Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  I tried to reassure Petra. It’s a lovely, peaceful place, I said. The garden will be perfect for the children. And the creek, she answered crossly. And how long will it take? Two years, maybe three. If the money doesn’t run out first. She laughed her exasperated laugh. ‘He is mad,’ she declared. ‘This fishing is madness.’ I conceded she might have a point.

  Sára woke up. I was allowed to retire inside the cabin for a nap. When I woke up I was plied with Spanish brandy by the two fathers. Under its influence Petra’s father managed to unlock more of his store of English.

  The subject of the gypsies came up, as it usually did in any extended conversation in Slovakia. There were 400,000 of them in the country, the second largest population in Europe (after Romania). The one thing that everyone agreed on was that they represented a massive, intractable social problem. Largely unintegrated, uneducated, impoverished, and unwilling or unable to embrace the standards and aspirations of the rest of the population, they were regarded as a kind of national disfigurement. Their way of life and the frightful conditions in the ghettos and slums where they had been segregated provoked shame and disgust in equal measure.

  Under Communist rule the gypsies were shunned, oppressed and victimised in the familiar way – but quietly. Now, with Slovakia in the EU, the problem had to be publicly acknowledged, solutions proposed, measures taken. The collision between the obligation to devise social programmes to help the gypsies and the age-old urge to vilify and demonise them left a nasty taste in everyone’s mouth. Most educated Slovakians agreed that it was unacceptable these days to treat anyone as being beyond the pale. But when you saw how they lived! The crime, the prostitution, the squalor, the rampant breeding, the drugs, the idleness – was it any wonder that people were turning to right-wing groups demanding extreme measures including forcible sterilisation and segregation?

  At it happened, I’d gained a second-hand insight into ‘the gypsy problem’ on my way to Slovakia. On the plane I’d found myself sitting next to a police officer from Sheffield. To begin with we’d chatted about fishing, which was one of his passions in life. Then I asked him his line of work. He was attached to a new unit set up to investigate the recruiting and smuggling of young prostitutes within the enlarged EU. He was on his way with two colleagues to Bratislava, to take into custody a Roma man accused of running a vice ring in Sheffield, exploiting under-age gypsy girls from Slovakia. The man was facing trial in Sheffield, where his wife was already serving a lengthy prison sentence. (In the event he got seven years.)

  I didn’t mention the story the policeman had told me to Peter or Petra or their families. It was a horrible saga of degradation and exploitation that would only have embarrassed them with the thought that this was the one Slovakian export I knew about. They talked about conditions in the gypsy slums. Petra said they were unbelievable. She used the word ‘medieval’, then explained it to the others. They all nodded. That was right. Medieval. But what could you do? Petra’s father said he’d been brought up in a village where there were many gypsies. Some had been his friends, and when he was naughty or went wandering, he would be told that he would have to stay with them. They were not all bad, he said. But different. Just different.

  The sky continued to darken. Far away, curtains of rain stretched across the hills. Petra and her children and her mother and the sad grandmother went home, as did Peter’s sister and her family. The level in the brandy bottle declined. The two fathers urged me to stay to help finish it and start another. With difficulty I extricated myself. It was time to go fishing.

  Slovakians have two endearing habits of speech which help keep their conversations bubbling along. One is the use of ‘hey’ as a gap-filler, as we might say ‘y’know’ or ‘like’ or ‘know what I mean’. ‘Hey’ means nothing, but it gives their speech a lively, positive tone, suggesting that good and interesting things are happening or could happen at any moment. Should they do so, the appropriate exclamation is ‘super’, pronounced with the syllables stretched: ‘SOOPAIR’.

  For Peter Bienek, Žilina was ‘super’ in almost every respect, although to a visitor it may seem a pretty nondescript town. There is a small, pleasant historic centre arranged around a square with the usual arcades, elegant public buildings in pastel shades, fountain and church. The situation, circled by ranges of hills, is picturesque. Otherwise it is sprawling, busy, aesthetically unappealing, clean, functional, and – at least when I was there, before the crash of autumn 2008 – conspicuously prosperous.

  EU development funding, Asian investment, the readiness of the Slovakian government to offer industrial sites at knock-down prices, and the availability of cheap labour, had combined to make Slovakia the biggest car-producer in Europe, and its economy the second fastest-growing (after Poland). Žilina and its Korean-owned Kia car plant led the way. Three thousand people worked directly for Kia, and thousands more in dependent components factories. Many other businesses had been attracted to the town. At that time, Žilina was a place where, if you wanted a job, there was a job to be had. Wages were good by Slovakian standards and people had money to spend.

  When I first went to eastern Europe, anglers were aware of who the brand leaders in fishing tackle were, but rather in the way that an agricultural labourer in Elizabethan or Jacobean England might have heard of the silks and spices of the Orient or the strange smoking weed from the New World: as wonders they never expected to see or sample themselves. Brands like Hardy, Farlow, Orvis and Sage were spoken of with a kind of hopeless yearning. A rod made by one of them cost at least six months’ wages, and could only be obtained abroad. The fishermen made do with grossly inferior equipment, crudely made glass-fibre rods, tin reels, hopelessly unreliable hooks.

