Quiet Flows the Una

by Faruk Sehic

Even before leaving my flat I would be seized by anxiety. I would quickly get dressed, annoyed that the winter was lasting so long, and start out on my pilgrimage. My ritual touching of the living thing that was the river, of watching the big bubbles that lifted grains of sand from the bottom, and that whole underwater turmoil of fluid tempests awakes in me only one desire: to become a fish with arms and legs.

  Rain drips from the eaves of the house, and the cellar is flooded. When the water retreats, the cellar will be full of sand, branches, leaves and everything else that floats on the water’s surface. The house is like a beacon, and through the living-room window full of light I can still see my Grandmother’s face with its fine wrinkles; and I see the interior of the room that refused to obey the horizontal rule of the air bubble in the spirit level, instead standing at a slant and sinking in slow motion into the soft bank of the river.

  Everything is different in the winter, including the behaviour of the water and the fish. The water is a translucent pale green and sometimes a transparent yellow like a balloon whose skin affords a hazy glimpse of a person, animal, object or event. The water is then in contingency mode, and the fish behave accordingly and are rarely seen. When you do catch a glimpse of them, they seem somehow pallid and tired from the cold that penetrates all the way to the riverbed. Deep below, the bullrushes have gradually lost their chlorophyll.

  My grandmother’s house is a gentle fortress with a chimney, moated by water. When there are floods, the water comes so close to the kitchen window that you can wash your hands in it. The hazelnut tree immediately below it serves as a mooring for boats. Further down is the sandy bank and several sewage pipes overgrown with moss. Above the house, an asphalt road leads to the river island, which has two football pitches. Above the road, houses stand packed together like grey crows in misty treetops. Here there are also concrete barriers on the rocky bank, whose purpose is long unknown and secret. Thorny brambles have now grown out of them and spilled out like a foaming wave. And moss has shown its splendour on their walls, as if the north resided right there in the concrete basins that once stored manure and other waste. Beside the basins the rock wall has flexed its muscles by rising out of the scant soil together with the robinias, showing the water level and the autograph of the river from times long before us.

  My Grandmother’s house is below the rock wall and the northern flats. Its courtyard runs parallel with it. A rose bush forms its centre, although it stands up against the fence of our upstream neighbour Ramo, who repairs pistols and rifles. The rose bush is the heart of the continental world the moment it flowers. The Una flows some 20m from it. My Grandmother is in the steep-floored kitchen on her prayer rug. When she prays, perfect silence fills the house. It’s a house, whose every object smells of the river. When you lay your cheek on your pillow, you can hear the roar of the cascades and smell the sand, the fish and the freshwater mussels. I feel a premonition of my diving in the future, and that makes the palms of my hands sweat.

  My Grandmother’s house is in complete harmony with the water. It’s a harmony, moreover, in which Arabic prayers mix with the pagan voices of piscine shamans. Grandmother is a frail pathfinder for her god, lost on the winter shore of this water-bound town. Her intimate god, Allah, is the only deity I ever believed to exist. I can see her at the threshold, drifting away from the bank as the house begins its journey, with grapevine sails and windows resembling human eyes. The opposite bank becomes ever further away and the Unadžik takes on the breadth of the sea. I let the house continue its voyage, although I am sorry because I know what it will turn into at its journey’s end.

  My Grandmother’s house is in complete harmony with the water.

  The Love of Ruins

  We pretended all the ruins didn’t exist, but they were everywhere. You couldn’t miss them. Our town had become a festival of ruins, and every day we charged foreigners for guided tours so they could photograph our burned houses and obliterated neighbourhoods. Our suffering was legendary, and we ourselves were exposed in more detail than in a weird porno film. Our town ranked third on the scale of the most devastated towns in Bosnia-Herzegovina. That wasn’t exactly something to be proud of, but we had no choice other than to wallow in the mess we’d inherited.

