by Faruk Sehic
The credits and cast begin with the shiny metal sculpture of a knight on horseback turning on its axis, then my Grundig TV begins to show a Survival special about the African national park Etosha: lionesses lie around drowsily, crocodiles roll with wildebeest in their jaws at the watering holes, and birds lazily lift off from the tops of the acacias.
One purple earthworm is my time machine. A few words are also essential for the journey. I pull the soft worm apart as much as I have to so I can see its internal organs, and then I rip it to shreds. A mighty taste develops in my mouth, the taste of soil. When I speak that last word, winged phonemes lead me away to a land I’ve prepared for myself behind tightly shut eyelids. I depart the grey world of flats, slush and horseshoes clattering along my street with a tedious rhythm as if I am living in a Charles Dickens novel.
Then I fly through the purple wormhole. My body whistles and I am completely content.
I land at the foot of the giant grass. Every blade is the height of my block of flats. The flowers are like football fields. The caps of the mushrooms turn red and the spots on them create cheerful, simple enigmas. The law of this world has eradicated unhappiness. Short grass grows at the foot of the giant grass and provides a road, which my feet gladly tread.
The insects are the same size as in our world. There is no food chain, and no one eats anyone else because everyone lives on the smell of the gigantic flowers and the balloons of pollen that drift lazily through the air. This is an unfinished world as in a bedtime story that the teller skilfully alters every night. New plants and animals are constantly being added to it, new colours and creatures. Reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, I realize I must never be allowed to meet my antipode, that anti-me, and that if we did meet we mustn’t look each other in the eyes, because both of us would then disappear with a massive discharge of energy in the air, like the explosion of a fireworks rocket. Apart from that, there is no other fear. Gargano is safe, deep inside the wound on my forearm, and there is no danger of us ever meeting because he is in my flesh, shut away beneath seven sutures.
I hang out with a green android. He sleeps in the pistil of a huge bird of paradise flower. His skin smells of warm, clean bedlinen from the days when there was only one brand of washing powder. The green guy has blue eyes and prehensile eyelashes that he can make flutter like wings. We don’t talk at all. We communicate through our thoughts. Our words materialize in the air and last until one of us thinks up the next sentence. We get into long philosophical debates about spring, summer and the meaning of different flowers because every flower is the bearer of a certain emotion. There are so many flowers that emotions must be the stuff this world is made of. Greeny confirms my hypothesis as we stop in the shade of a leaf that comes down to refresh us with its stomata, emitting cool oxygen. At the bank of an emerald river I realize I’ve been here before long ago. This world is as close to me as the skin of my mother.
‘That is the Una with its greenholes – little pocket mirrors, in which Paradise sometimes looks at its face. That river makes life doubly sweet!’
In my thoughts, I almost shouted that at the top of my voice, with as much force as to shake the magic landscapes of orange-hued Micronesia or cause spots behind a person’s tightly shut eyelids. But I stifled that desire.
It was winter on the opposite bank and I caught a glimpse of my antipode there; he was bending over and warily dipping his hands into the water, and then his arms up to the elbows, while gazing at the transparent blue surface. Perhaps he saw the contours of my face in the water’s depths, down where the bullrushes would gradually lose their chlorophyll. Our movements weren’t attuned because my antipode was in a different time bubble. I had to open my eyes and go back. Opening my eyes took a lot of willpower – but there, I did it!
The street light has gone out. The television screen shows a Yugoslav Radio and Television test pattern accompanied by a monotonous tone. The scent of Mother Earth fades from my nostrils. The phonemes are without enchantment now. The earthworm has been sacrificed. The pads of my fingers are stained with its insides. I’ve returned to Earth. I know it by the blood on my fingers. Blood is unpleasant, who’s ever it is. The bathroom is ice-cold and the water washes the earthworm’s tiny erythrocytes into the basin. The dirty water vanishes in the vortex of the plughole and returns to the Una: here it’s lapped up by an underground giant, who lies horizontally beneath the river and the town. Don’t ask how I know about the giant, I just do. He’s lying down there and resting. When he turns over in his sleep, the earth trembles gently. Nature’s cycle of water and fear continues.
