Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  They were, however, getting a helping hand in real time, too, because the prince and his wife were hosting a party in the castle’s ballroom later in the year, with a guest list of 250–300. Like as not most of the A-list of suitable marriage partners would be assembled, because a Hohenzollern was quite a catch.

  ‘Will there be some families you don’t invite? Old enmities?’ I was thinking in particular of the Habsburgs, and it must have been written on my forehead.

  ‘The Hohenzollerns weren’t friends with the Habsburgs in the past,’ he said, ‘but there’s no particular frostiness when we meet these days.’

  No, his main concerns were plainly the status quo of his business, and building up sufficient momentum to be able to pass on the estate in a healthier state than when he found it. ‘Besides, I couldn’t live a life without work, it would be too boring.’

  ‘You could say the same of all work and no play.’

  ‘Well of course I like to ski,’ he said impatiently. ‘And to sail. When I can. And I play in a band, a jazz band.’ He rootled around in a drawer and pulled out a CD for a band called Charly and the Jivemates, which he gave me as a parting gift as he showed me to the door.

  ‘Which is you?’ I asked, looking down at the smouldering, slightly sleazy, figures in shades on the cover.

  ‘That’s me, the other me,’ said Prince Karl-Friedrich von Hohenzollern, pointing to the one in the middle wearing the snakeskin shoes and the leopardskin jacket. ‘Charly.’

  I should have known.

  I left Sigmaringen thinking that my first contact with Danube aristocracy had gone reasonably well, but it hadn’t produced a string of downriver addresses as it had for Leigh Fermor. The prince had seemed defensive and rather private, but it had seemed unrealistic to expect anything else. Why should he invite an unknown, slightly smelly writer any further into his life than necessary? What benefit could it be to him? If he had, I might have found out more than he was prepared for me to know, and put it in a book like this. They may not be in each others’ houses any more, these Danube aristocrats, but there’s plenty of gossip along the riverbank, most of which I’d forgotten by the time I got back to London and listened to Prince Charly’s Jivemates CD. Listening to it, all those weeks later, I realized that somewhere underneath that frosty exterior there’d lurked a whole personality I’d barely noticed, that of a serious musician shackled by his position in life, trying to get out. The recording was remarkably good.

  On my way out of Sigmaringen I had one final storyline to pursue. I was keeping a weather eye open for anything called the Fishermen’s Rendezvous, aka the Treffpunkt der Fischer. An inn of this name in Sigmaringen hosts the opening scene of Jules Verne’s little-known book Le pilote du Danube, where members of the Danube League, a fishermen’s society, met in 1876 for their annual boozy lunch.

  At the meeting, a Hungarian called Ilia Brusch, whom no one in the society had heard of before, bragged that he was going to descend the Danube from source to mouth, surviving solely on the fish he would catch all the way down and making a large profit by selling what he didn’t need. He was prepared to take on any bets that it could be done.

  The League was intrigued, particularly because in those days the Danube had a big problem with piracy and theft affecting noble properties along the banks, and members were of the opinion that the enterprise was very risky. But then, once Brusch had left the meeting, another previously unknown new member suggested they send someone (i.e. himself) with the Hungarian, to verify whether or not he did as he promised. The League’s membership agreed.

  Unaware that he was to have a companion, Brusch started from the Breg and Brigach intersection on what he estimated to be a two-month journey, and caught his first fish within sight of his sending-off party. In Ulm, a couple of days downriver, he was joined by the mysterious new member of the League, who persuaded his way on to the boat as a passenger. The reader knew by now that the latter was no fisherman but the Danube’s chief of police, and of course that Brusch was no fisherman either, but a prince amongst thieves looking for a good cover story to travel the river. The rest of the book is an account of how the two men try to find out more about each other as the journey becomes more dangerous, and how they finally become firm friends, bonded by common enemies – pirates, and the Danube itself.

  Whether or not Jules Verne ever travelled the river I don’t know. His account is very imprecise, and even in the days before hydroelectric dams it would still have been practically impossible for a fisherman to descend by boat from the Breg and Brigach intersection, bearing in mind the sunken section by Immendingen. So I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t find any evidence of a Fishermen’s Rendezvous on the outskirts of Sigmaringen.

