Mary Ethna Black is a public health doctor from Northern Ireland. A medical globe-trotter, she has judged silver salmon in Alaska, mapped the Belize Barrier Reef, and raised two children with the oarsman who saved her life from pirates in the Bay of Bengal.
Fiction: Keep Darkness from the Door won the Irish Writers Centre Novel prize in 2021. This work in progress is inspired by a forgotten 1980’s medical scandal. It examines how ordinary people can be imperfectly brave.
Memoir: Blood and Roses connects her war work in Belfast and Bosnia and won the 2021 Fish Publishing Short Memoir prize. She is currently writing Her Life in Hats, about three generations of women doctors that collectively span the history of the NHS.
The opening of Small Stories from Senjak is presented here. This is a celebration of her impermanent family home, a wooden splav moored on the River Sava in Belgrade. The cast of characters include children, criminals and a ginormous catfish which is the size of a Lada. The stories are tall but true.
email: mblac001@gold.ac.uk
Small Stories from a Splav on the Sava
For Ilya, who is missed, and missing.
2022
‘They’re re-zoning the riverbank,’ said Ozren, my husband.
Immediately, a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach, all because of a ramshackle wooden shed on a patched up pontoon moored on the River Sava in Belgrade. My world had just become a bit more unstable, which is an odd thing to say given what my life has been like so far: a melange of warzones, children cutting their teeth on overnight flights (and the infamous teenage vodka episode), a pirate attack in the Bay of Bengal…
‘What happens next?’
‘Perhaps a more permanent mooring. Could also be game over—the authorities might force us to move.’
Lose our splav? This falling apart refuge where nothing much happens, bar the interstitia between the official events of our days? (In other words, all that is truly important happens on the splav.)
‘How long have we hung on so far?’
‘Twenty years, if you don’t count the time when it was a restaurant.’
‘So, what’s the plan?
‘We’re getting organised, all of us.’
I want to explain how we got here and describe the place to you, but mostly I’ll write about all the small things that have happened here. I’ll say a little about the big, important happenings in our world, but I don’t really want it to be about those, for I want to show you the details, the spaces in-between.
And the people who sit on our deck and drink coffee, of course.
I’ll write about them.
1. The Splav
Here are the directions if you’d like to visit. Take a cab from the centre of Belgrade, navigate spaghetti junction across Ada Bridge from Senjak to Novi Beograd, turn left at the flea market, follow the dusty road round the old gravel works and past the line of smoky-windowed black Mercedes parked by Restaurant Marinada, scatter the white geese belonging to Americanać—carefully, don’t hit them—and park by the tall tree with a tyre swing. Now, walk through the rosemary and lavender bushes that line the verge (Ozren got the neighbours to club together for those), take the few steps along a narrow dirt path, duck through the overhanging branches (I keep meaning to cut them back), and descend the crumbled concrete stairs. Pause at the green metal gangplank: there it is, our century-old, makeshift heaven. We’ll be waiting at the open door, because you’ll probably have got lost. Come in, please, no need to remove your outdoor shoes. Coffee? Something stronger? Rakija, perhaps, this one from plums is especially good.
You are now on one of the oldest splavs on the river. For 30 years, this squat wooden shed was the wheelhouse of a ship; for the next fifty, it was home to an elderly couple in a field. During the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Vaske carted it to this spot on the River Sava (I’ll say more, quite a lot more, about Vaske later on). Vaske cut the wheelhouse in four and extended it out from the centre, added a veranda on either side and secured it on flotation tanks that he salvaged from an old river crane. Then he anchored the contraption to an empty stretch of the bank just along from his house. Every weekend he ran a small restaurant. You had to know this, and Vaske would only let you in if he liked you. In the single big room and on the terraces, Vaske and his family (wife, two children and Baka) served up fried catfish, riblja čorbe, potato salad and bottles of cold beer. It was a good-natured, no fuss hangout. There were ashtrays on red-checked tablecloths.
‘Vaske’s tired of gutting fish,’ said Ozren, one day. ‘We could make him an offer.’
‘Excellent! The children will be happy.’
And I’ll be happy too, I thought. A refuge—we could do with one. A space away from the busy city streets and our packed working lives and the state of Serbian politics. A place to do nothing much.
‘Imagine—our very own splav.’
Since we bought the place in 2003, other houseboats have moved in to fill the gaps along the bank, all connected in some way to Vaske. We are a sociable community, almost clubby, eccentric. We have a sailing club two splavs down. Our neighbour has a hot tub (although I’ve never been in it.) During the day, the wide Sava is busy with two-way river traffic. At night, the Ada bridge is outlined in blue, pink, purple, yellow, green, all except the one section where the lights don’t work. The moon perches between the cables as if it lives there.
Malleable, our splav embraces all those who arrive, without squeezing them into a certain shape or expecting them to behave in a certain way. It merely invites you to sit on the veranda and watch the river. It is the place where I am not sad. Each object within has its story, and nothing is there without a reason. We nurture a functional and frugal simplicity: old sails shade the veranda and mismatched wine glasses replace those that disappear at parties. A red blanket from my childhood home in Northern Ireland covers the bed. We insist on excellent Wi-Fi. We also serve the best coffee on the Sava River. A recent fandangle is the hot shower. You poke the blue plastic hose connected to the hot tap through the kitchen window to where a bar of pink soap waits on the sill. My husband has rigged up a screen I can pull around me. I leave a gap so I can watch the passing boats as I soap my bits. He watches from the window as I coyly jiggle around. We giggle a lot during shower time.
If our splav sank overnight (and might in a storm), it will still have lasted longer than anyone expected. A few years ago, when the pontoons were about to fail, we agonised over whether to build a new and comfortable home but opted for a quick fix. Vaske hired two Roma guys to pack the tanks with sheets of polystyrene. To orient the odd-shaped pieces, he outlined a naked woman in thick black marker on each piece. Two curves for the body, semi-circles and dots for the boobs, 1300 times.
On our Splav it is forever Groundhog Day. The same simple routine, a limited palette of activities, people, options. Nothing fancy. Brew bosanska-kafa in the old djezva that fits on top of the small electrical hotplate. Carry boiled eggs in Baka’s scratched plastic egg cups onto the east veranda, sit on the wooden bench but not on the wobbly bit, and wave at any neighbour who might be about. Watch the morning parade on the river. Motorboats dash along in both directions, inelegant fenders flying. A low black tanker hauls gravel to Romania. The dredgers we know by name and routine. Rowers from Red Star Belgrade practice manoeuvres: single, double, quad, eight. Those lines of ducklings look just like the ones from last year, and the ones before that. There is an informal rota for the hammock and over the course of the day we work online, read books and make more coffee. The same guests and neighbours come to visit and some of them have their own keys. We have a hotplate to prepare simple food. When dark falls, we wait for amplified gypsy music to surge across the river from the Black Panthers. I turn over in bed, reach for the earplugs, and hope for an intermission before dawn. Wrapped in my comfy cotton nightdress, I am lulled to sleep atop the submerged stacks of 1300 naked women.
I know this place. When the leaves fall from the bank-fringing trees, the splav becomes visible from the road, only to be hidden from view when the foliage returns each Spring. It gets too cold in winter and too hot in summer. We wrap up in sweaters when it freezes and hose off or jump into the river in the heat. The structure creaks with the wash from each passing boat and nature intrudes; stink bugs live in the cracks of every wall. A lone beaver appeared one year and has never been seen since. A tiny turquoise bird made a nest between the wooden slats. Dice snakes discard pearlescent skins beneath the bed. There is a particular way we hang sheets to keep the sun off the hammock, and we know where to place buckets to catch leaks. If the river swells, our home rises with it.
When the Sava broke its banks in 2014, Ozren, Tara, Luka and I set off on an adventure. We borrowed Vaske’s long metal šiklja and motored over the drowned road, across the verge, and away from the bank. We tied the splav up and clambered on board. In the silent grey April light, water stretched in all directions. I imagined we might break from our moorings and set off down the river, under Ada Bridge where the giant catfish lurks, past the crumbling bricks of Kalemegdan fortress, along the mighty Danube, onwards to the far-off horizon.
