Leontyne

by Richard Goodwin

  Captain Frolich, our pilot, was due to join us the next day from Linz where he lived, which was downstream about two hundred miles, in Austria. His friend Captain Ott had invited Ray and me to have dinner with him and his wife Christine at their house in a little village just outside Regensburg. We took a taxi and found them in the garden of a house that he and Christine had built with their own hands. The meal was very memorable because their next-door neighbours were Catalans and had come over to cook the most magnificent paella I have ever tasted. This kindness, and many others that we had found in Regensburg, convinced me that it is a very special city, one that has long had a spirit of independence which I hope it never loses.

  At seven thirty the next day, Captain Frolich arrived with his Burberry neatly folded over his arm. He was a huge, neat man who spoke no English at all except for one mixed-language phrase that served for many occasions which was, ‘100 per cent Absolut Catastroph’ which covered anything from my bad mooring techniques to Ray not stirring his goulash properly, but it was always said with great good humour and we soon grew very fond of him. He was a superb boat-handler and swung the Leo neatly in the current as we headed downstream out of Regensburg and down the Danube, passing right under the portals of Valhalla.

  Our first stop was at a town called Straubing which lay at kilometre 2222 from the mouth of this enormous river. The kilometres on the Danube are marked with large white boards displaying the number of the kilometre. Every hundred metres is a smaller board, with the half kilometre marked by a plus sign. This way of marking is extremely easy to read and a great deal easier than the official Danube charts. These are like no other charts that I have seen in that they have a complicated system of folded paper, so that when the river bends the chart is folded to bend also, representing the course of the river. When I pulled out my copy to show the Captain he laughed and indicated that the only time that professional Danube men ever used those was when there had been an accident, to establish their alibi.

  One of the great problems we were to face on the river was a lack of suitable places to moor. The sides are rocky and the current swift, and the alternatives are either anchoring – which is fine if the river is wide enough – or finding a pontoon which won’t have one of the frequent passenger boats arriving while you are tied up. Straubing had such a pontoon and we made our touch. At the end of the gangway was a small municipal garden which had been turned into a permanent exhibition for the local sculptors who, to my eye at least, were a talentless lot, as were a group of artists we had met in Regensburg who seemed to do their best business by shocking their would-be clients with lurid pornographic paintings and then selling them something far more modest to assuage the guilt they had been made to feel for not having the guts to hang a depiction of a six-foot phallus in their drawing room.

  The Captain then revealed one of his great talents. He had brought a parcel of food with him and during the day he had been preparing a goulash for his first night aboard. Very much on our best behaviour, Ray and I laid the table and sat down while this vast man doled out, with incredibly neat movements, beautifully cooked rice which he had cooked with lemon – plus his delicious red goulash. He had, he said, made enough to last us a couple of days and when he saw how successful he had been promised to make us ‘Matrosen Fleisch’ next, which he said meant ‘sailor’s meat’ and was a mixture of beef and anchovies: Ray looked a little doubtful but I liked the sound of it.

  Our next stop was to visit my daughter’s former German mistress who had come to teach in a boys’ school in Metten. She was a brisk German girl who had tried very hard to get to understand the British by taking enormous walks round London and the suburbs. Her view of life in London was very refreshing and I had always enjoyed her swift prattle and slight accent. The school she worked in was a fine old school run by monks, who had been recently forced to take in girls. She proudly showed us the library built by the Aram brothers, a fine pair of architects in the eighteenth century. The library had a very interesting cataloguing system which consisted of paintings on the ceiling of the type of books that you were likely to find in the section underneath. For example, if you wanted to find a book on astronomy, you’d look for the picture of the moon and stars. She came to see us off at the landing stage and waved a red silk handkerchief as we slipped away down the river – for some reason I felt homesick at that moment.

