Aksham-sanjak

Kožo called me once at two past midnight to tell a joke. He has this habit of calling in the dead of night from the pub to tell a joke. Well, Mujo was sitting alone at home in the evening watching The Twilight Zone, stories from the fifth dimension on television - and it was a really scary episode, well Mujo took a shit on the couch - when suddenly someone knocked on the door. Unlucky Mujo shuddered in fear, turned down the volume on the television, when it knocked even louder. Mujo then walked quietly to the door, swallowed the dumpling, and cautiously asked, "Who is it?" A voice from outside shouted loudly - "It's me!" - and Mujo turned as pale as a rag, felt all over his chest, shoulders and face, and in disbelief blurted out: "Me?!?"

Okay, that's just a joke - it's easy to screw someone from the other side of the paranormal, from one of those four dimensions on the other side of Muja's door - but from this side, from Muja's couch, Bosnia and Herzegovina is arranged exactly like the Twilight Zone, all of Bosnia one great Akšam-sanjak.

And if I were asked, as I am not asked, for the national anthem of Bosnia and Herzegovina - if it has to be without lyrics - I would, by God, declare the theme of the French composer Marius Constant, well known to everyone from the opening credits of the Twilight Zone. The legs of the terrible Belgians would be cut off when, in October, in the World Cup qualifiers, the dark-skinned representatives of Bosnia and Herzegovina ran onto the lawn of the King Baudouin Stadium in Brussels, and the anthem started over the loudspeaker: "Ti du ​​ti du, ti du ti du..."

There are brilliant identity horrors in that trinational Aksham-sanjak - "Me?!?" - and there are also pieces of the classic Twilight Zone, as if Rod Serling himself wrote them. Like the one when two Sarajevo trams collided over there near the Technical School, exactly at the same place from which exactly two years earlier Mevlid Jašarević shot at the American embassy. When the "six" on the way to Ilidža hit the "three" from Ilidža in the same place, it was revealed - you all remember that creepy story - that the same trams had already collided in the same place once: the tram towards Ilidža had a garage number at the time 215, and the one from Ilidža 228, and when the latter crashed and ended up in scrap metal - replaced by a tram with garage number 222, whose number was then changed to 228 - a few years later, here, in the same place, tram number 228 again collided with the same by that tram number 215. Ti du ​​ti du, ti du ti du...

It is, you understand, the Bosnian Twilight Zone: half of Sarajevo still uneasily recounts the eerie episode with the trams, the story "from Satan's side", and they forget Mevlida the next day.

There are, however, those Twilight Zone classics in which the hero wakes up in the fifth dimension, beyond the possible, and finds himself in a world turned upside down like a sock. Only thirty years ago, such stories were banter and jokes - "Me?!?" - as written by the Surrealists, like their iconic one with Rad Pendrek, a policeman who woke up one of those mornings "after which nothing will be the same again" - ti doo ti doo, ti doo ti doo... - finding himself in a twisted and twisted world in which the police demonstrate around the city, and the demonstrators beat them, detain and interrogate them.

On one such morning, "after which nothing will ever be the same again", the managers of Sarajevo City Center, the largest shopping center in the country, woke up to find that high school students and students from Sarajevo were gathering at the tables in front of the cafe and fastfood restaurant on the third floor, so - they learn.

Namely, word got out among Sarajevo's youth about a nice place in the city center where, on these cold, cloudy and foggy days, one can find a free table and prepare homework and exams in a dry and warm place, and soon the third floor of Sarajevo City Center looked like university libraries. The phenomenon took off so much that due to the complaints of the fast-café owners, who complained that the kids were just occupying an expensive Arab business space - sitting for hours at tables, staring at books, writing in homework and not ordering anything - the management of the Center to students and high school students some time ago, you heard the horror story, decided to ban studying at the SCC desks.

Damn you Twilight Zone, Rade Pendrek and all the Surrealists to the last, Đuro and Nele would never have thought of this even at the local maksuz-crack from Majevica: the management of the shopping center kicked out the students who gathered there to prepare for exams!

Rampant juvenile gangs from the surrounding high schools, construction and engineering, clans from Sarajevo's most fucked-up high schools, First, Second and Obale, and worst of all, student gangs from the nearby Faculty of Philosophy, the fear and trembling of Vrbanja, invade the glittering Sarajevo City Center, like wild hordes climb to the third floor, occupy all the seats in front of the Food Gallery, Pizza Montana and other fast-food restaurants, take out notebooks, laptops and books from their backpacks in front of the terrified visitors of SCC, and openly read and write in front of everyone.

They don't even order a hot sandwich, let alone a pizza with anchovies - they just brag about the tables, and as in some nightmarish Bosnian version of Hell's Orange, they loudly sort chemical elements by atomic number, analyze Hasanaginica's characters, solve linear equations and argue about whether she killed God postmodern or Friedrich Nietzsche.

Thus SCC gained a bad name, decent Sarajevo losers, jalijas, smugglers, drug addicts and petty thieves began to avoid it, the golden youth and city starlets, matchmakers, desperate housewives and "housewives from the Bosphorus" returned to BBI in fear, and "nothing is be the same". Until in the end the administration hired security to deal with the hanged high school students and wild students of oriental philology. As Mujo would say, "why don't you take drugs like all normal kids?".

And again everything will be as it always was and as it should always be, Rade Pendrek will wake up in a world where demonstrators demonstrate and the police beat them, Sarajevo starlets and jalija girls will return to their Sarajevo City Center, to sort Zara's T-shirts while chewing hamburgers by the numbers and arguing whether Versace was killed by mafia mercenaries or by Dolce and Gabbana.

The latest episode of the Bosnian Twilight Zone, in which students gathered in the middle of the biggest consumerist temple in the country with collections of math problems, will remain a permanent reminder of how creepy Bosnia and Herzegovina would be if one day it accidentally became a normal country from a twisted, fifth dimension, those in which intelligence and knowledge count.

(Liberation)