by Faruk Sehic
The young man’s whole exterior radiated an elemental nervous energy and I was afraid to look him in the eyes. His face showed an abandon that had become ingrained because a large screw in his heart had come loose. That was the first and last time I saw him.
In 1993, the town we knew disappeared before our eyes. It was disguised by plants and ruins, and despite the explosions all day it acquired a hypnotic aura. We stared at it as if it was the last image we would take with us when we left this world. It became the strange, confused capital of that utopia we called ‘I-want-to-return-home-and-for-everything-to-be-like-it-was’. There is something captivating in that decline that progresses from second to second. It affects the whole of material reality, and human works are the first to suffer: dead things become even more dead and break down into their chemical elements. Carbon is the most prevalent and dominates in ash to the same extent as in diamond. The destruction of Kareli’s house reached its peak.
No one mused about water and fish any more. Anglers became warriors. In the complete transformation of one world into another, the leg of a pre-war footballer didn’t kick a ball but had to take care not to tread on mines. At the end of April, nature awoke from its winter dormancy, and that went unnoticed too. Gradually we returned to primitive forms of existence, where the most important thing was to have a full belly and to be warm and safe. We learned to hate because that’s the only way of surviving, and it can help unlock a strength and fury in you that keeps you alive and gives you the will to live. Learning to hate isn’t hard, you just need to follow your body, whose impulses make you do whatever is necessary to survive. We couldn’t rely on an abundance of weapons and ammunition, nor did we have a mother country behind us, like our former Serbian neighbours did, so we relied on ourselves and what is strongest in a person: bravery. It was our deadliest weapon and helped make us into cannon fodder.
How ridiculous the desire is to come through it all physically unharmed. People do their utmost to get by without a scratch. They demarcate severe borders on their skin in order to preserve a heap of flesh and bone, a heart and, if they can manage it, a soul. They believe that the town cannot be destroyed, that it is imperishable. The streets are full of the skeletons of torched houses and new debris. Every little piece of rubbish has its life history and cries out for narrative reconstruction. One clump of rubbish is worth as much as Borges’s Aleph, in which many different times, spaces, people, animals and things come together, except that their vital colours have lost their lustre like melted-down silverware. After that, the town and its people will never be the same again, assuming they live to see the end of the war.
Yet nothing will be like it was before, and this is a fact people are unaware of. Everyone believes in their own future and the potential of the town, which is surely how people think after every war. When our houses cease to be temporary museums making futile attempts to exhibit an untouched past, they will become habitable again. In ten years time, the outward signs of the war will be visible only in black-and-white photographs. Volumes can be written about the inner traces, but these will be pointless tomes that no one will read. It’s a paradox that we were mangled in so many ways, and yet were condemned to win. This is a strange victory, full of the affliction of remembrance of the dead, the living and everything else.
The moment of vacillation and doubt passes, and I again believe in the town and the river: their strength and vigour will raise people up out of the ashes. They will give people the will to live.
The young man with the scar and crossed eyes was captured, had his penis cut off and stuck in his mouth. He has been dead for nineteen long years.
Snake Power
We were doing a twenty-day deployment on the front line up at Sokolov Kamen. Nothing could happen to us because we were separated from the enemy by the deep and wide canyon of the Una, a perfect barrier that let us sleep peacefully at night and just demanded the odd patrol during the day. We went around bare-chested, collected berries, swam in a small dam, hung out with the Frenchmen from the United Nations, picked mushrooms and lay in the shade of the abandoned house. Snakes crawled about everywhere without interfering in our daily business; they were oblivious to the war and the shells that came pouring down. The Blue Helmets earned their pay by counting the shells that fell on our town, several kilometres downstream as the crow flies, and they couldn’t know that we were getting used to the dead and all the ceremonies that implied. Over time, I went to so many funerals that they became a mechanical duty. Sometimes we would hang around furtively in the bushes, laughing hysterically, although a comrade-in-arms was being interred.