  We couldn’t expect all those houses, factories and bridges to rise up again magically, out of water. The pockmarked streets couldn’t grow a new skin. We passed between the ruins as if they were intimate monuments to our pre-war lives. Here and there, in Serbian houses, which we hadn’t entered for years, some of us would find a photograph from our school days, from an excursion or of us hanging out together by the Una. Another guy saw the face of a former girlfriend, who had stayed on the enemy side; teenage love burned out faster than the cigarette of the soldier who was caught by mortar fire out in a meadow without any cover. Believe me, two or three puffs are enough to make you start smoking filter cigarettes. It’s the fear that makes you smoke.

  The iron bridge had been destroyed on our side of the river, and a load of pebbles was dumped there so we could at least somehow get across the Una, which flowed through the centre of town. Imagine a town with its Marshal Tito main street overgrown with weeds! Rumour-mongers say that the Chetniks kept pigs in the town’s coffee house, but that’s unrealistic because the centre of town was very close to the river and thus the front line, so pig-breeding would hardly have paid off. Less than thirty metres from there, the town’s mosque had been blown up. Hideously deformedly by the explosion, its stones lay scattered all around. The minaret lay on top of the main heap of rubble like a telescope, through which believers were once able to summon and see the Absolute. The Orthodox Church, untouched, towered above the remains of the mosque, reflecting the balance of forces before we recaptured our town. I found a piece of blue and yellow stained glass from the mosque on the road there. I put it in my pocket.

  We became very fond of the ruins. I went to the remains of my Grand­mother’s house in Pazardžik almost every day. Only the Unadžik was still largely unchanged. All the houses were gutted. The newer ones, made of brick, had the good fortune that at least their walls remained standing. I dug into the ruins of my Grandmother’s house with my hands, assuming that that was where the living room had been, because one day before the war began I’d left a little gold chain in a box there, as well as precious photographs, letters and a .223 Remington hunting rifle with two handfuls of ammunition. All the rooms of the house were now one big heap of sand, tiles, mortar and stone. No one had yet developed a compass for coping in conditions such as these. My Grandmother’s house had ceased to be three-dimensional, but the main stem of the grapevine survived the fire in the shelter of the new house we’d started building in Grandmother’s garden.

  Members of the Serb Democratic Party’s paramilitary forces attacked the town from the direction of Lipik and the Grmeč foothills at 17:50 hours on 21th April 1992. Units of the Yugoslav People’s Army were dug in above the town and were supposed to protect us from ‘external enemies’. An alleged gun incident involving Muslim police reservists was given as the reason for the attack – the men were from the isolated village of Arapuša, which had a Bosnian Muslim majority and was surrounded by Serbian villages in the Grmeč foothills and outlying suburbs of Bosanska Krupa on the right bank of the Una. Innocent Serbian civilians were wounded in that imaginary incident, so a combined artillery and infantry attack was launched on the town. Only the blind would fail to notice the striking similarity with the simulated attack by SS units, disguised as Polish soldiers, on ethnic Germans near the city of Gleiwitz – a prelude to the destruction of Poland. Arapuša was later turned into a detention point, where civilians were confined in the houses before being transported to concentration camps or to unoccupied territory to be released.

  I only began to notice the ruins when they no longer existed. While rubble towered at the sides of the streets like Cyclopean walls, the eye was used to the sight. The ruins gradually disappeared and new buildings, heavier and more u
gly than the pre-war ones, sprouted from the debris of the former houses like plants from radioactive humus.

  When I entered the town for the first time from the direction of the hospital, going down through the centre towards my block of flats, I felt suffocated by the bland realization that the town I knew had simply shrunk. My own body seemed huge and hard. I didn’t see a single face, familiar or unfamiliar, at the windows of the houses. No one waved to me. The town was empty and almost dead, without a single resident. This is what the Earth would look like following a third world war and the twilight of civilization. Only an occasional curtain trembled briefly in a window before returning to its rigid state, like the eyelid of a person dying.