  But now Peter Bienek’s shop in Žilina stood comparison with anything you could find in the UK or the States. He had the latest Sage and Orvis ranges, cabinets of reels imported from everywhere, shelves of DVDs and fly-tying gear, racks of Gortex and breathable waders. And they were selling. Peter said that when he started out in the tackle trade, Slovakian anglers were interested only in the cheapest. These days the new imported model was like anything else: if you could afford it, you got it; and many did.

  So Žilina was super for business. It was super, too, in that both sets of grandparents lived there, freeing Petra to earn good money with the pharmaceuticals firm, and Peter to work and then go fishing whenever he wanted. I told him that at the start of every fishing season I resolved to get to the river at least once a week, but I never quite managed it. He looked at me pityingly. ‘I must fish every day,’ he said with mock seriousness, ‘or I die.’ And when he fished, he did so as if his life depended on it. His technical mastery was complete, his concentration intense and unwavering. When I watched him on the water, I could not help thinking about that look on Petra’s face: helpless, resigned, uncomprehending.

  His home river – highly super – was the Rajcianka. It flowed out of the hills to the south of Žilina through the western side of town to join the Váh. It was a nice stream, its banks heavily wooded, the water clear but looking dark because of the subfusc colouring of the streambed. The pools and streamy runs and the holes by the roots of the willows and alders were full of grayling, mixed in with some trout.

  Slovakian fishing permit

  The evening after the lunch with the parents, Peter took me to the town water. In the morning we’d fished a stretch three or four miles upstream, where I caught a few grayling and Peter many. This time, wonder of wonders, he said he needed to go home and put in some family time. He’d be back at nine to pick me up. Before leaving he went into the water with me to show me the best places to try. The sun was almost off the water and rings were beginning to show in the smooth glides beside the trees as the fish fed. He tied on a little nymph for me – I have never seen anyone so swift and sure with knots – and could not resist an exploratory cast or two. He gazed longingly at the river, then turned away.

  The Slovakian fly-fishing ethos (the same ap
plies generally in eastern Europe) is very different from ours. In England there is an unspoken understanding that fishing is a quiet, solitary affair. We keep our distance from each other. If we see someone else casting, we circle around them to find another spot, keeping well away. A chance encounter on the bank may lead to a brief exchange of comment about the weather or the quality of sport, but we do not expect to be addressed by a stranger while we are fishing, and would take it very much amiss if one were to barge in next to us because he had seen us catch something or just liked the look of the spot. Such behaviour, however, is entirely the norm on the rivers of the east.

  The Žilina town water was thoroughly democratic. Immediately upstream a party was in progress. A radio blared dance music. Meat smoked on a barbecue. Lads in swimming trunks booted a football around, breaking off now and then to dive off a rock into the pool. Children paddled, dogs swam for sticks. I skirted around the merrymaking and found a series of pools hemmed in by trees where I caught some nice grayling as the water darkened and the thunderclouds continued to pile up over the hills. Eventually I went back to wait for Peter. I watched a fisherman play and land a decent fish no more than 15 yards from where three blokes were wallowing up to their waists, hurling sticks and clods of mud at each other.

  It would never have done, I reflected, in Hampshire, Berkshire or Wiltshire.

  Chapter 12

  Times change

  ‘WE LIVED WITH eyes closed. Eyes closed. That’s how it was in that time.’

  Peter Bienek was 20 in 1989, a student at Brno University (his subject was fish behaviour, which somehow didn’t surprise me). He was one of the surging throng on the streets that November, chanting for the end of the regime, by then crumbling from the outside and imploding from within. The students believed that the momentum came from them: their youth, their idealism. It was people power; they called it the Velvet Revolution, change without violence.

  Now, older, wiser and more versed in the ways of the world, Peter Bienek believes they were fooled. It wasn’t their doing, and it had little or nothing to do with ideals. The levers were pulled from inside the Party. ‘For sure. They could see what was coming. They needed to arrange everything so that they would do well, have the power, make the money. For sure.’

  The following summer, when it was all over and the system that had controlled everything throughout Peter’s life had been swept away, he asked his father a favour. The borders were down and you could go to places you had previously only dreamed of. Peter fixed on Greece as the land of milk and honey. His father worked as an electrical engineer for the state police and had a car that went with the job, a 2.5-litre Russian-made Volga. Peter asked if he could borrow it to go to Greece. His father said no, whereupon Peter said he would hitch. His mother intervened, and in the end he got the car. He and two friends drove the Volga to Greece where they all got jobs packing tomatoes. That was freedom.

  Three years before, Peter had been chosen to represent Czechoslovakia in an international fishing competition being staged in Florence. Such events were problematic for the Party. It was necessary for teams to be sent in order to demonstrate socialist sporting prowess. But attendance brought with it the acute danger of competitors being infected by outside influences, even brain-washed into believing that conditions wherever they were going were preferable to those at home. The record of defections on such occasions was extensive and shameful.

