Quiet Flows the Una Page 11

  So I run along the empty street with my jaws wide open like Rhincodon typus, and heavenly plankton flows into my mouth.

  If I were a Catholic, I’d proclaim that being torn between the desire for a normal life and the thirst for blood was nothing short of saintly. But I’m not a Catholic – I’m a member of a people that, in Bosnia of the 1990s, was earmarked for the same fate as the Jews in the Third Reich.

  Refugees

  Grandma Delva is a purple bird with clean, soft plumage. She walks tiredly, with a rolling gait, on our way home through Žitarnica. I take care not to trip her with my foot as she shifts her weight from one leg to the other, and I’m scared that the neighbourhood dogs and cats could dash up and pounce on the purple bird that talks.

  I ask her if she’s afraid of dogs and cats.

  ‘I’m too old to be afraid of anything,’ Grandma Delva says and waddles on, the sun shining through her feathers like a comb through hair.

  Now we’re right in front of Grandma’s house. The front door is overhung with Mediterranean plants, some hardy, others luscious. Even now, that green rampart protects the three or four stone steps that lead up into the air, surrounded by black walls with weeds growing at acrobatic angles. Already during the war we noticed a new type of house that has a convertible-style roof. Although I know she’s dead, that doesn’t disturb me at all because I’m glad we’re talking as we stroll through the watery strata of sleep. It’s as if we want to compensate for all the words unspoken during our lives, when I was a boy and high-school student, and Delva a vital sixty-year-old with a white Yugoslavia filter cigarette in the corner of her mouth like one of the Immortals. As soon as one flagged, Grandma replaced it with a fresh cigarette.

  ‘May thunder singe your socks!’

  ‘Damn and deuce you!’

  I hear her colourful expressions that once resounded behind the hedge, from the window of the summer kitchen. Its floor had an opening with a wooden cover. When you lifted it, cold and darkness welled up from below. Rungs met your feet when you went down, blindly, into that cellar with neatly stacked piles of chopped firewood. It smelt damp and musty – just like I imagined it would in the underground hide-out of my Partisan Grandfather and his wife Delva, who came from Mostar. I don’t know if this will make sense, but there was something very precise and soothing to that smell: if I breathed in deeply, I’d be swept away to a dense forest that smelt as if every tree was the essence of their underground world. The hard hats of fungi that grew on trees had the strongest odour, as did the moist forks of branches. The forest litter and humus smelt of earthworms, whose intestines were full of soil. Its aroma was strongly arousing.

  Grandma Delva’s plants were the only things stronger than the war. The suburb of Žitarnica diminished like everything else after the battle to win back the town. The way unknown plants grow at right angles out of the walls is moving. Here, where life has been scorched, there is fertile ground for new growth. Those rooms with neither floor nor ceiling can be launch pads for soaring up into the sky. Everything that was once in the house has done exactly that. Blackened and heavy from the smoke and fire, gasping for air, they found their way upwards. The rooms’ coolness and darkness, the Bosnian carpets, ottomans, porcelain, crystal glasses, vases and cutlery, the tin woodstove, the light fixtures and the stone from Mars, or rather the moon, are now all immortal refugees.

  Grandma and Grandfather are at the town cemetery in Lipik, alongside each other. Their souls have entered the map of stellar pathways. On evenings when the Leonid meteor showers fall, refugees returning to their earthly houses are skilfully concealed among them. Life is repeated in all its simplicity, full of little habits and human rituals.

  ‘May thunder singe your socks!’ and ‘Damn and deuce you!’ can be heard between the meteors that burn up in the atmosphere.

  Indian Summer

  A warm October wind passed through our hair and swirled the grit and grime of the street. An unexpected energy took hold of us in those days when the putrid beauty of autumn accumulated in nature. It was a time for playing basket and ball, for active daydreaming and gazing into the starry sky, for adventures that wouldn’t happen, but the thought of which would live on when snow covered the world in white impassiveness.