  But I did discover one at the end of that day’s pedalling, by a village called Rottenackers. With Jules Verne in mind, I stopped off for a shandy at the Rottenackers Fischhütte, which turned out to be a glorified garden shed with a terrace and bar overlooking three artificial fishing ponds fed by the Danube. I was hoping to meet wise old Danubian fishermen who might be able to tell me a thing or two about the lifecycle of the sturgeon, but the only drinker was a young man too pale for anyone who spent any time out of doors, with the sort of face that had been rendered immobile by too much beer. Like the fish in the ponds, his expressions struggled to reach the surface through an opaque soup. They were too sluggish to respond to any emotions that he might have been feeling underneath. Talking to him was a matter of throwing bait on to the water to see if there was anything that caught his interest, and I didn’t have much luck with traditional openers. But when I mentioned my bicycle, his lips puckered up into a question. Where was I headed?

  ‘Budapest.’

  ‘Ah, Poland,’ he slurred.

  ‘No, no, not Poland,’ I corrected, and I filled him in on the list of countries that the Danube flowed through, most of which I don’t think he even heard. But the talk of destinations unlocked another pattern of sentences in his brain, and he started to give me directions on how to get to the autobahn that headed east.

  ‘I’m on a bicycle,’ I reminded him. ‘And I’m following the river.’

  ‘Which river?’

  I was already beginning to tire of his company. When I’d finally managed to get him to understand where I was going, and where I was coming from, he asked the only logical question.

  ‘Why?’

  I explained about being a writer, in my experience usually a mistake. His eyes grew wide.

  ‘So when you get back to London, big big city, you’re going to be writing about how you stopped in a fishermen’s hut by Rottenackers, small small place?’

  I nodded. I was thinking I probably would, now that I’d met him.

  This thought seemed to worry my companion.

  ‘I don’t know how many people in London know about Rottenackers,’ he said, dubiously.

  I agreed that not many would have had the Rottenackers experience. But added that, after a few days on a bicycle, I was beginning to get some inkling of it myself.

  4

  Ulm and the Danube Swabians

  German schoolchildren invariably learn two things about the Danube. The first is the mnemonic that helps them remember its tributaries, which runs thus: ‘Iller, Lech, Isar, Inn fliessen rechts der Donau hin/Altmühl, Naab und Regen sind dagegen links gelegen’ (‘The Iller, Lech, Isar and Inn join from the right, and the Altmühl, Naab and Regen come from the left’).

  The second is the tongue-twister about the river’s first substantial city, ‘In Ulm und um Ulm und um Ulm herum’, which means ‘In Ulm, in the vicinity of Ulm and around Ulm’, and when muttered repeatedly from the handlebars of a 20-euro bicycle fits neatly with Rossini’s gallop from the William Tell Overture: Diddle-er diddle-er diddle-rum-tum-tum. In Ulm und um Ulm und um Ulm herum. Diddle-er diddle-er diddle-rum-tum-tum. In Ulm und um Ulm …

  I was diddle-ering towards Ulm, giving thanks for the consistently good weather, when it occurred to me that a
n Ulm herum – a slight detour – might be a good wheeze, to take in a couple of the tributaries that weren’t large enough to make it into the river mnemonic despite pretty mnemonical names. The Ach and the Blau.

  So I had a salami sandwich in Riedlingen’s market square, near a fountain of tumbling storks, and got out the map to think it over. Around me a clutch of market stalls were selling fruit, cheese, meat and vegetables, and a roaming dachshund was doing a circuit of us bench-lunchers with an intense, quizzical expression that said ‘I’m not actually begging, I’m just doing a survey of what people are putting in their sandwiches this year. For which I require samples, please.’

