By the end of month, mom and dad went with Veljko to Hungary, for their first border crossing ever, and forgot to bring their passports (I was on mom's), so they had a nice day on the Palić lake and came home. A week later we all went, me included, to Békescsaba. Veljko spoke hungarian (a rare thing in a Bosnian, they usually have great ear for music but are tone deaf not only to languages, but even to dialects within our own language or variations in names), so he was our interpreter. We were the center of attention when we parked in front of the hotel, where we were supposed to be selling the small-time contraband (at the time, I think it was vegeta, nylon stockings and chewing gum), and about a dozen people talked with us (through his interpreting) and ogled our fića. One of them, Feri, invited us to be his guests, and in time he'd come visit us. Since we didn't really have enough forints to get a room in the hotel, we agreed.
They had a rather largish apartment, with its own entrance, in a series of what we'd call townhouses nowadays. The place was unfinished, at some point I stepped into a pile of lime powder outside - the mortar was still made. I remember trying to talk with their daughter (name translates to Violet, which I didn't know then), a year or two younger than me, sweet, dimple-faced and completely unintelligible. We found a few common words, like zsaba/žaba (frog). Much later, I'll learn that hungarian language kept only about 20% of its old words, the rest were loaned from all around, including the 20% which came from us.
My mom insisted on buying a pressure cooker, and while there was an interpreter, the host's wife insisted on explaining the works herself, and she spoke too much too fast, so Veljko simply couldn't cope (and he was, I guess, drinking with the guys and interpreting for them). The weight valve was, in hungarian, "figyelem" - a warner, the thing that tells you to pay attention. Mom understood it to be "fićulem", roughly similar to whistler. Which was true, in a way.
While Hungary was generally in worse shape than we - the smuggling went from our side and they were the customers, mostly buying chewing gums, nylon stockings and Vegeta - they had a few items we wanted. Pressure cooker was on the top of the list, not much better than what was made in Vogošća near Sarajevo, but far cheaper; the soda bottle with carbon dioxide pods was next. Then their assortment of salami and local sausages was next, and of course the wines. The list goes by our family priority and it varied over the years. The last two items, however, stayed, only cheese was added to it.
The trouble with the pressure cookers (which we had perhaps six of, over the years, even though they could last indefinitely) is the rubber gasket, which may last two or three years and then simply stops being a gasket and leaks the pressure. There were no two compatible models - the gasket for one wouldn't fit any other. So these gaskets were always a problem. By the time you use up the two spares that it comes with, the model is out of print and you can't find the gaskets for it. Which is why we kept buying them, because these things come really handy. There are several dishes in our cuisine which require long cooking, sometimes over four hours, and a pressure cooker reduces that to a quarter, while sacrificing none of the quality.
Now, as I write this, I feel the crave for sarma.