Quiet Flows the Una. Faruk Šehić
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once read in a paperback with a dubious title. My reality is boring and a long way from fantasy; and, I don’t like realistic books.
Instead, I muse that my heart beats in time with distant galaxies. For me, night isn’t a time when ghosts from a mass of former lives come out and stop you from sleeping. Night for me is a vacuum, a gap between the setting and the rising of the sun; a necessary evil. I wait for daybreak so as to slip out from under the heavy quilt in my grandmother’s house – it can be chilly even in June – because I can’t wait to slip on my Bermudas and espadrilles, climb the concrete stairs pot-holed by the rain, and come to the mossy abutment where orange-coloured slugs have left shiny trails of slime. I want to travel those rainbow highways with the pad of my finger and follow them all the way into the holes and cracks until my finger can go no further. That inability to enter small worlds, to creep inside the stem of a plantago leaf or the tightly closed bud of a white rose, would hound me in much more terrible times, too.
The walls of my grandmother’s house are thick and warm because tufa stone from the riverbed has been built into them. A clock hangs on the wall above my head and its hand ticks haltingly across the unintelligible inscription Tempus Vulnera Curabit, and whenever I read those words I shrink like a boiled shirt.
The slugs’ slimy bodies sometimes look darker: they’re red and brown in the cold lee cast by the long, three-storey buildings nearby; later they become a transparent yellow in the rays of the sun. It rises above the dew-wet tiles of the tallest house in the neighbourhood, which looks to me like a medieval castle that no one can come out of happy. The eyes of a boy follow me pleadingly from its windows. He’s my age but afflicted by premature ageing. The lines of his face show a haggard old man with the eyes of an innocent boy. He waves to me and smiles from a window that frames him like an icon.
The spindly waifs without so much as a house on their backs emerge from cracks in to which fine fingers of moss grow. Their antennae timidly probe the morning air. Cold scalpels. When I touch them, they quickly retract and the slugs stop furrowing their sticky trenches. The sun will turn them into little roads in all the colours of the rainbow, spectral Golgothas, on which no one will be crucified.
The softness of their bodies was shocking and stirring, so I loved and pitied them at the same time. I didn’t understand how a tender body could become a dry, lifeless remnant in the midday sun. Afterwards I would reluctantly realize that they, too, had their end like every other living thing.
I got up and ran to see the slugs every morning until a mysterious crime happened. Some pedant had peeled the moss from the retaining wall and covered up the cracks with mortar. Without a doubt, that killer of nature was an over-ambitious person, surly and morbidly industrious. Who was he? An old man who wanted to iron out every irregularity on the surface of the Earth? A carpenter obsessed with geometry, hated any gnarls and knobs in his wood – excrescences reminiscent of frozen stellar spirals? A mason with a bitter trowel in his heart horrified at the emptiness around us and condemned to furiously build and build? Who was that malefactor who strove to kill imagination?
I mourned for the slugs for two days and soon forgot about them. I had to shrug off that bittersweet mourning and find something new. It was then that I discovered fish. They’re free and cannot be walled in because water is a realm of freedom. Fish are large, elegant submarines with scales that cast gentle reflections through the water and the air. Pike, faster than arrows, bask in the sun on the surface between the threads of swaying bullrushes, from where they shoot out towards their prey. I discovered whiskered barbel – bottom feeders, which anglers used to feed leftovers of roast lamb. Then there are roach and sneep – the grazing cows of the river. I discovered grayling – icthyo torpedoes that launched out of the water to swallow fluorescent-green flies with gluttonous repetition. Trout, the unchallenged masters of the cascades and rocky riverbeds. Some people can tell the future by reading coffee grounds, but I learned to watch the fish.
Here at the beginning, it would make sense for me to go back to our origins: to the water we’re made of and the swirling currents of the underwater epic, where I’ll hearken to the anarchist trout and their fulsome chatter. You’ll find out later why the trout are anarchist. ‘Fulsome chatter’ is Rimbaud, I’ll be a hypnotized boat, and the rivers will carry me wherever I wish.
The Water’s Republic
The Una and its banks were my refuge – an impenetrable fastness of green. Here I hid from people beneath the branches in leaf, alone in the silence, surrounded by greenery. All I could hear was my own heartbeat, the flutter of a fly’s wings and the splash when a fish threw itself out of the water and returned to it. It’s not that I hated people, I just felt better among plants and wild animals. When I entered the covert of the river, nothing bad could happen to me any more.
One of the Una’s branches, the Unadžik, flowed past my grandmother’s slanting house that was slowly sinking into the deposits of sand and silt brought by the raging water in the forceful April floods. The riverbed was of tufa overgrown with waterweed. Mussels with mother-of-pearl mirrors stuck out of its fine yellow sand, and lively eels wriggled. Where the bed was covered with stone, we used to catch bullheads using forks tied with wire to dead branches, and we would put our catch in large jars so we could watch them and marvel at their slippery bodies.
In places you could see a wood stove or a rusty washing machine, worn-out chestnut pans or old car parts at the bottom of a greenhole – our word for deep, green pools in the river. The water was so transparent and clear that a coin could be seen several metres down, reflecting the dial of the sun.
Each house had its own sewage system, whose contents would come thundering out into the river through a concrete pipe. When the water level dropped in the summertime, those cast-concrete maws of mortar welded to the ground resembled lazing crocodiles that would periodically belch out faeces and the froth of washing-machine detergent. Grayling, barbel and chub would gather in those places to feed on what people had been unable to digest. Standing on those crocodile carcasses, anglers would cast sinkers and hooks with maggots, earthworms and bread. They used hand-crafted flies, coated with a special grease (to stop the feathered imitation from sinking) to lure and snag fine specimens of grayling, which they would pull up on to the bank together with the bubble float. The whopper would thrash about in a dense patch of stinging nettles, tangling up the thin line and all the other flies tied to the main line, which passed through the ceramic rings of the rod and ended in the shiny spool of a Shakespeare or D·A·M Quick reel.
Brown trout with red and black dots hovered solemnly and motionlessly in front of a rock or just above a slab of tufa, usually closer to the far bank, and would loudly launch themselves out of the river to swallow mayflies that fell into the water in the gloaming. Their leaps made shivering circles that would gradually disperse on the peaceful surface like smoke rings in the fug of a bachelor’s flat. With the coming of night, dragonflies would buzz above the Unadžik: blue-black males and greenish females – light river cavalry supported by a cacophony of owls, cuckoos and nightingales. The river sang a nocturne.
Autumn, the Moss-grown Horseman from the North
Every year at the end of August a weed with pale-blue flowers ran riot in my Grandmother’s courtyard that gently sloped down the sandy bank towards the river. I didn’t know their name, but I called them blue loners. They would bashfully start to flower in June, but August was their promised month.
The calf becomes sirloin steak and schnitzel at the butcher’s
The butcher has strong hands and ruddy cheeks
A charge through the grass with tin soldiers
Kinder Surprises produce Vikings of bronze.
Downstream, the blue loners were nourished by blood from the butcher’s shop in a basement, whose drainpipe came out in the middle of the bank; from there, the blood seeped calmly towards the water.
The houses held their never-ending vigil looking down on the river bank, while stands of corn watched over the river’s silence from the other side. People in their houses dreamed their civilian dreams about loans, working hours, football and fish. In the evenings,