Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  Our first two outings together were evidently intended to show me that there was more to life in Târgu Mureş than mere survival and staying out of trouble. The first was to the zoo, where we admired a panda from China, oryx from Ethiopia, bison from Poland, a tiger from Siberia, monkeys from Cuba, and various other tokens of erstwhile socialist friendship. From there we progressed to a leisure complex with tennis courts and a boating lake surrounded by cheerless blocks of holiday apartments – two of which, Ioan told me proudly, had been allocated to himself and Grigore.

  Ioan accompanied us to the cabana in Bistra Mureşului and stayed with me when Grigore left for Bucharest, where his business included getting a fishing permit for me. To reinforce the message that no one was starving, Ioan prepared a huge meal of grilled meat on the barbecue, after which he and I set off in my car to explore the valley. We had just got round the corner when Ioan spotted a man he knew unloading a crate of beer from a van. We stopped and were invited into a garden by the river. Smoke was rising from a barbecue on which was sizzling an array of pork and sausage very similar to the one I had just eaten. Half a dozen men were gathered around, stuffing themselves. Greasy hands were wiped on teeshirts then thrust forward to grasp mine. I was given beer and a plate piled with meaty bones, and amid much hilarity Ioan explained the rumours circulating abroad about Romanians not having enough to eat. A man with a stomach like a sack of grain slammed a thick chop down on my plate in the manner of a court lawyer producing his conclusive piece of evidence.

  Beer was followed by tuicǎ. Glasses were raised to England and Mrs Thatcher. One bottle was emptied and replaced by another. Dripping with sweat and pork fat, I implored Ioan to tell the company that I was keen to resume our excursion. Eventually, after a final burst of toasts, handshakes and more toasts, we left.

  We followed a forest track that kept the stream company until both emerged into the upland above the tree belt. We came to a shack where a ragged, wild-eyed figure sat on a log. Ioan asked him about an alleged waterfall that he had been told about. The man bawled at us that we had taken the wrong fork. Asked about his life up here, he said there were many animals: bears, wolves, lynx. But not many people, I ventured. He yelled with laughter. I gave him a cigarette, an untipped French Gitane which he smoked with luxurious pleasure.

  A dog started barking a little way up the hillside, and we watched as a small flock of sheep was driven into a rough pen. The shepherd came down to join us. He wore a little round black hat, a loose woollen shirt, belted leggings and thick socks above his leather boots. I gave him a cigarette as well, then we headed back to the village, leaving the aroma of black tobacco to mingle with the scents of pine and bog myrtle.

  Romanian fishing licence, 1990

  Grigore reappeared the next day, triumphantly brandishing my fishing licence. It had taken several hours of patient bargaining at the Forestry Ministry in Bucharest to secure it; the main difficulty, evidently, having been to convince the officials of the existence of an Englishman who wanted to go trout fishing in Romania. The licence ran to six densely printed pages listing more than a hundred rivers in Transylvania that I was now at liberty to fish. A large proportion of these, Grigore explained, were not worth the trouble – not so much because of pollution, which was concentrated in lowland areas, but because of poaching induced by hunger. Most of the accessible reaches of the mountain streams had, he said, been virtually emptied of fish during the epoca Ceauşescu. But there were still a few places.

  One was the Ilva, which ran into the Mureş 15 miles or so upstream from Bistra Mureşului. Its valley was much steeper and narrower than that of the Bistra, and there was no proper road up it nor dwellings beside it. It was as clear as gin and as pretty as a favourite piece of jewellery. We followed the forestry track high up, where the trees thinned, and began fishing in the late-afternoon when the sun was off the water.

  Grigore showed me how to do it, dibbling his flies behind every rock and in every little holding place where the water was more than a few inches deep. Initially I found it impossible to believe that there could be anything worth catching, but after a time I came to a footbridge with a genuine pool below it. The surface was marbled by competing currents and, as I peered more closely at it, I saw it broken by dimples made by feeding fish. From below I cast two small bushy flies up towards the bridge, their hackles nicely visible against the gold reflected from the evening sky. One vanished in a tiny splash, but I was too slow and just felt the fish for a split second. Next time I was quicker and brought a plump grayling to the hand to be unhooked.

