Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  I embarked into the Delta from the port of Tulcea, on the last bit of dry land. From here, onward travel had to be by boat, so the long bend in the river as it swept through town, smelling of sewage and engine oil, was the focus of a great deal of activity.

  Towering over the far end in the distance were the shipyards, which still turned out boats that could cope with both river and sea. Closer at hand came ugly balconied blocks of flats which had been painted Neapolitan blues and greens to try to soften the ghastliness of their architecture. Between them and the river stretched a long, sweeping promenade in rippling concrete, sticky with melted ice-cream, which at various points in its progress also doubled as a car park. Its edge was lined with all varieties of floating creations in various states of undress, some of which looked like junkyard scrap until you saw them take on passengers and push their noses out into the stream. Entrepreneurs had converted barges into shore bases with restaurants and bars, and they all advertised tours and fishing trips. Around them clustered speedboats, ambulance boats, pontoon boats and little ramshackle flit boats, ready to take a paying customer anywhere, as long as it was within rowing distance.

  Every now and then a big whale of an oceangoing hulk would steam up past all this chaos, covered in rust and peeling paint, dribbling ribbons of bilge water from spear-holes in the hull and frothing fetid cappuccino at the stern. These ships were usually headed for the steel mills at Galati, a bit further upriver, and their names and home ports suggested far-off places in the Crimea and out beyond the Bosphorus – in other words the big wide world outside.

  But Tulcea was concentrating on the Delta dwellers. They were the target for its louche cocktail bars, retired seamen’s clubs and dilapidated discos along the back of the promenade. Alongside them were more utilitarian outlets, too: import–export agencies, shops that sold chainsaws, outboard-motor spares and bits of modern plumbing. There were several clinics to give the sick and injured a choice as soon as they staggered off the boat: a choice between medical attention, or the reviving delights of the Ambiance cocktail club, with its rotting sunshades.

  Tulcea’s big moment in the day was the departure of the three main Navrom ferries, substantial ships the size of small cross-Channel ferries that headed off down the three main Delta channels at 1.30 p.m. Reconditioned Russian hydrofoils made these journeys too, tinny metal lozenges that buzzed in and out through the morning, but their fares were too high for the average Delta-dweller, so their passenger list comprised handfuls of officials and business people whose time was precious and whose ticket was being paid for by somebody else, and who didn’t mind the claustrophobic, sweaty interiors. Besides, the majority of villagers had cargo to carry, so they stuck to the ferries.

  As the time approached, the promenade became increasingly choked with men pushing trolleys piled high with boxes. Beer was being shifted in big quantities, gas cylinders were being delivered by lorry, crates of bottled water were moving east and mountains of sweets and crisps were going west. I tagged along in the wake of a cart piled high with luggage being hauled towards the Dnieper Star, a river cruiser from the Ukraine that was making ready to head out into the Black Sea for Odessa, Sevastopol and Kiev. And just astern of it I found what I’d been looking for: a small ferry destined for Mila 23, a prosaic name for a fishing village at milestone 23 of the original sinuous course of the Danube, in the days before the Sulina Channel had been cut straight to the sea.

  Taking the Sulina ferry would have been the fastest way to complete my journey, but also the most tedious. The Sulina Channel was the Delta’s high street, busy, developed and full of outside settlers who’d built new holiday homes along it. By contrast Mila 23, I’d been told, was an original Lipovani settlement, home to the descendants of Sea Cossacks who’d fled there after a fissure in the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century. The Tsar of the time (Peter the Great) had insisted on modernization, demanding that the Old Believers cut off their beards, and when they’d refused he’d sent the army after them. Many had fled into the forest (lipa is Russian for lime tree) and ultimately ended up in the Delta, which was a particularly good place to hide. There are still five Lipovani villages here, of which Mila 23 is one. I was expecting a rustic, old-Russian Venice, but that was not how it turned out.

