01-X-1975.
Beštara and I moved into the place he found and invited me to be his roommate. Dunno what he tried to study the year before, didn't work. So he enrolled into law, freshman afresh. He had the whole schema worked out in advance, he had some uncle who was some dick in the court, and he was already practically a judge, just after he dispenses with the formalities like study, exams, diploma, state exam. Yeah, right... but then who knows, he may take this one seriously. There was a hyperproduction of law students. The lectures were held in two auditoriums, professor in one and a set of loudspeakers in the other. Well, at least until december, when the number of attendees would dwindle enough.
On maths it was quite different. The intial sixty of us dwindled to around forty - the others gave up or just couldn't pass enough exams. The atmosphere at the lectures was rather relaxed and altogether quiet. The wainscotting made for an intimate setting, made one almost sleepy, which still didn't happen to me then. But as soon as next year I was able to sleep through the break - I'd strew my jacket over the desk and just lower my head on it. Once the guy next to me just couldn't stop laughing, seeing the impressed zipper on my face.
The shot was made during a break.
The room we had was in the middle of downtown, in a first floor apartment (that'd be second floor american) above a little shop on the corner, in an old building with high ceilings.
The owner of the apartment was an old guy with young wife and a ten year old son. The old man was quite deaf and liked to hear the news, so we gradually learned to be away at 20:00, when the main daily news on Tv were. He was someone in the late forties, being caught on the romanian side of the border, where he was accused as a titoist and condemned to death three times. Survived somehow. This was anywhere between 1948 (FPRY breakup with east bloc) and 1953 (Staljin's death). Now if the kid was born around 1965, this means that he managed to get to this side around 1960. Hero or a fool, I couldn't guess. His wife was cute, if only she'd wear something else. Almost too cute to be harmless, but at least she was completely silent, haven't heard a word from her. Maybe she didn't quite speak serbian, who'd know. And I had a girl and no inclination to get into adventures of that kind, and Beštara had his girls. I'd sometimes see some of them when no amount of planning could prevent it, it just happened ad hoc. Usually it would be "is there a good movie tonight" and that was it.
Most of the time we understood each other in half sentences. Sometimes we'd have a tenfold back-forth without completing a single one.
We mostly ate at the students' mess halls, one was really just behind the corner, except breakfast, which would be what we brought from home (monday, tuesday) or what we bought in the little shop on the corner (other days).
On the picture is the linnen box, which held whatever the old guy kept in there. It was between our beds, and we used it as the breakfast table. I see this was shot when he just brought the new Bairette camera, its wrap is still there.
He managed to spill just about anything, except when we'd cook wine, that he never messed up. The best pearl of his was when we once had bread and bacon for breakfast and he cut the bakon with a huge knife, his left hand ending up greased quite well. He then went on to open the bag of milk. Milk in bags was the common packaging then, ever since they quit using the classic glass bottles (which I remember we had well into sixties). Plastic bottles won't be practical until after 2000 and the carton packaging was too expensive, it was used mostly for homogenized milk, in tetrapak (a tetrahedron it actually was). He held one corner of the bag and started cutting. I watched, unbelieving, thinking that he'll switch the grip about halfway - when he finishes the cut the bag will simply fall, so he must have had something in mind, so I just watched to see how will he do that and how will he handle that huge knife. Well, he didn't have any plan, he had no clue what he was doing, and when he made the cut, the bag just obeyed the gravity. Then he tried to grab the bag as it fell, and almost made it - the jet of milk went a meter high - but his hand was greasy so it slipped. Only then I remembered that I don't have to be just the flabberghasted observer, so I jumped in and grabbed the bag. Luckily, that knife was already laid on the table.
One of the pickle jars would stay on the table and serve as a combo ashtray and trashcan. We'd throw just anything into it, and it got really ugly really fast, sometimes it'd stink seriously (luckily, we had a stopper for that one, so when we threw it into the dumpster, I only hope the rotten sour cabbage in it didn't explode). We called it „srkni pa crkni“ (slurp and die). Too bad the picture isn't in color, the gamut of the shades would have won an oscar in a scary movie.
Judging by the folder where I shoved the reshot slide, and how we are dressed on it, this must have been this month. We went, all four of us (mom, dad, we two) in the evening at Lazar, like house friends. They showed us the slides from a teachers' ekskurzija to Greece. Looked great. To avoid too much trouble with projecting them on the wall, because the largest one was covered with a regal and the other one was behind a couch and anyone who sat on it, and not wanting to bring the screen from the club as it was big and unwieldy, he made, by someone's advice, a rear projection surface from a mirror and frosted glass, A4 sized, in two wooden frames connected with hinges. No problem to make that, when you teach oto you know a bunch of tricks. He shot a few slides that evening, and one of them ended with me.
Eh, the times when photo material had physical carrier so you had a limited number of prints, as many of them as you make, and with slides there was just the one, copying thereof was prohibitively expensive and/or complicated, I don't know anyone who did that. Just once, a few years later, a guy from DC-99 was making prints from slides, using Cibachrome process, which means it's twice the inverse process. Allegedly the chemicals for it were so nasty, that they came with a neutralizer, to react against that instead of with sewer sludge, less poisoning this way.
Mentions: DC-99, ekskurzija, Lazar Josin, Milovan Sebešćen (Beštara), OTO, regal, in serbian