The Danube Read Online Free PDF Page B

couple are just leaving as I reach the gate. Their eyes are not graveyard red, but their lips are fresh from kissing. There's a little chapel with a wooden tower and a weather vane, and just behind it is the British section of the cemetery. The English names seem particularly desolate beside the Danube, so far from the Tyne and the Thames, the Mersey and the Medway.
    ‘Sacred to the memory of Thomas Rutherford of Houdon Pans, England, Chief Engineer of the Steam Ship Kepler of North Shields, whodeparted this life on the 26th day of July 1875 at Sulina, aged 36 years.’ This is followed by a quote from Psalm 39: ‘Thou makest my days as a handbreath, and my years are as nothing before thee.’ James Mason, of the Phoenician of Sunderland, died at Sulina on 3 October 1852, aged twenty years. William Simpson died at Sulina on 28 July 1870 aged forty-six years. His stone was erected by the European Commission of the Danube, ‘by whom Mr Simpson was employed for 13 years as foreman of the works’. I wonder if old Charles Hartley attended the funeral, exposed his bowed head to the burning August sun as they lowered Bill Simpson into the ground. There are four names on the next stone, seamen from HBMS Recruit , all drowned in the Danube between 1859 and 1861. How could a ship be careless enough to lose four sailors in just two years? ‘And also for Peter Gregor, stoker, who died from the effects of climate.’
    The wrecks marked on shipping charts, on either side of the Danube mouth, are proof that this is not always such a placid river.
    Finally, with a beautifully carved olive branch at the top of the stone: ‘In loving memory of Isabella Jane Robinson, eldest and dearly beloved daughter of E. A. and E. D. S. Robinson of South Shields, aged 28, who drowned off Sulina on 27 September 1896, by the foundering through collision of the S/S Kylemoor .’
    Near the entrance of the graveyard, I see the freshest grave of all. A low shoulder of hard sand and a bunch of flowers. Ion Valentin, it says on his simple wooden cross, born 2011, died 2011.
    Sulina is a town founded by pirates, made famous by consuls, which survives on an uneasy diet of fish and foreigners. It was first mentioned by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII in a long letter to his fourteen-year-old son in AD 950, about the tribes he might expect to have to deal with when he inherited the throne. ‘The Russians come down the Dnieper river to the Black Sea each year in dug-out boats,’ Constantine wrote, ‘past the Danube mouth to the Selinas (Sulina) river, and are constantly harried by the tribe of Pechenegs, who pick off any boats that stray from the rest, all the way down the coast to Constantinople.’ 4
    The far gate of the graveyard is already locked for the night, so I clamber over the fence and press on towards a sea I can no longer see but can hear more clearly, resounding off new houses, poised in the sand like crabs beyond the cemetery. Seabirds call from close at hand among thewhispering reeds, their preparations for sleep disturbed by my intrusion. Then the sand is suddenly soft beneath my bare feet, followed by the painful crackle of shells, and I see the white lines of the waves on a dark canvas. For once, the Black Sea is really black. A lighthouse pulses white at the end of a long jetty. I walk for a long time, alone along the shore.

    The sun rises next morning over the sea. I lean out from my wrought iron balcony at the Jean Bart, straining to catch the first rays on my face. A single seagull perches on the top of each lamp post with a similar plan to my own, and the tops of the willow trees on the shore turn to gold. There is a bustle of people rushing for the six-thirty boat back to Tulcea, boys pushing bicycles, and women with three or four shopping bags in each hand.
    Over morning coffee in the wood-panelled bar, the owner of the hotel, Aurel Bajenaru, tells me his story. He came here aged twenty, and is now fifty-two. When he arrived