14-I-1961.
They started buying me kids' newspaper, "Politikin zabavnik". It boasted an episode of Flash Gordon on front page, an episode of Miki Maus (spelt so) inside, Bim and Bum (by Joe Musiel), Paja Patak (aka Donald Duck) and "Tale of czar Saltan" by Đorđe Lobačev in the rear. Later in the year, they had Popeye too.
From that day, we kept buying it every friday (though officially it came out on saturday, but appeared on kiosks a day earlier). Soon, I guess next winter, they started sending me to buy it, because I didn't have to cross the street en route to the kiosk at šećerana. The traffic was becoming a problem at the time, three buses would pass each hour, and the kombinat itself generated some traffic. The two sidestreets weren't much, both of them dead ends, ending at the railway, and not even paved, so nothing there went faster than on foot. The problem was the path (not proper sidewalk, which existed only on the other side of the street, see Učubić) along the last block - it was almost a meter below the road (and there they go saying everything's flat here), and when the snow would thaw or after any better rain the near part would be a puddle. And I never had watertight shoes, unless we count the rubber boots I wore for a couple of winters (guess around 1964-65). Those were cold, but kept my feet dry, unless I got snow in them. I had the tough choice of crossing the street and walking by the park (but then, I was told not to cross the street!), to walk by the edge of the road, which was likewise muddy or puddles (shallower though, and no longer muddy starting this summer), or to wade around the puddles, hoping not to slip on the grassy slope. Don't remember having any trouble with that, just that it required an effort and was a nuisance.
Late in 2019 all the old issues were finally scanned and made public, so I could now go back to the oldest episode I remember reading, and this is it. I'm not sure I exactly was able to read everything, far less to understand, but I managed a lot and I actually followed the plot, specially that of Flash Gordon, friday to friday.
The print was a bit less contrast, the pulp paper they used couldn't take so much black, and the scan is true to it, I just enhanced it here so it's easier to read. The picture is actually wrong, from a year before, because I somehow remembered th third frame, but then didn't remember the following episodes. So traced it forward and this date is the correct one.
This is the how the yard regularly looked every winter. There was, as a rule, lots of snow. I was happy to see it, just like any other kid. Luckily, I wasn't big enough to clean up the snow, and when I once was, it was for only a few years, there around the eighties, when we didn't get as much snow every winter anymore. The trouble was in the shovels. To clean the snow one needs a smooth and thin shovel, preferrably a bit wider, for those days when it needs to be cleaned but there's not so much of it to shovel it, simply shoving it does it. Of course, it helps if it fell on smooth surface. None of those - the iron shovel was never smooth, it always had some stuff on it, whatever it was it was rough and baked in. There was the wooden one too, but dad made those of inch thick planks, without thinning out the business edge, and the slat which doubled as a handle went all the way down. Dad never bothered too much to have good tools, just as long as he had them, and the condition of it was a given, whatever it was. He sharpened the axe and the saw, the rest he didn't bother with. And the flat surface was out of the question, as the paths in the yard were laid bricks, and on the street it was smooth in the summer, then it got muddy, and all the ridges and grooves left by wheels and soles would just freeze as they were. This fall they'll pour a few wheelbarrows of crushed stone, leftovers from the underlying layers of the pavement, which was supposed to lessen the amount of mud. It didn't, but now the surface became even more uneven, the spade would often snag on larger stones.
I didn't like to clean the snow until the conditions of flat surface were met, but after that I did. Once I was also picking my own spade, it became a pleasure.
The yard was still pretty much of peasant type at the time - there's the chicken wire fence, flowers in the front, hens in the back, though by now it was hens no more, had vegetables there. I don't remember when exactly we planted strawberries. They grew like crazy and gradually moved, from that fence to the back neighbor, and then to the right.
The wheel and the cabin on the right are the well, i.e. its santrač. The wheel wound the chain to lift the bucket with the water, and then there was a hook to hold the wheel from unwinding. It will stay like that until 1963, when the paths will be made of concrete and the santrač replaced with a hand pump. We didn't drink that water, it was more for washing, chicken and plants, it's the first water, three meters below, not quite potable. In the summer the bucket was often used in the bostan season, the watermelon was lowered in it to cool down in the water.
Granma used to scare me with a baba Roga (granny Horns), probably to wean me off from leaning over and falling in. I had a nightmare of that once or twice, enough to remember.
Behind the well one can see the shed roof and not the outhouse beneath, it's behind the santrač. The toilet paper we didn't buy, nobody did, we had newspaper. The newspaper were of two kinds. Politika and Nin, and later also the Ekspres, were for cutting and arsewipe. Ilustrovana Politika (no network at the moment to find when did they issue the first one), Zabavnik, later Kekec and Mali Jež, were collected and bound. Dad would bind them like a real book binder, except he never put any kind of hard cover. At the time I was already a shitter big enough to stop using the bucket in the pantry, so I learned to do it fast enough before freezing out there in the outhouse.
On the second page of Ilustrovana they printed „Belgrade shop windows“, featuring new and interesting wares to buy. I read that, it had pictures, said what it was. The two page articles, and even longer later, I began to read later, perhaps at age of nine or ten, when I commanded the art of guessing the meaning of words (though the word „context“ didn't exist until, guess, nineties). That's where it gradually dawned on me that what it writes in the papers is not necessarily how it really is. Many things published there I never saw. One explanation was what I heard many times later, „for Belgrade there must be“. And later, when I grew up enough to wade through shops on my own [my own what?], and this column was still published, I realized that all the shops mentioned there were within the „circle of deuce“ (the route of tram line #2, circular, the shorthand for 'strict downtown'), and I've even visited a few, and some of them exist also in Zrenjanin, e.g. RKB, and almost none of the itemst printed there I ever saw on shelves. They'd either be in short supply and would sell fast, or would appear only in Belgrade, or would be not enough for even just Belgrade. Maybe two or three items I saw at my aunts' (čiča Rada's sisters), or would eventually find their way here, two or three years later.
Mentions: bostan, kombinat, Radomir Sredljević (čiča Rada), šećerana, Učubić, in serbian
4-III-2020 - 6-II-2026