RECORDS FROM ÚŠTA

Second of January sigh

On the second of January, our life is waiting for us, unadorned by opiates and hysteria. We suspect that replacing the wall calendar will not change anything in us or around us. The water level of the impossible rises, the level of sweet illusions falls

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View through the window, Photo: D. Dedović
View through the window, Photo: D. Dedović
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

Perhaps the most terrible is the fate of the artists whose paintings are exhibited in the Louvre - to the left and to the right of the Mona Lisa. They are like great local musicians when someone like Mick Jagger comes to their town. The brighter the star they are next to, the deeper and more unfair the shadow they are pushed into. Such is the relationship of the second day of the year with his brother who is only 24 hours older.

Poor second January

While the birth of the first day is greeted with champagne, global euphoria and completely unreasonable joy, the second day of January is left to lazing on the couch, measuring the consequences of excessive intake of poison in the body, settling accounts, family gossip. Some think about their own life, some are already making plans for the new year.

There are also those who escape from the celebratory frenzy to their homes on the last day of December, only to go to a repeated welcome on the first day of January, which the skilled tavern owners, in order to lure guests, declared a better welcome than a welcome. Thus, the January XNUMXst hangover extends into the next day.

But then there is nowhere to go. We chase away New Year's glitter like flies and start preparing for the new year in old rags.

There were exactly fifty-seven such other Januarys in my life. I'm trying to remember where I've been. And what thoughts I was thinking. Could I have imagined myself today - a middle-aged man staring out the window at a walnut tree and two birch trees, at the parking lot behind them and a four-story building from Tito's era where the first windows are already glowing, even though it is only afternoon.

Golubinci, Srem's nowhere

I suppose that I met my first second January - in 1964 - as a baby in Golubinci, a Srem village where my mother was a teacher and my father was the financial manager of the local cooperative. One could say - in Srem, at the end of the world. I imagine frozen arable fields, endless white furrows all the way to the Danube, the sky and fog draped over bare apple trees in a row.

Golubinci used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Military Territory. For the needs of the officers, a building was built in the 1795th century in Golubinci, which they somewhat pretentiously named Schloss - "castle" in German. Ludwig van Beethoven's first love lived there for a while. Her name was Johanna von Honrath, she was his age, born in Cologne, a gifted singer, a charming, blonde high society to which Beethoven had access only through his patrons. Although the sympathy was mutual, Johanna, or Jeannette - because in Cologne they liked to write their names in the French way to make it sound more elegant - she married the Viennese officer Karl von Gret, who immediately after the wedding, in XNUMX, received a command in the Military Region - in Golubince .

Ludwig and Johanna maintained their platonic relationship for a while by writing tender letters. In one of them, addressed to Beethoven, there is a sketch of the Schloss and an exact description of the route. From this, some historians conclude that Beethoven at least once set his sights on Golubince.

I can't know any of that on the second of January 1964 in Golubinci because I haven't been in this world for nine months. Perhaps on the second of January 1797, Johanna was looking at the endless whiteness of Srem - then the winters really brought thick snow - as I was looking out of the window from my mother's arms on that Thursday at the beginning of the sixty-fourth. It's the same melancholy. Mine, Johanna's, Ludvig's, mother's, anyone's.

Deep Bosnia

The second of January 1968 is a Tuesday. The wooden steps leading to the teacher's apartment above the two classrooms froze. Steam is pouring out of my nostrils and almost freezing above the snow in the yard. The river, or rather the Dubnica stream, disappears under the thick ice. Horses pull a sleigh loaded with wood along the road. Then nothing is heard for a long time.

I go inside, shaking large snowflakes from my coarse wool sweater. The Christmas tree is decorated, on the wooden table there are diakonies whose preparation my mother practiced in Srem - sweet salami with figs, walnuts and marzipan, rolls, rum balls. In some miraculous way, a Japanese tea service, a family heirloom from the mother's side, arrived in this Bosnian, Podmajevic village. It rests in a crooked sideboard. Figures and decorations on cups made of almost transparent porcelain feed my imagination.

