were less marred by the heavy Soviet style than upstream. The town of Ruse was unexpectedly pleasant, almost Parisian in its wide boulevards, its plane trees, its pavement cafés, its classical statuary. And God bless McDonald’s: the hamburgers were as lousy as ever, but you can’t fault the toilets. In Ruse I sat in a sunny square and scribbled a postcard to a friend in Holland. This is what I wrote:

  Voyage nearly over now. Another week or so will see me to the Black Sea, I guess. All jolly good, I suppose, but rather dull, looking back on it. I would have liked just a few more adventures; discovering the princess of a lost island-kingdom, perhaps, or being captured by pirates. Still, mustn’t complain, I suppose. Speak to you soon.

  Love,

  Sandy

  They say that the gods destroy us by granting our wishes. They are right, and I was soon cursing the whim that led me to voice such an ill-made wish.

  Romania now lay along the northern bank, Bulgaria along the south. The river here was very wide and empty, and scattered along both banks were countless islands, tangles of dense reeds and willows and osiers. All morning the breeze had been blowing gently from the west, a perfect following wind, so I had been able to set the sails, put the tiller on auto-pilot (a carefully propped shoe) and lie back in the dinghy propped up on cushions and read. I had done my daily memory exercises, this time saying the whole of The Eve of St Agnes in different accents for each part. The narrator’s part ranged between Edinburgh Academy Miss Jean Brodie and Radio Sports Presenter. I was happy but – as is probably clear – partially insane.

  The gossamer, I mused, had become a nuisance. It was all very well at first seeing it as a magical hint of autumn, drifting through the air, floating above the river’s surface, borne on the slightest of breezes, airy silver strands of finest silk festooning the rigging with fairy-pennants. It was all very well musing that in the brilliant October sunshine, Jack was an enchanted barge out of Elf-Land,

  a ship of leaves and gossamer

  With blossom for her canopy

  sailing along, trailing clouds of glory, straight out of an Arthur Rackham illustration into the world of Mortals.

  Yet the great poets who have dealt with gossamer had failed to mention one or two salient points about the stuff, such as its stickiness, its tendency to drape over and around anything in its way, its habit of clogging and clotting together in one’s ears and eyes and mouth, the way that every swipe of the arm to clear the stuff from tickled nostrils simply brings more fibres floating in to drape themselves in great swathes across the face and eye-lids; and perhaps most importantly of all, the fact that it comes out of spiders’ bottoms and is therefore accompanied by tiny pin-head baby spiders in their thousands. These lose no time in crawling into every facial orifice, nesting in one’s hair, no doubt eating their way deep into the middle ear there to rear their horrid brood and colonise the human cranium.

  Such thoughts as these occupied my restless mind as I sailed along, all unknowing. Romania on the left-hand bank looked wilder and more attractive than dreary denuded Bulgaria, but it was forbidden territory as I was not yet ready to use my single-entry visa. Once I set foot on Romanian soil, I would not be allowed to return to Bulgaria. As much as I longed to leave the latter, I was still dependent on its riverside towns for the next hundred miles, as the Romanian bank seemed to offer nothing but trackless forest and the odd bevy of rummaging swine.

  There were several long wooded islands in mid-stream, and the only channel where the wind was blowing steadily was along the left-hand stretch of water between the islands and the Romanian shore. I was halfway down this strait when from out of the reeds and willows appeared a Romanian fishing-boat manned by two fisher-men. They beckoned me over with a wave. Not feeling like stopping I gave a cheery but hello-and-goodbye sort of wave, called out ‘Eng-leski’ and turned my attention back to the sailing.
I was startled a minute later by their appearance alongside my boat – they clearly wanted to chat for a bit.

  Ah well, so be it.

  One of the fishermen was short and grizzled, with a smiley clownish face and a filthy beanie jammed down over his head. The other, manning the outboard in the stern, had a broad face, a gentle rueful smile and crinkled eyes. Both were quite indescribably filthy. They were jabbering away in Romanian, and before I knew it had grabbed my bow-painter and lashed me alongside their boat. Smiles. Laughter. Handshakes all round. The offer of some lethal dark-purple murky-looking liquor out of a lemonade bottle (declined) and before I knew what was happening, we were heading for the Romanian bank.