  Peter had never been abroad. Before leaving for Italy, he was twice summoned before the director of his school in Žilina and lectured at length about the behaviour expected of him. He was forbidden to buy anything, to take photographs, to talk to anyone apart from his fellow team members and their minders, above all to have anything to do with anglers from other countries who might fill his head with dangerous nonsense about rock music and Levi jeans.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when I was in Italy,’ he recalled, shaking his head. ‘Where were all the poor people they told us about? They said there were people sleeping beside the road, crying because they didn’t have food. I was looking for them but I didn’t see them. I was so innocent, so stupid.’

  What he did see were the shops on the Ponte Vecchio stuffed with fabulous things, and a swarm of people who had money to spend and appeared to be quite happy about it. Peter came home confused. Maybe there was another side to the story. Maybe he hadn’t been told everything. He tried to talk to his mother and father about it. They told him to be quiet and get on with his studies. But he couldn’t help thinking the unthinkable.

  The Eastern Bloc leaders were right to fear the West. In the end it was finding out how others lived that destroyed their system, as much as anything else. Stories of sudden revelation, like Peter’s, were common. Sometimes it came very late in the day. Such a case was that of the President of the Polish Fishing Association.

  All his adult life he had been a dedicated Communist. The Party had given him everything he had, raising him from the meat-packing factory where he had worked as a furnaceman to a position of status. Its collapse left him bewildered and depressed, but he remained a dedicated Communist. A year later, in September 1990, he accompanied the Polish fly-fishing team to the world championships in Wales, where he was lodged with a local doctor. One day he and another member of the team, who spoke good English, met a couple with a smart new car on the back of which were strapped two mini-motorcycles. The dedicated Communist asked who they were. He was bemused to be told that the woman worked as a cleaner for the doctor with whom he was staying.

  Later he was fishing from a boat next to a golf course. The dedicated Communist knew something about golf. It was an English game played by members of the aristocracy on land they had stolen from the poor. They had servants to carry their clubs. He looked more closely. Some of the golfers were elderly, some younger. They all carried their own clubs. They didn’t look like aristocrats. They looked like perfectly ordinary people – in fact, rather like him, except that he was a dedicated Communist.

  He talked to his team-mate. Perhaps, he suggested, this capitalism wasn’t all bad if the doctor’s cleaner could afford a new car and motorbikes for her children and people like him were able to play golf. The world that he had known had recently been turned on its head. Perhaps it was time to be an ex-dedicated Communist. He was a good fisherman and tier of flies. Perhaps there might be opportunities here for someone with his skills?

  You need to be on your guard when you go back to the special places. You may locate them easily enough on the map, but maps tell only one story. Times change, and places and people change with them. The memory plays curious tricks, and things are often not as you remember, or expect, or hope.

  For me, rivers and streams have always been the special places. I carry a portfolio of them in my head: the roots of the horse chestnut washed by the river of my boyhood, with the cavern beneath where the chub and barbel hid; a pool on a burn in the west of Scotland, the sea-trout waiting where the whisky water crashed over the boulders; a wild currant bush on the Eamont in Cumberland, its branches reaching towards a deep, marbled run where the trout watched for the blue-winged olives to hatch; the flawless blue Andean sky, the current etched into the bend on the far side, grasshoppers tumbling on to the water from the waving grass; a mile of broken water on the Zambezi, tiger fish on sentry duty in every pool; these and others, plenty of others.

  When I came home from eastern Europe towards the end of that summer of 1990, I brought with me a sheaf of mental images. Four of the sharpest were of little streams – not so much for the fish, although there were fish, but because they had a particular magic about them. Fishermen will know what I mean, even though it cannot be satisfactorily expressed in words. I have warm feelings for all rivers (except those blighted by poison or imprisoned between the concrete embankments favoured by a certain kind of criminal engineer), but I like little rivers the best. They make no big noise and keep themselves to themselves, withholding their delights for those who know them or are lucky enough
to stumble upon them.

  In Poland there was the Białka, which, when I went back, I found had survived my absence in good fettle. There was one in Romania and one in Bohemia, still to come. And in Slovakia there was the Biela, which means the same in Slovakian as Białka in Polish: ‘white river’. They were like a pair of sisters, both tumbling out of the Tatras over worn, pale stones, each sparkling with life.

  It was thanks to Pavel Janicek that I found the Biela. Pavel lived and worked in Ostrava, the vast, sulphurous coal and steel city of northern Moravia. But he regarded himself as an honorary citizen of Slovakia because that was where he did his fishing.

  At that time Pavel was captain of the Czech fly-fishing team (it was still Czechoslovakia but not for much longer). I met him outside a grey, horrible apartment block in Ostrava. He was a couple of inches shorter than me but twice as wide, with a broad chest and a mighty belly that strained against his blue windcheater. I greeted him in English and he greeted me in German. I explained in English that I couldn’t speak German. He explained in German that he couldn’t speak English.

  We went together to the flat of a friend of his who was head of the English department at one of Ostrava’s secondary schools. Like Márta Hegedüs in Hungary, her English was fluent and rooted in a passion for literature. She adored Graham Greene, but he was so sad. For laughter one needed Muriel Spark. And Angus Wilson, she asked, was he still as popular as ever? She greatly admired Hemlock and After.