Quiet Flows the Una

by Faruk Sehic

  Night-time Journey

  If it rains on the eve of Friday, the rain will fall for seven days, Grand­mother Emina always used to tell us. And rain covered our sky with the force of the ayahs from the sura Al-Qari’ah (The Calamity).

  I dreamed that the water surrounded us on all sides, and my Grand­­mother’s house set out on its first voyage. Before we became Una-­farers there was a mighty crash as the house tore loose from its earthly roots. Thus relieved of its foundations containing remnants of bomb casings and stabilizers from the Second World War, detached from the stones of the former house that burned down when the Allies bombed the town, and freed from the fluvial tufa at its base, the house prepared for the worst: a journey into the unknown.

  The fleet-footed ones who weren’t caught unawares by the water, like we were, climbed up to Ravnik on the very top of Hum Hill, where they hoped the sun would finally break through the clouds and stop the deluge. Those of us who had little choice and didn’t want the freak weather to decide things for us took fate into our own hands.

  Miraculously, the cellar retracted into the house and became our machine room with red pressure gauges and small, round wheels for steering in those precarious floodwaters. The valves of the gauges flipped up from time to time to let off angry steam whenever the engines ran hot. The grapevine uncoiled from my Grandmother’s house and became a sail of leaves, in case other forms of propulsion failed. We tore through the deck with the help of a crowbar and I took up the metal steering wheels. My Grandmother stood at the kitchen window together with Uncle Šeta, who had served in the Yugoslav navy. The house had become a vessel and the kitchen was now the bridge, with my Grandmother as captain, holding her string of prayer beads. The amber beads circled in their silent universe. Šeta held a harpoon at the ready in case he spotted a giant pike. Water sprayed in our faces and surged towards the kitchen, but that didn’t diminish our mariners’ resolve.

  We floated on down the Unadžik straight towards Pilanica, and all the way to the confluences, whose sandy beds always harboured barbel and sneep. Here the Unadžik flowed into the Krušnica and the two waters came together. The Krušnica stayed close to the right-hand bank, so the water was colder, while the Una took in the left-hand side of the fraternal stream. When the river was low during the summer, shaggy bullrushes would float in the middle of the current, and their flowers looked like the eyes of timid, pygmean hydro-beings. I tried casting a brass spoon lure made for use in turbid water through the cellar window, while closely monitoring the manometers with their red needles and following the course given by my grandmother. Skilfully, we steered clear of the thick, opaque layers of tufa that the water flowed over.

  ‘Hard left!’ my Grandmother yelled, and I would take the rudder and turn it until the house responded to the desired manoeuvre.

  We were never in any great danger on our voyage, not even from the giant waves that collided with each other, creating formidable water giants. I recalled Nostradamus’s verses about the end of the world:

  At the forty-eighth degree climacteric

  Fish in sea, river, lake, boiled hectic.

  The river-side houses in Pazardžik had long disappeared from view and we passed down through the crests of the Pilanica cascades into the newly formed lake, which stretched all the way to the school and threatened to inundate the first houses on the grassy slopes at the rear of Hum Hill. Although it was the time of the year for floods, no one had seen one of this magnitude, at least not in my Grandmother’s lifetime. Now we began to glide down the arm of the Una and the main current of the Krušnica, whose combined force submerged the long islands and everything on them for miles around. The crossbars at fc Meteor’s stadium and the football pitch of its lower-division brother, fc Željezničar, jutted out of the lake showing just a foot or two of post. Mute, dirty water besieged the stadium’s western grandstand. The bloated carcass of a cow hung in a goal net. Three hours from where we’d started, the water was trying to reduce Točile Hill by climbing higher than the crowns of the powerless trees. Birds’ nests were swallowed up everywhere. Fish never seen in the daylight emerged from the depths, with ungainly bodies and heads so much like people’s that some of them could talk.

  One with tin scales called out to me in astonishment, gazing past my Grandmother’s house at the clouds drifting above Točile: ‘The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood....’ Quick to interrupt it, I replied through the porthole of my machine cabin: ‘and it was hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees burned up and all the green grass.’ Upon which the fish withdrew into the silty depths, slapping the water’s surface with its heavy tail. The look in its eyes was terrible – older than time. I thought I caught a glimpse of the Monster from the Juice Warehouse riding in a giant freshwater mussel and carefully noting everything that happened. Weariness was taking hold and it was impossible to ward off dismal thoughts.

