Quiet Flows the Una

by Faruk Sehic

  Everywhere the algebra of chaos: inside out clothes, leaves of paper and littered objects. I entered the flat, which had been abandoned in a great hurry. The walls of Smith’s study were covered with sketches of atmospheric grey. Sketches of ten types of clouds: the delicate wisps of cirri; cirrocumuli like small sheep; veil-like cirrostratus; altocumuli (white or grey rags, rolls and rounded heaps); altostrati (bluish cloud cover); nimbostrati that bring rain, snow and sleet, stratocumuli (whitish rags with dark parts); strati that bring drizzle and granular snow; cumuli (mounds, domes and towers); and cumulonimbi (huge mountains and towers) – the most noteworthy clouds in the sky, whose energy is equal to that of several atomic bombs, and all their types and variations. These brief descriptions of clouds were spelled out in his handwriting.

  The clouds’ time of formation and duration was carefully noted on a two-metre-wide roll of paper pasted from ceiling to floor along the length of the wall. He didn’t have a bedroom for the simple reason that he never slept. A being of his rank had no need for sleep – that is for us mortals. The wind tried in vain to drive the curtains into the room, banging the wooden venetian blinds against the façade and back towards the window. The pungent aroma of surgical spirit still hung in his study, while the floor of the bathroom-toilet was covered by a heap of dried-up faeces that had no smell at all. It had gone hard, was six feet high, and had obviously been shaped into a symmetrical hill of excrement, which stretched from where the toilet bowl should have been to the bath. There were wads of cotton wool soaked in alcohol on the floor, which suggested he had cleaned his body with them because the shower mixer had been ripped out and stopped up with plaster. That was all that remained of Smith the Redeemer: clouds and shit. No messages on the fridge door under a magnetic holder. In the fridge I saw a jar with a frozen yellow Una maggot inside. I sat down on the couch, reached out for the pile of books on the floor, blew the dust off the title-page and started reading The Catcher in the Rye. I expected the end of the world or something similar. The regular afternoon delirium gripped people in their lower-middle-class flats, where the television represents the door to perception, to both heaven and hell. But everyone kept pretending they were normal. No one tore open the window and screamed at the top of their voice. The wind dropped away, and for a few seconds absolute silence reigned. The first drops were as silent as a cat’s footfall. The rain started its white back-jets, ever stronger and faster. In the flat across from Smith’s an elderly man masturbated while looking at photos of scantily clad teenage girls on Facebook, who revealed to the whole world how enamoured they were in their own bodies. There was time for sleeping, for alcohol, and for popping the amazing two-coloured pills that could launch me into the maw of the astral lizard. Smith the Redeemer had betrayed me again like he did the time I chased him over the river islands and across the Una. I fell asleep on a couch in a flat in a part of Sarajevo I’d never been to before. I dreamed I was writing this book and that I’d never finish it.

  The House on Two Waters

  The house by the Una had its rises and falls. It burned down the first time in 1942 during the Allied bombing of the town, and only a heap of ash was left. The household members gathered around it as if it were the grave mound of a dearly departed relative. In the time that followed, the wind blew the ash away over the river and a new house was built of tufa and Una sand, but with timber for the stairs, reeds for the panelling and oaken beams for the diagonal supports of the walls. That was the house I remember, and it would meet with the same fate, except that it was destroyed in a different way – by a dirty, uncouth hand in 1992 that held a cigarette lighter to a sheet of paper that fell in slow motion on to a petrol-doused carpet, which would sweep the house away into the sky. With the words ‘you’ll rise to the sky in smoke’ in his poem ‘Death Fugue’, Paul Celan unknowingly wrote an epitaph for my Grandmother’s house.

