This time, I woke up in the part of the city that was located on the slope between Košutnjak and Ada and was taken aback. The frame of the French window showed the dazzling whiteness of the morning. Like snow on an old TV. But it was real, January snow. I was happy as if I were seeing an old acquaintance who hadn't visited in a long time. The winters that were behind us were icy. Even if it fell, the snow would melt quickly. It was as if we had all gotten used to mild winters and excessively hot summers. Real winter had moved into memories of the last decades of the last century.
This time it was different. The snow had no intention of stopping. I stayed on the glassed-in balcony to mingle with the whiteness.
Tolstoy's Russian winter began to appear before my eyes. It intertwined with Bajaga's voice, informing me that he was waiting for minus twenty-six because of some Tamara: "I melted like snow, when you put it in your palm". Only love can do that.
Or the somewhat sadder question posed by Točkov Smak: Why don't I like snow? I read somewhere that the song was written because someone very close to the author of the lyrics was buried in the winter.
Looking at the snowflakes, my thoughts began to wander in a giant slalom between Andersen's Snow Queen, Snow White and her dwarfs, until Šaban's voice appeared uninvited from somewhere: "It's snowing again, Snow White". The first folk song for which I made a little secret space in my rocker soul in the seventies. And then all the other snowy memories began.
ENCOUNTER WITH WHITE MATTER
The first snow I remember is the one from Dubnica. In the yard, in front of the village school building, something infinitely white appeared, on which the morning sun left a myriad of sparkles. I think they took me from the apartment on the first floor. I think I remember icicles as thick as a horse's leg, their row on the edge of the roof, which I would later, in my memory, compare to the light electronic trace of music on recording devices. It was frozen music.
I think the surprise must have been great. The palm of a human cub on a white floury substance. Cold. Which does not look cold, because it collects all the light of this world. In fact, as I would learn later, it rejects all the colors of the spectrum. The snow said a resolute no to the courtship of the sun, whiteness is a complete rejection.
Vasko Popa will write in one of his poems: Hot iron has the whiteness of snow/ Snow has the whiteness of hot iron. Yes, snow can be dangerous to a person. To burn him, like hot iron. To offer itself to him as a bed for a white death. And then Bebek's voice: While I lie awake, on a bed of snow...
Maybe the next year, or it could have been 1967 - as rare photographs testify - I went out into the snow with a sled. I could barely drag it behind me. I had to remember that when I saw parents with children sledding down a slope in a Belgrade neighborhood these days, on one of the rare city areas not occupied by shady investors. The world is, despite everything, being renewed.
STADIUM ČESTE
Of the snowstorms that would accompany my Bosnian childhood, I certainly remember those in which the snowdrifts by the roadside were bigger than me.
When I got a little older, after moving to the town, I played all the wild winter games that packs of brats came up with. But I remember one in particular. They were often a place surrounded by forest, where there was a small, frozen lake in the thicket. Black-and-white tube televisions were already burning in the houses, on which we saw hockey players for the first time chasing a barely visible puck with their sticks.
We tried to do it too, skating on worn-out shoes, or on skates made from the edge of a crate bent over a fire. We made sticks from sticks bent at the end. All around were hornbeam forests, with crowns white with snow. We would not stop playing even when the snow started to fall again. We saw with our own eyes Rilke's verse come true: The wind in the winter forest drives a flock of snowflakes like a shepherd. We would not stop even when a bluish twilight interwoven with the whiteness of the snow began to take hold. We fell, got up, fell.
On the slopes of Majevica, smoke billowed from the village roofs, and egg-yolk-colored light bulbs began to flicker in front of the houses. We would only stop when we heard the angry and anxious cries of mothers from the town below.
In the spring, one of us would fall through the sweaty ice up to our waists into the lake mud. It would be a sign that the hockey season was over.
I traveled by bus to Tuzla high school. In winter, the "Harmonika", an articulated bus, would rumble by my window about twenty minutes before departure at six-ten in the morning. I would run down and take a wooden seat. After a half-hour ride, it would stop on the ascent of Krojčica Hill before entering Tuzla. We would get out, beardless high school students and hungover workers, and we would push the bus while its hysterical wheels spun in place. When the smell of snow and salt mixed with the stench of burning rubber, it would suddenly move off and laugh at those who were pushing it, shaking them off like a dog chasing fleas. And that would mean falling into the slush. We would arrive for class wet from Krojčica and its dirty snow.
MAGIC HILL IN THE DARKNESS
Sarajevo winters were still real, mountain ones. I lived in an area called Mrakusha. It gave me an excellent snowy setting for reading novels deeply immersed in the world of Alpine snow, such as Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain: "Instead of the sun there was snow, snow in masses, in such enormous quantities that Hans Castorp had never seen in his life. True, one could not have wished for more snow last winter, but all that was nothing compared to this year's winter. The terrible, immense masses of snow filled the soul with the awareness of the dangerous character and eccentricity of this region. The snow fell day after day, all night long, sometimes just drifting, sometimes pouring down thickly, but it kept falling. The few roads that were kept passable looked like cuts between the snow walls that rose, above human height, on one side and on the other, like alabaster slabs, which in their granular crystalline shimmer were pleasing to the eye and served the inhabitants of the Berghof for writing and drawing, for communicating various news, jokes and caustic allusions".
Thomas Mann visited his wife, who was being treated in a sanatorium in Davos. It was in 1913. This gave him the idea for the book. The novel "Wild Mountain" was written intermittently until 1924, when it was published.
