Read Online The Danube by Nick Thorpe - Free Book Online Page A

outhouse, his young girlfriend remains almost mute as Sorin cleans and fries small crucian carp. His best tales are about his grandfather. Born around 1907, he fought on both sides in the Second World War, eventually opting for the Germans because they treated their soldiersbetter. ‘I got both brandy and chocolate,’ he told his grandson. The Russians treated him even worse as a prisoner of war than as their own soldier. Captured on the Eastern Front in 1943, he spent nine years in a prison camp in Siberia. Potato peelings were a rare luxury. Released in 1952, he made his way back as far as Izmail. Just across the river from the city, he could see the sparse lights of Romania, glittering like beads along the shore. He asked about a boat to get him across, but was told that none existed. When he announced his intention to swim instead, he was told he would be shot. One night he went downriver to Vlkovo, where the Danube is wider still, but there were fewer border guards and swam several miles across to the Romanian side. Nowadays Vlkovo is treasured by Ukrainians for its early strawberries, which you can buy in the marketplace in Odessa.
    Sorin is very proud of his grandfather. ‘He was one of twelve brothers, and he went out to fish at the age of nine, to help feed the family – they lived only from fishing.’ Even now, he says, there are people who come up to Sorin in the street, and tell him how his grandfather saved them when their boats capsized. His family were Don Cossacks, offered land by Catherine the Great in the Crimea. But the Crimean Tatars pushed them southwards, all the way to the Danube. Sorin used to go to Izmail by boat in the 1990s, to bring food and alcohol back to sell in Romania. ‘Everything was so cheap there – you could buy a whole head of cheese, big as a wheel, for almost nothing!’ He now makes a living from the tourist trade in summer, and from fishing. The winds in the delta each have a name. The south wind is called the moriana , and fishermen say that when it blows you just have to put your nets in the water and they fill with fish. The north wind, the crivǎțs , comes from Russia, and brings us nothing, he says. It is so strong it makes currents in the water, and breaks nets thicker than his thumb. He holds it up, for dramatic effect, still covered in the entrails of the fish he is gutting for our supper. ‘But the wind is fickle, it can turn around from one moment to the next, and blow a squall from the other direction.’ I remember the British graves in Sulina and all the deaths from collisions and drownings. His fried carp are tasty and plentiful, but full of bones. They might have been better suited to Maria Avramov's fish balls. The level in the two-litre plastic bottle of wine he picked up from a ramshackle bar with the money I gave him plunges downwards dangerously. We part company after supper, and he says he will pick me up in an hour from myhotel for our fishing trip. The hours pass, and by the time he arrives roaring drunk after midnight I have gone off the plan altogether.
    The next morning, to make sure that no feelings are hurt on either side, and to lessen the danger that I will ask for the money back, he takes me by boat to the fish-collecting centre. There is a floating platform with a metal shed at the back, where fish are stacked to the ceiling in plastic crates. The man in charge is busy on his mobile phone. At first he is suspicious of me. This is nowhere near the tourist season and my story about writing a book about the Danube sounds far-fetched. Reluctantly, he answers my questions. The herring come in from the sea when the Danube reaches 6 or 7 degrees centigrade. The migration takes place every five years. They take forty-five days to swim upriver, as far as the Iron Gates dam that blocks their way. There they spawn, before swimming back to the sea, which takes only fifteen days downstream. He pays five to six lei per kilo for the fish (under two dollars)