Quiet Flows the Una. Faruk Šehić

      Hypnosis

      One

      Sometimes I’m not me, I’m Gargano. He, that other, is the real me: the one from the shadow, the one from the water. Blue, frail and helpless. Don’t ask me who I am because that scares me. Ask me something else. I can tell you about my memory: about the world of solid matter steadily evaporating and memory becoming the last foundation of my personality, which had almost completely vaporized into a column of steam. When I jump into the past, I’m fully aware of what I’m doing. I want to be whole like most people on this Earth. Now I feel better, staring at the unbroken white line on the steel-blue asphalt. It soothes me. Darkness falls painlessly. I don’t look back. The dark is behind me, but it feels like it’s not there at all; not swallowing up the road, the buildings and the trees. It walks along behind me but dares not come close because it knows that then I would have to use my shield of paper with luminous words, and everything would go down the drain. And no one wants that to happen: neither Gargano, nor the dark, nor that other, meaning me – the astronaut, the adventurer and explorer of rivers and seas.

      My memories are ugly and dirty. I feel disgust when I have to talk about the way things were in Yugoslavia and the start of the war. Poor boys in the piss-stinking changing room before PE lessons. The very sight of the school building made me break into a cold sweat under my jumper, which was so tight that I got attacks of claustrophobia. How could I forget? We found salvation from the school’s excessive military discipline in the toilet block, where the concentration of ammonia took your breath away. The teachers were strict and starched, the corridors polished like rifle barrels, and the blackboard was black with grey stripes from the sponge with chalky water. Cigarette butts and condoms floated in the toilet bowls: the only form of rebellion against the crusty establishment. All of us had to wear identical blue dustcoats. The air in the corridors smelt of school sandwiches made with the cheapest salami (pompously named ‘Parisian’). Given its architecture, the school could immediately be turned into a barracks in the event of war because it had a mass of small windows, from which we, little soldiers, our faces defiant and sooty, with slingshots and stone-firing wooden guns, would offer resistance to the numerically superior, insidious enemy, while singing Partisan songs during lulls in the fighting.

      The rotten floorboards in the tenements dating back to Austro-Hungarian times stank of stale faeces and the diseases of their tenants; the lumpenproletariat of my home town, Bosanska Krupa. The neck of the pint bottle of beer peered out of the forest around Striborova’s mature vagina when the waitress showed customers what her organ could do. She lay on the table with her big snow-white thighs spread wide and her ponytail of satiny black hair hanging down at the back of her head, and a vein as thick as a finger bulged on her neck. The light on the high ceiling flickered, and those with poor sight came up close to convince themselves of this voracious vulva. When she had finished her performance, she collected money, pulled on her long white drawers, let down her short skirt and went back to pouring brandy for the thirsty spectators. If those bystanders, sodden with cheap brandy and reeking of nicotine, read Latin books, they would know they’d just had the good fortune of peering into the speculum mundi, the mirror of the world.

      The memories are so ugly that they neutralize themselves. Every­thing I remember makes me stop rewinding the story. I see horse droppings steaming on the asphalt of Tito Street. I hear the clatter of horses’ hooves – a relentless, depressive beat that unnerves me. The rain falls for days in the rhythm of the horseshoes. I know I can suppress that feeling of nausea and see everything in more beautiful colours, but then I feel I’ll betray my wish for an uncompromizing view of the past.

      A coffin with a glass window emerges from my memory: my art teacher is scowling at me through it with his black-rimmed glasses, and it’s as if that black frame has already downsized his face to the format of an obituary notice, decades before he would be killed. I remember never-ending Partisan funerals, the trumpets and trombones of the brass band sounding their mournful notes, and sweat trickling down my spine from the marches I watched at nine-thirty on Sunday mornings on channel two of the State television. I see the open coffin with my great-aunt’s body in a white bundle being lowered into the side of Hum Hill, from where you can look out over the green islands of the river. It was the lie we lived and which would come back at us through thousands of shells fired over the four years of the war. My disgust could take the form of a religion, but I don’t want to give in to hatred. That would be too cheap and easy for my taste.

      Too hot in the sun; cold and damp in the shade and the stench of urine, excrement and shoe polish. Those are the memories of my past life that first come to my senses. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get over my disgust for the empty phrases the former State rested on. The very mention of those words makes me feel unwell. Luckily, we still have indirect speech and words with hidden meanings. And we have the River Una.

      Two

      Journalistic polymaths, those experts on everything, say it was a case of force majeure: a tectonic disturbance of history, a white hole in the nebulae of Asterion and a sub-spatial fluctuation within black matter, the collapse of the last utopia of the twentieth century, blah blah blah. The Berlin Wall came crashing down on us, so it was only fair that blood be let somewhere. Except that I wasn’t a tiny cog in the workings of some cosmic powers – as a real man with a formed personality, I had one private mission: physical survival. Why should I believe those who have never smelt the odour of gunpowder on their own skin, which no detergent can wash off, when they don’t believe me? If I needed anything, I did it myself. I took my fate into my own hands and didn’t wait for a knock on the door in the wee hours and to be taken away and shot in a ditch. People always pay for passivity with their lives, and I had some living to do. Just then, I didn’t think of my landlady from Zagreb, a giant old peasant woman, who said to me and my room-mate in 1990: ‘The Serbs are gonna slaughter you all in Bosnia’. What could we have known back then, we tender-handed navvies enamoured of film and literature?

      Post-scriptal analysts have trouble understanding the struggle for survival because they like to bandy around convoluted metaphors and explain my fate with global processes and events of crucial significance, pseudo-events that will never be able to explain the cataclysm. The river of blood and the ruthlessness, the squeak of the tracks of a T-55 tank that makes your blood freeze even two kilometres away. I’m not going to list you all the fascinating images of horror I witnessed because that would take a book twice as thick as this, and the effect would be the same: whoever doesn’t understand can simply remain in the blissful dark of ignorance.

      My biography is a string of coincidences, many of my own choosing, but some of which chose me. If I was able to explain everything to myself, I might as well dig a grave and go and lie in it because there would be no point in living. My biography is about flesh and blood, not entertainment. I am somewhere there in the middle of it all. I am one, but there are thousands of us – the unbreakable broken ones.

      I have to tell you this: I’ve killed a man, and not just one but several. When you’re firing, all your worries vanish. Not every bullet finds its mark, of course, but some certainly do. When you’re shooting, you’re as light as a feather, and that pleasure could make you lift off the ground and hover for a moment, but you’re in cover, lying belly-down in the churned-up soil, flattened grass and wet leaves, because that’s what your instinct tells you to do. When I shoot, I feel like Jesus Antichrist. I deliver the very opposite of compassion. There are no pangs of conscience, and no one is going to whisper in your ear that the enemy is human too. Things are different on the battlefield: the enemy is the enemy. He cannot be human. The enemy has to be a slimy hymenopteran with horns and pig’s trotters, so just fire away and don’t worry about the nonsense that cowards and philosophers waste their time on. I killed several individual enemies in hand-to-hand combat, so now my fellow townspeople avoid me, and when I walk down the street everyone crosses to the other side. I can just smell their fear. It reeks of loathing, of Hegel and Kant, of the universal sense of human life and of so-called human kindness; all of which deserve my complete contempt.

      I killed three