  An hour later, we had arrived in Passau and tied up in the middle of the old town where three rivers, the Ilz, the Danube and the Inn meet. Up until the point on the Danube where the Inn meets it, the Inn produces much more water than the Danube and so, by sheer volume of water, the Danube should really be called the Inn. Passau is a fine old town, but on the day we arrived it was clear that something unusual was happening. There were a number of coaches which must have brought a large number of people into the town. I inquired what was going on and was told that the Neo-Nazi Party of Passau had been allowed to hire the town’s official assembly rooms for a meeting. Ever curious, I walked up the hill to have a look and found that there was quite a large crowd, composed mostly of policemen, standing in front of the hall. Inside, the Neo-Nazis were having their meeting, and standing about in the street were the opposition, mostly from the German Green Party who looked very much like the demonstrators who had been campaigning for nuclear disarmament in the 1960s.

  I asked a number of people what it was all about, and it transpired that in Passau there are very serious unemployment problems and the Neo-Nazis were spouting the same old fascist slogans about ‘foreigners out’ that the world had heard in the 1930s. So many Turks have been brought in to do the menial tasks over the past few decades that now that the economy has contracted a bit, it is the poor native German-born workers who are out of work – or so the neo-Nazis say. I watched the crowds surround the Nazis as they left the hall and barrack them as they walked to their buses through a phalanx of police efficiently clad in the most modern types of riot gear. Apart from a few hurled insults nothing happened – except that just about everybody who had been at the demonstration was filmed by a police video unit, using telescopic lenses on a number of cameras dotted round the neighbouring buildings. I felt rather odd now that I was on the official German police files as a demonstrator.

  During the demonstration, I met a gentleman in a beret with a very dirty collar who asked me to come and visit him in his house nearby in the woods. I went to see him and found a veritable Dr Dolittle, completely surrounded by animals which all roamed around in and out of his house, a wooden shack perched on the side of a wooded hill. He explained to me that after his wife had died he had given up regular contact with human beings because he found that animals were far more romantic. He told me that the goose, Anton, was the night watchman and was very fond of his kitten. The lamb and the poodle were the best of friends and all of them got on with Lisa the donkey. The African parrot seemed to care only for him and was perched on his shoulder – hence the soiled collar. He lived a strange life but his passion for the animals was intense and they responded with affection. He told me he had been wounded at the Battle of Stalingrad but had managed somehow to survive. I suppose it was little wonder that after such a war he was particularly interested in seeing that Fascism was not allowed to rear its ugly head again, hence his attendance at the demonstration.

  Passau Cathedral has the world’s largest organ, or so the guidebook would have it. This great machine is extremely beautiful and has 17,000 pipes which make the most magnificent sound. It is one of the most popular attractions in Passau for the tourists who queue up for hours in the cathedral square waiting for the doors to open for the daily concert at noon. I talked to one of the organists who clearly did not approve of the vast numbers of visitors coming to the cathedral and had some very uncharitable things to say about these hordes of people. Musically the organ sounds quite superb and it has a kind of nineteenth-century stereo effect, namely being able to make it sound as though bells were ringing outside the church. I can see
why the tourists flock there, for it is magnificent and should not be missed.

  As we left Passau we were overtaken by a huge barge from Bulgaria with lorries neatly parked on the deck. I asked Captain Frolich, or Captain Non-stop as we had now affectionately named him because he had dredged up this new English phrase which he used frequently, what the purpose of these lorry transports was. It seemed that the Austrians had become annoyed with the number of heavy lorries thundering across their country towards Germany, and had imposed a quota system for lorry movements. The Bulgarians had decided that the best thing for them to do was to build four barges able to transport forty-nine lorries at a time from Bulgaria to Passau. Once safely in Germany, they were unloaded and driven off to their various destinations. It was interesting to see the normal roles being reversed and some more work being put back on to the rivers. The drivers seemed to like it as they sat on the deck by their lorries, playing cards as they sped along on their four-day trip.

