While writing some of these, it crossed my mind that we once went to the city bath. It was an old decrepit building, on the higher bank of the river, bordering the park between Dom and the puppet theatre. I think we went there just that once, probably because it was complicated - you'd need to bring a full change of clothes plus towels, and then if your hair was any longer than just stubble, you may catch cold on the way back, because it would never be dry enough when you walk out. Fear of flu ran strong here.
The walls were something from "Stalker" - the oil paint was peeling from the walls, the floors were black - probably not even concrete but what passed for pressed stone then, the fine gravel, rice sized, thumped into place with something involving lime, and then polished. That's how tombstones were made here until at least nineties. This was probably polished enough, and you didn't quite have to step on it, because there was a wooden grille next to the bathtub - and everything was wet. There was a bathtub, standalone. I remember that much, and that mom and dad were with me, but don't even remember what faucets were there (or were there just buckets with hot and cold water? who knows) or on which side.
The building was surely gone by the end of the sixties. It was probably deemed too far gone to be fixed. Amazingly, nothing was put in its place, the place on the slope above the river is now just a staircase to come down from the park. The city archives say it was torn down in 1974, but I remember there was some stretch of the park between it and the Dom, because that's the passage we took many times. The building was maybe half fallen by then.
This may be the time, or maybe it was a couple of years before, when dad was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The doctor in case turned out to be father of Mika Fišer. Dad was already a non-smoker - he gave up when the habit came to more than three packs a day - and on x-ray there was some blotch. Which turned out to be a nothing, a glitch in the equipment or material, but he got the treatment just in case. He was rather thin, still, so the doctor gave him chits for augmented diet - which meant ham, butter, cheese at some low, subsidized price. And he was getting regular injections of streptomycin, for which first a nurse was visiting (the mother of Bakračevi brothers), but then mom learned the technique and completed the treatment herself. It involved breaking an ampule of distilled water - it had a narrower spot where the small saw was applied to weaken the glass, so it would break exactly there, then injecting that water into the little glass bottle with a rubber stopper and sheet metal frame to hold it tight. In the bottle there was the streptomycin powder, which would then have to be shaken vigorously until it all mixed up into a suspension. Then the solution would be pulled into the injector (the syringe would be poked through the rubber cap), then the air would had to be blown out of it, and then dad would get it into the buttock. The favorite technique was to slap the other buttock to confuse him, so he wouldn't have the time to react to the poke. The same nurse said that the trick works all the time.
The therapy worked, in the sense that dad was never thin again. In a couple of years he developed quite a pounch, and by mid-sixties he was well into the hundred (kg) club.
Around this time (give or take a year) we bought a vacuum cleaner*. Because a broom is limited, and actually raises dust, this is far better. It came in a sizable box of thick and firm cardboard, without any markings, nothing printed on it. I think it was made in some factory in Čačak. It was firm and reliable and had a bunch of various add-ons which were almost never used - for one, some box with two little balls of crystal naphtaline, of interesting smell, which was to be hooked into the rear, to blow air through it and it was supposed to suffuse the coats hung in the cupboard, to dispell moths. The coats were made of wool then.
The other add-on, which was used a couple of times, was the blowdryer. It also plugged into the exhaust, at the end of the flex hose, and its power cable plugged into an outlet in the rear of the insucker. There were two problems. One, the same flex hose was used at the front end as well, so when it was first tried, it blew out various dust and motes which remained in it, straight into mom's wet hair, so she had to rinse it again. The next time the hose was blown out first, but a different problem appeared - the blowdryer had no thermostat nor switch, and it got powered as soon as it was plugged in, wasn't even behind the main switch with the fan, so it started heating up immediately, even before receiving a jet of air. In a few seconds its bakelite tube had blisters, and then there was fire inside. It wasn't used ever again.
Those two gadgets, plus various front end shoes that it had, stayed untouched in that box for years, in that coat cupboard, where I'd dive in to play at times, and they were a matter of mystery to me. There, I knew what an insucker was and what it does and how, and knew the purpose of all those, it's that feeling that we have a technical miracle somewhere in the house, lying dormant and waiting for its chance to be taken out for once, didn't leave me for many years, even appeared in my dreams, where I'd find some hidden box they didn't even bother to tell me we had. The irony of it is that those dreams finally left me by the time when they have come true. Presently (december 2024) I can remember, off the top of my head, at least three machines we have and never even opened (okay, I did take out the instruction manual for one and read it).
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* the expression in english is a complete misnomer. First, it doesn't use vacuum or come anywhere close to it. It provides just a lower pressure, which is still far from zero. Second, vacuum is clean, needs no cleaner. The serbian expression is usisivač, literally in-sucker. It sucks stuff in.
27-VI-2020 - 25-III-2026