Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  She had visited England once, in 1968, after the Prague Spring, paying her way by picking strawberries in Kent. Oxford was so beautiful, she reminisced, pouring more Twinings. And London. Ah, there was nowhere like London, even if the taxi drivers did speak so strangely. And the English! So friendly, so welcoming. She noticed my sceptical look. Oh, yes, she insisted. The English were the most civilised people in Europe. Look at Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens. So many others. No other language had inspired such genius.

  ‘Now everyone is wanting to learn English,’ she said. ‘Before, always, it was Russian, Russian, Russian. Now no one learns Russian any more. The young teachers are trying to train to do German, French or English. But the old ones, they are finished. And now everyone at the school is very polite to me.’

  She poured more tea, then translated Pavel’s arrangements for our excursion to Slovakia. She said it was a great pleasure to meet an Englishman and talk about English writers. One day I must come back to Ostrava and meet some of her pupils. She was only sorry that she was not able to accompany us.

  So was I. The linguistic situation looked problematic. But in the course of a long drive around the western flank of the Carpathians and along the southern foothills, vestiges of a long-forgotten, not at all successful, German O-level campaign began to surface like bubbles of marsh gas. At first single words popped off the tip of the tongue – forelle, fluss, bier (trout, river, beer); then a smattering of phrases and short sentences: fliegenfischen, Mann muss trinken bier und schnapps, wir gehen aus Fluss. It was hard work, demanding all my concentration. Bumping over a level crossing in the town of Ružemberok, I was distracted from trying to make sense of Pavel’s flow by the blast of a horn, the ringing of bells and the thunder of wheels as a train roared through, feet from my back bumper.

  For much of the way we followed the course of Pavel’s favourite river, the Poprad, with the white fangs of the High Tatras gleaming to the south. We went through the town of Poprad, a smoky, shabby, industrial mess, then reached a dusty little place called Podolinec, where we had to stop to collect my fishing licence from the secretary of the local club. As I was the first Englishman in the history of Podolinec to require such a document, the transaction turned into something a ceremony, with handshakes, speeches proclaiming the Brotherhood of the Angle, and many glasses of slivovice, the Slovakian answer to Hungarian palinka. Finally we sat down beneath the gaze of a gallery of trophy trout and grayling heads collected and preserved by the secretary, and tucked into fried trout and spuds served by his wife.

  The final leg of the journey took us from Podolinec towards the regional capital, Stará L’ubova. On one of the bends in the river we came upon a campsite. Tents, wooden hutches and metal cabins were scattered across a wide meadow.

  Pavel Janicek (at rear) and friends, Slovakia, 1990

  A group of Pavel’s friends were waiting for us in the restaurant, which was packed with noisy youths and teenage girls on some kind of field trip. We proceeded to drink a good deal of beer and more slivovice, then assembled in one of the metal cabins to tackle a 20-litre container of warm white wine.

  In the morning, sore-headed, I rubbed away the condensation on the inside of the window next to my bed and peered out. The grass around the campsite was silver with dew. The sun was showing through the spiky tops of the conifers lining the ridge along the far bank. In between hurried the Poprad, lentil-coloured from the melting of the Tatra snows. We had ham and eggs in the canteen, and toasted the day ahead with glasses of slivovice.

  The Poprad was too dirty to fish so Pavel had arranged for two local anglers to accompany me to a tributary, the Biela, that ran into the main river a few miles downstream from Podolinec. They were brothers, Stano and Slavo Truska. Stano worked in a factory in Stará L’ubova and was markedly more prosperous than his brother, a qualified vet. They met me at the junction, and one of them produced a map that showed the Biela’s path from the mountains. It rose just inside the border with Poland and ran east-south-east, so that all that hot, brilliant morning I had the highest peaks of the Tatras in front of me, etched against the blue of the sky as distinctly as if they had been drawn with a newly sharpened pencil.

  The water was so clear that, at first, you thought it could hide nothing. But there was concealed life behind the rocks and where the current flowed with any depth over the white stones. A shadow would drift across the bottom as a fish shifted position, or vanish in a stab of movement if it was alarmed.

