There was us, the boys from the corner - Kale, me, and 4-5 others, and while we weren't in any way a gang, we were expected to get into a group fight with some other gang. Though we were practically the guys from šećerana, it was some other gang who were legendary under that name. Literally legendary, because apart from the legend, nobody knew any one of them, didn't know whether they really existed.
Then there was one family of hungarian Gypsies in one of the clay pits, the nearest one, where they'd discard the slag (mostly black sand, with some molten-like pieces of black tar, rock solid but light and hollow) from the kombinat's power plant. There was a railroad track, narrow gauge as in a coalmine, with perhaps a dozen wagons and one or two horses, which would bring the wagons to the pit, unload them, then go back. They did that perhaps twice a week, I don't know really. The pit was perhaps originally 80x80 meters, but by this time it got shorter, at least ten meters was full.
These hungarian Gypsies had a little house, pressed clay and ramshackle roof, no bigger than anyone's summer kitchen and a pantry, with some lean-to shed to it, and they had several fierce looking kids, at least two of which were older than us. One was called Eči, but that's actually a nickname - hungarian öcse doesn't exist in the dictionary (or I spelt it wrong), but it's something to call a male kid. Actually, Kale's nickname would mean the same.
The nearest we got into an actual fight was once when we stood at a few meters distance and shouted at each other, and promised to break bones if one of the other side treads the street of the other. But then they didn't really have a street, they lived at the edge of the pit. A couple of years later their house was gone and so were they.
Living on the edge of the kombinat would bring stuff from it every now and then. In that pit there was a dump, where most of the garbage was the insulation removed from cables. Then from some workshop, from time to time, nuggets of sulphur would arrive, but I can't possibly remember what were we doing with it, it's only the picture of how yellow they were. And the smell, I remmeber that just as well. The carbide was more interestin. It was used for welding, because it would develop acetilene when wet, which burns nicely and develops enough heat to melt metal. Someone would procure a nugget of that, and we'd dig a hole in the ground, sized just about a child's fist. A used tin can would be found, without a lid, and one of the guys would have a proper hunter's knife (and if it would be a switchblade with a spring mechanism, that was envied by all) and would cut a hole through the bottom. We'd lay the carbide in the hole and wet it - someone'd pee on it - and as soon as it would start foaming, we knew that the acetilene is coming out. We'd cover it with that can, someone would put a burning match to the hole. The gas would, of course, light immediately, making for a good little explosion, which would launch the can high, even above the wires. We did this two or three times, this and... preceding or following year.
Behind the last house in te backstreet, next to the railway track, a small meadow remained, which couldn't be used for anything else, being so triangular. We played small goals football there, whenever anyone brought a ball. It was unwieldy with one goalline being so much shorter than the other, and the rules weren't quite clear to me, nobody knew how to explain them to me while everyone claimed to know them, so sometimes the dispute took longer than the play itself. A whole new vocabulary - „enac“ (which I understood, much later, as „played with hands“), „opsaj“ (later corrected into „ofsajd“), „u autu“ („in the out“, which I actuall got but when later I understood the word, came across as funny). I wasn't too good with the football, perhaps I scored once when the goalie went to pee.
On that meadow someone would bring sheep to graze at times, so we had to watch for fresh droppings, not to step into one. Because of either the sheep or us, the grass there was never rich, it was mostly bare, well tamped soil, with many tiny holes, there seemed to be a whole village of some sort of spiders. The holes were vertical and perfectly round, with well pressed walls, a nature's miracle. Then someone brought a trick how to fish those spiders out. Take a ball of tar, knead it well until it becomes soft, then put it around the end of a thin thread in a shape of a thin shuttle, like a plumbbob. Then slowly, with steady hand, lower it into the hole, and then the spider should grapple it and then its legs would be stuck in the tar, just pull it out. I saw guys who managed to catch one; for me it was enough that I mastered the technique and managed to lower my thread almost a pedalj deep. Maybe I once got a spider out.
The brick plant which made bager was moved elsewhere long ago - it's easier to move it than to haul clay every day - and lots of stuff remained in it. I never went in, don't even remember how it looked, but from time to time gypsum models of roof tiles would emerge from it. Which we then chopped and shaped and made pistols. I had one such in my hands, and I kind of remember sculpting it myself, with lots of details, just can't remember what did we use to paint it.
Another pastime, which we didn't do often, was ironing the coins on the railway track. Of course, only the smallest coins, one dinar or two, five would be already much. When the train drives over it, it becomes guess three-four times longer, and sharp-edged on all of its sides. The relief is practically gone, barely recognizable. We didn't do that often, as we really never had much money to spare, and we also heard it was forbidden, what if the train rolls over and then they blame you, though there's no chance that it can roll over, but then what do you know. And it became boring as well.
The track had three tracks, until, I guess, 1961. So it would take both regular trains and the narrow track ćira. The ćira rocked a lot, those tracks weren't exactly flat, and I was often scared that it would keel over. Probably its very low speed made this never happen, at least as far as I knew. Then the ćira was retired, so on some routes it was simply removed (e.g. the famous little track, to Romania), while elsewhere it was turned into regular track, like the Vršac track. I remember we went to an ekskurzija there with a ćira, but that would be this year's october, it was raining all day, everything was wet and the windows in the car were foggy. It would take some historical digging to find out the exact data, years.
Later we heard that anyone who grows near a railroad does this.
The movies at the time, in the „Kristal“ movie theatre by the kantina, were mostly westerns, John Wayne was big, few guys were imitating his wry smile and winks. I was into it too, until I saw a scene where a woman mounts a horse, and then he slaps her butt with whole palm. Well, such disrespect, stopped liking the guy. Specially when I understood that these are all actors and he obviously enjoyed it, wasn't acting. Horst Buholz was also popular, always playing the youngest member of the gang (or team, whatever) who'd prove his worth towards the end. I remember some horse cart with... what, dynamite or guns, being escorted throughout a movie, but not quite who was it for and what was the plot. That's the kind of movies we went to watch on our own, in the afternoon, usually the 18:00 show. With parents I watched different movies - comedies with Danny Kaye (Kaminsky), „Cat on a hot tin roof“ (of which I remember only that they talked a lot and at some point a guy with one and a half leg, with crutches, swore a whole minute), „La violettera“, some with Doris Day and then a bunch that I don't even remember. I wondered why the subtitles didn't cover everything that was said, sometimes several sentences would go untranslated, and I guessed they won't repeat what's already been said, you should have learned the first time. Sounded a bit fast for me, but okay, it's made for adult speed. So I began practicing. Not that I got anywhere with it, but at least started listening.
Then movies in other languages came, and my theory was bust. Nobody can learn so many languages so fast, with that method.
The one japanese film I remember was, amazingly, not a Kurosawa, but „Onibaba“, black and white, kind of horror (yup, one scene, but it was scary), more a story of jealousy and power grab, among three people who live in reed huts in a swamp. Remember that one better than all the westerns together.
27-VI-2020 - 6-IV-2025