Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Faruk Šehić

after a summer shower. ‘She’s clear!’ they call out the old river greeting, and the extension rods protruding from the anglers’ rucksacks look like antennas. I leave my Grandmother’s house and go to sit on the sandy bank. Sometimes I’d like to be a boat of leaves that, like most of the Balkan rivers, ultimately joins the Black Sea. Although I’d never been in the body of a slug, I thought I could sense their sorrow as I sat there on the bank of the Unadžik and threw pebbles into the green water. But as soon as I caught sight of a sizeable grayling, my heart would begin to beat faster. At first I would just watch it for minutes, but then I would

of the kind there will be in paradise, until the nightingale proves with its song that it is truly the heart of the tree. The river is born again after the rain, and within half an hour the clay colour has gone and the Una returns to its old appearance. Plants that the shower bent to the ground straighten up and continue their eternal watch. When the sun, a god even stronger than Bynt, begins to beat down, the last traces of the rain will vanish and the droplets on the leaves will be spheres where rainbow children live. The first anglers’ caps have already passed along the street that faithfully follows the river. Wooden windows creak and people lean out to breathe the town’s loveliest smell – the aroma of the Una

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