I would have to strain my memory to find myself at a birthday table in a village near Podmajevica. My memory is a drone. It is March, and there is still snow in the courtyard of the village school. In the 1960s, winter could last until April, and in the Bosnian hills until May. From above, I see a chicken coop, like a cube thrown onto a snowy surface that sparkles with millions of sparks in the harsh March sun. To the left, on the edge of the white surface, is another black cube – a squatter. I remember urinating on frozen boards. The hot urine melted the ice, carving strange shapes into it.
The drone descends towards a dirt football field that is not covered in snow, but black with mud – a sign that children have been running around on it and in the wet snow, turning it into a sticky mush.
Now we come to the school building. The all-seeing eye descends. The ground floor is lined with stone. Wooden stairs on the side lead to the first floor. My memory slides along them. They creak even under the feet of a newly-made five-year-old. Behind the door is the kitchen. Wooden floors with the occasional hole from which a mouse's snout occasionally peeps out.
There are smells in the room. A fatty chicken is cooking in a pot. There are traces of flour on the table. Brown bread is already baking in the oven. And on the very surface of the table, which is made of the same rough wood as the floor, is the crowning proof that today is an unusual day. The queen of cakes – sweet salami. And a bowl of rum balls. Everything smells of scalded chicken, marzipan and figs. On a day when everyone – father, mother and sister – will be unusually cheerful, I got up confused. They will pull my ears, supposedly to make me grow even faster. They will kiss me juicyly with unpleasant sounds. There will also be some gifts. A sailor shirt, trousers. Maybe a toy or two. But I don't remember them.
Yugoslav hits come from the radio. I loved the taste of figs, marzipan and walnuts. The taste of birthdays. As well as the taste of egg yolks beaten with a spoonful of sugar that I drank every morning. The taste of fish oil. The taste of childhood.
HOW DO WE REMEMBER?
The drone hovers over the kitchen table, slowly ceasing to transmit its image. It fades and freezes. I'm back in the present, five and a half decades later. Yes, that could have been my first consciously experienced birthday. If only I could remember it.
I can't remember most of my or other people's birthdays. Neither faces, nor presents. I know that when I was a child, I played the most in the sand with empty sardine cans. We would drill holes in their walls and connect them with wire. Those were our shiny sand sleds, our trucks that we used to cross the hills. Every now and then I would get real toys. A model of a Jat plane. I tried to make it fly. I played with it for a long time, and when its wings broke due to its stubborn refusal to fly. I also had a yellow, one-eyed teddy bear.
When I became a father, there were hundreds of them on store shelves. In my childhood, they were extremely rare creatures from another world. Today, Chinese stores in Serbia are huge camps for toys waiting to be adopted by a child for their birthday.
Some gifts – for reasons I don’t understand – I still remember well. In the early seventies, in a small Bosnian town, I accidentally told my best friend that my birthday was tomorrow. His older sister, a beautiful and mischievous brunette, appeared at the door with him. She gave me my first lotion. I had just finished my first painful shave. She said, addressing her brother and me, that we were no longer children but boys. And boys have to smell nice. I couldn’t even say thank you properly, I never knew how to accept a gift, I was more happy when I gave something to others. In that way, I am similar to my mother.
Pino silvestre – a lotion in a green pinecone-shaped bottle – would fill the room with its bittersweet scent as soon as I unscrewed the cap. It wasn't until much later that I realized the lotion's name was actually the Italian word for white pine.
When I go to the shops today, I secretly open the bottles and sniff them. Although the woman I trust says the scent of that lotion is sad, I'm glad that the green pinecone, like me, has survived half a century and is still flaunting itself in the shops.
HISTORY OF BIRTHDAYS
A few thousand years ago, only the pharaoh had a birthday. Everyone celebrated his birthday, as if they had none of their own. It was not until the Greeks and their best plagiarists, the Romans, began to attach importance to a person's birth by invoking guardian spirits on that day to protect the celebrant from evil. Birthday gifts are actually sacrifices made to these spirits.
What has not survived from ancient times to the present day is the custom of people born on the same day coming together and celebrating both themselves and the gods supposedly born on that day.
Herodotus left testimony that the Persians attached the greatest importance to their birthdays of all the celebrations of the year. According to these records, the rich were able to eat roasted cows, horses, camels and donkeys, while the poorer had to be content with a calf. Birthday overeating seems to be as old as humanity.
The birthdays of Roman emperors were holidays. In all these civilizations, astrology developed – the alleged art of predicting the character and fate of a human being based on the constellation of celestial bodies on the day of birth. I am not inclined to believe in horoscopes. Not because the vast universe does not influence us, tiny beings. On the contrary. But I doubt very much that these tiny beings can understand the way of influence, to systematize it, classifying newborns under zodiac signs as if in drawers.
Christianity has turned all of this into one single birthday – Jesus'. As strange as it may sound, Christmas is actually Jesus' birthday party.
