When the River Fell Silent

The first thing I remember is the taste of limestone. Not a taste on a tongue, for I have never had such a thing, but a taste in my essence. It was the incredible, clean, mineral shock of water forcing its way through ancient stone, finding a fissure, a weakness, a new path. I was that path. I was that pressure. I was the sigh of the rock and the chuckle of the stream that was born from it, high in the snaggle-toothed teeth of the Sniježnica mountain.

They call me a vila. A nymph. A spirit of the water. I am the consciousness of the aquifer that feeds the Konavle field. I am the memory in the deep, dark pools of the Ljuta River as it carves its way through the lush, green valley to the sea. I am the whisper in the irrigation canals the Romans built, the vibration in the moss that clings to the old Dubrovnik aqueduct, the shimmer on the surface of the well in the village of Gruda. I have no name, for the water needs none. But if I were to have one, it would be the sum of all the sounds the water makes here: the drip, the rush, the gurgle, the roar, the silence of deep seepage.

My body is the flow. My senses are not confined; they are the entire watershed. I feel the thirst of the ancient olive trees in Molunat, their gnarled fingers drinking deeply from my hidden veins. I feel the cool embrace of the river stones, smoothed by my constant caress. I feel the joyous shock of a child's foot plunging into a shallow eddy near the old cloth mills, the janjičari, whose great wooden wheels I turned for centuries. I feel the slow, patient kiss of the sun, drawing my essence back up into the sky, a promise to return as rain.

I have watched them, the humans of Konavle, for two thousand turns of the seasons. I saw the Illyrians, with their fierce gods of rock and storm, leave offerings of honey and rough wine at my spring. They understood the balance. They took water, but they gave thanks. Their fear was a respectful, clean thing.

Then came the Romans, all order and ambition. They heard my song and sought to cage it in stone. They built their canals, their aqueducts. But they built them with the land, not against it. They listened to my gradient, followed my natural course. Their stonework was a collaboration, a new verse in my eternal poem. I flowed through their arches gladly, for it was still my song they were singing, just in a more complex rhythm. I blessed their vineyards, their orchards. I made their Konavle wine famous.

After them, the Slavs came, and they gave my kind its name. Vila. They told stories about us, beautiful women with long, flowing hair, who could curse a man who polluted a spring or bless one who showed respect. They were not entirely wrong. The form is… malleable. If I need to be seen, I can pull the mist from the river at dawn, gather the sunlight dappling through the plane trees, and shape a form that they can understand: a tall, slender woman with skin the colour of river foam and hair that cascades like a waterfall. It is a costume, a translation of my true self into their limited sight.

Mostly, I am unseen. I am the feeling of peace a farmer has when he sees his field well-irrigated. I am the sudden chill on a hot summer day near the source of the Ljuta. I am the inexplicable sense of being watched by the old, deep water.

I remember the great earthquake of 1667. I felt the deep bones of the world grind together in agony. The city of Dubrovnik, which I also fed through my long, stone veins, crumbled. But deeper than that, the shockwaves travelled through my aquifer. For a terrifying moment, the flow reversed. The water screamed in its channels. Springs ran muddy, then dry. The fear of the people was a sour taste in the water table, a metallic tang of panic. I had to work, then. I had to coax the water, find the new fractures, and reassure the terrified flow. It took years, but I guided it back. The new springs that emerged were my doing. A rearranged melody, but the same song.

Centuries flowed. The cloth mills rose, and I gave them my power. The rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the fulling hammers became a new heartbeat in the valley, a sound I wove into my own. The women of Konavle, famous for their embroidery, would wash their brilliant silks and linens in my waters. The colours—the deep red of pomegranate, the green of cypress, the black of winter earth—would bleed into me, a fleeting, beautiful dye.

I loved their songs. As they worked, they sang. Their voices, harmonising in the old klapa style, songs of love and loss and the sea, would drift over the water. I learned them. I would echo their melodies in the ripple over rocks, an unseen chorus. They probably thought it was just the wind.

The balance held. They took, but they gave. They gave their songs, their respect, and their offerings of flowers by the spring. They understood that the water was life. It was the soul of Konavle.

Then, the change began. It was slow, at first. A new taste, sharp and chemical, washing off the fields after the rains. It was a poison, a tiny, insidious death that stung my capillaries. I recoiled from it. The frogs in a particular stretch of stream grew sickly. The water-skaters vanished.

Then came the sound. Not the rhythmic thump of the mill or the cadence of a song, but the relentless, grating growl of the diesel engine. They dug deeper wells, with pumps that didn't ask for water; they screamed for it, pulling it greedily from the deep places, disrupting the gentle pressure of the aquifer. The water table began to fall. I felt a constant, draining ache.

And the people… they changed. Those who knew the songs have died. The young ones moved to the city or to other countries. The solid stone houses that had housed generations were now being bought and turned into something else. Vile. They used my name for these new things. Summer houses. Tourist villas.

The new humans did not hear my song. They heard only the splash of a pool. They did not feel my essence; they only felt the need to fill a glass, to water a manicured lawn, to run a dishwasher and a washing machine all at once.

One day, a great machine arrived at the edge of a field that had continuously been fed by a gentle seepage spring. The spring was weak now, thanks to the deep wells. The machine was a yellow beast with a metal jaw that bit into the earth. It dug a pit. A bottomless, square pit. Then men lined it with concrete. They were building a swimming pool.

I watched a gathering tension in the flow. This was not a canal to guide me. This was a prison to hold me. A stagnant, chlorinated jail, cut off from the cycle, from the earth, from me.

That night, under a fat, silver moon, I pulled myself together. Mist rose from the Ljuta. Moonbeams caught in the droplets. I shaped a form of water and light, a woman tall and terrible in her stillness, and I stood by the unfinished pool. I let my presence be felt. The cold intensified. The leaves on the fig trees shuddered, despite there being no wind.

A man, the owner, came out onto the terrace of his newly renovated house. He held a phone, its blue light a pathetic mimicry of the moon. He felt the cold. He looked up, and he saw me.

His mouth fell open. The phone clattered on the stone tiles.

I did not speak with a voice, but with the sound of the river—the rush, the deep groan of stone, the cry of a thousand thirsty roots. The sound filled his head.

This water is not for your vanity.

He stumbled back, his face a mask of terror. He crossed himself, fumbling for words. "Vila…?" he whispered, the old stories crashing into his modern world.

I let my form dissolve back into mist. The message was delivered.

The next day, the work came to a halt. But it was not out of respect. It was out of fear. And fear, I have learned, is a feeble substitute for wisdom. A week later, a priest came and sprinkled holy water around the site, mumbling Latin phrases. He was trying to exorcise me. He did not understand that the water he held in his little vial was, in fact, me. He was asking me to leave myself.

The work resumed. The pool was finished. They filled it from a well that drank deep from my aching aquifer. They poured in bags of chemicals to keep it "clean." To me, it was a festering, sterile wound in the earth.

This was the new war. Not against armies, but against indifference. Not against those who would dam me, but against those who would simply take without seeing, without hearing.

The summers grew hotter. The rains became more frantic, either a deluge that ripped at the soil and overwhelmed my channels, or a complete absence. The tourists came in greater numbers, each one a little thirsty. Each shower, each flushed toilet, each ice cube was a tiny pull on my strength.

I was fading. I could feel it. My connection to the upper streams grew thin. The great source of the Ljuta, which had once roared, now whispered. The old Roman canals were often dry. The farmers argued over water rights, their voices hard and desperate.

I had to make them see. Not one man, but all of them.

The idea came from the deepest part of me, from the ancient pressure that first created me. I would not show them a spectre. I would show them the truth. I would show them myself.

I gathered my strength. I pulled from every rivulet, every droplet of dew on a spider's web in the morning, every hidden pocket of moisture in the shade of a rock. I drew it all in, focusing on the central valley, on the main channel of the Ljuta near the old mills.

