Quiet Flows the Una

by Faruk Sehic

  I couldn’t help feeling I was in the grips of a perverse fascination by being attracted to what disgusted me at the same time. It’s like when you look down from a balcony: you’re drawn to that drop, but you don’t take a casual step into thin air like the suicide jumper whose goal is the car park below. You’ve probably thought about your stomach while holding a long kitchen knife in your hand – well, it’s the same perverse fascination that takes hold of me whenever I think about life in former Yugoslavia and its break-up.

  Four

  You don’t get dizzy from watching the river flow. If you start talking about something you’ll soon lose the thread because the water takes hold of you and you forget the words you wanted to say, and Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode plays in your ears. We enjoyed watching the Una as it flowed now fast, now sluggishly, and its restless surface spread peace all about.

  We avoided our brigade’s anniversary event because we had no time for stuffy observances in the mood of the old system, which still hung over us like an undead spirit. The factory buildings on the outskirts of town were like that too, where people had already begun salvaging usable sheet metal. The carcasses of factories and Serbian houses were to be thoroughly pillaged and dismantled, down to the last brick. Who now remembers all those bizarre deaths of wretches who were crushed by the concrete ceilings of abandoned houses where they’d been chiselling bricks out of the walls? Beginning in September 1995, and continuing for some months, caravans of tractors, trucks and horse-drawn carts passed through the town loaded with plunder from villages in the Grmeč mountain range, heading for places some way away. The lust for other peoples’ property is a strange and widespread malaise.

  We got together on our brigade’s anniversary to celebrate a lot of things we didn’t want to call by their names. We toasted in a cheer­ful Zen manner, without clicking bottles and without excessive exclamations. Our alcohol-fuelled jaunt of favourite locations inevitably took us to a caravan selling drinks in the shade of Japanese plum trees. Our legs led us there all by themselves. The shade was perfect, the booze too, and our stories left reality far behind. Later, someone suggested we go and see the freshly renovated hall of the Culture Centre because we all loved buildings untouched by fire – they were a direct physical link to our past. We could take a peek behind the heavy brocade curtains, where cinematic illusions were shown. King Kong’s sadness because of his impossible love for a woman was palpable there in the damp air, accompanied by sighs and tears. My best memory from that hall was the visit of a troupe of Italian magicians sometime in the late 1970s. They charmed cobras and skewered a midget woman with swords in a wooden cube, only for her to hop out again cheerful and unharmed, in a bathing suit, to the general enthusiasm of the gullible audience; and they performed many lesser and greater miracles, too. There were the fakir’s mass hypnoses, where a boy would climb up a rope suspended in the air, or the fakir would chop up the boy with a machete and put his parts in a basket, only to bring him out in one piece afterwards.

  The Ramayana Flying Circus from India was to perform that evening. The hypnotist was having a dress rehearsal and needed a guinea pig. And suddenly there was me: an aspiring poet and veteran of our dear war. Why the fakir chose me of the three of us remains a mystery to me. I had only just made myself comfortable, leaning back in the leather-upholstered chair in the middle of the Culture Centre’s empty hall. Apart from the scar cutting diagonally across my face, there was nothing else that made me stand out.

  Before the war, the hall could take an audience of seven hundred on fold-up seats, and when King Kong, Godzilla or Bruce Lee were screened people would sit on the floor, too. I didn’t get to see the main entrance or the stage with the heavy brocade curtains. The sun and the birdsong in the poplars and the luxuriant black walnut trees remained outside. My two friends had played a trick on me by bringing me here, under the pretext of showing me the renovated hall. They had actually hoped to see circus animals, especially drunken dancing monkeys.

  ‘Not too long ago, I think sometime after the war, a circus came to the football stadium in Banja Luka. A guy who went to see it told me there was a magician with a young monkey on a chain – a mandrill or baboon, he couldn’t say exactly – and the magician started to swing the chain. The monkey lifted off the ground and flew around in circles above the magician’s head in front of five thousand people. And do you know what it did?’

  ‘No, what?’ I asked the guy.