  At the forty-eighth degree climacteric

  Fish in sea, river, lake, boiled hectic.

  At that point the dream was cut as if by the blade of a Solingen knife and I woke up breathless in my Grandmother’s guest room under the massive quilt. The beating of the clock’s mechanism on the wall above me lent a Gothic note to the sleeping darkness. The house was still on dry land and the Unadžik back in its suit, which had not become too narrow for it. The water was content and travelled tirelessly on towards the confluences to mix with the Krušnica’s cold flood. I resolved to get up and go down to the cellar to check the red needles of the two metal water gauges, whose position and number showed the water consumption of my Grandmother’s house.

  I got out of bed at dawn and went into the corridor. Water was trickling down the coat-rack mirror on the left near the front door and the carpet in the corridor was soaking wet. The thick coats of white paint on the walls had cracked in places as if the house had been hit by an earthquake. Now I realized that my grandmother’s house moved about secretly at night, nudged through the water with the furtive aid of aquatic protozoa and their cilia; its nightly progress could be expressed in centimetres, for the time being. Cilia are the tiny flagella of certain water-borne organisms, a substitute for legs. The house wanted to move to another, more stable neighbourhood, far from the wild river in my dreams and out of reach of floods and other disasters, to somewhere it could live to a ripe old age. It should be a town with better inhabitants – Peter Pan, Hansel and Gretel. But the house was naive, just like those whose hands built it. In the spring of 1992, the house thought it would be spared because it had never caused anyone any harm. All the other houses around it were blazing yellow torches on children’s drawings. It made believe that there was such a glare all around because the stars had come out early in the sky. It pretended the other houses were not fiery suns that collapsed back upon their inner infernos. Its mind withdrew to the very highest point of the attic, where it cowered and shuddered like a freezing owl.

  But all that the house had at its disposal were the cilia and the river, whose murmur would conceal its escape. Time flowed inexorably, and it wasn’t on the house’s side. The house prepared to betray its destiny, which has been repeated with horrifying precision every fifty years – that it be reduced to ash. Needless to say, its flight never succeeds.

  Gargano, etc.

  You will forgive me here for having to talk openly about the war. I know that’s not popular today, but it seems that depressive visions of the future are. First you’ll be fed and stuffed, and when you’re up to weight you’ll be ready for depression to be implanted in your herd-animal hearts. You’ll mope through the shopping malls with your lumbering shoulders and fat arses, longing for the sirens’ bodies on the hologram boards. They want to lure you into oblivion. They wear you down so your nerves are blunted and your chakras blocked, and then the future is here. Long live depression! That’s why I’ve tried my utmost to block out the form and content of wartime images. I wanted to repress them
and to push them under, like when you give someone a good dunking in the river by standing on top of them and forcing them ever deeper, down into the darkness at the bottom where the marble trout lie, until they run out of breath. I wanted to be like the unimpaired, conventional guys – normal and grey. If I secretly opened my eyes, the snakes on the fakir’s turban would hiss and flick their tongues ever faster and more wildly, which was the fakir’s way of telling me that I had to rid myself of the form and content of those wartime ghosts.

  So I flipped the finger to the futuristic landscapes of shopping malls and biomechanical palm trees on the shores of dietary seas. I refused to drink cocktails concocted to give eternal youth to my face and genitals. I said good riddance to neoliberal depression – my demons definitely didn’t live in today’s world.

  You will be offered progress and prosperity in strictly policed states, and you’ll pay for them with oblivion. I don’t forgive or forget, and I remember everything. To write means to speak, to make speeches to an invisible audience – this is my little rostrum. I can see no other way of fighting for the right to memory.

  Gargano’s Story

  I admit it: I’m phantasmagorically mad. During the day, I see the sun in the hot colours of the night. I yearn for sex with the darkness. In the evenings, I secretly fondle my wounds, and I worry what will happen one day if they heal. When the round lantern in the sky goes out, the stab-wound on my forearm opens. I got it from a knife in a street fight, protecting a young lady of the night. My wound murmurs with waves that cast themselves up on a pebbly beach, feeling every single stone. Pine trees smell of resin. Sea creatures break down on the shore, spreading the narcotic aroma of salt. The sea at night is peaceful. Naked human bodies float in it, and spindle-shaped plankton gather around them and sparkle in the froth. My wound helped me to see the sea as a grey monster that hypnotizes me with its bizarre colour and force – a muscle-bound, wave-tossed slab that swallows up every reality. The sea is now metallic grey, now the colour of rotten cherries when the sun sinks into it; soon to leave no trace except in the mackerel sky high above.

  The wound on my forearm is also home to a malevolent second self: dark-skinned Gargano, with soot-black hair and fiery eyes. Sometimes we swap identities, but I don’t like that because the world seen through his glasses seems even gloomier than mine. Gargano had a sadomasochistic attitude towards pets and other animals in childhood. He loved and hated them at the same time. Let us draw a line: he was more inclined to misdeeds than me. Once he tied an emaciated magpie to the branch of a plum tree to hang by one leg and then used it for target practice with carefully chosen, sharp-edged stones. The river flowed beneath the plum tree with its blue and green eddies. The leaves trembled in the wind, the green of the vegetation and water dazed him, and he had to really concentrate and aim carefully. His arm muscles seized up and relaxed with an unnatural tic, and his mouth was dry with excitement. He was completely focused and devoted to his morbid game.

  ‘If I hit it in the head it will go straight to paradise,’ he said calmly to his companion, who was also throwing stones.

  ‘But is this really fun?’

  Gargano hated birds and only had a certain fondness for goldfinches and titmice, which accentuated the beauty of their plumage in the spring. He liked cute, tiny birds that could sit in the palm of his hand. Just as some people prefer tall, blond and blue-eyed individuals, Gargano preferred pretty little birds. He was afraid of big ones – birds of prey and vultures, so he had to hate them to diminish his fear. Nor was he inclined to ugly, sickly birds or those in distress. The magpie evidently fell into the ugly category. The other boy at the stoning of the black and white bird was older and taught Gargano everything about fish, water and fishing. In the end, holding the string squeamishly with the tips of their fingers, they swung the dead magpie into the Unadžik to be devoured by the cold vortexes because water cleanses and can revive even a dead body.

  ‘Aqua fons vitae,’ Gargano pronounced cynically and watched as the water consumed the bird.

  Since I have quite a few wounds that can only be viewed at night, because the night keeps secrets, we quickly move on to the next. The second wound contains the Amazon rainforest, and I’ll survive there too after the crash of my biplane, alone in the damp vegetation full of dangerous and cunning wild animals. I am used to that and enjoy it. I am a master of survival, which is why I have so many wounds. They tell the most superb and exciting stories. But first I have to take a machete and start cutting a path through the jungle’s hostile green to make my way out.

  When I opened the third wound, Gargano was waiting for me there too, sitting at the bar and taking long swigs from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. On the inside of his lower right arm, with which he was holding the whiskey, I saw a tattoo written in Courier New font: ‘All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.’

  He wanted me, and no one else, to describe him in words and bring him out into the daylight.

  That was the birth of Gargano, a cynical creature devoted to darkness and adventure. Not an angelic being, demigod or straight-laced zealot who loves the monotheistic, pseudo-moral, paedophilic image of the world. Rather, a cruel and clever male­factor. A Darkman. One of us.

  And now, dear civilians, as previously announced: please take a deep breath, and may your peacetime hearts not quiver. Here is a word or two about the war and what came afterwards.

  A Telegram from Dark Waters

  I hadn’t touched the Una for months. The most I got was a glance of it. The river flowed as if nothing had changed. Three metres beneath the surface, in the heart of a greenhole, the silence was inviolable. The fish went about their miracles, and the acoustic impressions of an artillery attack on the dot of noon don’t reach them. The forces of nature are insensitive to wartime operations. The tree breaks in half when hit by a tank shell. It has no words to complain with.

  The river was far away and I became a man of dry land. I had a hump for survival – an army rucksack – and a rifle as close by as a third hand. My name was ‘The First of Ten’, a clear allusion to the Borgs in the Star Trek series. Borgs are superior beings that formed by assimilating subdued civilizations on the planets in their path. They’re humanoids with metal implants, beings without identity and personality. One should actually speak of the Borg, singular, because all Borgs are one. They have no individual consciousness, and all their minds are parts of one group mind. They’re telepathically interconnected, and their ships are the shape of a cube and have no motor because they travel with the willpower of all the Borgs on board. The Borg is a perfect image of a totalitarian regime, worse than fascism and Stalinism put together. The Borgs’ best-known phrase is, ‘Resistance is futile.’

  During the war we called people who were still devoted to the ideas of communism, or rather who couldn’t break with the mindset of the former regime, or ‘communards’ as we called them, after the group. Those people couldn’t accept that they were being shelled by artillery and an army they’d helped fund with their taxes throughout their working lives. The grotesqueness of their behaviour in wartime conditions made them like little, awkward Borgs, forgotten by their mother ship and forced to be independent, which is what they most feared. They were saved to an extent by the hierarchical system of leadership and command within military units, where they felt relatively secure. Some of them eagerly accepted the new ideas of complete devotion to the new totem of nationalism, but I couldn’t take them seriously in that role because they were still people formed by the old system, and the “communardism” in them would only vanish with their death. It’s a strange irony that the communist system developed an intricate web of hierarchies throughout the country although the tenets of communism expressly opposed any manifestations of hierarchy and class. Our communist society was full of small class differences and inequalities – the State hadn’t ‘died away’ but was constantly pumping iron so it would never lose strength and would remain eternally young. The communards had a
term for this: state socialism, which was supposed to be a transitional stage to the withering away of the State in the communist paradise. Any similarity with monotheistic religions’ promise of life after death is far from coincidental.

  I commanded a squad of ten soldiers. Everything becomes easier when you turn into a neat number, and that was of my own choosing. I wanted to be a number, a random figure. I wanted to find biological proof, a pattern in nature that would be my equivalent, like in Darren Aronofsky’s film Pi. I wanted to be reflected in the eyes of a horned insect, the stag beetle, which falls into the water in the August twilight and becomes food for chubs as fat as human thighs. I saw mortar craters fill with rainwater in no time and become little lakes – biospheres for ancient life forms that are insensitive to wartime operations and the military logic of the human world. Volvoxes, amoebae, paramecia and green flagellates. Pieces of shrapnel in tree trunks coalesce with the fabric of the tree. Only animals are afraid of death, like people are. Birds fly away to safer, calmer places far from the front line. Dogs start to whine and behave like snivelling children before an artillery barrage because they sense the deathly silence that reigns in the several seconds before it commences. Then ants and humpbacked carrion beetles pour out of the ground. Shreds of human flesh showered over the meadow flowers reek of sulphur and gastric acid, while biblical monstrosities of clean air emerge from lairs and dens. Sometimes I think I can even see the bacteria in the air if I strain my eyes. I see them teeming and moving in all directions, and that crawling is the purpose of their existence – Roman legions advancing and subjugating the chaotic nano-world.

  I wanted to return to mother nature, but it wasn’t like I thought it would be. We lived in the forests, in damp holes, and slept between the roots of trees, estranged from the life stream of nature that couldn’t be silenced by the din of the battlefield. Sometimes a nightingale would welcome the morning in the mutilated branches and sing for us lonely sentinels. That would happen when a deceptive ceasefire reigned and the birds gradually began returning to look for their nests in the thoroughly shaken flets of branches and leaves. Then you could enjoy your all-night guard duty, listening to the sounds of the forest, like the stream that babbled in front of the line, with downsized tortoises floating in its meanders, and inhaling the aroma of fresh leaves and humus full of robust insects. Enjoying nature was of little use when the shooting started again because it only intensified the colossal melancholy, that discrepancy between the bubbling of life and the silence a man slips into when he gets hit. So my facial features became coarse on the forest battlefield near Biljevine, while my beard grew bristlier and darker. I felt a spirit bashfully spreading inside me. But ‘spirit’ is too grand a word, and at first it was just like a grain, small and unsure. Then it grew and expanded. My spirit learned harmony with my body, matched my arms and legs, and matured in the all-encompassing nightmare around us. I was living matter with a soul. I knew other specimens too – soldiers who didn’t have a soul, but that’s a different story. I hadn’t touched the Una for months, not even with my fingertips. I went down through the courtyard, knelt on the river bank behind my grandmother’s house and immersed my hands up to the wrists in the water; tiny barbel were swimming, as hungry as an army.