Large pair of tables occupied by mid/late teen males, all outfitted, one Hilfiger among them. (Not finger—the spelling needed checking, even after ten years in Singapore.) Sleeveless puffers, discreet other labels, clean trainers.
Odd how in their particular presence all the old Serbs down in the South had risen up so strongly.
Mr Jankovic across the street, who Bab needed to call upon to slaughter our chook, when she herself couldn’t manage. Stevo Savanovic, the unprincipled skirt-chaser. Working as a storeman at the Spencer Street Station cafeteria, Mr Djordjevic had swung the first job at illegally at fourteen.
Mitrovic, Jovetic, Djurovic—there was no need to differentiate the Montenegrins & Herzegovinians in particular. Golic & Djakic, both like Mr Jankovic & Stevo Savanovic, had married Germans after their internments.
Chika Djakic’s middle son Stevo had been the schoolboy friend of big John Dickinson, from their time at Wembley Primary. Daki he had been called then, a card like his father. One afternoon visiting with Bab, Mr Djakic’s playfulness created alarm when he called his wife in the kitchen for a knife, in order to cut off his young guest’s willy. Later at Easter the father provided the son a painted wooden egg, which won all the egg knocking contests in the grounds of Our Virgin, in Carlton, before St. George was built in St. Albans.
Not ever met, Mr Jovanovic in St. Albans with another German wife, had a younger son who married lovely Lizzy Sutherland. Often his ghost too came back with those others. The suburban sprawl of the city ensured separation, even though Mr Jovanovic was later discovered to have contributed to the building of St. George, like all our group on the other side of town. Following Dostoyevsky a couple generations earlier, during his incarceration this Mr J.—there was another Jovanovic a couple streets away who had married a Macedonian—was taken out to the execution yard, blindfolded and shot with blanks. The spreading of terror was more useful this way than mere reports of deaths.
The slow trip North from Athens had unexpectedly turned up a concentration camp in Nis. After all the readings, photographs and documentaries over the years, the simple physical remnant could not shock much. Old stone & brick buildings from the earlier Royalist barracks of King Aleksander had been repurposed by the Nazis. The barbed wire that had been added to the top of the perimeter wall had since been taken down; in some of the cells it had been left stretched over the concrete floors. Within the men would eventually tire and need to get off their feet, few surviving long, the guide in her booth suggested. The small hole in the roof of the cell had not been provided for the prisoner, but the observation of the guards. Socrates’ cell in the hill below the Acropolis was similar.
Before the wall at the rear of the grounds prisoners and rebels had been executed. A large outbreak of over a hundred inmates in 1942 had been the first such of the war in Europe. Numbers of these subsequently captured had been shot.
In Melbourne through the ‘50s & ‘60s men like statuesque bronzes returned home afternoons from the factories, rail lines and roadworks. Labourers, painters, gardeners, cleaners. Those a little luckier with trades earned better as mechanics, carpenters and shoemakers. Even work days on their bicycles, dignified in jackets, coats and shoes that were likely polished by their wives.
The other in the street fitted the same profile, the Poles, Istrians, Italians, Croats & Magyars. Two doors down, for years Mr Stein had been mistaken for one of the old settler Australians. (Some years later the Jewish counterpart in Acland Street with their numbers on their wrists were discovered.)
After two - three years of law at Moscow University, Maria Popov had walked three months to West Berlin in the wake of the retreating Nazis and advance of the Communists. Judging by the ages of the children, Pavel & Lydia, husband Stefan had been picked up along the way, or in the DP camps. The wheel of big Teta M’s pink & white Chevy needed revolutions of the week cornering. A peasant woman like our Bab sitting in the audience at the Moscow Circus before Cossack dancers, at the opera & concert hall, perchance beside her friend.
Our Kuma Jasna made the unfortunate choice for one of the second wave, a Herzegovinian handyman who took to the drink. A trifle uncannily, Kuma echoed Hamlet’s point about his father in thinking of the lesser men of the succeeding generation. No doubt father and Uncle Jovan closely resembled her own father back home.
These young lads at the café tables and their older siblings knew the bare details of the disintegration of the former country; and as for the great wars that was beyond grasp. Books, much less photographs & film, would offer little and often mislead. Lest we forget, when forgetfulness was inescapable and integral.
Hilfiger. Vans. Adidas. The middle class was perfectly understandable; like the poor and beggars, they would always be with us.
Even in the early ‘50s the Saban handyman on the hill at Zelalici came back up after his odd jobs on the water with tales of furniture in the houses, drapes & bathrooms.
Word of a kucni pas, an indoor house dog back in the homeland, had emerged in the mid ‘70s. Here in Vracar they were legion and probably fetched back pre the first war. Handsome examples appeared all sides, their poop often properly cleaned after them. For some reason the Samoyed of the Equator (Singapore), had failed to appear in ten days on the streets. Pussy love again for some reason was rare here, nothing like the Tropical example. In Athens below the Acropolis a dedicated group fed strays among the Roman ruins, which drew photographers.
Marvellously leafy Vracar, lessening the heat island effect in this quarter the city, Cousin Vlado said. The phases of construction over the many decades gave interesting variety to the physical fabric; the wear of mortar and discolouration had been missing in Singapore.
The labelling was far less in Vracar. (Encountered in an Indian resto, German Jan with the local girlfriend, settled here four years, had been told more than once that Vracar was not Belgrade.) One recent tee was straight out of the eternally corporate striving, ferocious tiger territory of Singapore. A young gal with high buttocks pounding the footpath by Cuburac in fashionable sportswear, proudly blazed her aspiration: PRESSURE IS A PRIVILEGE.
Vračar, Belgrade
NB. Built on the Vračar Plateau—with Ruski roubles from Putin helping bring it closer to completion—the enormous Church of St. Sava was meant to echo Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, long since turned into a mosque, of course. Craning the neck on each pass after the library adjacent, the initial guess had been 25-30m height. Wikipedia gave SEVENTY-NINE.
