Читать книгу Quiet Flows the Una - Faruk Šehić - Страница 7

The Water’s Republic

The Una and its banks were my refuge – an impenetrable fastness of green. Here I hid from people beneath the branches in leaf, alone in the silence, surrounded by greenery. All I could hear was my own heartbeat, the flutter of a fly’s wings and the splash when a fish threw itself out of the water and returned to it. It’s not that I hated people, I just felt better among plants and wild animals. When I entered the covert of the river, nothing bad could happen to me any more.

One of the Una’s branches, the Unadžik, flowed past my grand­mother’s slanting house that was slowly sinking into the deposits of sand and silt brought by the raging water in the forceful April floods. The riverbed was of tufa overgrown with waterweed. Mussels with mother-of-pearl mirrors stuck out of its fine yellow sand, and lively eels wriggled. Where the bed was covered with stone, we used to catch bullheads using forks tied with wire to dead branches, and we would put our catch in large jars so we could watch them and marvel at their slippery bodies.

In 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.