Quiet Flows the Una. Faruk Šehić

and then suddenly lifts you up with the thrust of a rocket. When it lifts you like that you think you’re on top of the world. I turned living bodies into apparitions like moths in the night. I am a poet and a warrior, and secretly a Sufi monk in my soul. A holy man, according to Baudelaire. I killed on battlefields those with forgotten and insignificant names, in all climatic conditions: when wet snow is falling, blood is red like in the film Doctor Zhivago, and one drop of blood and a little snow are enough to be able to draw a daisy with your finger.

      Sometimes I asked myself why? What is the sense of killing? Now I know the answer, and I couldn’t care less. I don’t have any pangs of conscience because of the men I now imagine as ghostly portraits on photographs, where the heads have been cut out with scissors. Before long, they will depart my memory for the darkness. I never saw Pope Wojtyła anywhere in the combat zone, although the lichen on the trees resembled the colour of the spots on the back of his hands. In war, everything is so simple and clear. Except when blood gets under your fingernails – it’s hard to wash off when it sets, and then you can’t get it off for days.

      I killed because I wanted to survive the chaos. I didn’t know how else to do it, and my pride didn’t allow me to spend the war in the units at the rear. There are those who did it differently to me: those who prayed to God that they might get hit, that they might be killed because they were full of life and strength, and that was what oppressed them – the fear they would stay alive with so much terrible energy in them. They didn’t know what to do with it. That’s what made them charge with eyes open and a pure heart, unafraid of where they were going. They had to charge because such was the life in them: stupendous and greater than death. But I was calm and knew what I was doing. I never got drunk or stoned at the front line I was always focused. That’s why I’m able to tell you this now. Dead mouths don’t talk, as you know. I’m not unfeeling, in case you think that, just honest. I’m a bit like a Nazi: I like to listen to Bach played with a Stihl chainsaw. Black & Decker isn’t bad either.

      Three

      The forests were turquoise and the trees swayed gently from side to side like the arms of a sea anemone. That was the scene in the distance, on the edge of the horizon, as seen through the fogged-up windowpane, a rainbow filter, because I was exercising my imagination. The trees were actually bare and ash grey, covered with lichen and the occasional ball of mistletoe, whose green had no connection at all with the general dearth of chlorophyll in nature and in people’s souls. Colours were infiltrated agents of the Western world; they smacked of luxury and opulence and as such had to be banished from our lives. On this side of the windowpane I was the lord of indoor reality. Outside in the streets, other stories applied. Beneath my balcony lay a town that I still couldn’t feel was my own – I was too young for that kind of love – a soft town like warm vomit in the sun. For me back then, the State was like a distant sphere from the Atlas of Celestial Bodies. Later I became very fond of it, despite the supernatural effort being made to conceal all the differences between us with the tall tale of us all being brothers and sisters, and about everything in Yugoslavia being the best, while misery, squalor and debauchery flourished in both the East and the West. What a twangy word: debauchery. I felt like a stranger in my own town when I realized we weren’t all brothers and sisters – not because I didn’t want us to be – but because there was no good will among most of the local Serbs and Croats. Not to mention the ridiculous situation when I did my compulsory military service in the ‘Yugoslav People’s Army’ and had to state my ethnicity: since I came from a Bosniak family, the Serbs and Croats tried to persuade me to write ‘Bosnian Muslim’ because Yugoslavs didn’t really exist, they said. Yes, I lived an identity that was marginal in the very country named after it. The biggest shock for me was when I discovered that the number of people who identified themselves as Yugoslavs was statistically tiny. When I finished school and went off to do my military service, my mother advised me to declare myself a Yugoslav because she thought the other recruits would laugh at me if I said I was a Muslim. Both her suggestion and that of my comrades were beside the point because I was enamoured of the Spanish Civil War. I regretted not being able to return by time machine to Spain and die fighting for freedom. Only there, in that short period, did my nation exist.

      ‘Who leads our struggle?’ yelled the tired voice beneath my balcony that was heading a column of young people on their way back from a communal work project. Like when a diver brings up a dead body from the raging river on a length of cable, so the foremost voice pulled along all the others.

      ‘Tiii-to!’ reverberated from a hundred throats.

      ‘What are we part of?’

      ‘The Peeeo-ple!’

      ‘What guides and bonds us?’

      ‘The Paaar-ty!’

      I recognized the faces in the first few rows. They had the look of automatons and were drooling for a big serve of army-style bean stew from the field kitchen. That was what the lofty ideal of ongoing revolution boiled down to, it seemed. The voice ascended through the centre of town towards the hospital, to be drowned out by car horns and the yelling of public drunkards. A guy called Yup stood out among these: a paunchy, lumbering man who resembled a bun, and when he had no firewater he was like a greasy, ill-tempered rodent. Not so his father, Yup Senior, with his tiny, bird-like physique, gold signet ring and hair always slicked back the old-fashioned way with brilliantine: he pickled himself calmly and with class, as befits a baron of the bottle. The guy from the League of Young Communists shouting his questions, whose answers were as irrefutable as the existence of a second horn on a unicorn, had an indigo tear tattooed on his cheek – the ‘medal’ of the infamous Zenica House of Correction.

      Somewhere in this catalogue of disgust and attraction was the nasal sing-song of the blind Romany who used to stand with his creased face and matted black hair in the town marketplace every Monday of the late 1980s, amidst the masses that stank of sweat and fresh curd cheese.

      ‘Give me alms, good ladies, comrades, young folk...

      A small donation, may God giii-ve yoo-u heee-alth...

      May God proteee-ct your children...’

      This people’s Homer stood like a statue at the side of the street chanting his prayer, which reconciled communism and Islam. Early in the mornings, his family would take him there to beg and leave him to do his work. When the market was over, they would come and take him away again like a Sony robot with rusty works. Sometime before the war, Homer left for the south with the swallows. I could have sworn that for four years after that no one saw a single swallow.

      I couldn’t help feeling I was in the grips of a perverse fascination by being attracted to what disgusted me at the same time. It’s like when you look down from a balcony: you’re drawn to that drop, but you don’t take a casual step into thin air like the suicide jumper whose goal is the car park below. You’ve probably thought about your stomach while holding a long kitchen knife in your hand – well, it’s the same perverse fascination that takes hold of me whenever I think about life in former Yugoslavia and its break-up.

      Four

      You don’t get dizzy from watching the river flow. If you start talking about something you’ll soon lose the thread because the water takes hold of you and you forget the words you wanted to say, and Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode plays in your ears. We enjoyed watching the Una as it flowed now fast, now sluggishly, and its restless surface spread peace all about.

      We avoided our brigade’s anniversary event because we had no time for stuffy observances in the mood of the old system, which still hung over us like an undead spirit. The factory buildings on the outskirts of town were like that too, where people had already begun salvaging usable sheet metal. The carcasses of factories and Serbian houses were to be thoroughly pillaged and dismantled, down to the last brick. Who now remembers all those bizarre deaths of wretches who were crushed by the concrete ceilings of abandoned houses where they’d been chiselling bricks out of the walls? Beginning in September 1995, and continuing for some months, caravans of tractors, trucks and horse-drawn carts passed through the town loaded with plunder from villages in the Grmeč mountain range, heading for places some way away. The lust for other peoples’ property is a strange and widespread