To Szeged. Just a smuggling trip, I'd say, buying T-shirts and sausage.
The agriculture fair in Novi was around mid-month. True, we aren't any sort of agricultural outfit, we're the stour's erc, but Radoja found a good excuse in Iskra Delta and a few other „manufacturers“ of computing gear being exhibitors there, so he took me and two other programmers there, to take a look.
That was part of his policy - while being quite limited in what he could do about our salaries, he managed to find other ways to make us feel less shitty, to be something. Fair as fairs go, same as ever, we saw a bit of all of that, it's rather that we were somewhere together and not in front of terminals. Then at lunchtime the choice came to me, as the only one who studied here and not in Belgrade, to choose the place where we'll eat.
It'll be Borsalino, of course, I know of no other places. This is where it became obvious, by me knowing just one tavern without them noticing anything odd about it, that all four of use were from medium to lower well off families, and didn't have much cash to go out while studying. The only exception was once Radoja's roommate, a priest's son, who'd also play it thin except after the village slava, after which he'd be overflowing with cash for a couple of weeks.
The Borsalino had one dish, beans, on its menu, but it was good. Nobody complained. The house tradition kept each table with a glass of water with three hot peppers in it. Largish, light green. Radoja and the colleagueess didn't reach for them, the colleague and I sure did. I ate mine to the stalk, he gave up on his at half. Said mine was less hot. Okay, we'll see tomorrow. I took the third one with me.
Next morning I rode my bike to the green market, to get ćevapčići and whatnot from Trpana. Cut this third pepper lengthwise, he took one half, I the other. He ate two thirds of his, I ate all of mine. He paid the breakfast for all. At least we didn't have to clear out the small change.
Which often did turn to be a challenge, because I never had enough cash with me to simply pay for all of it and then charge each of them for their share. Instead, I'd gather some contributions, roughly rounded amounts of expected cost, and then we'd get clear accounts. Which would be simple if we put it all on paper (which we actually did a couple of times, when nothing else helped), but no, we kept trying to make shortcuts and only complicated matters. It was once said „well screw us all, four mathematicians around the table and it's second coffee break and we still haven't cleared the change“.
The works on the house were progressing, slowly. We already had a plate on the basement, a smaller crane came, by mediation of stambena, and lined up the siporeks boards on the wreath aka serklaž* on its walls, that was last year. Then we built the ground floor walls up to the next wreath, and then I had, again via stambena, a much larger crane, from the shipyard, lift those boards to make the top plate. For that I summoned a minor moba, just Radoja, one more colleague from the erc and I. I was up on the plate, initially just the wall, and when the crane lowers the board, I'd unhook the lines on which it hung, take them out so that the crane can make the next round, and the two of them would position the board correctly by pushing it from below, using the scaffolding poles. It was all done in an hour or two. There was a funny incident when they came to pick me up, because Nina said straight at the door „so you are that firm Radoja“. What was that - about a year before that, as he was interested in our housebuilding, because he also went through that a few years before (and his house is quite good, been there a couple of times, also has a big dayroom with kitchen at one end), even passed me a copy of his house project, just to see how that goes and what it takes, we once discussed the total cost of it. And there he said „there's no way it'll cost you less than a billion, here, let's bet“, and took a business card and wrote on its back „billion, affirms Radoja, on a dinner at Intercontinental“ (note that both „firm“ and „affirms“ are „tvrdi“ in serbian, hence the confusion). Nina found it, because I kept it in my driver's [licence], read it, and understood it like that.
Of course, he was right, and then also wasn't... because the inflation already had some momentum, and all those numbers lost any meaning. I never actually bothered to tally the total cost, because if I would have seen how much it all costs, I would have shat myself. Or, on the other side, I would consider myself immensely capable, if I managed to make that much money.
And missus K. remembered to ask me how far did I get with the house, probably to remind me of the honor extended to me by means of that housing loan, „did you pour the rear plate?“. [There's still a dispute whether 'rear' could be used to mean 'last', as it does in croatian and slovenian; IMO it should not be thus abused] „I did, only one plate left“. „How, if you finished the rear?“ „Well the rear one is in the back, over the basement, now the front one remains“...
Then we had quite a large moba to pour the concrete for that plate, but I absolutely can not remember what was when, nor how did we lift the concrete, as we didn't have any kind of elevator. I think we had a pulley, so we lifted one bucket at a time. We still have that pulley, somewhere on the upper terrace.
But that must have been the next year, because the whole summer and fall I still made the hull around the serklaž for that plate. I couldn't possibly get enough planks to make a regular hull, and even then, how to hold them in place while concrete is poured. I also tried to avoid having any of the concrete emerging on the surface, so I decided to build that surrounding box out of siporeks. Our blocks being 30x25x60, I'd cut them into four plates of 7,5x25x60, and build with that. The cutting didn't go smoothly, these blocks are still concrete, doesn't matter that it's concrete foam, it eats the saw. I soon gave up on attempts to sharpen the saw, but would take the pliers (of course, Unior) and space the teeth out. The saw's edge had pairs of teeth separated by a deeper break, so I'd twist these pairs so they'd protrude sideways, and that sufficed. The blade bent a lot, the cut would veer sideways, can't span it tight enough, but I'd turn the block this way or other, saw from this side and from that.
I'd put these together using fierce cement mortar, 1:3, and it held firmly. But the progress was slow, specially as I'd be doing that in the afternoons, even in december, when the day is quite short. But doing a meter or two every time, I got it done.
We two often went to do this or that, there was always some work to do. Up to about this year there was a path by bager, to which we'd go down the side street behind the house to the railroad, then carry our bikes over, then straight. But then a garbage dump formed around that path, it reeked of carcassed and we also risked stumbling into a shard of glass or some rusty iron. So we switched to going around, and it wasn't as big as before, because bager was already declared a landfill and it was much smaller now. On the filled part a path formed, several paths, which we'd take to reach the railroad crossing in our street.
Sometimes it'd happen that it was dark by the time we returned, and we couldn't easily pick the best path, the soil being quite uneven. Only my bike had a working headlight, hers and dad's couldn't boast of that kind of luxury, but light made it worse. It's a wee five watt bulb, and doesn't really shine much but casts weird shadows and makes me drive around seemingly nasty obstacles, straight into much worse ones that I didn't see. Once the light's wire got unhooked, I realized that driving blindly was much smoother.
During one of these weeks Mars and Jupiter were really close and bright on the western sky, looked like magic. If any astronomer sees this, may help me to decide when did this actually happen. My best guess is september this year.
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* wreath has several meanings in slavic languages, including a crown, a mountain ridge; in construction, it's the reinforced concrete frame on top of a wall. Since it connects the walls into a frame, it's considered a circle; serklaž is the transliteration of french circlage (or whichever way they chose to spell it)
6-III-2020 - 20-XI-2025