The Danube (38 page)

Then we pass Helemba Island, 1,713 kilometres from the lighthouse at Sulina and the mouth of the Vah river on the Slovak bank. The island, like most islands, was a burial ground before the Magyars occupied Hungary. First mentioned in church records in the thirteenth century, it became famous for its apricot trees. Now it is uninhabited, a great bush of willows, just turning green. Grey heron watch our ship pass, feigning interest in anything other than the wash of our bow wave on their gravel bank. Travelling the other way the Dutch-registered
Novalis
from St Annaland sweeps downriver. We pass under the green Mária Valéria Bridge that links Esztergom, the seat of the Hungarian Roman Catholic Church, to Štúrovo
on the Slovak bank. This was destroyed in the Second World War, and its ruins stood for decades as a denial of the official myth of Hungarian–Slovak reconciliation, under the careful control of socialist internationalism. It was finally rebuilt in 2001, and has since been much prized by Slovaks as a way to get to work in Hungary, where unemployment is much lower, and for Hungarians to stroll over to the thermal baths in a town they still call by its pre-war name, Párkány, and taste some proper beer.

We deliver the boatel to its owners in a small bay overhung with willows. There are strange huts, poised above the water on sturdy concrete bases, on a superstructure of steel. The new restaurant looks small once we have cast her off, the red hull and bright white upper decks shrink into the shore. In the distance stand the blocks of flats on the outskirts of Esztergom.

This was one of the last trips of the
Tatabánya
. Burdened by the cost of her upkeep, her owners reluctantly sold her to a Greek shipping company soon after my journey. Renamed the
Anya
, and sailing under the convenience flag of Panama, she motored away down the Danube, bound for Istanbul in September 2010. It has never been particularly lucky to rename boats, and this was no exception. On 5 December 2010 the
Anya
foundered in heavy seas with the two barges she was pushing, just off the Black Sea beach of Kilyos, north of Istanbul. One of the barges broke in two and sank. Listing heavily and taking on water, the Bangladeshi crew managed to steer the
Anya
and the other barge onto the sandy beach of a popular holiday resort. Nothing more is known of her. Her former Hungarian fans believe she was taken to the scrapyard.
¹⁸

In July 2012 I visited Szentendre again to meet the Slovene geomancer Marko Pogačnik. Originally an avant-garde artist and sculptor, he became an adept at the ancient art of geomancy – divining from the earth – and developed what he calls lithopuncture.
¹⁹
Tall, carved stones are placed carefully at strategic places on the crust of the earth, to heal the damage done by human violence. One area of conflict where he has placed stones in the past is either side of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Pogačnik's own country took him seriously enough to choose his design for a new coat of arms for Slovenia, newly independent of Yugoslavia. Like the old coat of arms, the centrepiece is the triple-peaked Mount Triglav,
Slovenia's sacred mountain. New features include a two-lined river running across its base, instead of the old three-lined river, and an inverted triangle of silver stars representing democracy poised on a dark blue sky above the mountain. It is a fine symbol, even a powerful one, and Slovenia has prospered under its blessing since independence more than most countries in eastern Europe.

We sit drinking late harvested white wine from Balatonakali in a friend's garden. He has just finished a three-day course of lectures, teaching people to read and communicate with nature, with trees in particular. The earth, he believes, is going through a massive transformation and needs our cooperation to succeed. If we refuse, or fail to do what is needed of us, he fears the end result will be chaos.