  I went ahead of the brothers and came to a flat concrete bridge supported in the middle by a concrete pillar on a base. The current divided around the base, creating a smooth glide to each side, shaded from the sun. I was about to wade through under the left arch when there was a wink in the shadows. Looking more closely, I saw tiny wings, slate grey against the gleam of the water. They travelled 18 inches or so, then the surface was broken for an instant and the wings disappeared.

  Soon after my own fly was following the same route, and in the same spot a nose tilted up. I struck, there was a lunge, the rod arced over and almost immediately straightened as the hook hold gave way. I cursed and shifted across so that I could cast into the right-hand arch. I did better this time and was admiring a plump, vividly spotted trout when Slavo Truska floundered up behind me. He grasped the fish, thumped it over the head and slid it into his pocket. We exchanged a slimy handshake and smiled and laughed and cuffed each other about the shoulders, needing no common words for the common delight we felt.

  Slavo Truska on the Biela, 1990

  The next afternoon Pavel and his chums had to return to Ostrava – Mann muss arbeiten he said, shrugging his big shoulders. The weather had broken overnight and the day was grey, wet and chilly. It was decided that in the time left to us, drinking would be a surer source of amusement than fishing. We sat at a table in the canteen while, outside, buses came to take away the students. We began with beer, progressed to gin, then on to slivovice. Pavel was planning my next visit. From Zakopane in Poland he would summon Władysław Trzebunia, the world fly-fishing champion with whom he had made friends at the championships in Finland. The celebrated Slavoj Svoboda would come from Bratislava.

  ‘Fliegenfischen und trinken,’ Pavel bellowed, banging his big fist on the table.

  ‘Ja, wunderbar,’ I replied.

  His fat forefinger waved indistinctly before my eyes. ‘Aber du muss kommen in Oktober wann der ist nicht schneewasser im Poprad. Wann es ist klar und schön und die lipan …’ His fingers snapped.

  ‘Ja, die lipan sind gut.’

  We used the Czech word for grayling as neither of us knew the German. Rain beat down on the tarmac outside. Mist crept across the windows, obscuring the now empty and lifeless camp. At intervals the barman appeared with more beer and slivovice and cleared away the empty glasses and overflowing ashtrays. Eventually, after a crescendo and climax of pumping handshakes and declarations of eternal comradeship, Pavel and his friends squeezed themselves into a Škoda and left. I went to my cabin and slept while the rain drummed on the roof. In the evening I returned to the canteen and tried to order an omelette. Omelettes didn’t exist, only fried pork, greasy chips and pickled red cabbage. A programme about Solzhenitsyn was being shown on TV, which consisted mostly of heated conversations in Russian or Czech between men wearing shabby jackets who smoked almost as furiously as they talked. But one of the participants was the British peer Lord Bethell – translator of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward – whose well-cut grey suit, white shirt and patterned tie, and calm, modulated English tones filled me with acute loneliness and homesickness.

  Before leaving, Pavel had procured for me an additional permit to fish the Slovak side of the Dunajec, which formed the border with Poland to the north. The accessible reach was upstream from Červený Kláštor, where a Carthusian monastery has stood beside the river since the fourteenth century. Opposite the monastery on the Polish side, guarding the entrance to the Dunajec Gorge – a favoured destination for kayakers and r
afters – was a cluster of jagged crags known as the Three Crowns.

  The little road to Červený Kláštor twisted through the Spišská Magura, which means Little Mountains of Spiš. This is the Slovak version of Zips, the name given to the region comprising the valleys of the Hornád and the Poprad and the lands around by colonists from Germany who settled there in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Spišská Magura partially plug the gap made by the Poprad as it breaks north through the Carpathians; and even though they are not very big, they still form a considerable barrier between the valleys of the Poprad and the Dunajec. They are wild and thinly populated, with a sprinkling of hamlets and a very few larger villages.

