Read Online The Danube by Nick Thorpe - Free Book Online

father had to rescue him. He has no romantic nostalgia for the Romania of his childhood. ‘Everything is easier now than it used to be. In those days, everyone rowed. There were no engines before the 1989 revolution. That was very hard.’ He regrets the ban on sturgeon fishing, but says it must be respected. His main contempt is reserved for those of his colleagues who use illegal methods to fish, such as electrodes attached to car batteries. ‘They ought to be electrocuted themselves!’ he says, and I don't think he's joking. Sturgeon was always the hardest fish to catch. ‘First we had to sharpen the hooks. Then we had to know exactly where to lay them.’ The best beluga sturgeon Tudor ever caught was a 280 kilo female, with forty kilos of caviar. ‘Where did you sell it?’ ‘To the fish collecting point. We had no choice …’ He's impatient to go back to his fish, but I persuade him to tell one last story. ‘We fear the fog here in the mouth of the Danube more than any other weather. It comes down suddenly, out of nowhere. There were a lot of us out on the river, fishing one day, when that happened. It was so thick, you could hardly see your own hands, let alone the end of the boat. The women and children came out on the shore when they realised we were lost, and beat pots and pans together to guide us back to the village. But it was no good. The sounds seemed to come from all sides. It took me hours to find my way to the shore.’
    Tudor's wife Maria is planting onions in the small garden in front of her house. We talk in her kitchen. ‘Life is better here than in other parts ofRomania, because we have fish. Even if my husband doesn't catch enough to sell, he always brings some home to eat.’ She likes all kinds. ‘We cook them in the same ways we cook meat – fried, baked, boiled, in breadcrumbs or as fishballs.’ She gives me her fishball recipe. ‘First remove the backbone, then put the whole fish through a grinder. Add the onion, garlic, two eggs, breadcrumbs, a grated raw potato, cover them in a light dusting of flour and fry them till they're ready. Then eat them with tomato sauce, or put them in a sandwich – they're healthier than salami!’ Living here at the fraying edge of the Danube, she watches the climate change and worries how it might affect their precarious existence between a sinking river and a rising sea. Her birthday is in a few days time, on 29 March. ‘Each year, my mother used to go and look under the snow, to find the first few snowdrops to pick for my birthday. Now look at the thermometer! Its twenty degrees at the end of March!’ There were years when the Danube was still frozen solid here on 15 March. She misses the spring and autumn most. ‘Nowadays we pass straight from cold to hot.’
    Sorin is a different kettle of fish to Tudor Avramov. I meet him near the harbour, near his Chinese-made boat, the ‘King of Rubbish’. ‘Rubbish’ appears to be a mistranslation of ‘junk’ – in homage to his craft's Far Eastern origins. Sorin is as talkative as Tudor was quiet. He swiftly fleeces me of a handful of small denomination lei notes, and talks me into a fish dinner at his house and an all-night fishing trip afterwards. He is a fountain of stories or legends about his years as a soldier and a fisherman. He served in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, he says, and came home in the end because he could not bear to live without the Danube. He has a high forehead, round jaw, blue eyes, alternately fierce with anger or wet with tears, big biceps and an anchor tattooed on his forearm. The day he was released from the army he rang his father to get his rowing boat ready. When he stepped off the ferry from Tulcea, he climbed straight down into his own boat, without a word to his relatives, and set off alone into the familiar labyrinths of the delta. For three days and nights he fished and slept and fished, cleansing himself of a life of war and obedience to authority. In his