  It was almost dark by the time we reached the outskirts of the village. There was a bridge that took the track over the Ilva, with a long, slow pool shaped like a boomerang above it. Most of the pool lay in black shadow. But on the far side, below a shelf of rock, was an amber band lit by the last of the sun’s light where fish were feeding keenly on a hatch of sedges. I got down opposite. The air was alive with moths and insects. Bats hunting their supper cut sharp, irregular lines through the twilight. I flicked a sedge imitation towards the band of light. Once, twice, fish rushed at it and missed or turned way. Then one took it and I felt the plunge of it.

  Ioan heard my cry and came to stand on the bridge. He was joined by two villagers who abandoned their cows to watch the fun. I played the fish in, and at the second attempt got my net under it. I knocked it on the head then struggled up the bank to show it off. It was a trout, perhaps ten ounces in weight, as precious as any I had ever caught. There was an appreciative murmur from the small crowd that had now gathered. An old man in a battered felt hat shook my hand, then turned away to tend to his animals, which were snorting impatiently in the darkness.

  ‘Fishing was better in time of Ceauşescu,’ Peter said from the front seat of Grigore’s big Nissan. I was sitting in the back with a young man called Calin, the son of Grigore’s lawyer friend Vasilie. I had to remind myself that when Ceauşescu was shot, Calin had been less than two years old, the same age I was when Stalin died. The epoca Ceauşescu was as remote to him as the era of the purges in Russia to me.

  Peter was almost certainly right. Twenty years before, Romania’s grinding poverty still acted as a shield to her unspoiled places. Most people simply did not have the leisure or the means to reach them, even had they had the inclination. Now several years of strong economic growth had fed a surge in car ownership and building, putting sudden pressure on valleys previously left in peace. Grigore and I had already been to the Ilva, which I hardly recognised as the pristine stream we had fished before. The open patches of ground had been annexed by holiday chalets, the water was murky, and a mechanical digger was helping itself, quite illegally but without hindrance, to gravel from the streambed.

  Now we were on our way to try the Gurghui, a bigger stream that runs westward out of the bear-infested Gurghui Mountains (another Carpathian offshoot) to join the Mureş at Reghin. The road alongside it was abysmal even by Romanian standards, which – despite the economic improvement and the availability of EU investment – are the lowest anywhere in supposedly civilised Europe. It was extravagantly pot-holed, jarringly uneven, and inclined to relapse in each of the villages into undulating stretches of cobbles that demanded respect even from a 4x4 Nissan. But the awfulness of the road had done nothing to inhibit the sprouting of new houses and chalets beside it. Every clearing along the river bank had its picnic benches and tables, its campfire marks, its drifts of rubbish.

  Peter was a live wire, a restless knot of energy unable to keep still or quiet for a moment. He was Jewish, and made a good living as a dealer in parts for cars in Târgu Mureş. Some years before, he had hired an English tutor for six months, as a result of which he spoke the language rather more fluently than Grigore. They fished together a lot and Grigore was endlessly amused by his perpetual chatter and motion. ‘She has three mobile phones,’ Grigore said, laughing. ‘Sometimes she speaking into all at the same time. Not she. He.’

  Peter told many jokes: Romanian
jokes, Jewish jokes, but mainly gypsy jokes. When I said something about the river looking a little coloured after the recent rain, Peter said: ‘It is not the rain. The gypsies have been washing. It happens once each year.’ He and Grigore cackled. They never tired of mocking the gypsies for their idleness, their dirtiness, their incurable dishonesty and fecklessness, their fertility. Calin laughed dutifully at the jokes but did not make any himself. He told me his father had represented a group of gypsies whose homes in Târgu Mureş had been destroyed in one of the frequent and vicious outbreaks of racial violence. A Romanian judge had thrown out the gypsies’ claim, whereupon Vasilie had taken it to the European Court and won compensation.

