Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  The fine municipal museum at Keszthely, the town at the western tip of Balaton, contained a permanent exhibition that revealed something of the lives of the lake people. The lake provided for them and bound them to it. It shaped every important aspect of existence, so that its horizons became their horizons. They stitched nets and wove traps of wicker to lure eels and catfish. They made their homes from reed and willow poles and mud. They shot ducks and geese. They fashioned fishing spears with six-or eight-barbed prongs to impale carp and bream as they spawned and eels as they quested for food. They shaped their canoes from single tree trunks and carved sledges and skates for scooting across the ice.

  The museum’s old photographs lifted the curtain on another time. Dark, muffled figures gathered around holes in the ice, waiting for the fish to bite. Two brawny fishermen in waistcoats and pork-pie hats, sleeves rolled up for business, one with a long pipe clenched between his teeth, paddled their canoe across a bay towards the reeds. A spear-fisher stood erect in the prow of a boat, his weapon raised to strike.

  Another picture showed a group gathered in a clearing near the shore in front of a pair of reed huts, a social function clearly in progress. Bottles and bread were arranged on a rough table. A pot of spicy fish stew hung over a fire. A cone-shaped fish trap lay on the grass in the foreground. The men were all in jackets or waistcoats, most with black moustaches, most smoking, one with glasses and a spreading white beard. You could almost smell fish in the air.

  There was no date on it, but the timing must have been about right. Could one of these fellows caught by the camera on Balaton’s shore possibly be Michael Varga? Or perhaps his father or uncle?

  All I knew of Michael Varga was that he was a Balaton fisherman, active in the years after the Great War, who had known everything a fisherman could about the great carp of the lake. He appears towards the end of a wonderful book called Confessions of a Carp Fisher, which was published in 1950, the year before my birth. Loosely modelled on de Quincey’s memoir, it is an account of carp and carp waters and the obsessive behaviour they can inspire, and was written – mostly – and illustrated by the writer and artist known as BB, whose real name was Denys Watkins-Pitchford.

  The title page of BB’s classic

  The final chapter, entitled ‘King of the Carp’, was borrowed by BB from a German book called Horgaszbottal sent to him by a correspondent. It provides a magical snapshot of Balaton towards the end of its age of innocence. The author, one Wilhelm Kovácsházy, relates how for ten years after the end of the First World War he travelled there each season for the fishing. Initially he was after fogas, the pike-perch. But as a result of a chance meeting on the train he is told about the carp, and advised to seek the services of the fisherman Michael Varga.

  He comes upon Varga at the boathouse at Balatongyörök, across the bay from Szigliget, and asks him where to go to catch carp. Varga takes him along the reedbeds to a little inlet which he baits up with maize. Over the next few days he comes each morning soon after dawn and catches good carp. One morning, with the mist still on the water, he hooks a monster at least four and a half feet long. After an epic struggle it breaks free, but not before he has noticed five curious gleaming points on its shoulder, shaped like a crown. He tells Varga about this disaster. When he mentions the curious markings, Varga shakes his head. That was the King of the Carp, he explains. ‘He is nearly twice as big as the second largest fish of the lake. Perhaps that is the first time in his life that he has felt a hook. So don’t feel grieved that you lost him, be grateful that he didn’t drag you into the water.’

  All the time the spell of Balaton grows on Kovácsházy. One day in June Michael Varga finds him sitting by the water. ‘Sir, the carp are spawning,’ he cries. Together they make their way across to the mouth of the Tapolca Brook, which enters the lake under the gaze of the castle at Szigliget. At that time, Kovácsházy explains, the flat basin between the lake and the town of Tapolca about five miles to the north was a reedy marsh speckled with ponds into which the carp made their way each year to spawn.

  Varga and the angler sit and watch. Families of 20 or 30 carp, tightly packed, glide through the shallow water into the brook and disappear upstream. The volume of arrivals increases, until there are thousands. ‘They passed us in hosts and throngs … like a living chain’, many of 20 pounds, some of 30 and more. The procession goes on and on. ‘The scales in their nuptial splendour refracted the sunbeams and dipped the whole wedding procession into a sea of glittering colours of yellow, pink, brown, purple and greenish hue. It seemed as if all jewels and all the colours of the rainbow were being reflected in this mass of fishes.’

