by Tom Fort
My position as fishing correspondent for the Financial Times made me, in the eyes of the Hungarian Anglers’ Federation, a visitor of some importance. Mr Csákó welcomed me warmly. He had a full head of silver hair, well greased and brushed back, and a suave smile that revealed two rows of dark, crooked teeth glinting with gold repairs. I heard later that Mr Csákó had previously worked in the Party’s youth wing and that on becoming assistant-secretary to the Anglers’ Federation, he had intrigued and plotted against his boss there whom he had eventually discredited and supplanted. He was said to be savage and tyrannical towards subordinates, but to me he was all genial charm. With a flourish he presented me with a printed itinerary for my stay, which invited me to deploy my ‘professional skill’ in pursuit of Hungary’s fish.
To my dismay I realised, too late, that I had fallen into the stifling embrace of officialdom.
The following day, in accordance with the programme, I returned to the Federation’s offices. Mr Csákó was absent on business even more important than me. The Federation’s interpreter, a lively, loquacious old bird called Eva Deszenyi, introduced me to his deputy, Mr Attila Hunyadi. Mr Hunyadi was a large, shambling figure with a bright red, memorably ugly face, and spectacles so powerful that, from certain angles, they made his eyeballs appear to be the size of melons. He greeted me with great enthusiasm, pumping my arm up and down and pressing on me copies of the Federation’s magazine, consisting largely of articles written by him and illustrated with photographs of him clasping fat carp and hideous catfish to his chest.
He led the way out of Budapest in his aged Wartburg, with Madame Deszenyi and I driving behind. As we passed through the suburbs I learned something of her history. She and her family had fled Hungary after the 1956 uprising, and had ended up in Australia. She was still very bitter towards the Australian immigration authorities: ‘We are refugees but because we have passports they think there is something wrong with us, that we are Communist or something. So we come back. I am glad. I never like that country.’
She spoke five or six languages and had been able to make a reasonable living as an interpreter. But now there were so many problems in Hungary. Prices. Jobs. The cost of a flat. Her hands fluttered anxiously. Her daughter was living in Spain, married to a circus acrobat, except that he was too old to manage the high wire any more. She would like her daughter to come back, but where to live? How to work?
I asked her about the Federation. She pointed to the rear of Mr Hunyadi’s Wartburg, part obscured by blue fumes. ‘That Attila, he is a good man, not like Csákó, but all he thinks about is fish. He has a daughter, very ugly like him. I don’t how he did what he must do to make her because he is always fishing! Soon I think he will not have job. The Federation has offices everywhere in Hungary, and camps and pensions and managers. How can we pay for that?’
We reached the Pilis Mountains, which are not mountains at all but a range of low hills north-west of Budapest. Pretty enough once, no doubt, they had been sacrificed to the Hungarian passion for weekend retreats, and were covered in a patchwork of fenced plots, each with its verandah-fronted cabin, vegetable patch and orchard. Near the small town of Pilisvörösvár a stream had been dammed to create a muddy little lake surrounded by potato fields and weekend cottages. At one end was a substantial two-storey building which was the Federation’s guest-house.
On arrival, Mr Hunyadi summoned the manager, then addressed me at some length. Madame Deszenyi did not bother to translate. ‘He is telling you about the fish. I do not know the names in English. They are fish.’ We toured the lake. There were anglers all around, except for the section in front of the guest-house which was reserved for me. It was sizzlingly hot and many of the anglers were asleep on the bank in front of their cars, radios blaring unheard beside them.
Madame Deszenyi informed me that any sizeable fish I caught would be cooked for me by the manager’s wife. I said that in England the kind of fish found in a lake like this – bream, roach, carp – were invariably returned alive. This information was relayed to Mr Hunyadi and the manager, who refused to believe it. This was a joke, an example of the famously obscure English sense of humour. I persisted and eventually convinced them. Their incomprehension and scorn were boundless. ‘They want to know why English people go fishing if they don’t like to eat fish. They want to know what you do with the fish.’ I said something about looking at them and enjoying their beauty. There were more gales of hilarity.