  I arrived at my block of flats as ill prepared as Gulliver. This was like a dream I’d long known was coming, but now when I had to confront its realization I wasn’t ready. The reality I saw was repulsively surrealistic. Let me be clear: I loved surrealism in literature and painting, but this was a film that made me feel sick. My titanic body versus the miniature town. I still hadn’t noticed the ruins. The town’s park may have gone to seed, but my building was the Gobi Desert with tiers and balconies, whose metal railings were being eaten by rust.

  If I’d been in charge of the natural incidentals for this scene, I would have chosen a fine rain that slowly intensified. The soldier in the uniform of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina would keep standing, getting wetter and wetter in front of the entrance, above which a blue, bullet-riddled board read ‘89 Marshal Tito Street’. Then he would start vomiting.

  I never joined the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Once, in a Marxism class, I added my name to the list to become a member, but I changed my mind and crossed it out again. I didn’t want to be in a party that anyone could join, without any check or test of their political convictions. There were many books that drew me away from blind faith in that system of ideas. And when I saw nationalists joining the League of Communists, or rather the pseudo-nationalists from my high school, my dreams of a cadre party fell apart. Only the naive could ask how it was possible for yesterday’s communists to become ardent nationalists. The answer is clear: they were never communists.

  Now my grey-green block of flats was in front of me, nothing else. A feral cat appeared on the balcony for a second or two and then quickly vanished into the living room. Now a holographic projection of the Romany Homer came out, moving his lips: ‘Give me alms, good ladies, comrades, young folk... A small donation, may God giii-ve yoo-u heee-alth... May God proteee-ct your children...’ His face looked like the hologram on a Schengen visa, a stylized circle truncated at the South and North Pole, from whose perforated bases rays with little concentric circles spread in all directions. In place of his eyes he had two golden lilies.

  The rain would wash the vomit away downhill towards the place where the mosque and the Catholic church had been demolished but the Orthodox church remained whole; when we were bored at the guard post at Kareli’s house, on our side of the Una, we took our rifles and used its copper cross for target practice, for a bit of fun. After all, we didn’t have any larger-calibre weapons like a disintegration cannon to reduce the church to its atoms.

  The colourful piece of stained glass has become my secret peacetime weapon. If I hold it up to my eyes I see what was, what is, and what will be: never again such beautiful ruins.

  Blind Spots

  Although I knew the fakir could manipulate my ethical stance during hypnosis, I wasn’t afraid at all, so I made myself go back to my blackest and most difficult memories – to what is inside each of us, though hardly anyone wants to admit their own wrongdoings. I am in my labyrinth and I’m not afraid. I have the strength to be ashamed for others. Shame is a murderous creature with the head of a bull – a bloodthirsty Minotaur that should be avoided at any price.

  Half-dried blood from my unkempt mane gets between my fingers and under the nails. I touch my bloodshot eye and my mucous-covered tongue clenched between my teeth. The next-door neighbour lies dead in civilian clothing; no one wanted to see him being taken from his flat to the town rubbish dump. A long, echoing shot from a TT pistol blackened the sky with crows and the odd ponderous raven. I heard one man in a camouflage uniform say to the other: ‘He got what was coming to him. Now he’s free and can go wherever he wants.’ They both laughed as they walked away through the rubbish. One of the uniformed men put his pistol back into the leather holster on his belt, then produced a whalebone comb from his breast pocket and tidied his hair. Swarms of crows and jackdaws cawed in flight as if they were casting spells at the earth. I was seized by superstition and became afraid of the birds. I felt the skin on my back crawl. So I quickly crammed the books into my rucksack, cursed the love of literature that made me root about in the town’s rubbish for them, and entered the darkness of the forest, sticking to the safety of the path, which ferns stood over with their perverse smell.

  There is only one way out of this labyrinth: through memory and speech. The brave learn to articulate their memory. Those who have sworn themselves to silence find a different refuge from the shadows of horrible events – ‘six feet under’. Gargano is the kind of man who will take his secret with him to the grave.