  The plumage on the duck’s neck shimmered in all the shades of the rainbow like the horizon in paradise. The weeping willow lowered itself over the surface of the river and greeted the millions of faces anxiously travelling downstream towards the kingdom of the tropical sun. The river spirits were troubled – eternal travellers who always changed their appearance, taking their cue from Proteus, the god of waves and tides.

  What if memory is only a delusion, a system of perfect deceits arranged by the tangle of human nerves? But all this is real: a whole string of words to describe the river, and a river that wants to verify the world – our world prone to cyclical destruction.

  The first video game in our town had a fantastic sound, and whenever I hear it in my memory now it reminds me of a different time: a life of innocence and peace beneath the bell jar of the Yugoslav atmosphere. Clunky, two-dimensional spaceships blinked statically on the screens of the hulking devices, usually near the upper edge of the screen, and our mission was to destroy them by firing puny space cannons, which were only able to cause slight exterior damage. The game was called Galaxy. You had to destroy the galaxy ship and beat your personal best score. That sound represented the cannon’s blast when aimed at the ship. I wasn’t all that good at killing spaceships. There were also other ships in the game, which looked like little bats with folded-back wings; they flew fast and erratically, dropping deadly bombs, but that wasn’t a problem because your stock of lives, given in the upper-left corner of the screen, was still substantial.

  As soon as you entered an amusement hall, as they were officially called, you would be bombarded with a mélange of sounds from different glass-and-metal boxes with pretentious English names, where cosmic battles were simulated, or a pinball machine happily gurgled in its electric language when someone won a replay. I was most attracted to the square glass case on metal legs, which contained packs of cigarettes with unfamiliar names imported from distant countries of the capitalist West. The glass case had a lever that operated a metallic hand with robotic fingers. That mechanical hand allowed you to pull out and win a pack of foreign cigarettes, and that was considered quite a feat because hardly anyone succeeded at it. Often you would pick up a pack of Rothmans with the metallic fingers and triumphantly start to move them towards the glass cube’s exit hole, but the robotic fingers were crude and clumsy and the cigarettes would promptly fall out of their metallic grasp. None of us smoked at that age, but each of us longed to grab a pack of cigarettes and lift it out of its glass confines, to feel the paper in our hands and smell the aroma of cigarettes from the faraway lands of the capitalist West. There was something almost sacred about that. We yearned to touch that world of neon lights and the sleepy glare of the street, things seen only in American road movies – to grasp what was different and untouchable, which we faithfully imitated when we listened to electro-rock and new wave.

  This was meant as an evocation of an Indian summer, a mood that spread over the whole planet like a radio wave – the story of an autumn and of a river that travels through itself. Then the organic gods of nature joined forces with the electric messiahs from the cumbersome, flashing video machines, which is possible only in memory: Time takes a cigarette...

  An Angler’s Hymn

  I fought with the trout for three days. It was my first experience of a struggle like that. I only drank a little water, and didn’t eat anything for three days. Uninterested in the routine of everyday life around me, to others I seemed like a Muselmann from a Nazi concentration camp. I kept up the pressure at night, too, casting a fluorescent Mepps lure – that was the proper way and helped kill time, but the real fever wouldn’t come until daytime.

  My adversary was a brown trout. Back then the Una was still fr
ee of introduced rainbow trout, which are not particularly noble because they go for anything anglers throw at them. The aim was to catch an energetic, crafty fish, not a fat one you could hook just like that. A brown trout with red and black spots on its upper body and a golden sheen from the side-line towards its belly is a gem of the river. The shape of a brown trout is natural and fish-like, while a rainbow trout looks like a saw with fins tacked on.

  My trout came from down in the tufa of the main current, slicing the cascades with its dorsal fin like a hot knife through butter, and the greenhole just below Grandmother Emina’s house was now its home and hunting ground.

  I watched it rule the deep like Captain Ahab’s whale. Old and sly, it wasn’t going to be caught easily with flies on the surface, which I cast out over the water and skilfully dangled the fly just above its mouth, in the hope that it would jump at the ‘yellow drake’, swallow it and churn up the surface as it tried to pull the line with all its strength towards the sandy bottom of the greenhole.