I let the flow weaken. The river, which was always heard in Konavle as a constant, soothing background presence, grew quiet. Then silent.

The silence was louder than any roar. It was a shock. Birdsong sounded unnervingly loud. The air grew heavy and still. Without the evaporative cool of the water, the heat of the day became oppressive.

People came to the riverbank. They pointed at the exposed, dry stones, at the dying watercress, at the trout gasping in the last few shrinking pools. Their confusion was a cloud. Then, their worry. Then, their fear.

I was there, in that fear. I was the dryness in their throats.

In the main pool, the last of the water gathered, a dark, deep circle reflecting the concerned faces of the villagers who had gathered. Among them was the old miller, whose family had tended the janjičari for generations. His eyes were not afraid. They were sad. He understood.

I poured the last of my consciousness into that pool. I did not form a woman. I showed them the water itself.

I made the surface still, a perfect mirror. And then I showed them. I showed them the Roman legions building the aqueduct. I showed the Illyrians leaving their offerings. I showed the women singing as they embroidered, their reflections dancing on my surface. I showed the great quake, and the water fleeing in terror. I showed the clear, cold flow of centuries, teeming with life.

Then I showed them the poison runoff. I showed the relentless drain of the deep wells, like vampires at the neck of the earth. I showed the swimming pools, dozens of them now, each a bright blue scar on the land. I showed the plastic bottle floating in a tributary, and the concrete pipe pouring wastewater illegally into a dry creek bed.

I showed them the future. A cracked riverbed. The olive trees withered and turned grey. The valley, brown and dust-blown, empty of people, empty of song.

They saw it all, playing out on the surface of the last pool of water in the Ljuta River. A silent, terrifying film of their past, present, and future.

There were gasps. Murmurs. Tears.

An old woman, her face a map of wrinkles, stepped forward. She was one of the last who knew the old songs. She knelt by the water, her knees cracking on the stone. She didn't reach out to touch it. She simply bowed her head.

And then, she began to sing. It was an ancient song, a lament for a lost love, a song her grandmother had taught her, a song that had been sung by these waters for a hundred years.

Her voice was thin and reedy with age, but it was pure. It was a gift.

As she sang, something happened. The others grew quiet. The fear did not vanish, but it was joined by something else. Shame. Memory. A dawning, horrifying understanding.

The miller stepped forward and stood beside her. Then his wife. Then a young woman, a tourist guide who had returned to her homeland, her eyes wide with revelation. Then others. They didn't know the words to the lament, but they hummed. They provided a low, human harmony.

They were giving back.

I felt it, like the first cool drop of rain on parched earth. A tiny strengthening. A connection re-established.

I did not have the strength to hold the vision any longer. The images on the water faded, and the pool showed only the stunned faces of the people looking into it.

But the old woman kept singing.

The next day, a meeting was called in the village hall. The mayor, pale and shaken, spoke of water conservation. The miller talked about the old ways, the shared irrigation schedules that had worked for centuries. The young tour guide started a group to clean the riverbanks and monitor the water quality.

It was a beginning. Just a trickle. But a trickle, given time and care, can carve a new course.

They passed new laws. Limited the wells. Banned the pesticides near the water sources. The swimming pool man, chastened and changed, became one of the most vocal advocates. He even emptied his pool and turned it into a rainwater collection garden.

The rains came eventually, a soft, gentle fall that seeped deep into the thirsty earth, and I drank it in greedily. The Ljuta began to flow again, tentatively at first, then with more confidence.

I am not what I was. The aquifer is still wounded, and the world remains hotter and thirstier. The balance is more fragile than ever. But it is a balance they are now trying to keep.

Tonight, I feel the coolness of the moon on the water. I feel the roots of the olive trees drinking deeply. I hear, from a house near the bank, the sound of someone practising the old songs on a guitar. It is clumsy, but the intent is there. It is a gift.

I am the vila of Konavle. I am the memory in the water. I am the sigh of the limestone and the chuckle of the stream. And for now, the song continues.