Chapter 17
Towards the Danube Delta
My turn has been to be assigned on a downriver trip. The tug has been waiting in a backwater harbour near the town of Dunaujvaros 60 miles downriver from the capital.
I have taken the train to the town and after arriving there I walked to the harbour. My suitcase has been heavy and I came tired after the 2-mile walk. The tug lay there and I entered it through the boarding plank. Everything was deserted, I called loudly:
"Anybody here?”
Some minutes later a small, but broad-shouldered man with a kind face appeared at the head of the forecastle stairs. He asked:
"How can I help you?”
"I have been assigned here as a machinist.”
"You must wait some minutes. The chief machinist is at home and the other machinist, your colleague is out in that boat with a girl.” He made a gesture toward a small paddle barge in 300 feet from us. It also looked deserted.
The man called out:
"Hooligan!”
From the boat the head of a blond young man popped up.
"What do you want?”
"Your colleague has arrived.”
There was an unintelligible grumble and a girl was sitting up putting her bra on place. They paddled to the tug. The mood of the young man mirrored his disappointment for being disturbed. I thought he would not like me and I guessed it right. His name was Julius.
It became soon clear that the girl was a woman married not long ago to another man, but, as she was 16 she did not find much difference between lying with one man or another. I did not bother as it was not my business. He showed me to our cabin in the rear end of the hull below deck. My bed has been under the deck at the side of the ship.
J. showed me everything in the engine room and in the two days before we left to take the barges and, having arranged them behind the tug, to begin our downriver trip, I have learned all needed. But in that two days I had a funny accident that made it necessary for me to return to the capital for a fast visit.
In the morning following my boarding my colleague, his lover, her friend – another young girl that has been a maiden yet – and me, went to see the whole harbour around from the paddle boat. In the middle of the bay the girls made a fuss and I fell into the water. There would have been no problem had I taken off my glasses as usual before swimming. But, as it came suddenly, my glasses remained on the bottom of the bay under 20 feet of water. In the muddy bottom it has been impossible to find them.
I had carried glasses since when I was 9. Beginning with a minus half diopter it soon became minus 6.5 and 7.5. Without my glasses I could not do my work on the tug. I quickly walked to the station, took the next train and by noon I reached the optical shop selected for urgent service. I have chosen the cheapest frame to make my money cover the expenses. As I did not have time to go to the doctor for a prescription I had to pay full price. By late afternoon I had got my new glasses and arrived to the tug before sunset.
The six weeks I have spent on that ship have stored in my mind a lot of pleasant and unpleasant events. It is funny, but hard I try to catch a memory of the chief machinist, I cannot remember him. But his deputy I can. He was a graduate engineer who did not want to follow the compulsory hierarchy of construction offices, he had taken the job of a ship machinist and he wanted to see and experience as much of the real world as he could. His character was alien to me, with all his self-confidence and other human shortcomings. But during that six weeks he has been my boss and I had to bear his practical jokes and unintelligent remarks about the possible misbehaviour of my fiancée. At that time I have almost been an adult with 21 years behind me and I had lost a lot of my born naiveté. It has been a further lesson to me about human society.
On the tug I could rely on the sailor whom I first met on board. He was a very good natured honest man. The captain made me sometimes chat with him. He reminded me of one of my teachers from elementary school and we understood each other very well. He has seen in me rather the intellect, the would-be engineer and not the simple machinist as the deputy chief machinist has.
There was a system of kitchen crew assignment at the company having its roots from times before the war. On every tug and freighter with a crew of more than 12 there was a woman cook and a kitchen hand, another female. At their assignment it had to be taken into account, currently who were their partners. It had caused a lot of problems before, as women had been assigned to boats different from that, where their partners had been serving. On the tug-boat "Esztergom” there were no problems, they have been on the right boat, and all took it into consideration. For this reason the crew members of the tug have lived their life as a big feudal family with a lot of single members and strict rules.
I can consider myself lucky to have had the opportunity to see the cataracts of the Danube in their original state. Now they are closed in a concrete frame and most of them is under many feet of calm water. As soon as I became accustomed to the routine of life on the boat I have spent most of my leisure time seeing as much of the environment as possible.
Life on a tugboat is not very eventful. Everyone does his or her duty. Usually the tug and barges are moving at a constant speed day and night, stopping at frontiers or, when mist or other conditions make it necessary.
At the time of my first downriver trip, i.e. before the building of the Iron Gate Dam, the 90 miles of cataracts made a real obstacle in the way of shipping. It is the place where the Danube flows through the southern line of the Carpathian mountains. The beauty of this country is overwhelming.
There were three sections on that part of the river. The uppermost section was about ten miles long with a normal wide basin that was, however, full of piercing cliffs. Actually there was only a narrow navigational route created 160 years ago by the best engineers of the country to make the Danube navigable. In the drier season when the water-flow decreased, almost the whole current flew via that route and the current was strong. At tide the current lost its speed, as water could flow over the cliffs.
Downriver a tug and two barges could safely pass the route. It meant, the 9 barges behind us had to be anchored at the bank – turning the unit around before that – and two by two slipped through the bottleneck. For the tug the upriver period was hard, but with full speed she managed it without the help of the chain-tug.
When a towage has been coming upriver the tug was to tow her barges one by one and besides, she had to take the help of the chain-tug. It has been a special equipment. Originally a steam tug-boat herself, called "Vaskapu” (Iron Gate), the tug has been equipped with an enormous chain through-winch. An anchor chain of an extreme size had been laid down on the bottom of the river and, as the chain-tug operated its winch, it moved up or down in the bottleneck shipping route. The chain simply went up its deck, through the winch and back again to the bottom. But it gave a high boost to help vessels go upwards against the current. The tug and barge to be assisted have been fastened to the chain-tug.
