Quiet Flows the Una

by Faruk Sehic

  During my time at an army supply base, one fellow-soldier showed me a hangar where captured Serbs from Ćojluk were tortured and killed, and buried nearby, from where they would later be exhumed and transported to prisoner exchanges, or rather corpse exchanges. I don’t remember there ever being any exchanges of living prisoners in our combat zone.

  I slept several nights near that hangar for torturing and killing. We were close to a mountain with a relay station on top, so we had the good fortune of being able to pick up Croatian state television. Early in the evenings we would watch the quiz show Numbers and Letters. The host waved his arms theatrically and the audience clapped when they were supposed to. Every time one of the quiz participants turned the wheel of fortune, a soldier up on the bunk bed would pronounce, ‘The wheel of fortune spins: someone loses, someone wins’, and then he started to whistle a jumbled melody made up on the spur of the moment. This in no way disturbed the host with his energetic arms and well-fitting suit, the quiet middle-aged audience and the wheel of fortune he turned every Thursday, bringing contentment to anonymous elder folk in the Croatian provinces. The peace he made to radiate from those faces was shocking for me: I saw only the bovine satisfaction that comes with rumination – a dullness bordering on the brilliant.

  Before the war, that hangar had been used for raising and fattening cattle. It made me feel sick, and neither water nor the passage of years could wash the blood from that place. I thought about it having been the ‘duty’ of those people to torture and to execute, but that thought never lasted long because the revulsion I felt became a creeping madness; until turning off my brain became the best solution.

  I never set foot inside that hangar – I detoured it unconsciously, and sometimes semi-consciously. For me, it was a place tainted with the death of my enemies, and a particle of my own death could potentially be there too, a tiny embryo that I feared. A few hundred metres from there was the battlefield of Ćojluk, where my death languished and waited for me in the bare hills. I would have most liked to run away, but I was ashamed. Death is everywhere and doesn’t takes sides, it doesn’t care about ethnicity and isn’t politically correct. It leaves a trail of blood and the stench of bodies and fear behind it. Those are its subjects, inanimate workers who pour molten lead into your marrow, taking your breath away and turning your legs to tree trunks fused with the centre of the Earth, so there is no way of fleeing – as if in a haunting dream. The hangar was a forbidden space and I gave it wide berth.

  Meanwhile the audience in Numbers and Letters applauded frenetically, and I felt like plunging into the cathode tube, ripping out the wheel of fortune and using it as a rudder, a machine-gun or a shuriken to chop off all their heads. Blood glistened under the doors of the hangar like fruit syrup on a cake. Exhaled air turned to little clouds of steam. I lit a cigarette, collected my thoughts, and breathed in the sharp mountain air. Wild dogs howled over at Gomila, while a tubercular moon sailed the sky above Ćojluk. I was full of life, and no horror could spoil the pleasure of that feeling for me.

  During our great offensive, we came across a woman in a largely Serbian village. She didn’t want to flee with the other residents and had decided to stay at home. The houses at the beginning of the wealthy, bucolic village had been meticulously torched because they had belonged to Muslims. The style of arson showed the thoroughness of the local ‘cleansers’ in charge of the purity of God’s chosen Serbian people. There was no time for me to think what had become of the former residents.

  The woman was middle-aged and healthily stout, with rosy cheeks like two apples beneath her bound headscarf. She sat at the table in her courtyard as if nothing was happening. The horror had completely calmed her. We ran into her by coincidence because the operation involved entering the village from several directions, so there was the usual traffic jam and confusion when units of different brigades came together.

  I heard her speaking to some of the soldiers milling around nearby: ‘Are you Serbs too? You are, I know it. You just don’t want to say you’re Serbs...’, which irritated our Bosnian soldiers.

  I’m not sure if I heard the burst of machine-gun fire while I was still in her field of vision or when I’d gone around behind the barn, hurrying to accomplish our objective of taking the high ground. I don’t remember – I may even have seen her collapse and convulsively clutch at the waxed tablecloth, pulling the stainless-steel tray with the coffee service down onto the bright green grass covered with morning dew and knocking over the table, but afterwards my mind refused to preserve that vision of the crime. Your thoughts are racing at a hundred miles per hour at moments like that, and everything beyond your immediate goal flashes by in that waking nightmare.

