Quiet Flows the Una Read online

  I leave my Grandmother’s house and go to sit on the sandy bank. Sometimes I’d like to be a boat of leaves that, like most of the Balkan rivers, ultimately joins the Black Sea.

  Although I’d never inhabited the body of a slug, I thought I could sense their sorrow as I sat there on the bank of the Unadžik and threw pebbles into the green water. But as soon as I caught sight of a sizeable grayling, my heart would begin to beat faster. At first I would just watch it for minutes, but then I would run back to the house for my fishing rod and tackle. The pleasure of outwitting and struggling with a fish so preoccupied me that I wouldn’t notice when night fell. By the time I became aware of the crickets and the warmth streaming along the bank, bending the herbs and grasses and flowing between my legs, the full moon would have cast anchor above the water. The sounds of that riverine microcosm were a cradle for indescribable happiness and deep dreams in my Grandmother’s house.

  Grandmother

  Grandmother Emina loved Comrade Tito, an atheist, although she was a devout Muslim and prayed five times a day. Her husband abandoned her and the three children she gave birth to in the railway tunnels where people hid from the Allied aerial bombing raids. The Second World War was over, and he went off to Banja Luka chasing the skirt of a certain Jagoda, at least that’s what family oral history said.

  It was beyond her to hate socialism, although the Partisans had executed two of her relatives under the dubious accusation of collaborating with the enemy. My Grandmother’s whole family, without exception, were Partisan supporters. Grandmother herself, then a clerk at the local court, helped the resistance by carrying messages in her beige handbag, and her cooperation with the communists remained a deep secret. Therefore she derived no material benefit from it after the war. Many years later, only her cream-coloured shoes with the black, rounded ends reminded her of the time when she took messages from one prison cell to another in a miniskirt and with her handbag under her arm. That would happen when she climbed the steep wooden steps up to the attic – where she kept her old shoes – to put laundry in the washing machine, or to go to Uncle Šeta’s room, where she would prop her elbows on the windowsill and watch the Unadžik for hours, looking even further, past the willows, through the avenue of aspens, all the way to the end of the aits, where the Una returns to one channel and continues on alone, without islands, towards Jasenovac. The husband who left her had been at the concentration camp there for two years.

  My Grandmother didn’t lose hope when her husband was inter­ned at Jasenovac. On the contrary, she travelled by train to Zagreb, down the Una line that faithfully follows the river as far as Kostajnica, and tried to save him from the death camp. By plying several high-ranking Muslims in the government of the puppet Independent State of Croatia, Grandmother succeeded in having her husband released from the camp after he had been there for two years. Before that, according to family history, he had been interned for six months at the Stara Gradiška concentration camp, which is mentioned in a song: ‘Jasenovac and Gradiška – the home of Max’s butchers.’

  Grandmother’s husband survived the murder-sprees of sadistic Croatian commander Max Luburić and the slaughterhouse of Jasenovac. Her insider contact saw to it that her husband was transferred to serve in the Croatian Home Guard, where he was given the rank of captain on account of his university education. After a while he deserted the Home Guard and went over to the Partisans. My Grandmother was known to possess perhaps even mystical powers, and her inner strength exercised a powerful suggestion on people she spoke to, who would do what she said without reflection. That was our explanation of how she managed to rescue my grandfather from Jasenovac.

  Like every true miracle-worker, my Grandmother never spoke about her powers. She used to say that reality was a toy in God’s hands and that people were aided by Allah, to whom she prayed five times every day from when she was eighteen. ‘Man proposes, God disposes,’ she would tell us.

  Imagine me now very small – so small that Mirdal Terzić can carry me in the straw shopping bag that smells of fresh bread and milk to my Grandmother’s house in the suburb of Pazardžik. The first stop on our way was in Žitarnica, where we played badminton. Or rather, Mirdal played badminton with his friends, who were the same age as him, and I chased after a fat bumblebee, trying to swipe it with my racket-rocket and launch it into space.