BOOKS AND BIRTHDAYS
In high school, my friends realized that I loved to read. For my eighteenth birthday, a few of my friends gave me the book "Riba na biciklu" (Fish on a Bicycle) by Croatian poet Zvonimir Balog. It was a logical choice. The zodiac sign of March, Pisces, got its own Pisces on a Bicycle. After all, that man infected me with his poetic humor:
"A song should start/ from the sky and into the ribs,/ it doesn't have to be/ all made of silver,
"A song is not a cutlery./ It must have your soul,/ and its own silly body."
The second book I received as a birthday present came at the right time. In the spring of 1983, on my birthday in a converted garage, somewhere at the top of the Turkish steps called Žagrići, a group from the Tin Literary Club gathered. I had been a student in Sarajevo for half a year, and the people who wrote like me became my first real tribe to which I voluntarily belonged – a poetic pack. The celebration was wild, but I won’t go into that. They brought Leonard Cohen’s book “The Power of Slaves” to my dorm room as a gift.
The book was a guide for me in writing for a while, and I can't say that about many printed things. Now, after a long time, I'm leafing through it again. Page 110:
Nothing you built has lasted.
Whatever system you invent without us
will be shot down
It was a poignant read even 42 years ago. Now the truth of these verses casts its shadow all the way to Belgrade's March 15, 2025.
Perhaps the most significant birthday present I received in the last decade. Both Balog's and Cohen's books were burned on a wartime bonfire in a shelled apartment in 1992. All my photographs burned with them. I especially missed the pictures from one of my summer vacations in Makarska in 1983.
After three decades, I met the girl I met then in Belgrade. She gave me our photos from Makarska for my next birthday. I have never been so happy about a birthday present. For hours, days, weeks, I would stare at those thirty or so photos, which she had preserved like good old analog film, and then simply had them re-processed by a photographer. I carefully observed those faces – at the same time close and strange. Us as smiling ghosts from the analog era. I faced myself as a twenty-year-old, with my dreams, hopes, and the love we had in abundance. That gift made me a pharaoh, a Roman emperor, for a moment, it drove away evil spirits, and summoned the best in me. “Let us remind ourselves that life consists not only of breathing, but also of moments that take your breath away,” Mark Twain once wrote. That was one such moment.
Perhaps a sweet salami, a lotion named after a white pine, two books and a small photo album could be a strange series of memorable birthday gifts for a sixty-two-year-old. I will forgive all other gifts, even expensive ones. We are capricious beings, things imprint themselves on us without asking our permission. And we forget the moments that we easily say, especially in the age of digital talambas and false enthusiasm, are unforgettable.
OLD BOXES AND OLD SOCKS
Speaking of unforgettable birthdays, my sixtieth, which I celebrated in the Skopje tavern Čardak surrounded by good people and people I love, is the best tavern gathering I can remember. The gray-haired bard of the Skopje taverns sat at our table and played for us for more than two hours, singing everything a Balkan soul can imagine. Hendrix also said that music is the most powerful form of magic.
That whole birthday was actually a lavish one genethliakon – that's what birthday songs were called in ancient Greek times.
Life is often a sloppy pastime, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes a boring routine, most often a meaningless hamster running in a wheel. But sometimes, it is as luxurious as a glass from which champagne bubbles. Some days are closer to immortality than others. I remember such a day – my jubilee birthday. It should not be surprising why this magic fell only into the lap of a mature man. Schiller wrote that with each passing year his love for life grew stronger.
Maybe two or three more celebrations were very good, but memory is unreliable – what is not written down or recorded is as if it never happened.
The birthdays of monarchs and dictators are still important dates. I am happy and indifferent to some, and despise others. Social networks remind us every day of some birthdays. You click on happy birthday and forget.
Christian religious purists object that name days are in the Christian tradition, while birthdays are in the pagan tradition. This would mean that the day a martyr died, after which a child is given a Christian name, is more important than the day that child was born. The same applies to literal Muslims, who might accept the celebration of the Prophet's birth, but see secular birthday celebrations as infidels.
However, people do not pay attention to dogmas, but celebrate as they please. In the north of Germany, a folk custom has been preserved that certainly has a problematic meaning in this century. For a girl who has not married by her twenty-fifth birthday, her friends and relatives weave a wreath of old cigarette boxes and similar boxes and boxes. The meaning is actually offensive. When in German a woman is said to be an “old box” – alte Schachtel – then she is an “old girl” or “old woman”. A similar custom applies to men who have celebrated their thirtieth birthday as bachelors. For them, a wreath is woven from old socks – because the expression “old sock” has a similar associative field as the expression “old box”. Although the customs are not in line with today's times, and they are quite rude, they are quite tenacious in these German regions. This is an example of how the community has always participated in the life of an individual through its pressure. He might be happy to think of years as a series of numbers. But others don't see it that way.
The meaning of a birthday changes considerably in old age. While a young person's birthdays, according to the opinion of those around them, propel him towards a bright future, the elderly can be grateful that they lived to see that date. When the senses fail, boisterous celebrations certainly do not make sense. But the great satirist George Bernard Shaw also saw some undoubtedly positive side effects in old age: "Old age has two advantages: Your teeth no longer ache and you no longer hear all that nonsense they talk about."
Birthdays remind us of another fact – time is the only completely non-renewable resource we have. Seneca would say – it's not that we have little time, but that there is a lot of time that we don't use.
Bonus video:
