I had a friend in Gospić from my earliest childhood—Žarko Vujnović. We met in Jaska, and our fathers worked together.
His father had always wanted to return to his native Lika. He was originally from Čitluk, and in the end he succeeded. They moved to Gospić, where his father built a house on the road out toward Bilaj.
We often stopped by to visit them, giving the parents a chance to reminisce about old times, ask after one another’s health, see the children, and do the usual catching up. It was all very ordinary: people would sit down and have coffee.
Žarko’s father was short and rather overweight, with a round, solid, protruding belly, short, coarse black hair, and a moustache. He was remarkably lively in conversation and had a contagious, high-pitched, almost squeaky laugh, his belly shaking in rhythm with his laughter. He always caught my attention as his lively, sharp eyes moved over me.
His mother was a calm woman occupied with household chores, and she always welcomed us cheerfully, with a sincere warmth that could be seen on her face.
I remember one particular visit that stayed especially vividly in my memory because of the fishing trip—the kind of fishing I had never experienced before and never would again.
Seeing that the parents were enjoying themselves, they allowed us—probably so that we would not get in their way—to go fishing on the Novčica, the river that flows through Gospić.
Fishing fascinated me at the time, but I had never had much luck with it. Not in Jaska, where I caught just two tiny fish in the stream which, although barely worth a bite, ended up in the frying pan; and certainly not on the Jadova, which was then full of fish, barbel and chub, all of which were invariably more skilful and clever than I was.
Once, I spent hours trying to catch a sunfish in the shallows, one as big as the palm of my hand, but without success—until a fisherman came along with a net and pulled it out of the water.
I wondered what the fishing would be like here and whether we would catch anything at all. But Žarko was confident and quickly headed toward the Novčica.
“You’ll see. There’ll be as many fish as you want.”
And that’s exactly what happened.
We cast our lines and pulled out sunfish, released them back into the water, and caught them again.
It wasn’t easy either. Taking a fish off the hook meant risking being pricked by its sharp dorsal fin, but the excitement of the hunt was stronger.
Along the way we also had to contend with frogs that kept jumping at our hooks, hoping for a tasty morsel. Then we switched to catching frogs, which frantically leapt at a piece of red cloth we had attached to the hook.
Eventually we grew tired and, satisfied with our excellent adventure, returned home empty-handed.
I wondered what was going on with those fish and frogs that made them so eager to bite the hooks. The reason was probably the low water level in the drying river and the sheer abundance of fish and frogs.
I remember Žarko from those days. He was a year older than me, and we were almost the same height and similar in the face, except that I stood out with my full cheeks and trousers stretched tightly around my belly and backside.
I met Žarko again by chance, and to my surprise, in the mid-1980s, at the company “Nikola Tesla,” where I had started working.
I could sense that he was no longer as close and open as he had been in those distant childhood days, probably because of problems he was carrying inside. A few years later, he died suddenly.
Željko Narančić