I spent two days in this depressing place, with only the manager’s silent, expressionless wife, and occasionally the manager himself, for company. I caught no fish, although I cannot say I tried very hard. It was not my kind of fishing at all. From Pilisvörösvár I drove to the next place on my programme, the Federation’s guest-house on Lake Velence, a biggish sheet of water about an hour’s drive south-west of Budapest. It was full of German and Austrian anglers whose favourite subjects of conversation were the decline of the fishing and the hopeless incompetence of Hungarians in all fields of human endeavour.
One morning a storm broke just as we were all preparing to go out in the boats. A gang of workmen who had been retiling the roof fled, leaving the upper-floor sitting room exposed to the rain. One of the Germans led our party up the stairs to inspect the damage. Water was pouring through the ceiling, spattering on the tables and soaking into the upholstery. Chunks of sodden plaster lay on the bulging cork-tile floor. The manageress appeared with a mop and some buckets. The Germans rocked with laughter. Had it never rained in Hungary before? Had they never heard of plastic sheeting? What a country! What a people! What a system!
Lake Velence – murky, suburban, grossly over-fished and visibly polluted – did nothing to lift my spirits. Balaton – the great lake further to the south-west, commonly referred to in guidebooks as ‘the Hungarian Sea’ – was even more dispiriting because of the greater scale of the crime against it. Virtually the whole of this amazing natural wonder had been converted into an aquatic holiday park, mainly for the benefit of Germans from the lower socio-economic levels, for whom it represented a cheap and convenient playground where they could have fun and throw their weight about. Most of them seemed to regard Hungary as a de facto province of Germany, and the Hungarians as a subject race whose role was to serve and count the deutschmarks.
Mr Csákó’s programme directed me to the Anglers’ Federation complex on the tip of the Tihany peninsular, which thrusts out like a thumb about a third of the way down the northern shore of Lake Balaton. The camp was full of German anglers, intent upon catching and taking home in their camper-van freezers as many of Balaton’s carp and famous fogas (pike-perch) as they could get their hands on. As a result the staff were generally too busy carrying out their orders to pay much attention to me.
One hot afternoon I scrambled up the bluff behind the camp and spent some time sitting on an outcrop staring across the milky blue expanse of the lake, trying to imagine what it must have been like before the beast of mass tourism was unleashed. Later I wandered into the village of Tihany, which occupies a fabulous position, high above the water. It is an ancient settlement; the bones of the Árpád king, Andrew I, have lain for 950 years in the abbey crypt. Around the abbey are narrow streets of little cottages, built of volcanic tufa, from which the fishermen of Balaton once scanned the waters that sustained them and their families. That past had been comprehensively buried by the lava flow of visitors. The cottages were all souvenir shops now, and the nets draped outside were purely decorative. The stalls clogging the approaches to the abbey all sold the same baskets, the same chess sets and plastic dolls, the same mediocre pottery and embroidery. The stall-holders were united in a single purpose: laying their hands on more of the deutschmarks stuffed into the pockets of the Bermuda shorts swaying past.
‘We have become … I don’t know the word … people who ask for money in the street.’
‘Beggars.’
‘That is it.’ Susan Péterfi gave me a strained smile. I had the impression
that she did not want to say the word. We were in her office in the Academy of Science in Veszprém, a historic town north of Balaton whose unhappy fate had been to find itself in the middle of Hungary’s main bauxite mining region. Susan had been drafted in by a friend of hers who was the Anglers’ Federation manager for the Veszprém district to explain the next stage in my programme. Instead we were discussing the condition of Hungary. Eleven months before, the barbed-wire fence along the border with Austria had been torn down, allowing a flood of East Germans to pour into the West. Eight months before, the People’s Republic of Hungary had reverted to being the Republic. In March 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed to withdraw Russian forces, and free elections had been held.
But Susan was far from exhilarated by the upheavals. ‘It’s true, for at least we have got rid of the Russians,’ she said. ‘But I am afraid what will happen now. You have seen the tourists. So many Germans coming with their deutschmarks, and we are here with our hands like this.’ She cupped her hand at me. ‘It is the same with everything. They say our industry will only live if it has German investment, but what is our future if we can’t make it ourselves?’
