Blue River, Black Sea by Eames Andrew

Author:Eames, Andrew [Eames, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781446421383
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2011-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

Atilla’s vision of filth and grime is contiguous with the present day, but amongst those things it had washed away, from just where Attila sat, were throngs of Jewish children aged between four and twelve, machine-gunned into the river in the latter days of the Second World War. A row of metal shoes lined the embankment edge where they disappeared.

The boat slowed and turned back into the current in the lee of Buda’s biggest hill, Gellert, topped by the city’s most adaptable monument, Lady Liberty, holding a palm frond aloft for all to see. Lady Liberty is a true survivor amongst Eastern European statuary. She’s overcome the vicissitudes of Hungary’s very difficult century, starting her career during the fascist period as a personal tribute to a dictator’s son, riding out the communist period as a Liberation Monument thanking the Russians for their advance, and now she stood as a generic memorial for all those who had died for Hungarian independence. Adaptable and ambiguous, she’d managed to epitomize heroism for each new regime, although she’d required discreet remodelling at every regime change in order to escape being melted down into ship’s propellers.

Below her, we nosed ashore just upstream of the Chain Bridge, where art nouveau merchants’ houses spread in staccato clumps along both shores, demi-semiquavers on a stave. The bridge is Budapest’s most photogenic and elderly crossing, a string-of-pearls suspension, a suspender belt across a svelte river which was briefly stockinged by a rifling breeze. It was constructed in 1849 at the instigation of Count Széchényi, after he had been forced to delay his father’s funeral for eight days because the river was too high for him to cross. This was an inconvenience that he found intolerable, and he decided it was time the city had a more permanent crossing, so he contacted a British engineer who’d just created a Thames river-crossing at Marlow: ‘I want one of those.’ Back then in Hungary the aristocracy made everything happen, even big things like the building of bridges.

For the moment I didn’t need to cross it, but my destination was close to its western end, and within twenty minutes of disembarking I’d wheeled my bicycle into the kitchen of a fourth-floor apartment block in Buda’s riverside Taban district. There my well-travelled 20-euro set of wheels came to rest, five weeks after leaving Donaueschingen. I never rode it again.

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