Quiet Flows the Una. Faruk Šehić

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      Watching the Fish

      I am an Earth-bound astronaut, and I travel without movement and goal. The atmosphere is my prison. If only I could roam the vacuum of outer space, albeit shut away in a wooden rocket with a porthole, I would perhaps say: ‘Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.’ What sweet dreams! I am an Earth-bound astronaut, and I travel at the speed of thought. I won’t live to see the picturesque vision of battle cruisers in flames at the edge of the constellation Orion – the film will have to do. Nor will I see the blond replicant played by Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner sitting at the top of a building, completely naked and with his legs crossed, saying his famous: ‘Time to die’, before closing his eyes and expiring in the incessant rain from the dark sky. I won’t break through the stratosphere, behind which no one knows where fiction ends and reality begins, and vice versa. All the SF films are happening up there in the universe right now.

      I have butterflies because it will soon be dawn.

      I make a pair of binoculars with my hands and watch the Evening Star, the last to leave its watch post. Summer is no time to die, some elderly people said yesterday as they gazed at the main current of the river from the wooden bridge. But the stars go out like souls leaving bodies – suddenly and quickly – I once read in a paperback with a dubious title. My reality is boring and a long way from fantasy; and, I don’t like realistic books.

      Instead, I muse that my heart beats in time with distant galaxies. For me, night isn’t a time when ghosts from a mass of former lives come out and stop you from sleeping. Night for me is a vacuum, a gap between the setting and the rising of the sun; a necessary evil. I wait for daybreak so as to slip out from under the heavy quilt in my grandmother’s house – it can be chilly even in June – because I can’t wait to slip on my Bermudas and espadrilles, climb the concrete stairs pot-holed by the rain, and come to the mossy abutment where orange-coloured slugs have left shiny trails of slime. I want to travel those rainbow highways with the pad of my finger and follow them all the way into the holes and cracks until my finger can go no further. That inability to enter small worlds, to creep inside the stem of a plantago leaf or the tightly closed bud of a white rose, would hound me in much more terrible times, too.

      The walls of my grandmother’s house are thick and warm because tufa stone from the riverbed has been built into them. A clock hangs on the wall above my head and its hand ticks haltingly across the unintelligible inscription Tempus Vulnera Curabit, and whenever I read those words I shrink like a boiled shirt.

      The slugs’ slimy bodies sometimes look darker: they’re red and brown in the cold lee cast by the long, three-storey buildings nearby; later they become a transparent yellow in the rays of the sun. It rises above the dew-wet tiles of the tallest house in the neighbourhood, which looks to me like a medieval castle that no one can come out of happy. The eyes of a boy follow me pleadingly from its windows. He’s my age but afflicted by premature ageing. The lines of his face show a haggard old man with the eyes of an innocent boy. He waves to me and smiles from a window that frames him like an icon.

      The spindly waifs without so much as a house on their backs emerge from cracks in to which fine fingers of moss grow. Their antennae timidly probe the morning air. Cold scalpels. When I touch them, they quickly retract and the slugs stop furrowing their sticky trenches. The sun will turn them into little roads in all the colours of the rainbow, spectral Golgothas, on which no one will be crucified.

      The softness of their bodies was shocking and stirring, so I loved and pitied them at the same time. I didn’t understand how a tender body could become a dry, lifeless remnant in the midday sun. Afterwards I would reluctantly realize that they, too, had their end like every other living thing.

      I got up and ran to see the slugs every morning until a myste­rious crime happened. Some pedant had peeled the moss from the retaining wall and covered up the cracks with mortar. Without a doubt, that killer of nature was an over-ambitious person, surly and morbidly industrious. Who was he? An old man who wanted to iron out every irregularity on the surface of the Earth? A carpenter obsessed with geometry, hated any gnarls and knobs in his wood – excrescences reminiscent of frozen stellar spirals? A mason with a bitter trowel in his heart horrified at the emptiness around us and condemned to furiously build and build? Who was that malefactor who strove to kill imagination?

      I mourned for the slugs for two days and soon forgot about them. I had to shrug off that bittersweet mourning and find something new. It was then that I discovered fish. They’re free and cannot be walled in because water is a realm of freedom. Fish are large, elegant submarines with scales that cast gentle reflections through the water and the air. Pike, faster than arrows, bask in the sun on the surface between the threads of swaying bullrushes, from where they shoot out towards their prey. I discovered whiskered barbel – bottom feeders, which anglers used to feed leftovers of roast lamb. Then there are roach and sneep – the grazing cows of the river. I discovered grayling – icthyo torpedoes that launched out of the water to swallow fluorescent-green flies with gluttonous repetition. Trout, the unchallenged masters of the cascades and rocky riverbeds. Some people can tell the future by reading coffee grounds, but I learned to watch the fish.

      Here at the beginning, it would make sense for me to go back to our origins: to the water we’re made of and the swirling currents of the underwater epic, where I’ll hearken to the anarchist trout and their fulsome chatter. You’ll find out later why the trout are anarchist. ‘Fulsome chatter’ is Rimbaud, I’ll be a hypnotized boat, and the rivers will carry me wherever I wish.