In the room on the first floor of the house I wrote convoluted, surrealistic poetry utterly unrelated to my surroundings. I was unable to penetrate the veil that obstructed my clarity of mind and precision of expression. That blockage made me launch a barrage of fiery metaphors from the Katyushas of my poems.
I didn’t have a way with snakes like Emil the herbalist did, but I still liked them. They have a bandit-like streak and you can just imagine them destroying the Garden of Eden, home to Man and Ms Spare-Rib. Someone had to be to blame, so the snake and Eve were made scapegoats. Adam remained innocent. So I have to help defend the reputation of the snakes. They say that a fish in one’s dreams is a symbol of worry, and a snake is evil and a sign of impending danger. But both animals are bearers of good news for me. The last time I dreamed of a ball of red snakes I won 250 Bosnian marks at the betting shop.
During a routine patrol in the summer of 1993, on the slopes of Sokolov Kamen, I saw a coiled-up snake, a horned viper. It was lying lethargically on a rock. I grabbed it behind the head and lifted it up. I don’t know why, but I cut off its head with my switchblade and threw it down slope towards the Una – probably because it was wartime and I wanted to let off steam. Nothing much was happening at the betting shop, and I mainly backed number one; I rarely bet on number two – only in hopeless situations like when we fell into an ambush.
They shed their skin from time to time and leave behind a slough that looks like a cover for an antediluvian umbrella. Can you imagine such a hallucinogenic regeneration of life? You can’t, of course.
A snake is absolute muscle with a gut running through it. If a galactic super-snake existed, it would be able to swallow and digest the Earth within a few hours. Death would occur immediately due to asphyxiation caused by the contraction of muscles twice the size of the Himalayas. I wrote a quatrain for the snake:
It comes from deep space near the North Star,
Riding a planet the shape of a skull
With fifty gleaming starlets on its brow
From the hellish ice where Muhammad sleeps.
A snake, monsieur, doesn’t care for mercy. When I saw a grass snake patiently and persistently swallowing a frog the size of a man’s fist, I realized what the face of God looks like – merry and mad. They’re cheerful in a way unknown to humans, who mope over the civilizational jetsam they themselves have made.
When I was a boy, I was once garlanded with a large grass snake. The late Mirdal Terzić put it around my neck like a long, slippery piece of jewellery. I was as happy as a child-turned-king, initiated into the world of my elders, whom I admired, and Mirdal most of all. Mirdal, that magician from my childhood, the man with the safari eyes and safari hair, vanished one post-war day that smelt of oak in the dense pine forest up on Ravnik. Or we got separated for a moment in the savannahs of his safari eyes. He just went into the pine wood, which isn’t so large that you can get lost in it, but, like a true magician, Mirdal knew how to vanish in the inextricable architecture of pine needles, to instantly soar up to the top of the tallest pine, from where he could easily climb onto the first cloud and leave our post-war world far below.
The skin of Mirdal’s snake in my childhood was warm and supple when you stroked it. The gilded domes of cities, the illustrious peoples who made history in the battles of the nations, and the works of human hands from Leeuwenhoek’s light microsco
pe to the Hubble Space Telescope were third-rate rubbish when seen with its eyes – no comparison with a stone warmed by the sun.
But I was in a different state of mind when I stood on the tail of an Aesculapian snake with my boot, and its head was level with my mouth. I did this to impress a French lieutenant from the UN forces. He had come to inquire about our military set-up and told me I was a brave man.
‘Pascal Rocher,’ he said, holding out his hand.
‘My name is Mustafa Husar – you know, like a hussar cavalryman,’ I explained. ‘We’re totally isolated here and fighting for our own reasons. We have no senior command and we’re living on wild animals and what we can find in the forest. This is our line, and this is where we live. We are desperados.’
I was lying, of course, but there was also a grain of truth in the lie.
