by Faruk Sehic
We inherited this town through unfortunate circumstances: the death of all its population. Half of them perished in the eddies of the river, sinking in the sweat of their armour and chain mail to the bed of the Una – into oblivion, not legend – when a mighty host struck on 23 June 1565 and razed Pset Castle to the black ground. Those who survived became food for the grey crows and ravens up at Ćojluk that glimpsed another feast in that town shielded on all sides by the river. It took us three days to scrub the stubborn blood from the pavement in front of town gates, where a handful of enemy heroes broke through our lines. But we soon cut down all four of them, while their commander, ‘a mann of heavy bodie’, drowned in the Una.
This battle won’t be recorded in any major history books, but for the participants themselves it was very important indeed, especially for those who lost their lives.
We live here in our town together with the hunchbacks at the borders of the empire. We have sufficient food, ammunition and weapons, and our destiny is clear, as cannot be otherwise at the edge of a mighty empire: with constant ordeals and battles ignored by historians, with swords that became scimitars, and with a young moon above the highest tower of our invincible town.
Whenever the town is besieged, we withdraw within its thick walls and burn the bridges. We take our horses and cattle into the stables filled with hay. The river is then a boundary that erases the borders of the two empires, and we remain among ourselves on the island in the middle of the Una.
People are like birds – susceptible to the wind that brings varying voices. The main thing is for us to be calm and collected. An astrologer taught us to gaze into the sky, search for constellations and give them names to help us while away the long hours on nightly guard duty when only the river can be heard, and the cascades imitate the boats of a ghostly enemy. But that is only a trick of the senses we have long got used to. Fine snow falls on the satin roofs, and winter resembles a mausoleum.
Then I think how it would be to jump from roof to roof, light and elusive like the water sprite that comes out from below the Kožara cataract on those nights when there is a lunar eclipse that frightens the livestock.
The constellations have interesting names, which we pronounce in at least two languages. During sieges, our hunchbacks withdraw with us behind the walls. No one mentions their stench and no one shuns their bewitching eyes. The hunchbacks know the tunnels through the rocks of the island that lead to fresh water and even better fishing. But that is not why they are now treated as equal members of our society. It is because of the war, and because we believe in our dead and like to think we will not become like them. It is because we are blood relations, and blood ties are respected in wartime. If we live out the siege, the hunchbacks return to their caves and are banned from the daylight once again. They are allowed to walk the town from midnight through till the crack of dawn. None of us have become sufficiently acquainted with their logic, even though the better educated among us speak at least two languages and can read three alphabets. The hunchbacks are a sin we dare not admit; I do not know if they think the same about us. Do they hate us or secretly admire us? Here on this river island, at the border of two empires, with armour that is closer to us than God... I will soon be dead, and my mind will be broken...
All this was written in old vernacular Bosnian on a tufa slab that I, Hasan the diver, brought up from below the Kožara cataract in the summer of 1999. The words, in cursive Cyrillic script, looked as if they’d been engraved with a dagger or sharp sabre, although that would hardly have been possible. Who could have thought that such frightful battles took place in and around our Old Town? As if for proof, I, Hasan brought up an Austro-Hungarian sabre from the riverbed. Its sheath was well on its way to becoming tufa, but when he pulled out the sabre, it blinded us with unimpaired radiance. Its wooden grip had decayed, but the silver wire that had been wound around it was whole. We were all afraid, standing exposed on the grass in our swimming trunks, when Hasan started to brandish that sabre.
Tonnes of water and sand overlie the fatal din of ancient battles. Fish live between the surface and the riverbed as if in a giant, God-given aquarium. Books are mute – they confirm nothing and are unable to revive the past. Plants cover the two prominent towers of the Old Town and the Una is beautiful and stubbornly silent, supporting the old assumption voiced by Borges long ago: that official history is just another offshoot of blossoming fantasy. The testimony of one anonymous person is more valuable than the coldness of encyclopaedias.
Diving into the Mirror
The time of vibrant, disquieting pleasure begins. Summertime, when the sun’s rays – the arms of a deity that accepts us, drawing us to its immortal, nuclear heart – will scorch us all over so we become as coppery dark as American Indians in Western films. It’s the time for swimming, which begins around the First of May, because that holiday will be celebrated by the banks of the river, and the boldest and most inebriated are sure to throw themselves into the water and be baptized in the cold, clearing their minds and cleansing their tired, workers’ souls. Meanwhile we children will hide in the secluded curves of the river, strip down to our white underpants, and enter the water with a shudder and slight fear of the cold, until the river turns our lips blue and our thumbs freeze from the pleasant cold of the greenholes and mighty cataracts.
