A long time ago, Ćičo Senjanović called me to tell a joke. He did not have the habit of calling at two past midnight to tell a joke he had just heard: he, in fact, invented jokes himself.
Well, on that day the Croatian water polo team played the final of the Mediterranean Games in Bari, Italy: for the most trophy-winning Croatian team, which took silver at the Olympics in Atlanta a year earlier, the final of some kind of Mediterranean Games would be a magnificently unimportant match - something like a final Adriatic meetings in Umag - if the opponent was not the hated FR Yugoslavia. "What do you think about the game?" Ćičo asked me then. "Which game?!", I replied confused. "Well, the water polo final in Bari," he answered even more confused, "or aren't you watching it on television?" "I didn't," I admitted, "how's the rest?" "We lost 7-8," he replied, and I could hear his mustache laughing right through the receiver. "Damn," he added, "Yugoslavia was better."
That Ćića's ingenious mischievous quip, "Yugoslavia was better", in our society later became the key to decoding the forbidden past, what was only allowed to be talked about in public with jokes, like the question "which came first, the chicken or the egg?", and the answer "before there was everything". Before, of course, there was not everything - if there was anything in the late Yugoslavia, everything is gone - but those jokes never talked about life in the former state anyway, but about lives in the present one, in which the prohibition of all memory produced the myth of a glorious utopian an arcadia that was better, and in which there was everything, including even today the completely incomprehensible concept of "work experience".
In a funnier way - the jokes are funny for everyone except for Muja and Sulja - the famous Bosnian basketball players Žarko Varajić and Ratko Radovanović, who were arranging their pension papers these days, realized that there is no Pension and Disability Insurance in Sarajevo records of their seniority. They were lost in the war, they were told, burned, disappeared, simply gone. They searched and dug through everything, it's not that they didn't, "what did you say your name was, Varagić?", "Varajić", Žarko would correct them, "Varajić, Varajić...", the lady in the Pension register would scroll through the computer, "yikes, there's no ".
It would not be a particularly unusual thing either, that some records were burned during the war - two million books were burned in the Sarajevo City Hall alone - so it is not impossible that the books of the Basketball Club of Bosnia with records of the service record of the citizen Žarko Varagić were also burned in the besieged city. Yes, Varajića, I apologize. After all, Mr. Varajić would not be the first to have to dig through bureaucratic labyrinths to prove that he was employed in a company before the war, and that he had accumulated some nice, as it was then called, work experience there until 1992. The only difference, the only thing that comes to mind at this time, is that other mortals are not so lucky that their work experience, instead of in the books of the Pension and Disability Insurance, will be recorded in history. And with those, as they say, golden letters.
"I believe you that before the war you were the captain of Bosnia," the lady in Penzijski would answer, somewhat nervously, "but you are simply not in the computer!"
"How about you try it on YouTube?", citizen Varajić would then helplessly cry.
There are actually several videos on YouTube with a certain basketball player Žarko Varajić, but you know how it is with computer technology: you can't trust everything on the internet either. According to YouTube and the internet - what else can I tell you - it turns out that on March 5, 1979, in the final of the European Champions Cup in Grenoble, France, KK Bosna beat the famous Italian Emerson, and that he, as you said his name is - yes, Žarko Varajić - that Varajić scored forty-five points on that magical evening, fifteen more than the legendary Kinđet, actually more than anyone before and after him in the Champions Cup finals! And that was before three-pointers were invented!
The lady at the Pension and Disability Insurance has never heard greater nonsense in her life. Listen, Bosnia was the champion of Europe?
The fact that the famous captain Žarko Varajić, the best scorer in the entire history of the European Champions Cup finals, and the good giant Raša Radovanović, who played five hundred games for the Sarajevo club and scored ten thousand points, must at all - let alone cannot - to prove that before 1992 they accumulated some fucking work experience in the Basketball Club of Bosnia, it speaks more precisely and plastically about the amputation of memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina than all the scientific papers, records and jokes on that topic.
There is no Varajić and Radovanović in Bosnia and Herzegovina's records, there is no Bosnia, there is no its 1979 Champions Cup, there is none of those three championship titles of Yugoslavia, there is no Yugoslavia, there is nothing before 1992 - there is only some Bosnia Royal. Now, whether Bosna Royal on Skenderija is a basketball club or a casino, they are not entirely sure in Penzijski.
If there had been - if there had been Yugoslavia and within it the European champion Bosnia - it would have turned out that Yugoslavia would have been better, and that it would have been above all else. And we know that it wasn't, and that it wasn't. I guess someone, fucking mother, would remember that before the supposed final in Grenoble, Tanjević's and Delibašić's Bosnia played the final of the Korac Cup, that the final of the UEFA Basketball Cup was played in Banja Luka, and that referees Mottard and Kotleba had to play for Varajić and Radovanović five personal mistakes, Prajin and Kić's Partizan would somehow win, barely, in overtime. However, who remembers that final today? I checked the records of the Pension Disability Insurance in Sarajevo, and they don't know anything about it.
It was all luck in the end that the great Mirza Delibašić died, because even today he would have to prove that he was employed in KK Bosnia, on the job of a club legend full-time. Or maybe Varaja and Raša are something else? Or maybe that's why - because it's something else - Varajić is not in the KK Bosnia monograph, nor on the fucking Bosnian Wikipedia?
"Oh, you didn't think that it was because we are erasing every pre-war memory and every memory of Yugoslavia?!", the lady at the Pension and Disability counter would be genuinely surprised, as if she were apologizing to some two-foot-tall elderly person in front of her. "Well, that's only because you're a Serb!"
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