Travelling through life on the deck of our home.
Vasky’s recipe for Fried catfish
Catch a catfish. A rod, with a bit of raw fish on a hook, cast out from your splav or šiklja.
Scale, gut and cut the fish into steaks.
Rinse with water from the hosepipe on the veranda. Watch for the tiny fish that rush to
catch the fragments. Pat dry, and sprinkle with lots of paprika and salt.
Fry in hot oil until the outside is brick red and crispy, and the flesh flakes from the bones.
Spread the tablecloth and have paper serviettes ready, this gets messy.
Serve with bread, potato salad and cold beer. Green salad too, if you must.
2. Pigs Might Float
Splav-dwellers coexist with other creatures. We keep an eye out for nesting mallard in spring. Spot small snakes that dart through the water in curlicues. Fish from the bank, or from the deck—you get a clearer view into the water away from the entanglement of the bank. In summer, mosquitoes abound. You learn to go inside when you hear the insecticide spray plane approaching the line of the river. In winter, wind blasts through the falling-apart walls and the stink bugs huddle in cracks to survive.
In this place, inanimate objects take on a life of their own. Plastic waste is a problem. Washed down the river it catches everywhere, but with a bit of judicious poking, you can dislodge it. With this river, I assume nothing. Tolerant about what is ‘normal’, I never expect the river to be object-free. I would imagine people visiting East London for the first time might find it odd to see people grilling sausages on portable fires in London Fields park, women covered in black veils, or fox families poised in the middle of the street at dusk. The same rule applies in every new place: after a while, if no one around you looks surprised, then best wait to see what happens next. Our splavs are around 15 metres apart, so when I’m on my deck, I can see who is eating what for breakfast, who has just caught a fish and who has gone for a swim.
One afternoon, I relaxed in the hammock in an approaching thunderstorm. Lights scorched the distant sky and the smell of imminent rain carried across the water. On the ruffled water, a fleshy object floated, nestled in a scatter of branches. The surface was pink-white and smooth, the contours half submerged. I got up to lean over the railings and look more closely. My first thought: this is a human body. Then I saw the snout: a dead pig was headed towards my home. I shuddered. What might it feel like to bob against such a corpse while doing my usual sedate breaststroke? Rocked by ripples from the passing boats, the lump drifted past and wedged beneath the mooring chain of the next splav.
I gesticulated to my neighbour. ‘Look. Over there. I believe it’s a pig.’
‘A what?’
‘Svijnje umro,’ I called out in my poor Serbian.
‘Huh?’
‘A DEAD PIG.’
‘Uredu. OK.’
My neighbour slowly put down his newspaper and fetched a long pole. He levered away at the animal to dislodge it and the wooden tip sank into decomposing flesh. After ten minutes, he had manoeuvred the pig back into the river. He dunked the pole up and down in the water to remove the gunk. Why was I so squeamish? I eat pork; I slice and dice dead flesh on my plate. Perhaps it was the thought of eye sockets, the eyeballs no doubt long gone.
The bundle travelled onwards. Bon voyage, Pig.
I imagined this scene repeated every few splavs, until the creature would finally sink to a watery rest miles from home, there to be fragmented by the very fish that we might catch and consume later. Lightning crackled closer and heavy sheets of rain descended. Time to retreat inside, line up buckets under the most familiar leaks, and cook another coffee. As the rain pelted down on our patched-up roof and the small pot boiled, I contemplated the nature of rivers and the raw underbelly of this body of water swollen with detritus and submerged life. The branches and plastic bags that drift, half-submerged, until caught on the bank. The cans and bottles that incubate on the muddy bottom. The shit and paper flushed from our toilet to pile up beneath the pontoon. The Sava copes with all of this and more. It could easily absorb a dead animal. Is it ever possible for rivers to be clean, or are they, inevitably, polluted? The sacred Ganges has an even bigger problem with dead bodies, and it seems to manage, but even the holiest of places must have their limits. In our small spot on the Sava, a pig is the least of our worries: plastic and pesticides the greatest.