  After that machine-gun burst, we continued on towards our hill through the descending September darkness. As we were passing the Orthodox church, we heard the firing of a Wasp rocket launcher and an explosion. The commander of a sabotage unit appeared and told me and my men to take cover because there was Chetnik shelling, although it was clear that they themselves were trying to demolish the church with Wasps. When we finally reached the hilltop without being ambushed, we spread out along the ridge and dug in well. No enemies attacked us because they were seriously out of it. We stayed in the area for ten days. The houses had electricity, and we watched Croatian state television as if hypnotized. In terms of ammunition, weapons, food and cigarettes, those were the golden days of the war, and its last. We withdrew without a fight in pitch-black night by order of senior command. I remember the code 801 they sent to my Motorola, which meant immediate withdrawal. The village vanished behind us in the darkness. Succulent bell peppers hung ripe in its gardens and surrounding fields, flourished by the fertile, sandy soil. Their colour was poignantly reminiscent of the cheeks of the peasant woman seconds before she was shot.

  Elegy for a Toshiba

  My imaginary Alexandrian library, the one that should consist of small items, innocuous daily rituals and fragments of memory, also contains an old Toshiba cassette recorder. I bought it at a bookshop sometime in the early 1980s, and that cassette recorder with two heads was the first model whose buttons were at the bottom, immediately under the flap for the cassettes. It was light and well made, neither too tall nor too bulky, and of black plastic. It had a radio scale, whose gleam at night could whisk me away to distant places like Riga or Vilnius, cities whose location I didn’t know for sure at the time. Their names seemed as if they came from another planet, and the Baltic and non-Slavic parts of the USSR were just that, with the exception of the Lithuanian basketball players in the Soviet team. The cassette recorder aged at the same pace as other devices, as design progressed and ever faster and crazier new functions evolved. Capitalism, still remote and beyond the Berlin Wall, worked wonders that we would see in delayed action, when it had already lost emotional value for us. We would be lost in the remnants of our own and others’ lives, in our attempts to rebuild them and rediscover wholeness and simple happiness. The 1990s therefore have power over us like totalitarian memory. I am one, but there are thousands of us – the unbreakable, broken ones.

  The film Blade Runner shows massive advertising boards for the TDK Corporation on top of the buildings in a futuristic city constantly lashed with rain. I’ll always remember that brand for its 60 and 90-minute cassettes. There is sure to be a hidden planet somewhere, a world for lost things and objects that have gone out of fashion, their ads pulsating with the neon radiance of non-ephemerality. I now realize that this cassette recorder will be an exhibit high up on the scale of importance in my imaginary Alexandrian library. I’ve always been too quick to renounce material objects, and if I’d known what was about to happen I would have carried it with me through water, fire and mud. But no, I left it in Zagreb on the 15th April 1992 and returned to my country, already in the grips of war.

  Eastern Bosnia was attacked by units of the Yugoslav People’s Army together with numerous, well-armed bands of criminals from Serbia under the guise of countering ‘
Muslim extremism’ (‘the Green Berets’) and fighting to preserve Yugoslavia. I saw with my own eyes the refugees from Zvornik standing with plastic bags and bundles in the car park of Zagreb’s mosque. Those were people of flesh and blood, the first Bosnian refugees sent off into the world like tracer bullets in the night sky, scattered in all directions. We’d gone to the mosque to convince ourselves of what we heard from Radio Sarajevo’s reporters on the ground. The radio journalist from the east-Bosnian town of Foča didn’t know who was shooting at whom there. Confusion was rife. For the civilians floating down the rivers Drina and Ćehotina, the war was unmistakably over because they were dead. Rallies for peace and the preservation of Yugoslavia had been held in Sarajevo several days earlier. Feeble-minded miners and workers, the urban underclass, marched with Yugoslav flags and socialist songs on their lips until Chetnik snipers ensconced in the Holiday Inn made them scatter. I was twenty-five years old and didn’t feel any sympathy for them. Whoever wanted to die like an idiot had my full support.