  As we passed the junction of the Inn and the Danube there was a marked change in the colour of the water. The Inn must have a lot of chalk in it somewhere upstream because its water was a kind of milky white whereas the Danube is much darker. We did not have far to go until we came to the border post at Obernzell, where we stopped and dutifully showed our papers, to the Germans first, and then to the Austrians posted in a tiny shack directly opposite on the other side of the river. I was surprised to learn that Austria had not yet joined the Common Market.

  An Austrian friend had told me that in Germany they say, ‘The situation is serious but not disastrous,’ and in Austria, ‘The situation is disastrous but not serious.’ I rather looked forward to a little humour after the slightly sombre time that we had had in Germany.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Passau to Vienna

  Our progress down the Danube took on a stately demeanour with Captain Non-stop guiding the boat skilfully through all hazards. He had the most extraordinary eyesight and could pick out the nationality and size of on-coming barges before I could even see them. He would wave only to the captains of barges from Austria and Germany and never to anyone from the Eastern Bloc countries. Ray and I made up for this by waving at just about everyone and getting a satisfactory response. The waving was a relief, staving off boredom as we travelled though mile after mile of densely wooded valleys which swept right down to the water’s edge. From time to time there was the odd strip of field with some old lady dressed as one would imagine a peasant to be dressed, with faded headscarf and canvas apron. Here and there were orchards but for the most part it was Heidi country.

  On the northern shore, the tourist department has come up with a marvellous arrangement for cycling holidays. Because the Danube has been tamed to some extent with dams and locks, the towpath or access road is flat, perfect for the middle-aged cyclist. Moreover, spaced along the Danube are guesthouses run not by hotel chains as they would be anywhere else, but by individual families who take a pride in having the same people back year after year.

  We stopped one night at the pontoon at Schlögen, which is so called because the giant bend in the river looks like a giant sling. The family that owned a big old guesthouse there had festooned it with the heads of wild boar and whatever else they had hunted over the years. They had taken hunting trips to Hungary by river all through the Cold War – the division of Europe seemed to make very little difference to them or, probably, to the wild boar. I should have thought that once you had one savage head up on the wall, licking its chops and staring at you in the dining room while you ate, you would have found it quite sufficient, but the family who decorated this place seemed to have a passion for these sombre beasts. I found out afterwards that they also bred wild boar in a small farm hidden in the forests – explaining why there were so many different dishes made from the indigestible meat on their menu.

  The Captain slipped back to his wife in Linz and we stayed for a day in Schlögen to try to repair the battery charger which was causing us a good deal of difficulty. There is nothing so important, except of course a sound hull, as the electricity supply on a boat. Our generator was working beautifully but the batteries were not recharging properly. The batteries were the backbone of the system: we had something called an inverter to convert our 24-volt DC current to 220 volts AC, vital for all the small modern appliances that we have come to rely on so heavily, such as electric razors and battery chargers for radios. We found in the local town, thanks to the Captain’s information, a battery dealer who could supply us with a suitably powerful battery charger. He was a young man but insisted on talking to me like some Austrian count in an operetta. Constantly calling me, ‘My dear Mr Goodwin’, he gave me the giggles, causing me to lose my way completely with his strictures about ampere hours and overheating. The gentleman he sent to fix the battery charger into the boat thought it was very funny and though he could not speak English imitated his boss, ‘My dear Mr Goodwin’, perfectly and we all laughed a good deal about this incredibly stilted phrase.

