places you could see a wood stove or a rusty washing machine, worn-out chestnut pans or old car parts at the bottom of a greenhole – our word for deep, green pools in the river. The water was so transparent and clear that a coin could be seen several metres down, reflecting the dial of the sun.
Each house had its own sewage system, whose contents would come thundering out into the river through a concrete pipe. When the water level dropped in the summertime, those cast-concrete maws of mortar welded to the ground resembled lazing crocodiles that would periodically belch out faeces and the froth of washing-machine detergent. Grayling, barbel and chub would gather in those places to feed on what people had been unable to digest. Standing on those crocodile carcasses, anglers would cast sinkers and hooks with maggots, earthworms and bread. They used hand-crafted flies, coated with a special grease (to stop the feathered imitation from sinking) to lure and snag fine specimens of grayling, which they would pull up on to the bank together with the bubble float. The whopper would thrash about in a dense patch of stinging nettles, tangling up the thin line and all the other flies tied to the main line, which passed through the ceramic rings of the rod and ended in the shiny spool of a Shakespeare or D·A·M Quick reel.
Brown trout with red and black dots hovered solemnly and motionlessly in front of a rock or just above a slab of tufa, usually closer to the far bank, and would loudly launch themselves out of the river to swallow mayflies that fell into the water in the gloaming. Their leaps made shivering circles that would gradually disperse on the peaceful surface like smoke rings in the fug of a bachelor’s flat. With the coming of night, dragonflies would buzz above the Unadžik: blue-black males and greenish females – light river cavalry supported by a cacophony of owls, cuckoos and nightingales. The river sang a nocturne.
Autumn, the Moss-grown Horseman from the North
Every year at the end of August a weed with pale-blue flowers ran riot in my Grandmother’s courtyard that gently sloped down the sandy bank towards the river. I didn’t know their name, but I called them blue loners. They would bashfully start to flower in June, but August was their promised month.
The calf becomes sirloin steak and schnitzel at the butcher’s
The butcher has strong hands and ruddy cheeks
A charge through the grass with tin soldiers
Kinder Surprises produce Vikings of bronze.
Downstream, the blue loners were nourished by blood from the butcher’s shop in a basement, whose drainpipe came out in the middle of the bank; from there, the blood seeped calmly towards the water.
The houses held their never-ending vigil looking down on the river bank, while stands of corn watched over the river’s silence from the other side. People in their houses dreamed their civilian dreams about loans, working hours, football and fish. In the evenings, the ethereal fish would enter through the balcony doors and roam the whitewashed rooms, keeping watch over the Una’s people, pausing above the anglers’ foreheads and blessing them; those fish of air, clean and slender, with glittering tails, would enter people’s thoughts. True anglers catch fish because they have no other way of showing them their wonderment. Some of them even kiss the fish before putting them back in the water. Dawn will break the spell and the sun will take possession of the balcony. Dawn emerges from the Una, borne by the mists and vapours of the river. The intangible fish expire, people awake, and thus the circle is constant every night.
The petals of those blue flowers were separate from each another like Omar Sharif’s front teeth, so that they looked like propellers made of sky. Their colour was unreal amid the darkened, porous chlorophyll that reached its peak and then gently slid away towards the eddies of decay, before autumn tuned its instruments and struck up its symphony of dankness, rain and water vapour. It’s hard not to love humidity – the soul of the soil, and what we’re made of. I thought it impossible for such a shade of blue to exist in nature. I believed an invisible dyer went round at night and during the reign of the coppery mists and painted the flowers with diluted blue vitriol. A dragonfly with a human face; a harlequin of the earth with spikes of wheat in place of hair; a god of green and growing things, whom we would never see.
For me, plants were the world’s greatest secret, a proud aristocracy of chlorophyll that didn’t believe in life after death, and which, one day, when the hour came, would finally cover the whole world. They were a succulent essence, which you could only penetrate mechanically, leaving green juice all over your hands – the blood they didn’t care about and gave so amply because they were eternal and indestructible in their spring awakenings.
As the glossy green of the other weeds faded, the cornflower intensified its azure. The late glory of the cornflower heralded the death of the summer by the Una – the coming of chill morning mists and shivering dusks, and the fickle sun would only warm faintly at its height because as soon as a wind blew from the water it spent no more warmth.
Then autumn would descend like a horde of Huns down the Točile and Kolajevac hills, beneath which flowed the River Krušnica – six kilometres long and as cold as the Bering Sea. The vegetation had no chance before such an onslaught. Autumn made cascades of watercolour leaves flow through the forests on Točile Hill, and their murmur was pure melancholy. Autumn would enter our chests through the ether we inhaled, to be distilled into the purest emotion, which tightened our throats and moistened our eyes with boyish sorrow. Then I would begin to read books about magic kingdoms in preparation for the winter, and after that I would wait for the earth to cast off its snow so the yellow trumpets of primrose could again announce the turmoil and pleasures of spring:
May I introduce myself: I am the King of Leaves
I am the opposite of the moss-grown horseman
The grain beneath the snow will sense me
Wild geese bear me on their wings.
Growing with the Plants
A summer shower caught me behind the main grandstand of the FC Meteor stadium as I walked briskly along the gravel path to go swimming at Ajak, where an arm of the Una passed under a small bridge of creosoted railway sleepers to join the Krušnica. We used to swim in the greenhole in front of the bridge, while the central sleepers of the bridge were reserved for sunbathing. Further downstream the water was alive with chub and brown trout. Once I nearly drowned in that greenhole, and, strangely enough, that early brush with death only reinforced my love of the water.
Cumulonimbus clouds, swollen with moisture, drifted swiftly across the sky like in a speeded-up sequence of a documentary on the seething exuberance of the living world. I began to run as hot drops came down on me like big, mother’s tears. My sodden white T-shirt clung to my body. I jumped seething puddles, enjoying the crazy feeling of freedom that filled my chest and spread through my veins. I was a land-dwelling dolphin, a flying squirrel, a fiery flamingo pacing across mudflats that smelt pure and pristine.
That feeling of freedom blurred my reason and intoxicated me with the raindrops, and I stopped at every flower whose pollen the rain had smudged, stroked the broad leaves of a plantago, ran my finger down a blade of wild barley and gazed at the molehills evaporating the earth’s abundant warmth. What osmosis!
I thought I could fly with euphoria, like in a dream when I lift off in a sitting position, and simply wave my outstretched hands instead of wings and soon rise up above the ground. I float over the treetops and the roofs of familiar houses, always close to the ground, hoping for a soft landing the moment the enchantment wore off. Except that this now was a dream with my eyes open, a vision on a river island beneath a rainy sky. Not for a second could I see what was to come as I stared at the network of veins on