  ‘It held on to the chain as tightly as it could, like a little person,’ he tittered with a smoker’s laugh.

  My friends and I went in the side door, holding our bottles of beer, and ran into a fakir with a torch in his hand. It was rather disquieting to see a bearded man in a long robe standing and staring at us. He seemed to have been expecting us because he wasn’t surprised at us being there. We struck up a polite conversation about the authenticity of mass hypnosis, after which the fakir pointed his finger at me, switched off the torch and vanished into the pitch darkness. My heart started to beat like a drum. I’ve always been one for unusual challenges – the crazier the better.

  The light fled at familiar speed through the narrow gap between the doors as my company vanished. When I found a chair and slumped into it, a spotlight went on up on the stage. I pushed my bottle of beer under my chair. The temporal bond between my pre-war and post-war life had been broken, and the discontinuity had to be bridged. Because I want to be whole again, if only in memory, I would have to become a time traveller and go back to the past: that would mean attempting the impossible task of over-flying the war and overcoming my own queasiness in order to find that temporal bond to join the past and the present. It seemed to be the first time in my life that there was an advantage in having a scar on my face. If it attracted demented, neurotic women and half-mad men, was I one of them too, marked with a shadow of disfigurement – a freakish, dark aureole above my head? The answer was affirmative. This kind of magnetism isn’t exactly a blessing. But the scar became my ticket to the show.

  Five

  The hypnotist strode on to the stage in a turban with chilled-out, hissing little snakes, and in that instant a mist rose to my knees. Behind his back, a wind broke everything before it, blowing over barren wastes from the stacked loudspeakers. And I thought I heard the electric bellow of little plush elephants, which I remembered having heard in the streets of Sarajevo, where free­loaders sold them to bustling crowds. Our time has vanished, I thought for a moment as my gaze dropped from the ceiling of the hall to the wall above the stage, where letters had been scratched out of the slogans extolling Tito, the people and the Party, and proclaiming eternal life for all. Since I didn’t have a single pre-war photograph, how else could I think about my past other than as something non-existent. I closed my eyes and ran the excellent black and white video spot of Wonderful Life for myself on the inside of my eyelids. And I’ll attach that video as a last piece of evidence that my intimate world from the past did exist, even though I myself sometimes thought I’d invented my memories. The sounds of the wind slowly receded, muffled by the crackling of a record that hypno­tically repeated one and the same sound. I was at some kind of fanciful investigation.

  No need to run and hide

  It’s a wonderful, wonderful life...

  Each time the hypnotist spoke a number; I would arrange tsunamis of thoughts into meaningful wholes and turn them into confessional statements. I already had faithful listeners, whom I could tell anything to for hours, but this was a different experience. Now I was like a switch on a device for decoding people’s lives and just needed to be flicked. I was an optical instrument – an eyepiece, lens tube and magnifying glass – crossed with a long-necked orchid, and I would blazon forth stories through its trumpet.

  The choice of music was unusual because normally a relaxing soundtrack is used to induce hypnosis. The white-bearded fakir stood in the bright circle of the spotlight on the stage, as straight as a candle. His eyes were grey and cold, his mien a
s clear as mud. When he had finished the countdown induction, he told me in broken Bosnian:

  ‘Now you returning to your own past, your childhood... Your head is clear and cold. How old are you?’

  ‘Thirteen,’ I told him.

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘Yes, I’m thirteen and I’ve just left the house to go fishing. I’m wearing gumboots, and I have a fishing rod and an angler’s rucksack. The bullrushes smell of fish mucus. There are so many fish that you never tire of watching them. It’s like the feeling of a miser fondling his gold – he can’t get enough of it. I check the bubble float, which has to be half full of water, and I grease the artificial flies so they will stay on the surface. I cast all the way to the opposite bank and the bubble float lands on the soft, sandy shore covered with waterweed. It looks as if I’ve laid the float on a green pillow. Now I gently pull the line and the bubble float into the water because a prize trout is waiting just a metre or two downstream. It’s a good 30 cm long, 24 cm being average. I have a hunch that this is going to be a long fight. I use the tip of the rod to unfurl the fishing line with the flies tied to it, and I give the last one a tweak so it goes right over the mouth of the big fish. I watch the fly breathlessly; the fish shoots up towards the surface, misses the fly and makes a big bubble in the water. The handhold of the rod is at my right hip and I immediately jerk it back like a gunslinger, and the float with the flies travels all the way back into the grass at my feet. It happened so quickly that I only saw the trout’s white underside as its mouth snapped at the fly. I have to calm down, cast towards the green pillow again, and do everything from scratch once more. I’m so excited that I don’t notice the people higher up on the bank kibitzing me and the fish...’