  Some time in the 1930s the whole of the Tapolca marsh was drained. The various muddy streams that crept through it – including the Tapolca Brook – were regulated, embanked and blocked by hatch-gates, leaving the carp to find somewhere else for their reproductive business. But although the area was regulated to a degree, it remains rough, uncultivated and largely empty of people. The nearer to the lake, the wilder it becomes. Groves of big willows and poplars rise from pools of stagnant water, giving way to a thick belt of reeds, well above head-height, a tawny, rustling jungle cut by dark channels. Enclosed within it, I felt the other Balaton, the brochure Balaton, slip away.

  I spent a long, hot afternoon following the paths through this whispering wilderness, looking for the place where the angler and Michael Varga had watched the procession of the carp. In the end I located the Tapolca Brook, which ran from the road towards the lake beside a straight line of poplars, before winding around the edge of the village of Szigliget. I crossed it by a footbridge and came to a cluster of decaying brick buildings, some of which were being used to store reeds cut for thatching. Beyond, the brook widened into a creek. Every yard of bank was claimed by a boat of some kind. I followed the path as far as I could, but it stopped short of the exit to open water. Briefly I contemplated borrowing a boat to paddle out, but they were all firmly chained and padlocked, which would never have been the case in Michael Varga’s day.

  The next bridge along the road towards Keszthely crossed a dark rivulet making its way furtively towards the lake. The sign beside it identified it as the Viszló, which reminded me of my intention to find out what had happened to Hungary’s only trout stream. I still had the map I had acquired on my previous visit, which showed it winding off to the west of Tapolca. I stopped at a couple of places where the road crossed its course, and explored up and down. It was exactly as had been prophesied: the bed was grass, weeds, dry earth and stones. The stream was no more.

  Tapolca, on the other hand, was looking refreshed and revived by the death of bauxite mining. It had turned its back on the hideous industrial sprawl left by the Baksony Bauxite Company along its western side, which was decaying fast. It looked busy, prosperous, distinctly spick and span.

  It is an old settlement, and interesting both historically and geologically. The centre is built around two small artificial lakes fed by springs that reach deep underground. One lake is higher than the other, and they are connected by a chute installed to drive the wheel of the mill that stands on the spit of land between them. The wheel is still there, turning picturesquely but unprofitably, attached to the side of what is now a rather delightful hotel. The millponds and the old buildings and walls and gardens around them form one of Tapolca’s major visitor attractions. The other is a cavern containing a subterranean lagoon which – like the millponds – is fed from the reservoirs beneath the layer of karst on which the whole region sits.

  As well as devastating the landscape, bauxite mining played havoc with the region’s complex water table. Pumps ran day and night to keep the mine shafts workable. There were incidental beneficiaries – such as the Viszló and its trout – but overall the impact was disastrous. Periodically Tapolca’s millponds and caverns ran dry, while at Hévíz – way to the west – Europe’s largest thermal lake threatened to disappear. Protests were raised, but the bauxite took precedence over
everything else. No more. Now Hévíz is smiling again, the Tapolca cave is full, and the millponds are brimming.

  I had my breakfast on the terrace overlooking the upper lake. The surface was glass-smooth, the reflections of the walls and old buildings around its edge unbroken. Then the glass was gently, silently fractured. A silver-haired gent in shorts, with a comfortable stomach, guided a sky-blue boat across the water. It was powered by a small, noiseless electric motor, and attached to the bow was a wide net arranged to trap the clods of algae that had risen to the surface during the previous day, as well as cans, bottles and the like. The boat glided here and there until the silver-haired gent was satisfied that he had gathered up all the unsightly stuff. He took out the litter with a long-handled net, then carefully steered the algae over the outflow, whereupon it dissolved in the foamy water at the bottom.

  The operation was conducted without fuss or hurry, in a way very pleasing to the onlooker. What a very useful, worthwhile job, I thought, as I sipped my coffee.

