Herceg Novi

I recently spent a few days in Herceg Novi, at the Montenegrin team chess championship. Chess is one of the rare human activities where youth is not a particular advantage. A chess game clearly shows a person's character: is he cautious, aggressive, thoughtful, frivolous, optimistic or pessimistic? And the way he leads his white or black pieces and how he behaves at the board will give you a possible answer to the question of whether he is polite or a scoundrel.

Many people find it hard to bear defeat in chess. In all other sports, you can find an excuse for failure in the fact that your opponent is stronger, faster or taller; in chess, you think he is smarter, and that is not forgiven.

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In Herceg Novi, everything (finally) looked like it used to, like in early November 1973, when I was a participant in the Montenegrin junior basketball championship. I played for "Gimnazijalac" from Bar, if you can say "played", because I briefly entered the game once in three games.

At that time, Herceg Novi was Las Vegas compared to Bar. Sparkling, illuminated, full of life, play, joy, warm-hearted people, and gentlemanly... Novi's "Primorje" and its best basketball player, Slobodan Subotić, dominated the concrete court under the Kanli Tower, and at the dance in the "Ivan Goran Kovačić" School Center, while the orchestra played the then-hit Čobija and Pro Arte "My great-grandfather fired a cannon", all the attention of the long-legged Novi girls (at that time, all Novi girls were long-legged majorettes) was attracted by the players of "Primorje" Vučković and a young man who looked like D'Artagnan.

A quarter of a century later, I was at the chessboard, in another Novi, dilapidated, worn out, lifeless, joyless... On the streets, I saw cleaners in orange with the words JP "Communal Services" Bar written on their backs. I asked a passing lady what they were about. "Well, lucky for you, you come from the cleanest and most beautiful city in the country, Bar. Your 'communal workers' have come to help, to teach us cleanliness and order!"

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On average, I walked 12 kilometers a day, along the "Pet Danica" promenade, from the "Dr Simo Milošević" Institute, to the "Škvere" and then the "Nikola Đurkovića" Square, all up the famous 315 steps (I think Zoran N. and I counted them correctly). But I couldn't just enjoy it, I also had to play chess, which, for me, as well as for that old intermaster from Kuril in Bar, is "creative torture". I played two games for Mornar on the last, sixth board and won both. I used an old trick by Maksim Lutovac. In the early phase of the game, I offered my younger rivals a draw. As expected, they refused. I would have done the same if I were in their place. But, this refusal, according to some unwritten rule, obliges them to play to win at all costs. Well, that "at all costs" "got to them". I felt like Marko Kraljević after the fight with Musa Kesedžija, I executed him better than myself. Except that it wasn't the fairy godmother who came to my aid, but my friend from heaven, Maxim.

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I have already written about the Institute, a good host for chess players, on this blog, as well as about chess, which is my eternal inspiration and destiny. In the aforementioned 1973, through an opening in the Institute's swimming pool (I couldn't get a ticket), I watched an unprecedented miracle - the biggest Montenegrin derby, the water polo match between Jadran and Primorac. What a spectacle it was. Now I passed by the pool and saw another unprecedented miracle: everywhere was dirt, debris, and dirt.

How Montenegro managed to bring the Institute to these branches is a real enigma, regardless of the fact that I know that in all of this there is our proverbial disregard for the common good, incompetence, greed, arrogance, vanity...

It is encouraging that what is currently being done within the Institute is functioning at a top level, so I believe that everything can go back to how it was before.

And some new Thomas Mann could certainly easily write "The Magic Mountain 2", about the miraculous setting in which the (devastated) Montenegrin sanatorium for body and soul is located.

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The only thing worse than a grumpy doctor is a grumpy and rude doctor who doesn't turn his head to look at a patient when they ask him something. At the Health Center, I ran into a grumpy young female doctor, and at the General Hospital, a grumpy and rude specialist.

Of course, the worst thing is to run into an unprofessional doctor, but in this particular case, everything remained at the level of paperwork.

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I went to Komunalno to advertise something. A lady told me to come with her, in the cramped elevator to the fifth floor. She didn't know that I would make her a decade older if the elevator got stuck, that's how claustrophobic I am. It turned out that she worked in the Billing Department. We entered a small room "three by three", where there were seven employees. They quickly finished what I came for. I accepted the kind invitation to make me coffee, we chatted, the radio was playing...

In that room, I dare say, there was more life, joy, and optimism than in all the bar directors' offices that morning.

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When I used to spend the day in my pajamas, I was content, as if I were stealing from life and prolonging it. Now, on my retirement vacation, a day in my pajamas is a cause for concern, as if I were shortening my life by that one day.

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I don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned, as soon as I wash my car, it starts raining dirty.