Quiet Flows the Una. Faruk Šehić

caught them and crammed them into fogged-up jars because they were a supreme delicacy for big chub.

      The cloudburst ended abruptly, creating rainbow arcs in the rain-washed blue. The air had a savoury bitterness from the respiration of the plants. I watched them grow before my eyes. The first swathe of mowed grass smelt of lust: the aroma of orgasm and the vampire kiss of decay. And so I matured, hot and cold, together with the plants, and in my thoughts I wrote these lines:

      The river is besieged by rain

      An astonished mariner sinks beneath the tufa

      The spirit of a mole-cricket whispers in his ear:

      Melancholy is what defines us.

      No Resurrection, no Death

      Contempt wasn’t strong enough a word. The boy had done nothing to me, but I couldn’t stand him. His appearance was irritating – perhaps he was good at heart, but you couldn’t see it from the outside. That freak with the ungainly head too big for his body was one of the male scions of the Hodžić dynasty, which lived in the suburb of Žitarnica in a pedantically whitewashed house that radiated orderliness and a smell of modesty. Balloon-head Dino had a misshapen noggin like one of those plastic footballs you could buy for just a few coins at the Yugoplastika shop. That head was welded to a skinny torso with stalky little legs, and his arms were like insects’ feelers. Flawed as he was, he didn’t elicit any sympathy because of the malevolence you sometimes saw on his face. He didn’t partake of any children’s games and was quiet and withdrawn, probably because of the puritanical discipline instituted in their house by old Asim, the redeemer of pigeons, which he loved more than all other beings.

      Grandfather Asim was the silver-haired head of the family who went out into the glazed-cement courtyard every morning with handfuls of breadcrumbs for the pigeons. He always called out Vitiviti, vitiviti to attract them, and the pigeons flew down devotedly like celestial dogs from the clean roofs to land on his head, shoulders and the arms he held out horizontally as if he was their Jesus. Soon he would be completely covered in them and the sun’s light would refract on their neck feathers in a purple haze. When he walked, the pigeons didn’t flee before him but balanced with their wings outspread to accord him their esteem. Their elated cooing filled the air of Žitarnica beneath the rocky slope of Hum Hill, that sacred mount of our childhood topography. A public toilet was built into the rock wall. It was a concrete bunker overgrown with ivy, a green-brown living thing with ivy veins and capillaries, where bubbles of ammonia welled from the earth and piles of faeces grew between the luscious green leaves. All this could mean only one thing: that drunks and lovers met here – those oblivious to the divine smells of human waste. Rows of prefab garages for the residents of nearby flats stood in front of the toilet, and next to them there rose an angular substation tower.

      The old man’s everyday bird-feeding helped him gather currency for the interstellar fuel he would need to reach heaven and be among the houris – the celestial beauties. He was so old that his skin resembled pure, fine cotton, in places transparent and pink. And his body, which looked like it was about to overcome gravity at any moment, was evocative of a time when people mixed with the cherubim, and it was as light as a feather from an angel’s wing.

      One morning I came out of Grandma Delva’s house, sat on the steps and looked at the Mediterranean plants in flowerpots that she visited with ice-cold water at six o’clock every morning before the sun established its rule. The lemongrass gave off a strong scent, and beyond the concrete of the courtyard there grew long stalks similar to bamboo, which were hollow on the inside, but their green skin was strong and wouldn’t break when you pressed it.

      Through the wall of bamboo I saw Balloon-head moseying around the substation where there was a rusty barrel full to the brim with pondweed.

      Drawn by curiosity, I ran up to him. The creep had thrown in several kittens, which were slowly drowning in the murky green water. I felt a pressure in my head like a black rod, and I punched him in his weedy stomach and drove him away. I pulled the kittens out and laid them on the grass. They looked so skinny with their fur plastered, wet and gleaming, having been licked by tongues of death. I moved them closer to the dense grass at the wall of the substation, hoping their mother would find them and revive them with her warm breath. But there was only earth beneath my feet as I stood dumbfounded above their little bodies, which lay there half-dead, with their eyes wide open.

      I half-closed my eyes in despair and wanted to see old Asim, the redeemer of pigeons, revive the kittens, levitate to the top of Hum in rage and hurl bolts of lightning. He would howl old-Slavic prayers in a terrible voice and summon black crows from the clouds to punish all human evil. But that wouldn’t be enough to return the kittens from the dead. Here, whoever dies is dead forever. Kittens go to heaven too, with their fur a-bristle.

      Only old Asim refused to die, lying in his astronautically white room. In the hour of his death he became white as if covered by the first hoar frosts of winter. His pupils were snow-white heads of tailor’s pins. He changed into a cotton jellyfish beneath the sheet and whisked out the window, loosening and tightening his cape-like body several times as jellyfish do. Only briefly did he hang in the air above the tumult of the streets before disappearing, escorted by a flock of white doves – far away from clay and worms, far away from cats and people.

      Catching a Fish

      ‘The Bulgie!’

      That shout had an almost shamanic weight to it. ‘The Bulgie’ was an old woman who lived in a run-down Austro-Hungarian villa on the very bank of the Unadžik, where the river had made a particularly deep greenhole, and then flowed frothing through a narrow, stony channel beneath a wooden bridge and the old abattoir. The Bulgie lived alone in that big house, whose façade was crumbling due to the damp. There were orchards with long, swaying grass around her house, and we used to run through them, tearing bedewed cobwebs in our search for ripe apples. The old woman’s nickname came from her late husband, who was allegedly Bulgarian, and the opaque greenhole just a few metres from her house was also known by that nickname.

      ‘Bulgie’s greenhole’ was home to pike, chub, grayling, barbel, troutlet and adult trout. Willow branches on the opposite bank leaned over the water and lightly caressed the surface. Very large trout lurked there and would launch out at floating flies. The pikes were to be found closer to our bank, where they waited for the swarms of young fish. The bottom was sandy and silty from decayed leaves and wood. If you waded out into the silt, columns of air bubbles and the black ink of fossilized wood rose towards the surface. And everywhere there were calf’s skulls, shoulder blades and other bones that the butchers dumped into the river from the wooden bridge. Inside the skulls that had almost become part of the tufa we used to find fat yellow maggots. They hid in cases made of sand and fragments of wood. First you take the maggot by the feelers on its brown head and pull it out of its case. When you take it out, it writhes like a new-born baby, and tries to wriggle out of your hand. We would put them in yoghurt containers or jars filled with water so they would stay fresh and alive. Then they were hooked, usually through the head, because if the maggot’s body was punctured it oozed an ichor and puffed up like balloon. The yellow maggots were worth their weight in gold to anglers, and only passionate connoisseurs of the river knew where to find them. That maggot was the larva in the life cycle of an insect from the order of caddisflies (Lat. Trichoptera). We also called them ‘water blossoms’ or ephemeral mayflies because when they turned into winged adults after a year or two as larvae underwater, struggled free and made their hazardous way to the surface, they only lived for one more day.

      Once my friend Sead and I caught an enormous pike near the Bulgie’s. We cast and cast for hours, skilfully drawing metal lures through the water. It took Sead’s spoon lure, and after a short fight he pulled a two-kilogram pike up onto the sandy bank, where I was hopping about with joy. How exciting is it when you see a fish open its white jaws and take the bait. The creature flashes in the water and turns its silver belly towards the surface. Afterwards it tries to get the lure out of its mouth by vigorously shaking its head from side to side, beautiful in its bewilderment. The rod bends from its weight like the letter omega. As I was trying to remove the three-headed hook from the pike’s