Quiet Flows the Una. Faruk Šehić

      Mariners of the Green Army

      There was a flash in the air, a festive explosion, and the circus of nature would announce pollen in the flowers and the triumph of green in the town’s park. An incurable spring mood took possession of every thought and every tuft of grass, upsetting the schedules of airborne insects, which collided in the aerial avenues. There was drunkenness in the earth and the air that announced the birth of something splendid. Spring is that miracle that material­izes like fireworks in the sky, when the shapeliness of every girl and woman is hormonally magnetic and that little Krakatoa in your trousers is primed to erupt.

      I would pinch myself to make sure of my own mortality because we’re made in the image of God, and for a moment I thought I was becoming ethereal with bliss.

      Spring was that carnival that would bring the whole world to the brink of travesty. In the blink of an eye, a grey winter wasteland would become green Atlantic grass that we could sail through if only we were able to shrink to the size of an ant or a merry grasshopper. And that was very hard in a world ruled by adults, who tried to make us be like them in every way possible – frowning, moustachioed men who performed important tasks for the existence of our great and powerful State. But I didn’t want a moustache and wasn’t in a hurry to grow up.

      I believed in the red of my Pioneer scarf. And in the blood of all earthly proletarians, who would close ranks in their dim, under­ground factories, thirsting for world revolution, when Marx, Engels and Lenin would raise them from the dead. Later it would just take Karlo Štajner’s anti-Gulag classic 7000 Days in Siberia for me to strike communism from the list of beloved, sacred ‘isms’ in my high-school diary, albeit it in pencil and with a wavering hand. In the language of the Party, I had had become a revisionist; I was like Rosa Luxemburg, whom we hated because she had abandoned the true current of the revolution and become a vile agent of imperialism – at least that’s the way it was served to us in the Marxist textbooks.

      Everything had to be in the service of our powerful State, the fourth-largest military force in the world, whose wings of steel we were more than proud of. Even our town’s park boasted small patriotic trees (more like bushes) planted with geometrical precision to form a socialist star in leaf. This large, foliate star was home to the nests of robin redbreasts, that working class contingent among the birds – a Red Army of uniform appearance that was far from possessing any talent in song but composed an industrious and obedient youth wing that forever wove its grey, hanging houses in those bushy trees, whose berries had a reddish juice with a bitter taste.

      Still, robins were sweet-feathered creatures that always chirped and worked tirelessly to further their small, socio-political communities, creating a secure avian commune that functioned according to the principle from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. That really was a classless society because all its members had equal rights like in the hyperborean land of Sweden.

      ‘Just you try walking on the grass!’ Kosta the park warden would roar in his grey-green uniform and huge Russian fur hat, whose circle of shade could shelter a family with ten or more children.

      ‘Even the grass will be red if the Central Committee so decides,’ Kosta tried to scare us, invoking the grand masonic lodge that ran our great and powerful State – and all just because we loved to walk on the grass and pick the daisies and star-shaped dandelions. I was more afraid of his fur hat than his bony features, his face with broad cheekbones and ill-tempered, grey gimlet eyes that sent a glare instead of a greeting when he was officially cross. The total power of the State could be seen in the fact that even its lowest echelon, Kosta the park warden, was perfectly intimidating.

      We avoided him like the plague, and we would wait for him to go down the road into town reciting the Party slogans he had learned by heart, which could even make the bark of the robinias seem smooth and soft. Then we would dash to the wild and irre­pressible bushes with sturdy rods sprouting yellow petals all along their length; we called them magelana, but later I discovered they were forsythia. These were our boats, which we named after the famous Portuguese seafarer Ferdinand Magellan.

      Every magelana could fit two sailors and a captain. Our magelanas grew close together, so we could see and call to each other on our imaginary journeys. It was best when a warm spring breeze came up, and then it was like a gale that strained at the ropes of our ships and rocked us on the branches like mariners fighting against a raging sea. Everything started to spin around us – the grass, the trees, the gravel on the paths and the houses nearby. That was the moment when we were freed of gravity. The Earth turned and the world hung above us, but we gave resolute orders and bravely put out into the wide sea of the sky. We sailed without fear, with our hearts as astrolabe and compass.

      Look, this is where that marvellous tree used to be, whose trunk was completely covered in ivy, so it was easy to climb up its tough veins into the crown, where you really couldn’t tell which leaves were the tree’s and which belonged to the velvety creeper. I would climb up into that crown, to where it was quiet and peaceful inside. The darkness there was my ally, while the main thoroughfare of Marshal Tito Street ran below it, full of comings and goings: people, cars, horse-drawn carts, ambulances, stooped peasant women... But there were also upright ones carrying heavy loads on their heads; women whose necks were surely able to carry whole slabs of the world, chunks their households rested on. Old men passed by too, bitterly spitting out something akin to the acrimony of their lives. Everything was in motion: lines of lizards, ants and red-black beetles, columns of cattle, sheep from the high pastures of the Grmeč range, nomadic shepherds in fur hats like those of Cossacks, the blind and the drunk, children and youth, workers who were also drunkards, and torrents of people who knew nothing and expected nothing, because no one could see the future. It was guaranteed by the weight of the big stone letters up on Tećija Hill that spelled the name of the greatest son of all the Yugoslav peoples.

      Up in the tree, in the peace and quiet, I was perfectly invisible. I didn’t exist. I could even close my eyes and the world would become insignificant. I would be all by myself, a small light in the darkness, before the storm blowing in from Grmeč. One body, nothing more, that shivered with cold as the wind rushed through the green branches. From my vantage point I watched ordinary life, the secret life beneath the town’s park, by the side of the asphalt road that Kosta went down into the history of the night, marshalling clouds and elusory celestial bodies. Apart from the enticing female hips, the sea was peaceful, with no waves and agitation. Past and future was all the same. O people, flow like you are water! I was terribly afraid of death, but wherever I looked it was not to be seen.