Dictionary of my youth

That year, Yugoslavia feverishly awaited the start of the Winter Olympic Games in Sarajevo. After the New Year's holidays that I spent in Sarajevo, in January I stayed with my mother for a while in Kalesija, a town that was the voice of the most underdeveloped municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

My day must have looked like this: I would get up because I would be woken up by the shouting of high school students under the windows and the screeching of the bus at the departure station for Tuzla. All the windows of the apartment on the second floor faced the main street. The memorial ossuary for fallen soldiers in the Second World War was located right in the heart of the small park behind which was the House of Culture. Next to the Slobodan Bajić-Paja elementary school, the street led to Sprečansko polje, bordered by the stadium on the left and the post office on the right. The fields ended with a hill under which the river Spreča meandered. Those few kilometers that I would see from the window were the landscape of my childhood.

The sister already lived in her own apartment. Mother was still working as a primary school teacher and was at work. I would open the window and light a cigarette. Blue Morava. The smell of garbage from the heating plant would mix with her smell. As if from a gallery, I would observe the street, which was extremely lively at that time of day. High school students make their way through the slush to the bakery, municipal officials follow paths known only to them that end in a pub, a little girl screams in the school yard.

I close the window and the world goes silent. On the table is a copy of the Kalesija newspaper. I intended to thicken Heidegger's essays on Nietzsche and Helderlin. But it won't escape me. Since I've been visiting here for several years now, it's not bad to read something about the homeland. To get a bigger picture.

I start flipping through the newspaper.

IN SEARCH OF THE TIMELINE

This memory is quite reliable. Or at least I think so now. But forty years is a long time. I don't remember a single word from the newspaper I read then. It's kind of scary. It's as if one morning sitting by the window, between the warm radiator and the kitchen table in my mother's apartment, never happened.

I've been trying to get hold of digital copies of the Kalesian Newspapers for several years now. I know people in the library and the cultural center. But it can't be adjusted. My trips to the town have become less frequent since my mother died.

This time I am arriving to replace my ID card. My name is Fahra, writer and director of the Bosnian Cultural Center "Alija Izetbegović". He says that several years of the newspaper have been preserved in the form of digital photographs. I stop by BKC. This is the House of Culture from my childhood. I peek into the hall. Instead of wooden cinema seats, there are now red-upholstered chairs. I watched my first movies here. I recited my first poem on this stage. This is where I took the pioneer oath.

Fahro announced that he will not be able to come in person, but one of his colleagues kindly helps me and copies all the available editions of the newspaper onto a flash drive. I thank you and leave across the street. Bus number 13 arrives after a few minutes.

From the seat behind the driver, I watch them promote famous pictures. Downstairs is the infirmary. Ćira's house was here. And here is the forge. I realize that I am one of the few who sees behind this new town also one that has disappeared, along with all those people and days.

In Belgrade, I did not immediately look at the contents of the flash drive. I didn't want to immediately feed my own melancholy. But December can bring fog. On those days, it's best to turn on the light, play some light jazz. And open the Kalesijse newspaper published in 1984.

REPORTS FROM THE SUNKEN WORLD

The municipal unemployment figures were actually alarming. Out of 38 inhabitants, only 000 were employed. The Employment Association registered 1 unemployed. Two thirds of them were young people. And 650 people worked abroad. This is what Kalesijse novine from January 1 tells me.

Back then, in the eighties, I didn't pay attention to whether we were being ripped off by traders. But the newspapers remembered it. As many as 22 cases of swindling customers, concealing deficient goods and similar tricks were recorded in one trade organization "Retail" alone. Fines and disciplinary action followed.

In addition, "subjective weaknesses" were noticed in various companies regarding the use of official cars, trips abroad, misappropriation of social property, manipulation of fuel vouchers, damage to work equipment, and private provision of services with the tools and machines of the work organization. Butcher Meho received money in hand and did not pay taxes. The director of the Košuta motel provided rooms for the night free of charge. Organizations of the Union of Communists in Zolje, Memići, Zelina, Jeginovo Lug, but also in the company Komunalac are not equipped to oppose these negative phenomena.

I can imagine the despair of the local communists. They would lead the local kabadahs into a classless society through honesty and self-denial. And people who are people, slander, steal, steal, cheat, do everything so that they personally find themselves in some kind of personal utopia during their lifetime.

What the newspapers did not write about was the behavior of some comrades in power, which did not significantly differ from the behavior of those who showed "subjective weakness".

THE CHRONICLE THAT IT IS NOT

When I read it, the same feeling I had back then, four decades ago, when I was reading "the list of labor and socio-political organizations of the municipality of Kalesija". Gloom and boredom. Sometimes it seems to me that the communists in Yugoslavia lost both power and country only because they became indescribably boring. However, the newspaper reminds me of some events that are worth remembering. In January of that year, Ismet Mujezinović, a partisan and painter who decorated the hall for the first session of AVNOJ, died in Tuzla. The writer Derviš Sušić came to hunt rabbits with the local hunting club.

The seventh Cup of amateur singers was held in the Košuta motel - everyone could register at the kiosk of the "Jedinstvo" agricultural cooperative. The winner was Ferhatović Sefer from Olanovica with the song "Branka". Speaking of the music scene, the unstoppable fame of the band called Kalesijski zvuci reached the local newspapers. The stars were violinist Ramo Salkić and singer Hasan Požegić. Sarajevo's "Discoton" released a single with two hits - "Selo moje maleno" and "Sedam puta lola se zhenio", and Belgrade's "Jugodisk" released a cassette with things that are now evergreens of peasant or original music: "Neighbors across the street", " I'm waiting for you Milice".