  Out on a battlefield in the late autumn of 1994, when the leaves bled in pastel colours along with the men, I rescued a Sanyo cassette recorder from a house that was about to burn down to the foundations – fire is the good spirit of our time. The cassette recorder would last me all of fourteen years.

  The Zlovrh battlefield was one of mud and rain, rain and mud, like the Russian front in late autumn before the snow, ice and biting cold set in. Everything sinks into the ground, plants droop and die, and the ash-grey mire devours all hope that the sun will ever shine again. Our front was worse than the Russian front in books because we had no broad steppes to retreat across; but there was that front inside us. When I first think of it I feel a chill in my bones, but later it becomes a pleasant source of warmth – a stove I don’t invoke, yet it warms me. Then Rutger Hauer turns up in a long leather coat, as the rain pours at the front line, and, making his way through thorny bushes with his bare hands, constantly repeats to us: ‘This isn’t time to die. This isn’t time to die...’

  Even after I stopped using it, long after the war, it continued to stand among the functional objects around me as a protective relic of at least some kind of past – my past. Its plastic jacket had pretty much melted on one side in the heat of the fire. That wartime scar meant that it finally ended up in a rubbish skip on the steep side of town when I moved house.

  During my fragmentary dream I saw the Toshiba cassette recorder before me. It lay smashed open on the table, with its wires only just holding it together. Its display gave off a faint blue gleam, and inside its works were almost untouched, with rows of distinctive yellow diodes that looked like a transformer station. Solitary monuments of an old technology like ghost towns from the Wild West – that’s what its insides looked like. Its exterior was broken, but it still worked. Weren’t we all like that straight after the war? Unaware of how we were damaged by omnipresent corrosion, but full of the mad adrenalin of survivors.

  The cassette recorder and many other lost things, especially those that aren’t material – lost emotions and memories of the shadow of some toy in the distant twilight ten thousand nights ago – are what impelled me to build my Alexandrian library. That is the duty of an archivist of melancholy. When I put a new item in the library it automatically closes. My past fills up and the emptiness of the world becomes less. The library mysteriously fades from view, as befits it, and I can then be a more or less happy archivist of my past.

  Centaur

  In a completely different dream, thick warm snow was falling. My sister and I were walking through a town. It was quiet and easily recognizable as our town, and yet a little different or unusual, as things often are in dreams. We stood in the central square, which must have had some kind of under-floor heating because the snowflakes melted as soon as they touched its stone blocks, which were wonderfully coloured. The square was a brilliant, intricate mosaic with lamp-posts and old-fashioned benches around the edges. I marvelled at the colours of the large slabs: they were rich and beautiful, and the smooth stonework even felt like it was living matter that could soak up moisture like a sponge if you wanted it to. A gaily-coloured tram suddenly passed down the main street, which ran down one side of the square, merrily ringing its bell through the downy puffs of snow.

  We talked about how strange it was that we hadn’t noticed the beauty of our town before, with the novelties of the colourful square and the trams, but we weren’t overly astonished – we accepted the town as it had become. We stayed on at the square. My sister was wearing a chequered coat of warm winter fabric; I couldn’t see myself well because I was absorbing all the colours, the snow and the warmth, despite it being a freezing day. A general feeling of warmth and comfort pervaded my body. In my dream I was completely aware of it being a dream, but that in no way lessened its charm for me. Perhaps I wandered off for a second or two and forgot that I was dreaming. Then I went with the flow of the dream to the place where our town was doubly beautiful. It was reminiscent of the staid little town in peacetime, in the late 1970s or early 1980s, but it also had something of a future that might one day come.

  Without smokestacks the sky would be free for birds, pagan gods and aeroplanes. In the Old Town, instead of heavy guns and howitzers from the Second World War, there would be models of Alice in Wonderland, Godzilla, King Kong, Flipper and other imaginary heroes on show. The Una would perhaps be navigable for one part of the year (for the rest it would be the same, transparent and green) and tugboats – vessels full of melancholy – would glide down it lazily. This would open the possibility of a poem of boats, water and long journeys, further spreading the world of the river in the spirit of mariners’ cosmopolitanism.

