06-VII-1977.
Train to Stuttgart, visiting her kin there. It went all night, and we kind of slept at times, though not much. Some time in the morning we got there, found our way to a local train to a lesser city, then to a local bus all the way to the village. Found her uncle's house and found them there. Klaus was born already, but still at the hospital. There were some complications at birth, there was some damage to his head, but he survived. We didn't get to see him at all, he was there all the time.
We came just in time for lunch, one of many, where they tried to emulate the cousine of their childhood here. The soup would be from an old hen, with domestic pastry, the yellow grease not in those circular droplets, but covering all of it. Inge, Oma's younger sister, came by with her husband, and we sat in the yard, coffee and cakes. Long talk about something with batteries, and about batteries in particular. I actually didn't speak german, still don't, but had some idea how far would analogy with english get me, and picked words and bits of grammar as I went.
There I got the idea to ask around where I could buy an extension cord with a clock, to turn its power off at a given time and turn it back on at another, to turn off my amps while I sleep and turn it on before I wake up. The guys never heard of it, though Schmidt, as an engineer, understood that it must exist. Nobody had any idea how would it be called, so the term „Stecker mit dem Wecker“ (outlet with an alarm clock) was coined, and kept that name in our house dictionary. We didn't find it. I think I saw it in that Neckermann catalog four years ago.
Canned peanuts, the drug.
Uncle owned a section of a two-storey house, the last in the block - beyond it fields were stretching. There was a small factory packaging spice for pickling cucumbers, mostly caper. The whole area smelled of it. There was a basement, then on it the first apartment that they were renting out to some gastarbeiter (a Turk or further east) and they lived in the upper apartment. They have fitted a room and a tiny bathroom in the attic, and we got that. It was a bit warm at times, but the weather wasn't too hot - this is hills, rolling. We had an old color TV in the room, but didn't watch much, it was all in german. They dubbed everything.
We bought a radio-clock for Ljuba and his wife, which we later used as a pretext to pretend fear at the customs, and when, with trembling hands, I pulled it out of the backpack, the customs officer dismissed me as a naive fool. Which was good, because he didn't even bother to rummage through our luggage. In the leg of my new bell bottom jeans there was a cassette player of some size. Actually, the bells were just far too wide, I didn't wear them too much.
There would usually be a bottle of mineral water (was sprüdel the word or brand?), which was carbonated far more strongly than at home. Later I found that where ours had perhaps 5g of carbon dioxyde per liter, this had 17 or so. We'd leave the bottle open overnight and it was still strong in the morning. Not much of a water, though, didn't have the taste of Knjaz or anything. There was also lots of local beer. The uncle had a subscription (!) so a crate of beer would arrive regularly - perhaps weekly or on call.
A couple of times we went to visit her further cousins in that nearby city. Then I had the time to notice the notice on the bus stop "nich plakatieren!" (post no bills). Next village, "plakatieren verbotten!". Next, "plakatieren streng verbotten!" (strongly forbidden). Too bad we disembarked there, so I never knew what was the next degree. There, on a train station, was a public scale. I inserted half a mark and got my weight printed on the same cardboard ticket like the train tickets were - "sie wiegen 160 halbe-kilo". Which meant the scale was graded in german pounds (Pfund), which were rounded up to 500g, to differ from american pound, which is an oddball number (453,59237 g).
Also visited Helga and Stef. Their daughter is a cute girl now, though a little lost, just like a teenager should be. She asked me to gather as much material on the group "The Sweet", which is well known to me but couldn't ever take them seriously, they were chewing-gum kiddie rock. Never got anything - at this stage I completely stopped tracking the scene, didn't even care about any musical magazines (actually never bought any even while I did, despite "Džuboks" being quite good). This was the age of punk, the total destruction of the guitar hero culture, right on time. I only made a mental note to self to check periodically whether they started any construction. Much later, around 1981, there would be the new wave, which was good, but I was lost in it for a while, didn't catch up until 1982.
Stef told us how his shop was making a special machine for calibrating the precious stones - should separate them by size and/or weight. The problem was with rubies and a couple of other stones, which would get statically charged and would remain stuck somewhere in some corner of the machine. The customer measured the total stones against those which passed through the machine during the test, and decided not to bother with the lost ones, the loss was negligible to them. So we got a bag of some 7-8 rubies, sized 3-4mm. It's still somewhere, if anyone could remember where.
Mentions: Helga, Inge tanti, Klaus, Ljubivoje Tomić (Ljuba), Oma, Stef, in serbian
25-XI-2015 - 31-X-2025