Now, I always check for pigs. Sun or shine, rain or snow, high water or low, a porker perpetually lurks below the surface of the water. I wait for a body to surface, even though I know for certain that years ago, that particular pig travelled on and away. One more thing—a splav must be securely moored. Our Splav has a steel cable on either end. One of them is buried in a large concrete slab; the other one is tied to the tree that holds the rope swing. That cable resembles an inert snake drawn taut across the rough path.
Or is it merely sleeping?
3. The Giant Catfish
‘I’ve seen it,’ said Ozren one morning over coffee.
‘Huh?’ I said; we’ve been married for so long, we often speak in shorthand.
‘The absolutely enormous catfish.’
Now that was interesting. I put down my coffee cup. Siluris Glanis, the sole species of catfish in this part of the world, can reach up to 3 metres and 200 kg, although we have never seen one remotely that big. Bosanac holds the record so far. Five feet long, although Vaske is convinced he is exaggerating.
‘How big?’
‘About the size of a Yugo, with a mouth big enough to grab a dog, or a small child.’
I considered this: Ozren was clearly having me on. ‘That’s a little ambitious.’
‘This one is much older than the one Bosanač caught. It might be 100 years old, or more.’
‘Who would believe that?’
‘There’s no proof it doesn’t exist. Conditions under Ada bridge are perfect for catfish, and many ducklings disappear.’
‘Yeah, right.’
The bet was on and the story spread around the neighbourhood. All projects in Belgrade require sustained effort to keep them going. Ozren stuck to the facts. I kept a straight face. Vaske pantomimed defensiveness and regaled us all with stories of large catfish he had caught. As I flipped through his photo album, I thought it a pity that these ugly bulbous fish couldn’t finish their pensionable years underwater, a damn shame. But then we would have no riblija čorbe. We passed that summer lazing on the deck of the splav interspersed by trips across the river to eat fish soup at Bosanac’s little restaurant. He caught and minced the fish himself and served it with bread, to soak up the soup. I brushed away thoughts of what the creatures might have been eating in the river. The giant catfish story reverberated, was believed by a couple of tourists, and then faded away.
Years later I attended a writer’s retreat at the Arvon centre in Yorkshire’s Hebden Bridge. Cathy Rentzenbrink conveyed the intricacies of memoir to a gaggle of girls (a euphemism as we were much older, but very definitely gaggled). The grey stone buildings looked over a paddock towards a dense line of deciduous trees shielding a clean, rocky mountain stream. I wondered how it was doing under Ada Bridge and how it managed to commute here so quickly each day. Was it still free? Was it upset at the state of the river? Did it know a lot, and could it tell what it saw on these travels? The myth had worked its magic on this audience of one, as if the giant catfish embodied riveriness. In that place, amidst the framed poetry of Ted Hughes, to the sound of the intermittent rain that battered my window, and the rush of water down the dank moors and stone culverts, I heard the call of the catfish. Each morning, I strolled down a winding track through the valley to drop breadcrumbs into the mountain stream and appease the giant fish. What would be next? Ritual sacrifice? The catfish followed me back up the hill and lurked near the door as I sat at my small writing desk. First, the faintest flip of a tail, then a miniature version glimpsed in the corner of my eye. All of a sudden, the creature swam across my page. That evening, the entire scaly bulk plonked itself down on my second paragraph and wouldn’t move.
As I get to know the catfish and allow it into my stories, it seems happy to paddle around in my head.
‘Write about me,’ it says as I gaze into those glassy river-brown eyes. ‘Because if you don’t…’
Once upon a time, there lived a giant catfish, holed up in a watery lair beneath Ada Bridge. Every day, the giant catfish would patrol the riverbed all the way up to our splav. It would linger for a while to check out our flotation tanks, count the 1300 naked ladies, and chase away the bad things. Then, like an untrustworthy great-great-grandfather, it would sidle off to find a comfortable spot in the depths of the Sava for a snooze.
One quiet morning near the paddle-boarding club on the opposite bank, a few splavs down from the Black Panthers’ notorious and rather noisy hangout, the hungover crowd hunched over strong black coffee were disturbed by a loud swish. They let out a collective gasp as a vast back ripped apart the surface of the water. Then…
Riblja Čorba (Fish Soup)
Bosanač’s recipe
Take mixed river fish, whatever you have to hand. Catfish is good, or Som (there isn’t much choice). You can use leftover pieces. There will be bones, so mince them fine. Take a deep black pot. Add secret quantities of paprika, chopped onion, sliced carrot, oil.