  Afterwards I strolled around the water admiring the fish. There were thousands of them, great and small. Shoals of minnows and little roach darkened the gaps between the weedbeds. Goldfish sunned themselves just beneath the surface, some pale, almost white, some a burnished carrot red, a few actually gold.

  The top dogs, however, were the carp. They paddled around in slow, dignified style, tilting their snouts down or to the side to take in some choice morsel, casting large, important shadows on the bottom. Some were koi, mottled in outlandish shades of white, gold and black. But there were also common carp and mirror carp, stately grey shapes with wide shoulders and big, questing mouths: descendants, quite possibly, of the fish Michael Varga and the angler watched in the procession up the Tapolca brook long ago.

  Chapter 11

  Saturday in Žilina

  A TREMENDOUS, CRUSHING heat pressed down from a sky drained of almost all colour. By late morning the thermometer registered 38 degrees. The surface of the lake was ruffled by a wind that felt as if someone had opened the oven door. Sailing boats like little cut-out paper shapes danced over the ripples. To the south, beyond the lake, pavilions and ramparts of cumulo-nimbus were building as the air rose against the hills. The slopes of the Malá Fatra hills to the east were grey-blue humps, so indistinct they looked as if they might disappear at any moment.

  I had been invited by my new friend, Peter Bienek, to meet his partner, Petra, and their two children, as well as their respective parents. They all lived in Žilina, a town in north-west Slovakia tucked beneath the westernmost finger of the Carpathians in the valley cut by the River Váh as it bends south towards the Danube. The venue for lunch was Peter’s father’s weekend holiday home, which sounds a touch Cotswolds or Cornish fishing village but was nothing of the sort, just a basic retreat a couple of miles out of town.

  In the days of the regimes these refuges from the grime and smoke of the factory zones, and the cheek-by-jowl communal life of the apartment blocks, were prized beyond price and invested with almost sacred significance. The plots were usually spread across an accessible hillside that the urban planners had deemed surplus to industrial or housing needs. The custom was to grow fruit and vegetables, but also to install a simple dwelling of brick or wood fitted out for basic living. These places provided food and something even more precious: a measure of privacy, freedom from surveillance and state nagging, a place to relax and be normal.

  Peter’s father’s cabin had a single room which acted as kitchen and living quarters, a separate shower, and an outside earth closet. To one side there was a makeshift awning of plastic sheeting attached to wooden beams, under which the families were gathered, dressed for maximum comfort. Peter’s father, Pavol, tall, grey-haired, tanned, wore blue shorts below a bronzed torso brushed with drifts of silver hair. Peter’s father-in-law, Ivan, was even more minimally dressed, in a pair of brief, electric-blue swimming trunks that fitted snugly beneath a generous swell of stomach. Peter’s mother, Tatiana, her hair cut short and dyed a striking white-blonde, glasses poised on a beaky nose in front of quick, eager eyes, wore a shapeless floral dress. His mother-in-law, Janka, wore a bikini and a worried look that never left her face. She looked after Peter and Petra’s little daughter, Sára, so that Petra could go to work for a pharmaceuticals company. A few days before there had been a fall in the playground, as a result of which Sára was sporting a starburst of black stitches in the middle of her forehead.

  The adult company was completed, for the time being, by Petra’s grandmother, who lay back in a chaise longue in the corner, holding her stick and gazing mistily into the middle distance, saying almost nothing. Peter told me she had been like this for a year or so, since her husband’s death. They were all very kind and attentive to her, but she was too immersed in her memories and grief to respond.

  I was offered a glass of red wine. I was parched after a very hot and sweaty morning’s fishing with Peter, and asked if there was any beer. Consternation. A single bottle was all they had. Peter was sent off to the town to get more. His mother and father, and Petra’s father, took turns to poke at a stack of chicken wings smoking on the barbecue. I caught glimpses inside the cabin of a slim, pretty woman in denim shorts and striped blue shirt, looking anxious. The little girl tottered around from grandparent to grandparent, hands continually reaching out towards her lest she trip. At one point the grandparents’ committee decided she was ready for a sleep, and she was taken inside. Loud cries of protest ensued. She reappeared and the petting and cooing resumed.

