august 1962.
Dunno where I got the air rifle from, I know we borrowed it. Kale had one, so perhaps it was his, or dad got it from somewhere else. These weren't expensive, I guess, as there were many of them around, almost any neighborhood had a couple, and kids were becoming quite proficient marksmen, shooting a coin at fifteen steps, or even birds.
Dad didn't mind (while some other things were forbidden to me as too dangerous), actually I think he always wanted to see me as a soldier. With his grandfather along with two brothers being killed in the WWI or before it, in Balkan wars, and his father being a POW for all four years, serving at some peasant's in Germany, he kind of enjoyed being in uniform, and I'm not entirely sure that he didn't volunteer to be a reserve officer, so at least from time to time he'd get to dress up and play, even though he ended up in the territorial defense, which was about the lowest kind, only a notch above the civil defense.
Hence there are as much as three photos like this, at a time when we went through maybe three spools of film a year.
I wasn't that bad with the rifle. While I never got enough ammo (cheap and available as it was) to build enough practice to learn how the rifle carries and to quite counter the recoil, I managed to hit the target quite often. Once Kale and I were shooting a ladle that we propped into a crack of the fence wall, and I shot the business part of it. The pellet ricocheted twice inside the hemispherical part and came back at us, hitting him near the navel. Nothing much, the pellet (called, wait for it, „dijabola“, who knows why and how is that related to devils) is about one gram, and it rebound twice, so it lost a lot of speed and it was barely a scratch.
As far as I can see, my hair is still fair.
This was the month of my birthday, of which I remember just nothing. There must have been a cake, mom always made one. Granma being the main cook, mom took to cakes and cakes*. She managed in various ways, as we couldn't exactly afford various ingredients required by the recipes, so she invented or found various tricks to pass cheaper. One was to make a „keks torta“ (biscuit cake - see how the nomenclature here is full of false friends), which cost two boxes of pti ber (petit beurre - little butter) and half a liter of coffee. She'd lay the biscuits in layers, across the plate, then douse each layer with coffee, pouring it from a coffee spoon, then spread a thin layer of filling, then go for the next layer - up to six or seven layers. Then she'd top it and surround it with the remaining filling. When the recipe required strawberries or raspberries, she'd sacrifice half a bar of lipstick into a regular white filling (sugar and margarine, perhaps an egg or two, originally butter). The lipstick already had some fragrance of its own, which in the end all fit well together.
Ten years later the cakes became more serious, of which I remember Vasina (Basil's) the best, nowaday I'd eat that gladly, if it was as it was then.
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* cakes are any kind of cake which covers the whole oven plate and is then cut into pieces to be served; a cake is actually called torta (not identical to tart), and is one taller piece, cut radially into slices, or an equally tall square piece, cut into full height slices. The cakes one can hold in hand while eating; the latter requires a small plate and a tiny fork. The main difference is that cakes have the filling only inside, and are topped with just powder sugar; a cake is also covered with filling on both top and sides. There are exceptions to this division, of course - šampita is all filling and thin crust on the bottom, shaped as a cake, but still counts among cakes. Baklava fits into neither definition, having no distinctive filling, its filling is random nuts and not a spread, and it's pastry doused with syrup, it also counts among cakes.
Mentions: David Jamaček (Kale), in serbian