The hydrofoil for the Iron Gates leaves from Belgrade, near the point where the Sava flows into the Danube. As we start off, Grandma Anka casually points out the part of the city where, during the German bombardment of April 6th 1941, she spent a day buried under the debris with her second husband. She was, of course, unhurt; in fact they both were. The sun hangs above the river, transforming the waters and the mist to a dazzling shimmer. We speed down the Danube, between the shores on which Trajan’s memorial stone records his campaigns against the Dacians of King Decebalus, on waters which were full of snares and whirlpools and other dangers before the big dam and hydro-electric power station were built at Djerdap, on the Jugoslav-Rumanian frontier, and close to the border with Bulgaria. This gigantic undertaking, which produces a considerable amount of electricity, has changed the landscape and erased many traces of the past. Until a few years ago, for example, the Danube still had its island of Ada Kaleh, populated by Turks, complete with their cafés and their mosque; but now Ada Kaleh has vanished, submerged by the river, and dwells in the slow, enchanted times of underwater things, like the mythical Vineta in the Baltic.
At the Iron Gates in 74 B.C. the Roman general Gaius Scribonius Curio expressed his unwillingness to penetrate into the dark forests on the other side of the Danube; maybe as the representative of an ordered, victorious civilization, he felt some obscure repulsion in the face of the manifold stratification of peoples and cultures, intermingled and indistinct, which is witnessed even today in the excavations at Turnu-Severin. I make a tour of the hydro-electric plant, surrounded by schoolchildren on an educational visit. The power-plant is possessed of an inexorable grandeur; it has a suggestion of menace, of heroism. The documentary film served up to us on the tour recounts the story of its construction, showing us titanic blocks of stone tipped into the current, the cleaving of the waters, the irresistible advance of the wheels of giant trucks. Accustomed as we are to the constant criticism of progress, and concerned about ecological imbalances, we are rather taken aback by this Saga of the Five-Year Plan, by these pictures of the triumph of rationalization and technology over Nature, and we cannot help wondering whether those waters now harnessed by cement have really been tamed, or perhaps only suppressed for a moment, and are dourly meditating their revenge.
But this epic achievement, which recalls the Roman aqueducts, the roads which Tamburlaine cut through the mountains or Kipling’s elephants, does have its grandeur and impersonal poetry, which is concealed from us by the anguished and certainly understandable objection to technology which pervades our culture. Maybe we ought to regard these modern pyramids with neither the progressive’s rhetoric nor any sense of apocalyptic terror, giving to each his due, as Kipling in his Bridge-Builders, where he accords equal stress to British engineers and to Indian gods, praising, but at the same time setting limits to, the Labours of Hercules performed by Progress. The film was magnificent and incisive but not without a certain implicit rhetoric as employed by the regime. This was neutralized, however, by the schoolchildren who, for all the yells of their pretty, good-natured schoolmistresses, hurled fireworks into the dark corners of the hall, elbowed each other in the ribs, and generally re-established the balance between the solemnity of work and the impudence of life. Without the cheeky shindig set up by those children, I would probably have had less appreciation for that cyclopic endeavour.
We go by bus to Kladovo on the Bulgarian border. For a poorly prepared Westerner, geography gets vaguer and vaguer. Felix Hartlaub, the German writer whose fascinating notebooks were written “in the eye of the storm”, which is to say in the special commando forces of the Wehrmacht, observed that to his mind, after Belgrade, there began a formless fog, which cast a vagueness over those Balkan lands in which he found himself, so that he wondered where on earth he was. I too, as I wait for the bus at Kladovo, wonder where I am.