Balkan summers are hot and humid. Your feet step on the wet mud and you slowly walk into the green water. The frogs complain against your presence loudly and jump away from you amongst the yellow straws. It smells like rotten fish but the water is cool.
The sun bites your back and you are sweating. You did not put sun lotion on. It is just like last summer and the summer before and three summers ago. A dog barks at you.
Marko is looking at you from the hill. The old shepherd is also watching over his cows, sitting on the ruins of a neighboring house, burnt ages ago. While you were driving to the lake you wandered whether Marko would be here again this summer, and here he is, old and strong as an oak. He speaks the German he learnt at the time when the Germans came. He had to walk all the way back from his prison camp in Italy. His wife does not believe it and they always argue about it.
Now Marko mumbles as he watches his cows chew grass and whip away the flies. Last year he invited you to a shot of rakia in his garden. His wife poured you one glass after the other while all of you stared at the Venezuelan soap opera on TV with subtitles in Cyrillic. After the second Turkish coffee he told you the story of a big fish he had seen jump during thunderstorms.
Marko believed the catfish was behind the disappearance of Bor, a gypsy musician who used to swim in the lake after summer evenings of fishing and drinking beer. Bor played the trumpet in a local band which filled weddings, funerals and new year's parties with a happy noise.
One morning Marko found Bor's fishing rod, boots and cigarettes by the shore. His body never appeared. Marko's wife argued the whole thing was a set up. Bor had actually escaped with Marko's niece, Ksenia, a 17 year old student from one of the wet mountain villages. Ksenia had also disappeared at that time. However, because it all happened at a time of war and persons disappeared and newcomers arrived routinely nobody though of it as a big deal and the story merged with hundreds other bizarre stories which probably nobody, politicians apart, wanted to remember.
You swim slowly towards the other side. You only see green water through your goggles. Then the village on the hill. Then cool green water again. You start swimming butterfly style and do not see a shadow disappearing under you.
The catfish sinks slowly down to twenty meters, comes back up and jumps over you with its two meters and a hundred kilos of fish flesh. You do not see its yellow fangs. Its small silver eyes gazing at you. You both splash back in the water.
Marko hears the noise and turns back to look at the lake, but only see you swimming back slowly to the shore. He yells at a cow that is walking away and starts rolling a cigarette he will smoke in half an hour while watching the new telenovela chapter. (Today Maria Isabel, the beautiful, will almost marry Juan Alberto, the rich liar, but Luis Alfonso will intervene just in time to reveal the awful truth about Juan Alberto).
You step back in the mud, the frogs complain again and the dog barks louder at the water. The water was nice and you will swim later and try to reach the other side.