Swimming is something people hanker for all through the autumn and winter, too. No one talks about it when it’s snowing or raining and people’s steps are sodden with the weight of uncertainty, but the desire is buried deep in our hearts and, like the bud of the quince tree, is just waiting to blaze up in an irresistible onrush of happiness and physical pleasure. It’s about affirming that fine germ of life, which nothing can snuff out because summer has come, which is our time of year. Then people avoid work because the sun makes our bodies lazy, allowing our muscles energy only when we swim and dive down to watch the sand at the bottom as it swirls in the deep currents. Then you really can grab fish with your bare hands, except that as they are protected by a layer of mucus, they soon slip away, and bolt into the opaque, green veils of the river. It’s hard in the summer to wait for the sun to come out and traverse its path to the zenith, so sometimes we meet at the river bank at nine in the morning and talk about the water, waiting for the sun to give us a secret sign that swimming can begin. Before that solar wink, we keep checking the water with our fingers and hands, comparing its temperature to yesterday’s, and we always conclude that it’s even warmer and more beautiful than the day before. When the first body finally jumps in, all things from dry land are forgotten. No one remembers the dusty streets of the town any more, nor the sweltering heat that turns the asphalt to plasticine, which can be sculpted by our feet. Worldly problems vanish as soon as you plunge into the water and set your eyes on the tranquillity of the riverbed covered with sand and waterweed; which exist as if nothing in the outside world is of interest to them. They exist only for themselves and the fish that will search for tiny crayfish and tender larvae there. The Una, that fluid, flowing oblivion, prepares us a long-awaited pageant.
Perhaps we really are reborn every time we dive into the water. We return to primordial caves adorned with seaweed; our memory returns there. Perhaps our cells remember their former shapes before the scales fell from our skin and we finally began crawling through the shallows towards the terrible dry land. Swimming was then another word for resurrection and new life. Oh, how we used to pity towns and cities that weren’t lapped by waves of holy water because every body of water is sacred and magic, even a narrow stream that makes its way through the underbrush of a nondescript paddock. Our rivers elevated us in our eyes and we felt we were chosen and special compared to all the deplorable towns deprived of a water source, or in comparison with those that bathed in turbid and dirty streams, whose riverbeds weren’t visible like this mirror of ours, into which we plunged every day that we swam. It’s hard to deny that life arose from the water. The bond with the life-giving force of nature that
we feel when we jump into the water is beyond comparison with other gifts of the earth. Entering the water and becoming one with it is that closeness that lovers throughout the ages have yearned for.
Green Threads
I awoke with a jolt from my hypnotic trance, without any apparent external stimulus. A tincture of darkness, private and personal, was in my eyes. Immediately I wandered off into the dark, away from the leather chair, and panic sealed my mouth like a black billiard ball. I staggered on like a sleepwalker, feeling in front of me with my hands for fear of falling or hitting my head. This couldn’t be sleepwalking because my mind was working flat out. Everywhere there were protrusions, holes and sharp objects. I expected to break a leg or get an eye poked out, but nothing of the kind happened. I came across a large puddle of sticky liquid. Adrenalin intoxicated me like backwoods hooch. My feet grew heavy and I plodded on like a defeated army. Who knows where I was, in what chronotope, because after some time in the dark hall I lost all sense of external time, and the space around me could have been a slavering maw. When I fell to my knees, my hands touched something soft very close to me. I recognized it at once: grass – fragrant and clean.
It’s matchless. Nothing else has such persistence, not even the rain, which is tangible on your hands like sands of bereavement from the sky. I watch it breathing beneath the snow, and its colour assures me then even more of the permanence of this world, however much the sacred books try to convince us of the opposite. Even though grass is the unruly hair of graves, that cannot lessen its worth in my eyes. On the contrary, I shall consider it even more terrible and unshakeable because I know that one day it will conquer the world, leading the other plants. In fact, it has ruled the world since its inception as the silent vanguard of the vegetable legions.
In the beginning there was a green cloud. Then the cloud – verbum caro factum est – took physical form and came down to Earth. That body divided by parthenogenesis into a multitude of tiny life forms that milled and thronged over the Earth’s crust. The age of grass is hard to establish. It existed long before trifling human things such as language and religion. Only with poetry, which is the ‘alpha and omega’, does grass enter people’s concept of immortality. But I know there has always been an equals sign between grass and poetry. The last poetry will be made with poorly articulated sounds from the last throat. Then the wind will take command of the acoustic world.
Grass gives the world its essence; something not even fire can destroy. I watch it sprout and break through the crust of charred soil. Ruined houses smoulder and smoke all around me, muffling the echo of explosions. At first it’s pale, later it becomes dark and serious in its persistence. The smell of burned earth has crowned it, and it ascends through the air in invisible ferry-boats. When I travel, I often want to stop and fondle the green hills. Just as a dandelion resembles a balmy sun to a two-horned insect that warms itself on its tender petals and feeds on its pollen – I, the traveller, am sustained by the colour of grass.
When my earthly term of office expires, I’ll become a hardy blade of it, one among a myriad. I’ll be plural and singular. Devoid of any elegy for the body or other fictional surrogates for sorrow, I’ll be simple like you. And those who can make do without pronouncing my name shall have my blessing, just as I was blessed as I lay in the grass that towered up to protect me, as I inhaled the pungent aroma of its mowed stems, setting off a sensual rush of blood to all my extremities under the exploding blue of the sky.