From Veszprém I crossed a landscape wounded and scarred by mining operations to reach Tapolca where I met Susan’s friend, Rajnai Árpád, who had been appointed by the Anglers’ Federation to accompany me to Hungary’s one and only trout stream. We drove out of town, past an immense bauxite complex encrusted in filth, through rolling grasslands until we came to a gentle, wooded dale where we stopped. I could see no sign of any running water. My companion, who spoke German but almost no English, signalled to me to follow him as he forged his way through a wall of vegetation. I found him standing on the edge of a high bank below which flowed the Viszló, no more than ten feet wide and apparently ten deep, unnervingly clear with thick tresses of coarse green weed.
Rajnai pointed at it and made casting motions. I pointed at the thickets that rose from both banks, almost meeting overhead, and tried to make him understand that fly-fishing would not be possible. He nodded and showed me his rod, which was about four feet long and designed for flicking a spinner under low branches. He set off on his own into the undergrowth. I spent a very hot and annoying afternoon battling my way downstream in search of open spaces. Every now and then I caught glimpses of the Viszló as it tunnelled its way in the direction of Lake Balaton. In one or two spots I actually managed to land a fly in the water. The weed seethed with shrimp and other invertebrate life, but of trout or any other fish I saw nothing.
The little river was doomed anyway. Susan Péterfi had told me that the water in it came from deep underground and was pumped into it as a by-product of bauxite extraction. The mine was due to close the following year, whereupon the Viszló would cease to flow.
Chapter 9
The fishiest river
THE TUMBLING DOWN of the worm-eaten structures of the old system had cleared space in Hungary, as elsewhere, for a breed of eager entrepreneurs to sprout like mustard-and-cress. During the few days I had spent in Budapest immediately after my arrival, I had made contact with one of them, Tamás Hajas. He was dark, bearded, snappily dressed, and smoked a lot of Marlboros, all the time tapping his fingers, brown eyes darting hither and thither, perpetually on the lookout for new business openings. He worked for a German company that sold sporting equipment, and also organised fishing and hunting trips for foreign clients. Through the interpreter he’d brought with him, he launched into a tirade against the Anglers’ Federation.
‘They are his enemies. They are Stalinists. They are only interested in keeping their power and stopping people like him. He says everything must change. Organisations like the Federation are finished. He says … oh, so many things.’ The interpreter’s voice hardened. ‘Mr Hajas has lived in Vienna,’ she added sarcastically. ‘He knows how they do things in the West.’
I didn’t much care for him either. But an invitation to accompany him to his fishing camp on the Tisza, the river of Hungary’s Great Plain, was opportune. Mr Csákó’s programme had made me heartily sick of Anglers’ Federation lodges, bauxite mines, German pothunters, suburbanised countryside and murky lakes. I knew nothing much about the Tisza but the name alone seemed to hold out the promise of something more elemental and less dull. Without telling Mr Csákó, I accepted. After returning to Budapest from Lake Balaton, I rendezvoused with Hajas and followed his car east towards the Great Plain.
His camp was near a riverside settlement called Kisköre, where the Tisza had been dammed to create a lake into which its notoriously destructive winter floods could be diverted. The lake was taking its time to fill, and in the meantime the river flowed past strings of islands that separated it from a network of meres, lagoons and marshes. As a result of some shadowy deal with a malleable official, Hajas had managed to obtain a lease on one of these islands. The arrangement was not sanctioned by the Anglers’ Federation, hence the state of war between them.
The camp had an improvised air about it. It consisted of a cluster of canvas tents in a clearing, the biggest of which was the kitchen and, for want of a better word, dining area. Salamis, smoked sausages and cheeses dangled from the overhead frame. A canvas larder, crammed with duck eggs and various leftovers, hung from the main strut. The table supported a battery of bottles of beer and palinka, the Hungarian spirit distilled from plums or apricots. Discarded cans and bottles were scattered across the ground outside, along with rat-gnawed loaves of stale bread. A short distance away was a little tent like a telephone box: a Russian-style shit-house, I was informed. One glance into its miasmal interior was enough to immobilise my bowels for the length of my stay.