  The ferry journey took three hours, across lily-carpeted ghiols and down increasingly narrow canals. It seemed a hazardous selection of shortcuts; the bows burst repeatedly through clusters of overhanging willow, klaxon sounding, the skipper roundly cursing any boats coming the other way, until we finally emerged on to what was plainly the old course of the river, reminiscent of the Danube as it had looked way back in Austria or Hungary. And there was Mila 23, straggling around the inside of a big bend in the river, the roofs of its houses only just visible behind a high embankment.

  Anchored to stakes along the water’s edge were lines of slender fishermen’s skiffs, clinker-built and tarred on the outside, and I wanted one as soon as I saw them. Bigger boats had to tie up at Mila 23’s two pontoons, one for Navrom boats and one for private vessels, alongside its main shop, which also served as the village bar (it had the village’s only substantial fridge) and therefore the centre of its social life. From here, hard-baked dusty tracks ran off in all directions, upriver and downriver and at diagonals inland.

  An isolated shop like this played a major community role; it provided the villagers with luxuries and bare necessities, and although most of Mila’s households were effectively self-sufficient, the shop’s stock served every purpose from birthday presents to what would be under the tree at Christmas time. Its hard-drinking regulars dominated village gossip. Given this limited sphere, I could begin to see the appeal of the diversity (and the anonymity) of Tulcea’s shanty town of bars and discos.

  The village centre itself took a moment to locate, away from the river’s edge across open patches of ground on a slightly higher elevation, where it had been moved after catastrophic flooding in 1960. Here a small estate of skew-whiff, reed-roofed, timber- or mud-walled houses sat in little compounds within stockades, their eaves studded with many decades of swallows’ nests, whose presence, Lipovans believed, was a defence against fire. Each home had its own vegetable garden and fruit trees, a run of geese or chickens for when they needed to pay the doctor or celebrate a special occasion, and a patio area roofed with vines where the woman of the house usually sat, shelling peas and talking to the neighbour or the cat.

  There was lots to talk about, for the narrow paths that constituted the village’s main thoroughfares were being dug up for the installation of a proper sewage system, replacing the existing practice where everyone made their own arrangements in thunder boxes at the far end of the garden. The sewerage money came from Europe, and the demand was being driven by the two biggest buildings in the village, both nearly complete, and both of them small hotels. It seemed that I’d got to Mila 23 just before the rest of the world; somebody had woken up to the fact that this Lipovani village, on a river rather than a ditch, had major selling points for tourism, and there was about to be a helluva lot more shit flowing about. Next year, I found myself predicting, there’d also be a helluva lot more beards and fewer jeans, because it needed to look the part, too.

  Of course the downside of being in the village before the hotels opened was a shortage of places to stay, which is how I ended up entering into conversation with Barbaneagra Neculai, who was resting his belly on his stockade opposite the village church, shirt off, watching the world go by. He listened to me in silence, let the silence extend well after I’d finished while he looked me up and down, and then offered me a room in his house, for a fee. Judging by the expression of glee when I accepted it, the price was outrageous, but it seemed eminently reasonable to me, especially when I insisted that it included meals.

  His house was long and low and had smooth, thick walls of straw and mud. It was more modern than most and had obviously been added to, eccentrically, over the years by Mr Barbaneagra himself,
with some rooms accessed through others, and even more (the bathroom, for instance) by going round the outside. Half the bathroom’s floorspace was occupied by a giant mud-brick stove, fired from the outside, to heat the water. The kitchen stood separate and open-plan, connected to the main building only by a corrugated-iron roof, under which fishing rods were stashed. Given the nature of the Barbaneagran diet (fish, fish and more fish), keeping the kitchen at a distance was undoubtedly wise, although the Barbaneagras had a gas cooker and no longer used the stove fired with old maize husks, as many of the more primitive houses did. A transistor radio sat on the outside of the bathroom window, permanently on but veering delinquently between stations. The Barbaneagras never paid it much attention, and I suspected its main purpose was to drown out any unfortunate bathroom noises.

  Mrs Barbaneagra was a large, calm shamble of a woman with a long tumble of greying blonde hair and a nice smile that showed a good display of gold teeth. She reminded me of an Indian squaw, particularly when her grandchildren came round in the early afternoons, clambered all over her and pulled her hair, to her evident delight.

