Visegrad Letter: The look of incredulity on the mayor's face was probably answer enough. Behind him, groups of soldiers were pumping out inundated houses and reinforcing a wall of sandbags around the Danube village of Nagymaros.
Momentarily dumbstruck, it seemed, by the effrontery of the request, Mayor Andras Edocseny declared at last that no, under no circumstances would he ask the Hungarian army to take a reporter across a river that was closed to all but emergency traffic.
"The Danube is at its highest-ever level here," Mr Edocseny shouted above a cacophony of generators, clanging spades and water gushing from hosepipes. "This is an emergency situation - even if a government minister came here I couldn't let him out on the river." With a shrug and a wan smile at his powerlessness, the mayor turned back into his office as the brown Danube made quiet advances towards the village square.
He had plenty to worry about, with a few families washed from their homes, farmland flooded, and the tourist season starting with uprooted trees floating down what used to be the waterfront promenade and across the terrace of a riverside restaurant.
The trouble began with melting snow surging down from the highlands of central Europe into hundreds of already rain-swelled tributaries of the Danube, the Sava, the Oder and the Elbe, the great waterways that drain this region on their way to the sea.
My problem began with a train that deposited me at Nagymaros-Visegrad station, on the opposite soggy bank of the Danube from the historic town of Visegrad, whose crumbling hilltop citadel now glowered across an apparently impassable river.
The ferry that linked the riverbanks was out of action, as were all other non-emergency vessels on large swathes of a working river that flows from Germany's Black Forest through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria, before tracing the border between Romania and Ukraine and finally disgorging into the Black Sea.
Further north, the Elbe and Oder inundated parts of Germany, Poland and Czech Republic last week, while the Sava and Danube now threaten Belgrade at their confluence in the Serb capital; some 200,000 hectares of Serbian farmland is submerged and 1,700 conscripts are fighting floods that have swamped part of the city of Novi Sad.
Emergency crews are also preparing for a surge in Danube water levels this week in Romania and Bulgaria, where dozens of people were killed and thousands were left homeless last year in the worst floods to hit the countries in decades.
The deluge had already come to Visegrad and to Nagymaros, where a Hungarian army motorboat bobbed teasingly on its leash and the train back to Budapest sent up a cajoling whistle as it neared the village station.
It was then that a stocky figure broke from a huddle of camouflage and approached, beckoning with gestures not intended for the officious eye of the mayor.
With a disdain for bureaucrats and landlubbers that is common among men of a military and nautical persuasion, Lt Laszlo Danyiko cast us off without a backward glance to the mayor, who gawped on the bank as the boat roared out into midstream.
"Don't worry about him, we'll get you across," called our pilot, who was one of a group of soldiers dispatched from Budapest to help with flood relief.
An old man with a lively dog watched us arrive on the Visegrad side, the lieutenant steering between half-submerged trees to bump up a grass bank and leave us next to a road that workers were clearing of debris washed up by the floodtide.
Beyond the sodden fields by the river, Visegrad basked in spring sunshine beneath a castle and hilltop citadel built by Hungarian kings after the 1242 Mongol invasion.
In 1325, King Charles I made Visegrad the royal seat of Hungary and, a decade later, he welcomed the rulers of Poland and Bohemia here to seal a peace between their states and improve political and trade links.
The spirit of that 1335 summit moves the modern-day Visegrad group, a forum that regularly brings together leaders and senior officials from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the biggest countries to join the European Union in 2004.
Visegrad citadel, which was besieged by the Ottomans and later destroyed by the Habsburgs to stop it being used by Hungarian independence fighters, still affords fine views across two ranges of wooded hills that embrace a sweeping curve of the Danube.
Way below, the army launch was waiting on the riverbank at the appointed hour the next day, and bounced us back across to Nagymaros through the bow wave of a Ukrainian cruise ship and a cargo barge glinting with neatly stacked new Mercedes.
"The river reopened to some traffic today, but the ferry's still not running," shouted our military pilot as the spray leapt around him. "But we'll be here for a while - we're expecting even higher water in the next couple of weeks."
