New subjects in the curriculum... now that we actually knew the system. First and second grade, the teacher would usually just get in and tell us what to pull out of our bags.
New thing was the music. Not so new to me, as I knew a lot (including theory) from my accordeon lessons - I could read and write sheet music (and music sheets) like old. I didn't know what was the name of the note noteboook (for lack of better name). It was "notna sveska" for me, as that was what we called it the last two years at those lessons. Now they had a different name for it, and everyone seemed to use it - "kajdanka", which didn't ring any bell first dozen times, because it was mentioned without context (except that I knew some had them in their bags). Once I got it, got it wrong again, as "gajdanka" - which made more sense to me, as gajde (bagpipe) is a musical instrument. Took me years to get this corrected - my, by then, well developed habit to seek logic in the language just screwed me again. Well, no big deal, perhaps once or twice I didn't bring it for the day when I should have.
The other confusing word was raboš*. Though I've never seen one, except maybe decades later as a museum exhibit, there were enough phrases in the language ("...put it on his raboš“) to get an idea. I intuited (correctly, as it turned out) that it's some imaginary account where one's debts are accumulated, a sum of what one owes. Well no, that's what I knew, everybody else aligned their understanding with that of baba (granny) Raboška. She didn't have any other name, that anyone knew of, nobody ever asked her. She sold roast sunflower seeds, which everyone called fried, even though it's dry roast, no grease. For five dinars she'd pack you a paper cone of 0,05l of seeds, measured by a rakija shot, 0,10 for ten, in a larger cone. And then as a marketing move, she'd add a thimbleful more, what she could lift with three fingers, „here's a little raboška“. Her serbian was almost a pidgin, she sounded as if not even from Čurda, but some purely hungarian village, so no gender, case, vocabulary.
She operated from the bench by the kiosk at šećerana's gate when the movie theatre by Kantina had a show - which was pretty much every day at 16, 18, 20h, and from a tiny kitchen in the yard of the 2nd house next to the gates of Zmaj, where she'd be when we go to school or return home.
We were all her customers, at least boys; some girls would too, sometimes. My upper front teeth never smoothed out, their edges are still somewhat jagged, because I kept munching them seeds at the time when that was to occur.
We took care at school not to be seen having it. While it wasn't quite forbidden, it was frowned upon because it created garbage. So we generally didn't nibble during classes, because the tiny cracking sound can be heard if there's suddenly a silence, and collecting the shells was a must or else one could be spotted by a bunch of black things on the floor. In the schoolyard, however, it was tolerated, nobody really cared, the wind would blow them around until they stuck in the lawn as fertilizer. The movie theatre was on the other end of the spectrum - imagine two hundred people doing it at the same time. After the last show, the cleaners could collect a big sack full of husks and cigarette fags. When leaving, you'd hear the shells crunch under your feet.
This held for years. At least for as long as she worked, perhaps into the seventies. Some guys gave up on sunflower only when they needed the money for cigarettes.
----
* counting rod, where the stick would be split lengthwise and then debt memorized by tally marks, carved when the halves were put together.
25-VII-2020 - 5-VII-2026