Quiet Flows the Una

by Faruk Sehic

  Writing would allow me to make myself a crutch, a substitute world. They say books last longer than people, and I agree, but an ordinary copper hairpin is more durable than whole generations of people. As confounding as that is, I decided I would write down for myself everything that I dreamed and told the fakir when I came out of hypnosis. I would use autohypnosis to make the memory of the séance come back and then, in a waking state, speak everything into a tape recorder. Later I would put my fears into a book and thus incorporate myself into something that would last, without any idea what purpose it would have for others. When I did that, I realized how far I’d strayed from my initial intention of linking up with my past, of feeling it with my hands as one would embrace the face of a beloved person, tenderly and with a tremble. I registered the changes I experienced during this journey in painstaking detail, not wanting to let anything go, not even those images of crimes I would prefer to bury at the remotest point of the Milky Way; no, I recorded them too. Every tiny detail I saw in my memory or reimagined in a random flashback can be made into a colour in life’s fresco. The pine needles and buds of the white pine behind my Grandmother’s house could take on colour. After the war we cut down that tree, as inexplicable as it is to me now, in the hope of starting back from square one, unaware that there is no ‘square one’. We stood forlornly at the smoking ruins of our former homes, in a state of enduring shock and accustomed to the brutality of what we saw; we were those shards from Guernica, living beings that walked the ruins, devoted to the automatisms of clearing away rubble and reordering the blighted town. That was the best we could do in our situation. (My Grandmother’s house had been reduced to a mound of rubbish and only a pipe jutted up where the kitchen sink used to be, with a trickle of water flowing from it for months after the war.)

  When I touched sacred objects from my past and finally became whole, I was disturbed once more to realize that the war and its temporal-spatial discontinuity weren’t the only cause of my trauma. It was also caused by the tiny antennae that have spread all over my body, the layout of my nerves. I realized I was writing a book about melancholy. It is the shield of luminous words – the most lasting of all my belongings.

  If I was born somewhere in the West, this book wouldn’t need to be a lyrical document, a novel with irrefutable facts – it could afford to be light reading about vampires, because objects endure in those lands, and public and private worlds are not prone to cyclical destruction as they are here. Even if one of the Western worlds is wiped out, it would be easy to replace because there are technical drawings that enable it to be rebuilt. Everything there is recorded, preserved in archives, while here we’re just at the beginning of the great adventure of noting and recording, and of resuming a normal life. But we should always leave a little space for the possibility of fire and ice from heaven, or from the earth, for caution’s sake. It’s all too easy to misprophesy in unpredictable times. That’s why I dream of a big book, in which all the people from these sad climes can be inscribed with their fears and hopes, one big book of the living that will be used for medicinal purposes. In that way, dreams and art shall become our strongest weapon.

  The House of Horrors

  Mustafa Husar went out into the daylight after several hours in the hall of the Cultural Centre. He tottered over the gravel of the car park in front of the building, which slowed him down as if he was trudging through desert sand. He had been at a hypnotic seance with the fakir of the Indian Ramayana Flying Circus. The circus was actually Italian, but the troupe included several genuine hypnotists and snake trainers from India. It provided a dash of multiculturalism in a white, European company – a careful dose of spice typical of Europe, the world capital of hatred and prejudice.

  He was thirsty, but he couldn’t quite get his bearings and find a drinks stand to slake his thirst after that demanding, vocal stream of consciousness that had roared through the hall during his long session with the fakir. Exhausted like an actor leaving the stage after performing for several hours, Husar wandered through the L-shaped fairground that nestled up to the Cultural Centre. He couldn’t easily leave now because of the throng, being hemmed in by cheerful adults and their children, flashing lights of different colours, a cacophony of screams from the merry-go-round, and models of spaceships from Star Wars moved by giant hydraulic rods. Their shadows flitted over his face at the speed of smoke. He recalled that he had left a beer bottle under his chair with a few swigs of lukewarm beer left inside, but that was too far to break through the circus jungle. Now he heard elephants trumpeting inside a tent, and a mass of children in the audience stood open-mouthed watching animals they’d never seen live before or didn’t know existed – a Bengal tiger and a capuchin monkey – just as they didn’t know about bananas or Milka chocolate because they’d been born during the war when such exotic foods weren’t on sale.

  He had lost all sense of time in the dark hall but, judging by the grey-blue sky, he concluded that dark was just beginning to fall. His head gradually cleared and he pushed aside his thoughts with the gentle movement of an imaginary hand. He needed something exciting to raise him out of his perplexity and lethargy. Without much ado, he entered the House of Horrors to give himself a good fright, so his blood would course through his veins like when the shell landed just two metres in front of him during the war. A ghostly peace reigned inside. He let his feet take him about the room of mirrors, where he was beset at every turn by distorted shapes of trolls and little demons. He kept on going, bravely, as if the lives of thousands of helpless civilians depended on his advance through the House of Horrors – he knew the expectations of those far behind the front lines perfectly well. But he wanted to free himself, to stop thinking and resolving problems that others didn’t even see. He wanted to stop his redemption for collective suffering, because not even a thousand redeemers could heal people in a country where everything was defined by a war without victors. In the tunnel, with walls of a rubberized material, he was attacked by fists and merciless hands, that grabbed him by the neck, arms and legs. Ten metres from the end, where a reddish light kept blinking and going out again in the depth of the darkness, he fell to his knees. He felt as if someone was hitting him on the back of the head with a mallet and hammering him into the rubberized floor of the tunnel, but he wasn’t afraid. Unexpectedly they desisted, and the mallet was gone too. He sat down on a perforated metal bench beneath a yellow light. In front of his very nose, two metres away, a yellow train rushed by at 120 kilometres per hour. He saw the rails and above them an advertisement with the face of an unnaturally beautiful woman, and on the side near the woman’s ear it read: Botox to go. He took this to mean that Botox was a living god that walked among people.

