Fly-Fishing the 41st

by James Prosek

  The Karagöz was Edenic; an even-flowing stream that wound lazily through cow pastures and meadows of tall grass where boys slept on golden mounds of hay. We stood beside the banks and watched the smooth clear river glide by and the tall green grasses show their silver undersides to the wind. It was a strong antidote for sickness and the anxiety the military presence had caused. I jumped into the water and scrubbed myself, then I lay down near the bank and fell asleep.

  While I rested, Johannes dove in the water with his mask and snorkel. He explained when I woke that this stream held a very special kind of trout, a subgenus of the brown trout called Platysalmo platycephalus.

  “Six years ago I fished here and caught many,” Johannes said, “today I have not seen a single one. The water is not as clear as I remembered it and algae is growing on the bottom.” We drove upstream to see if the water was clearer near its source and there we witnessed the problem. They had mined something from the hillside, and silt from the operation had flowed into the stream. The gravel necessary for the trouts’ spawning had been covered with a fine gray mud.

  “It is possible that this unique trout is now extinct,” Johannes said as he stared in the water. “War may be the only hope for them.”

  Visibility decreased toward twilight as we drove through sheets of dust, backlit by a warm orange sunlight.

  Late the next morning we were already on the west coast of Turkey, driving through a dense hardwood forest at the foot of Mount Uludåğ (Olympus). We stopped for a cucumber salad and yogurt with a bottle of Coke near the town of Bursa on the Marmara Sea.

  As we approached the town of Edremit on the Mediterranean coast that evening I wrote in my journal of my surprise at the diverse nature of the trout we had encountered on the trip. Every population we had seen looked slightly different, and I imagined the differences were not only physical but genetic.

  Johannes and Ida had arranged for us to stay with an Austrian friend named Ekhart who lived with his Turkish wife in Akçay, a clean white-plaster town with palm trees on the Mediterranean. We found their apartment building on a quiet street. Ekhart greeted us at the door and gave both Ida and Johannes a full embrace before leading us up the stairs to his apartment. As he spoke in German, I could understand only a little of what he said. He was concerned about Johannes’s plan to return to Austria through former Yugoslavia, nations that had found recent peace after eight years of war. Ekhart sat us down in the kitchen.

  “I read in the paper, Hannes,” Ekhart warned, “that it is dangerous to pass through Serbia. The country is in chaos. Highways and borders are closed, bridges across major rivers are blown out. Corrupt policemen are stealing from travelers. The war is over, everyone is an opportunist.”

  Johannes listened. “It is a crowded ferry ride from Greece to Trieste,” he responded. “I would rather drive and take the risk. Besides, there are many interesting trouts there.”

  Ekhart took Ida’s hand in sympathy and kissed it. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” Ida said, “I’m used to it.”

  Shortly, Ekhart’s wife appeared and greeted us, a lovely Turkish woman who spoke perfect German. She poured us each a glass of sweet wine like a muscat. It was cool and foreign, and seemed to plane the dust off the inside of my mouth.

  Ekhart talked for some time as we sat around the kitchen table. I just kept filling my glass with muscat and watching Johannes, who seemed to be as indifferent to what Ekhart had to say as I was. Ida told them about our trip so far, which she described as a “horror trip.” Johannes smiled occasionally and lit a cigarette, which appeared to shield him as he smoked it. His eyes were focused on something beyond the table where we sat. Ekhart and his lovely wife held hands as they spoke.

  That night the five of us ate dinner at a restaurant near the beach. A truck drove around spraying insecticides, the mist settling in my drink and on my food. In an uncharacteristically autobiographical moment (he was drunk), Johannes told stories of his carefree twenties and how he first came to dive for trout. I smelled a warm salt breeze and heard the crashing waves.

