Quiet Flows the Una

by Faruk Sehic

  I have butterflies because it will soon be dawn.

  I make a pair of binoculars with my hands and watch the Evening Star, the last to leave its watch post. Summer is no time to die, some elderly people said yesterday as they gazed at the main current of the river from the wooden bridge. But the stars go out like souls leaving bodies – suddenly and quickly – I once read in a paperback with a dubious title. My reality is boring and a long way from fantasy; and, I don’t like realistic books.

  Instead, I muse that my heart beats in time with distant galaxies. For me, night isn’t a time when ghosts from a mass of former lives come out and stop you from sleeping. Night for me is a vacuum, a gap between the setting and the rising of the sun; a necessary evil. I wait for daybreak so as to slip out from under the heavy quilt in my grandmother’s house – it can be chilly even in June – because I can’t wait to slip on my Bermudas and espadrilles, climb the concrete stairs pot-holed by the rain, and come to the mossy abutment where orange-coloured slugs have left shiny trails of slime. I want to travel those rainbow highways with the pad of my finger and follow them all the way into the holes and cracks until my finger can go no further. That inability to enter small worlds, to creep inside the stem of a plantago leaf or the tightly closed bud of a white rose, would hound me in much more terrible times, too.

  The walls of my grandmother’s house are thick and warm because tufa stone from the riverbed has been built into them. A clock hangs on the wall above my head and its hand ticks haltingly across the unintelligible inscription Tempus Vulnera Curabit, and whenever I read those words I shrink like a boiled shirt.

  The slugs’ slimy bodies sometimes look darker: they’re red and brown in the cold lee cast by the long, three-storey buildings nearby; later they become a transparent yellow in the rays of the sun. It rises above the dew-wet tiles of the tallest house in the neighbourhood, which looks to me like a medieval castle that no one can come out of happy. The eyes of a boy follow me pleadingly from its windows. He’s my age but afflicted by premature ageing. The lines of his face show a haggard old man with the eyes of an innocent boy. He waves to me and smiles from a window that frames him like an icon.

  The spindly waifs without so much as a house on their backs emerge from cracks in to which fine fingers of moss grow. Their antennae timidly probe the morning air. Cold scalpels. When I touch them, they quickly retract and the slugs stop furrowing their sticky trenches. The sun will turn them into little roads in all the colours of the rainbow, spectral Golgothas, on which no one will be crucified.

  The softness of their bodies was shocking and stirring, so I loved and pitied them at the same time. I didn’t understand how a tender body could become a dry, lifeless remnant in the midday sun. Afterwards I would reluctantly realize that they, too, had their end like every other living thing.

  I got up and ran to see the slugs every morning until a myste­rious crime happened. Some pedant had peeled the moss from the retaining wall and covered up the cracks with mortar. Without a doubt, that killer of nature was an over-ambitious person, surly and morbidly industrious. Who was he? An old man who wanted to iron out every irregularity on the surface of the Earth? A carpenter obsessed with geometry, hated any gnarls and knobs in his wood – excrescences reminiscent of frozen stellar spirals? A mason with a bitter trowel in his heart horrified at the emptiness around us and condemned to furiously build and build? Who was that malefactor who strove to kill imagination?

  I mourned for the slugs for two days and soon forgot about them. I had to shrug off that bittersweet mourning and find something new. It was then that I discovered fish. They’re free and cannot be walled in because water is a realm of freedom. Fish are large, elegant submarines with scales that cast gentle reflections through the water and the air. Pike, faster than arrows, bask in the sun on the surface between the threads of swaying bullrushes, from where they shoot out towards their prey. I discovered whiskered barbel – bottom feeders, which anglers used to feed leftovers of roast lamb. Then there are roach and sneep – the grazing cows of the river. I discovered grayling – icthyo torpedoes that launched out of the water to swallow fluorescent-green flies with gluttonous repetition. Trout, the unchallenged masters of the cascades and rocky riverbeds. Some people can tell the future by reading coffee grounds, but I learned to watch the fish.