  Ivan, it turned out, had worked for some time as a hydro-engineer in Nigeria where he had acquired a smattering of English. He now took it upon himself to converse with me. Screwing up his face under his bunch of tight grey curls, he squeezed out some words. Nigerians, very nice people. But working there, very difficult. Weather in Žilina very hot. How was fishing? Very hot, I said. Nigeria very hot, he said.

  Peter Bienek with trout

  Peter came back with the beer. He was twenty years younger than me and looked another ten years younger than that. He had a pale, boyish face, fine, sandy hair, glasses, an expression of innocence and slight surprise. He had a naturally quick, restless way; being still and quiet seemed to be a trial to him. He spoke good English and talked a lot to me, mainly about fishing, which was both his obsession and his livelihood. He and a business partner owned four fishing tackle shops, one of them in Žilina, which Peter managed. This meant that he talked fishing, thought fishing, or went fishing much of every day. This suited Peter well enough but was clearly the source of some tension between him and Petra.

  The family ambience and the need to attend to parental duties seemed to diminish his usual vivacity. His mother, in contrast, was full of beans. She and Pavol had just returned from a holiday in Tunisia, hence their deep tans. To me, still struggling to adjust to the changed contexts, it seemed extraordinary, almost unreal, that an ordinary retired couple from a provincial town in Slovakia should holiday in North Africa; whereas what was truly extraordinary was that they thought no more of it than a couple from Redditch or Goole would. Tunisia, she said, was very good, very hot. She pressed chicken wings on me, and chunks of grilled pork. I ate one plateful, drank my beer, did my best with another plateful. Across the lake the mountains of cloud darkened.

  Peter’s sister Andrea arrived with her husband, two children, a little dog and some salad. Husband, children and dog disappeared in the direction of the paddling pool and I did not encounter them again. Andrea sported a bikini that registered a refreshing disregard for the body-beautiful norms promoted by the beauty magazines. There was a good deal of body on show, but she clearly cared not a hoot about such trivial matters as varicose veins, the effect of gravity, cellulite, a roll of flesh here and there. It was the weekend, the sun was shining, it was time to unbutton and let go. She was a nurse and had worked in Italy, so we talked some Italian together, and she was very jolly.

  Eventually the little girl did go to sleep for a ti
me, in a pushchair at the bottom of the garden, with her mother on guard beside her. I went and sat with her and we talked in whispers. Petra had lived in London for a year, working as an au pair. I asked how she had liked it. London was good, she said, but she hadn’t seen much of the rest of England. The family she worked for were Jewish Orthodox, very strict. The children were very quiet, very polite, very clever. The father read from the Torah every evening and they hardly ever went out.

  Her life in Žilina struck me as too full of anxieties for one so young. Her job meant leaving Sára with her mother every day. It was too much to ask, but the job was good and they needed the money. Samuel, their son, was at school but there were problems with his behaviour and it worried her when he played with Sára. Then there was Peter and his fishing. Her face manifested an infinity of exasperation.

  I had encountered plenty of cases of extreme fishing mania before, so I knew what she meant. It was particularly acute in his case because he was the mainstay of the national fly-fishing team, and had represented Slovakia in a total of seven world championships in countries as far distant as Australia, Finland, England and – most recently – New Zealand. The New Zealand trip, lasting three weeks, had taken place when Sára was eight months old. Moreover he was away at least one full day nearly every weekend, taking part in regional competitions, and practised like a demon in between.

  ‘Do you know about the house?’ she asked. I did because Peter had taken me to see it.

  Together, like a nice, normal couple, they had agreed to buy a nice, normal new house on the outskirts of Žilina and move out of their cramped apartment. But one day Peter was passing through a village a few miles out of town on his way to the river when he came upon a plot of land for sale. There was a wrecked dwelling on it, unfit for habitation. Behind, choked by uncut grass, was a neglected orchard of apple and pear trees – and beyond the orchard was a little creek, with trout in it. Peter showed me along it, pointing out a little pool here, a potential spawning gravel there. It’s perfect, he said, though I wasn’t entirely sure for whom.