‘I didn’t go to military school. War is the best military school,’ I told him, upon which he was forthright and offered me help in ammunition and food. That lanky Frenchman in a forest that looked so much like the Elven woods in the Lord of the Rings, with their mighty cover of oaks and beeches, gave the scene an underlying sense of reality – one that had fled from our dreams. If you want to survive, looking back is out of the question. There was no time for crying over pre-war life. It’s good that limbo is devoid of memory. Our subconscious didn’t function either, but we didn’t need it. I wrote a quatrain for us:
The cold metal gun is a geyser of comfort
When adrenalin makes you touch it
It repels and attracts at the same time
So very similar to snake skin.
I released the snake into the tangle of ferns and grass. We were hovering above reality in an epic fantasy forest because there wasn’t even a classical semblance of reality. We really were left to fend for ourselves, living on mushrooms and wild rabbit on the spit. Like a lost nation of Men in Tolkien’s Middle-earth that has slipped from between the covers of the book, in the wilds below Sokolov Kamen in 1993. We were young, greenhorn soldiers imitating actions from the collective unconscious. That’s why we and the snakes got on so well. Torture, killing, rape, pillage and arson are inscribed in us, but we can resist those untried capabilities. If you’re ever asked for a nutshell definition of war, you can go ahead and say, ‘It’s like a double End of the World with whipped cream, only much, much better.’ It’s a plague of snakes the colour of the sun and the moon, and we make love with them all night beneath the open sky.
Emil
A long time ago, when the souls of our towns rose skywards like billowing clouds, a man called Emil lived and worked in our town. He was real, a man of flesh and blood. He was of Czechoslovak origin, and who knows what winds brought him here to the green valley of the Una, where a band of the ancient Iapydes people once decided to raise a village by the river, reckoning that its fruits would ensure them a good living. They respected the laws that the river imposed on them every spring without fail. They treated the floods as one of the elements. They would calmly collect their drowned livestock and the occasional unfortunate lad who had been reckless and got too close to the torrent, perhaps staring into a swirl that seemed to him like the eye of the god Bynt.
The Iapydes lived close to nature and rode to the banks of the river on oxen with branching horns, in which birds had woven delicate nests. Their decision to settle gave rise to today’s town. It was here that Emil spent the last years of his long life. He was a man who understood the mysterious worlds of animals and could heal maladies with wild herbs whose names were not to be found in the compendiums of medicinal plants. But what he was most noted and respected for was his familiarity with snakes. He had a close and secret relationship with them. When people called him, he was able to go into their house and rid it of hissing reptiles. He needed no flute or other musical instrument as a tool for this unusual work. He would come empty-handed and make the snakes leave the people’s home just with spoken magic formulae. The whole brood of snakes would obey and set off after him in line, and Emil would lead them away to a place they would be safe: usually an isolated rockery in the canyon of the Una. Elaborate tales were told about Emil, some of them true and others fabricated, as befits human imagination that embraces the whole world. Emil’s skill was lost with his death. He was buried at the town cemetery in Lipik, modestly and with dignity. After several unprecedented rainy years, woody plants sprang up out of Emil’s grave mound, and their tops were compellingly reminiscent of the ox’s horns of the early devotees of the river. Those plants grew quickly and soon covered the decayed wooden cross, on which the letters and numbers of Emil’s earthly existence had vanished.
Then Emil dispersed in several dimensions at once. In the dimension of hats, he was an island of purple, perfectly round and beyond description. In that dimension, you can buy a decent straw hat cheaply, for just a few kopeks. When you put it on, it starts a slide-show in your mind, and you see men of Srebrenica with their hands tied behind their backs – the whole process of execution in real time. The bodies fall to the ground and sink into it, through a filter of leaves and twigs.
In the verbal dimension, Emil was a forked, snakelike tongue at the court of King Revolutionaria. He was in the mouth of a corpulent snake that slept beside the throne. On rare occasions the snake, in discomfort and driven by an inner spasm, would open its mouth as if about to vomit, stick out its grey, forked tongue, and whisper: Emil, Emil, Emil...