The kitchen faced the soapy green water of a lagoon. A path led from the camp in the other direction to a wide expanse of yellowish water moving from right to left with massive serenity. This was the Tisza.
The plan was for me to be left at the camp in the care of a grimy, unshaven, dark-skinned fellow called Csaba. He spoke only Hungarian, of which the one word I could pronounce with confidence at that time was gulyás, so sparkling conversation was not in prospect. But a party of Germans was expected the next day, and it was confidently predicted that at least one of them would speak English. I couldn’t see that this would help much unless they also spoke Hungarian, but I kept my thoughts to myself.
Before returning to the relentless pursuit of business opportunities in Budapest, Hajas had time for a brief excursion. He and I, together with a hunting chum of his called Zoltán who spoke fluent English, headed upstream in the camp boat. Storms in the past few days had raised the river and given it its jaundiced colour. The weather was hot and menacing, the sun a hazy ball in a colourless sky, the air still and heavy. Hajas steered the boat towards what looked like an unbroken bed of reeds, which parted at the last moment to reveal a channel just wider than our craft.
We followed it into open water. Ahead, poised on a branch of a waterlogged tree, was a bird about the size of a chicken with plumage the shade of dead reeds and a sharp, olive beak. It was a bittern, the first I had ever seen. We entered a forest of drowned trees. In the far distance the steeple of a church pricked the sky. Cormorants and herons watched us from the skeletons of the trees. Hajas took us into a wide channel, the water dead still and dark as night.
This was the old Tisza, as it had been before engineering rearranged it to a more convenient place. Beds of water lilies extended from the fringes, ruffled towards the centre where the flowers tilted up, dazzling white, with golden, nectarous stamens into which bees and butterflies dipped hungrily. The water was clear over the black mud. We cast spinners into likely spots while Hajas talked of fishing. On the water he relaxed and seemed more human, less of a caricature of the slick, eager money-man. Once, he said, he caught 90 pike along this channel, in one day. That was in autumn, when the pike fed. Winter was even better; you could fish through the ice or crunch across it to shoot duck and geese.
We caught nothing. We went back to the camp and Hajas and Zol
tán left for Budapest. Under the influence of several doses of palinka, I went to sleep in my tent for a time. When I woke up, I wandered back to the river. Large pale insects were lifting themselves from the surface into uncertain flight. The numbers increased gradually until the air above the water was pulsing with them. Along the banks objects like little broken twigs surfaced and broke open to reveal segmented bodies and translucent wings struggling to dry. I recognised the insect as the mayfly, known here as the Tisza Flower. At home, on the chalkstreams of Hampshire and Wiltshire, the mayfly’s season roused trout into a frenzy of feasting. On the Tisza the feasting was left to the ducks and moorhens, cruising the fringes with their beaks open, and to great squadrons of swallows and wagtails that skimmed and swooped, intercepting insects in mid-air or dipping low to pluck them off the surface, leaving minute rings in the water.
By evening enormous clouds of mayfly had formed above the flag irises and marigolds along the banks and around the branches of the trees. The male of the species rises and falls as it lies in wait for a passing female, and en masse the vertical oscillation is suggestive of some kind of ecstatic ballet. In fact the up-and-down movement is simply more energy-efficient than hovering, and enables the eyes on top of the creature’s head to remain focused on its air space and any potential partner ahead. After mating, the males soon perish from exhaustion, while the females rest for a time in the trees and bushes, before the final metamorphosis in which they shed their body coverings, lay their eggs on the water, and die.
Each afternoon I watched this amazing, silent show. I also went fishing with Csaba and caught absolutely nothing, the Hungarian word for which – semmi – was added to my vocabulary, together with nem ehes, which means ‘not hungry’. Csaba would grin and point at the soupy water, indicating that conditions were not favourable. We became so desperate we even tried spearing carp in a reedy bay off the lagoon, but they fled at our approach. The German party did not materialise.
