The Danube (39 page)

Twenty years later, in the spring of 2012, I return to see the hydroelectric turbines, the canal, the storage lake, and meet some of those I interviewed in 1992. Béla Marcell had died two years earlier, but in Csallóköznádasd I meet Elenóra, the daughter of Sándor Bölcs. Sándor was a self-taught thatcher who thatched and repaired most of the houses in his village from the 1950s to the early 1990s. I remember him well, sitting astride his roof, speaking of his pride that he has handed his skill on to his sons and sons-in-law, so that they will still be thatching – he paused to grin, and point with his elbow, ‘when I am on the other side’. I followed his gaze, down the steep-sloping far side of the roof, and into the world of the dead. Elenóra is living in a more modern house now, built in front of the old thatched house where her father brought up the family. Just beyond it is the huge, outward sloping wall of the canal, eighteen metres high. If it were ever to break, hers is one of the first houses that would be swept away. Sándor crossed to the other side at the age of seventy, with prostate cancer, just a couple of years after I met him. ‘Even in the hospital in Bratislava,
he was still making little models of the stall in Bethlehem – thatched of course,’ his daughter remembers. ‘It was certainly the hard work that got him,’ his son-in-law adds. ‘He would work in all weathers in the reeds, in the snow and cold and damp.’ He would stuff newspapers inside his rubber boots, and set out.

There's not much thatching done in the village any more – the roofs are tiled, and thatch is seen as a luxury. The four of them can still thatch, but only get to practise their craft three or four times a year, normally to repair a roof. They make a living from building and fencing now, instead.

To get to the three villages on the far side of the canal, Vojka, Doborgaz and Bodíky, a ferry crosses twice an hour, but is often stopped by high winds. There is almost always a strong wind now, they say, whereas before they were protected by the forests that were chopped down to make way for the dam and the canal. The villagers have been told that if the wind speed ever gets up to a hundred kilometres per hour, the dam could collapse.

The majority in the villages are now second-home owners. The dam and all the roads that were built with it completely opened up the closed world of villages and water, regular floods and islands, to the outside world. There are fewer and fewer Hungarians and more Slovaks, though the two peoples have always got on well, on a local, if not political, level. The storage lake beyond Čunovo, and all the other little recreation lakes into which the old wetlands have been channelled, are lined with weekend houses. Some of them are even thatched – ‘and some are really beautiful,’ Elenóra admits, readily. As we speak, she bounces her daughter Zsófi on her knee, and we sip red wine from the Izabella grapes Sándor planted in the garden. One thing that hasn't changed, they say, are the mosquitoes, barely a nuisance some summers, unbearable in others. Local people like to climb the walls of the canal, and watch the barges and passenger ships pass in summer. In winter, when the lakes freeze, the children skate as they always have, and Elenóra wishes her father had lived long enough to see his grandchildren skate. We bid each other fond farewells, and I drive down the road to Gabčikovo. On the top I park the car and watch the waves breaking along the huge mass of concrete and steel.

I drive towards Bratislava to see the ferry crossing, but crossings for the rest of the day have just been cancelled because the wind has reached
sixteen kilometres an hour – and regulations say they should stop the ferry if it crosses the twelve kilometres an hour threshold. There are two ferries, but only one is in working condition. As well as the captain, several of the other crew gather round the table, to drink tea and chat about the old times. ‘What I miss most,’ says the captain, ‘is the kindergartens and schools. In Bodíky both have closed down, together with the post office. There's just a bar left – three bars in fact!’ The men laugh. A doctor visits the villages once a week: ‘you have to get ill on the right day!’ they laugh again. The villages have been connected to the mains water supply and to the sewage system. They drink water from the tap, not from the wells any more. And the soil is still good for their vegetables – for maize, wheat and sugarbeet.

I stop on the shore near Čunovo, to visit the Danubiana modern art gallery, on an exposed promontory.
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There are white waves on the grey green waters of the storage lake, and sculptures around the gallery, of strange blue, white and green figures, of rakish golf players, of a peculiar Napoleon head, by the Dutch-born sculptor Hans Van de Bovencamp, somehow add to the bleakness of the place on a cold day. ‘In creating large sculptures, he focuses on their interaction with the surrounding environment,’ reads the blurb. Two giant twisted metal hens or cockerels alone seem to do justice to the tortured former wilderness of the place. Out of the water huge piles of rocks protrude, and the lake is lined with concrete embankments.