  Calin had just finished his second year studying law at the celebrated University of Cluj. Very tall, very slim, with glasses and neat hair brushed back, he had a thoroughly wholesome look to him, combined with an air of idealism. Although he had followed his father’s path thus far, he was not sure about the law as a career. He was concerned that the first loyalty of lawyers had to be to their clients rather than to truth and justice, and that this would sometimes conflict with his conscience.

  I asked him if his fellow students were interested in the past, in what had happened under the regime. He said the old people talked about it all the time, like it was yesterday. Some thought it would be good if Ceauşescu were still the boss because he gave everyone somewhere to live and a job, and now many people didn’t have a job and couldn’t pay the rent. It was at this point that Peter made his comment about the fishing being better then. Calin laughed, but became serious again. ‘We watch the documentaries on TV, we know what happened. But for us it was another time.’

  Fishing licence, Romania, 2008

  It was a blazingly hot day but the Gurghui was thickly wooded, the air over it deliciously cool and moist. Away from the picnic sites, it kept itself to itself in the private way some rivers have, its secrets communicable only to those prepared to get close to it. Peter had brought a large wooden box with a barbecue inside it and enough meat and salad to feed a rugby fifteen. While he worked on the feast, the rest of us dispersed to fish. I went upstream, ducking low under the trailing branches of the willows and alders, slipping and sliding on the rocks, the current welling up against my waders.

  By now I was a little more accomplished in the Romanian technique. The river was in too much of a hurry to bother with proper pools. You had to look out for the little pockets of water below or between the boulders, where the texture of the flow changed and there was enough depth for fish to hold a position out of the main force of the stream. There was no room to cast in the conventional back-and-forth manner; it was a question of flicking and flipping the flies into a possible holding place, and trying to keep them there long enough for any fish to take notice.

  I slithered and dodged quite a way, catching the odd trout here and there, not many and none of them of any great size, but enough to keep me happy and alert, and for the time to fly. I was aware of nothing beyond the pervasive, gently percussive sound of the water, its shifting rhythms, the play of sunlight through the trees, the darting of warblers and – twice – the flash of a king-fisher. Then, suddenly, I realised how hot, thirsty and hungry I was.

  Back at the picnic site Peter was crouched over the fire. A trestle table was covered in plates of tomatoes, peppers, salad, onions, and the fiercely hot little green chillies that Romanians love to chew while they wait for their meat. At the next table a tall lad with razored hair was sitting with a group of girls, drinking beer and Coke, talking and laughing. The lad was Peter’s son, Kristi. He and the girls were celebrating the end of their university exams. Most had studied medicine, although Kristi was going to be a dentist. Peter tapped his own crooked, yellowed gnashers proudly. ‘He is very good. He is repairing my teeth for nothing.’ I told Peter about some recent root canal work I had suffered, and how much it cost. ‘Kristi will do for you, he is needing the practice.’

  Calin gave me a can of beer that had been cooling in the water. We ate blackened chunks of coarsely minced pork and beef, shaped like sausages but without skins. I sliced mine and made a thick sandwich with tomato and onion. Peter urged more meat on me, and then more, until I felt that if I didn’t eat again for a week, that would be soon enough.

  A couple of the girls in Kristi’s group went for a paddle. The rest joked and laughed. Their youth and happiness and shared sense of eagerness and excitement were palpable, and I felt rather old and wistful. I noticed one of the girls parodying the fly-fisherman’s casting actions. Her performance prompted convulsions of hilarity.

  Later on I fished again, until I was too tired to fish any more. Grigore, disgusted at the lack of sport, had long since given up. By then we were high up the stretch of the Gurghui on which fishing was allowed. The valley had closed in and the shadows had lengthened. The river was dark and uncommunicative. Ahead lay the Castle.