  The march of collectivisation that had claimed all the flatter and more fertile parts of Czechoslovakia had stopped short of these steep slopes. Below the limestone outcrops and woods of beech, fir and spruce, the land was still cultivated in the same narrow strips first cut and dug by hardy German pioneers 700 years before. Most of the work was done by hand, and most of the workers were women, middle-aged or older, stout and strong of leg and body, wearing tough boots, aprons over rough skirts, and headscarves pulled tight around their weathered faces. Legs wide apart, they bent over the wandering furrows, weeding, thinning, sowing or picking. Some worked the soil with hoes, methodically and tirelessly. When I came back down the same road late that evening, the last of them were trudging home with their picks and hoes and buckets, a bundle of grass tucked under one arm for the animals in the farmyards. Upright, they still looked bent, as if bred for closeness to the ground.

  It was the grass-cutting season. The air was sweet with the smell and alive with the sweep of scythes and the cries of the cutters, mixed with snatches of song. Narrow frames made from stripped branches of fir were arranged at intervals across the meadows. By evening many were draped with grass, so that from a distance they looked like miniature tailors’ dummies covered for the night by pale dustsheets.

  The mix of races across this part of Slovakia was as diverse as the landscape itself. A little way to the east was an enormous, disorderly Ruthenian village, Jakubany, spread along several miles of dusty, potholed road, along which modern concrete housing blocks had been thrown up side by side with traditional single-storey houses made from mighty beams edged in yellow, blue or purple mortar, each with its barn, stack of wood, store of grass and hen-infested yard. Near Stará L’ubova were several Ukrainian villages, while either side of the border lived the Górale people who spoke a Polish dialect. Elsewhere Slovaks, ethnic Hungarians and the descendants of the original German colonists were indiscriminately jumbled together.

  It was late afternoon before I got down to any fishing. I crossed a meadow beside the road and took a path towards the river, disturbing a deer that bounded off through the willow brush. The Dunajec flowed broad and even to a diagonal gravel bar where it broke into two streams, one curving towards Poland, the other washing the Slovak shore. An old woman was driving cattle along the far bank, whacking her stick against their flanks, her shouts of abuse and encouragement carrying across the burble of the water. The sun broke through, lighting the sky and spreading a pinkish glow across the bare summits of the Three Crowns.

  I had the river to myself. I waded out a little way then edged downstream, taking no risks with my footing, casting as I went. It was easy work, the line hissing through the rod rings and snaking out over the water, the flies pulling round an inch or two below the surface. I got two or three grayling above the gravel bar, nice fish of three-quarters of a pound or so. Below the bar almost every cast induced a snatch at the flies, but for some reason I could not hook a fish. There was no more than 30 yards or so of fishable water before it dissolved into a fierce-looking rapid. The light was fading, so I reeled in and made my way back to my car. I came upon another deer in the twilight and it leaped away in terror.

  I had one more outing with the Truska brothers, to a meagre stream near the border crossing at Mnisek where we caught a few miserably undernourished trout. Afterwards we went back to the canteen in the now deserted and silent campsite on the Poprad. The brothers presented me with two books, one about Czech fly-fishing, the other about Stará L’ubova and the Spiš. Slavo had a Slovak–English dictionary as well as a few words of English; together like a pair of elderly horses yoked to a primitive plough, we managed a slow, wandering furrow of conversation. I wanted to hear about their hopes and fears for the new age. They smiled and shook their heads. Looking around, they saw a country being pulled apart by its interior contradictions, economically crippled, environmentally devastated, demoralised by the decades of heavy-pawed, centralised control. They did not believe the effusions of optimism from the new democrats. They had been conditioned to expect nothing, to hope for nothing, to believe nothing; to take their consolation from sources that would not let them down. Fishing, drinking, the mountains, the streams.

  Elections were due in four days. They would solve nothing, the brothers said. Politicians just told you what they thought you wanted to hear. The country was in a mess and would stay in a mess. Thank God for the fishing. We toasted the fishing. Slavo said he would vote Green: ‘For our rivers and our children.’ Suddenly he grinned at the thought of it, a vote, someone counting it. We shook hands. He said he was glad to have shared the beauty of the Biela with me – ‘your beloved Biela’, he called it in a letter that reached me in England many months later.

