Restarting the diary. The first entry is mostly about the innuendos in the class (5th grade, ending), where Zvojko is mentioned as having a thing for Rencika, and another guy (a neighbor, unimportant) is colluding with me to make some other guy (don't remember who, just a nickname that I can't connect to a person) ask for a photograph from Lidija and K(*).
The municipal maths competition was around this time, at viša. I think this was my first time there, I was just beginning to learn the city. So far my range was delineated by the circumference of kombinat, ruža and Lesnina, plus that street to downtown, with very little else to the left and right of that.
I have no recollection of anyone else who was on the team, this period is completely murky to me. I just remember how Ivka was pissed off at the tasks containing stuff we didn't learn, must have been some setup to help some competing school, maybe one downtown. We didn't know of such things until then, but by next year it became clear even to us. The tasks weren't prepared by any top level committee from the state, it was rather some mathematicians' board at province level. And the competing schools, that became a public secret, which schools are on almost not speaking terms with each other, which ones were thinking too high of themselves, which were normal etc.
The competition proceeded by all of us (of same category) being seated in a larger classroom, spaced apart, we'd get stamped-on sheets of merchants' paper**, and the tasks, mimeographed and upturned, were waiting on the desks. Then the president of the žiri would declare the start, we'd turn up the tasks, read them and begin working.
About giving impossible tasks, that's the old soviet tricks. Every few years they'd dole out one of old unsolved problems on their mathematical olympiads, in the hope that among the thousands of contestants one will be found crazy enough to solve it, by the old „what does a kid know what's three hundred kilos, they just pick it up and carry“. And sometimes it worked.
Outside the viša we waited for the žiri to check our work, and the music was coming from radio somewhere. It was probably the „Meeting at nine and five“ emisija, on sunday mornings on first programme, guess they played the new songs from the subotica festival of the evening before. I remember some thing by the Elipse was there, then the one which made Prelević famous, and „Osmijeh“ (the smile) by Grupa 220. That's how I remember it, wasn't writing a diary in full yet, didn't even know what I'd find relevant sixty years later, so fuckit. These early traces are somewhere far, beyond focus.
(and I think I misremember - writing the above paragraph in 2025 I found that „Osmijeh“ was published in december of 1968, but from an interview with Drago it turns out that it was in july of 1967, and it was a common occurrence to have a popular song make rounds on the wee number of radio emisija playing rock, far before the publishing process ran its course, and the record finds its way to the shelves)
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* K. was by far the largest of us, two sizes taller, heavier and larger. But no bully, she wore glasses. She vanished after the elementary school; much later her son was in the same class with my daughter.
** double A4 sheet, i.e. A3, lined in blue grid spaced 4mm horizontally and about 10 or 12 vertically; there was a red line on top, about 25mm below the edge, and a vertical one on each side, some 40-50 mm from the edge. Very similar, in outline, to the vežbanka, which was a copybook for official written tasks that we'd have for serbocroatian, maths, foreign language and later also physics and descriptive geometry.
4-VI-2020 - 23-VI-2025