Quiet Flows the Una. Faruk Šehić
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to celebrate a lot of things we didn’t want to call by their names. We toasted in a cheerful Zen manner, without clicking bottles and without excessive exclamations. Our alcohol-fuelled jaunt of favourite locations inevitably took us to a caravan selling drinks in the shade of Japanese plum trees. Our legs led us there all by themselves. The shade was perfect, the booze too, and our stories left reality far behind. Later, someone suggested we go and see the freshly renovated hall of the Culture Centre because we all loved buildings untouched by fire – they were a direct physical link to our past. We could take a peek behind the heavy brocade curtains, where cinematic illusions were shown. King Kong’s sadness because of his impossible love for a woman was palpable there in the damp air, accompanied by sighs and tears. My best memory from that hall was the visit of a troupe of Italian magicians sometime in the late 1970s. They charmed cobras and skewered a midget woman with swords in a wooden cube, only for her to hop out again cheerful and unharmed, in a bathing suit, to the general enthusiasm of the gullible audience; and they performed many lesser and greater miracles, too. There were the fakir’s mass hypnoses, where a boy would climb up a rope suspended in the air, or the fakir would chop up the boy with a machete and put his parts in a basket, only to bring him out in one piece afterwards.
The Ramayana Flying Circus from India was to perform that evening. The hypnotist was having a dress rehearsal and needed a guinea pig. And suddenly there was me: an aspiring poet and veteran of our dear war. Why the fakir chose me of the three of us remains a mystery to me. I had only just made myself comfortable, leaning back in the leather-upholstered chair in the middle of the Culture Centre’s empty hall. Apart from the scar cutting diagonally across my face, there was nothing else that made me stand out.
Before the war, the hall could take an audience of seven hundred on fold-up seats, and when King Kong, Godzilla or Bruce Lee were screened people would sit on the floor, too. I didn’t get to see the main entrance or the stage with the heavy brocade curtains. The sun and the birdsong in the poplars and the luxuriant black walnut trees remained outside. My two friends had played a trick on me by bringing me here, under the pretext of showing me the renovated hall. They had actually hoped to see circus animals, especially drunken dancing monkeys.
‘Not too long ago, I think sometime after the war, a circus came to the football stadium in Banja Luka. A guy who went to see it told me there was a magician with a young monkey on a chain – a mandrill or baboon, he couldn’t say exactly – and the magician started to swing the chain. The monkey lifted off the ground and flew around in circles above the magician’s head in front of five thousand people. And do you know what it did?’
‘No, what?’ I asked the guy.
‘It held on to the chain as tightly as it could, like a little person,’ he tittered with a smoker’s laugh.
My friends and I went in the side door, holding our bottles of beer, and ran into a fakir with a torch in his hand. It was rather disquieting to see a bearded man in a long robe standing and staring at us. He seemed to have been expecting us because he wasn’t surprised at us being there. We struck up a polite conversation about the authenticity of mass hypnosis, after which the fakir pointed his finger at me, switched off the torch and vanished into the pitch darkness. My heart started to beat like a drum. I’ve always been one for unusual challenges – the crazier the better.
The light fled at familiar speed through the narrow gap between the doors as my company vanished. When I found a chair and slumped into it, a spotlight went on up on the stage. I pushed my bottle of beer under my chair. The temporal bond between my pre-war and post-war life had been broken, and the discontinuity had to be bridged. Because I want to be whole again, if only in memory, I would have to become a time traveller and go back to the past: that would mean attempting the impossible task of over-flying the war and overcoming my own queasiness in order to find that temporal bond to join the past and the present. It seemed to be the first time in my life that there was an advantage in having a scar on my face. If it attracted demented, neurotic women and half-mad men, was I one of them too, marked with a shadow of disfigurement – a freakish, dark aureole above my head? The answer was affirmative. This kind of magnetism isn’t exactly a blessing. But the scar became my ticket to the show.
Five
The hypnotist strode on to the stage in a turban with chilled-out, hissing little snakes, and in that instant a mist rose to my knees. Behind his back, a wind broke everything before it, blowing over barren wastes from the stacked loudspeakers. And I thought I heard the electric bellow of little plush elephants, which I remembered having heard in the streets of Sarajevo, where freeloaders sold them to bustling crowds. Our time has vanished, I thought for a moment as my gaze dropped from the ceiling of the hall to the wall above the stage, where letters had been scratched out of the slogans extolling Tito, the people and the Party, and proclaiming eternal life for all. Since I didn’t have a single pre-war photograph, how else could I think about my past other than as something non-existent. I closed my eyes and ran the excellent black and white video spot of Wonderful Life for myself on the inside of my eyelids. And I’ll attach that video as a last piece of evidence that my intimate world from the past did exist, even though I myself sometimes thought I’d invented my memories. The sounds of the wind slowly receded, muffled by the crackling of a record that hypnotically repeated one and the same sound. I was at some kind of fanciful investigation.
No need to run and hide
It’s a wonderful, wonderful life...
Each time the hypnotist spoke a number; I would arrange tsunamis of thoughts into meaningful wholes and turn them into confessional statements. I already had faithful listeners, whom I could tell anything to for hours, but this was a different experience. Now I was like a switch on a device for decoding people’s lives and just needed to be flicked. I was an optical instrument – an eyepiece, lens tube and magnifying glass – crossed with a long-necked orchid, and I would blazon forth stories through its trumpet.
The choice of music was unusual because normally a relaxing soundtrack is used to induce hypnosis. The white-bearded fakir stood in the bright circle of the spotlight on the stage, as straight as a candle. His eyes were grey and cold, his mien as clear as mud. When he had finished the countdown induction, he told me in broken Bosnian:
‘Now you returning to your own past, your childhood... Your head is clear and cold. How old are you?’
‘Thirteen,’ I told him.
‘You are sure?’
‘Yes, I’m thirteen and I’ve just left the house to go fishing. I’m wearing gumboots, and I have a fishing rod and an angler’s rucksack. The bullrushes smell of fish mucus. There are so many fish that you never tire of watching them. It’s like the feeling of a miser fondling his gold – he can’t get enough of it. I check the bubble float, which has to be half full of water, and I grease the artificial flies so they will stay on the surface. I cast all the way to the opposite bank and the bubble float lands on the soft, sandy shore covered with waterweed. It looks as if I’ve laid the float on a green pillow. Now I gently pull the line and the bubble float into the water because a prize trout is waiting just a metre or two downstream. It’s a good 30 cm long, 24 cm being average. I have a hunch that this is going to be a long fight. I use the tip of the rod to unfurl the fishing line with the flies tied to it, and I give the last one a tweak so it goes right over the mouth of the big fish. I watch the fly breathlessly; the fish shoots up towards the surface, misses the fly and makes a big bubble in the water. The handhold of the rod is at my right hip and I immediately jerk it back like a gunslinger, and the float with the flies travels all the way back into the grass at my feet. It happened so quickly that I only saw the trout’s white underside as its mouth snapped at the fly. I have to calm down, cast towards the green pillow again, and do everything from scratch once more. I’m so excited that I don’t notice the people higher up on the bank kibitzing me and the fish...’
The artificial mist swallowed me at ant speed. I fell through time as though through pliant peat. As I sank through sparkling blackness and the pink light of silt, I caught a glimpse of houses growing out of the ground beneath my feet, and then spirals snaked up from their chimneys – a signal that life would put down roots by the River Una. The trees in the town’s park were