  It missed the fly several times, and its powerful tail broke the smoothness of the water that flowed away with its own sense of eternity. Then I managed to hook it and drag it two or three metres, several times, but it always released the fly and quickly vanished into the safety of a shadow made by the sun shining on the tufa. My happiness would turn to bitter disappointment for a moment and I would become dispirited, but only until the next cast, when hope returned. After a few seconds of being on the hook, the fish would go livid with rage, or was that just a trick of the light and water against its body? Mosquitoes bit me and I was gleaming with sweat, but that didn’t bother me because fishing is a passion greater that can be found among so-called vices. Some anglers find calm in their hobby, but for me it was pure excitement. Then my heart pounded with a cosmic rhythm, just as Élie Faure once dreamed of.

  Next I tried to catch it with a small, live fish, which I fastened to the hook and cast with a sinker to give it weight and help maintain its balance as I drew the bait through the gleaming water. The trout snatched the fish and began to swallow it, revealing its snow-white jaws and pulling at the line, which I slackened so it could carry off its quarry wherever it wanted. When I judged that the small fish was on its way to the trout’s stomach, I tugged the rod skywards and began pulling it towards the bank. I already thought it was mine, restraining my heart that brimmed with immeasurable delight, but right at the bank, with a rustle in the bullrushes, it freed itself of the hook, and the rod went straight and the net became limp again.

  I spent all of the next day on the lookout for it, casting Mepps lures, flies and bait. But when I wasn’t lucky enough to catch it, I just crouched on the bank and watched, and the pleasure of seeing its firm, fleshy form enchanted me, reminding me of the bright azure of the sky at full moon when it fell on the heart-shaped leaves of the grapevine at midnight. The leaves that beset the walls of my Grandmother’s house like Gog and Magog.

  When I finally caught the trout, I laid it on the scales my grandmother used for weighing icing sugar and flour for her cakes, and the needle shot up to 900 grams. It was a huge, motionless spindle, a silver sword adorned with red and black cockades – a trophy with absent glory and a glossy, greasy fin that circled in the sky by day and night, waiting for its shooting star.

  The Smell of the Burned Town

  Our town grew out of people’s bond with the river. The Una is the power that holds the town together, otherwise both the river and its people would have been swept away long ago; like tortoises with houses on their backs, they would have fled far and wide. All the people of this town are believers in the water. They know very well that most problems vanish by simply watching the flow of the river. That’s why it’s so worth living here and committing oneself to lifelong faithfulness – to the preservation of the secret union that must not be revealed.

  Whoever marries the town ends up at the cemetery in Lipik or in one of the many family graveyards. The tombstones are testimony to people’s love of the Una and its world. I once had a strange experience: I was walking through town, feeling all nervous; I raised my head by chance and caught sight of the gleaming white marble in Lipik. Immediately a sense of security and relief came over me because I realized I would be buried up there too – on the hill where an enemy tank was dug-in during the war, and where battered old tombstones were stacked in the loose earth before the war when the Mahala hospital was built over part of the Muslim cemetery.

  We made this town, Bosanska Krupa, of black mire, yellow sand and green water borrowed from the Una. The tall towers of our town tickle God’s feet. Then someone always knocks it down again and tramples it like a sandcastle, with painful nightmarish precision. The next day we would try to raise all those castles, Rapunzel towers, Gothic cathedrals, vivid Russian churches and barbel-eyed Ottoman mosques from the river sand again before the stomping giants came back. They always come from the north and head downstream, faithfully following the river. They’re clad in mist, and the sun is a medallion on their chests. I trust that I’ll be able to cheat fate by waking up before I’m crushed. The war descended on us just like this nightmare: without end and without a rational beginning.

