03-IX-1984.
Among the september shots there's one series, made in the garage, with floating flash. Loba came to have some of his paintings photographed, he's applying for some stipend from Germany, some foundation or whaddafuck. We leaned them against the pre-war cupboard in the back of the garage. I didn't have a tripod, so we improvised - put the table in the middle of the garage, a stool on top of it, turned off the light and I pressed the wire shutter and kept it pressed (there's a screw for that), and fired the flash four times. It turned out quite well, and he did get the stipend, and they two went there and so we didn't meet for a few years. But it took some time, the bureaucracy wasn't fast, the procedure may have taken a couple of years, or maybe he didn't make it on first try.
This is Nina, in her classical edition. She always somehow achieved to have one sleeve up and the other all the way down, with bare shoulder. The tree in the back is the huge cherry, which we two planted back in 1976. It bore enormous amount of fruit, of best quality. Luckily, it was close to the garage (no, it was intentional), so its flat roof, which always dripped rain inside, at least served to make cherrypicking easy.
The hammock is granma's handwork, she used to make them when she worked in the factory. The girls really loved to play there. I don't know whether this one survived into 1992 or granma made a new one.
The cat's name is Azraelka, named after Gargamel's cat Azrael from the Smurfs. It was really slim. The next year she bore kittens. We never quite managed to convince Nina not to touch them nor bother them while they're small, no use. She'd just come and say „I took a kitty!“. We somehow distributed them or they vanished on their own when they grew, maybe we found hosts for them. The next year she had another two or three, even prettier. We took one to Magi, and the others dad took to a farm on end of town, they always have mice because they store pig fodder, so cats are in demand. He took Nina along, so she'd see a big pigpen, with hundreds of pigs. There she saw one pig scratching a shourder against a pole, rubbing it up and down. The memorable utterance was „look, a pig doing pushups!“.
At work I invented a gimmick to avoid turning [my*] back to the class. Or maybe I did that last year, who'd remember exactly. The blackboard were wide, all over the wall, the mašinska requires a lot of drawing. Good that I don't have to wipe it that much, or to call for the orderly to do his number and amuse the class, but the far left end of it, in the corner by the window, is a fuckup. I have to turn my back to the class to reach the corner with my right hand, and then there's clamor within seconds. Well maybe I don't have to... I remembered how in 1976 I realized that I'd suddenly become illiterate if my right hand was out of commission, say in a cast, so I started practicing my left. Took the chalk in my left and it turned out even easier than with a pen, and not too much uglier than with the right. The added effect was that this attracted the guys' attentin („look how prof writes with [his*] left!“), all the better.
It would happen often that there's five-three-two minutes left before the bell and I've done what I planned, nothing to do now. To check the time, I used the pocket watch I got in Moscow (24-II-1978.), which is discrete and I can do it unnoticed, facing the blackboard. This unnoticed thing is one of the two things I remembered from the methodics class (the other was „don't shout, there's 40 years of breathing chalk ahead of you“). The trick, as that deadbeat claimed, is that the kids should not see professor looking up the time, because then they go lax and their attention wanders away, and it looks far more professional if the prof has the sense of time and doesn't get surprised by the bell, it's like magic. True, those whose classes I attended mostly had that magic, we rarely saw a „what, bell already“ or three minutes of looking around and not knowing what to do.
To fill the time, I'd tell a joke or two, or when there was just one minute left, I'd just pull out the bag (later the tozna) and roll a cigarette. While smoking in a classroom was forbidden (except during a popravni), no regulation anywhere mentions rolling. After a few months of that, I noticed that a guy from the last bench extended a hand across the aisle and received money in it. They explained to me later that they were betting on my speed, if I roll it within 20 seconds one guy wins, if not, the other. And this wasn't the first time they timed me.
Salary would land on our savings booklet, which wasn't called an account for reasons unknown. We'd simply go to the bank (all at the same bank, in our case the SIZ for education selected Ljubljanska, not LJB but LB, because lj is not a separate character in slovenian) with the noodle**, where they'd check it against the list they got from the school, and would update the booklet with it. We'd raise cash from there, you just go fill the cash takeout slip, the girl in the window checks it (do you have as much money as it says, they seemed to have that much of computing at the time), writes a cashier's order, the cashier counts the money to you, done. They had some bearded guy for a cashier, a true wonder, the hand ballet as he counts the money, I loved to watch him do it. Not because of the money, but for his skill being so honed that he achieved a full elegance of movements.
It happened just once that the girl behind my window was Branka. How did she get there. We greeted silently, she filled what paperwork I had, I went to the cashier, got my cash and then didn't see her next forty years. She appeared somewhat withdrawn, no smile, not quite sad but would rather be anywhere else. As if her chief grated her ten minutes ago. Who knows what it was.
Around that time I remember attending yet another moba, for colleague machine engineer (or was he a metallurgist... most likely the rijeka school like the others). On Gradnulica Guvno, the north end of town. This is where there was a lot of wild construction, so city regulated it and released (finally!) a whole set of building lots, so some three-four new streets were built. Everything the same like on any other moba, don't even remember what we were working on, probably pouring the upper floor floor (yess!), I remember he already had some walls. The same old gang of professors from mašinska, just not mathematicians alone this time - engineers to, even one of them PE guys. The one thing I clearly remember was excellent beans from a huge pressure cooker, proper domestic.
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* is this really necessary in english? Is there anyone else's back or hand that I could have meant? What possible confusion is this supposed to avoid?
** the salaries were calculated on huge sheet, almost two meters wide and as longs as there were workers, in duplicate. The calculant would write numbers for all categories into their cells - work hours, points accumulated, sick leave, paid leave, tax, social [security] contribution, montly installments for loans etc etc... who'd remember it all. There was one row per person. Then the calculants would take out the totals, type the a virman for each thing to pay out, and eventually archive their copy of the big sheet. Our copy would be sliced into strips, called noodles, it's all written in there.
Mentions: 24-II-1978., Branka, Margita Gunaroši (Magi), moba, MPSŠC (mašinska), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), popravni, Slobodan Šumić (Loba), tozna, virman, in serbian
4-VIII-2022 - 10-VII-2026