  “I used to drive from Austria to the Croatian coast and go skin diving. I became interested in the sea fish and began catching them for my tank at home in a small net I had made, not much different from the net I use now. On the return from one trip I passed by a river with very clear water and I saw fish in it so I decided to dive. It was the Krka River, and I didn’t know how cold the water would be, or why it was so cold, that it came from big springs underground. I also didn’t know the fish were trout, but when I dove I caught one and guessed that’s what it was.”

  Johannes poured me a glass of raki from a carafe. He spoke about his apprenticeship as a young baker in Colombia, and about the two years he spent in South Africa. He suggested that I should enjoy being young and free. I added some water to my glass of raki, drank a bit, and yawned.

  “Estas cansado?” Johannes asked me, are you tired? And then he looked at Ida. “Es mejor estar cansado que casado,” he whispered, which in Spanish was clever and funny because the words for tired and married were the same but for one letter. It is better to be tired than married, he had said.

  We paid the bill and walked back to Ekhart’s.

  The next morning Johannes and I drove inland, up the valleys between the coastal hills, through winding roads in olive groves, along rows of tall cypress. We passed a young boy shouldering a shotgun, a pair of songbirds tied by the feet to the end of the barrel.

  We fished high above the coastal towns, and could often glimpse the sea. The trunks of the olive trees were black, almost charred looking, and their leaves were thin and powdery green. The oldest olives had been cut back many times, their hollow and ghoulish trunks sending out new and fertile shoots. They flailed their entwined limbs, dancing in a wild ecstasy, it seemed, to some music in the wind.

  The next morning we departed Ekhart’s on a ferry from the Turkish coast to Greece. Camped beside the sea that night, I had a distinct and memorable dream involving Johannes.

  In my dream Johannes and I had hiked up a mountain and stopped to eat our lunch at the summit, seated on the edge of a cliff. We were calm and civil and not afraid of being so close to the edge until we had a look beyond it, and saw that below us was a deep abyss. After I had looked over the edge I could not get off my hands and knees for fear I might fall. And then, watching from my position, I saw Johannes walk to the edge, spread his arms as if he were stretching, and then leap.

  His action to do so was intentional; he even had a slight smirk on his face. And as he flew in the wind and my view followed his calm descent, I yelled, “Help me, help me.”

  I hiked down the mountain to look for a ranger’s office and as I did I tried to decide whether I should call Ida and if I did what I should say. I thought it would be just as well for anyone else to tell her what happened. Maybe I’d write a detailed message of the event and deliver it to her.

  As I was drafting the letter in my mind, I was thinking that Ida would surely give me Johannes’s books, research materials, and photos on trout. Of course, it was the first thing she would want to get rid of, remnants of the obsession that consumed him and had diverted his cares and attentions from her. I wouldn’t ask, but knew she would give the collection to me. I would tell Ida that Johannes’s death had been an accident.

  Then I walked to a bar and had a drink. I was seated beside a man, and then recognized that it was Johannes’s ghost, standing, with one arm on the bar, as he always did. I didn’t act surprised to see him, I only asked him why he had jumped. “When did you decide to do this?”

  “Monday, while I was driving,” he replied. I tried to think back to Monday and where we had been, but I could not remember the days and places.

  That day we had passed all of Greece in a rainstorm and now were traveling west through dark tunnels to the border with Macedonia. The border station looked abandoned but an agent emerged as we approached, checked our passports, issued us transit vi
sas, and let us through. After some driving through a green and mountainous country, we crossed another border into Serbia.

  Some kilometers down the road we were halted by police at a barricade.

  “Passports,” one said. Another looked at our plates.

  “Fucking Austrian!” he yelled in English and waved us on.

  The countryside was beautiful and the new corn in the fields held no ancient hatreds, as some of the people did. We soon found our currencies were not accepted, our dollars, shillings, and lira not exchangeable.

  In the late afternoon we began to look for a hotel where we could stay the night. The proprietors told us that the only valid currency was deutschmarks and we had none. A thunderstorm blew over the road on our way to Priština. As our money was no good we could not even buy gas, though the tank was still half-full. Toward twilight, rain still falling, we pulled off the road where we would not be seen and camped in a farmer’s field.

