may 1988.
Granma, backed up with mom, spruced the girls into identical dresses (of different sizes, of course) and we (they and we) went to town. It's a vrbica, the willow day. Which is somehow related to easter (though how did they have willows in Galilea, it's a riverside tree of middle to north Europe). I didn't like the idea of joining any religious act, but thought that the girls should at least see some of it and have a feel of all the behavior modifications that are enforced in there, so I went as a driver and photographer.
I remember granma took me to church, surreptitiously, so dad wouldn't know, once or twice. I stood there, just soaking there the imagery and all the folks behaving strangely, as if acting out some ritual (well, exactly what they were doing), the weird woodwork of the seats, the tall ceiling and... didn't like it.
The woman with a boy is a neighbor we met, second house behind Đuđa. The church is across the street. The cobblestones are probably a hundred years old, or more. Thirty-some years later, still as they were, only the houses perhaps got some face lift.
Around the time the building where stour's erc was underwent some redecoration - replastering the walls here and there, repainting, driving out the moisture out of the pressed clay walls etc. The majstors left a plank, something 4m by 35cm by 5cm, smooth and varnished but bent. It was warped enough to be unusable in a hull to hold concrete while it sets, so they just left it.
It stayed in the hall for days. Then suddenly Žića appears, notices it, and promotes it into the most important issue of the day. That plank just must go, immediately. Where to? Well, the waste paper and AC room... or at least the little hall connecting it with the system room. Okay, a colleague and I carry it there, but can't maneuver it into the little hall, because the left pane of its door is stuck. Then Žića revealed his inner Sledge Hammer, and applied a mighty leg kick and opened the door. So the issue was solved, the day was saved... and we still had the plank. I asked Radoja what happens now with the plank. Best if someone just took it away. That's me, I said, it'll come handy. So the next day I came with škodilak and a trailer, tied the plank on the trailer, took it to building site. It served for several years there - as a gangplank, as a scaffold, you name it. I think I eventually made a ladder for dad out of it. And it was called Žića's plank all the time.
Around that time I got a housing loan from the firm. The mechanism was that we all contributed, hey contributed, it was taken off our salaries, some amount into the housing fund, which was then used for such loans. These were given for various renovations etc. In larger firms whole apartments were bought and then given away to workers (formally still owned by the firm, but once one's a tennant for five years and acquired the right-of-tennancy, couldn't be kicked out ever by anyone), but the loans were paid back, in installments. Thos was more to show that, there you go, while there's no way my salary could be decentrly raised, at least I get something. I'd have to pay it back, though, but with the inflation, the payback will be cunt's smoke. And so it was, the last eight installments I paid at once, and the total amount was just a bit larger than the virman processing fee.
The fuckup was that the amount loaned was roughly equal to my net salary, if not for the current month then the next, we kept up the pace with the inflation. And then there was the mandatory field check by the housing committee, to see where the social means [aka money] are spent. The committee was Radoja, missus K. and... maybe a third guy, from internal bank perhaps. We drove to the placić in the office lada and there I showed them... the foundation, the siporeks slabs laid on it, the basement walled and floored but unroofed, and weeds all around. It rained previously, so there was water in the basement. Radoja said „what did I say, nobody sane digs a basement here, there's water underground, I told you you'll have water in the basement“. „Yes, because there's no roof and it's waterproofed so this can't get out. Once covered, it'll stay dry.“
(now there's some confusion in my head as to what was when, I remember the weather was nice, looked like may, maybe april, but should be this spring either way and not in 1987... somehow I'm not sure I got the timeline right)
Now I wish I knew when that meeting at Bole's in Čurda was... should be around this time. I konw Vanji was there, perhaps Fefi and maybe one more guy from erc of kombinat. About that field chart, the Grain project. Which was supposed to be an expert system to track what was done, where and when, by field and culture, what was added to the soil, what was sown, how was the weather, how was the crop. All of it a very long shot, and we rather clueless about how big it could be, but cost us nothing to pick a larger windmill to charge. We didn't even have our own PCs to do that on, nor any kind of organization but bicycles and maybe cars, quite nothing. Just the idea. We met perhaps twice.
I could have taken that path, shown on the shot, to go to work, but it's cobblestones in disarray, puddles everywhere, so I rather took the main street to the post [office] and then entered that street from the farther end. It happened at times that I walked, when the weather wasn't suitable for the bike (nope, that's not the reason, any weather is good for the bike, it's that the bike was dying under me and this year I bought a new one - that one served me nice for ten years - so on days when I just didn't have a workingbike). Anyway, in those few passes down my old path, same as I walked when going to gimnazija or downtown, I noticed that some business space, adjacent to the Nets factory yard (where granma worked until retirement) was now abandoned. Not just empty, but rather missing everything - no shop window, no doors, nothing, just bare walls and a heap of debris in this one room facing the street. It stood like that for a few years. Over times some graffiti appeared in it. Only two, actually, one „KAZ“ (the legendary klub alkoholičara Zrenjanin - alcoholics' club), and the other „bread is a need, rakija is a must“. The latter slogan became famous, heard it reverberate in odd places, years later.
Couple of years later some shader moved in, selling venetian blinds and them metal or plastic stripes type.
Mentions: 29-VIII-2014., The friday off, 12-VII-2021., Bole, Čurda, Đurđa Rođanović (Đuđa), erc, Ferenc Farkaš (Fefi), gimnazija, kombinat, lada, majstor, Radoje Maletin (Radoja), rakija, siporeks, stour, škodilak, Vilmoš Baranji (Vanji), virman, Žića, in serbian
21-XI-2020 - 20-XI-2025