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 lower jaw, it bit me and bloodied the back of my hand. The pike’s head was twice the size of my fist. Frightened and in pain, I hit it several times on the head, which was stupid because a pike’s gill covers are sharp too. We returned home at dusk with the big fish, happy despite the fact that I was bloody, wet and hungry. The moon shone through the branches above the river, blessing the richness and crystal clarity of the water. The whirr of ducks’ wings furrowed the air full of the river’s aromas. I had to go to sleep and wait for daybreak, and in the morning I would immediately spread the story of my amazing catch in the greenhole near the Bulgie’s.
Prince of the Una, Dragons and Reconstruction
‘The leaves have fallen and now float dead and heavy down the Unadžik,’ I wrote with the terseness of a chronicler. I reread my words, observed the natural world and recorded the changing micro-structures of the river bank, the water and trees, when the roaring rainy backdrop of autumn gave way to the tranquillity of winter. Sometimes I headed off downstream from Grandmother Emina’s house for no particular reason, just to check how things were. First, I would stop at our greenhole and look till I found the grayling; further down, in the shallow water, trout would be waiting; then there came a cascade, below which was another greenhole, where there were troutlet; then there came a stretch with a sand-and-tufa bed, where chub kept watch at Mita’s house; further downstream the fish community was mixed; and just before the bridge young barbel with their golden bellies were in the majority, always clinging to the pebbles at the bottom. I was able to recognize and distinguish different fish by their traits. The appearance of a new fish in the aquatic realm of the Unadžik would heighten my passion of observation or, if you prefer, my obsession with fish, which required no logical explanation.
Wet and sodden leaves eventually sink to the bottom of the water like decomposed fish and become part of the river. The water loses its green-blue colour and turns icily transparent, heralding the long, cold winter. The whitefish withdraw from the Unadžik into deeper arms of the river, while trout, troutlet and grayling remain. Flies no longer fall on the surface, and the grayling now take only bread and the small crayfish from the bullrushes. The trout and troutlet patrol the water in search of small fry and become hungry and savage. Fishing for troutlet is prohibited during the winter and through until May. ‘Troutlet’ is our name for juvenile marble trout and they’re protected up to a length of 80 cm, although hardly anyone abides by the regulation. The troutlet is a long, fast silver-white fish with occasional black spots along its back and sides. Its belly is as white as snow and its tough head is somewhat darker. It’s one of the most voracious fish and attacks anything that moves in the water. Only the pike is more ravenous and has been known to snatch a full-grown duck, as well as feeding on frogs and goosanders – river birds that dive for small fish. Troutlet have a large white gullet, and in the late autumn and winter it’s easy to catch them with a nickel spoon lure or a female butterfly with a fluorescent sticker that shimmers enticingly when pulled through the water. True anglers consider it a sin to go after troutlet at that time because they’re blinded with hunger and attack every lure indiscriminately, but also particularly because troutlet are only a transitional stage in the development of the queen of the deep cascades, the Una marble trout, which can reach a weight of twenty-five kilograms. Several times I saw one of about ten kilograms, and I didn’t want to meet a really big one in the summer, eye to eye, when swimming in the deepest greenholes made by powerful, foaming cascades.
The troutlet is the prince of the Una and its hunting activity marks the beginning of winter, which sheathes the river banks in ice and snow. Then the river is more beautiful than ever because it’s decorated like a Christmas tree. The banks are coated with ice crystals of different shapes that cover the willow branches and bend them to the surface of the water. The water melts the ice during the day and the branches, whose bark has taken on a reddish, wintery colour, briefly come alive, but only till dusk, when the cold claps them in chains again. Once so much snow fell on the trees on the bank opposite my grandmother’s house that the bank looked like one long dune of snow. They say the Unadžik only completely froze over once, sometime in the 1930s, and that it then resembled