Varoš experienced not only the expansion of rural notes but also urban development. A new post office was opened and a basketball club was founded. And as far as football is concerned, there were two suspensions of municipal league matches. In the first case, the referee was attacked by a certain Bajro, and in the second, the referee was even less lucky because he was attacked by the coach and three players - Ljubo, Ljuban and Radojica.

THE SNOW OF THE CRISIS

From some text, the nose of the crisis that will destroy the country is approaching. Prices and cost of living increased by almost 1981 percent from 1983 to 50. The editors state: "Of the 45 apartments planned for construction in 1983, nothing was done." In another article I read: "Unemployment is the sea of ​​humanity that affects the youth the most."

The Municipal Headquarters of the Territorial Defense dealt with a document called "Strategy of the Armed Struggle of the SFRY". The paper served "for the preparation and organization of the armed struggle in the future national defense war". Eight years later this dusty wording would take on an ominous prophetic sheen.

Journalist's pens sometimes played a little in their desire to sound learned. In an otherwise exemplary collective, there was a "conflict of mutual relations". I imagine "interrelationships" as beings grabbing each other's necks.

My sister was elected to the presidency of the Municipal Conference of the Association of Socialist Youth. I congratulate myself afterwards, after four decades.

THANK YOU FOR THE BICYCLE

In addition to the detailed report explaining the "Spring Sowing Plan" and enthusiastic reports about the "Relay of Youth", there is again a series of details about self-management sins: the milk collector Ljubinka falsified the lists and charged about 4 liters of non-existent milk. A certain Mustafa, as a collector of radio and television subscriptions, kept the money for himself, and a certain Ismet issued checks without cover. The restaurateurs, whom I knew from a young age as colorful characters, were underreporting their income in an attempt to avoid taxation. And the income must have been good because the newspaper states with regret that "500 percent of the workers drink alcohol." I would add that the same applied to non-workers.

A friend's father, a well-known merchant, who normally liked to drive, was repeatedly caught in illegal activities.

I come across a portrait of the man who taught me to ride a bicycle - Branislav Nikolić. We called him teacher Brano. In the school yard, he spun me around on a "pony" in a circle for a long time, and then he let me ride on my own. I continued to circle, I did not fall.

One of the two long shack-like single-story buildings below the window of the building where I grew up has been demolished. The first was removed several years before the report of the demolition of the second. In the seventies, there was a library in it, on the steps of which I used to sit and flip through books, not having the patience to wait until I got home. Those were the oldest municipal buildings. I didn't miss them then. But now I miss them. They were erected in 1958, when the new government decided to make a new one out of the two municipalities at that time - approximately halfway between them. Varoš can thank that decision for its growth.

DICTIONARY OF MY YOUTH

Even then, the term still smelled of outdated socialism. Abbreviations from that time seem strange now. But I remember that people pronounced them the way "zeitin" or "plata" is pronounced. One of those who immediately opened a window for me at that time was SIZ. Through it, as if through a keyhole, I can peek into the seventies and eighties. Self-governing interest community.

That was the name for state bodies in the self-governing socialism of the former Yugoslavia. That experiment began with the Constitution of SFRY from 1974. The former municipal funds were only renamed. "I'm going to SIZ to see where it's stuck", has become a normal sentence in everyday speech. Self-governing concepts landed on the provincial version of socialism by directive, but it just shook off older concepts, like a dog out of water, learned new ones by heart without too much input into their meaning, and continued on its way to collapse.

I read with a mixture of wonder and discomfort the expression "moral-political responsibility". At that time, it was extralegal responsibility for violating the "norms of socialist morality." The theorists of self-management believed that the sanction could consist of "stating socially inadequate behavior" or "morally negative assessment". It all came down to the fact that at the meetings of the local Committee and the municipal government, companies and individuals who are prone to cheating, cheating and swindling should be counted. It is published in the local newspaper. And so some call for "moral-political" responsibility, while others continue to steal from a state that has decided to die.

In practice, the moral-political racket of the municipal committee of local communists or some other municipal body irritated a man who evaded taxes, beat up a football referee or resold fuel coupons. In the small town where I grew up, the language of self-governing socialism hid rather than revealed the essence of relationships between people. Even when he talked about "negative phenomena" that language came from an ideological projection of reality, without a real experiential foundation. The renaming of municipal funds into "self-governing interest communities" did not provide them with more money. It's just that, claiming that it's the money of all of us, he exonerated in advance all those who hide their selfish intentions with socialist platitudes, to try more from the common pot than others.

I don't know how it was in Slovenia, but in Bosnia, in the town I knew like the back of my hand, self-governing socialism lacked self-governing leaders. I could not recognize them neither in the fathers of my friends, nor in the people gathered around the chessboards on the terrace of the cultural center, nor in the fans of the local club in the stands. A butcher was a butcher, a vegetable seller or a drunkard who sleeps by the fence of the "Hunter" were what they are in each of the possible worlds, including the self-governing one. People socialized, joked, got drunk, rejoiced, lived and died. The newspaper that I read four decades after the publication of that issue could not fully reach its reality. Words were like liquid glass that hardened as soon as the sentence was finished. And that glass, thick and full of scratches, prevented real contact with life, creating a distorted image of it. Paradoxically, it is the only chronicle of that time that we have. We will have to learn how to read it productively. Behind the strong phrases and selective perception of that chronicle, there are signs of the real lives we led. If the ill-fitting experimental ideological cloak with which reality was covered is discarded, that reality must not be discarded either. Because she's the only one we had.

That 1984 with a lot of snow in the interior of Bosnia deserved to be remembered, if only because it happened only once and will never happen again.