  I don’t want to know anything for sure about the origins of the town, and I don’t want to deal with stale old topics and be a doom-monger, because history has never taught anyone anything meaningful. The water knows, but it doesn’t talk. There are lots of valuable records concerning the town’s first rulers, the dukes of Babonić, and the founder of the town Blagaj on Sana, Babo Babonić, whose descendants were known as the Blagaj Babonićs. According to Croatian historian Radoslav Lopašić, by the late thirteenth century the Babonićs were known to be holders of huge tracts of land all the way north to the Styrian and Carniolan borders, and also far into Bosnia to the east, beyond the River Vrbas. Babo Babonić’s son Stjepan founded the line of the dukes of Babonić-Krupski, and who is mentioned with his brothers Radoslav and Ivan as viceroys of Croatia from 1294 to 1316.

  What I do know for sure is that everything repeats itself: history is repeated and the slaughterhouses of nations are renewed – they’re never destroyed completely because their technologies are secretly preserved for reuse. Mass graves are a chorus through time, and towns never come off well. In every war, towns are the litmus test for the degree of the people’s fury and destructiveness. All I know for sure about the origins of this town is that it is covered in a crust of bitterness, because history is an exhibition of graves. I don’t want to remember all the repulsive things from the war. All I can say is that my blood is a contribution to this form of history.

  Me, I still believe that our town arose from people’s bond with the river. The town is a freshwater mussel with a pearl inside made up of the best wishes of its dwellers. That’s my childish imagination speaking; when I’m old I might one day discover what the town really means to me and others, if that question interests me then at all.

  For now, it’s a haven by the water to which you can always return, even when you’re thousands of miles away, because the thought of it is faster than light. It’s both imaginary and real, and two-fold like light. My sailing, literary town, older than the stars: I can only save it if I remember.

  I was fascinated by the town when it was ‘ruins in progress’, with houses razed to their foundations and others half-burned, with fire-blackened buildings and bridges. You enter a house, and around you there are just walls, above you the sky, and in the kitchen there stands a fridge, intact and full of chunky maggots the size of macaroni. Timbers reduced to charcoal jutted out of collapsed roofs. There was mutilation and imperfection everywhere. Birch trees with their innocent, grey-white bark were already growing out of some roofs. Fire had cleansed the town, freeing it of surplus people and other living things. I loved the dirty streets criss-crossed with power and telephone lines, and covered with branches, leaves, scattered personal belongings and books that had tripled their volume from moisture. Disintegrating shoes, futile umbrellas (be
cause the rain had turned to shrapnel), casseroles with carbonized food like those found in Pompeii, wide-open doors of houses, broken windows, facades as if a giant had bespattered them with mouthfuls of food – destruction seemed quite a natural state. Half-burned roof beams, which had been quietly smouldering the day before, now smell like smoked cheese. I even think I only really came to love the town when it was thoroughly in ruins. Not because I pitied it, but because its beauty spread outwards in radial waves towards all the continents.

  The Hunchbacks

  They are seen in the twilight hours shrouded in mist and rags of deep-blue night. No one wants to meet them – neither the baker, nor the nightwatchman nor even the drunkard, who is afraid of nothing by then. The hunchbacks are all we have left from the last war. They are all that we are not: dirty, ragged and unrecognized members of our society. Each of us has their hunchback, and all of us are afraid of their outlines up on the town roofs that cast disfigured shadows, making the weathervanes’ strutting roosters and golden angels look grotesquely alive in the night-time wind. When the day is fast ticking away, the wind lures the hunchbacks out among us humans, who pray to God and dream assiduously of the promised paradise.

  Although we are aware of their existence and the smells that hang in the air for hours over the cobblestones together with the steaming droppings with undigested stalks of meadow plants, no one will ever utter their name. That is a secret we swore to keep when we came to this town of spirits, to the smoking ruins wreathed in eerie silence, like the desolation of a mass grave. It is not their name that is forbidden and untouchable, but a whole chain of facts that should be forgotten because we are alive, while they are more like the half-alive. They are in fact mostly dead, with only some traits of the living such as hunger, thirst and an inclination to nightly anxiety. During the day they hide in the catacombs of the town, where not even the biggest fool would stray. Our priest said that their name was holy, but also unspeakable, because that is what the Almighty ordered, except in prayers when it is proper and holy to name the causes of their emergence.