  Those were its earthly downfalls, but the inner world is quite different, and here the house continues its existence. Its residents are still living inside, in that airy space. In the summer, the wonderful aroma of roasted coffee rises from the roasting drum on the porch formed by the roof, which slants steeply down to the part of the courtyard facing the river. The grapevine extends its tendrils across the posts of the porch and the water gurgles from the metal pump, and before it pours into the concrete trough it murmurs in strange voices like a creature freed from heavy fetters in the blackest depths of the earth that finally breaks out into the light of day. My Grandmother, her face framed in a headscarf of soft colours, waters the rose bush in the garden, which sprouted out of the rich, sandy soil you can find only on the banks of the Una. The smell of its petals is intoxicating, and Grandmother will make them into a sweet, pale-red cordial in two-litre jars. The petals will rest on the surface for a while and then start sinking towards the placid, sugary bed. Where the garden ends and the courtyard begins, wild chamomile and plantago grow. There is a bench with a table beneath the quince tree, and just three steps further is our greenhole and the small landing-pier. The boats there are heavy and their ribs – planks bent to the shape of angular horseshoes – are damp from constantly being in the water. The boats are used for extracting sand and going fishing. Whoever has a boat also has a pier, and every pier is named after the owner of the boat, just like greenholes bear the surname of the family that lives closest.

  My Grandmother’s second house, the one I remember, had been sinking into the bank, facing the river, for years. The floor in the kitchen was already steep as if the house was in the process of sliding into the water. Grandmother didn’t like this, and she always dreamed of a firm, reliable stone embankment to stop what was impossible to stop: the unity of the river and time, like in Heraclitus’ metaphor.

  On the bank below the house there was a hazelnut tree, skimpy but spry, and I would sometimes watch the kingfisher sitting in it with the celestial colours on its neck feathers and its black, silent beak pointing towards the water, as if it was aiming at a fish swimming carelessly close to the surface. In late autumn, the kingfisher would sit there on a bare branch for hours, without any catch, until the rain came. It destroyed the clarity of the river, making it a terrible monster of incomprehensible tongue and broad, murky musculature that instilled fear and apprehension. When the kingfisher darts towards the water it becomes an awl that stabs the water with a gentle plop and comes up with a fish in its bill, which it takes to a willow branch. Drops of water would cling to its oiled plumage, and their shine would intensify the bright, paradisiacal colours on its neck and chest. In the summer, the kingfisher would be invisible in the leaves of alders, willows or aspens, which would turn the white undersides of their leaves in gusts of wind that signalled rain and storm.

  It’s hard to describe the house in winter, coated in snow and with icicles hanging precipitously from the edge of the roof. The fire in the sheet-metal stove reigned then, and often some orange peel or the fragrant piece of elecampane root from my Grandmother’s china closet lay on top of it quietly drying. Whoever liked watching the water also enjoyed the fire. Tiny tongues of flame licked through the little door of the stove, which was a space catapult that would launch us into unknown, balmy landscapes without wet snow and the raging Una. My Grandmother’s prayer rug was a source of warmth – a treated sheepskin with white locks, on which she prayed to her god five times every day. The china closet displayed glass dishes, old documents with the seal of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, golden jewellery and bottles of rakia with medicinal herbs for making compresses. None of those things cared much for human perceptions of time. There was also a locked drawer that I only managed to peek into sometimes when Grandmother took out her golden ring with the opal, which changed its hues before my eyes when I turned it towards the light fixture with its hidden light bulb.

  Winter by the river wasn’t exactly fun. The house was a sarcophagus that sealed us in until the coming of spring and divine summer, unless Uncle Šeta performed a trick for us like making
a coin disappear from the palm of his hand or swallowing a chain – magic he learned during his time in the Yugoslav navy.

  My Grandmother’s house stood on two waters, at the boundary of two worlds, and leaned of its own accord towards the River Una, the other indescribable river, into which it would finally sink one day. Then I would be able to see it as part of a sunken city full of nymphs and water sprites, and I would recognize the contours of my face in the water’s depths.

  The Una will keep flowing after I finish my story.

