28-VIII-2016.
We promised dad to take him for lunch on Neša's birthday. He got ready, shaved (left the moustache, and grew a beard later again), put his dentures on (which changes his face, comes out almost botoxed), and we came to pick him up... with a taxi.
And we kept not telling him where are we going, and he kept thinking it would be out of town, the taxi being a way for me to have a drink too. Instead, we go just 200m down the street, to kantina, where debelamačka now operates. He probably could have walked that far, but with considerable effort and would have prefered to take a break, and there aren't any benches on that side of the park, so taxi.
Smilja has put up the space just nicely, she even renewed the fountain around the statue of the chick* kneeling on a fish, though she'd have to adjust the nozzles, the jets barely reach her feet, the old ones went over her head. But the old ones were clogged long ago, and to replace them she'd have to break the concrete, so she lined a tube around the bottom of it, but above the floor.
And the façade of the Culture home (to the right; the kantina itself is lower building in the back) is renewed, but only yardside. The front, where the movie theatre entrance was, has seen the brush, since the nineties, between zero and one times. The fence is overgrown with shrub and vines. What once the Kombinat's Vlada parkar (that's how we called the guy) kept pruning has bejungled long ago.
We stuck to the regular order of things. First a fićok of brandy - some apricot or quince, though we know it's a fake, it smells of fruit instead of fruit brandy, but doesn't matter, one won't do a thing to us, then the standard ragou čorba (the fat lady can't fail with that, and even knows how to make proper Banat soup with noodles), then some czech black beer (I'd say Kozel, excellent) with I guess barbecue.
The family tradition says we should have ćevapčići here, but I don't remember whether we stuck to its letter, as the house special is sausage and pork hocks (the lower part of ham shank).
Dad, surprisingly, didn't go dewy-eyed, which he became prone to, he was rather measured and composed, though we could see that we hit the right spot by bringing him here, there's lots of memories right on the spot, even I almost got born under a table here, and as I kid they often brought me here, where I probably ate my first ćevap and learned to love chopped onions.
The fat lady has this gift to conceive a tavern, create the ambience, fill it with people, gain reputation... and then somehow fails to keep it full. Though, the city changed too. kantina was once too small for the number of people visiting it, when kombinat was operating. Now there's nobody there, industry vanished, and I fail to see how will she keep this place full.
We returned by cab again, left dad at his gate, everything went fine.
The next day she went upstairs for something, and called me to see something. Wasps. All dead. Hundreds of them. Too bad we went to cleaning right away, so I brought the good old eos40 only near the end, just to memorize that day. The mystery of what happened here remained until 01-XI-2023..
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* in serbian slang, girl is not a chick but a fish, so „fish kneeling on a fish“
Mentions: 01-XI-2023., čorba, ćevapčići, debelaMačka, eos40, Kantina, kombinat, Nenad Berger (Neša), in serbian