  ‘Lipovani,’ explained her husband, nodding towards his wife, and adding that he himself was not. He’d been a ship’s engineer out of Galati until he’d retired. He didn’t mention it, but he’d obviously had some kind of accident in the engine room that had made a mess of his right hand. I wondered if another accident was responsible for the high-pitched voice, or maybe that had been the only way he’d been able to make himself heard over the barracking diesel. Anyway, his previous career conferred a special status on him in a village that still essentially survived on what it could catch, barter or grow, because he had cash. He had an income in the form of a company pension, and people like him were important in making the whole Mila 23 economy go round, as was I.

  The Barbaneagras seemed pleased to have a guest. They gave me a room that was basically a corridor to their grown-up son’s room, making me understand that he ‘only slept there’ and spent most of his time in some other unspecified location. I never discovered what that unspecified location might be, but the son did exactly as his parents said he would: he arrived late at night, only to depart again early in the morning, and each time I pretended to be asleep.

  Now that I was in the house, Mrs B was very concerned at what I might or might not eat. She walked me through her vegetable patch, pointing out aubergines, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes and onions, checking whether I had any objection to any. And then, in the evening, I’d have fish ciorba (a cold thick soup, usually with potato and pepper) and fried fish (with another token vegetable) and she and I would have an exchange of smiles and pointing, indicating exactly where in the garden the potato or the pepper or whatever it was had lived out its happy life before dedicating itself to my needs. During these meals Mr B would absent himself to a seat on the other side of the stockade, out of sight but not out of earshot, and Mrs B would pass comment about my table manners for his benefit. It would then be repeated from the other side of the stockade, with greater emphasis.

  ‘He’s spitting out the bones,’ she’d say.

  ‘HE’S SPITTING OUT THE BONES,’ he’d reply.

  ‘He doesn’t like the eyes,’ she’d say.

  ‘HE DOESN’T LIKE THE EYES,’ he’d reply.

  ‘He’s dunking the bread,’ she’d say.

  ‘HE’S DUNKING THE BREAD,’ he’d reply.

  ‘I don’t think he wants any more,’ she’d say.

  ‘THEN TRY HIM AGAIN,’ he’d reply.

  Mr B, to give him his due, was very keen to help in any way he could, so when on the morning of my second day I told him of my plan – that I wanted to find a suitable boat so that I could row the last 23 miles to Sulina – he didn’t laugh. In fact he didn’t believe me at all, so it took a mixture of mime, drawing and repetition of basic words to drive the point home. Even then, he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to travel like that when there were passenger boats there for the asking.

  ‘Mr Andrew, multi canali, multi canali,’ he kept repeating. There were so many canals he was sure I would get lost.

  But I persisted, and in the end he pulled on a shirt as a tribute to the seriousness of the mission and took me with him to see a man about a boat.

  I hadn’t appreciated that the village was effectively surrounded by water. An inlet from the river filled a lagoon around the back, a rather rank lagoon that turned out to be the village’s parking place, full of more of those finny tarred skiffs that I’d seen on the riverside. Three men were sitting on an upturned wreck fixing fish-traps, and one of them looked up when Mr B called his name. We all shook hands, and they listened attentively while he explained what I wanted. But when it came to the final question – would any of them rent me a boat – they had no hesitation: it was out of the question. Mr B didn’t seem in the least surprised.

  ‘OK then,’ I said, not discouraged, ‘let’s forget rental.’ Boat hire was clearly an unfamiliar concept amongst Lipovans. ‘I’ll buy one. A wooden one like that. How much?’

  This time there was more of a murmured consultation, and then one of them turned to me and said in English, ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, no? I haven’t made an offer yet.’

  But apparently ‘no’ meant ‘no’; none of them would sell me a boat, however high the price, and they didn’t know anyone who would. The problem was that, without their boats, explained the one who’d said ‘no’, they couldn’t work and a Lipovani man needs to work. So no one would sell.

