31-I-1977.
The date can be any time between 15th of january and 15th of february, but probably leaning to the first one. Since Borče didn't find the fourth guy, the landlord simply decided to rent the basement, i.e. the wine cellar tunnel, to some enterprise. He was actually a forester, which meant he was supposed to be making his regular rounds and not have the time for a vineyard - probably true, we didn't see any such equipment around the yard, but then we didn't roam the yard either, just the few meters between the entrance and the gate.
So we had until the end of the month to move. By sheer luck, accident, hunch, whichever came first, we found a place just halfway between the bottom of that staircase and the main street, in a house which was, allegedly, the oldest still standing house in the village. Our room was a converted pantry of sorts, or a former summer kitchen, back in the yard. The ceiling was rather high, and the floor was solid planks covered with "warm floor" - the thinnest possible linoleum with just as thin felt glued below, which is cheap and fine while it lasts. First tear, or folded-up corner, makes it look cheap and ugly, which it is, but it more or less gets the job done.
We didn't have a bathroom now, there was a lavor (washbasin vessel) and a wastewater bucket in the smaller room. We just carried the oil heater down the stairs... or did we have a car again?
We found a bunch of practice work by some student of visual arts, mostly nudes in coal on big sheets of packing paper, and we bought a pack of thumbtacks to pin them up, to hide the walls. The walls, however, were really the old solid pressed clay, and despite the tall ceiling we had no problem heating this up. The winter was mild, anyway.
Covering the walls extended in an unexpected direction. Ljuba kept a connection to the guy where he lived last year - a guy from physics - and this guy had more money and somehow managed to acquire issues of Lui and Playboy, where you could see the subtle differences between french and american soft porn - the french girls were more sensual, their poses more mysterious or at least alluring, while the american ones were, ahem, just richer and more upfront. Soon there was another source of the materiel - the assistants to our professor, whom we got to know through Paja. We actually started visiting him at times, for a late night vodka, where we'd observe a game of cuger - which was the fast move chess, total time a minute each, then a shotglass, then another game. He had quite a collection of different, decidedly all different, shot glasses, including one (mine from then on) which was a miniature glass potty. And, of course, he had books everywhere. Even after the guys helped him make shelves, good strong iron bar shelves, pretty much everywhere, including above the kitchen door, he still had heaps of books everywhere. Including a lot of SF, of course, it wasn't all maths and astronomy - I remember I got "Babel-17" and first "Dune" from him some time this month. Of course, I devoured them.
And our wall collection kept growing. We started including pages from "Start", a playboy-like magazine from Zagreb, which passed the same tests - it did have long high-brow articles on, say, modern sociology or culture or art, and best collection of tits, buts and cunts from these areas. There was even a lengthy dispute among the readers about the appearance of one Ula Jakobson, who did look great IMO, but her shoulders weren't gentle, looked a bit rough and tough. Which I didn't mind, but many readers did, so the letters to the editor contained „crampus“ and worse than that.
We had loads of punch cards. Some with code we wrote at practical classes, some blank, but most were the discarded ones - either the typist's error, or syntax one, or simply discarded by virtue of becoming unnecessary in the code. Not that this initial course of Fortran ever mentioned any optimization; just writing code which would run and even do its task was success enough.
And this extra bunch of cards found its purpose. I can't recall what I wrote on the fifteen-some cards I lined up above my bed (bottom left on the picture), none of the shots show them clear enough. Some of these must have been bits of wit/wisdom, the rest were just poking fun. For the new year we made greeting cards out of them - wrote best wishes on the blank side, put the postage and address on the other and just mailed them. We later heard how puzzled the recipients were, to the point of „dad said some strange bill arrived“.
The landlord was a butcher, but still had a basement and a tunnel of unknown length. In these areas, in wine areas, it's quite common to have the tunnel extended for the next pair of barrels by each generation, so the length is proportional to the age of the house. And he said his house was the oldest one in the village.
He also had a backyard, divided from the front yard by some yard building - whatever was in there we never knew - and a bit of fence and a door in the passage between this and the main building. The trouble was that our toilet was about 2m behind that fence, and he had hens in the backyard. Had to be very careful not to step into chicken shit in those two meters. For some reason, hens just loved to relieve themselves on the concrete. We had an exra pair of slippers (Ljuba's dad is a shoemaker, he makes those) just for that purpose. We wrote "OUT" on each, so it was "you don't go out without outout".
Physics annoyed me with its offhand approximate methods. The alleged existence of a reversible process is among those approximations, and I'd define it like this: 'an event in which the state of the observed parts and system parameters changes and eventually returns into the state in which it was at the beginning of observation'.
The fuckup is that it's impossible to observe all sides of an event, so the reversibility is just an illusion, because we managed to get few things into the status quo ante. Having spilled some energy along the way is unimportant, besides, this is mechanics, not thermodynamics, dear colleague...
Mentions: Ljubivoje Tomić (Ljuba), Mališa Borkovski (Borče), Paja Ćurčić, in serbian
7-XII-2020 - 25-III-2026