is used to induce hypnosis. The white-bearded fakir stood in the bright circle of the spotlight on the stage, as straight as a candle. His eyes were grey and cold, his mien as clear as mud. When he had finished the countdown induction, he told me in broken Bosnian:
‘Now you returning to your own past, your childhood... Your head is clear and cold. How old are you?’
‘Thirteen,’ I told him.
‘You are sure?’
‘Yes, I’m thirteen and I’ve just left the house to go fishing. I’m wearing gumboots, and I have a fishing rod and an angler’s rucksack. The bullrushes smell of fish mucus. There are so many fish that you never tire of watching them. It’s like the feeling of a miser fondling his gold – he can’t get enough of it. I check the bubble float, which has to be half full of water, and I grease the artificial flies so they will stay on the surface. I cast all the way to the opposite bank and the bubble float lands on the soft, sandy shore covered with waterweed. It looks as if I’ve laid the float on a green pillow. Now I gently pull the line and the bubble float into the water because a prize trout is waiting just a metre or two downstream. It’s a good 30 cm long, 24 cm being average. I have a hunch that this is going to be a long fight. I use the tip of the rod to unfurl the fishing line with the flies tied to it, and I give the last one a tweak so it goes right over the mouth of the big fish. I watch the fly breathlessly; the fish shoots up towards the surface, misses the fly and makes a big bubble in the water. The handhold of the rod is at my right hip and I immediately jerk it back like a gunslinger, and the float with the flies travels all the way back into the grass at my feet. It happened so quickly that I only saw the trout’s white underside as its mouth snapped at the fly. I have to calm down, cast towards the green pillow again, and do everything from scratch once more. I’m so excited that I don’t notice the people higher up on the bank kibitzing me and the fish...’
The artificial mist swallowed me at ant speed. I fell through time as though through pliant peat. As I sank through sparkling blackness and the pink light of silt, I caught a glimpse of houses growing out of the ground beneath my feet, and then spirals snaked up from their chimneys – a signal that life would put down roots by the River Una. The trees in the town’s park were slim at the waist, and the town itself was brand new. I don’t know who grew closer to whom, I to the town or it to me, but wherever I looked the town was there, within my grasp. I could change the years and decades, as I liked. I saw Grandmother Emina’s house and knew I had to stop. The journey begins here and will be rounded off here, too, because this journey never ends. The mist enveloped me from feet to neck, stopping at the height of my polo neck. I’ll tell everything – even what the fakir doesn’t ask me.
Mariners of the Green Army
There was a flash in the air, a festive explosion, and the circus of nature would announce pollen in the flowers and the triumph of green in the town’s park. An incurable spring mood took possession of every thought and every tuft of grass, upsetting the schedules of airborne insects, which collided in the aerial avenues. There was drunkenness in the earth and the air that announced the birth of something splendid. Spring is that miracle that materializes like fireworks in the sky, when the shapeliness of every girl and woman is hormonally magnetic and that little Krakatoa in your trousers is primed to erupt.
I would pinch myself to make sure of my own mortality because we’re made in the image of God, and for a moment I thought I was becoming ethereal with bliss.
Spring was that carnival that would bring the whole world to the brink of travesty. In the blink of an eye, a grey winter wasteland would become green Atlantic grass that we could sail through if only we were able to shrink to the size of an ant or a merry grasshopper. And that was very hard in a world ruled by adults, who tried to make us be like them in every way possible – frowning, moustachioed men who performed important tasks for the existence of our great and powerful State. But I didn’t want a moustache and wasn’t in a hurry to grow up.
I believed in the red of my Pioneer scarf. And in the blood of all earthly proletarians, who would close ranks in their dim, underground factories, thirsting for world revolution, when Marx, Engels and Lenin would raise them from the dead. Later it would just take Karlo Štajner’s anti-Gulag classic 7000 Days in Siberia for me to strike communism from the list of beloved, sacred ‘isms’ in my high-school diary, albeit it in pencil and with a wavering hand. In the language of the Party, I had had become a revisionist; I was like Rosa Luxemburg, whom we hated because she had abandoned the true current of the revolution and become a vile agent of imperialism – at least that’s the way it was served to us in the Marxist textbooks.
Everything had to be in the service of our powerful State, the fourth-largest military force in the world, whose wings of steel we were more than proud of. Even our town’s park boasted small patriotic trees (more like bushes) planted with geometrical precision to form a socialist star in leaf. This large, foliate star was home to the nests of robin redbreasts, that working class contingent among the birds – a Red Army of uniform appearance that was far from possessing any talent in song but composed an industrious and obedient youth wing that forever wove its grey, hanging houses in those bushy trees, whose berries had a reddish juice with a bitter taste.
Still, robins were sweet-feathered creatures that always chirped and worked tirelessly to further their small, socio-political communities, creating a secure avian commune that functioned according to the principle from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. That really was a classless society because all its members had equal rights like in the hyperborean land of Sweden.
‘Just you try walking on the grass!’ Kosta the park warden would roar in his grey-green uniform and huge Russian fur hat, whose circle of shade could shelter a family with ten or more children.
‘Even the grass will be red if the Central Committee so decides,’ Kosta tried to scare us, invoking the grand masonic lodge that ran our great and powerful State – and all just because we loved to walk on the grass and pick the daisies and star-shaped dandelions. I was more afraid of his fur hat than his bony features, his face with broad cheekbones and ill-tempered, grey gimlet eyes that sent a glare instead of a greeting when he was officially cross. The total power of the State could be seen in the fact that even its lowest echelon, Kosta the park warden, was perfectly intimidating.
We avoided him like the plague, and we would wait for him to go down the road into town reciting the Party slogans he had learned by heart, which could even make the bark of the robinias seem smooth and soft. Then we would dash to the wild and irrepressible bushes with sturdy rods sprouting yellow petals all along their length; we called them magelana, but later I discovered they were forsythia. These were our boats, which we named after the famous Portuguese seafarer Ferdinand Magellan.
Every magelana could fit two sailors and a captain. Our magelanas grew close together, so we could see and call to each other on our imaginary journeys. It was best when a warm spring breeze came up, and then it was like a gale that strained at the ropes of our ships and rocked us on the branches like mariners fighting against a raging sea. Everything started to spin around us – the grass, the trees, the gravel on the paths and the houses nearby. That was the moment when we were freed of gravity. The Earth turned and the world hung above us, but we gave resolute orders and bravely put out into the wide sea of the sky. We sailed without fear, with our hearts as astrolabe and compass.
Look, this is where that marvellous tree used to be, whose trunk was completely covered in ivy, so it was easy to climb up its tough veins into the crown, where you really couldn’t tell which leaves were the tree’s and which belonged to the velvety creeper. I would climb up into that crown, to where it was quiet and peaceful inside. The darkness there was my ally, while the main thoroughfare of Marshal Tito Street ran below it, full of comings and goings: people, cars, horse-drawn carts, ambulances, stooped