2007 According to Gargano
When Gargano called me, hastily tapping in Morse code on the inside of my skin, I knew it was something serious and his tongue was just itching – he needed to confess.
I have to talk to you, town, because you’re always present in my memory, and it is the only paradise from which I can’t be expelled, the poet says. You’re now a phantom town and your name is insignificant. You could also be called Zyx, but that wouldn’t change anything for the better. Your dwellers walk the streets stooped and in constant fear of the weather’s whims, of the sky that often changes its mood over the decisive days from the end of May to the middle of June. The favourite topic of idle coffee-house creatures, pensioners and young men is death in all its facets. Death comes from above and bears people away regardless of their years. It takes them up to the hanging gardens of heaven, among the concentric circles, thrones, divinities and cherubim, so say the holy books.
Death is your most developed industry and here you’re peerless.
You’re now a phantom town. As soon as swirling, coal-black clouds darken the horizon, everyone hurries home, as if home was a sanatorium where they’d be safe from the hysterics of the climatic behemoth. Winter is even more disconsolate because other monsters reign, formless and impalpable. There’s no sun then, and no rain or summer storms, only shadows gliding through the town, the souls of the dead and souls of the living mingled in disorder and driven by the same restlessness; that feign anxiety spread by subterranean waters.
Winter is a state of limbo, whose every cell is made of depression. Those endless twilights that begin as early as half past four in the afternoon and have a pale and weak sun, unable to warm the sullen face that watches the outside world through a window. Those nights, devoid of all magic because the minutes and hours are hammered into the heads of your dwellers like heavy-duty nails, puncturing their memory with its pining reminiscences of that other life – a former, old, better, more beautiful life where we were all young, strong and unburdened by others’ death, memories continued in peacetime even when the war had ceased. Death is the only continuity that hasn’t been disrupted. Such thoughts work their way along people’s mental pathways in the nights as boring and eternal as the panting of the undertaker’s assistant digging fresh new graves at the town cemetery.
Once you were different. They used to call you Little Paris. You were full of greenery, shops, bars, factories and throngs of people blithely celebrating the happy eighties, unaware of why they were merrymaking. People were as carefree as birds. If someone wanted to be poor, that was their own choice. Enjoying life came as naturally to you as the realization that tomorrow will be a new day. Your three houses of worship (with the Orthodox cross, the Catholic cross and the crescent moon with a star) stood so close to each other that you could sometimes see their shadows touch and intersect in the semi-darkness of a summer evening – a fantastic interpenetration of the earthly and the otherworldly. No one took any notice of that back then because that harmony seemed a gift of forgotten ancestors and something taken for granted. People lived without history, and outside of history. The Cold War only brought temporary fuel shortages and occasional queues for fresh bread. Soon the days of restrictions were over and the future opened up, sumptuous and generous. Or is it quite conceivable that you were never like that?
You’re now a phantom town. Your foundation
s rest in not-too-distant memory. You’re now a town of memory. You have none of the otherworldly vibrations that gave people faith in the joy of life. Now you are just home to plants and animals. A river passes through you that no longer bestows you the fruits of its waters. You’re now a phantom town: a waiting room of death, second class. But it’s quite conceivable that both you and I are nothing but creations of a coincidental illusion.
These are just a few of Gargano’s random thoughts that I caught in shorthand because he told them to me like this. Then he shot up a tree in two or three hops, with the agility of a wild man. He sat on a branch, clasped his knees to his chest and stared absently into the fibre of my being. His long black hair covered his forehead. The leaves on Gargano’s tree changed colour like a chameleon wanting to merge with its new environment in fear of serpentine predators. When the leaves began to bleed and the tree started to sob and shake uncontrollably, I closed my wound by passing my hand over it without touching it. I had to go out for a walk to break my own stagnation. I had to tear myself away from Gargano and his contagious thoughts. It’s an awful thing to feel as if someone is tattooing you on the inside, on the walls of your internal organs. That’s why I cried as I walked briskly through the empty evening streets.
Somewhere in the Earth
I lay in Mother Earth in a field where we had dug-in facing the Autonomists from the break-away, north-west of the country, and my thoughts wandered. Above me were stars, below me churned-up soil, whose smell stopped me from sleeping, so I strung together sentences in my head to calm me. A cow mooed in its stable in an invisible village behind me like a mournful tugboat. The stars had no smell. At one point, they began to fall into patterns and jump at my eyes.
Let us enjoy the defeat of the sun that sinks through the deep-set windows of bewitched buildings, where old folk sift their loneliness playing Patience all day long. How can we enter the sun in the tally of these days? It is a pale mirror image of our faces, from which the solar paint acquired over the summer is now peeling. We are sun-loving vampires, and soon autumn will come – the time for deep sleep and lethargy. We bid you farewell, o sun, o great guest, o pygmy pentagram, as you fall into shadow on the other side of the globe.
The walnut tree’s leathery leaves have withered and its fruit rolls down our streets. The sweet cores rattle inside them. The poplar is still strong, a secret home for goldfinches with their cheerful, pretty songs. One nest is level with the glass balustrade on my balcony. Inside there are two lovers.
Grass, that most amazing plant, continues its growth by the millimetre. Nothing can foil its intention of provoking the sky with its colour. Shrews cast up new and ever newer mounds of clumpy soil, which languid underground spirits rise from in the evenings – nameless essences, whose task is to refresh the air with the smell of loose black earth. Pears, badly bruised from their fall, emit alcoholic fumes, stupefying the day that becomes ever more tired and soon retires to sleep. Drunken, drowsy night saunters through the orchards and spills black ink lavishly in all directions.
The hills are gloomy in the evenings and a heavy aura of dampness and cold gathers over them, blanketing the point of life – the water vapour that forms the atmosphere. Birds rest in the branches and their fast pulses, like mainsprings, tick away a time unfamiliar to us. I’ve always wanted to burrow to the core of the hills, the heart of the mountain: to pass through the soil as if through water; to hold my breath and move beneath the grass and the tree roots, ploughing through the soft, carnal black earth; to bypass the living rock that is an island in the sea of the rolling, trembling ground. Perhaps only the dead asleep in their graves penetrate it, with the phosphorus of their bones lighting up their way.
The river is full of chub and their dorsal fins peep above the surface. They seem to want to leave the water and start walking on land. Chub are reckless and slightly stupid fish that will eat anything, even little berries that drop into the water. Early autumn is most certainly the time of the frivolous chub.
People, however, become worried and stern. They dream of southern seas. They put on thick, felted coats to keep out the north wind that scuds over the river, roams the streets and works its way into homes warmed by beech-log fires. The windows whine in the gusts of the north wind. For me, that is the dearest music of autumn’s violins.
I will get up. Yes, I will get up and go to a cabin by the Una. I sing your praises, o autumn, o shaman of shamans that bewitches nature so as to strengthen it again. O perfect mechanism that rules matter, you mysterious energy – who was it that conceived you, named you and released you into the air, water, earth and fire? You are the air, water, earth and fire. The wheel of plants, the windmill of snakes’ bodies and the fire of haze and mist are just a few of your visible signs. I heard an owl hoot, it too exalts you, while you drive the water that combs the hair of the tufa nymphs, brown bullrushes that rustle proudly and solemnly in the water’s depths, beneath which the spotted barbel spawn. They too celebrate you, the resistance of their bodies giving the water its fluid force. O autumn, luminous conquistador!
Lying in the trench, I dreamed of a man with fluorescent pimples on his face. When he started to foam at the mouth when speaking, the pimples would shine and bulge out like sparks on a summer evening. His pimples were dwarf stars. We buried that man because he had started to decompose. I sat beside his grave mound and waited for the fluorescent pimples to emerge from the ground. The cow mooed its deep elegy. Then they really did come out and gently rose into the sky. It was the black of night. I was lying in the soil of a battlefield. If an inquisitive Martian had been sitting on the jagged point of a distant star and looked down to Earth with his mind’s telescope, he wouldn’t have seen me. He would have seen the pimples giving birth to surprisingly large stars, as well as occasional, scattered bodies near the front line, in natural positions imitating death’s calm: bodies, whose vapours coalesce into our dreams. I doubt he would have been able to understand things, even if he had exerted all his tremendous Martian willpower. The battlefield was a crude, hard fact, despite imagination that took me away to intact worlds of the forgotten past. The Earth was becoming warmer and warmer. The cow mooed its deep elegy. Tomorrow we would be burning houses and killing people with the same names as us.
1992 – Year Zero
I used to know an old fellow from a nearby village who had been a tank crewman in a German armoured division and took part in the tank battle of Kursk. He was over eighty, short and sprightly, and he talked about the Second World War as vividly as if had just ended yesterday. He lifted up his shirt to show his belly and torso and said: ‘See, I’ve been wounded all over. There’s no place without a scar big enough to stub out a fag on. When the tank’s ammo was used up, we jumped out and fought with knives. There were times when tanks crashed into each other, and the strongest came out on top.’ Then he would take a long drag on his cigarette and watch the gentle May breeze rippling the green field of wheat. Through the valleys and over the hills came the faint rumble of explosions on distant battlefields. Just at that moment, one man was fighting for his life; another was already dead.
Do you remember Kareli? His house resembled the skin of the tank crewman, that tough old nugget. It was hard to find a single brick in the walls that hadn’t copped an XXL piece of shrapnel. On the inner side of the wall, in the room where we rested after guard duty, an undoubtedly talented person had managed to find that brick and write with a flat, mason’s pencil, in hindsight: ‘Despondence and despair came over our boats, / The first days of war are fresh dew / And we are drunken bumblebees.’
Kareli was the man who ate a whole bicycle in front of Comrade Tito, as the story goes, and also several kilograms of dynamite. When they asked him how he did it, and if he had any after-effects, Kareli said: ‘My stomach hurts a little bit, probably from the dynamite.’ There used to be two Karelis – one in Serbia and one here. The encounter with Tito is attributed to the former, but for literary reasons I’ve ascribed it to the Kareli fr
om our town.
His house – a huge, vacated human nest – was phenomenally indestructible. Although now as hollow as a cheese grater, no shell or missile could knock it down. We were safe in its concrete cellar.
We had been driven over to the left bank of the Una. The setting was the row of abandoned houses on the left bank, which lost all their warmth and original purpose as early as the second or third day of the war. The tenants fled and consigned themselves to being refugees. Their countenances were hazy and out of focus. Catapulted out of their own town, they would have to learn to be refugees in foreign towns and cities.
Although everyone with weapons moved fast and was always running under a hail of shells and bullets, everything now looked as if in slow motion, frozen as in in a wax museum.
One face particularly stood out in the general chaos: that of a young man in his early twenties with a scar and crossed eyes. His hair was dark but he had a fair complexion, with eyes spaced in a way that gave his face a slightly Asian look. His movements were energetic, and his body muscular and well built. His face was harsh and tender at the same time, a clash between the desire to look dangerous and his actual youthfulness. He stood with one leg on the windowsill and the other on a couch, looking out towards the other side of the river at our concealed enemy, who was armed to the teeth.
‘Those are our local Serbs and their relatives from up on Grmeč. They’ve come down into town to settle old scores with “the Turks’,’ he told me, still staring at their positions. ‘That means us.’
Then he sneered at me: ‘you don’t belong here, you wimp. Clear out while you still can.’
His eyes roamed the room, which suddenly became claustrophobic because of the tension between us. Everyone wanted to be a hero, a lone wolf, because that’s what drives the fantasy of young men hungry for excitement in war. Competition was therefore extreme, and at the beginning of the war every soldier imagined himself as an idol, about whom songs would be sung and poems written. The objects in the room were swollen from the damp and the parquet flooring played the role of waves at sea frozen by the movement of an omnipresent hand. The intact chandelier was irritating, to say the least. If a seven-spot ladybird the size of a Red Delicious apple had come up and hovered near us, waving its little wings in slow motion, and started to laugh hysterically, the roof would have collapsed and the whole house with our tragicomic characters inside would have sunk down to the centre of the Earth, where Professor Oliver Lindenbrook, Lars and the pet duck Gertrude, evil Count Saknussemm and his loyal servant Torg were wandering aimlessly. But nothing crazy happened apart from the parquet cracking beneath our feet.