  I returned to this real river and mixed with its colour and strength, but the sun was already tracing willow veins onto the smooth surface of the water. The radio broadcast of a Sunday football match came from behind the curtains of a house’s open window. Laundry on the line, as dry as gunpowder, danced in the west wind. Everything was possible, near and touchable. Over near where the river takes a turn past the abandoned abattoir in the cascades full of air bubbles, I see a thirteen-year-old boy with a fishing rod in his hand, making his way through the mint and long grass by the riverside, and then disappearing in its wild waves.

  The First Words of the Book

  Let us imagine it’s raining outside, simply because the watery mood is good for writing. I think of mushrooms springing out of the moist soil right now: first the little caps emerge, then the upright bodies. A man walks through the forest and his feet sink into the damp leaves underlaid with soft humus. He’s a magician who can turn a metal bar into a wisp of smoke when the roof of the factory he’s set fire to at the edge of town melts. (There are always two magicians, black and white; the white magician would turn a metal bar in the hands of a killer into a slimy snake.) The black magician walks through the forest, a wide-brimmed hat on his head. His face is hidden. His trousers are wet to the knees from the forest undergrowth. I stop the rain. I delete the magician because I don’t like black. I put sea horses above the forest, and they drift and make faint, high-pitched noises as they ride on columns of air bubbles. But how can sea horses be flying above a continental forest of hornbeams and beeches? The mushrooms return to the earth. The rain retires to the clouds. But a different, terrible rain now pours into all my wounds. Various creatures and stories strive to get out of me, fleeing before the great flood that’s coming. I ought to start saving what can be saved. Words, figurines of speech, sketches, and creatures like the mad Gargano and various objects ought to be put on board a sturdy ship.

  I hastily opened a file at the computer and started brainstorming names for the book, all of them in two parts:

  A nature novel (Life with an IOU)

  Night time notes (The AK-47 and its meteors)

  Quiet flows the Una (A Balkan requiem)

  A book of nature (A nocturne for Yugoslavia)

  A brief glossary of melancholy (I broke down into atoms)

  A brief glossary of sadness (The book of mist)

  A brief glossary of everything (An epitaph for ants and lizards)

  A brief glossary of the world that disappeared in the whistle of the mist’s steam engine

  A brief glossary of the world that disappeared in the whistle of the rainbow’s blackbird

  A brief glossary of the aquatic world (Ethereal soldiers)

  A brief glossary of the Una (The green book).

  I had to start somewhere, and the titles seemed like a good beginning. When I’d chosen the name for that sturdy boat I embarked all my inhabitants and set off downstream towards the sea in a grand and glorious adventure of writing. And that vessel is called Quiet Flows the Una.

  I’m not sure what’s become of all the other names and whether I’ve managed to incorporate some of them into the book, at least superficially. Whenever I tried to flee from myself:

  to the safety of the greenery,

  to the calm of a greenhole,

  to Manaus, in the steamy rainforests, where a cricket counts the seconds of summer in the muggy night;

  something would always bring me back.

  Whether the public TV Teledex was fraught with:

  the excavation of mass graves,

  reports from the trials of war criminals,

  world news about volcanoes erupting,

  earthquakes,

  civil aviation catastrophes,

  outbreaks of mysterious viruses and the threat of nuclear war.

  All these things drove me from my original intention of saying I’m sick of myself and fed up with writing about the war and its consequences, and that I want to flee to the idyllic world of my childhood by the River Una. But it shouldn’t be a classical book about growing up (I’m opposed to growing up) because I was overloaded with people and tired of the inane clutter of their lives. I wanted there to be as few people as possible in the book. Of course, I didn’t succeed in my intention of writing a calm book about water, plants and animals because my desire was insincere and resulted from the pressure of my environment to adopt pseudo-narratives. In the end, I’ve resigned myself to the journey, guided by instinct, that most reliable of compasses, towards uncharted land. Of all the uncertainties I have to live with, the only thing I am certain about is my reason for writing this book.