  I had to admit that this was not what I was expecting. Plainly, there were plenty of boats in that lagoon, more than enough to go round, and not many of them looked as if they were in regular use. So I began to produce money from my wallet, money in what I considered suitably copious quantities. But the three men just stood, shrugged their shoulders and looked embarrassed. Eventually I was forced to admit defeat, and I couldn’t really understand why. Mr B, who had an I-told-you-so expression on his face, didn’t offer any insight or encouragement, so in the end I thanked the three men and we started back towards the house.

  We’d almost reached the gate when we were hailed from behind. It was one of the three, and he said something to Mr B, who turned to me.

  ‘He has a boat,’ he made me understand. ‘A boat for sale.’

  Which is how I came to be the proud owner of a green plastic bathtub.

  I have no idea how this boat ended up in Mila 23, but it certainly didn’t belong in a fishing community. It was large, heavy, broad in the beam, fat in the bottom and high in the water. A brute to row, a brute to steer and all in all quite out of keeping with the setting, which is presumably why I hadn’t seen it in the lagoon. I reckoned, on looking it over, that it must have fallen off the deck of a passing ship, being the sort of boat that would have been quite good at bobbing about in rough water with a lot of people in it until rescue came. A happy family on one of Disney World’s watery rides would have been quite content with it, too, but any self-respecting Lipovani fisherman wouldn’t have been seen dead rowing around in it, which was why it had been secreted away. And why they were happy to sell it to me.

  But it had oars, and it was dry inside, and I would have the current behind me pushing me on, so I wasn’t fussed. In fact I was secretly elated, because I’d begun to accept that I wouldn’t be able to complete the journey as I’d wanted to, which would have been a major disappointment. However, rather than seem too keen and settle the deal there and then, I said I’d give the boat a half-day spin around the neighbourhood, and provided it performed satisfactorily, we’d agree a price.

  That half day was beguiling. Conditions were dead calm, and it was a pleasure to be under my own steam at last, pottering around on the river I’d been stalking for so long. It was like the consummation of a prolonged courtship. A union long awaited. I sculled up and down side canals, nosing through reeds and dawdling across secret lakes, bothering frogs and scattering flocks of waterbirds like a dog cha
sing sheep. I didn’t go far, both for fear of getting lost in Mr B’s multi canali, and because I’d agreed to report back at the inlet in the early afternoon.

  When it came to that negotiation, I entered into it well prepared, armed with my favourite Romanian word, scump, meaning expensive: scump, scump, scump, delivered with the emphasis of a pile of bricks hitting a sand dune. But the Lipovans had already seen how ready I was to part with my cash, so however much I scumped, I still ended up paying 220 euros for something I was pretty damn sure had fallen off the back of a lorry. Or a Dnieper Star.

  24

  Rowing to Sulina

  I used to row competitively before my lower back forced me to give up, so I know that a racing shell can cover 2 kilometres in around seven minutes, even without a stream pushing it along. At that rate, 23 miles should only take a couple of hours, but I’d allowed a whole day to do Mila 23 to Sulina in my green plastic bathtub with the current behind me. If the worst came to the worst, I could camp out; I had a mosquito net, basic food and water, and a drybag.

  To give myself the best chance I set off at dawn, a dawn so misty that I could feel the moisture prickling my skin. Emerging from Mila 23’s inlet, assuming the water was all mine, I found the grey veil already peopled with fishermen, bending, waiting, turning and cursing, like furtive actors getting into position in front of the safety curtain before the lights went up. Sadly, there was no chance of my slipping between them unnoticed, clumping along in my club-footed bathtub, but only a handful of them softly returned my greeting, even though I was prepared to bet that they all knew full well who I was and how much I’d paid. Even Mila’s dogs seemed to be having a laugh about it, and it took ages before I was properly out of barking distance.

  Even then it was never silent on the river. Every now and then there’d be a big thump and a splash as something substantial ate something not quite so substantial: a pike chasing a perch, a beluga sturgeon swallowing a Danube mackerel, or a carp thrashing its tail. Occasionally there were cattle on the bank, some of them standing contemplatively up to their ankles in the water, and my approach would trigger a mini stampede, and that in turn would give me a heart attack. And in between whiles there’d always be a frog, abandoning its lilypad with a startled plop.