In 1984, I would look up from my book and be faced with Sarajevo's thick snow. Mrakuša was my Magic Hill. And now, in 2026, it's Banovo Brdo.
In Sarajevo, the water used to run out in the winter because the pipes froze. One such Sarajevo winter, I was sitting on the steps of a house that jutted out like a watchtower above the city. I was looking at the sparkling valley. There was only a jar of jam in the student household. Instead of bread, I took snow on a plate - it was everywhere, you just had to stretch out your hand. This snow up there, above the Souk-bunar and even higher, above the Bypass - the former route of the Višegrad Railway - was not sooty like the snow in the bazaar. It was clean. Plum jam mixed with snow. A recipe created by one hungry Sarajevo night. When the world around me is covered in a beautiful blanket, I can almost taste the taste of plum jam.
Then come the pre-Alpine snows in Bavaria. The snowman I make with my son in Wangen, a town in the far south of Germany. And those same icicles under the roof. What score has the heavens hung up for us to admire this time?
While walking on Ban's Hill behind the Roda cinema, I come across a newborn Snowman. And I think about how all these silent snowmen are actually interconnected by very human traits. They were born in the game. Until death, embodied in the sun's rays, melts them. If they could speak, they would probably say they believe in an immortal soul. Until all that's left of them is a pot that served as a hat, a few pebbles from a smile. Maybe a carrot, if the creators didn't take it with them for soup in the evening.
I remember that in Lithuania, a snowman is called a "brainless man." In 2005, citizens made one hundred and forty-one "brainless men" around the parliament as a sign of protest. That's how many deputies the Lithuanian parliament has. There are many more in Serbia. Where do people find so much snow?
FLAT YOUR SNOW
Mato Lovrak created a hit for all Yugoslav children with his 1933 novel Children of the Big Village. My generation remembered the book under the title "Train in the Snow". From leafing through this exciting children's story, while the frost was freezing outside, to the later event that would make me a passenger on another train in the snow, perhaps ten years passed. In the dead of winter, the train was rushing from Sarajevo to Belgrade. Back then, I had long hair, wore leggings and knitted socks over my legs. It was as if I knew what was coming.
The train suddenly stopped in the middle of the night. I stretched out in the compartment. I ended up under the seat opposite, crushed tightly. I heard voices, someone was moaning. The conductor came along. Blood was seeping through the handkerchief he was clutching to his cheek with a huge fist. He was writing something with a pencil when the train hit something hard and stopped. Physics is relentless. The conductor stuck his pencil in his cheek.
A girl appeared at the door, dressed to say the least inappropriately for this moment. A fur coat and a skirt. She asked what was going on, then stayed in the compartment. The heating was no longer working. Someone said that we had to walk a few kilometers to the next station. The girl looked at me helplessly. I took off my woolen socks and handed them to her without a word. The snow was crunching outside. People were already walking through the night. We went out too. I thought that snow was always white. This one after midnight, from the plain where the wind whistled, carrying snowy frost, was - bluish. Miloš Crnjanski spoke of "blue and thick snow" in Lament over Belgrade. That was it.
That night we barely made it to the small station building in the middle of nowhere. When the railbus came to pick us up, the girl took off her socks, said thank you and went on her way. She belonged to the pretentious world, the one that Čola described when he mentioned the "doll from Trieste". I was in a post-hippie mood. Only the bitter Slavonian frost managed to reconcile our worldviews for a moment and, in an ironic move, to award her warm striped socks that my mother had knitted for me according to my design. It was my "Train in the Snow".
SNOW ON THE SAVA RIVER
From the terrace of the Ada shopping center, there is a beautiful view of the banks of the Sava River, the Ada Bridge on one side and the swimming area, lined with white lace, on the other. The boats sleep, covered with a white blanket.
Summer is just a bold thought, nothing more. The anthill of people has already dispersed with autumn, the wind whips along the shores. The sun and water are the same, but the temperature difference is 50 degrees. With coffee, I think of my favorite novel by Orhan Pamuk - Snow. The band Haustor comes to mind with the chorus: "And don't go without a coat, look, everything is white, it's winter."
It's already the fifth day since the snow fell in the morning. I look at that whole place, there are no fox tracks on it like in the poem by Vojislav Ilić, nor those notes of the locals from Čarobni brijeg. I think of the heavy wet snow under Komovi, which I walk through with the help of my brothers, to visit the house where my father died. Or the snow that falls without stopping on the stone pillow with my mother's name.
From somewhere, Noga's verses emerged:
Sleep, my dead/ without graves and without markers
May the wind embrace you/ May the blanket of snow wrap around you
I shiver, partly from the cold on the balcony, partly from the verses. Ljubomir Simović joins him: A cold time of snow and smoke will come, when the devil will be your god, a raven your brother, and a viper your sister, while your wing grows and your horn grows.
Đorđe Balašević is less dramatic: A gentle white legion is storming the city, January is spreading its refined carpet.
But that's a fairy tale in reverse.
In the evening, I will be cheered up by the verses of Jovan Nikolić Jof, which begin with the question "When I love her all." And one of the answers is:
When he breaks into my room
And brings snow on the eyelashes
And it smells like outside.
Finally, digging through poetry that helps us not get buried in snow, I find something written by Rade Drainac. He explains what people tend to remember about snow:
There are days when white frost falls, countless eyes look at me;
Like dogs on the trail of a bloody animal, my memories bark from the darkness.
And let that bark be the last thing we hear before the snow drowns out every sound.
Bonus video:
