Quiet Flows the Una

by Faruk Sehic

  It was that experience that points to human stupidity and ignorance – our horrible desire to explain everything for ourselves, to order and systematize things and then write a book about them, which will become a canon for fools who don’t trust their own brains and emotions. Stupidity is epochal and unable to be reduced to a single root, and the whole of civilization is the outcome of it. Just look at the rules of grammar, that jungle of conjugations, declinations and phonetic mutations that sicken me whenever I think of them. Grammar is a playground for the petty-minded, those who start wars and tear the planet apart each century. Hitler is a classic example: he wrote a book and then put the content into practice. His admirers are exclusively people at a low level of spiritual evolution. Such tag-along killers are always in the majority, we can choose any time and space, the conclusion is always the same: the amalgam of stupidity and ignorance = mass murder. An intelligent monster is rather a recluse – it isn’t a harbinger of evil and doesn’t mix with those prosaic killers that populate its epoch.

  ‘Spring is like a perhaps hand,’ e. e. cummings portends for us. Spring is a carnal time, a time of convulsion. Every bud is the swollen vein of a many-eyed, invisible creature. Don’t startle it! Walk through the vernal forest with discretion, when the song of elated, passionate birds accompanies your shadow. If you bend down to pick a cyclamen or a violet, take a look at the forest floor, the peaceful face of humus – it reflects your appearance more than any ancient books.

  Awoken from my trance by a snap of fingers, with eyes open but still in a hypnotic sleep, I watched the seed of an Indian mango sprout in the fakir’s hand and grow into a tree of natural size. I climbed up onto the stage and picked one of its fruits. The fakir suggested I eat it. Then he gave me a pencil and paper and asked me to write down whatever came into my head. That was the method of automatic writing I used to draft this piece about the spring.

  The fakir’s instructions were precise and clear. Using the technique of hypnotic regression, of returning to the deepest stages of my childhood, I surfed the experiences of my boyhood and teenage years, both ones I remembered clearly as well as those forgotten details buried at the back of my memory. There have even been instances where a hypnotist has been able to take the hypnotized person back five hundred years, to former incarnations. In a Copenhagen prison in 1945, a certain Hardrup met a certain Nielsen. Hardrup was serving a sentence for collaborating with the Germans. Nielsen introduced Hardrup to yoga and hypnosis, and also suggested to him that he would free and unite the whole of Scandinavia, but that he would need a lot of money to do it. After leaving prison, Hardrup robbed a bank, killing its manager in the process, but the court didn’t acknowledge that he had acted under hypnosis and convicted him to life imprisonment with hard labour.

  That was obviously a case of strong post-hypnotic suggestion, where a message is implanted in the mind of the medium, who, long after the end of the hypnosis, at the exact time determined by the hypnotist, carries out the particular suggestion, regardless of whether it clashes with the medium’s own moral principles. I loved bizarre and insignificant events that had a meaning and a message; insignificant, that is, for the big history of humanity. I adored that parallel world of unusual people, to whom I belonged if only through my picaresque biography and the red scar cutting across my face.

  I slipped back into my trance.

  The Monster from the Juice Warehouse

  It was so long ago and I was so small that I find it hard to believe that it all really happened. I learned to walk and talk early and plunged straight into the whirlpool of life. Awake for hours before daybreak, I had to wait for the mechanism that ran the town’s life to start ticking – and then I would rush outside. One morning when I was sliding between puddles, I slipped and fell face-down on the title-page of a wet newspaper clinging to the asphalt, where it said that Salvador All... had been killed (my hand had erased part of the surname). Allende was dead, and I was wounded. I kept running with the open wound on my knee and gripping the wad of newspaper in my hand. The day was a merry labyrinth that I wanted to get lost in, as in someone else’s memory.

  Maybe it was exactly the day when I crumpled up dead Salvador Allende that the Monster from the Juice Warehouse answered my persistent questions about how she could stand the loneliness of the icy caves. She gave a short monologue with a few allusions to silence, the cold and loneliness. I don’t remember everything, but some of her words have stuck in my mind because I felt sorry for the Monster.

  ‘I’d say silence is that feeling. Gar-gar-gargel. Silence floods over the hills where the green banners of the trees and the grass wave in honour of the watery power that nourish them. I don’t see them, except at night when they don’t show their colours because I dare not leave this shelter during the day. The silence isn’t disturbed by the swarms of insects and birds but is enhanced by the holy melodies and rhythms coming from the very heart of existence: the fabric of the Earth or the astral spores – the meteorites that sowed the bacteria of life. Gar-gargel.’

  Monster made these guttural sounds because her Eve’s apple trembled uncontrollably on her thin neck, which held up a huge, melancholic head. I’d like to say her head was ‘adorned’ by unusually large eyes, but that would be dishonest. Creatures with eyes like that can never be completely happy. Whoever sees the world through such enormous eyes must have tears the size of Maybeetles. Just think how excited Monster must have been when a boy like me came by, and I was the only person she had to talk to. I stole adult books from the library and fed them to the insatiable Monster. You can imagine all the nuances of solitude that the well-read Monster from the Juice Warehouse reflected on as she sat in the cavern cut by human hands from the living rock, and upon which a medieval fort stood. And she had the even worse fate of being the last of her race.

  ‘Gar-gar-gargel. Silence is easiest to catch over the surface of the water, and then it appears as a pale haze of river vapours rising elegantly like the spirit of a lady – a sovereign of aromas, elegance and tarot, with cards of tufa and sand. She is the Lady of the Water, who rules the water sprites and whose chill spirit brings evening calm to the houses by the river when twilight steals out of its heavenly chest full of worldly wonders. Gar-gar-gargel.

  ‘Solitude can also be clad in cold, remember. Only that gentle cold has the strength to carry you away to the incredible dimensions and expanses impulsively produced by people’s imaginations, imitating the power of creation we’ve discovered in religious cosmogony. Cold worlds, distant and untouchable, which everyone’s soul longs for, exist in every water molecule, hanging in profusion like the cells of a honeycomb. Solitude is the possessor of the unique and varied atmosphere we get at the setting of the sun, and it resides in many words: gloaming, twilight, dusk, darkness, night, daybreak, black and blue-tinged morn, rosy-fingered dawn, eclipse, blackness... Gar-gargel.’

  ‘Borges mentions two kinds of semi-darkness: pigeon-blue, that of morning, and raven-black, that of night. Solitude finds its garb in all of them, sometimes heavy like the cloak of a martyr, other times as gossamer-fine as the silk wedding veil that hides the beaming face of a mermaid, who will only vacillate between woman and fish for a few moments longer. Solitude is thus the strongest shield of sufferers and saints. They reproduce through it, confirming the purpose of their earthly existence. Life itself began because of the solitude of ‘the one’ infinite being. But what if solitude itself is that infinite being, whom the various religions have persistently tried to name and appropriate for themselves and their followers? Or what if it’s expressed in the billions of feelers of eternity implanted in our bodies and those of fishes? One way or another, it’s hard to make oneself clear to others and vice versa. That is solitude – an impenetrable protective suit of sorrow... Gar-gargel.’

  While Monster was speaking, I had a visual notion of every word she said – my photographic memory registered every letter she spoke. I didn’t understand the meaning of most of the words. I imagined solit
ude as a stalactite with cave water eternally dripping from it.

  I drank my bottle of juice to the last drop and said goodbye to Monster with our old greeting: ‘While there’s juice, there’s hope!’ We knocked our foreheads together, and with thumb and middle finger we flicked the bungs into the darkness, where the Una flowed. Monster went back into the depths of the nuclear shelter, rushing for her bedchamber through tunnels where, four hundred years ago, the hunchbacks used to hide from people. I closed the steel door stealthily and silently so it wouldn’t screech, then I dragged a willow branch behind me as I went to erase my footprints in the sand. I climbed the steep slope below the thick walls of the Old Town and walked in a zigzag over the grass to cover my tracks.

  The town burned with electric luminance and the hopes and good wishes of its inhabitants. I went down to the asphalt road below the Catholic church and hurried to the old town fountain to wash the green palms of my hands. It was late in the evening and I joined the flocks of people out strolling. I already knew very well how to keep a secret.

  PS

  Monster, an envoy of the water and the aquatic world, according to her own tale, came into being because the powers in the sand of the Una sensed an influx of misfortune from the human world that threatened to spill over into the aquatic world. The demiurges of the sand united, and their combined strength gave rise to a powerful aura that emerged from the water, from which then strode forth an awkward and wistful human-like creature. Her task is to observe people and their way of life, to get close to them by reading their books, and in the moments before her death to convey that knowledge to her father-mothers, the demiurges of sand, who have ever been wardens of the river and its world. Thus the sand knows the history of the human race better than humans themselves. How can Monster prevent that onslaught of human misfortune, I hear you say? Very easily: by absorbing it into herself and then expelling it from both worlds through solitude. That’s why she has such big eyes. And that’s why her lifespan is very long because the elimination of human misfortune requires a lot of human time, and solitude. But since that misfortune accumulates at such a rate that nothing can stop it, the powers in the sand decided to stop probing the human mind. That’s why my monster is the last of her sort.

  I first met her long ago when I used to pass the storehouse for fruit juice, a cavern hollowed out of the bank of the river island where the Old Town once stood. Formerly people used it for storing ice, which was brought from the caves of the Grmeč range and then delivered from here to the various taverns and kitchens. The juice warehouse was, of course, a place for storing juices of all colours and kinds. Rows of plastic crates stretched as far as the eye could see, and the moderate damp and cold made it ideal. Strange noises always came from the juice warehouse, as if the bottles were murmuring and squeaking, bobbing and bumping against each other. When I went in for the first time, attracted by this music, Monster was standing behind the massive, half-rotten door. I was so small that I could squeeze in by pushing apart two loose slats of the high door. So began our friendship, which ended when I went to do my military service because Monster could only be friends with children. When I grew up, Monster disappeared, along with so many other things.