  Here at the beginning, it would make sense for me to go back to our origins: to the water we’re made of and the swirling currents of the underwater epic, where I’ll hearken to the anarchist trout and their fulsome chatter. You’ll find out later why the trout are anarchist. ‘Fulsome chatter’ is Rimbaud, I’ll be a hypnotized boat, and the rivers will carry me wherever I wish.

  The Water’s Republic

  The Una and its banks were my refuge – an impenetrable fastness of green. Here I hid from people beneath the branches in leaf, alone in the silence, surrounded by greenery. All I could hear was my own heartbeat, the flutter of a fly’s wings and the splash when a fish threw itself out of the water and returned to it. It’s not that I hated people, I just felt better among plants and wild animals. When I entered the covert of the river, nothing bad could happen to me any more.

  One of the Una’s branches, the Unadžik, flowed past my grand­mother’s slanting house that was slowly sinking into the deposits of sand and silt brought by the raging water in the forceful April floods. The riverbed was of tufa overgrown with waterweed. Mussels with mother-of-pearl mirrors stuck out of its fine yellow sand, and lively eels wriggled. Where the bed was covered with stone, we used to catch bullheads using forks tied with wire to dead branches, and we would put our catch in large jars so we could watch them and marvel at their slippery bodies.

  In places you could see a wood stove or a rusty washing machine, worn-out chestnut pans or old car parts at the bottom of a greenhole – our word for deep, green pools in the river. The water was so transparent and clear that a coin could be seen several metres down, reflecting the dial of the sun.

  Each house had its own sewage system, whose contents would come thundering out into the river through a concrete pipe. When the water level dropped in the summertime, those cast-concrete maws of mortar welded to the ground resembled lazing crocodiles that would periodically belch out faeces and the froth of washing-machine detergent. Grayling, barbel and chub would gather in those places to feed on what people had been unable to digest. Standing on those crocodile carcasses, anglers would cast sinkers and hooks with maggots, earthworms and bread. They used hand-crafted flies, coated with a special grease (to stop the feathered imitation from sinking) to lure and snag fine specimens of grayling, which they would pull up on to the bank together with the bubble float. The whopper would thrash about in a dense patch of stinging nettles, tangling up the thin line and all the other flies tied to the main line, which passed through the ceramic rings of the rod and ended in the shiny spool of a Shakespeare or D·A·M Quick reel.

  Brown trout with red and black dots hovered solemnly and motionlessly in front of a rock or just above a slab of tufa, usually closer to the far bank, and would loudly launch themselves out of the river to swallow mayflies that fell into the water in the gloaming. Their leaps made shivering circles that would gradually disperse on the peaceful surface like smoke rings in the fug of a bachelor’s flat. With the coming of night, dragonflies would buzz above the Unadžik: blue-black males and greenish females – light river cavalry supported by a cacophony of owls, cuckoos and nightingales. The river sang a nocturne.

  Autumn, the Moss-grown Horseman from the North

  Every year at the end of August a weed with pale-blue flowers ran riot in my Grandmother’s courtyard that gently sloped down the sandy bank towards the river. I didn’t know their name, but I called them blue loners. They would bashfully start to flower in June, but August was their promised month.

  The calf becomes sirloin steak and schnitzel at the butcher’s

  The butcher has strong hands and ruddy cheeks

  A charge thr
ough the grass with tin soldiers

  Kinder Surprises produce Vikings of bronze.

  Downstream, the blue loners were nourished by blood from the butcher’s shop in a basement, whose drainpipe came out in the middle of the bank; from there, the blood seeped calmly towards the water.

