august 1960.
They kept trying to teach me some manners, but didn't offer much of an explanation for it. Never understood why would I say "ljubimruke" (kisshands) to just any old person from the neighborhood - why, the very image was sort of repulsive to me. Sure they liked to hear it and I didn't have to do it, but still... didn't sound right.
Also, when asking for something, I'd just say "I want" and thought I made enough sense to convey my meaning across. But no, "hoću" wasn't good anymore, granma insisted on "molim" (I beg, but also means "please" as a phrase). She wouldn't give me water until I said so.
So on a hot august afternoon, despite the house being of pressed clay, walls thick, windows shaded, but the heat still comes in somehow, and I got thirsty. We brought fresh water from the artesian well (should be arteški, but we said arterski, equalizing by similarity) right behind the corner, we were lucky that way - the others carried two bucket on an obramica - an arced pole with hooks on either end, perhaps 3-4m long, on which two buckets would hang low enough for balance. They didn't have to carry it too far - the next such well was two blocks away.
The fresh water was in those buckets in the pantry, on a little shelf (still in one piece, in the garage in the old house, as of 2019). I simply refused to be forced and said "zajtim sam!" (I scoop myself!). Because I just realized I was finally tall enough to lift the 0,5l pitcher, take some water in it and drink as I please.
This event was recounted many times later, and I also remember it quite vividly, the rim of the enameled buckets just around the height of my eyes, when I prop myself a bit on my toes, and the dark blue enameled pitcher with enamel knocked out in one place on the bottom, around the bottom edge.
The shelf was painted dirty white, same as just about anything else in the pantry, which I thought is a rule, must be so, for many years, because real white paint can't be made. Turned out to be not so - it was a rule among painter majstors who just thought it's better this way, pure white is for a hospital, for a house you muuuuust drop a bit of black, which they once demonstrated to me, to see how little of it is needed. They did it every time, without asking, considering the knowledge of arcane secrets of their trade beyond the province of the customer. That once when I saw it was when my parents paid some guys to repaint their windows and doors. And that was the last time - from then on, we painted them ourselves, starting in early seventies. When it was my turn to start doing that, we were already skilled - I never paid anyone to hold the brush.
In the hot summer afternoons, it was customary for everyone to lie down and take a nap. While all three went to work and came back around 14:20 (dad and grandma on bicycles, dad had a stainless steel clip to hold the right leg of the trousers so it wouldn't get caught in the chain; mom would take a bus), the lunch would be over by 15, and then a couple of hours in the worst of heat would be spent behind the thick walls of the house (outer walls about 70cm, inner just 50-60), with shades pulled down (some thick curtains until 1963, then roll-down dark green ones until about 2008). Some days in august, at the times while we still had that well with a bucket on a winch, the traveling salesmen, i.e. peasants with horsecarts, mostly špediters (with tires), would sell bostan. We'd buy a large watermellon and some canteloupes, put the mellon in the bucket (already full of cold water) and lower it into the well. It wouldn't be eaten until late in the afternoon, when it's cool enough.
Mom kept taking me on walks, often with a friend of hers - by the shots, quite a pretty girl, dressed likewise in those summer dresses with lots of cloth from the waist below, I'd say influenced by the Hollywood movies at the time, Dorris Day was quite popular then, and Sarita Montiel with „La violettera“ wwe heard in several versions, mostly domestic. They'd take me to the last of the villas in that line from šećerana along the yellow brick road. Judging by the scaffold poles behind, it was probably being prepared to host the new Institute (science and technology for the kombinat).
Note that despite having rich and lush dresses, they had identical shoes. There were many items for which there wasn't much choice - everyone was just happy enough that they were finally available. While the dresses were made by any seamstress in the neighborhood (mom had one in the novogradnja right across this villa), the shoes had to be industrial. The handful of cobblers in the city were busy enough repairing the soles (and adding 'blokej' on leather soles of new ones - a blokej was a small steel sheet that'd be nailed to the tip and the heel, so these wouldn't wear out so fast), they didn't have the material nor the time to make much of new shoes, and what little they did was probably too expensive.
There's a bunch of shots with this girl in the park behind the city hall, there in the gazebo and by the fountain, on that ferry, on the Little bridge.
I've often (not always, just each time!) wondered what was the little cage, dangling on the edge, for. It may have been movable, so it would have been used as a repairman's mobile scaffold - there were a few pipes in the undercarriage of the bridge, so what if one of them sprung a leak - but never saw it in use. After a dozen years it was gone, and I never found out.
The fence on the near bank was like that since, I guess, beginning of the century. Always bent and slanted like that, never repaired, but then never got worse than this, until it was finally replaced with a new one, don't remember when, probably in the nineties or later. Same kind of banister was on the Big bridge's staircases.
The four windows seen under the bridge belong to the old library building.
Mentions: bostan, kombinat, majstor, novogradnja, šećerana, in serbian