  The Ballad of the Black Hole

  We all know that heaven is above and bright-burning hell is below. And God rules supreme on both floors. Between them is the Earth, where we are. And God is our master. Such is the order of things as imagined and inscribed by the paedophiles in priestly robes. O Man, you sacred beast! We warrior Adams are just ordinary animals in the vast kingdom of Regnum Animale. That’s why I forsake myself as a man and would much rather be a whale shark, Rhincodon typus, fifteen metres long and as heavy as a bus – a gentle, mega sea-dog that eats only plankton. But I’ve mislaid the shape changer, so now I walk the town, whose architecture will be embellished by fire and made infernal over the next four years.

  My town was a place where heaven and hell kissed. Shreds of mortar shells were raining down, bouquets adorned with bursts of 20 mm flak rounds. I ran and entered a large room of a damp, one-storey house. Through a hole in the ceiling and roof I could see the stars.

  The moon lit up a photo portrait of a passionate pair of lovers with frozen smiles. She wore a crown of silk on her dark hair. His dense crop was combed back with more than a dab of brilliantine. They were lying naked on a bed with brass bars, caressing each other’s hair and holding each other tight as if every night was Judgement Day. He remembered his birthplace in the marshy borderlands between Lithuania and Poland, and as a boy wading through the peatbog, up to his knees in the cold slush, touching in wonder the speckled eggs of a wild duck in a nest covered in leaves, and it trembled on the surface of the black water. His homeland was in those marches where wind often changed the borders. Or at least that’s what I imagined as I looked at the photograph, which the damp and the sun had made ever more like a daguerreotype.

  With her head thrown back, the woman combed her long hair in front of a framed mirror, examining the reflection of her well-proportioned body with its pronounced hips. She ran a finger over the rosette-shaped birthmark above her navel that brought her good luck. Every time she did that, a smile would make little wrinkles dance around her eyes. She let her hair down over her breasts, and the curls covered her erect, protruding nipples. The man lay on the crumpled bedclothes smoking in the dark. When he inhaled, the tip of his cigarette would glow, revealing the lack of one finger – the price he paid for fighting in the Ardennes. His gaze was fixed on the ceiling, through which the stars shone.

  I leapt out of my mouldy bed in a flash and stared at the flare that whistled low over the roofs before going phut. The gunfire outside stopped like a sudden summer shower. Gunpowder was the Christian Dior of the nightly air. Sheltered by a row of houses, I walked along the street, which was about one hundred metres long and dead straight. There were quite a few unrendered houses here that hadn’t been burned down, and the moonlight revealed the holes bored by shell fragments in the red brick walls.

  Black holes hide in shrapnel pits

  Small tight balls of raven feathers

  According to Hawking, the light here is endlessly bent

  Fly fervent into a wormhole and you will come out again alive.

  I threw myself to the asphalt that had been colonized by grass and soil, and a flare lit up the half-burned houses, rampant weeds and the skeleton of the Alsatian Arkan, who had died of artillery fever. Have you ever seen a dog trembling while shells are falling? Arkan shook like a frightened person, and it was that completely human fear that killed him. Pale sprouts of grass now grew between his ribs, and larvae had lasciviously sewn what remained of his skin with the threads of their scabby bodies.

  Half-burned houses are clocks with atomic precision, which show that the time of the war has only just begun to flow. Because when the heatwaves and the rains come, the fire-marked building material will turn to debris, and the interiors of the houses will swell and pucker; winter will grip them in its freezing vice, and later they will crumble into dust and ash, becoming soil and returning to the earth over the years of maltreatment by the forces of nature.

  No one lived in this part of town any more because of the closeness of the river, which was the front line. I felt that the whole street and all its houses were my possessions. Not a breath of wind stirred the trees in the courtyards of the phantasmal, but still real houses. My senses were finely honed and almost perfect on those lonely, night-time walks. The street was filled with my body, my sweat and the smell of my weapons. My innermost being spread through the forsaken courtyards and entered the houses with their broken windows and unlocked, half-open front doors. I felt the aura of all those desolate houses, their hidden warmth and the mayhem of war in their courtyards as if I’d spent my childhood in each one of them, although I’d never been here before. This street was the homeland of my first year of the war. Here I discovered my secret peace. The evening dew condensed on the weeds and the other coloni
zers. I thirstily inhaled their smell, bitter and pungent, together with the ether formed by the midday shower. A silence steamed from the street that was only possible after a fierce exchange of gunfire.

  I would roam the town that night, borne by the wild freedom of my body, bristling with excitement because a shell could fall any moment and put an end to the story. My heart throbbed in my whole body under the camouflage pattern of my uniform. I enjoyed gambling with something bigger than myself. But it wasn’t enough to say I loved life. I loved it so much that I was willing to die for it. Oh, sweet tenderness of war that drives my heart to explosion. And that wartime sky with Van Gogh ochre stars arched over my love for that unknown street is my salvation – only now do I know it – from the scourge of hatred and vengeance.