At last, to my relief, a great V-shaped formation of geese flies high overhead, a reminder of the awesome symmetry of nature. I long for William Blake in this plastic playground.

The road into Bratislava from the Danube villages and Šamorín is quiet, compared to the brash motorways that approach the Slovak capital from other directions. I've chosen a boatel moored on the Danube bank to stay in, just beneath the white castle. One hundred and seventy-two kilometres
of the Danube's length flow through Slovakia, and Bratislava, like Budapest and Belgrade, and to a lesser extent Vienna, owes much of its glory to the river.

Pulling my small suitcase down the plank, I'm assailed by a wonderful smell of Indian curry – there's an Indian restaurant on board. Over breakfast the next morning the manager tells me that the boat used to be busy as a floating brothel, downriver in Budapest, before he found a better use for it in Bratislava. He gives me a little brass cabin number from those times, number 301. I sleep like a log both nights on his sturdy craft, lulled into my dream world by river waves and seagulls.

Jaromír Šibl leans slightly forward over the table as we talk in his office, a tram's ride from the city centre, between the Botanical Gardens and the Waterworks Museum. He's a tall, bearded man with a Santa Claus twinkle in his eye, who looks as though he was born with a rucksack on his back. I first met him in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as he was one of the few brave Slovaks who opposed the construction of Gabčikovo. Now he runs an environmental organisation called Broz.
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‘The main victim is nature. The point is that normally this was a floodplain area which was regularly flooded several times a year, the whole area, the islands, the meadows and the forests. You could only travel through the forest by boat. The whole ecosystem was based on this simple fact of regular floods.’ One pleasant surprise has been the lack of damage, so far at least, to the huge underground aquifer, beneath layers of gravel which are in places several hundred metres deep. There is a lack of research, he adds, but the research published so far by Slovak scientists is reassuring.

The fall in the ground water-level, on both sides of the river, but especially the Slovak side, is much more alarming. Hungarian engineers and policy-makers faced up to the fait accompli of the Slovak diversion of the river early on, he said. The only agreement ever reached between Hungary and Slovakia about the Danube was the construction of an underwater weir in the old bed of the Danube near Dunakiliti. This allows a small lake to build up from the remaining waters in the river, which is then carefully redistributed through the region via a system of natural and man-made streams and canals. This helps to keep the water level up, and prevents the complete drying out of the area which the diversion would otherwise have caused. On the Slovak side the situation is much worse, according to
Jaromír, because the Slovak authorities refuse to do anything at all about the problem. ‘The official policy of Slovakia is that the 1977 treaty is still valid, and we should behave accordingly. This means that we should use whatever means we have to force the Hungarians to complete not only this part of the original project, but also to complete Nagymaros. So if we take any steps that were not envisaged in the original project, we would be implicitly agreeing that the Hungarians were right when they stepped out of the treaty. And this would weaken our position in an eventual future legal dispute. This is the main political problem which we have not overcome for the past twenty years.’

In 1997, the Court of Justice in Luxembourg found both countries guilty of breaking the 1977 treaty, Hungary for stepping out of it unilaterally and Slovakia for pressing ahead with the C-variant.
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It ordered both to reach agreement over the division of the Danube waters, of which Slovakia now takes 80 per cent. No agreement has been reached and none seems likely.

In Bratislava, the level of the Danube has risen half a metre as a result of the storage lake, adding to the flood threat during periods of high water. No studies have ever been published comparing the cost of construction and maintenance of the dams and managing the vast sediments in the storage lake with the value of electricity gained. Broz focuses its efforts on smaller projects, to improve or restore the natural balance of the river and the lands beside it: on Petržalka, the part of the city on the right bank of the river, dominated by vast housing estates, and on restoring traditional animal grazing on the banks near Bratislava and downstream at Komárno. Before the communists took over, the willow forests along the shore of the Slovak Danube were pruned by local people for firewood and grazed by their animals. After fifty years of neglect the Broz project enabled people to gather firewood again, and their animals drove back the many invasive species that had harmed the willows.