In Lotti and Kata's garden in Szentendre I wanted to talk to him about the Danube. Especially about the harm done to it by human intervention, the vast regulation works of the past hundred and fifty years, the straitjacket into which the river is forced, the dams and dykes. For all its lingering beauty, at dawn or sunset, what happens to a river when people treat it as a motorway for ships, or a flush toilet to take away their waste? ‘Ecologists, as people with rational minds, always look in a segmented way at a central point, while for me what is important is this aspect of the river that is whole in every place. This means that if a river has enough space and time to enjoy its young days, and places in-between to regenerate, then the river is capable of overcoming these problems … There is a limit, nevertheless, to how much a river can take. So this is not an excuse for what humans do. It is optimistic, but it is also demanding, to be more conscious …’

A lot of Marko's recent work has been in cities. In Paris, he had a vision of the Seine holding a plate up out of the waters, with a snake curled up on it, representing the whole course of the river. ‘We think of relationships being always between human beings, but the river is also somebody, is a being, is an individual, is somebody in our vicinity. It is not enough just to enjoy a walk along the river. There should also be at least two minutes dedicated to the river – diving with one's sensitivity, so to say, into the river. Feeling it, sending an impulse from the heart. If we could learn again to relate to rivers – this would be a great help to these beings … I was working east of Basel, at Rheinfelden. There is a big plan by the German
and Swiss governments to make a gigantic dam on the Rhine. And while I was working there I had a vision that the Rhine showed itself as a dry channel, completely dry, and the snake was not coiled but in knots. It was a sense of the great alarm of the river. The Rhine was making me aware of what problems the river would have to overcome such an obstacle – to stay one, to stay interconnected.’

He tells me one story of the Danube in Budapest. ‘When I was trying to sense the presence of the river, I was very surprised that at the Gellért – which is like a natural dam – the river starts to flow backwards. Not physically, but as if the essence of the river would turn back to the height of Margit Island, and, let us say, circling and spiralling this whole area. It is as though something important is taking place in its history, like an initiation. As though it is gathering its energy before this great outflow into the Hungarian plain.’

Upstream from the city of Győr, the Szigetköz and Csallóköz (Žitný Ostrov) region of the Danube between Hungary and Slovakia spreads like a fan of islands, of floods and shallows, and was once the main breeding ground of the sturgeon and all the sixty or so fish species in the river. When Algernon Blackwood wrote about it, at the start of the twentieth century, this stretch was still largely intact, a mysterious and often frightening stretch of river, where the spirit of the Danube turned suddenly serious, haunting and awe-inspiring.

The 1977 state contract between Czechoslovakia and Hungary foresaw a massive intervention along a two hundred-kilometre section of the river, from the Danube bend at Nagymaros to the uppermost tip of the new storage lake in Slovakia. The stated aims were to win 880 Megawatts from the river, to eradicate flooding and improve navigation. The end result, according to the preamble of the treaty, ‘will further strengthen the fraternal relations of the two States and significantly contribute to bringing about the socialist integration …’
²⁰
Instead, the project has poisoned relations between the two countries, destroyed precious wetland forests, and threatened the long-term water supply of millions of people. The only mention of the environmental impact in the original treaty was Article 19. ‘The Contracting Parties shall, through the means specified in the joint contractual plan, ensure compliance with the obligations for the protection of
nature arising in connection with the construction and operation of the System of Locks’.
²¹

On the positive side, the Gabčikovo dam provides 8 per cent of Slovakia's electricity supply, according to official estimates, and a large water-sports facility on the storage lake near Čunovo.

The centrepiece of the project was the diversion of the waters of the Danube into a vast above-ground canal, thirty kilometres long inside Slovakia, to generate electricity at Gabčikovo. Another dam was to be built, 120 kilometres downstream at Nagymaros in Hungary, to generate more power and to limit fluctuations in the water level. The plan was for the two countries to build the scheme together and share the electricity. Even some of the tame government scientists who studied the project were appalled by the implications. They feared the impact on the immediate area, on the vast underwater aquifer that had taken tens of thousands of years to build up, filtered through the gravel and washed down from the Alps. They worried about the impact on the flora and fauna on the banks of the Danube, both in the areas of construction, in those covered by the sixty-square kilometre storage lake and along the section of the river between the two power stations. When the Hungarian radio journalist János Betlen put some of these questions to a senior Hungarian engineer in 1983, the answers were so weak that he was ordered to go back and do the interview again, this time with carefully vetted, soft questions and reassuring answers. He suggested they send a technician instead, not a journalist, if they already knew the answers they wanted. He was suspended for six months.
²²

