Quiet Flows the Una. Faruk Šehić
doors and roam the whitewashed rooms, keeping watch over the Una’s people, pausing above the anglers’ foreheads and blessing them; those fish of air, clean and slender, with glittering tails, would enter people’s thoughts. True anglers catch fish because they have no other way of showing them their wonderment. Some of them even kiss the fish before putting them back in the water. Dawn will break the spell and the sun will take possession of the balcony. Dawn emerges from the Una, borne by the mists and vapours of the river. The intangible fish expire, people awake, and thus the circle is constant every night.
The petals of those blue flowers were separate from each another like Omar Sharif’s front teeth, so that they looked like propellers made of sky. Their colour was unreal amid the darkened, porous chlorophyll that reached its peak and then gently slid away towards the eddies of decay, before autumn tuned its instruments and struck up its symphony of dankness, rain and water vapour. It’s hard not to love humidity – the soul of the soil, and what we’re made of. I thought it impossible for such a shade of blue to exist in nature. I believed an invisible dyer went round at night and during the reign of the coppery mists and painted the flowers with diluted blue vitriol. A dragonfly with a human face; a harlequin of the earth with spikes of wheat in place of hair; a god of green and growing things, whom we would never see.
For me, plants were the world’s greatest secret, a proud aristocracy of chlorophyll that didn’t believe in life after death, and which, one day, when the hour came, would finally cover the whole world. They were a succulent essence, which you could only penetrate mechanically, leaving green juice all over your hands – the blood they didn’t care about and gave so amply because they were eternal and indestructible in their spring awakenings.
As the glossy green of the other weeds faded, the cornflower intensified its azure. The late glory of the cornflower heralded the death of the summer by the Una – the coming of chill morning mists and shivering dusks, and the fickle sun would only warm faintly at its height because as soon as a wind blew from the water it spent no more warmth.
Then autumn would descend like a horde of Huns down the Točile and Kolajevac hills, beneath which flowed the River Krušnica – six kilometres long and as cold as the Bering Sea. The vegetation had no chance before such an onslaught. Autumn made cascades of watercolour leaves flow through the forests on Točile Hill, and their murmur was pure melancholy. Autumn would enter our chests through the ether we inhaled, to be distilled into the purest emotion, which tightened our throats and moistened our eyes with boyish sorrow. Then I would begin to read books about magic kingdoms in preparation for the winter, and after that I would wait for the earth to cast off its snow so the yellow trumpets of primrose could again announce the turmoil and pleasures of spring:
May I introduce myself: I am the King of Leaves
I am the opposite of the moss-grown horseman
The grain beneath the snow will sense me
Wild geese bear me on their wings.
Growing with the Plants
A summer shower caught me behind the main grandstand of the FC Meteor stadium as I walked briskly along the gravel path to go swimming at Ajak, where an arm of the Una passed under a small bridge of creosoted railway sleepers to join the Krušnica. We used to swim in the greenhole in front of the bridge, while the central sleepers of the bridge were reserved for sunbathing. Further downstream the water was alive with chub and brown trout. Once I nearly drowned in that greenhole, and, strangely enough, that early brush with death only reinforced my love of the water.
Cumulonimbus clouds, swollen with moisture, drifted swiftly across the sky like in a speeded-up sequence of a documentary on the seething exuberance of the living world. I began to run as hot drops came down on me like big, mother’s tears. My sodden white T-shirt clung to my body. I jumped seething puddles, enjoying the crazy feeling of freedom that filled my chest and spread through my veins. I was a land-dwelling dolphin, a flying squirrel, a fiery flamingo pacing across mudflats that smelt pure and pristine.
That feeling of freedom blurred my reason and intoxicated me with the raindrops, and I stopped at every flower whose pollen the rain had smudged, stroked the broad leaves of a plantago, ran my finger down a blade of wild barley and gazed at the molehills evaporating the earth’s abundant warmth. What osmosis!
I thought I could fly with euphoria, like in a dream when I lift off in a sitting position, and simply wave my outstretched hands instead of wings and soon rise up above the ground. I float over the treetops and the roofs of familiar houses, always close to the ground, hoping for a soft landing the moment the enchantment wore off. Except that this now was a dream with my eyes open, a vision on a river island beneath a rainy sky. Not for a second could I see what was to come as I stared at the network of veins on a leaf, still green, that the wind had torn off; as I fingered the oily fin of a grayling; or as I kneaded a lump of red clay from Hum Hill in my hand. Like I say, there were no symbols and signposts towards what was to come. The war year 1992 was far away.
I came so close to meeting ‘Smith the Redeemer’, but he eluded me every time by hiding behind a screen of leaves, fleeing into the shade of a willow tree by the river, or jumping into the water and swimming to the other side. When he took the shape of a grass snake, cutting the water’s surface in two like a giant zipper that threatened to spill open the whole world, swimming was in vain because he would already be on the opposite bank, striding with the pace of someone going home at dusk and leaving an aromatic trail of Solea sun cream and beer behind them. And I would quickly forget where my thoughts had gone off to and what kind of search I’d started out on, as I stood at the edge of the steep bank, while schools of little fish swam in the greenhole before my feet. They were bleak, which could never grow to more than 10 cm and so were good bait for going after voracious salmonids. Sometimes I felt sorry for catching them because they were so beautiful. Perfect and vulnerable. I would grab Smith the Redeemer by the lapel of his coat, he would have to stop, and I would pull him back so we were standing face to face at a respectable distance and I would ask him questions from the future:
Where would my books from the shelf above the Grundig TV set go?
What would happen to the television with the soft-touch command panel?
Where would my original cassettes disappear to, which were stacked above the books, a good hundred of them?
Where would all my letters go – love letters, as well as more trivial ones?
Where would my numismatic collection end up, including the gold florin with the countenance of Franz Josef and a copper coin from 1676 with the word soldo embossed on it, which was perforated because someone had worn it as a good-luck charm around their neck?
Where would my room go?
Why would there be nothing left in our flat but bare walls and gaping holes where the sockets and the toilet bowl used to be?
Who would steal all my photos, and on which of the countless heaps of rubbish would they shrivel in the sun like autumn leaves?
Who would read my copy of Zvonko Veljačić’s novel about a space-travelling boy hero?
Who would take the Super 8 cinema projector and the tapes in the great cardboard boxes with film posters and credits on the lids?
Where would the black and white tape of War of the Worlds go?
Who would make all the things from our flat vanish ‘just like that’?
Who would vacuum away our family history and make me think of the past as a gathering of amiable ghosts?
Would I be allowed to blame anyone, and whom would I accuse?
But, as I’ve said: 1992 was far away. There was no need for these questions from the near future because we were still in a holistic past, in the middle of the happy 1980s.
Dwarf corn grew in the sandy fields in the summers. Its sharp-edged leaves cut droplets of blood and the stalk would shake when it was showered with rain, which washed the sand from its knobbly roots. Tangles of tough veins sent minerals and water to nourish its living green. Armoured mole crickets dug