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And, really, the local wise men said, there you had it. That was the root of it, all right, that great poxed whore of a river that ran by every front door in the Balkans. Well, in a manner of speaking. It had brought them grief and fury, iron and fire, hangmen and tax collectors. Somewhere, surely, it was proposed, there were men and women who loved their river, were happy and peaceful upon its banks, perhaps, even, prayed to its watery gods and thanked them nightly.
Who could know? Surely it was possible, and it was much in their experience that that which was possible would, sooner or later, get around to happening. Fate had laws, they'd learned all too well, and that was one of them.
And it was their fate to live on this river. It was their fate that some rivers drew conquerors much as corpses drew flies—and the metaphor was greatly to the point, was it not. Thus it was their fate to be conquered, to live as slaves. That was the truth of it, why call it something else? And, as slaves, to have the worst slaves' luck of all: changing masters.
For who in history had not tried it? Put another way; if they had not tried it, their place in history was soon given over to the next applicant. Every schoolchild had to learn the spellings, for their national history was written in the names of their conquerors. Sesostris the Egyptian and Darius the Persian, remote bearded figures. Alexander the Great—one of their own, a smart Macedonian lad, a very demon for the love of a fight like they all were down there, a hundred miles south in what they called the dark Balkans. With reason. Charlemagne came through this way, and so did Arpád the Hungarian. (Magyars! A curse on their blood!) Genghis Khan, with his Tatar armies, who believed that babies grew up to be soldiers and that women were the makers of soldier-babies. And acted accordingly. The Romans had come down on rafts, after Dacian gold. The legions of Napoleon were stopped some way upstream. (What? A disaster avoided? Oh how we will pay for that.) And at last, the worst. The Turks.
[...]The river, he knew from hours of droning in the dusty schoolhouse, did not stop in Vidin. It rose in Germany, its legendary source a stone basin in the courtyard of a castle of the Fürstenberg princes in the Black Forest. Called the Donau by all German-speaking peoples, it moved through the Bohemian forests to Vienna, crossed into Czechoslovakia at Bratislava, where they named it the Dunaj, turned south through the Carpathians into northern Hungary, divided the twin cities of Buda and Pesth, flowed south into Yugoslavian Serbia, passed Belgrade at the confluence of the river Sava, known now as the Duna, roared through the Iron Gate—a narrow gorge in the Transylvanian Alps—and headed east, serving as a border between Romania and Bulgaria, where it was called Dunărea to the north and Dunav to the south. Then, at last, it turned north for a time and split into three streams entering the Romanian delta, snaking through the marshes to Izmail, Sulina, and Sfintu Gheorghe, where it emptied into the Black Sea, bordered by the Russian Crimea and Turkey, where the Caucasus mountains ran down to the sea, where Europe ended and Asia began.
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