As a young boy, I was fascinated by the Danube. The way the water struck the banks. It was nothing pleasant. Pools of black and blue, the flood enticed, carried, and then snapped like siren gates. We all knew someone who’d drowned in one place or another. And we’d heard the stories of the wars, the bodies floating down the river, reports of dead cows bloated, swelling, uncontrolled, raising and falling with the waves. One Deda claimed that the river had turned red. Men would rush into the current, struggling with the weight of the bodies. On shore, they’d pull apart the limbs and roast them, keep the skin if they could. No one, and at the same time, everyone, believed the Deda.

But it was my own Baba who told me the story that captured my thoughts, that drew me to the river again and again.

The most beautiful woman in Banoštor, Milena, was to marry a man from Begeč. Both villages were invited. And although this winter had been difficult, unusually cold, the villagers prepared torte that would have made your mouth water, roasted the remaining pigs, pogača the size of a dining room table had been baked. A gang of musicians was hired, twenty or so with trumpets, accordions, guitars, drums, tubas, fiddles, singers, and the poet.

The first day of the wedding was to be held in Banoštor, and the second and third in Begeč. It was so cold that the Danube had frozen over completely. The great river was almost unrecognizable, so far as it was under all the ice, and only in the deepest moments of sun could you see any blue beneath the surface. The river became a pathway, a new road for the villagers. And what a celebration!

Milena was bargained for; the children ran into the street screaming for the musicians. The poet began, his shouts immortalized in puffs of cold, smoky air. And a moment of silence. Milena’s mother sat quietly, tears falling, until the groom’s mother approached her, wiped the tears, kissed her twice on the cheek. Together the women stood, and the villagers began to stomp, clap their hands. The ground was alive, pulsing, the air absorbed it all, and the drummers began to beat their drums, anticipating, anticipating, until finally Milena’s mother cried out, raised her arms above her head, stomped her foot, once, twice, so the trumpet shrieked out the first note, other trumpets followed, the poet, the singers, the mothers, the villagers, cried out the opening lines, the song joining the families, and the tubas boomed, the accordions and fiddles, the guitars faster and faster until the crowd was spinning, sun shaped, always circular, and the crowd moved together, right and left, and the tapping of their feet sprayed bits of snow into the air and caught the light, flashing. Banoštor was alive with music, with celebration, and the villagers marched together, down the hill. Men and women took swigs from rakija bottles, the liquid lining their throats, coating them warm, and down, down the villagers went, to the river of ice.

The villagers prepared their horses, their sleighs, still singing, still dancing, the party marched forward, pounded its way into the night. Only children, Babas, and Dedas, sat in the sleighs, covered in blankets. The musicians, leading the crowd, were kept warm with bribes, Slivovitz, coins, a few stockings even, of young women in the village. Babas tucked cuts of ham into their hands, and filled their bags with sausages, pickles, slanina, even knedle. When a fat tuba player bit into a plum dumpling, his eyes filled with tears for his own Baba, a traveler, he had left her in some distant land. The moon shone across the great white expanse. They moved forward, marched, illuminated, flowing into the night. Otsa sang a song of return, and the villagers joined in.

The first to see the shadow was a small boy. His mother’s eyes followed his finger to the ice, and they watched as a dark form swam below. And again they watched as the form rose and swirled and writhed, and the boy imagined a great monster with gaping mouths, sharp teeth, many tentacled arms and legs, his mother, some river spirit, some demon of the darkness. They couldn’t have felt the bump, the torpid unzipping of the river, over the great rhythm of the night. And yet, when the boy first saw the hand clawing, scrapping under the ice, a moment of recognition may have passed through him, the knowledge of some sage, some ancient erudite had been allowed.   

The ice shifted, one crack after another, until the first horse was pulled down, until they were all sucked into the throat of the river. And I know my own wretchedness, but I imagined what it looked like, the cherry red of Milena’s dress, the olive of the Baba’s scarves, the brown wool of the men’s coats. I imagined the sounds, the crash of some cymbal, the cry of the first out of tune note on the fiddle, maybe someone stepped on the accordion, someone screamed, and another crossed themselves a final time. One by one the villagers sank to the bottom of the Danube, their homes still lit with ceremonial candles.

When I walk the Danube now, I remember that the color came from pain. When clouds shift and parts of the river darken, I see the ancestral ghosts slithering through the depths like long eels. The water, like the robes, beautiful, dangerous.