Add the fish, cover with water and cook gently, stirring every so often
This must be served with bread.
Every year in July a riblja čorba festival is held in the village of Golubac, a couple of
hours drive further down Danube and across from Romania. All along the street open
fires burn beneath tripods bearing large black cauldrons filled with soup that is made in
the traditional way. There are tweaks but deviation is not allowed. I once proposed a Thai
curry version but my fellow splav dwellers met that suggestion with disbelief. There is
only one way to make riblja čorba; anything else is sacrilege, or another kind of soup.
4. The Senjak Chicken Society
Rain fell as we trudged around after the priest and threw heavy clods on the coffin. It was all that Serbian funerals should be—tragic, with nary a chink of brevity or light. The collapsing widow had to be physically supported. Widows do that in Serbia; they mourn intensely, then graduate as professional grandmothers or else become professionally ill with occasional bouts of recovery during which they will slice and serve a birthday cake and wash up after the meal with silent good will. Nena’s mother did all of this in spades, adding flourishes of arthritis for good measure and regular proclamations that her life was over and nothing good would ever happen. A year passed, and it became tedious.
‘I have to do something about my mother,’ said Nena as we drank coffee in her garden in Lower Senjak. ‘She calls. Endlessly.’
I nodded in agreement. ‘She needs a project. Something that will give her purpose.’
‘An activity in the village.’
Nena’s mother lives in Mislođin, around an hour from Belgrade, a village with fertile land and plenty of water.
‘How about something to do with farming?’
We trawled through the shortlist. Cows were too much work. Goats escaped. Snails were fashionable, but the outlay was high on concrete pens unless you let them slime all over your bedrooms.
‘I’ve got it,’ I said. ‘Chickens.’
‘It’s perfect. She can turn a profit and help us. Plus, they have personalities. Almost like pets.’
‘And we can eat them,’ I added.
That is how we became, for one eventful and never to be repeated season, the joint owners of a poultry enterprise. Soon afterwards, Nena’s mum shepherded 100 clucking charges around her garden. What cosseted lives those chickens led! Fed twice daily on corn and kitchen scraps. Foraging between the fruit trees. Damp cloths arranged over the henhouse as the temperature rose. That summer, we all wanted to be those chickens rather than sweat it out in our inner city offices.
‘How’s it going?’ I said to Nena.
‘She’s doing my head in. Still calling endlessly, but now it’s updates on the size, behaviour and character of those bloody chickens.’
A Sunday picnic in Mislođin more than made up for any irritation. Nena’s mother was on top form and our chickens were magnificent, with chests like Pamela Anderson—I was amazed they could stay upright. They were more like turkeys, or two-seater Smart cars. In comparison, London chickens are bland and limp, clammy supermarket products wrapped in cling film and date-stamped, lacking in personality. New York chickens are worse. Little flavour and garish packaging that promise paradise but conceal empty charms. French chickens have been on a sensible diet for so long they are a size zero, or else come fully feathered with an obstacle course of plucking ahead. Irish chickens are not what they used to be. Ours, however, had thrown out the rule book and ranged as chickens were meant to. Free Serbian chickens.
All good things end. Early one Saturday, fate arrived from over the hill in the back of a belching van. The owner, a legend in her own time, had made a small fortune from a homemade automated chicken plucker built from the guts of an old clothes washing machine. The phone did not ring that day till evening. Nena’s mother spared no detail. The slaughterer had cornered the 100, wrung their necks and lopped off their heads with a hatchet, leaving a mess of blood across the yard. Then she had stuffed batches of still-twitching corpses into the front hatch of the washing machine, closed the door, attached the hose pipe to some boiling water and turned the dial to Fast Spin. Minutes later, out came bald, pimpled, and very clean chickens. Nena’s mother proclaimed herself drained. She had become attached to her charges. To watch them murdered and then laundered was just too much to bear.