  The Captain arrived early the next morning with a plastic bag of lunch which he started to prepare as soon as he set foot on board. This time it was his favourite goulash again – paprika, beef, thinly sliced onions, kümmel (a German liqueur, flavoured with aniseed and cumin) and masses of garlic – which the Captain adored. I did not mind it but Ray is one of those unfortunates who are made quite sick by such a dish, so we had an awkward moment when Ray finally indicated that he could not eat any of the Captain’s masterpiece. During the morning we had passed through some of the most beautiful countryside on the Danube and had stopped at another pontoon to enjoy our goulash. All these pontoons are owned and operated by the DDSG, which stands for Donau-Dampschiffarhtgesellschaft, a semi-governmental company which takes care of all the official Austrian trading on the Danube. The pontoons are made up of substantial tanks, held away from the shore by massive pine logs, allowing deep-draught vessels to come alongside and also coping with the considerable rise and fall in the river level during the year.

  The Captain and I could converse now in some strange language that we both seemed to understand which was hardly German nor was it English, but he was able to give an impression of life on the Danube and of how it is changing, with bigger and faster craft owned by huge national concerns replacing those owned by individuals or family companies, making the whole river more impersonal. The boat people on the river had a fierce independence and were not very happy with the imposition of national rules on their lives; they would make the most complicated plans to avoid stopping in countries like Rumania, where even the shortest stop would mean hours of paper checking and handing out Kent Long Filter cigarettes, which have become a currency in Rumania. I am told that if you want anything done, there is a tariff measured in packs and cartons of this particular brand. Apparently the only people who actually smoke these cigarettes are prostitutes, who do so for effect.

  That evening we pulled into a village called Neuhaus Oberzell which had been completely rebuilt higher up the hill on which it stood, after the valley was flooded when the dams were built to harness the wild river in the 1960s. This village is on a very pretty bend in the river and we went alongside the quay on one side of the village square. As we tied up, a brisk white-haired gentleman hurried up to the boat and asked what we were doing on the ‘Blue Danube’ and without waiting for an answer asked why we had a large antenna on the boat. I explained that we had a short-wave radio and his eyes lit up: he was a short-wave enthusiast. He at once invited us to go and see his ‘shack’ in the top of his house. We accepted, but there was a certain amount of discussion about the time and he was obviously strictly controlled by his wife. We agreed to go to his house at eight; he said we would recognize it by the antennae on the roof. He promised to get in touch with England for us, which seemed a pretty dotty idea.

  The world of the amateur radio ham is truly quite unlike anything else. The greatest television sketch ever to be filmed on the subject is without question Tony Hancock
’s piece, ‘The Radio Ham’, which follows the inanities of their contacts. Radio hams spend a great deal of money on their equipment and their conversations are confined to what the weather is like in their part of the world, what type of equipment they have and what they are transmitting on at that particular moment. Finding the shack was not difficult: in a village with no more than ten houses the one with aerials festooning the roof was fairly easy to identify.

  Our new friend introduced himself with, ‘The handle is Herman.’ His callsign, which we were to hear many times that evening, was Ocean Echo Five Delta India Lima. He made good his promise and called up a contact in Truro in Cornwall called Tony and I had to suppress a fit of giggles when they went into their ‘What’s the weather like?’ routine; ‘Yes, it is raining here also.’ His shack was the top of the house, squashed out of his wife’s way, in a small room which was completely stuffed with equipment of all sorts. He was able to bounce signals off satellites and do all manner of things that a simple phone call would do at a tiny fraction of the cost. The appeal lay, he said, in never knowing with whom you would be exchanging news. Herman was a doctor and had been in charge of public health for the whole of upper Austria until his retirement some years ago. Since then he had devoted his considerable energies to his hobby and to making radio commercials for public health on Austrian radio. He called up another couple of his mates and then confided that the Kings of Jordan and Spain were keen radio hams. I asked, tongue-in-cheek, whether there was a private network for royalty, but he replied very seriously that there was not. He signed off to his callers with, ‘See you down the log,’ the log being a list of all the contacts he had made and their addresses so that he could send one of the postcards he had had printed of himself at his transmitter with his call-sign emblazoned over his head. Herman would also wish people 73s which apparently meant ‘kind regards’ in CB talk; 99 means ‘shut up’. As we left he kindly gave us a bag of organically grown apples.