  A wind started moving through the air of that space, and he detected a familiar smell he couldn’t immediately identify. He stood up from the bench and headed on wobbly legs for the poorly illuminated stairs. There was an exit with a big green U1. Uhlandstraße, he read on a sign and realized that this was the Berlin metro. He inhaled the fresh air on Kurfürstendamm Boulevard, where it’s quite normal to have a scar on your face and you don’t have to make sacrifices for the sins of the insensitive and unaware. It was early autumn and Mustafa Husar, veteran of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina and aspiring poet, walked through the shadows of the manicured plane trees, knowing that with every breath of Berlin air and its new, amazing smells he was forgetting all that oppressed him, all that gave him palpitations and made his heart miss a beat, as well as his arrhythmia and tachycardia. He was forgetting all the panic attacks he used to have when attempting to walk the twenty metres from his flat to the shop to buy some superfluous grocery item, just so as to check if he was able to take those twenty steps in the outside world, among people who were light years distant from him even when they brushed against his body. He was forgetting the murmur of dead planets in his ears, the twitching of the slippery creatures who encouraged him to die, and the way his arms went numb up to the elbows as he feverishly ra
ced through town towards the emergency ward, bathed in sweat, with his brain working flat out, imagining that he was dying of a heart-attack one minute, and then thinking he was having a stroke. He forgot the very next thought and just walked straight on looking into the faces of people he was seeing for the first time, yet feeling he had known them for all eternity. He knew he would soon come across the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which he saw for the first time in Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire, then later in Matthias Koeppel’s panoramic picture, and finally for real during a short stay in Berlin. When he came to the square where the Protestant church stood, he thought how close he was to its crippled steeple, which Allied bombers badly damaged in the Second World War, and the Germans later conserved. He marvelled at the lateral hole in the body of the church, through which a warm city breeze was blowing. He felt complete happiness and an emotional bond with chance passers-by. Then he stood for a long time and gazed at the steeple.

  The elephants’ bellows sobered him and he was standing firmly on his own two legs again, his feet bogged down in the coarse sharp-edged gravel of the Culture Centre’s parking lot. The moments of his ordeal were over. He had had a vision that everything was at his fingertips – a new world and new smells, but it was all more than untouchable. He returned to his body. To his familiar skin and scars. The smell of dew in the grass of the town’s park roused the spark of life in him. He wanted to walk the steel-blue asphalt that snails with spiral-shaped houses used to crawl out on to on rainy evenings. He melted into the crowd. Headlights from passing cars randomly lit up hidden nooks in the crowns of the trees. He heard the murmur of many voices. Others went in silence, deep in thought, with their hands behind their backs. People walked along the road, on footpaths, on tracks in the park, over grass through the darkness with the glow of cigarettes waving in their invisible hands. They made a gentle nocturnal rustle full of optimism and hope, characteristic of warm, starry nights. He melted into the crowd, infected with a sudden love for all these people. If he could, he would have embraced the whole horizon, together with the frozen celestial bodies.

  The Author

  Faruk Šehić was born in 1970 in Bihać, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Until the outbreak of war in 1992, he studied veterinary medicine in Zagreb. However, the then 22-year-old voluntarily joined the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which he led a unit of 130 men. After the war he studied literature and has gone on to create a body of literary work. Critics have hailed Šehić as the leader of the ‘mangled generation’ of writers born in 1970s Yugoslavia, and his books have achieved cult status with readers across the whole region. His collection of short stories Under Pressure (Pod pritiskom, 2004) was awarded the Zoro Verlag Prize. His debut novel Quiet Flows the Una (Knjiga o Uni, 2011) received the Meša Selimović prize for the best novel published in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia in 2011; and the EU Prize for Literature in 2013. His most recent book is a collection of poetry entitled My Rivers (Moje rijeke, Buybook, 2014). Šehić lives in Sarajevo and works as a columnist and journalist.

  The Translator

  Will Firth was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb and Moscow. Since 1991 he has been living in Berlin, where he works as a freelance translator of literature and the humanities. He translates from Russian, Macedonian, and all variants of Serbo-Croat. His website is www.willfirth.de.

  In 2015, Firth was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Trans­lation Prize and longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award for his translation from the Serbian of Aleksandar Gatalica’s The Great War, published by Istros Books.