26-XII-1974.
The dutch/german gang came: Rudolf, Senn, Arie and one more guy whom we never saw before or after. Rudolf's pal from the job or from police school, rather. The story was that they have a chance to avoid vojska altogether if they pass the exam. And the exam is in the shape of you judging the system, and if you fail to find good reasons to condemn the system, you get to serve it with long tube on your shoulder. If you win (as some do), you serve with community service - emptying the potties and pushing carts in a hospital or some such work. Rudolf, however, failed to appear at his hearing, because at the time he was in Netherlands, with Senn, streaking. So instead of serving the system with a long tube on shoulder, he went to be a cop and serve it with a short tube in a holster. He never was much of a student, passed high school barely, despite having the vocabulary and knowledge of a potential intellectual. So he couldn't get into a state college, and his parents couldn't even dream of a private one. So a cop he is, presently in some cops' school. Said the tradition in the school is to pronounce every f as pf, so Pferdinand and Pfrankpfurt. Or, when standing in line, and the officer would command "achtung!", he'd emphasize "acht" and you can hear "neun, zehn, elf..." from the ranks.
Thinking we must have even less petrol than they had (this being the time after the big petrol strike of OPEC, and they believing, for the last time, the anticommunist propaganda), they left the spaček at Passau, and went to Lajna first (just like we did a month ago :), then took a train here. We managed to get them to sleep somewhere (can't remember how and where, it was tight); went one evening to her place, and Oma made a great fish čorba. As hot as it gets, or in Senn's words "I feeel it comiiiiing!!!". The shot was made few minutes before that. From left to right, Rudolf, Arie, the other cop, Senn. The door behind her would periodically become a wall, then a door again, then wall in the end. The separate two rooms partitioned this way would be known as "rezidencija".
I remember we all went to visit Dženk at his place at the far end of ruža (same building where Aranka lived before, and I guess Oli Boj too, behind the last one on this picture). The railway šinjel that I wore just got extended with half a meter of artificial fur.
I see Tejka on some pictures taken sitting on the floor in front of a bookshelf (it's a 60mm color negative, rather bad, with smudged colors, which I somehow managed to reshoot on 13-VI-2012.)
Only now I see the tristać in the background. This one wasn't official.
The 4th guy is on the left, Arie in the middle, Senn. between his legs. This was on 25. maj. The houses in the back are long gone. The concrete mass on which they stand is now turned into a playground.
The house in the background is visibly dirty almost to window tops, because it was right next to the pavement, with barely 80cm of sidewalk, and the rain drains were either absent or not functioning, so each pair of wheels will splash dirty water quite high. Visible nicely even on this crummy negative.
The other reason we avoided that sidewalk was that's where a dog kennel was, next 10m to the right of those windows. It would be empty for months, then all of a sudden you just walk by and a dozen of mongrels in very foul mood start barking near your feet. There were some openings at the ground level, with solid iron bars on them, as if there was a basement and the openings were there to load the coal through, which is unlikely - this was a peasant area when these were built, and cocklestoves and/or central heating were rare. It got worse when the bars were gone, around 1971, so there were just openings with jagged edges. Dogs were gone too, but one was still weary walking by.
Mentions: 13-VI-2012., 25. maj, Aranka Gnajs, Ariejan Verschoor (Arie), čorba, Gradivoj Jankulov (Dženk), Melanija Merćep (Lajna), Olivera Stojanović (Oli Boj), Oma, Rosanne (Senn), Rudolf Ochsner, ruža, Slavica Tejin (Tejka), spaček, šinjel, tristać, vojska, in serbian
7-XII-2019 - 12-I-2026