  Workmen were demolishing an old house on the hill overlooking Žitarnica and throwing roof beams down through the trees that had seeded at the edge of the cliff. The beams broke branches as they fell with a loud rumble to land behind the row of sheet-metal garages near the substation and the public toilet choked with vegetation. Mirdal told me to go and catch one of those beams in flight. I ran towards one that was falling in slow motion and then felt Mirdal’s hands grab me before I could carry out the suicidal mission. He stuck me into the shopping bag as punishment, and my head looked out of it and swayed in time with Mirdal’s steps as we made for Ustikolina. From there one could see the river islands, the football stadiums and the confluence at Ajak, where I later once secretly bathed in the early spring: I dared to swim out into the river’s opaque green there, grey-hued from overnight rain, and only Sead saved me from drowning. It was April, and the water was high and freezing cold. Fish could be caught with angleworms. After that near drowning, mortality settled into me like an old man into a freshly whitewashed flat with a view of the sea. My childhood friend Sead survived the war but was killed in an accident like many other hardened veterans in the first years of peace.

  I saw smoke from my Grandmother’s house and we went down the narrow stairs next to the Harbašes’ house, where I loved to study the slimy orange slugs on the mossy wall in the early mornings, before the world of adults took on its contours of earnest. Back then, the world was created anew every morning. Buildings fitted together again at right angles, roofs came down to land on the houses, and double windows returned from their cosmic journeys full of frost from having been at altitudes of over ten thousand metres. Willows, elders, alders and aspens sprang up again every morning on the banks of the Unadžik. Točile and the other hills rose up out of the ground on the fine line between night and day, taking up their established geographical positions. At night, bed is the only thing that’s not an illusion, and if a person were able to be awake and asleep at the same time they would see myriad people in their beds slowly floating towards morning.

  I got out of the shopping bag and ran down to the sandy bank below my grandmother’s house. I saw the fish in the water: grayling and trout. The river bank smelt of herbs, grasses, bullrushes and the sewage pipes sticking out of the green bank, and I breathed deeply of all those aromas. The fish moved about, nervously and timidly one moment, then calming down and waiting in one spot for a long time like sentries. That was my world: I was a fish adapted to life on land – living proof of Darwin’s evolution. I was the non-missing link, a transitional stage between fish and Homo sapiens, although I looked perfectly human. What a strange passion it was that let me go hungry if only I could watch fish, even at dusk, when everything goes dark and the fish swim to and fro like black spindles, sensing the night, a time of agitation for animals and people alike.

  My grandmother’s house was stable, safe and indes­­tructible.

  I waved to Mirdal who was going back into town along the asphalt road that leads upstream towards the Old Town. Mirdal was also a magician. He taught me to love nature and all living things, especially lizards, snakes, frogs and tortoises. I wouldn’t have known what to do with myself without him. I went into my Grandmother’s house as if I was sneaking in with my shoes on, something strictly forbidden. My Grandmother was in the living room, kneeling on her sheepskin prayer rug and facing the floor, which was a little steep on the river-side because the house was gradually sliding down the sandy bank. I had to go along with my grandmother’s peace because she was miracle-worker and at the same time a paragon of modesty who never boasted about her powers, which made them flourish in my fant
asy even more.

  The whole day was ahead of me and I didn’t know what to do next. Should I search for purple earthworms in my Grandmother’s cellar, where discarded things have lain for time out of mind? When you pull apart a worm it has no choice but to reveal everything. Should I watch the fish and the movement of that incredible mass of water towards the Black Sea? Or should I sit on the wooden bench under the quince tree to smell its flowers and the plantago and wild chamomile?

  The Origin of the Species

  On the last day of the school year we would go round to the western side of Hum Hill with our satchels full of jotters and textbooks and, just above the quarry, get down to the ritual of celebrating the end of lessons. That side of Hum supported a stand of Cyclopean pines, which grew even at the very edge of the cliff, and from there we would throw paper aeroplanes and rockets made from pages torn out of our jotters. We competed to see whose would fly furthest towards the far boundary marked by the blue curve of the Krušnica, whose banks were thick with long waterweed – swept with the flow of the cold water like the combed hair of a buxom nymph. Our legs dangled down into the abyss, its stony terraces covered in dust and gravel, and we half expected Old Shatterhand to appear on one of them with his horse and sweat-beaded brow, surveying the green hills of Govedarnica and Zalug with the keen eyes of a seasoned frontiersman.

