Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  Maguri turned out to be a long, high settlement strung along a series of tracks at 1,200 metres, and it took over an hour and a half to walk through it, with very little shade. I’d made a couple of mistakes in route choice early on, which must have added 3 or 4 miles to the day’s total and certainly added to my weariness. But it was easy to see why this place had been chosen for settlement, amidst rich grasslands on a high plateau. The large timber houses, horse-carts and stockades reminded me of images of Amish country in the United States, although the Amish probably didn’t have satellite dishes, as some of these houses did.

  It was at one of these larger steadings that the young gypsy said he had been working, or at least that’s what I understood him to say. He’d been scything hay, apparently, but I wasn’t sure whether I believed him; all the other gypsy haycutters I’d seen had carried their own scythes, but this young man seemed to have no possessions at all apart from a packet of cigarettes and a mobile phone. Now the harvest was largely over, he said, his intention was to head back to his family in a town the other side of Cluj, which made his lack of any kind of baggage more worrying.

  Suspiciously, too, he didn’t seem to know the path any better than I did. It was I who asked whomsoever I passed whether I was on the right track, while he ambled on ahead, dropping the pace of his loping, path-skimming, light-limbed walk so that I was bound to catch him up. And when eventually the path slid down off the side of the plateau, leaving Maguri behind, he was still by my side.

  By that time I’d decided that my end-destination that day would be Racatau, involving 5 or 6 miles of steady descent through what was increasingly remote, mainly forested country. If my gypsy was looking for somewhere to knock me on the head, then I was about to provide him with a whole series of perfect opportunities.

  As I walked, so my suspicion turned slowly into a real anxiety, even fear, of what he might be planning – a paranoia that was made worse by my tiredness. I was aware, as I walked, that this feeling was comparatively irrational, being based entirely on what others had said and not on my own experience. After all, I told myself, fear of gypsies is a sentiment that Eastern European governments encourage, because it frees their hand in gypsy management. For their part the gypsies’ main crime is the disinclination to obey their governments, fearing being enumerated, labelled, ordered and put into a system that they are unfamiliar with. A system where they work when someone else wants them to, for someone else’s profit, and where they can be rendered redundant at someone else’s whim. To them such a system is unacceptably proscriptive, but for us in the West, being shackled to others like this has become the basis of our working lives. It is called being a team player, and if you’re not a team player then there must be something wrong with you.

  As we walked, my gypsy – I’m ashamed to say I didn’t learn his name – talked pleasantly of this and that, ignoring the fact that I rarely understood anything he said and gave him little encouragement. He was very interested in whether I had a car and a house, and where that house was. When I told him it was in a place called Anglia, he said he knew where that was – it was in Hungary. He knew, he said, because he’d picked asparagus there. Then he embarked on a passionate exposition of how poor he was, and how badly paid everyone was in Romania. In between whiles he chain-smoked, checked the strength of the signal on his mobile phone, and plucked occasional fruit off what looked like young beech trees, which he tried to encourage me to eat. I refused. For my part, I tried to always keep him in sight, to make sure he wasn’t using the fruit-picking as a cover to pick up a branch from the trackside with which to bash me over the head.

  And so we progressed down through the trees, he composed, and me agitated, wondering when and where an attack would come. Eventually, after an hour’s fast and hard walking, the Racatau valley bottom came up to meet us, complete with proper tile-roof houses, the noise of dogs barking and children crying. The sanctuary of civilization. When it reached the valley bottom the path from Maguri turned a sharp corner and spilled us out on to a roadway with a hardware shop on the corner. With a great sense of relief, I headed straight for the doorway and asked the shopkeeper if he could direct me to a place called Ionel’s Cabana, which I knew to be somewhere in the valley. Once we’d established it was a couple of miles up the road, I turned, expecting to see my shadow waiting for me as usual. But the gypsy grasscutter was a good 500 metres away and disappearing fast, loping away downhill in the direction of Cluj in that same loose-limbed, skimming stride, without once looking back. He hadn’t hit me over the head. He hadn’t asked for money. He hadn’t even said goodbye.