  Now I’m waiting for snow like that to fall so I can see my town as a perfect mélange of Sarajevo, Zagreb and a faraway Levantine city I’ve never been to, except in my dreams. The first snowflakes descend from the clouds and I close my eyes.

  When you’re in search of the missing, you become a chronicler of dreams. I therefore had to induce myself to dream, and in the dream to devise everything that didn’t exist in reality so as better to describe it in a waking state. Even when my dreams were to do with projections of the future, at an even deeper level I dreamed of the past. I had no choice and searched for inspiration wherever I could.

  Smith the Redeemer, AKA the Conductor of Clouds

  I saw the impact-action rifle grenade come down three metres in front of us with my own eyes. It had plastic stabilizer fins at the tail, and the body of the grenade looked like some kind of green, army grayling, 20 cm long, and its diameter was the same along its whole length. For a moment it seemed to hang in the air, and the leaves stopped falling from the trees, or stopped in the air, while we were off the ground, bounding like springboks and trying to get as far away as possible. We were caught in a vacuum beneath the forest canopy in October when trees change colour like the face of a mortally ill person, who, tired of the shell of their body, waits for it to expire. And so the leaves waited for the performance to end and the light to be extinguished by the hand of someone or something greater than ourselves, on the peak of that forested hill where we had the shit beaten out of us, after which nothing would ever be the same any more, at least in terms of the scars on body and mind. And at one moment we dropped to the ground, the grenade burst, and everything was blown to smithereens. The Earth turned upside down, the arthritic roots of the trees spread from my eyes, the men in front of us were lying on the ground, and the sky below them grimaced. Then I heard a scarcely audible sound above my head and a breath of air that raised the hair on my head; everything went black and soil came raining down. I hadn’t been hit by a single piece of shrapnel, but the fellow next to me was deader than JFK. A long, triangular shadow grew, and I caught a glimpse of him in his raincoat pierced by shell fragments as he soared into the forest and ripped through the canopies of the trees sopping wet from three days of rain. Stronger and more real than Superman, Batman and Spiderman put together, he didn�
�t care if anyone else saw him apart from me as he pushed through the canopies of the trees with his gory shrapnel-hands, and the rainwater showered us down on the ground. It fell on the dead soldier and his bearded face, where death took root in a millisecond, making blood from his chest gush out over the yellow clay of the forest track. A stratus cloud settled over the ground and concealed us from enemy eyes.

  I knew that was Smith the Redeemer, who had helped me countless times during the war and thanks to whom I can now talk about all this with a cool head and write with a steady hand. It was to him that I owed my bravery and wartime exploits, as a result of which I received several bonuses. But still I wasn’t awarded the ultimate medal, the Bosnian Golden Lily, because the brigade commander hated my guts and I didn’t know how to lick his arse.

  Whenever fear took hold – that utter fear that seizes even the nitrogen molecules in the air, he would appear and free me of the fear of death, and then I would be as light as a hummingbird and fast as a virus. That’s why I decided to look for him at the return address on the letter I received after the war, signed with his name. I found the apartment in 5 Emily Dickinson Street on the third floor of a grey building that looked like a sick pigeon, as Fernand Léger would have imagined it. It was a flat worthy of the prophet of a non-existent religion, which he was in his own right, though no one had yet raised kitsch statues to him like the ones in Catholic churches that made me feel nauseous as a small boy, in fear of the death that the cold interior smelled of. The relics of his bones weren’t encased in gold and silver like reliquaries. Whenever I see a pendant with a hair of a saint or some other reliquary, I realize with sadness how little of God is left on Earth. How primitive people are if they believe that a forearm with a hand cast in gold, with unnaturally slender fingers and golden nails, can possess the supernatural power to do anything other than stand around in a glass case with less kinetic energy than the cheapest jelly vibrator made in China.