  Puzzled, I tried to indicate that I didn’t want to go there – indeed, was not allowed to go there – but the man at the helm stolidly ignored my pleas and we chugged on. Very soon they had me jammed up against the Romanian bank, the hoisted sail tangling dangerously in the overhead branches, and I was getting cross. They indicated with gestures and another burst of Romanian that I should take down the sail. I pretended not to understand. Again they jabbered and pointed, and though their meaning was very obvious, I continued to play the idiot. It seemed to me that the hoisted sail was in their eyes the one obstacle preventing them taking me where they liked; perhaps they felt that to tow me with it up was dangerous or conspicuous. At this stage all was still confusion. They were smiling away, offering me the purple murk and, for all I knew, waiting to take me to a surprise party they had prepared in the woods. But after almost half-an-hour of stalling, they began to lose patience. Over and over I had asked them to let me go on my way; in turn they kept mentioning Giurgu, a Romanian town some twenty miles back upstream. I was damned if I was going to let them take me there. The sail, I said firmly, stays up.

  Finally the short one picked up a large brown catfish from where it was lying in the bottom of the boat and drew a large, purposeful knife from his belt. Carefully, deliberately, watching me all the while, he slit it from chin to tail, reached in and pulled out a handful of dark red giblets and hurled them at my head. I ducked, and they splatted into my sail. Then he held up the knife, pointed to me and drew a finger across his throat.

  Now this … this … I recognised as an unambiguous threat.

  ‘Oh, the sail? Take it down? You should have said …’

  And a minute later I had bundled the now stinking sail, boom and gaff together and hauled them out of the way. The quiet one started the decrepit little motor and off we headed up the river.

  Even now I was more puzzled and angry than frightened. But as we chugged up the channel, several things began to alarm me. When I went to loosen the rope that was lashing us together, the short one raised a black paddle above his head threateningly and I quickly desisted. When I decided that if he was going to have a knife, I might as well have mine, and reached down to unpack it, he again barked a threat and I turned the action into a harmless tidying up of twigs and debris fallen into the boat. But between whiles, all was so friendly, so matey: smiles and laughs and drinks all round. To try to lighten the mood I played my tin-whistle, a Mozart medley, which they loved. I even let them have a go on it. I offered them half a chocolate bar each. They grinned and accepted, but any move to free myself and the short one raised the paddle once more.

  After a while we chugged out from behind the long island and into the main shipping channel, and there, oh joy! oh salvation! was a huge Danube barge half a mile away across the water. Surely if now I stood up and shouted for help, the two fishermen would be unable to prevent me. But too late. They too had spotted the barge, read my mind and quick as a flash had wheeled around and we were racing back behind the sheltering screen of the island. My fears were confirmed. Whatever it was they were up to, they did not wish the world to see.

  For the next hour we hugged the Romanian shore, out of sight of any traffic on the main river. I spent the time considering my options, every one of which was impossibly melodramatic or impractical. One involved something I had read in The Day of the Triffids where the hero disabled an engine by pouring a jar of honey into the petrol tank. I had half a jar of honey but could not think of a plausible way of getting it into the outboard. Or could I drop the hoisted boom on the short one’s head and …? No, no, I had it! The motor was started, I noticed, by a detachable rip-cord. If I could do some of my magic rope tricks, ask to borrow the rip-cord and then fling it overboard so that … that what?

  The truth was that I could not bring myself to do any of these things. There is a strong and unshakeable conviction in most people that as long as one can keep things on a civil level, a friendly, reasonable level, nothing dramatic can go wrong. This, more than impracticality, is what ultimately prevented me from carrying out of any of my plans, which would have involved me being far nastier and more dramatic than my captors had so far been: oars through skulls and so on.

  Such thoughts were tangling in my mind as the two boats zoomed on through the water. But they were clarified a little when the short one leant over and rubs his fingers together. ‘Dollars? Deutschmarks? Leva? Krona?’ He pointed at me, and at himself again.

  ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t have any money,’ I said in a voice a little too loud. My two captors looked at me in amused certainty that I was trying it on. But at least now they had shown their colours. They were pirates of a sort. Not, I admit, the sort I’d been hoping for, with a parrot, a peg-leg and a penchant for lace at cuff and knee. These two were hardly likely to break into a G&S chorus of Pour, Oh Pour the Pirate Sherry and let me off for being an orphan. In fact I was sure that they were usually fishermen, but today had decided to indulge in a little piracy. Where it would end, I did not want to think.