  It rained all the next morning as we broke camp and all the way into Montenegro. We were descending to the Mediterranean and Johannes conserved gas by keeping his foot off the accelerator as we coasted down hills. We stopped on the banks of the Morača River to eat some canned meats and a dried sausage that Ida had brought from Austria. It was a dramatic river valley with mountains on both banks, the river forming deep pools in narrow canyons. We joked there, eating and staring into the water, about how we had camped covertly in the field. For some reason it seemed to amuse us.

  That afternoon Johannes drove us all the way to the coast to the town of Kotor, built on a well-protected harbor nestled in a bowl-shaped valley. It was a beautiful town and the kind of place you’d want to spend a week or two, but Johannes was determined to get out of Serbia and Montenegro. We were near a border crossing into Croatia but people in town told us it was blocked. Everything had changed, they said, since the war, they hadn’t bothered to travel out of the country for several years.

  We tried the crossing; it was near the town of Igalo. But the police there denied our entry into Croatia. So we drove on, to a small road that led to a crossing at the border with Bosnia. The border guards there were more amiable. They spoke English, so when they asked for money I was the one who negotiated how much we would give them in American dollars.

  “Prosek,” the man said, looking at my passport. He smiled; the name seemed to please him, and he repeated it. He took an interest in it. “Where is your name from?” he said.

  “My family is Czech,” I said.

  “I was thinking you were Czech,” he said, “though you know Prosek is an old Serbian word. It means ‘cutting through,’ like a river through a gorge. There are several river gorges I know called Prosek. Be careful on the road ahead,” he said, stamping our passports. “Don’t stray from the road too far, there are many mines.”

  Across the border there was a noticeable difference in the health of the roads and villages. Ahead of us an entire section of asphalt had been blown out and a charred tank sat there covered in graffiti. Had we not been in the Land Rover it would have been difficult to cross. In fields beside the road were numerous small signs with the word “mine” written on them in capital letters. “The threat of mines is serious,” Johannes said, pointing out the signs to me. He and Ida looked as nervous as I felt.

  Villages ahead of us were completely destroyed and where homes were not leveled their roofs had been blown off, making them uninhabitable. The land in places looked like it had been torched, the vestiges of tall trees were black and rows of bushes a sienna brown. Portions of stone walls had been blown out, holes blown clear through stone churches, power lines lay on the ground, house chimneys stood like monuments to the events that exposed them. Most likely these abandoned villages had been occupied by Muslims or other non-Serbs and were destroyed by the Serbian military, the inhabitants either killed, put in camps, or forced to go elsewhere.

  Johannes looked ahead only and did not turn to see any of the devastation for a second time. I could not help occasionally turning my head.

  As twilight grew closer our, gas supply emptied. Johannes seemed shaken, and was more eager than ever to find a border crossing into Croatia. I stared at him and tried to find comfort in his determined face and the unshaven reddish hair that had grown up around his mustache.

  We planned to cross in the town of Metkovi ´ c, but getting there proved difficult. We came to blown-out bridges, and were forced to take small side roads that were not on our map, where grass grew through the asphalt. We passed a charred vineyard, the burned lattice standing like a field of crosses.

  There were certain precautions Johannes had taken that I had taken for granted. I realized this when the sun set, and Johannes said, “I prefer not to drive at night.” It was the first time on the trip that we were driving in the dark. A car passed us without headlights. “Idiot,” Johannes yelled.

  We had very little gas left but Johannes was optimistic that we would make the border. He told me that we were nearing territory that was familiar to him, a good trout river called the Buna, but he had not been there since the wars had begun in Yugoslavia eight years before. He stopped at a campground where he and Ida had once stayed, but the entrance was chained off, marked by a sign with a skull and crossbones and the word “mine.”