  Instantly I felt bad. All that paranoia had proved completely unfounded. I had made mistaken assumptions based solely on his ethnicity in a way that I never thought I would. I felt as if I’d libelled him in public, and that I should publicly apologize. I wanted to summon him back and thrust some lei into his hand and tell him to take the bus home to speed him to the bosom of his family, but it was too late, he was already out of sight. So I turned and trudged up the track in the direction the storekeeper had pointed.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but the moment I turned to head for Ionel’s Cabana, I was walking into new-enterprise Romania, which had started to infiltrate the valley I’d arrived in and which was unexpectedly to dominate my next twenty-four hours. For my part, I was still blithely assuming my path would be strewn with colourful rustics and close encounters with over-romantic bulls, but I hadn’t bargained for the way that Romania had already changed in cities like Cluj, and how the fallout of that change was already pushing its way up nearby mountain valleys like this.

  I had a foretaste of that new-enterprise Romania at Ionel’s Cabana, which turned out to be composed of two large, purpose-built buildings separated by a courtyard and a kitchen. It was in full occupation by a group of well-heeled twenty-somethings who’d come out from the city in company cars and on quad bikes, and were now having the sort of frat party I’d never have associated with Romania. The girls were in bikini tops, the guys in Hawaiian shorts with beers in their hand, and the imported music system thumped out a kind of Romanian rap, which bounded off the walls of the valley. I arrived just as they were firing up the barbecue for the evening, and I was all but ready to turn away and collapse under the nearest hedgerow when one of the group’s alpha males hauled me back. There was, he said, a loft with mattresses in it, and I was welcome to sleep up there. And so I spent the night high up in the roof space above the party crowd, feeling the floor bounce beneath me, peering down through a loft window and watching the couples pairing off. The faces of local farmers appeared on the fringe of the firelight, looking on with a mixture of fascination and alienation as their new-look countrymen partied into the night in a way they must have seen done on cheap American TV, but could never have imagined in their wildest dreams fifteen years before. Mercifully, I was too tired to let the music’s heavy and insistent beat keep me awake, although I do remember some kind of middle-of-the-night procession where the group were bashing saucepans with spoons, and then later I became aware of sharing the loft with a couple having sex. Exactly how that woke me up I’m not quite sure, because they were being very discreet, but a man’s antenna are finely tuned when it comes to certain sounds. Needless to say, when I slipped away early the following morning there was no sign of them, or even of anyone else.

  That day’s walking was a culture shock, too. Accumulated fatigue meant that I’d changed my plans from valley-hopping to Cluj across the mountains to bearing straight down the Somesul Rece valley from Racatau to the main road, a distance of around 20 kilometres, and then looking for a bus. What I’d not bargained for were the weekend picnickers out of Cluj, and as I progressed I met a steady stream of cars coming up the valley on a summer Saturday, looking for grassy banks to spread out on and to spoil. The more populated the river became, the thicker the tide of litter that spread across its banks and accumulated in its pools, where it threatened to throttle the rapids. The Somes
ul Rece had become a conveyor-belt of used packaging.

  It was hard to understand the rationale behind singling out a beauty spot for weekend picnics and then abusing it in such away. It had to be the hangover from communism, which had never had any respect for conservation. That, plus the unaccustomed trappings of consumerism – specifically, in this case, non-biodegradable plastic bottles, beer cans and crisp packets. The net result was a local ecological disaster. In the bad old days the picnic wrappings would have been either glass, which had to be returned, or cardboard, which either decayed or was otherwise useful. By contrast the wrappings of new consumerism were throwaway, but not going to go away, so the litter-lined river became an emblem of Romania’s new freedom and its new purchasing power: ‘I am free, therefore I choose to throw my empty can of Carlsberg into the Somesul Rece.’ And who was I to criticize? The likes of my country, after all, were the ones who persuaded them to buy the cans of Carlsberg in the first place.