  Riedlingen’s centre was a cobbled Altstadt full of gabled and shuttered houses in a tight fist of alleys on the flank of a riverside hill. At cobble level around the main square were two bakeries, an optician, a pharmacy, a Gasthof, a bookshop and a Greek restaurant, most of them with the owner’s name and trade painted in Gothic script on the plasterwork above the awning, indicating that they’d been there for years and had no intention of moving on for years to come. It is hard to imagine such a state of perseverance on the British high street, where most retailers expect to move, be it up or down the retailing ladder, in the not-too-distant future. British retailing, with hungry franchising and prowling bully brands, is subject to true capitalist ethics: grow or die. Staying still is tantamount to an admission of defeat.

  Meanwhile in Riedlingen, above and around the long-staying shops, the truly elderly properties bent a bit at the knee in tacit acknowledgement of each other’s longevity, a nod here, a curtsey there, frozen in the act of shivering, huddling together for protection against the traffic. Some of them were so ancient that their half-timbering looked positively skeletal, but they still managed to puff out their chests in their upper storeys and look down their noses at neighbours who’d been done up by banks to become un-feasibly smooth-walled and straight in the limb, like film stars whose skin had become surprisingly wrinkle-free and who no longer sagged at their gable-ends.

  From my map I gathered that my choice of route ahead lay between sticking to the modern river-course east of Riedlingen and heading straight for Ulm, or following the Danube’s original glacial route herum, through prehistory around the edges of the Swabian hills. And heruming through prehistory sounded the more interesting of the two.

  The asparagus season was in full swing as I turned my handlebars north in search of the Ach, mumbling, ‘So, the Ach. Ach so.’ This was prime Spargel territory, and it had been on menus all the way from Donaueschingen; I’d even seen mention of an asparagus museum in one of the local towns, and found it hard to imagine how you’d derive a whole cultural experience out of a single vegetable (unless of course it was the potato, upon which complete nations have depended). I didn’t need a museum to tell me that this Spargel thingy was not the green spear that we think of at home. Germans like their asparagus to be pale and anaemic, or at best straw-coloured thanks to lashings of butter. To keep it pale and soft necessitates making sure it never breaks through the topsoil into daylight, and therefore as it grows, by the force of nature, so does the pile of earth above it, by the hand of man. The Ach valley north of Ehingen was one of those places where this tussle between man and nature was being acted out on a daily basis. Below ground, millions of tumescent spears were straining every sinew for a glimpse of the sun, while above ground a farmer had time to berate his teenage daughter, leaning out of an upper window in a dressing gown on a long phone call about last night, before climbing on his tractor and entombing his rows of straining Spargel into even deeper piles of earth. Sooner or later the Spargel race would end in Spargel tears, when groups of Hungarian or Romanian labourers would arrive by the vanload, plunge their hands into the moist earth and cut the poor buggers out of their darkness. They would finally have their wish for their moment in the sun granted, but too late to go stiff and green with pleasure, because they would be viewing it through a film of butter. So, the Ach. Ach so.

  For a river with a highly noticeable name, the Ach made a comparatively low-key entry into the Danube’s former valley, threading between the fields trailing a thin and sickly streamer of bushes, a kite’s tail looking for a kite. On my bicycle I found myself weaving from one valley flank to the other, trying to avoid the main road. Around me the season was moving fast and my exuberant dandelions in excelsis of the first few days of the journey were now being overtaken by highly regimented fields of wheat, marching in fascist phalanxes along the valley floor and rudely thrusting the wild flowers to the sides. The untidiness of spring, which had threatened momentarily to get out of hand, had been quickly brought to heel.

  Eventually the Ach and I arrived simultaneously in Blaubeuren, a handsome resort town with yet more fifteenth-century half-timbered houses, here with windows inturned and latticed wood in mashrabia style, like something you might see in Cairo. The Ach changed nationalities too, becoming bridged, canalized and neat, and threading between and under the houses, as if auditioning for a walk-on part in Amsterdam.

  At the far end of Blaubeuren, where the town rammed its head against wooded hills, I came across its main attraction – a jewel of a spring called the Blautopf (the Blue Pot) that would have done a far better job of being the designated starting point of the Danube than the spring at Donaueschingen, particularly now that I knew that most of the water emerging at Donaueschingen ended up in the Rhine.

  Actually ‘spring’ was a misnomer for what I found at Blaubeuren. A spring is something that slakes your thirst by burbling out from under a tussock, but this Blautopf was a vertical cave filled with water, the big front door for a whole underground river system. Its throat descended deep into the ground and its mouth opened wide to gargle out a glassy lagoon, whose superficial stillness belied the massive movement of H2O taking place below. That throat fed the mouth incessantly, at up to 32,000 litres per second, but only the lip of the lagoon quivered where it became an instant river, the Blau. I knew it eventually joined the Danube in Ulm, having snaffled up the Ach like a truffling pig just outside town. If only the Romans had designated this as the source of the longest river in continental Europe, then my journey would have been following the blue Blau, and not the blue Danube, which of course is decidedly not blau. And there was no denying the blueness of the shimmering Blautopf. Apparently, after rain, the blue turned lighter and cloudier, and after a lot of rain it could even turn green or yellow as the power of the extra rushing water released yellow particles of lime from the rock in underground chasms, but that day it was practically forget-me-not hue. The hole it emerged from was so deep – over 60 feet – that you couldn’t see the bottom, and the lagoon so calm and flat that it was hard to believe that the whole thing was on the move, and at a riverine rate which was more than enough to turn the wheel in an old smithy on the lagoon’s southern side.

  Below ground, the river flowed through caverns which were only starting to be explored. Sadly, I could find no mention of any direct connection with the Danube-sinking system, which was a shame; it would have made a dazzling, glamorous resurrection for the lost waters of Immendingen if some of it could have emerged here.

  That day a group of divers was going through slow pre-dive checks by the smithy, surrounded by a small crowd of admirers. I could see a couple of air tanks anchored to the bed of the lagoon, presumably for emergencies, for there had been accidents here, including deaths, in recent years, but there had also been major finds. A German archaeologist had recently discovered Europe’s oldest art, 30,000–33,000-year-old ivory carvings of a duck, a horse’s head and a mammoth, in a cave system connected to the Blau. These finds confirmed the theory that Europe’s first human beings had been adventurous ancestors of the Assyrians and the Chaldeans of Mesopotamia and Ur, who moved west from what is now Syria and Iraq. When they reached Europe they followed the only obvious route, the original course of the Danube, making their homes in riverside caves as they went. If this theory is correct, then the Danube valley b
ecomes Europe’s equivalent of East Africa’s Rift Valley, the cradle of European civilization, and so by heading downriver I could feasibly claim (cue portentous music) to be heading back to the dawn of time. Until someone finds something older somewhere else, that is.

  Certainly there was something primeval, compelling and unsettling about the presence of that giant hole in the ground and its silent, smooth delivery of so much pure water. Miraculous, even, and the presence of a Benedictine monastery next to the Blautopf, next to such a wonder of nature, came as no surprise. But it was the Blautopf that visitors walked around, talking in subdued voices, not the monastery church, and the spirituality they demonstrated was based more upon superstition than religious belief.

  ‘Can I throw money in?’ asked a little girl of her parents.

  ‘Better not.’

  ‘But I want to make a wish!’

  From the corner of my eye I watched how her parents would respond, and they in turn looked at each other, uncertain. The spring at Donaueschingen had been full of coins, but this fathomless hole into prehistory was a different matter.

  ‘You might hit one of the divers coming up,’ said her father, eventually. It was a convincing enough argument, but there was more to it than that. To toss a coin into the Blautopf would be a bit like lobbing bits of metal into the works of the world. And nobody would want to be the one who choked the blue Blau.

  A couple of hours later I was in Ulm, cycling past furniture warehouses and table-dancing clubs in the suburbs, not enjoying my first big city on the river. Meanwhile the Blau was still doing its tumbling watercourse act somewhere over to my right, gushing through the Fishermen’s Quarter (now reinvigorated with art galleries and designer B&Bs) where visitors sat out on terraces and little bridges and ate grilled trout. Eventually it would slide anticlimactically into the dung-coloured Danube below the city’s long medieval ramparts, and nothing blau would remain.