PROLOGUE: WATER

      I think I remember how it all began.

      The world was soaking wet like a sponge. By the time February came around, the earth couldn’t take another drop.

      The winter was unusually mild that year. But it dragged on, as can happen by the Mediterranean, until it swallowed the Spring like an Aesculapian snake eats an egg. The rain poured down day after day, for months. Soon it was half a year. The sardine season was almost over, but people still only went out if they had to, and only in their raincoats. The fishermen gathered every morning in their little cafés by the shore, where everything stinks of fish and seaweed, ready to drink their espresso and head out before dawn as usual. As if the old reality would come back if they held on to their little rituals for long enough. They sat in silence, scrying their coffee sludge, like the last survivors of an exterminated tribe that still doesn’t understand why its world has disappeared. They listened in vain to the weather forecast, as bleak as a pagan mass. There was no good news: the rain wouldn’t stop, the sea wouldn’t drop, and they wouldn’t be heading out. The men whose families depended on the catch despaired and drank glass after glass of grappa. In March, only the most persistent went after shad and then vainly stood in the rain trying to sell their fish to non-existent customers. The prawn season, the most profitable of the year, was delayed at first, and then it became clear that it wouldn’t take place at all. Even if they had managed to head out, risking their necks in the waves that broke with a roar in the shallow water of the bay, it would have been a pointless effort. The sea was icy cold – just 12 degrees – although May was drawing on. Prawns only come with the warmer currents. They herald the beach tourists, but they wouldn’t be coming either, it seemed. The nature that people knew, whose unwritten laws they thought they could rely on, had betrayed them. The things they considered certain failed to occur. What no one in their families had any memory of, and therefore couldn’t tell them about, had now happened. The most dogged of the fishermen kept setting their alarm clocks so they could get up at night and tip the water out of their boats, which would fill again even before they made it back to their beds. The others let their vessels sink. When all this finally passed, they would pull them up onto the shore and their skilful hands would clean, repair and re-float them.

      Once, out of curiosity, I went down to the marina at three in the morning. I wrapped myself in my raincoat, opened the parasol I had taken from a burglarized storeroom at the beach and sat down on a bench. I opened a bottle of Vat 69 and watched the boats lying at the bottom of the bay for hours. That’s what the Ulcinj pirates’ fleet must have looked like after it was sunk by the Sultan’s navy at the entrance to nearby Valdanos Bay. I thought that same, vacuous thought again and again, vainly trying to think of some other words, until I finished the whisky and threw the empty bottle into the sea. Only then was I able to free myself of the thought of the corsairs’ sunken ships. Whoever finds my bottle will get the message: I wanted to say that I have nothing to say. I trudged home, took the basins of rainwater off the bed and slept through until the next evening. It seemed to me, when I finally opened my eyes, that the rain was beating down as if it intended to flatten everything beneath it.

      If you wanted to go outside, gumboots were the only suitable footwear. But they were no good now either because the water was getting faster and deeper. In the end, wherever you went, you arrived wet up to the waist. The foundations of the houses absorbed the damp, and before the eyes of the tenants it climbed the walls towards the ceiling. Everything we touched was water. We slept on wet sheets under cold, clammy covers. The floorboards were swollen to bursting point. Parquet flooring buckled like the ground after mighty tectonic shifts, such as shook the Earth in pre-human eons. The contours of the floor changed from day to day. Windows, even those with heavy shutters, were no help against the rain. It came with a wild westerly one moment and with a sirocco the next, constantly changed the angle at which it fell, attacking now frontally, now from the side, until it had crept through every invisible opening in the walls and woodwork. In their rooms, people made barriers of towels and babies’ nappies beneath the windows. When they were sodden, they would be wrung out in the bathroom and quickly returned to the improvised dykes.

      Roofs let through water like a poorly controlled national border. Like in a bizarre game of chess, families pulled pots and pans across the floor: Casserole to f3, frying pan to d2. The whole town suffered from sleep deprivation. Everyone finally understood the terrible power of Chinese water torture: the beast dripped all night and drove everyone out of their wits. Some tried to protect themselves from the sound of the drops that fell louder than bombs by stuffing cotton wool in their ears. When even that didn’t help, they would turn on their televisions, radios and computers, trying to make noise to block out the monstrous aquatic symphony. Those who had small children would find brief salvation in the children’s crying. No one attempted to calm them. They screamed with hunger, fever or colic, but their parents made no attempt to feed them or lull them to sleep. Mothers later recounted guiltily that they had hoped and prayed the crying would go on forever. In the end, the children did tire and fall asleep, and the parents would again be at the mercy of the sound that tormented them. That winter, children learned that crying is useless because no one will help us. And parents learned the lesson that everyone who tries to find salvation in procreation realizes sooner or later: that the children will betray us, just as we betray them.

      Ultimately, everyone gave up the struggle. Those who would never have lain in bed and gazed at the ceiling now sat and smoked all night, staring vacantly and watching the containers on the floor fill ever quicker, until they decided it was time to stop emptying them.

      The Winter firewood was already used up, and going out to gather new wood in such a gale made no sense. The stove would only smoke, producing no heat, and there were no prospects of it drying the rooms, let alone the walls, where the rising damp was puckering the plaster.

      The alleyways ran like rivers. We would long ago have been inundated if the town was not built on a hill. The storm-water drainage became clogged before the New Year. The Central Canal gave way in the middle of April.

      Now what we called the Central Canal is an interesting thing: it had not actually been dug for the passage of water. The people of Ulcinj originally made that tunnel because of a different enemy - one of flesh and blood. It led from the old fortress by the shore to half a kilometre inland, all the way to today’s promenade, where you find one boutique after another with second-rate Italian wares and jewellers peddling trinkets from Turkey.

      At first, the tunnel served for the rapid evacuation of the residents of Kalaja, the fortified Old Town of Ulcinj, who, it should be said, were pirates.