A large radio with black glass on which the cities of the world are written, a melodious whistle comes from it, and then:

Who once at 8 even now pass your street and stand alone under your window. Sometimes at 8 even now I whistle down your street, I stand alone under your window.

The apartment, warmed by crackling logs from the stove, smells like Vojvodina cakes, Đorđe Marjanović is humming the iconic Belgrade hit song from the radio, I have the holiday edition of Politika zabavnik in my hands. It's bitterly cold outside - even the village dogs don't poke their noses out of their snow-covered houses almost to the roof.

Now, over half a century later, at the end of the southern railway line, I gazed through the window at the walnut and two birch trees, at the parking lot behind them and the four-story building from Tito's era, on which the first windows are already glowing, although it is only afternoon. I try not to lose the connection with that baby from Golubinac, with that boy from Dubnica, with myself.

Hence this rather arduous task of plucking the earliest images of the second of January from the dark well of memory and oblivion. I want to check if they are still where they should be, at the core of who I have become living a meandering life, changing addresses, cities, citizenships.

Palana ice rink

I could single out a few more January XNUMXnd days from that series. The seventies. In the Bosnian Kasabica, the only paved street stretched from the Slatko çoše pastry shop to the INA gas station. It was completely covered in snow that day. A few cars and blue city buses plowed through the snow. The newly installed street lights revealed with their beams that tiny snowflakes were falling in wavering paths from the dark sky. A whole day of cartoons and children's books. I leaned my nose against the glass, so that, emerging from the world of Disney, I would peek into reality. The window I was leaning on looked out from the second floor onto the main street like a stage.

Young men and women from neighboring buildings gathered on it. Sons and daughters of teachers, militiamen, surveyors, doctors, mostly foreigners. A part of the corse iced over in the evening.

They started skating hand in hand, pair by pair. There were also attempted pirouettes and falls and laughter. One young man imitated the voice of Milka Babović, a commentator of figure skating who knew how to describe skaters' dresses in a unique way.

It was a moment from which a great, beautiful illusion of a carefree future was born. None of the skaters on the second January stage are in that place anymore. Some are no longer even among the living. And those who are far from their ice rink, like me, live lives that they couldn't even imagine that evening through the bursts of laughter.

I'm just a boy who watched them curiously from the window. Subsequently, I note on behalf of those dancers on the Palaná ice that they all believed endlessly in the magic of the years ahead of us and that this faith was beautiful.

A deep sigh

She doesn't think about the worst that can happen to someone on the second of January. I am reminded of Abu Abdallah Muhamad aka Boabdil, the last emir of Granada. On January 1492, XNUMX, leaving his city for good, he once again looked at the Alhambra in the valley from the rocky hill. A sigh escaped him. The new masters, subjects of the Spanish Catholic crown, named that place "suspiro del moro" - Moorish sigh.

The heavy second-January sigh of a ruler without a country has inspired artists for centuries - composers, novelists, playwrights, cartoonists and film directors.

Boabdil's mother showed no empathy for her son's mental anguish. She told him that he should not regret as a woman what he failed to defend as a man.

I think of hard mothers and soft rulers who are left without a kingdom and go into exile. Isaac Asimov, a Russian-American biochemist and writer of science fiction books, born on January 1920, XNUMX, would snap to his warlike mother: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." What would have turned out then, I must not even think. It's lucky that the Emir's testosterone mother and the pacifist Isaac were separated in this world by five centuries. I don't know about the other world.

The second of January is therefore the right date to sigh. Not only Moorish. For a deep, human sigh. And what a year is behind us, what a New Year's celebration, maybe for two. So let's move on.

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(Opinions and views published in the "Columns" section are not necessarily the views of the "Vijesti" editorial office.)