Our next neighbor from the other street. His lot is quadruple, two lots next to us, two in that other street where his address and house are. There's a house number for this side but there's no house, it's an orchard and a beginning of a foundation for a house, which they never built. He built the house for their son, or planned that second one, but the plan came to nothing, because the son saw no future in the city so returned to grandfather's house and land in Mladenovo, becoming a peasant. Ostoja and Anka thus stayed in the city.
He used to work at the farm, i.e. the agricultural enterprise which tilled the land within city limits. When that burst during transition (now whether the land was returned or the thing was destroyed by financial maltreatment just like almost everything else was, who'd know now), he was left without a job and still missing some years to full retirement, so he registered as a farmer on those two back lots. At any time they have some forty hens, for meat, as often they lack eggs. When the current batch is ready to be slaughtered, he pays a professional to do that, and then we don't see our cats for two days. At times he had a couple of pigs, and held all of it rather neat, almost never stank.
He loves to have roosters, even gave us two because thus he could keep seeing them, the fence between us is just chain link. For forty hens the regular number of roosters would be four, tops, but he lets them be up to seven.
Almost everyone calls him Stole, wife calls him Stoja, here and there someone calls him Stojke. Speaks soft and I mostly don't understand what he says, I just nod wisely and try to catch a few buzzword to at least know what was he [talking] about. We rarely sit by a table; we did visit at times, once or twice a year, when we distill rakija from the excess apples he gives us, and bring them their share. Since some time in 2024 he went somewhat bonkers, a cog slip in his head, he keeps seeing some black guys spying on him and taking pictures, from our birch and the chicken coop. He walks his orchard wielding a long stick to shoo them and threaten them.
We mostly talk through the fence, and pass things we exchange over it - we get apples, sometimes chicken, they get eggs, tomato saplings, rakija. We sometimes get tomatos from them, but ours is always better.
Anka, his wife, is moderately chubby and unable to crouch. Most of the time she's about the garden, always bent over, with her back turned to us. Whenever I think of her, that's the first image coming to mind, face comes next. Her accent is the typical drawl of Lika, which I don't like to hear, mostly because of a heap of actors who imitated it badly. She's permanently unsatisfied, bemoans, grumbles.
19-VII-2026 - 20-VIII-2026