  The artificial mist swallowed me at ant speed. I fell through time as though through pliant peat. As I sank through sparkling blackness and the pink light of silt, I caught a glimpse of houses growing out of the ground beneath my feet, and then spirals snaked up from their chimneys – a signal that life would put down roots by the River Una. The trees in the town’s park were slim at the waist, and the town itself was brand new. I don’t know who grew closer to whom, I to the town or it to me, but wherever I looked the town was there, within my grasp. I could change the years and decades, as I liked. I saw Grandmother Emina’s house and knew I had to stop. The journey begins here and will be rounded off here, too, because this journey never ends. The mist enveloped me from feet to neck, stopping at the height of my polo neck. I’ll tell everything – even what the fakir doesn’t ask me.

  Mariners of the Green Army

  There was a flash in the air, a festive explosion, and the circus of nature would announce pollen in the flowers and the triumph of green in the town’s park. An incurable spring mood took possession of every thought and every tuft of grass, upsetting the schedules of airborne insects, which collided in the aerial avenues. There was drunkenness in the earth and the air that announced the birth of something splendid. Spring is that miracle that material­izes like fireworks in the sky, when the shapeliness of every girl and woman is hormonally magnetic and that little Krakatoa in your trousers is primed to erupt.

  I would pinch myself to make sure of my own mortality because we’re made in the image of God, and for a moment I thought I was becoming ethereal with bliss.

  Spring was that carnival that would bring the whole world to the brink of travesty. In the blink of an eye, a grey winter wasteland would become green Atlantic grass that we could sail through if only we were able to shrink to the size of an ant or a merry grasshopper. And that was very hard in a world ruled by adults, who tried to make us be like them in every way possible – frowning, moustachioed men who performed important tasks for the existence of our great and powerful State. But I didn’t want a moustache and wasn’t in a hurry to grow up.

  I believed in the red of my Pioneer scarf. And in the blood of all earthly proletarians, who would close ranks in their dim, under­ground factories, thirsting for world revolution, when Marx, Engels and Lenin would raise them from the dead. Later it would just take Karlo Štajner’s anti-Gulag classic 7000 Days in Siberia for me to strike communism from the list of beloved, sacred ‘isms’ in my high-school diary, albeit it in pencil and with a wavering hand. In the language of the Party, I had had become a revisionist; I was like Rosa Luxemburg, whom we hated because she had abandoned the true current of the revolution and become a vile agent of imperialism – at least that’s the way it was served to us in the Marxist textbooks.

  Everything had to be in the service of our powerful State, the fourth-largest military force in the world, whose wings of steel we were more than proud of. Even our town’s park boasted small patriotic trees (more like bushes) planted with geometrical precision to form a socialist star in leaf. This large, foliate star was home to the nests of robin redbreasts, that working class contingent among the birds – a Red Army of uniform appearance that was far from possessing any talent in song but composed an industrious and obedient youth wing that forever wove its grey, hanging houses in those bushy trees, whose berries had a reddish juice with a bitter taste.

  Still, robins were sweet-feathered creatures that always chirped and worked tirelessly to further their small, socio-political communities, creating a secure avian commune that functioned according to the principle from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. That really was a classless society because all its members had equal rights like in the hyperborean land of Sweden.

  ‘Just you try walking on the grass!’ Kosta the park warden would roar in his grey-green uniform and huge Russian fur hat, whose circle of shade could shelter a family with ten or more children.

  ‘Even the grass will be red if the Central Committee so decides,’ Kosta tried to scare us, invoking the grand masonic lodge that ran our great and powerful State – and all just because we loved to walk on the grass and pick the daisies and star-shaped dandelions. I was more afraid of his fur hat than his bony features, his face with broad cheekbones and ill-tempered, grey gimlet eyes that sent a glare instead of a greeting when he was officially cross. The total power of the State could be seen in the fact that even its lowest echelon, Kosta the park warden, was perfectly intimidating.

  We avoided him like the plague, and we would wait for him to go down the road into town reciting the Party slogans he had learned by heart, which could even make the bark of the robinias seem smooth and soft. Then we would dash to the wild and irre­pressible bushes with sturdy rods sprouting yellow petals all along their length; we called them magelana, but later I discovered they were forsythia. These were our boats, which we named after the famous Portuguese seafarer Ferdinand Magellan.

  Every magelana could fit two sailors and a captain. Our magelanas grew close together, so we could see and call to each other on our imaginary journeys. It was best when a warm spring breeze came up, and then it was like a gale that strained at the ropes of our ships and rocked us on the branches like mariners fighting against a raging sea. Everything started to spin around us – the grass, the trees, the gravel on the paths and the houses nearby. That was the moment when we were freed of gravity. The Earth turned and the world hung above us, but we gave resolute orders and bravely put out into the wide sea of the sky. We sailed without fear, with our hearts as astrolabe and compass.

  Look, this is where that marvellous tree used to be, whose trunk was completely covered in ivy, so it was easy to climb up its tough veins into the crown, where you really couldn’t tell which leaves were the tree’s and which belonged to the velvety creeper. I would climb up into that crown, to where it was quiet and peaceful inside. The darkness there was my ally, while the main thoroughfare of Marshal Tito Street ran below it, full of comings and goings: people, cars, horse-drawn carts, ambulances, stooped peasant women... But there were also upright ones carrying heavy loads on their heads; women whose necks were surely able to carry whole slabs of the world, chunks their households rested on. Old men passed by too,
bitterly spitting out something akin to the acrimony of their lives. Everything was in motion: lines of lizards, ants and red-black beetles, columns of cattle, sheep from the high pastures of the Grmeč range, nomadic shepherds in fur hats like those of Cossacks, the blind and the drunk, children and youth, workers who were also drunkards, and torrents of people who knew nothing and expected nothing, because no one could see the future. It was guaranteed by the weight of the big stone letters up on Tećija Hill that spelled the name of the greatest son of all the Yugoslav peoples.

  Up in the tree, in the peace and quiet, I was perfectly invisible. I didn’t exist. I could even close my eyes and the world would become insignificant. I would be all by myself, a small light in the darkness, before the storm blowing in from Grmeč. One body, nothing more, that shivered with cold as the wind rushed through the green branches. From my vantage point I watched ordinary life, the secret life beneath the town’s park, by the side of the asphalt road that Kosta went down into the history of the night, marshalling clouds and elusory celestial bodies. Apart from the enticing female hips, the sea was peaceful, with no waves and agitation. Past and future was all the same. O people, flow like you are water! I was terribly afraid of death, but wherever I looked it was not to be seen.

  Watching the Fish

  I am an Earth-bound astronaut, and I travel without movement and goal. The atmosphere is my prison. If only I could roam the vacuum of outer space, albeit shut away in a wooden rocket with a porthole, I would perhaps say: ‘Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.’ What sweet dreams! I am an Earth-bound astronaut, and I travel at the speed of thought. I won’t live to see the picturesque vision of battle cruisers in flames at the edge of the constellation Orion – the film will have to do. Nor will I see the blond replicant played by Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner sitting at the top of a building, completely naked and with his legs crossed, saying his famous: ‘Time to die’, before closing his eyes and expiring in the incessant rain from the dark sky. I won’t break through the stratosphere, behind which no one knows where fiction ends and reality begins, and vice versa. All the SF films are happening up there in the universe right now.