  The houses held their never-ending vigil looking down on the river bank, while stands of corn watched over the river’s silence from the other side. People in their houses dreamed their civilian dreams about loans, working hours, football and fish. In the evenings, the ethereal fish would enter through the balcony doors and roam the whitewashed rooms, keeping watch over the Una’s people, pausing above the anglers’ foreheads and blessing them; those fish of air, clean and slender, with glittering tails, would enter people’s thoughts. True anglers catch fish because they have no other way of showing them their wonderment. Some of them even kiss the fish before putting them back in the water. Dawn will break the spell and the sun will take possession of the balcony. Dawn emerges from the Una, borne by the mists and vapours of the river. The intangible fish expire, people awake, and thus the circle is constant every night.

  The petals of those blue flowers were separate from each another like Omar Sharif’s front teeth, so that they looked like propellers made of sky. Their colour was unreal amid the darkened, porous chlorophyll that reached its peak and then gently slid away towards the eddies of decay, before autumn tuned its instruments and struck up its symphony of dankness, rain and water vapour. It’s hard not to love humidity – the soul of the soil, and what we’re made of. I thought it impossible for such a shade of blue to exist in nature. I believed an invisible dyer went round at night and during the reign of the coppery mists and painted the flowers with diluted blue vitriol. A dragonfly with a human face; a harlequin of the earth with spikes of wheat in place of hair; a god of green and growing things, whom we would never see.

  For me, plants were the world’s greatest secret, a proud aristoc­racy of chlorophyll that didn’t believe in life after death, and which, one day, when the hour came, would finally cover the whole world. They were a succulent essence, which you could only penetrate mechanically, leaving green juice all over your hands – the blood they didn’t care about and gave so amply because they were eternal and indestructible in their spring awakenings.

  As the glossy green of the other weeds faded, the cornflower intensified its azure. The late glory of the cornflower heralded the death of the summer by the Una – the coming of chill morning mists and shivering dusks, and the fickle sun would only warm faintly at its height because as soon as a wind blew from the water it spent no more warmth.

  Then autumn would descend like a horde of Huns down the Točile and Kolajevac hills, beneath which flowed the River Krušnica – six kilometres long and as cold as the Bering Sea. The vegetation had no chance before such an onslaught. Autumn made cascades of watercolour leaves flow through the forests on Točile Hill, and their murmur was pure melancholy. Autumn would enter our chests through the ether we inhaled, to be distilled into the purest emotion, which tightened our throats and moistened our eyes with boyish sorrow. Then I would begin to read books about magic kingdoms in preparation for the winter, and after that I would wait for the earth to cast off its snow so the yellow trumpets of primrose could again announce the turmoil and pleasures of spring:

  May I introduce myself: I am the King of Leaves

  I am the opposite of the moss-grown horseman

  The grain beneath the snow will sense me

  Wild geese bear me on their wings.

  Growing with the Plants

  A summer shower caught me behind the main grandstand of the FC Meteor stadium as I walked briskly along the gravel path to go swimming at Ajak, where an arm of the Una passed under a small bridge of creosoted railway sleepers to join the Krušnica. We used to swim in the greenhole in front of the bridge, while the central sleepers of the bridge were reserved for sunbathing. Further downstream the water was alive with chub and brown trout. Once I nearly drowned in that greenhole, and, strangely enough, that early brush with death only reinforced my love of the water.

  Cumulonimbus clouds, swollen with moisture, drifted swiftly across the sky like in a speeded-up sequence of a documentary on the seething exuberance of the living world. I began to run as hot drops came down on me like big, mother’s tears. My sodden white T-shirt clung to my body. I jumped seething puddles, enjoying the crazy feeling of freedom that filled my chest and spread through my veins. I was a land-dwelling dolphin, a flying squirrel, a fiery flamingo pacing across mudflats that smelt pure and pristine.

  That feeling of freedom blurred my reason and intoxicated me with the raindrops, and I stopped at every flower whose pollen the rain had smudged, stroked the broad leaves of a plantago, ran my finger down a blade of wild barley and gazed at the molehills evaporating the earth’s abundant warmth. What osmosis!

