The water lock

/courtesy to Đorđe Balašević/

You know when a bead necklace breaks and all these multicolour glass balls disperse in all possible directions on the floor. Well, this is the story of my family apart from breaking anything of substantial importance…or maybe just a couple of vases on accidental occasions.

The point is we are getting together mainly on weddings and funerals and it all started back in time with my grandpa The Colonel. Being a military officer he was sent to serve the people of this small country at any possible border of its and this is why he had the big family suitcase at hand, in a state of almost pack-and-go.
A displacement of that kind could only lead to having mom and uncle born in the west corner of the countryside, while the bloodline as we remember it crossed borders and cut through the very heart of the land, still between the two World Wars providing us with a double set of fests to celebrate and of course two calendars.

The Colonel’s family is of Serbian descent and the apparent attitude to trifle issues such as making a home where nobody of a reasonable mind would decide to stay overnight also descended from that part of the border. Anyway, becoming local was not that easy. Once they stopped in the first settlement of their choice they could have been considered “Ours”. Why they have moved on from that spot left a mystery to us and we know of it as its place name has left a stamp and become the alias of our family name in a way indicating that these are not exactly from the “Ours”.

Next station, next border on and on the merry-go-round. Strange enough, no one of my grandparents later complained of dizziness after all these years. Last station is my point. The river corner of the land is where grandpa was last sent and after all where he retired from his service in the army.
The most magnificent thing about this place is the River. It makes a turn at the gates of the town thus pretending it is wider than you know it. Its charm is in the particular smell it leaves around and on your skin after half an hour swimming in it. My favourite author wrote about having all these chemists together in a laboratory, and in my opinion, they should be locked there until the day they were able to extract this special scent and turn it into perfume. As he pointed out, they will first need to get to know with us and the never ending summer hours spent fishing, swimming or just making waves in the water as we sat on the deck.

Later on and following the old family tradition to disperse from your string, it was quite accidentally (or was it?) I was admitted to study in an academy down the same river…not quite the same believe me! I’ve seen this river at its very spring – one could not recognize it, if not told, I enjoyed it in Austria and in Budapest and I tried to call it “Mine” over 10 years in Belgrade. Dear reader, this River is unique at any of the places it is flowing by and through, and incomparably dear to me it is at the Roman gates of my hometown, which is the third or fourth place of my family’s personal exodus.

In the no-mobiles era mothers obviously had their own ways and means to get informed on our arrival past the winter or the summer exam sessions at the academy. It was annoying to spend the last 20 minutes in the train crawling down to town, circling around it from any single side just because of the river turn here. There were these days I would go straight to the river bank not even leaving the luggage I was bringing and if I have left suitcases and bags home it would be to run in a hurry directly back to the river. I liked to plunge my hand in water and feel the smell it had this time. This was very important to me, along with the long distance swimming down the river during long summers that took us longer to walk than to swim but it was worth it…every single second of it. Now in my older days it is still important…

3 p.m. bulletin on the level of the river in centimetres that we childishly called “The Senz-jmont” was the other important thing about this river. Senz-jmont can’t be heard nowadays on the radio. And the radio has lost a certain touch of its elegance not having the daily Senz-jmont emissions anymore. All in all, there is a firm relation between the river and anyone born at the banks it washes. There is a string that binds dispersed beads together once more. And finally, there is a water lock somewhere in our hearts which will make us point out, as the mentioned writer used to say, “A lovely town you have here, such a shame that it is too remote, 70 km from…” …exactly, from the Danube.

“Eh, moj Đole...”