Hold On, Europa

Standing on the roof of a Soviet boathouse, I reach into the bag, crammed to bursting with repair materials. On the far bank of the Danube the Parliament shines in its stately, historic dignity, but my eyes are on the future alone: on my seventy year old folding kayak.

The wooden frame that holds the skin taut is broken in many places. It creaks, it wobbles. The skin leaks in countless spots, and where it was once grey it is now a patchwork of colour, from all the repairs I have given it.

Hold on, Europa, I whisper to the boat. Sixty more days and we reach the delta, Ukraine, the Black Sea. Almost a thousand kilometres we have followed the Danube now, the folding kayak and its crew, which consists of my black dog Fluffo and me. For a month we have been drifting down this timeless artery of Europe, from Ulm by way of Ingolstadt, Regensburg, Vienna and Bratislava, all the way to Budapest.

Four capitals, ten countries, I repeat in my head: the longest river in the European Union. And in the middle of it, between the shipping lanes and the swell, a melancholy but optimistic son of the old continent, paddling his boat Europa, on his way to leave it behind for a while.

Fluffo yawns loudly. Complicated trains of thought like these leave him cold; he leaves them to us humans. A long slip of paper works its way out of the bag and flies off. I jump after it. It is the receipt for the makeshift fixes, for the glue. I stuff it back, grumbling. The repair material was expensive, but a sunken Europe would be more expensive still, I tell myself, trying to cheer myself up. A bitter, ironic metaphor. My beloved Union is also an expensive, heavy hearted, patched up boat, one in danger of going under in an ever stormier world of giants, where the rules belong to the powerful.

I will remember that, I whisper wistfully, before throwing one more glance at the Parliament, where Orbán's cabinet is forging its plans, and I go back to work. Because my Europe has to be repaired. My future depends on it. The Danube too is growing wider, mightier, its waves higher.

Tassilo de la Torre Schönborn paddled the Danube alone from Ulm to the Black Sea in a folding kayak built in the 1950s, then continued overland by hitchhiking as far as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Eight months in total. He trained as an architect at TU München and works as a photographer.