Jaromír Kubias

”The boats were the worst problems, they sailed around all the time with the lights on. I couldn’t swim during the day because they would see me and some boat could catch me and during the night, the boats always had their lights on so that they would not run into one another. To swim across Danube would take some time and that worried me most. So that I would swim across the river when there’s no light. I left all my clothes on the Slovak side in the reeds, I left there some money and my ID. Naked, I went to the water. My plan was, in case they caught me, I would say: ‘But all my things are there, I was carried away by the currents and I’m totally dumb, I just missed whether I was on the left or on the right bank.’ I swam to the other side and my biggest problem appeared: mosquitos in the night. Who swarmed on me as if they got some prey from high heaven. I found my way a bit away from the river and I found out that the river is going on for about the same width, mud, one couldn’t walk in it, there was maybe half a metre, maybe a metre of water. So I swam like a mudskipper, those African fish who crawl using their feet and jump. I was lucky, there was fog. When I was in the middle of the river, a small boat sailed by. I don’t know whether there were fishermen or smugglers. I stopped swimming, only my eyes were sticking out of water and the fog was hiding me. Then I swam to the other side. Once again, I found out how it feels to be naked in brambles. Thorny shrubs reached almost to the water, and mosquitoes. I found my way through the thorny shrubbery and then I was in the fields. I don’t remember whether it was potatoes or some other crop. I was near a road indeed. That road is located about half a kilometre away from the river, it was some branch of Danube or a swamp next to Danube. I saw cars going back and forth. I crawled between the rows and when there was too much light, I hid between the crops. At the end, when I was at the side of the road, I found some shrub imn which I stayed. I waited for my dad to drive by. We had a Mercedes-Benz 170. All cars at that time had blinkers. And that Mercedes had a retractable trafficator in the form of an arrow. The trafficator went up, it lit up, then the trafficator fell. I waited until I would see a car with that arrow-shaped trafficator. And eventually, a car with an arrow arrived. They found me at the first drive-by.”