29-III-1999.
This [link defunct for a number of years now, domain for sale] was published under my alias on aman. Obviously, my English was heavily influenced by the language I originally used - the curse that bites you in the ass when you translate your own words.
This is the girls' room at the time, made with Greg's Lindenblatt and probably the old 30mm lens from 1976. The scotch tape on the window was just in case some bomb lands nearby and shatters the glass. Almost everyone had those x-windows at the time.
The sound column (as they called the home stereo at the time) is the shitty Sony she had then. It had a 3xCD carousel on top, which never worked right for too long. It's been fixed several times, and was only the first case when I concluded that Sony has no clue how to make a reliable optical drive. There will be more. The sound box and the phone are sitting on my old 30 liter speakerbox, made by Eči (speakers and front board) and uncle Staja (box) in 1977. The record player is the same Toska I bought at the same time, from that guy at Novi radio.
On top of the speaker is her coffee mug, which was later put back in use, and survived until about 2016, when it fell and shattered.
The phone is the same red phone I bought while in the vojska and sent it home via my parents. Though I don't remember when did I pull a phone line through the attic, I think we did it before I went to the army, so it was all ready, just no phone yet.
The cassettes were mostly my road stuff, which I used in any office yugo while in DBA, or now in fregata. Some of the cassettes still held code for zx spectrum.
The cigarette boxes are Go's. She allegedly didn't smoke at the time, she was just collecting empty boxes from parties. No attempts to make her quit pretending ever worked, and still won't, for another year or two.
In these early days of the bombing we went down to the basement. We'd sit there the few hours, even made it comfortable to lie down. Our old synthetic rug, which once covered the working part of the kitchen, served just right - it's heavy synthetic, practically indestructible.
The casks in the background hold the 150 liters of loza, that dad made in 1986 (first vintage), then 1990 and 1998. These he set aside, for the girls, 50 liters for each , when they grew up to be 6 or 7, to serve at their weddings.
The initial purpose of the basement was exactly that, to be the atomic shelter, as required by the then building code. Had to have one or pay for the amount of space under the community center, which is a whole kilometer away and probably sized way below actual population size of the local comminity. It was pretty much a krtlog (v. house dictionary) now, but we shaped it up enough to sit there, even sleep if needed. So the third day, when Faik asked us to shelter his wife and kids, we were able to accomodate them, plus some relatives. We fathers stood out on the street, looking at where the planes are, and guessing where is our artillery shooting them from. We knew, roughly, where they'd be, which was soon confirmed when the first guys from the reserve started coming home for provisions (mostly booze)... The story was that they'd dig themselves in four places, all fake but one. They'd leave a tractor or trailer in the fakes, to fool the radars, and would occasionally leave an unshielded mirko in the fields and turn it on for a minute or two, because it would resemble a radar much better than the real radar. Real radars weren't much use, because they'd get detected in a few seconds. They rather used some ancient, low frequency low efficiency radars, which went undetected, because nobody was scanning those obsolete frequencies.
About sixth day in, nobody cared about the sirens. We got used to it, and by this evening it was Faik's kin in the basement, and the rest of us on the street, smoking and watching the AAA shoot it out somewhere beyond our street.
We also realized that our city is such a shithole that there's nothing worth bombing in it, which eventually came true. The oil refinery, which was supposed to be built here, was teleported to Novi as dowry. Each local politician tries to get either there or to Belgrade, so their dowry is their push to bring investment (by state) to where they want to be. The paradox is that all the oil fields are here, east of Zrenjanin, and there's no oil on their side of Tisa. But the political gravity prevailed.
Few weeks later I heard the joke that the waiter in the Nato war room was a gastarbajter from Zrenjanin, and would always put an ashtray over it on the map.
So they got the refinery, and it got bombed, and one evening we went up to the attic to watch it burn. The flames could be seen from here, 40km away.
What we got instead of refinery was the consolation prize, the synthetic caouchouc (the Frenches should be firingsquadded for their spelling) factory at Elemir, which is a ticking bomb at all times anyway, somewhat less when it's not working, which was often. Still in one piece.
Once, that summer, I went for something to Novi, and the whole area between the highway and the industrial zone, where the road goes around the refinery, still stank of gasoline.
On thirtyfirst Kleks reported from Niš, finally, says „can't catch a time to write, whenever I decide to fire up this gadget, it sounds the raid alert. For a while I would go down to the basement (sister with her kid is there so to be an example to him) and now I mostly go out with neighbors, watch who's flying where or play ball or just gossip...“.
I reply: „We also cleaned up the basement - light, radio, chairs, terrace chairs, crackers, mattress... Wife finished welding the door, now only to fit in some plasterboard (laNperija* was planned, but...) and finishing them windows (I inserted sheet metal instead of glass, but did so around the frame so it all got askew, will have to redo)... and about making it all nice, spit spit... I destroyed the vacuum cleaner by the time I finished. And then (about friday [26th] for the last evening [one] we stopped going down. It's sooo boring, and we aren't targeted anyway. This city is so thoroughly fucked up since long ago, that there's nothing worth targeting.“
----
* the „ship floor“ aka „lamperija“... wainscotting with thin planks of cheap pinewood, with grooves and feathers on the edges so they'd seal he interconnections. It was usually installed as a decorative way to cover the ceiling (as mortar was a tad harder to make flat up there) or the bottom meter of the wall. Looked nice and kitsch at the same time. The transition of m into n before p or b is an in-joke, fake overcompensation - if it's not a bombona but a bonbona, then it's not lamp, bomb, pump but lanp, bonb, punp.
Mentions: aman bre, DBA, Endre Felbab (Eči), Faik Rizvani, fregata, gastarbajter, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Greg Reubenthal, house dictionary, loza, mirko, Novi Sad, uncle Staja, vojska, yugo, ZX Spectrum, in serbian
22-VIII-2010 - 28-VI-2024