  Reaching the main road at Gilau I encountered another after-effect of capitalism. It was a Sunday, so there were no buses. There used to be, said a shop assistant, but now people had cars. So I hitched a ride with a middle-aged boy racer in his souped-up Renault who was working the short stretch of road between Cluj and Gilau for the afternoon. In new-enterprise Romania, hitch-hikers pay a fee.

  In Cluj I fell into the care of a welcoming hospitable couple who were new-enterprise Romanians through and through. Carmen and Adi had new-look jobs, a swish company car, and lived in a new-look apartment in a condominium with shiny floors, broadband Internet, a designer open-plan kitchen and a great view. In another age and another country you’d have called them yuppies, and they’d have been proud of it, too.

  Mark, whom I’d left behind in Arad, had put me in touch with Carmen, a teacher of English whom he’d got to know on one of his courses. But now she worked in an environment which he would have struggled to approve of: a private school, one of the first in Transylvania. This new school was a symptom of the democratizing onrush of contemporary Romania, but not everything about it was completely democratic. Carmen told the story of how, when he’d learned that the school was full and therefore couldn’t take his daughter, a local businessman had leaned on a high-ranking policeman who’d in turn leaned on the headmistress, and a space had duly been created. Carmen was frustrated. ‘Why do we need to fear the police any more?’

  Over dinner we talked about their memories of the last years of communism, when they’d still been very young. Adi, who worked for a Hungarian-owned company selling computer software to supermarket chains, said he’d relished the friendships made.

  ‘We spent a lot of time in the streets. There was no TV. My grandparents thought communism was a good thing, but my parents didn’t commit themselves. Afterwards, they told me they never criticized the regime in my hearing for fear that I would repeat that criticism outside. In those days, suspicion was everywhere. You couldn’t say what you thought even in your own family.’

  For her part, Carmen remembered the shortages that forced her to do her schoolwork by the light of a candle, wrapped in a blanket to keep warm. She recalled her father’s clever ruse of forming an association in their housing block in order to buy a video cassette player – an association was necessary because an individual buying a VC player would attract official attention – and wiring it up to all TVs. The whole block could then watch movies smuggled in from Germany, lapping up anything they could get, no matter how poor the quality. Anything was better than the two hours of state broadcasting dished out every evening, two hours entirely devoted to the lives of the Ceausescus.

  ‘The movies were mainly Kung Fu and soft porn,’ she said. ‘And because I was always good at English, I was given a microphone and I had to translate. But then word leaked out and the Securitate came calling, so it had to stop.’

  She too remembered playing outside while watching for the next lorry to arrive at the shops. Her job had been to ascertain whether the lorry contained sugar or meat or bread, and then to alert her parents to see whether they wanted her to join the queue.

  ‘Even now I can’t understand,’ interrupted Adi, ‘how it was that with everybody working we had nothing in the shops. And how, now, with some unemployment, we have shops that are overflowing.’

  Overflowing shops made good business for him, of course, particularly as new international retailers were starting to open flagship stores up and down the country. But the liberalizing regime also meant that he worked long hours, often at weekends, and didn’t participate as fully as he would have liked in the life of their son.

  ‘We’re going to have a social problem with this,’ he predicted. ‘With the children of parents who go off to work, leaving their children without love and guidance.’

  I nodded. It was one of many social problems facing a rapidly advancing new-enterprise nation.

  ‘I think you probably are.’

  20

  Walking in Transylvania: the Saxon Villages

  A day later and I was back immersed in Transylvania’s timeless rural life. I’d dropped south from Cluj on a local train and emerged at a tiny rural halt, along with a handful of other passengers who all dispersed in different directions across the fields. I turned south across the fields towards the village of Atel, aka Hetzeldorf, an easy 5-kilometre walk through very different land forms to the Apuseni.

