Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Milorad Pejić

SALMON

Mighty is nature for it has endowed the salmon with a memory for a million years to return to die in its first water, on its native bottom. When it feels the time has come - it has come: it leaves everything, setting out from the distant oceans and moving like a compass needle in the imagined direction. Come fall, it’s already climbing up the Ångerman River, smacking its tail on fallen birch leaves in the shallows like a wild stallion swatting flies. Blind is the all-seeing hand that in our time has erected the hydropower plant so salmon, which keep arriving as punctually as registered mail, strike the dam, kamikaze style. Under the oil of moonlight, they swarm the unyielding gate until the first snows and, enervated at last, spawn there outside the walls. Water then bathes and sweeps away the bodies as if nothing had happened. Oblivious is nature for it has not taken away from God’s fish of the Ångerman the memory of home, so they keep on striking the concrete and assailing the unknown.

244