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Quiet Flows the Una
river’s opaque green there,
grey-hued from overnight
rain, and only Sead saved me
from drowning. It was April,
and the water was high and
freezing cold. Fish could be
caught with angleworms.
After that near drowning,
mortality settled into me
like an old man into a freshly
whitewashed flat with a view
of the sea. My childhood
friend Sead survived the war
but was killed in an accident
like many other hardened
veterans in the first years of
peace.
I saw smoke from my
Grandmother’s house and
we went down the narrow
stairs next to the Harbašes’
house, where I loved to study
the slimy orange slugs on
the mossy wall in the early
mornings, before the world of
adults took on its contours of
earnest. Back then, the world
was created anew every
morning. Buildings fitted
together again at right angles,
roofs came down to land
on the houses, and double
windows returned from their
cosmic journeys full of frost
from having been at altitudes
of over ten thousand metres.
Willows, elders, alders and
aspens sprang up again every
morning on the banks of the
Unadžik. Točile and the other
hills rose up out of the ground
on the fine line between
night and day, taking up their
established
geographical
positions. At night, bed is
the only thing that’s not an
illusion, and if a person were
able to be awake and asleep
at the same time they would
see myriad people in their