The protests on the Hungarian side that stopped the Nagymaros dam in the early 1990s were hardly mirrored on the Slovak side. Work was almost 80 per cent completed in Slovakia when communism collapsed and Slovakia was building up to independence from the Czechs on 1 January 1993. Instead of recognising it as a white elephant, the dam at Gabčikovo, and all the canal and construction projects which went with it, became a prestige project for the nationalist prime minister Vladimir Mečiar. The fact that most of the inhabitants of the area affected were ethnic Hungarians made it even more painful for Hungarians – and sweeter for the Slovak government. Just as for the Romanian and Serbian governments when the island of Ada Kaleh was destroyed by the Iron Gates dam, the local
inhabitants were seen as collateral damage. When Hungary washed its hands of the project, Slovak engineers put an alternative version, the ‘C-variant’, into operation. In October 1992 they diverted the Danube a few kilometres further upstream than originally planned, at Čunovo rather than at Dunakiliti. There, both banks of the river are on Slovak soil, and the Hungarians were powerless to stop them – except by military force, which was never contemplated. In a matter of days, the great bed of the Danube, or rather the labyrinth of beds through which it flowed, on both the Hungarian and the Slovak side, dried up. Algernon Blackwood's wilderness, where rebels once lured unsuspecting conquerors to their doom, was drained. I spent the last six months before the diversion filming in the forests and creeks, and in the villages on both sides of the river. The people were bitter, but resigned to what was about to happen. ‘Our throat will be cut,’ said Ferenc Tamás, a fisherman on the Hungarian side.
²³

On the Slovak side of the Danube at Csallóközaranyos, Ferenc Zsemlovics took us down to the huge gravel beach where he used to wash gold with his father, and set up his apparatus one more time. A watery sun rose over the willows as he poured gravel through a wooden contraption that looked like a raised hen hatch, turning every grain, not just the gold flakes, to burnished gold. Ferenc's father bought his first car with the little ingot of gold he and his son washed from the river. They took it into the bank, exchanged it for cash, and took the money straight to the Skoda salesroom, sometime in the mid 1970s. There was so much gold in the Danube then, if you knew where and how to pan for it, Ferenc said, even his village was named after the metal:
Arany
in Hungarian means gold. When the people weren't washing gold from the river, they were fishing. He remembers from his childhood that a Jewish merchant called Mr Weiss used to buy their fish from them, and take it on his horse and cart to the market in Bratislava. His father was also taught to wash gold by an elderly Jew in the village. Almost all the eighty thousand Jews of Slovakia were killed in the Holocaust.

Béla Marcell arrived from the museum he directed in Dunajská Streda, Dunaszerdahely, to be interviewed on the banks of the river just before it was diverted. He was well -versed in the rich folk stories of the region. ‘Among the people of Csallóköz there are many legends about supernatural beings, about the storm wizard, whom people think of as a student. With
his eleven companions, he studied the art of storm-bringing in a cave. And when he had completed his studies he set out to visit the villages in a ragged gown. When he arrived in a village, he always asked for something to eat and drink. Whatever he was offered had to be whole – a whole loaf of bread, from which he cut himself a slice, or a whole jug of water from which he poured himself a drink. And when he was given what he had asked for, he blessed that village, and the next harvest was always good. But when he did not receive what he'd asked for, he cursed it, and storm or fire followed his visit, blowing away the roofs or destroying the crops. That was his punishment.
²⁴
… The storm wizard is said to have had a book from which only he could read. You or I might have studied it in vain, and have attended university, but we would never have understood a word. Now, once I was talking to a group of people in the village of Bős [Gabčikovo], and an old man piped up and said he knew where the wizard's book was – buried under an old tree on the Danube shore. So I suggested to him that we should go together, at midnight, and dig it up. “Are you mad?” he retorted. “We would be torn apart by the witches …” So we couldn't dig the book out. And it seems to have been buried beneath that monster’ – he emphasised the last word with venom, and nodded his head towards the hydroelectric dam – ‘which has made the whole place so hideous.’