Читать книгу Quiet Flows the Una - Faruk Šehić - Страница 8

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.