TWTBACD Ch.1 - The River That Fed Them

Chapter 1

The River That Fed Them

Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia — 1982–2019

Ch.1 opening: The Petrov family's world before 2020

The Sava River at five in the morning is a different river from the Sava River at noon.

At noon it belongs to the tourist boats, to the kayakers, to the children swimming off the concrete bank at Sremska Mitrovica. At five in the morning it belongs to Dmitri Petrov, and before him it belonged to his father Branko Petrov, and before Branko it belonged to his grandfather Aleksa Petrov, and before Aleksa there were men whose names no living Petrov could remember but who had stood in exactly this darkness and felt exactly this cold and pulled nets through exactly this current.

Dmitri was born in 1982, the year the Sava's summer fish count first dropped measurably below the post-war baseline. He did not know this at birth. He learned it gradually, the way you learn the things that matter most: through accumulated experience over decades, through noticing that the net came up differently than it had, through asking his father why, and through his father's silence — which was not the silence of not-knowing but of knowing-too-much and not wanting to say it.

"The river gives what it gives," Branko Petrov had said. This was the fisherman's creed and the fisherman's evasion simultaneously.

The Sava of Dmitri's childhood was already diminished from the Sava of Aleksa's. Aleksa, dead before Dmitri was born, had spoken of a river so full of perch in summer that you could lean a bucket in the current and it would fill. Branko remembered that river as his father's river, already receding into the past. Dmitri knew only the river he had — which was, by the standards of other European rivers in the late twentieth century, still a river of extraordinary life, but which was not what it had been.

The industrial outflows from the factories upriver — some of them Yugoslav-era relics still operating on Soviet-designed processes that no Western regulator would have permitted — had changed the water chemistry in ways that the fish translated into behaviour: different migration patterns, different spawning times, a general retreat to the deeper channels where the temperature was more stable and the chemistry slightly better.

Dmitri had learned to find them in the deeper channels. He had adapted. That was the Petrov inheritance: not a pristine river but the knowledge of how to read the one you had.

He married Elena Vasović in 2007. She was a schoolteacher. She had grown up in Belgrade and had never gone fishing in her life and came to Sremska Mitrovica for love of a man and found, unexpectedly, that she also loved the river — not for fishing but for what it did to time. The river at five in the morning made time the correct speed. She had not known that time had a correct speed before she found a place where it was achieved.

They lived in a house three hundred metres from the bank that had belonged to Dmitri's parents. The house needed work — it always needed work — but it had rooms and a garden and a view of the water if you stood at the upstairs window and leaned slightly left.

By 2019, the river had given them Mila, who was one year old, and twenty-two years of Dmitri's adult life, and a profession that was both identical to what his grandfather had done and entirely different, because the river was different and the world was different and Dmitri was, underneath the fisherman's exterior, a different kind of person from his grandfather — a person who noticed the changes and felt compelled to count them, even before he knew why counting mattered.

He had begun keeping a notebook in 2015. Not a scientific document — just a notebook. The date, the time, the net yield, the water temperature where he could estimate it, the colour of the water, any unusual observations. He kept it in a waterproof bag in the boat. He filled three notebooks in five years. He did not know what he was doing. He was doing it anyway.

The world in 2019, from the bank of the Sava at five in the morning, looked like this: the water, grey-green and moving— the far bank dark with willows— the sky beginning to lighten in the east over Serbia's interior— the sound of the current against the hull— and the net, which came up with perch, not as many as there should have been, but perch, still there, still there.

Still there was enough. For now.

Ch.1 close: A fisherman's world on the edge of change