  How distant we were from the crimes that took place before our eyes. Sometimes we would talk about the soldiers of the ‘Vitezovi’ battalion (The Knights), who beheaded captive Serbs on the battlefield. Some saw that as reason to admire the military effectiveness of those soldiers and the bravery required to cut a person’s throat and chop off their head, thus raising the notional number of enemy dead. Enthusiasts like that, in cushy dens far behind the lines, thought wartime reality was similar to the Counter-Strike video game, while the more innocent would feel queasy or even sick at the images of decapitation. We rarely talked about such ‘events’, which weren’t referred to by anyone as war crimes back then. The struggle for sheer survival could justify all kinds of raids and actions, especially when you’re trapped in an enclave – a concentration camp in the open – with three enemy armies fighting against you: the Bosnian Serbs, the Serbs from the Knin area in Croatia, and Abdić’s Autonomists. There’s no room here for humanism and the Renaissance, we thought at the time, and I don’t remember anyone ever using the expression ‘war crimes’, which I first heard on CNN in connection with the Omarska and Keraterm concentration camps, and afterwards in the stories whispered around after the fall of Srebrenica. The Information and Morale Section of our army didn’t tell us the real truth about Srebrenica. The ‘moralists’, as usual, read us the latest censored news from the combat zones in eastern Bosnia. Their reports gave some casualty figures, but they were nowhere near the real figure of eight thousand men taken prisoner and then killed. They listed in detail the number of enemy tanks, other vehicles, light infantry weapons and the amount of ammunition captured when our fighters broke out of the Srebrenica and Žepa enclaves and headed for unoccupied territory near Tuzla, which was supposed to be a consolation. The fall of Srebrenica was presented more as a harsh military defeat, less as a war crime (or not at all), although you could sense the bitterness in the words and between the lines. I wouldn’t find out the real truth until the very end of the war when military secrets became senseless, but even then I was far from able to realize the scale of the Srebrenica tragedy, which the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague would later declare to be genocide. I went on with my own life. My view was narrowed and I couldn’t see the whole fresco, only its parts.

  We heard stories about the torture of Autonomists, both the notorious and those ostensible ones, and of the occasional Serb from Cazin (of the two or three who lived in the town) under accusation of being spies, in moments when the situation on the ground facing the Autonomists was difficult and we were on the verge of collapse. Rumours had it that the torture was carried out by local or ‘imported’ criminals in the service of the civilian police. They were said to give electric shocks to the testicles of the prisoners or make them eat salt, after which they were
given gallons of water to drink under threat of death. But even these stories didn’t particularly disgust us because we considered the Autonomists (particularly them) and the Chetniks to be organic enemies, who were to be shown no mercy in hand-to-hand combat; or maybe we were just on the worst of battlefields, where all your thoughts are subordinate to auto-suggestion: ‘I’m gonna get through this, I’m gonna get through this...’

  There was also talk of captured Serbs from our local battlefield of Ćojluk having been beaten to death with spades and steel cables from downed power lines. I was able to assemble that image, but it jarred in my mind because I couldn’t conceive of prisoners being tormented when they were unarmed and helpless in a cellar far behind our lines – when they were stripped of all features of the ‘sinister enemy’. Torture was the job of the military police, and they beat the Chetniks so they wouldn’t have to go to the front line themselves. Some of the torturers did it to avenge a dead brother, daughter or son. But I didn’t know anyone like that.

  I lie: I knew an older man who saw his dead son in every prisoner and therefore proceeded to thrash them. With every blow he withered away a bit more, dwindling as he rushed to meet his son. The old man’s strength was superhuman. He didn’t know how else to kill his pain, so death was the only drug for him. Something was eating away at him inside at a galloping pace, and shortly before he died he had shrunk from a colossus to the size of a spindly schoolboy. The prisoners he beat black and blue are also dead. The circle of their life is closed. All of them sit together in a circle in the Elysian Fields of their home with their legs folded Indian-style – borderland Cossacks smoking home-grown tobacco and looking down into the sky; Zaporozhians, whose sole religion was meat and blood. And rakia, of course, ubiquitous and indispensable. When they laugh, the sun shines and the rain falls.