  Where the Apuseni had been a high, raging sea, spumed with forest, this was a gentle, rolling swell whose downy flanks had clearly been lovingly groomed by industrious farmers for several centuries. In places the steeper sides had also been layered into terraces which had once hosted vineyards, but these terraces were now just empty shelves, adorned with the occasional vine-emulating thistle that grew to head height. Above them, the ridges were crowned by ordered copses of trees, and everything else was cloaked in a light covering of meadow grasses and wild flowers, which, if you examined it closely, proved to be a tessellation of colour, of gentian, clover and nodding sage. Here there were no plastic bottles in the streams, and the profusion of wild flowers suggested that no artificial fertilizer had ever been used. It was a hillscape which had clearly been thoroughly cared for, in a thoroughly organic way, and all that was missing were the people.

  This was the heart of the Saxon Lands of southern Transylvania, a region of around 230 villages which were once home to tens of thousands of German-speaking farmers and their families. As an ethnic enclave it predated the Danube Swabians by hundreds of years, because the Saxons first settled here in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at the invitation of King Géza of Hungary. Transylvania had just become a Hungarian principality, and the king had wanted to bolster its security against possible invasion from the east, so he invited farmers and traders from what is now Flanders, Luxembourg and the Moselle Valley. He granted them effective self-rule and tax advantages as well as land, just as Empress Maria Theresa was to do many years later with the Danube Swabians in the Banat. Soon afterwards the king also settled a Hungarian warrior tribe called Székelys in the wilder country to the east, where they too still remain.

  The Saxons, who were hardworking and innovative, turned a thinly populated straggle of hills into a fertile homeland. The farmers concentrated on the vineyards, maize fields and meadows, and the traders on the new fortified cities like Sighisoara, Brasov and Sibiu so that the farmers had somewhere to take their goods to market. For a while, it was a medieval garden of Eden, enlightened and egalitarian. Accordingly the population grew steadily over the centuries, reaching a peak of around 800,000 in the 1920s and becoming a major force in Transylvanian society. As part of the German-dominated Austro-Hungarian Empire – which recognized the Saxons, the Székely and the nobility (but not the Romanians) as the three ‘nations’ of Transylvania – they felt secure. Like the Danube Swabians, they were scrupulous about maintaining their German culture and traditions until twentieth-century politics happened along and upset the applecart.

  As he had with the Danube
Swabians, Adolf Hitler saw the Transylvanian Saxons as his advance guard in the east, and he recruited many of them into his army, with promises of returning the much-valued Saxon independence that had been lost at Trianon. So when the war ended badly for Germanity as a whole, the Saxons suffered too. Soviet forces marched through the villages, rounding up most of the adult population on the basis of collective guilt and transporting them off to Siberia for six years’ hard labour. Many didn’t survive, and those that eventually returned home found that some of their land and houses had been handed over to Romanians, Hungarians and gypsies. During the rest of the Ceausescu period they mostly kept their heads down, leading their traditional lives and trying not to attract attention – a strategy that nearly worked. But then in 1988 the president, who was becoming increasingly intolerant of Transylvania’s ethnic minorities, went public with plans to demolish all Saxon villages, as well as thousands of Hungarian ones. As a strategy it spectacularly backfired on him, because this was the trigger that started the riots in Timioara, and thereby the chain of events which ended in the president’s death.

  But the Saxons hadn’t stuck around to do much celebrating. A 1978 agreement between West Germany and Romania had allowed for them to return to Germany as citizens, and many had grabbed the opportunity, even though it was many centuries since their families had originally left. This voluntary cleansing wasn’t a fast process because the German government had to pay Romania 10,000 Deutschmarks for each and every one of them, ostensibly to repay all the money Romania had invested in their education. By the time the Wall came tumbling down, 250,000 had left, and most of the rest swiftly followed. But I wasn’t surprised to see Atel’s only street dotted with cars with German numberplates, because in the summertime they came back to check on the family property, to do a bit of painting and decorating, and to change the locks to make sure the gypsies didn’t get in. My German was going to be useful again.