03-VIII-2005.
Lena and I were sleeping at my folks'. After the morning coffee she wanted to go for a stroll to the park and swimming pool. Nostalgic herself, though she lived there less than two years, as a baby, before we moved to our new house. Alright, I picked the shooter, let's go. Whole area stinks of something nasty, though not the industrial decay of kombinat's remains, unless it was the beginning of the malfunctions in the carcass processing plant, less than 1km from here. Or was it something from the city's garbage dump, which is a couple of kilometers off the farther end of town, happens once or twice almost every summer, when there's a fluke slow wind contrary to the prevailing ones, then it stays whole day.
Dropped by kantina first. It fell apart. Between the yellow bricks, and in the cracks of the concrete, reed grows. The former kombinat's culture center still works, miraculously. The current custodian showed us around. This was the movie waiting room. There's another entrance to the left, so there were two ticket tearers. The corner doors lead to the staircase, which led to the projection cabin and the balcony, where the third tearer waited. The little window above the armchairs (look, leather, I remember they were some sturdy cloth while they were in the reading room) was the box office. The movie had two exits to the right, and one to the left, through the yard between the kantina and the reading room. The toilet was in the left corner, no peessoirs, just a classic concrete wall with thin jets of water always washing it, same as in the kantina, forever rusty and stinking of itself.
The last regular movie show here was some time in the seventies, and then the interest waned, everyone had televizors. They revived it a few times, but it never lasted. The space hosted other shows, it could take [live action] theatre, folklore, bands.
I climbed upstairs from the yard, to see where our accountants had offices. Nothing there now, locked.
This yellow brick road goes from kantina, it's the last one. Had that in the main street, but it's actually very bad for traffic, just a little water makes it very slippery. And it needs to be resettled every few years, because it doesn't stay put, the roots push it from beneath and the water finds its way as well. This I shot standing by the gates of obdanište, which ceased operation long ago. The next villa hosted the daycare, and the Insitute held only the last one. Now it holds all three, judging by the plate by the gate. Don't know if that little piece of shit, Štraus, is still its boss, or he retired. The business is still operating.
The next villa in the other direction, in which it turns I always knew at least half of the tenants, even when I didn't know they lived in it. All these villas were built with šećerana; the last and poshest belonged to the owner. This one was for the main engineers. Among them, my first private student of 1980 (his mom worked with mine and was a spitting Liz Taylor; dad was an alkos, then mom became one, and eventually the guy himself). E., house next to Đuđa, had an aunt there, we visited once. Then mr. Magda, an agricultural engineer of posh Zagreb, married here, kept the accent. Her husband was also an alkos, didn't last. She did, we saw her, even made a photo of, once in 2018.
Lena and I stopped to make this shot and a few more, and then someone addresses me, through the fence. An elderly couple... „you were the classmaster to our son“. Ouch, yeah, Feri... and the sweet M. of DC-99 was his sister, right... I exchanged a few sentences with them, in hungarian - good chance to oil a few hinges. Lena gets an impression that the whole city knows me.
The swimming pool was as it always was, but wasn't open, no water in it. Whether it was because of the stink or was it their periodic problem of underground pipes cracking as the soil settles. Which shouldn't happen, this is the place where they dumped the black sludge from kombinat's heating/power plant for years, exactly to settle the soil. Something wrong there.
In the afternoon we went to the dentist, the old Jelovac guy in the basement of the elementary school downtown, right across of the zanatlija. At the beginning of that street, the shitduct stuck again. It's the lowest point in the area (though the total elevation of the terrain varies less than 3m across town), any better rain makes it a lake, always a problem. Made this shot of the thick fi hundred sixty hoses stuck into the manhole, pumping out stuff, and immediately some Ilija Čvorović is all over me, why am I taking shots, who am I shooting for. Shooting for myself, my own memory, I'm back home for a vacation, this is a public place, show me where you posted a no shooting sign, what's your problem.
She spotted us from afar this time, got new glasses for distance. Don't know what dental work we got done, it took several visits, I know there were some extractions. I know I calculated the cost against the theoretical cost of doing the same in the US, and the net result was that the airfare and the 700€ the dentist charged us were still a couple of grand less than what it would cost over there.
After the dentist we walked a round on the štrafta. I had the hunch to make as many shots as I can, who knows what it will look like the next time, and ah did I have a hunch: this is my only shot of the pass on the right of Tekstil's building. The left one was already built over, there they shoved the then McDonalds, deceased, and this here is the prime league building lot, this is main street number seven, and it's got just kiosks on it, including Cvele's (v. 25-VI-1998.). So snap this, for remembrance's sake. And look, the nearest, red kiosk is the modular plastic job that was mass produced (in Slovenia?) in the eighties, one of the better examples of SFRY industrial design.
Cvele's is the one behind the florist's. Um... the label on top of it is something else, not what I remember, and not one that I'd consider good. Didn't even think of trying it out, being fresh from the dentist. We returned to the main square, sat at zelenozvono in front of the theatre, ordered a ness each, with straws. „You tell me when I got the straw correctly in place“ - because we both had our lips insensitive from the local anaesthesia, had no sense of what we were doing.
Mentions: 25-VI-1998., 24-VI-2013., DC-99, Đurđa Rođanović (Đuđa), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Kantina, kombinat, obdanište, šećerana, štrafta, zanatlija, zelenoZvono, in serbian