august 1988.
So this is how it was... the shot was taken through the skrobara guy's unfinished house window, upstairs. The little yellow-green tent is ours, and the big one to the left is my folks', and the one across is susjed's. Diagonally to the right is the beach, right behind the two houses. Velebit is on the horizon, seen over the Pag island. There's nothing to see on Pag, it's a desert. But you can't see that on these pictures - praktika was practically kaputt at the time.
The shots were all overexposed, because the shutter slowed down, stayed open far longer than it was set to, and we also fucked it up in the lab. This is, I'd say, the last time we messed with in-house color process. It's not for lack of skill, but for it being organic chemistry, the čorba oxidyzes far faster than b/w and it's harder to preserve. It makes sense to do when you run a few hundred shots per batch. With our tempo of two spools a year it perishes before we get to the second spool, no matter that we keep it in dark and in fairly corked bottles with no air inside. It spoils regardless, and then even the negative is bad and then there's no software nor scanner that can make a decent pie out of a shit original.
I see I took time off from shaving and trimming the beard. This seems untouched since may. All our hairs got lightened up, and we tanned incredibly. Nina was still a blonde, actually never brighter than now. She went platinum blonde, Go of course stayed blonde forever but this time even her freckles appeared (as did hers), which is a rare occurrence. She's always got them but they aren't prominent, they need lots of sunshine to develop.
I still can't understand how we stayed in the sun all day.
This is when I noticed the first gray hair on me. Not on my scalp, not in the beard - on the chest, by the heart. I concluded it's a workplace injury, from that inventory in Presprom (july 1988.).
Okay, we did have an awning, and some cloth was spanning the space between tents, so we at least had some half-shade. And we got used to it, so on day five it all came kind of normal.
Susjed's pal went into local politics, they formed some sort of homeowners' board, whatever, so they took their demands to Zadar municipality, or at least negotiated with the village. He got elected president of that, and they held meetings on a little field not far uphill from our make-believe street. We'd just hear, every now and then, the crowd shouting "tako jeee" ("so it is!"), which we then adopted as a buzzword. Whenever one says something silly or stupid, at least two others shout "tako jeee".
Susjed's son was already a cop, and was mostly spoiling for a fight, on a nationalist basis. Ahem, that won't turn out right, calm your hormones, man, you're not at home... He even told me, once when he and I went to get water, how they almost got into a fight, not quite clear on who against whom and which side is our side, but cooler heads prevailed, nobody really wanted a fight except the two-three hotheads, who were quickly pacified and told not to cause trouble. So, luckily, nothing happened.
The susjed's wife had no eyes to see the other guy's wife, and one night we had to listen for half an hour as she harrangued to susjed for being so submissive to her, who the fuck are they that you so crawl to them, and this and that. Maam completely forgot we're in tents and she shouldn't be shouting her ass off when anyone in 20m around can take notes. And not to mention the matter of which lady is better looking*.
And so the day came, three days to the end, when she would go home. Nina actually wanted to go with her and, well, why not. It was more interesting that way for both of them, and we also had more space to pack. This was shot somewhere in Zadar when we saw them off. That's when I understood how negative I got - hair lighter than face. In a shop window I saw myself and didn't recognize me, the figure I saw was some barba**. Of course, everybody else's hair got lighter, but them I saw daily, myself only now.
Later we heard that they had good time on the train, specially near the end, when they were waiting for Futog, to see all the cabbage fields.
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* The histories of both families went zigzag. When susjed died, she stayed alone with the children who were grown already. Daughter married to some gastarbajter in Austria; son was in some kind of a deal with a car registration "agency" in our (new) street - basically smugglers who'd produce paperwork to legalize cars; he had driven a jaguar or aston martin they had, „for testing“, for months. Which was the end of his police carreer, and he became a trucker. He was married and they had a daughter but his mom couldn't stand the bride so the marriage didn't last. She found another guy with the same name as her first husband, married him, then didn't, then eventually found some shady character, ex cop (rank of major), ex Foreign Legion, and ran him out too in 2018. Nowadays she's a real old hag, leg broke then slowly healed, barely walks, but still has a long tongue.
The skrobara guy and his wife are just two blocks from our house now, so we eventually met en route to Lidl in summer 2019, and visited a couple of times. Their house is huge, it's built for three families, yet the two of them are alone in it - no grandchildren, children spread somewhere, not interested in making families. The lady sill looks great, has style and hasn't aged much, except she got lost somewhere between Schrödinger and Alzheimer, asks the same question every twenty minutes.
Mentions: july 1988., 26-VII-2021., čorba, gastarbajter, Gorana Sredljević (Go), house dictionary, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), praktika, Presprom, skrobara, Zadar, in serbian
10-VIII-2022 - 7-IV-2026