Before leaving Slovakia, I drive northwards to visit the castle and cliffs at Devin, overlooking the Danube. This is where the Carpathian Mountains start, and where the Old Europe of Marija Gimbutas ends – the westernmost point that the Copper Age civilisations reached. The castle stands on a steep cliff, overlooking the point where the Morava river flows into the Danube. The Romans dislodged the Celts from here, as
from castle hill overlooking Bratislava. Devin is named after
deva
, the Slavic word for maiden. It was an important fortress on the corner of the Greater Moravian empire, as well as for the Hungarians. Following their defeat at the battle of Mohács in 1526, Hungarian kings were crowned in St Stephen's Church in Bratislava from 1536 onwards. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Slovak poet Lud'ovit Stur, after whom the town of Štúrovo, opposite Esztergom, is named, gathered his friends together to plot the birth of the Slovak nation, attracted by the rugged beauty and historic importance of the place. That was only forty years after Napoleon's retreating forces blew large parts of it up – the ruins made it even more attractive to the Romantic imagination.

At the foot of the cliffs beside the river, a concrete arch stands riddled with bullet holes, a memorial to all those who died trying to swim the Morava river to the Austrian side to escape Czechoslovakia. On the back are the names of more than a hundred people who met that fate on this heavily guarded section of the border.

Georg Frank comes out of his castle to welcome me. He's younger than I expect, too young to have taken part in the 1984 protest movement against the Hainburg dam, which made this park and his job possible. As manager of the Donauauen national park, he oversees the water levels, the trees and beavers, the fish and owls and frogs and little creeks of this stretch of woodland.
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He drives me down half overgrown tracks in a red park-authority jeep into the restricted area of the woodlands. Then we walk for a while together, two grown men in a sea of snowdrops. I pick a handful to sniff. They do have a faint scent, but nothing like the full-blooded linen of Babadag. These ones are made to delight the eyes, not the nose. Next time we stop the car we hear the woodpeckers straightaway. Each plays a different, rattling note on the tree, depending on the hollowness of the wood, the hardness of the trunk, and the power of its beak. Georg lists all the woodpeckers of this wood. The Balkan, black, white and red, the greater-spotted, green and, more elegant, the lesser-spotted, the rarer of the three, and several others; closer, or further away – turning the wood into an echo chamber, a carpenter's workshop.

He takes me to see one tree in particular, with all the reverence of a visit to the queen of the forest. The black poplar only grows on land that is
regularly flooded. It gets its name from the darkness of its trunk, which it keeps even in the brightest sunlight. The trunk of this one is surrounded by fallen wood, and there is a lighter brown wound in the back – the work of beavers. The beavers diligently make a ring around the trunk, then saw deeper and deeper with their teeth until the tree falls. There's no danger of that happening with this one, Georg says, though he is impressed by their boldness – attacking one of the oldest trees of this forest. ‘It's too far from the water – they have easier prey along the banks.’ We wander down to the shore of a wide creek and scare two young boar, who crash away through the undergrowth. Since this became a national park, there has been no forestry here – but there are signs of the old forestry in every hybrid poplar, growing tall and thin and disappointing in their uniformity, compared to all the other kinds of poplars. The park authority has decided not to chop down the planted poplars in this section, but to allow the beavers to do the job themselves. And on the far shore, it's clear they are fulfilling their ecological duty with a passion – five or six tall poplars, their bark all gone, on the brink of falling.

Then we go down to the Uferhaus, the River Bank-house, an old restaurant on the shore. The Danube seems male again here, manly, a weight-lifter. The flow is swift – swift enough to attract the dam-builders thirty years ago – and the barges labour upstream, groaning and whispering and grumbling against the current. We choose a table outside and order pikeperch fillets with a pat of garlic butter on each. Not from the Danube, Georg sighs. From ponds in Hungary or Slovakia. There's not enough fish in the main river.