  Objects couldn’t last. They would get lost without a trace, or they would break and fall to shreds, little pieces and dust. I wanted things to last. I always wanted to have one or more things that would go through time together with me. I needed that kind of inanimate travelling companion who would be completely subject to my will. I wasn’t a dictator; it was clearly the wish to have something I could always rely on. I imagined things of the hardest metal, for example a titanium watch that would be indestructible like Stalingrad. That watch would last without a single scratch. I hated to think of the moment when my object would suffer some mechanical damage; then it would be sullied for me, less valuable; I would lose faith in its healing powers, and that would be the end of our time together. But Titan and I would be inseparable. It would never leave my wrist. Its luminous pointers were hands of light, and they would show me the way when darkness fell and shadowy outlines were the only visual cues in the material world.

  Titan’s hand points to the cascade

  Where Šeta comes up to the surface with a fish on his harpoon

  Water droplets shine on the grayling’s fin

  The nuances of summer explode in the fish’s eye.

  There had to be something that would withstand the erosion of time, something sturdier than my life and my body. Clothing was unreliable because it wore out so quickly. It grew thin like snow before the gusts of the south wind. It became threadbare beneath my clammy hands, and from rain, sun and washing machine. I soon discarded my toys. There was no point in developing an intimate bond with them because they’re only made to last for one phase of life, and when you outgrow them they’re simply pitiable. Why should I collect objects that will provoke pity in me? Nostalgia is a fine thing, but I needed something more: an object that would show no signs of wear and tear – a diamond pocketbook full of an alchemist’s notes for saving the Earth and for the advancement of humankind – the ultimate object, into which I could integrate my subtlest feelings, and in which I would build a shrine to my solitude. Being alone and enjoying solitude is the peak of intimacy with the world that surrounds me. But objects, chattels, jewellery and watches couldn’t last. Everything of firm material was prone to destruction or disappearance, so what could I then rely on? I raised defensive walls of strong, futile objects in vain. I secluded myself among books and other beloved fetishes, and dust collected on them to warn me of the fragility of matter. As soon as you make a world, a house or a hut of sticks, it is doomed to failure; it was already doomed back when it was a black and white sketch in your head. That’s why I began to believe in words. They cannot be destroyed. If you erase them, they come back. Words float in front of your eyes and won’t retreat from the front line. If you set fire to them, they will burn with even greater ardour in your memory, and no memory-wipers like alcohol or narcotics will get rid of them. Words
are above destruction. If you erase them, they’re right back on the tip of your tongue again. That’s why I started describing just things that were important to me, like a maniac:

  ‘The mounted tusks of a prize wild boar killed in the same year as I was born used to hang just inside the front door of the flat on the narrow strip of wall immediately on the right, above the light switch. When you pass the trophy, the living-room door is directly to the right, and the hallway to my bedroom goes off parallel with the trophy. To the left of the bedroom is a narrow kitchen with its window looking out on to terraced gardens full of lush green plants. If you continue straight on from the front door, that’s the way to the bathroom and the toilet with cold, little white tiles. My things are in particular places in my bedroom: the herbarium full of pressed leaves and a mass of flowers, my letters, the handwritten results of the 1982 Football World Cup in Spain, and erotic magazines are all stacked in the compartments of a massive, X-shaped table with a stand in the middle. The table is upside down so as to take up less space and leans against the wall on one arm immediately behind the room’s glass door. The moment I sit down in the lounge and start watching Hollywood faces smile with their gleaming white teeth on the screen, I’m not aware that they’re actually long dead. It would take a whole book for me to describe just that lounge. An army of a hundred thousand words wouldn’t be enough to seize that space and jam it between the covers of a book. Now you know your way about my flat and can be part in its reconstituted three-dimensionality.’

  I hoped this act of description would make my objects firm and indestructible in the world that surrounded me like an endless dark forest. Everything that was gone forever could be rebuilt with words, I thought. I paid homage to my dead comrades and thus reached an understanding with that part of my bereavement. But the loss of the pre-war world of emotions and the palpable objects that comprised it – living rooms (the universe of the intimate), books (time machines) and photographs (time conserved in crystal) – was manifested for me as extreme pain.