Hook

Of all my childhood friends, I have met him the most in the last few years. Maybe because, unlike me, he always stayed in the same place, to which I regularly returned. The look of his green eyes under his bangs, his stubby nose with lots of freckles and something wistful in his facial expression told me that he had changed the least from us boys from the socialist Bosnian kasaba.

I would stop in front of him, we would stare at each other for a long time, and then I would say: Do you remember how we climbed Vis when we were nine years old? Of course he remembered, although he wouldn't say anything and although almost 50 years have passed since then.

In half a century in the Balkans, three countries can collapse, you are born in one, you live in another, you die in the third. If you live long enough, you've outsmarted all three, because each one at one point demanded that you die for her.

Okac was tough and pot-bellied. He kicked the ball with his left foot, he wasn't as gifted as a dribbler as his older brother Nečko, but if you didn't rush after him just when he was cutting short legs along the out-line, you couldn't catch him anymore. We played together the first game of the pioneering team in the history of FC Jedinstva. I defended because no one wanted to and I received five pieces, and Okac ran past the defender of the opposing team several times on the right wing, but he did not know how to stop in time, so he rushed with the ball over the goal line in the bar that was being made there because are the craftsmen who made the drainage of that part sfusherili.

We "the citizens"

We started hanging out because we were children of parents stranded a few hundred urbanized meters away, surrounded by villages and hills. People who came to the kasaba from different directions lived in the buildings. There were only a few of them. Next to the municipal building where I lived above the offices, there were two yellow two-story buildings in the neighborhood, typically done according to the Yugoslav recipe from the sixties - balconies with iron fences and holes for ventilation drains on the facades like acne.

Eight happy families per building.

Men in undershirts hovering over the engine like a doctor's council, women in dressing gowns and clogs, with curlers in their hair, run through the corridors of the building to gather at one, above a pilfer, like a prophetic council.

Children who run away in a pack with a smeared piece of national bread to who knows where and appear at dusk with a wolf's hunger.

Okac was from the other yellow building. Radeljaši, Kalajdžići, Vukotići, Radovanovići, Radivojevići, Senići, Ćatići - they were the people's militia or educators, the personnel needed by the municipality, which was conceived as a new center for the new era.

The children of these immigrants, regardless of whether they came from Pomerania, Herzegovina or a Bosnian town, were called "citizens" by their schoolmates who grew up in private houses with gardens and orchards. Since Kasabica will not be a city for a long time, a better term would be - "built".

Conquering the world

Okka, me and a pack of other children who grew up along several hundred meters of asphalt that ended on both sides with a macadam road - to the west towards Tuzla, to the east towards Zvornik - were connected by the label "citizen" which, in the absence of the city and in the presence of several a city-type building, inevitably took on an ironic color.

For us, it was the only world and the only one - and thus the best possible childhood. It turned out that among all those children, Samir, the son of a surveyor, Dževad aka Okac, the son of a militiaman, and I, the son of a teacher, have the most will to conquer the surrounding world.

Behind the asphalt, towards the first slopes of Majevica, like a thrown meadow mantle dotted with pear and apple trees, Husein's field beckoned. When our eyes outgrew its tall grass, the next goal appeared to us - a hill overgrown with hornbeam. We called it the First Forest. We soon knew her like the back of our hands.

Behind the First Forest, the glade and meadows called Paljevine were a training ground for games called "klis" and "sows". Throwing a hand-made spear, shooting an arrow.

Beyond the glade stretched the Second Forest, denser and more mysterious than the first. We spoke in whispers in it.

It was crossed by the road to Jajići, a mountain village made up of Muslim and Serbian parts.

We called the thickets on both sides of the road and swampy valleys "frequent". Here we are on the ice, under which the frozen mud turned black, playing hockey - footwear with plastic soles perfectly replaced the "slichuges" as we called skates, turning the German word "Schlittschuhe" (sled shoes) into a word incomprehensible to German speakers. I was in all those places with Okca, Samir and other 'townspeople'.

Walking on water

In the summer, we would already go to two "swimming pools" on Spreča. The river originated in the hills to the east, then flowed westward through the valley below Vis hill, which today a Bosnian doctor with business sense would immediately determine to be a pyramid, towards the mouth of Bosnia. A few kilometers of Sprečansko polje separated the buildings of the town from two springs - that's what we called the extensions in the riverbed: Zmajevac and Kazan or - Stumps, because in the middle of the water there were two tree stumps that the strongest climbed and defended themselves from others who wanted that privilege place. The one standing on one of the stumps looked like Jesus walking on water.

