Hlebac ti. By your bread.
Hleb ti jebem. Fuck your bread.
Ko tebe kamenjema, ti njega hlebom. To him who stones, return bread.
Suvi hleb, dry bread was said to be the diet for the incarcerated; and, interestingly enough, the same was prescribed for the fast on Veliki Petak. Good Friday.
The day after’s French stick was a close enough approximation of the stipulated.
From childhood Bab had fasted Fridays; which for her merely entailed no meat or dairy. Possibly her parents had followed the same.
When we began excavating the first, hidden half of her life, Bab told how she had fixed upon her practise. One day in childhood she had surreptitiously taken food from the larder; cheese or meat it must have been. There was no record of punishment, which likely meant there was none and that she had not been discovered. The guilt however had clearly remained. Thereafter she privately pledged to keep a Friday fast.
In her father’s house at Savici the larder could only have been a shelf, where bread, cheese & eggs were bound in cloth. Greens her mother Ruza, Rose picked from the sides, where rocket and other leaves were plentiful. Meat was consumed only occasionally in Bab’s father’s house; fish was brought up from the coast more regularly, for which they had traded their own produce.
Eggs were reserved for the son, George. The four girls could only watch George at his repast.
George toyed with the youngest, Bosa.
— See, here you have it. (Inspection allowed only by the eyes.)
Remarkably, there was no jealousy at the brother’s precedence. Somehow the bonds of family superseded; the culture cohered.
Once Bab married it was party-time, she was regularly joshed in latter years. The most eligible young man in the entire village, coming from the richest family, made quite a coup. That Bab had in fact been a great beauty herself, and her grandfather a village headman, came as a surprise many years later. There was worth on her side too; the husband would certainly never dominate her.
In old age when Bab’s appetite failed, when she was out of sorts, she was enjoined to cease scrimping and saving; to eat her fill.
Nemoj zalit koricu hleba. Don’t deny yourself a crust of bread; ie. as was your wont.
She had never in her life gone hungry, she maintained. (Unlike some others at Village Uble.)
The dictate of the rocky heights 850 metres above sea level instilled discipline and produced sturdy character. On the Equator seeing the honour the Malay young in particular gave their elders had bewitched from the outset.
There were many reasons to attempt the fast on Good Friday. The Veliki, Good Friday marked by the Julian calendar of Eastern Christendom.
In childhood we had attended St George in St Albans one or two Good Fridays, trekking over with the Jankovics from across the street. On one of those occasions cheeky Stevo Dakic had produced his coloured wooded egg that bested all our hardboiled in the contests at the church grounds.
Tough on the fangs the French hleb without the softening of dahl, &etc. The cut pieces made a CLUNK in the metal dish that was supposed to catch crumbs. (Partaking at Al Wadi would have created too much of a spectacle.)
Three years ago when a green Queenie mango had been presented by one of the men beneath Block 2 at the Haig, that particular variety had not been known. Now on Orthodox Good Friday, approaching the mid-point of the fast, opening the cupboard where four of the Queenies had been left on the shelf, the aroma was a kind of cheating.
With Ramadan a week away, the timing was excellent. It was difficult not to feel a little jealous of the unity of purpose at the evening iftar meals.
Geylang Serai, Singapore
NB. Written on Eastern Orthodox Easter.
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