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Quiet Flows the Una
Although I know she’s dead,
that doesn’t disturb me at
all because I’m glad we’re
talking as we stroll through
the watery strata of sleep. It’s
as if we want to compensate
for all the words unspoken
during our lives, when I was a
boy and high-school student,
and Delva a vital sixty-year-
old with a white ‘Yugoslavia’
filter cigarette in the corner
of her mouth like one of the
Immortals. As soon as one
flagged, Grandma replaced
it with a fresh and rested
cigarette.
‘May thunder singe your
socks!’
‘Damn and deuce you!’
Ihearhercolourfulexpressions
that once resounded behind
the hedge, from the window
of the summer kitchen. Its
floor had an opening with
a wooden cover. When you
lifted it, cold and darkness
welled up from below. Rungs
met your feet when you went
down, blindly, into that cellar
with neatly stacked piles of
chopped firewood. It smelt
damp and musty – just like
I imagined it would in the
underground hideout of my
Partisan Grandfather and his
wife Delva, who came from
Mostar. I don’t know if this
will make sense, but there
was something very precise
and soothing to that smell:
if I breathed in deeply, I’d
be swept away to a dense
forest that smelt as if every
tree was the essence of their
underground world. The hard
hats of fungi that grewon trees
had the strongest smell, as did
the moist forks of branches.
The forest litter and humus
smelt of earthworms, whose