Nena and I had enough corpses to pack our freezers with village-raised, organically fed chicken. What could go wrong? The following day, the electricity supply to Senjak broke down on the hottest summer day on record. Nena and I now had 100 defrosting chickens. I could almost hear the salmonella replicating. Our families and friends ate a lot of chicken, but not enough. As time ran out, we needed more mouths to feed. Nena and I gathered as many friends and family as possible and cooked up a storm. That night, the Senjak chicken society was born.
Our days as poultry entrepreneurs are now well behind us. We considered applying for a small business grant for a commercial venture combining emotional therapy for the elderly with organic farming, but in the end it was not cost effective: the phone bills were too high and our freezers too small. After the Mislođin debacle, we switched to a reliable source of poultry from further afield in Uziçe via our housekeeper’s cousin’s friend. He delivered ready-for-the-oven chickens in small numbers on request. We never quite reached the hassle-free logistics of Western Europe; delivery involved much discussion of bus timetables and chopping and changing of dates. The major difference was that we were no longer involved with the daily minutiae of the short and unmemorable lives of these fowl. We didn’t know the name and personal habits of each one. Getting a chicken to the table became manageable… but less interesting.
One thing did survive: the Senjak Chicken Society. The rules are clear. One: in attendance will be the two original families plus guests. Two: there must be a guest chef. Three: the menu will include chicken. We’ve had some memorable evenings. The Australian Ambassador to Serbia entertained up with a lengthy technical speech about chickens, my brother’s partner cooked up a ten course Chinese extravaganza on a gas wok on the balcony (after the electricity failed yet again), and I managed to find all the ingredients for a proper chicken curry. There were chicken dishes I cannot remember and ones I would rather forget.
Linden trees in June exude a perfume so distinctive it conjures up place and time without fail.
‘That scent,’ I said to Ozren over lunch in a café as the tree above scattered a pale yellow snow of petals on his head and shoulders. ‘What does it remind you of?’
He sipped his coffee. At that very moment, a flower landed on his bald head and bounced off.
‘Being in love,’ he said.
‘Now that reminds me of The Senjak Chicken Society.’
If heaven exists, it is a place where friends and family gather on benches under linden trees and dine on poultry roasted over an open fire, their flesh embellished with a lemon and rosemary marinade. Elysium is where we drink wine as old and young celebrate the good, simple things in life. There was a spirit of adventure in our pioneering days in the chicken business. A blithe engagement with nature and a return to the old ways. Those 100 chickens led us way beyond the coop and out into the free, bug-laden slopes of central Serbia. I feel their spirit with me now—that blind, stupid chicken look that approaches wisdom and rejects the obvious, that passionate disregard for suits and order, that intent pursuit of the delectable worm. I believe there is a parallel poultry paradise where fowl run free in green fields to peck up bugs, potato peelings, and the unspeakable things that chickens eat. I am certain that every year 100 plump white chickens gather there to share a few choice worms and reminisce about their short but happy lives, once upon a time in Mislođin.
A few years ago Tara, by then a vegetarian, asked, ‘Can we update it to the Senjak Chickpea Society?’
I considered the possibility. Devoid of personality, I doubt that legumes could ever heal a broken heart, but perhaps we should try, as every generation must strike out anew. I delegated the leadership opportunity. I call this advanced parenting.
‘Good idea. Why don’t you organise it?’
I’m waiting still.
5. Everyday Evil
What do you do when you find out something so terrible about someone that you can barely look at them? There was such a person in the environs of the Splav. A man rough round the edges, but not unpleasant. I would see this man from time to time, walking near our Splav, or tying up a boat. With his wife and three children, he was affectionate. Just average. A more or less ordinary person, really. It takes all sorts, I used to think when I talked to him. But that was before I learned what he had done.
During the war in Bosnia, this man had been part of a paramilitary gang. He boasted to an acquaintance of entering villages and making the women perform sexual acts. They were frightened women, probably trying to save themselves, their men or their children. Women will do anything in such a situation. I know that I would. After I heard this, I observed him differently, looking for the tell-tale signs of evil.
There were no particular warning signs.
To be continued…