The Pandemonium Diary
Photo: Faruk Šehić.
It’s good to have social media as these can serve as virtual diaries. You scroll through and come to learn that nothing ever changes, and that we’ll be perennially obsessed with bollocks. Our sweet little bollocks. And harbingers of the endtimes looming.Later, I listened to sad music. It was a band called Slowdive. One of their songs reminded me of apocalypse because it’s titled “Falling Snow,” and also because it snows grey in one of my stories, “Cortés, the Butcher,” which is supposed to be a metaphor for the end of the world. Two snows melded with the ashes from Buchenwald. The ashes from a crematorium.It was the first day of lockdown, too. They say that the world is never going to be the same after this. As if the world is a never-changing granite form of sorts. I was more interested in those inner cataclysms.
Photo: Faruk Šehić.
22
Sarajevo is desolate as if situated in a land of the last things. The lockdown affects minds and human hearts alike. Fear is creeping in everywhere, like a microorganism. Today’s the first day of curfew. At the moment, we’ve got two enemies: Our own state that is eager to imprison us and the aforementioned end of the world at a micro level.I’m going to be listening to sad songs to make sure I’m well-prepared for all things coming. I’m waiting for the grey snow to fall as soon as the sun reaches its zenith.23
Now covered in masks, women’s faces in the streets gain an additional trace of eros to them.
Photo: Faruk Šehić.
The entrance is from the underground garage tunnel. It isn’t busy at all. No one’s figured out this is the perfect spot for apocalyptic shopping. The shelves are full of various products. Everything is squeaky clean. The sales ladies and cashiers are wearing protective masks, visors, and latex gloves, as required. The customers are calm, wearing masks and gloves themselves. A slow, summer song is playing in the background. Everyone’s acting extremely normally, making the whole situation look utterly surreal.We’ve quickly adapted to a controlled abnormality. I saw no zombies in the supermarket. Toilet paper stalls were full.
Photo: Faruk Šehić.
A new sport appeared among the people: Counting the infected, recovered and deceased residents of the country. I can recall this sport being played during the war, even though it was an Olympic sport bringing us further down back then. We would play it in front of our radio sets, listening to a serious radio announcer from the national radio station. This is depicted in “Women’s War,” a story I especially wrote for the English edition of the book “Under Pressure.”Oftentimes, it happens that I’ve already written about something, so there’s no need for me to do it again.The sport of triple-column counting is to be continued. The goal is not to get to the end of the pandemic, but to strike a daily dose of fear in our own hearts, or wherever a person feels it.People love getting scared, that’s why they watch horror movies. However, it’s nasty when reality turns into a word horror film.
Photo: Faruk Šehić.
29
Went fishing in the river Krivaja. Caught six, released three. The moment I arrived at the riverbank, I took off my mask, immediately forgetting everything about the madness in Sarajevo.The redemptive power of fishing and gazing at the water, being surrounded by another kind of silence, different from the unnatural one found in an urban center, is such that I told myself what Leonard Cohen told himself just days before his death: “I am ready to die.”30
In a few months’ time, we’ll all be hippies.“Globetrotter” is a dead word.
Photo: Faruk Šehić.
The fish are about to spawn, they aren’t biting. Putting worms on the hook right under their noses, but they don’t give a toss. I can see the float moving twice. Giving it just a twitch, because I don’t like pulling the rod back violently when the fish bites. I caught a decent chub.At first, I can’t see if it’s a fish or a chub. I’m rooting for a fish. It’s satisfying to catch because it always fights, never giving up. It literally jumps out of dip nets, the ones with a metal bar you use to scoop fish out. It’s only newbies who land the catch with their rods. Although, admittedly, I do it myself from time to time. The fisherman’s adrenaline gets to you, so you forget the rule: The fish tends to fall off the hook more readily when you’re pulling it out like that, and sometimes it can even break the tip of your rod.My fish is putting up quite a fight, but my angle is weird. I’m casting from a three- to four-meter-high bridge, so I struggle to assess my position.
Photo: Faruk Šehić.
It’s a meter or so high. Still, I’m too far away, so I decide to lift it all the way up to the bridge. Success. I get it off the hook using pliers, holding it with my right hand, then run two hundred meters down the river, where I left my gear, because I want to put the chub into my keeping net. I prefer keeping my fish alive, because you never know when you’re going to release it. Otherwise, if it’s dead and you’ve got only one, you can’t let it back, you can’t let a dead fish back into the water.We spend the entire day fishing. The sun is strong, leaves still wrapped in small, light-green umbrellas. The Krivaja is verdant, almost emerald-colored. While I was on the hanging bridge, our mate from Solun took a four-kilo huchen on a float and the so-called flesh fly maggot. After a few minutes’ fight, he got her out, took a photo with the beauty and released it.
Faruk Šehić
Faruk Šehić is a writer born in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). During the war, he was a member of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Army, when he was also heavily wounded. Literary critics think of him as the voice of the so-called runned-down generation X. He received awards, while his work has been published in many languages. He lives in Sarajevo.
DISCLAIMERThe views of the writer do not necessarily reflect the views of Kosovo 2.0.
This story was originally written in Serbian.