During high tide there was no need for this help, a tug could easily do her work with one barge.
When we finished our shuttling at this section, we continued our trip for some miles until we reached the next bottleneck. It had almost the same look at that time as it has today, with two exceptions. It is the Kazan Straits. First, between the upper and lower stages of this place, the Greater and Lesser Kazan Straits, there is a section where at one side the mountains keep a certain distance from the river bank. At that time this widening of the river-valley made a gulf on that side, and a pretty small village had been situated there. In the middle of the bay there was a neat little island. This island has also appeared in the novel of Mr Jokai "The Golden Man”, where the hero at last finds his place at the side of the woman he loves. Now it is all under deep water and the river stretches to the mountain-side far away.
The second exception is even more sad. During the 2nd century A.D. the Roman emperor Traian conquered the south part of Transylvania being then the country of Dacia. He went along the Danube and his legions made a route on the riverbank hewn into the rock of the two Kazans above water-line. It has remained intact until the dam submerged it. Now only skin-divers can see what we saw pass by from the board of our boat.
The two Kazan Straits have the most majestic view on the Danube. The river is pushed inside a very narrow basin. The width of the river at places is less than 300 feet. At the same time its depth is even more than that. Having enough cross-section and a moderate fall the speed of the current is not very high. But because of the very narrow navigational route a tug in both directions can only handle one barge, taking it alongside and securing very well.
One by one our barges got through, and we arrived to the anchoring site of the town of Orsova.
On the whole section of the cataracts the Danube is a frontier river. The left side belongs to Romania, where Orsova had lain. Now only the outskirts of the town is visible, other territories are under water. The same fate is shared by the one-time island of Ada Kaleh, whose minaret had been famous before the dam.
In that town our shipping company has had a representative, and there the tug’s commander has got an instruction to put the barges on anchor and take on board a group of film-makers. The group consisted of six people: three actors, an actress, a cameraman and a director. They arrived here by train and wanted to finish their work in a week. They managed to do it in four days. It was the first seven minutes of the film based on the novel "The Golden Man”. We have been shown a medieval-looking small tow-barge called contrabass barge because of her prow design. It had originally been a 300-ton river barge made of steel, but it was clad by planks and was looking as the original "St. Barbara” in the book.
In the coming four days it was really interesting to watch the film in shooting. We always stayed aside to be of assistance when needed. As the small barge was only looking right from the outside, some of the interior shots have been made in our spare cabin – after a small rearrangement. The famous people were accommodated in a hotel in Orsova, but during day most of the time they spent on our tug. Once or twice even we from the crew have been selected to have a talk with one or the other.
The actress played the role of the Turkish girl, who becomes the wife of the hero, but never lies with him. She looked like. I have never seen her to make a conversation with anybody. The actor playing the hero was of Transylvania, just as the other one for the father of the girl. They had been hindered in their work in their native language by the official Romanian policy, so they emigrated to Hungary. That time it was common with Hungarian-speaking actors from Transylvania. Both have been very modest men. They stopped many times to have a talk with us. The third actor was playing the steersman and he could have been easily mistaken for one of our crew.
The other two men I have never seen outside the captain’s cabin.
When I returned from that trip and saw the film, it was a good feeling I had been there on the spot.
Getting through the hard section our barges were again arranged in a 3 by 3 format and the long trip to the delta began. The weather was hot, even a shower could not refresh you, as the water temperature reached 86 degrees F.
The river at that section is 4 to 5 miles wide and sometimes the bank you see is only an island, the bank is actually farther. Downriver the scene is changing constantly, but upriver you go down to sleep and when you come up, you se the same big tree on the bank, only somewhat behind.
There is an anecdote about this country worth telling. A sea-going passenger ship built for the Poles in our capital was on her way down the river to find her way to Poland. Her auto-steering went out-of-order and the ship began to run to the shore. Her speed could not be reduced sufficiantly, she ran aground. Nothing serious happened, only her artistically designed prow hit a tree on the bank and it was felled, killing a cow. The herder, who slept under the tree, remained unhurt. This is a true story, it happened in 1954. The ship has been built for Poland in barter for black coal.
At last we reached the place, where we were heading. It was Reni, a small town, but a big river-side reloading place within the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova then. Later there was a change of territories between Moldova and Ukraine, Moldova got the Pridnestrovia – a hot spot lately because of Russian troops relocated there from Afganistan – and Ukraine took all the lands on the Danube and the Black Sea for national security reasons. But that time it was still Moldova.
As a machinist I did not have much to do with load, I went to see the town. For my allowance I wanted to buy a camera. As I have mentioned, it was my first trip abroad and during the whole trip it was the first place to go to shore. I had already seen big poverty and terribly arranged settlements. But never before such a town of 40 thousand inhabitants. There were no roads, only lanes made by the wheels of vehicles. No shops, no restaurants, only a ruined church, as I later learned, grain has been stored in it. The whole town looked as the lower end of the village at home where I have been living before.
Following 9 years of Russian lessons, I could hardly get any information where to buy a camera. At last I found a shop. I could only recognize it by the Cyrillic inscription: MAGAZIN. I could get only one type of camera, a 35 mm plastic box-camera. There was no way to focus it and to regulate shutter speed. It represented the same level as my own make 3 years before. There were 3 aperture positions: a sign of the sun, that of a shaded sun and a lamp. I bought it for half a day’s allowance. This small camera served me for a short time only.