  I decided on a much simpler plan. I would push both men overboard with a swift one-two of the oar, leap into their boat and take off at top speed until I was thirty miles downstream, only then stopping to cut myself free and carry on my way. Yes. That was it. That was what I would do.

  Only of course I couldn’t.

  To this day I do not know whether I would ever have plucked up the sheer primitive indecency to do this, but suddenly the decision was taken out of my hands. The two men had for some time been searching the near bank for something – an inlet, a comrade? – and now at a shrill whistle from the shore it seemed that they had found it. A horseman had emerged from the thick woods and was hailing them across the water. Any action I might take was now impossible – the man had a gun held at the ready.

  Within minutes we were ashore. The horseman was the coldest, cruellest-looking man I had ever seen. In a face grained with dirt and sunburn, two lazy black eyes, cold as sloes, eyed me casually. He was clad in tatty khaki, but wore a bandanna of dirty crimson. His horse too had a red gypsy-knot tied in its bridle and a hundred jingling brass charms winking on its harness. This was quite clearly the King of the Gypsies, and my two friends bowed and scraped before him. A long argy-bargy followed, the rider smiling lazily all the while and looking me up and down in cold amusement. If it were not so ridiculous, I would have said that he was mentally undressing me, or picturing with idle pleasure how I might squirm if presented with a pointed stake, a leather strap and some anatomical diagrams. I began to feel very uneasy indeed. Questions and answers were flung to and fro, and at one point my bag was grabbed from the dinghy by one of the fishermen and handed to the horseman. He looked through it slowly – Keats poetry book, passport, tin-whistle, wallet: all were examined with the same smiling scrutiny. Then a decision was made. The horseman gave an order and they towed my dinghy round into a nearby creek, screened from the main river by willows and a half fallen poplar. There it was tied, and the fishermen pirates were dismissed. There was some grumbling about this at first, but the horseman stared coldly into the mid-distance and the whining petered out. They climbed in their filthy little boat and motored away.

  Once they had vanished, the horseman – Gypsy-King, robber-chief, mercenary thug, whoever he was – motioned that I shoul
d walk into the forest ahead of him. I then did the only brave thing that day, and ignoring his obvious signal, walked down to Jack to tie her up properly – the fools had simply looped a line over a log and already she was drifting loose. Then straightening up, on an impulse I took out of the boat a single oar and walked back up to where the man and horse were waiting and we commenced our march into the forest.

  Fear is a most peculiar thing. The body that scuffed its way through the yellow leaves clutching its ridiculous oar was sweating and nauseous and shaking like a jelly. It badly needed to evacuate its bowels and bladder. It was also wondering what on earth it was supposed to do with the oar. Trip up the horse? Deflect the bullets with a flashing twist of the oar’s blade? But none of this mattered a bit, because it wasn’t the real me at all. The real me was, I am almost ashamed to say, enjoying himself enormously. I was fizzing with daring ideas, to do with magic tricks and throwing dust in my captor’s eyes, none of which my incompetent body would have been capable of putting into action. That didn’t matter, though. The leaves are so yellow here, and smelling deliciously of plum-cake, rich and earthy. The horse is a noble beast. How could people ever eat them? Or break their legs with oars? I was alert and vibrant, almost gleeful – and intensely, excitedly curious.

  I was excited because I thought I would soon know what became of people after death. I was sorry, of course – sorry for my parents and sorry too for whoever found my corpse, if anyone. Please do not think that I am boasting of a bravery that I did not possess. I was scared, very scared, or rather the unimportant puppet with the shaking legs was scared, leaving the real me to be curious. No. Even that doesn’t get it quite right. The puppet was important, and I had to look after it, and it was, after all, me. I was feeling fear as I suppose it normally happens to anyone, but it was wholly different from what I had expected.

  After several miles of walking through the forest – leggy nettles, swampy willows, dead brittle grey branches – we came to an impasse. Across the rutted muddy path lay a side-arm of the hidden creek. My captor, who had been riding behind me, gun at the ready, reined up and ordered me to wade across with him. But when he rode through, the murky water came up to the horse’s thigh, and would have come up to my neck. This was as far as the road went for me. Ridiculous though it seems, and although I was sure I was about to be dispatched, I didn’t want to get wet and muddy, even if it meant that the time had come for me to turn around and face a tree. This, I was sure, was it.