The Heart
One summer night in 1981, the Heart appeared on the prominent tower of the medieval Pset Castle, which was the pride of the whole town and thus merited its place in the coat of arms together with the river, which was portrayed in a symbiosis of blue waves with a waterwheel. The Heart, as we called it, because we had no other word for that enigmatic organism, tore stones from the dilapidated tower that went tumbling down the steep, unassailable bank of the Una. Those who saw it said it was huge and purple and beat so loudly that it made people dizzy and sent them fleeing headlong in panic. Others had different versions, from the one that the Heart was the united spirit of two ill-starred lovers – a local version of Romeo and Juliet, to the story of it being an alien that rebelled against Tito, the Party and socialist self-management. Others again repeated the belief that the Heart was a poltergeist created by the rage of warlord Matija Bakić, the last commander of Pset Castle, whom the conquering Turks threw into the river with his armour on. Centuries later, part of his anatomy had now come up to the surface and taken possession of his former fort. That’s why I decided to climb the tower with its unsteady reconstructed wooden stairs to convince myself of the existence of the terrible Heart. When I started out on the worn, snaking path up the hill, with fragrant pines growing beside it, cuckoos in the trees betrayed my furtive approach and coo-cooed their autistic rhythms at the moon and stars. As I got closer to the tower, my own heart almost came into my throat and I shook and trembled all over. Sweat trickled down my jugular and I felt like a walking pine tree with sticky resin rolling down it. At the very top I was met by a breath of air from the river’s canyon, turning sweat into starch and salt. I caught sight of the back of a tall, grotesque figure. The terrified birds rustled in the branches.
He whipped around with a sudden spasm of his body, looked me in the eyes with his empty sockets and said, ‘The first of the tribe is tied to a tree, and the last is eaten by the ants.’
Then he swiftly wrapped himself in his cloak and vanished in a whirlwind of leaves and dust. If I was God-fearing, I would have uttered a prayer, but I just stood there aghast, surrounded by the silent stars.
If the world is a dream dreamed by multiple, endless lines of beings who create it night after night anew, and if God, by a certain definition, is a circle whose centre is everywhere and periphery nowhere, then this night was an unusual vision that I experienced for a particular, but nigh-unfathomable purpose. Did the words I heard up at the tower only mean the doom of Márques’s mythical Buendías or, together with them, the fall of the two easts and
the two wests, the destruction of the continents and an attack from outer space, that was meant to herald a post-apocalyptic era and the coming renaissance there will be no one to sing the praises of? I have no proper answer, but the Heart didn’t chill the hearts of the townsfolk any more. It faded into legend, the stuff of backstreet yarns, and I went on dealing with the souls of animals and plants.
Like every sensitive young person, I fell in love with high-sounding words like ‘soul’, ‘brotherhood’, ‘freedom’ and ‘revolution’. I strove to be a picaresque poet, equally appreciating the brutality of the street and the enticing shades of the long, tall rows of books in the town library. Revolution! I couldn’t wait for one to begin somewhere, and I quivered with the desire to burn in its flame. My wish would soon be granted, without me even being aware of it.
Spring
‘Rosebud’ – the dying word of the colossus played by Orson Welles in the movie Citizen Kane. It took me a long time to understand it and to learn the correct meaning of the English word. And so the time came for the budding of the trees’ hardy branches. Spring always arrives like a rising tide, a green trance full of grasses and a whole mass of known and unknown plants. Spring is a religion older than Mesopotamia. I ask myself where the life spirit of grass go after it loses its green blood? Does it gather in some ‘holy spirit’ that bridges life and death? Are those minerals its secret weapons: water, ions, cations and nutrients to which give scientific names and chemical formulae? What were the driving forces called before we clad them in human language? What was grass called in the age before language? Or tree? I spoke tree, tree, tree, tree inside me until the word and its thought had become entirely dendritic. (Perhaps I sensed the meaning of matter for a moment, and perhaps I was able to touch it in my thoughts.) The letters were lost in that mantra too, the tree ceased to be a tree and turned into something completely new that didn’t have a name or a mental image. It was as if you poured green ink into the air and then froze the passage of time. What hung in the air was impossible to describe: something shapeless and green that stubbornly refused to find its word.