A two-pound roach jumped out of the river just below where I was lying on the high bank of the Krušnica, watching the sky, and made me sit up in a flash. Fish sometimes come flying out of the water like that when chased by a large marble trout or a pike.
The Krušnica is a peaceful river with remarkable, constantly flowering bullrushes, which used to spread down the banks and create the impression of a self-effacing archipelago. This was the favourite abode of pikes because they could easily melt into that tangle of bullrushes. A hiding pike there was like a tiger in a bamboo thicket. It may well have been one such lurking hunter that made the roach launch out onto the shore. The frightened fish soon returned, thrashing, to the cold water before my hands could grab it. The river drew clouds to itself with the strength of a magnet. The first drops of rain allayed the shuddering tension that spread through nature like an electric shock. The fish fled into the depths to continue their struggle for survival. And an impression of my body would remain at the place where I lay.
When at long last, God be praised, I came crawling out of that theatrical imitation of dry scrub, blundering through tufts of real grass, I saw a luminous object moving in the fakir’s hand. I managed to find my chair again. His eyes were grey and cold, and his mien as clear as mud. I reached under the chair to check if my bottle of beer was still there, then I ran a finger along the red scar on my face. I trusted the fakir, although it had looked for moment as if he had forsaken me. Unlike most neuropsychiatrists, the fakir didn’t view me as a helpless endemic species that had to be saved from extinction by stuffing it full of pills, whose trade names were reminiscent of distant stellar nebulae. I didn’t want to float in An-Silan 3 and Indosin Balthazar like an insentient asteroid. Before the phase of relaxation and induction into deep hypnotic trance, I had forced myself to memorize a sentence: ‘Through the cracks in the wooden door I saw dirty snow that the sirocco had shaped like a board for a coffin.’ In my dream, I quickly set sail in an open stone coffin. A slow film of translucent water flowed beneath me, and the smiling faces of dead comrades were laid out in long rows at the bottom.
Watermark
Someone should make an inventory of the winds that constantly whistle over the water. They should list and describe all the river’s different mists and fogs, for morning above the water is not the same as that above a freshly ploughed field. They should painstakingly record all the nuances of the river’s dawn ordained by the accurate hand of a secret earthly chronometer and the inclination of the astral plane. What isn’t put into words doesn’t exist. To liken the crispness of the morning air I inhale through the window of my Grandmother’s house to salutary mountain air would be to the detriment of the latter. This air has a special spice to it, a taste that can take you back to the age before the invention of the chariot. That aroma of freedom rising from the waterweed is erotic and intoxicating because it contains elixirs of eternal youth – an alchemy that cannot be fully described because it is never-ending like tufa, the stone that the tiny tufa-makers have built their stems and hearts into for tens of thousands of years.
The town can look like a freshwater Venice in the summertime with a mass of boats plying the river’s by-channels and passing beneath bridges large and small. Adults and children sit and lie in those boats, chatting or silently gazing at their faces in the glass surface of the Una, until a roach or sneep jumps out of the water and returns with a big splash, leaving concentric circles on the surface that rush to be levelled out by touching the green banks. When you boat over the crystal-clear water and look down at the sandy bottom, you see an unreal sight, as if there was no water at all, or sand, or fish, and your boat is just gliding through time and space, detached from familiar earthly dimensions.
The human body in water hardly ever has the same martial aura as on land. Although your muscles glisten, wet with droplets, the cult of the body has only one purpose there: to strive against the river when swimming towards the foaming cascades so as to realize the full beauty of the water’s power, and for a moment for it to become part of your muscles.
Someone should make a catalogue of all the cascades, rocky beds, deeps, shallows, greenholes and calm spots in the Una. They should give them names that will sound supernatural, but even that would not be enough for us to grasp the full sense of the Una’s currents. As Joseph Brodsky writes in Watermark, ‘There is something primordial about travelling on water, even for short distances.’
The River Bank in Winter
It’s winter and the water has risen a
s high as the earthen steps in the flat section of my Grandmother’s courtyard. I dug those steps with a spade to make it easier to get to our small landing-pier because the bank is rather steep. Plum trees grow at the edge of the bank, which crumbles underfoot; the elder bush is self-seeded, and a little higher, up against the porch with the pump, there grows a solitary Scots pine, like in Catholic courtyards. Being so close to the house, it is always in the lee and gets little sun, so its needles are pale, in places almost yellowish, and it seems to be made of mist and the melancholy of the north.
Rickety fences now appear out of the water that has deposited yellow sand on the grass under the quince tree. The surface of the water is restless because the channel has become too narrow. Waves collide and spill into my Grandmother’s courtyard. The water is so close that it beckons you to dip your hands into it.
Getting to the water here meant going all the way through the centre of town, running the gauntlet of people’s goggling eyes. Eyes are just skilfully camouflaged in tense human bodies, pressed in like buttons, and those people hung out of shops, windows and cafés. I walked along, reeling off standard greetings to fellow townsfolk – ‘Hello, Hi there, How are you?’ – a small sacrifice compared to what came later. How could anyone like those gawkers? Blessed are the moles, for they’re almost blind and don’t peer anywhere. Moles are therefore much dearer to me than are most people.