  In time I lost touch with the Truskas, and eventually with Pavel Janicek as well. Before going back I tried the address I had for him in Ostrava, and posted messages on Czech and Slovak fishing websites, but with no response. Peter Bienek made some enquiries but no one seemed to remember the big, friendly man who had coached the fly-fishing team. Much later, when I was back in England, I got an email from Pavel via his grandson. He was glad to remember the time we had spent together, he said. Now his health was not so good and he didn’t go fishing any more; and anyway, since the so-called Velvet Divorce (legally effected on 1 January 1993) he had no longer felt welcome in Slovakia.

  The people faded away, as tends to happen, but I still had my collection of maps, including the one covering the Biela that the Truskas had given me, so retracing my steps was straightforward. I drove over from Žilina on a hot, windy July day, the High Tatras as jagged and toothy as ever, but with hardly a touch of snow on them, as if eighteen years had worn almost all their enamel away.

  Peter had spoken to local contacts about the Biela and been told that it was suffering badly from depleted flows and high temperatures, and that a violent flood a winter or two before had swept most of the remaining trout and grayling out into the Poprad. So I was warned. One look over the bridge where I had caught the fat trout and where Slavo Truska and I had shaken hands was enough to shatter the picture I had fondly carried with me for so long. The narrow glides where the fish had fed and sheltered were no more. In their place was an island of gravel covered by weeds and rough grass, strewn with cans and bottles and torn pieces of plastic. A trickle of water crept down each side over brown, slimy stones.

  Bridge over the Biela, 2008

  I walked downstream, along the edge of a field, towards the junction with the Poprad. I didn’t go all the way; it was too dispiriting. The Biela made no sound. There was not enough water for it to chatter over the stones or conjure a miniature cascade. It just slid by, looking ashamed of itself. I spotted a shoal of small chub in one lethargic excuse for a pool, but did not see a single trout or grayling. They need oxygen, cool water against their backs and flanks, life and sparkle. But the lifeblood of the Biela had been drained away. I felt a heavy sadness, as if the fate of this one little stream somehow reflected a whole generation’s disappointments.

  The Milava campsite where I had caroused with Pavel Janicek and his friends had long since been abandoned. The restaurant where I had poured glass after glass of slivovice down my throat was padlocked and rotting away. The malodorous wash-block was falling down. The metal cabins had been remove
d but the wooden hutches remained, half-submerged in a sea of grass that lapped at the picnic benches and tables near the river. The Poprad itself hurried along on its unchanging business. I remembered Pavel saying that autumn was the best time, when the water would be clear and the beech woods turned gold.

  I took the same road through the Spišská Magura towards Červený Kláštor. The way, all meadows and woods, was as lovely as I remembered, but the land was quiet and empty. Apart from an elderly couple rounding up some sheep, I saw no one in the fields. Most of the grass was uncut and the frames made to support it were lying around in untidy heaps.

  It seemed that the country folk had all migrated to Červený Kláštor in search of an easier life. Twenty years before, this place had been on the border between two countries which – while proclaiming socialist brotherhood – had rigorously kept their citizens apart and zealously arrested them if they strayed. Now what had been two sleepy riverside settlements, eyeing each other across the swift currents of the Dunajec, had mutated into a single holiday resort united by a footbridge which anybody could saunter across whenever they felt like it, without being asked their business by someone in uniform.

  The settlements had seeded themselves along both banks, bringing forth a crop of holiday chalets and flats, pensions, restaurants and campsites. Each building on the Polish side had its satellite dish, like an eyeless eye socket. On the Slovakian shore there was a heavy concentration of Górale restaurants and bars, advertised by a generic billboard displaying a fellow with long hair, a shaggy moustache and foxy grin, wearing a round hat with a feather in it, a short waistcoat and sheepskin leggings. Each restaurant boasted its Górale band, serving medleys of mountain music to go with the grilled meat.

  Those insufficiently musical to saw at a fiddle or bellow an air, but still able to supply their own hat and leggings, had found jobs on the rafts, poling the visitors down the boisterous but unthreatening rapids of the Dunajec Gorge. Fishing was only permitted upstream from the main port of disembarkation for the rafts, where the resort petered out. I found a path to the water. There was a fisherman working his way down a promising run close to the near bank. I could see two or three others further upstream, dark shapes against the surface, like upraised fingers.