01-XI-1976.
In the morning, I came with dad to bring my stuff - the usual comforter, pillow, books etc. However, the old hag didn't like us, or got a better offer, so she already rent the room to some other guys. What now?
Well, I still had the newspaper, it was actually today's, so I went through the remaining ads. Finally found one which sounded reasonable. True, we'd have a third guy in the room, but he's not a student, he's teaching history somewhere in a high school, he's away most of the time. And the landlord had a son in musical high school, clarinet, and another son who's in cops high school, freshly opened, across the Danube somewhere, so he's out of the picture. So okay, at least we have a room.
I drove dad to the bus station, and he went home and I went to Ljuba's place. Told hin the whole story, how the hag fucked us up, how I did what I could under the circumstances... okay okay, so where is this? That street, number 23, sixth floor, apartment 26... he nearly threw me out the window. He stayed there for a month last year, and couldn't stand it. The landlord is an utter bosnian moron, describes himself as a mountain wolf on hot city asphalt, misplaced and yet surviving. Sure, surviving, he used to work in a military factory somewhere in the mountains, managed to retire early with a hefty pension, his mother was in the partisans for a while so he got this big apartment and put her in a nursing home, ... the whole story.
He borrowed us one key, to "go downtown and photocopy". We didn't quite get whether this guy was simply illiterate or a complete moron. Only weeks later I noticed a little workshop downtown, which advertised "photocopying and making keys". Aha, this is where he got it. Wrong, of course, but not his original thought either.
So the month passed somehow. At least we had a proper bathroom, which didn't even have its own water heater, there was a central one for the whole building. Which I used just to shake out november from my mind - it was as dirty and depressing as it can be. The tiny shard of glass, which I somehow got into my left thumb toe, emerged and left me. I earned it when I once misstepped on the beach in Vrsar this summer.
We'd usually get in on monday mornings (me the evening before, such was the custom, we would take that slow afternoon train, I'd escort her to her place, then take a bus), attend the morning classes, and then in the afternoon we had, I think, pedagogy - monday was always loaded. Then we'd return to the room, realize where we are. His son would usually practice his scales in the other room for maybe fifteen minutes, then would switch to always the same čoček (qv.) in furious rhythm. Not bad, but always the same one, and it also began grating on our nerves. Then we'd go to buy something to eat and to drink.
On third or fourth such monday we found a bottle of Skenderbeg, the albanian best export cognac, and began meze with it. Somewhere around the 2nd swig (we didn't have shot glasses, or did we use water glasses?), the wolf came in. Had a nose for booze, obviously. Started all disgusted "so you're drinking in here! What... is that? Umm, ..." and then just sat next to Ljuba and didn't get up until the bottle was empty.
He was obviously freshly fat. Getting money any way he could. He was selling life insurance, to pad his pension. And many apartments in the area were given to university staff, and having students in the room (and two more in the other room, whom we actually never met), he thought he got the academic terminology down pat.
"So this guy wants to take life insurance, and I sit with him, there's a long form to fill. And when I ask him about profession, he says lector. No kidding. What's this guy, making fun of me? Or can't pronounce r properly or what? I mean I know what a rector is, and this guy now... well I wrote him down as a rector, won't fool me".
Last week of the month we went to Petrovaradin and found a room. We endured this one month, and that was enough.
One remark, which was probably uttered this spring, when I made friends with Ljuba, so it's from him, how David Bowie influenced the looks... And nowhere one single frajer to be seen who'd take the bait to start imitating him, but a heap of chicks did. And, of course, once he said that, all of a sudden I began to notice them myself, they were literally everywhere.
Years later I found one who stuck to that look deep into years: Pasa. Of course, she was far beyond the horizon at this time but some twenty years later we'll meet again.
As for the Skenderbeg... despite the overall impression that Albania was a backwater, poor and undeveloped and decades behind us in many ways, well pretty much like the whole east bloc (of which it wasn't a part, but not too different either), the cognac was good. All these countries with statist socialism had huge problems when producing everyday goods, like food, booze, furniture, appliances, vehicles. Their goal was heavy industry (and weapons) first, electrification and transport, health and education, and the building blocks for citizens' standard came distant fourth or fifth. The accounting system they employed favored numbers in production, not the quality or design; any improvement in quality was secondary, it was the amounts (of end products or the materials used) that were favored. So their stuff was either shoddy, or didn't last, or was made by imitation without considering the usefulness. The clothing was sturdy and ugly; the shoes we didn't even try but they looked they were uncomfortable but lasting.
But every one of these countries had a need for some representative items, most notably the drinks and a few specialty foods. USSR and Poland had vodka and furs; USSR also had caviar; Hungary had hot peppers, good sausages and wines (beer and coffee were just bad), Romania didn't have anything memorable (just nothing comes to mind, except one bottle of ţuica (rakija) which was an awful piece of shit), but they had nice imports - cuban rum, chinese spam; Bulgaria had rose oil. And Albania had this cognac and nothing else that I knew of. Later I found out that they were making things of carved metal - manual coffee grinders and toznas.
These things had to exist, because comrades in the higher ranks of The Party had to have something to brag about, and it would be utterly unpatriotic to do that on all imports.
Mentions: frajer, Ljubivoje Tomić (Ljuba), meze, Spasenija Višnjić (Pasa), tozna, in serbian
5-XII-2020 - 31-X-2025