Of course, sometimes Okac would also briefly reach the stump. With bruised lips, he would defiantly raise his hands like Stjepan Filipović under the gallows, and other children's hands were already grabbing his ankles and pulling him into the muddy water.

Needless to say, headlong jumps between two stumps were the greatest test of courage, which sometimes ended with bruises and cuts on the head.

And above Spreča towered the Vis boulder.

The steepest side

One day we decided to climb the steepest side to the top of the pyramid. Samir and I brought some backpacks, and Okac the whole school bag. He didn't tell us what was inside. Each of them broke off a thicker stick from the alder. We headed downstream. It was summer, the sun was climbing to its zenith. We stopped at a spring from which no one drank water since Hajduk used to defecate in it. They cleaned it, but no one came close to the water, icy and invigorating. The slope in front of us looked like a wall. Stone on stone. We have been climbing for half an hour. Sometimes our plastic sandals would slip, a rain of pebbles would start down the hill, which we followed with our eyes. We developed into "shooters" like German soldiers in partisan films when they search the forest. We didn't dare look back often. We barked and growled, growled and cursed. The last meters heralded a triumph, the stones retreated before the grass and pine needles. We sat down in the shade of a pine tree at the top and gazed into the valley, mesmerized. The buildings we lived in were distant matchboxes on the edge of the slopes of Majevica, a handful of human buildings in a sea of ​​greenery. Some windows would painfully redirect the sun towards our eyes. Things within a much larger frame suddenly become beautiful.

Descent

Our first encounter with the panorama of the homeland was not the last, but it left the deepest mark. We didn't talk about it. We just sat flushed and absorbed the gorgeous scene. Samir and I each took out pâté and a piece of bread, and Okac took out Zineta's pie. He had to share it with us. He wasn't sorry. We went down the least steep side, jumping over the meadow fences at places marked by wooden steps. Vis made us run downhill on his velvet belly, we couldn't and didn't want to stop.

At the foot, in the hamlet above Spreča, a surprised boy, a friend from our school, asked us where we came from. Instead of answering, we asked if there was water. He led us to the well in the yard. A tin bucket on a squeaky wheel and scraping chain. First, he sprinkled us with ice water to wash ourselves. Then he let us drink from the bucket. We will never drink better water in our life.

Childhood in the seventies

We did many things together. The first screening of the film "Fat and Thin" (as we called Stanley and Olija) and laughter to the point of tears in the auditorium of the National University, which, despite its sonorous name, was little more than a barracks. Watching the world championship matches on a black-and-white screen under a tent that served as a canteen for construction workers working on the asphalting of the Tuzla-Zvornik road. There we picked up new swear words from all over Yugoslavia.

Then all the spaghetti westerns, partisan epics and some Bruce Lee in the hall of the cultural center. Kicking around a ball, strutting in front of girls, sneaking through basements and scaring passers-by with barking. We found an old bag of cement, smeared our faces like Native American warriors and proclaimed the ability to see through walls. This type of hogwash was followed by boos from annoyed mothers who washed their hands.

Okac drove his "pony" at breakneck speeds and knew how to balance it in place for the longest time.

The three of us learned Morse code from radio amateur Marika and passed the radio amateur exam. But Okac will no longer be with us after that. His family moved to Tuzla when he finished elementary school. Although both Samir and I later went to Tuzla high schools, I rarely saw him.

Do you remember Vis, mate?

I didn't mention - Okac stopped growing at one point. We continued to juggle. Even though he thus came to an unequal position in the balance of power, he never backed down before the councils. He was hearty. When I read Tin drum Günter Gras, in which his main character Oskar Macerat refuses to grow further out of contempt for the hypocritical world of adults, I had to think of Okc.

Much later we realized that this problem was part of a wider disease. She started to improve already when he entered the university.

Then our lives scattered us to different cities, and later wars to different countries.

However, I see Okca most often. He was buried in 2011 at the Trnovac City Cemetery in Tuzla, and twenty meters away, his mother has been keeping him company since November 2017.

Green eyes from under the bangs are looking at me from the beautiful tombstone erected for him. A pointed nose with lots of freckles and something wistful in his facial expression tells me that he has changed the least of us boys from the socialist Bosnian kasaba - because he died first. This story about our childhood could be confirmed by Samir, but he is far from here, he first started a new life in Australia, and then another in New York.

I stop this time in front of Okca. From Trnovac, Tuzla can be seen almost like our town from Vis. We stare at each other for a long time, and then I ask him to myself: Do you remember how we climbed Vis when we were nine years old?

Of course he remembers, although he doesn't say anything and although almost 50 years have passed since then.