  Farther down the road and close to the Neretva River we saw lights flashing and heard loud music playing. Young people were drinking and dancing at an outdoor bar. They were the first people we saw enjoying themselves since we’d entered former Yugoslavia. Shortly after passing the bar we crossed the border into Croatia.

  After a good sleep on a firm bed at a hotel in Metkovi ´ c, our currency and credit cards valid again, I felt refreshed.

  Over an egg-and-ham breakfast we discussed our options for the next several days. Johannes had to return to work but we had at least two full days to fish. It was Friday, after all, and he might as well return to work at the beginning of the week, on a Monday.

  We decided to return to Bosnia that morning. Johannes said I must see and fish a beautiful stream called the Buna that tumbled full force out of a cave. He and Ida knew the owner of a café near the source of the stream, but alas, when we arrived, the café had been destroyed. The trout, however, were abundant, more so, Johannes said, than the last time he had been there, before the war began.

  The trout I caught there with my fly rod on small caddis larvae imitations were a peculiar species unique to the Balkans that Johannes called the softmouth trout, Salmothymus obtusirostris. Their mouths were smaller than the typical trout and the upper jaw extended over the lower, suggesting an evolutionary preference for feeding on the bottom. They were beautiful fish, slightly golden with red and black spots.

  The most destruction we witnessed was on the next stretch of road, as we returned through the city of Mostar to the Croatian coast. Mostar was an old Yugoslav city on the Neretva River, downstream of where the Buna flowed into it. Not a building I could see had been left unmarked by artillery fire. Empty shells from all manner of fire littered the gutters in the streets. It was in complete ruin. Ancient and delicately arching stone bridges over the river had been smashed at their peaks. But here, more than in any village I had seen, the people were active, rebuilding, planting flowers, laughing and smiling as if they had not noticed what happened to their town. “It is remarkable,” Ida observed, after days of relative silence.

  Eight years previous, before the war had begun, Johannes and Ida made regular trips in the summer to a small inn on the Adriatic coast run by an elderly couple who spoke German. Johannes and Ida were happy when we arrived in the old fishing village of Seline to find the couple alive and still running the inn. Only the wife remembered them and her German. She explained that her husband had forgotten his German and most other things after years of hiding in the basement during the war.

  Through a sense of duty, the old man sat Johannes, Ida, and me down at a table on a small terrace. I took deep breaths of the air, fragrant with sea smells. The wif
e brought us each a beer and a salad of fresh lettuce and tomatoes, she said, from her garden.

  The old woman served us a whole grilled mackerel on a platter and some grilled calamari. Then she brought out several clear unlabeled bottles filled with grappa. Time passed, different bottles were drunk from and toasts made. We drank out of a common sense of relief; to be near home, to be in a place where we felt safe. I hadn’t realized how much I’d drank until I stood up to use the head and dizzily tumbled back into my chair. Ida was drunk too and suddenly lashed out at Johannes.

  “Bah, Hannes. You don’t care about anyone! How many years of begging did it take before you bought Mariela a horse? And do you buy me anything? We don’t even see each other. When you get home from work I leave for work. You don’t even sleep at the same time I do.” She lit a cigarette and waved it at him. “You are here with me now, but you’re not here.” She waved her cigarette again to get his attention. “Where are you?”

  Life was not only trout for Johannes, I knew, though I consoled Ida, for she was very unhappy with him.

  He did not attempt to disagree with what she said; it was partly true. He only grinned, shook his head, and took a sip of grappa. Then he lit a cigarette and offered me one.

  “Truchas son la locura de el,” Ida cried.

  “What?” Johannes said finally. “You did not enjoy the trip?”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” she said. “It’s a joke.”

  I woke the next morning with a severe headache. It was our last day of fishing before we returned to Austria and I somewhat regretted having drunk so much, yet I enjoyed the occasional hangover as it made me deeply introspective.