  We made our planes to be like Russian MiGs, and they really flew far away towards the Krušnica, but no one ever got one to go all the way to the river, maybe at most to the asphalt road, which created warm thermals. The asphalt melted in the sun there, leaving foot and tyre marks and indents of horseshoes. Although our rockets were aerodynamic and had pronounced tips, they flew very poorly and would quickly become unstable and start spiralling downwards nose first, a form of flight called the corkscrew. That was how birds fell from the sky when hit with buckshot from a hunting rifle: beak towards the ground and spinning around their axis.

  At the bottom of the quarry there were hills of small stones and tired, old machines for the separation of gravel and sand. Puddles brimmed with slime, tadpoles and clutches of frogspawn that trembled in the tepid water, and the heads of small adult frogs peeked out of the green algae at the pools’ edges. All burned in the midday sun and took on the sleepy, dusty, time-worn appearance usual for Mediterranean landscapes away from the sea. We couldn’t see the Una from where we were. It flowed behind Hum Hill, and one of its arms joined the Krušnica there. The Krušnica was the most placid river in the whole area, deep and icy cold, because it was only six kilometres long. It emerged from a sheer rock face in virgin forest and was guarded above by circling eagles – the condors of our climes. After plucking apart our jotters and launching many a squadron of MiGs and paltry rockets, we’d settle down to throwing stones towards the Krušnica. A stone could really fly far before it stabbed silently into the river and made rings we could barely see from our elevated position. Of all of us, only Duda was strong enough to throw his stone all the way to the Krušnica, and we held his marksmanship in high esteem: at closer range he could hit a mosquito in the left testicle.

  High up in the pine trees there lived a special species of bird, rare and exotic: they were crossbills, and hardly anyone could boast to having seen more than two or three of them in their lifetime. Crossbills are members of the parrot family and named because of their beaks: the tips of their mandibles are crossed, unlike those of other birds, where the upper and lower parts of the beak are in alignment. In our hierarchy of birds, they were up on Olympus, ruling the avian world. Because they were invulnerable we declared them immortal, since no one had ever found a dead crossbill. When their hour of death came, they probably travelled skywards until they became just tiny dots and then they would disappeared entirely, to alight in some deep-blue paradise where they would forever be free of the physical sufferings of flesh, blood and feather. Free like ideas flowing through the expanses of outer space.

  The universe is assumed to have originated as an idea that grew and grew, taking in lesser and weaker ideas. In the beginning, the ‘Great Idea’ did not have a material form, but over time it acquired a tangible dimension when it became pregnant with the weight of its own sounds and words. A primordial soup bubbled and seethed within the Great Idea. The sounds and words had to free themselves from the parental embrace because every being seeks freedom and solitude. In this way, the planets, constellations, comets and asteroids were formed. P + planet, A + asteroid, M + meteor – everything was just named, and a sound would then join up with the thing it related to. Sounds made love with their meanings, and the universe was a colourful balloon.

  But then the Great Idea outgrew itself and life emerged: Thrae was born, a tiny reflection of the Great Idea, a fragment of the one and only word, and it began its own independent journey, during which it became lush with vegetation and mighty oceans formed. And it flew through space so fast that an inversion occurred and Thrae became Earth. Life developed its own free forms in the jungles and oceans: primitive beings, animals, plants... and inquisitive humankind – the cardinal error of the Great Idea’s cosmogony. Humanity’s greatest infelicity is its material worries, and from its very inception it has strived to return to an incorporeal state like a miniature, happy idea. Just like the crossbill high up in the pines.

