SP1: How I Met the Marble Trout

I should have been born in Nemški Rut, like my five brothers and sisters, but it seems my mother was worried. The war was raging, my mother was in her 48th year, my father was on the prison island of Ustica, one brother was in the Italian army, and my grandfather didn't want to wait for me and simply died. When my mother felt the contractions begin, she called her sister and together they walked to the two-hours distant train station at Grahovo. When they arrived in Gorica, I was ready to be born. They nonetheless managed to find a taxi of some sort and finally I was born at the hospital.

Nemški Rut under the ridge from Rodica to Črna prst. (public domain, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:%C5%BDiga)

Nemški Rut used to be called Deutsch Koritnica, as in the middle ages Koritnica was the last village in the Bača Valley (Baška grapa)*. Further up the Bača there were no Slovenian villages, so in the 13th century the Patriarch of Aquileia** brought Tyrolean settlers from Innichen to build new villages and originally Nemški Rut (Deutsch Gereuth) was the name for the whole region. To start the Tyroleans built four villages, the largest of which was the aforementioned Deutsch Koritnica. This was also the last to slovenicize, and thus finally came to bear the name Nemški Rut. It is the most suitable for farming of all these villages and stands under a ridge which stretches through the Julian Alps from mount Rodica to mount Črna prst ('Black Soil').

From my earliest memories, I knew fish. In books, of course, but also in nature. Two men often brought brown trout. One from Grahovo, who had the Koritnica river concession before the war. I don't know about the Bača, but after the 'liberation' of 1945, when a capitalist could no long exploit his fellow fish, sorry, his fellow man, he probably shouldn't have been catching these fish. But, of course, we had not been re-educated yet, so he simply caught them illegally and sold them. Before the war we had a restaurant and shop, so he had probably regularly brought and sold us these fish for many years already.

The other man was a smith and his house was right next to the Koritnica stream. He would catch them with bombs, and always brought around twenty fish. My mother would give him two big loaves of bread for them.

My mother was a good cook. Normally, I never wanted to eat and I was never hungry. But there were a few things I liked. I always loved to eat fish, and my favourite food were sardines. Sadly, my parents never wanted to buy them for me, so I had to make do with brown trout. When my mother prepared these trout, I studied them closely. I found her cook book from the fallen Austria-Hungary and it had colour pictures of fish. The brown trout in her book were too brown, but their spots were red and I realized that these were actually brown trout***. Ever since I learned English, the word 'brown trout' always reminds me of that cook book and my first studies of the trout from the local streams.

Our village is further up the slopes and it takes a solid twenty minutes to walk to the Koritnica. In the summers we children would sometimes take a Sunday afternoon to go and swim. Why only Sunday afternoons? If the grown-ups let us go down to the stream, we had to be big enough, at least eight or nine, for younger children could drown. But at that age, we had to work during the week and on Sunday mornings we had to go to mass. I also had the special role of altar boy, or as we said in Rut, 'konfiterle'. Well, one day while swimming the bigger children had the idea of catching fish. I tried, too, and incredibly I caught a fish! I didn't let it escape from its hole and a two-years older boy helped me catch it. I was boundlessly happy!

*For the etymologically minded, 'korito' in Slovenian means basin, sink or a narrow canyon, and Koritnica in this case refers to both the stream and the village at its mouth. Thus, they could be refered to as "The Canyon Stream" and "The Canyon Village". 'Grapa' refers to a specifically narrow and steeply-cut valley. This gives a good idea of the topography of the region. (Luka)

**From 1077 to 1433, this part of the world was governed as an ecclesiastical state by the Patriarch of Aquileia. More about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patria_del_Friuli (Luka)

***In Slovenian, the brown trout is called 'potočna postrv', which literally means 'stream trout' ('potok' = stream). (Luka)