  Although everyone called it the Castle or the Château, it was in fact a hunting lodge built in the 1920s for the second of Romania’s four kings, the Hohenzollern Ferdinand I. It stands to one side of a clearing in the forest, a long dark building, pine on the outside, cherry and oak inside, with high chimneys rising above steep shingled roofs. The hunting theme is insistent, particularly downstairs. Velvet chairs and polished tables rest on legs made of antlers. The gilded mirrors are bordered with more antlers. Stags’ heads with gentle, glassy eyes rear out from the panelled walls. A stained-glass huntsman in red hat, green jerkin, burgundy leggings and yellow boots marches across the dining-room window, jabbing a spear at a white stag, his dog following at his heels. In one of the forest scenes decorating the enormous tiled stoves, a hunter stands with a falcon on his shoulder, dog at his side, cherubs floating above.

  The air inside is cool, smoky, resinous. Although queens, princesses, countesses and royal mistresses came to Lǎpuşna, the atmosphere is still resolutely masculine. One pictures the morning of the shoot: men with moustaches, in jackets and breeches from the best tailors in Vienna or London, polished boots scrunching the gravel, cigar smoke hanging in the air; dogs yelping and scrabbling; beaters waiting at a respectful distance; King Ferdinand’s Director of Royal Hunts, Colonel August von Spiess (who styled himself Oberst August Roland von Braccioforte zum Portner und Höflein), deep in discussion with the local foresters on the prospects for the day.

  Deep forest stretches north, east and south from the Castle and is alive with capercaillie, lynx, boar and lesser creatures. But the prizes here are the great beasts, the red deer and the bear. It is on them that Colonel von Spiess’s mood – and the foresters’ jobs – will depend. If the bag at the end of the day includes a stag or two, or a bear taller than a man, then there will be feasting and songs of celebration, and the tipping will be generous. If not … well, no one is indispensable.

  Including kings, as it turned out. Although Ferdinand himself managed to last to a respectable age and a royal burial with full honours, both Romania’s subsequent monarchs – Carol II and Michael – were forced to abdicate. The replacement of Romania’s short-lived monarchy by the People’s Republic in 1946 changed many things, but not the tradition of preserving the special places for the select few; or, in the case of the hunting lodge at Lǎpuşna, the select one, a man possessed by a passion for killing animals that spilled well beyond the boundary of mania.

  No story about Ceauşescu and hunting was too fantastic to be disbelieved. It was said of him that he machine-gunned deer from a helicopter; that when he got bored with killing the native Romanian brown bear, he imported a pair of polar bears and shot them; that when he was in a hurry to get back to affairs of state in Bucharest, a suitable trophy would be immobilised with drugged food and shot lying down; that he employed a team of taxidermists whose job was to stretch the skins of his victims before they were submitted to the annual prize-giving organised by the Conseil International de la Chasse et de la Conservation du Gibier.

  Lâpuşna was merely one of his many hunting g
rounds. He came once or twice a year, some years not at all. It all depended on the bears. The task of the staff there was to search the forest until they found one worthy of the Great Leader’s attention, and then to educate it into becoming a convenient target. Trails of food were laid to bring the animal down to a clearing cut a little way outside the fenced compound enclosing the Castle.

  The leader’s shooting box

  On one side of the clearing, facing the trail from the hillside, was a little wooden cubicle with a window, and a ledge on the inside at a comfortable height for a man to sit and rest his rifle. A high-voltage light was fixed above the window, on the outside.

  Neat little notches were cut into the fir trees where the trail reached the clearing, so that the height of the animal could be accurately measured. In autumn, when bears feed hard in preparation for hibernation, the food supply was increased. Hunks of freshly dismembered horse were spread on the ground. The foresters watched from the cubicle. Once they were satisfied that a regular feeding pattern had been established, and that the bear was big enough, the call would be made to Bucharest.

  The underlings and Securitate men came first. In the lodge, empty since the last visitation, linen was aired, carpets were cleaned, the forest of antler legs and animal heads dusted, the great glazed stoves packed with logs and lit. At the appointed hour the black motorcade would sweep up the valley from the airport at Târgu Mureş, or the presidential helicopter would swoop from the sky. The villagers of Lǎpuşna stayed indoors and crossed themselves. The foresters and beaters uttered their prayers.