  The Final Battle

  Sunday. The day that convinced me that nothingness exits. Sunday was like a red trumpet playing into the ear of a weary, half-deaf colossus, and he scowled because his boredom was already so deep. Such an agonizingly slow day couldn’t satisfy people like me. Even so-called workdays were boring for me because other children did what their parents told them, so they had no time to come out and play. I hated it because there were no children in the streets and yards. All living things were so tired. Sunday was a boon for the idle, and everyone holed up to rest. Respiration was reduced to a minimum and the movement of the eyelids were decreased in order to save physical energy. You could smell the tawdriness of the one-party system from the kitchens: bean stew without meat, and pickled peppers. Workers’ flats were a cold, forbidding world, where nothing at all happened but everything was shrouded in a veil of secrecy and contemplation after the abundant afternoon meal. The knives, forks and plates in the kitchen sink were medieval weapons and armour dented after the battle.

  In the absence of any human beings in the street I had no choice but to play with the stone.

  It came from the moon, but I declared it a Martian because the red planet was much more appealing to me than the moon, which satellite images showed to look like a face pock-marked by craters of severe acne. That red circle, according to questionable mythology, was also the birthplace of the Roman god of war, muscular Mars, who today only takes the form of a silent statue in chilly museums. The gods of Hellenic antiquity, who by historical relabelling became Latin gods too, are all brooders and say nothing, according to the philosopher Heraclitus, who didn’t want to believe Homer’s poems with their frightening, human-like deities. I always preferred the Norse gods, with Odin at the fore, to Zeus’ hangers-­on, who were green-eyed and moronic like ordinary people. I loved the imaginatively drawn, fantastic Scandinavian gods from the Stripoteka comic magazine, who possessed formidable powers. Thor, the God of Thunder, was my ideal.

  The Martian was on show in the china closet in Grandma Delva’s living room together with Turkish-coffee cups of fine porcelain and crystal glasses for drinking cornelian cherry juice, which Grandma made by squeezing the pale red fruits in a wooden press with her strong hands when guests came. The alien was an irregular-shaped cobalt-blue stone with handsome white stripes; its edges were so sharp that you could even cut paper with them. It lay in that place of honour behind glass like a petrified mind, gathering invisible dust and waiting to be touched by my hand. As soon as the pads of my fingers came into contact with it, it lit up like Aladdin’s lamp and started to hover in the air.

  The living room was dark; the smell in the air was somehow stern and cold. Short-pil
e Bosnian carpets hung on the walls above the ottoman, their arabesques showing monstrous plants and geometric cities where the right angle was supreme. Shades reigned here, while the blazing sun beat down outside. Grandfather, a former Partisan wounded in the leg on a distant battlefield in Serbia, rested in the bedroom while Grandma, in the summer kitchen, rolled mince and rice in young vine leaves. The shades that reigned here obeyed me and told me hushed stories of the netherworld, of plantations where clumps of darkness grew instead of bolls of cotton. I learned the language of the shades while looking at those walls, where they would write their curt, quiet words. The shades most liked summer nights with a full moon. Then they were free and came from the netherworld, becoming human spies – spitting images of what every person will change into one day. If you free yourself of your shade you can become immortal, but no one has managed that yet.

  The Martian shone with a metallic glow. The shades darted across the walls, colliding and merging like swift divisions from a twilight realm. They fought a battle, but no blood was shed. That whole army ought to be set in motion and led out into the light of day to take the outside world in a glorious charge. May the light bulbs be little suns for people in their homes, and may the moon, twilight and semi-darkness endure outside. May nightingales sing a nocturne from one night through to the next, because day no longer exists with its vulgar light shamelessly exposing everything before it. Then all the stones from the moon, Mars and Venus will come flying. They will radiate a dampened energy, from which the shades regain their transparent bodies. And what about people? you ask. What will become of them? Let them be smaller than black poppy seeds, because all living things will be more important than them, and because their states and empires will dissolve in the long hexameters of nocturnal birdsong. Such was the mood that reigned on Sundays – that day that introduces us to nothingness.