Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Quiet Flows the Una

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

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

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