  I thought I could fly with euphoria, like in a dream when I lift off in a sitting position, and simply wave my outstretched hands instead of wings and soon rise up above the ground. I float over the treetops and the roofs of familiar houses, always close to the ground, hoping for a soft landing the moment the enchantment wore off. Except that this now was a dream with my eyes open, a vision on a river island beneath a rainy sky. Not for a second could I see what was to come as I stared at the network of veins on a leaf, still green, that the wind had torn off; as I fingered the oily fin of a grayling; or as I kneaded a lump of red clay from Hum Hill in my hand. Like I say, there were no symbols and signposts towards what was to come. The war year 1992 was far away.

  I came so close to meeting ‘Smith the Redeemer’, but he eluded me every time by hiding behind a screen of leaves, fleeing into the shade of a willow tree by the river, or jumping into the water and swimming to the other side. When he took the shape of a grass snake, cutting the water’s surface in two like a giant zipper that threatened to spill open the whole world, swimming was in vain because he would already be on the opposite bank, striding with the pace of someone going home at dusk and leaving an aromatic trail of Solea sun cream and beer behind them. And I would quickly forget where my thoughts had gone off to and what kind of search I’d started out on, as I stood at the edge of the steep bank, while schools of little fish swam in the greenhole before my feet. They were bleak, which could never grow to more than 10 cm and so were good bait for going after voracious salmonids. Sometimes I felt sorry for catching them because they were so beautiful. Perfect and vulnerable. I would grab Smith the Redeemer by the lapel of his coat, he would have to stop, and I would pull him back so we were standing face to face at a respectable distance and I would ask him questions from the future:

  Where would my books from the shelf above the Grundig TV set go?

  What would happen to the television with the soft-touch command panel?

  Where would my original cassettes disappear to, which were stacked above the books, a good hundred of them?

  Where would all my letters go – love letters, as well as more trivial ones?

  Where would my numismatic collection end up, including the gold florin with the countenance of Franz Josef and a copper coin from 1676 with the word soldo embossed on it, which was perforated because someone had worn it as a good-luck charm around their neck?

  Where would my room go?

  Why would there be nothing left in our flat but bare walls and gaping holes where the sockets and the toilet bowl used to be?

  Who would steal all my photos, and on which of the countless heaps of rubbish would they shrivel in the sun like autumn leaves?

  Who would read my copy of Zvonko Veljačić’s novel about a space-travelling boy hero?

  Who would take the Super 8 cinema projector and the tapes in the great cardboard boxes with film posters and credits on the lids?

  Where would the black and white tape of War of the Worlds go?

  Who would make all the things from our flat vanish ‘just like that’?

  W
ho would vacuum away our family history and make me think of the past as a gathering of amiable ghosts?

  Would I be allowed to blame anyone, and whom would I accuse?

  But, as I’ve said: 1992 was far away. There was no need for these questions from the near future because we were still in a holistic past, in the middle of the happy 1980s.

  Dwarf corn grew in the sandy fields in the summers. Its sharp-edged leaves cut droplets of blood and the stalk would shake when it was showered with rain, which washed the sand from its knobbly roots. Tangles of tough veins sent minerals and water to nourish its living green. Armoured mole crickets dug their tunnels between the stalks, making the soil loose and porous. Anglers caught them and crammed them into fogged-up jars because they were a supreme delicacy for big chub.

  The cloudburst ended abruptly, creating rainbow arcs in the rain-washed blue. The air had a savoury bitterness from the respiration of the plants. I watched them grow before my eyes. The first swathe of mowed grass smelt of lust: the aroma of orgasm and the vampire kiss of decay. And so I matured, hot and cold, together with the plants, and in my thoughts I wrote these lines:

  The river is besieged by rain

  An astonished mariner sinks beneath the tufa

  The spirit of a mole-cricket whispers in his ear:

  Melancholy is what defines us.