What Has a Leap Year Leapt Over?

Subotica is an amazing city. At one time it was considered to be the largest village in Europe and to me it seems rather strange that it had a population of one hundred thousand people in 1959, the year I came to Belgrade, and still has that same number today, while the number of Belgraders has increased from three hundred to two million in that same period! How has Subotica managed this? What is its secret? There are many answers to this question. My own answer is that it is a wonderful city for growing up, and when one grows up, then one can leave.

By Eva Ras
Photo by Milan Melka

I probably wouldn't have remembered such a distant past had things not been so tragic all around me. The glorious and victorious Red Army roared through Subotica with huge columns of German prisoners, which the inhabitants later had to feed. Barley was cooked in caldrons, and trucks would unload laundry in our yard to be boiled in those same caldrons. Prisoners were kept behind a barbed wire fence, many of them wounded and tearstained. People treated them benevolently because in the confusion of a world war everyone hoped that someone on the other end of Europe was giving an imprisoned family member a chance to survive.

Later, when the war's confusion passed, we cooked plum jam in autumn, in those same caldrons. I adored watching how my grandmother and mother took turns mixing a thick violet boiling liquid with a huge ladle so as not to allow it to stick and burn on the bottom of the caldron. They mixed and mixed until the thick liquid finally turned into a dark wonderful jam. And how I loved the noodles we used to eat only in the period of making plum jam. When all the jam was poured into earthen jugs and the caldron was emptied, my mother would mix dough for a large quantity of noodles, roll and cut it into wide strips, bring them from the kitchen where they had been cooked in large pots, and poured them into the caldron that was covered in the remains of jam. With the same ladle she mixed the noodles to take up what was left of the jam, and she poured a pot of lard to prevent the noodles from sticking. The noodles would take on the dark colour of jam and we used to call them smeary noodles.

Winters were severe in the post-war years. It would begin snowing in November and wouldn't stop till April. There was no fuel. Members of the family waited by turns in lines at the lumber yard, and there was no food either. There were long lines at the bakery and dairy shop and when your turn arrived there were no milk left. Bread was made from coarse corn flour and occasionally one would find bits of rope or nails inside. I refused to eat that bread and I was as thin as a stick.

I had already attended school and I was allowed to go to the city by myself to visit my numerous aunts – my mother had a large family and had thirteen brothers and sisters, all of whom lived in harmony. We visited each other every day and helped each other continually. Once, on the way to my grandmother's house, I saw buns in a dairy shop, and given that I had money I bought one. When I bit into it I saw that it was cut in two halves and had an unknown substance whose taste I liked enormously. It was butter, which I hadn't known until then. It was a feast that only childhood can offer. To taste something like that for the first time ! Childhood is the only age when you have more than enough opportunities to taste many things, and later in life later no town can compete with the town of one's childhood because these first experiences are unforgettable. Whenever I eat butter I attempt to repeat that same thrill I experienced when I tasted it in the dairy shop on Palić road where it intersects with Majšan's road. Even nowadays, when I go to Subotica, I first rush to the market to experience the tastes of my childhood. Freud found that nostalgia among people living far from their native towns comes from their craving of tastes from their childhoods – nowhere are cherries like the ones at home.

Mother would grate American cheese from UNRA provisions on bread – nobody knew to prepare sandwiches like her in 1947 and she was, I guess, the first in the world to discover how that small quantity of cheese we got from coupons could last longer: other women cut cheese in thin sheets and I also admired the tangled threads in Vojvodina's bread, so huge and with a round, sun-like core.

The Town Hall is the most beautiful building in Subotica and it was my property in childhood because my uncle Gabor Katandžić was a fireman and was frequently on duty in the tower under the clock, staring at the plain for the first sign of fire. How strange it is today that he guarded crops in this way, walking to all four sides of the balcony that surrounded the tower, watching for any sign of smoke. Subotica back then hardly had any telephones, and there was no power or water supply in the suburbs. We had to go to the well to fetch drinking water, while our yard had a well with a winch so that we could water the garden and fill the wooden tubs to bathe. I would take lunch to Uncle Gabor in the tower. I wasn't scared while climbing the dark stairs because I liked going high up, on the balcony, and viewing the panorama of the town with him, craning my neck so as to see the huge identical clocks at all four sides. There were no tall buildings at that time, the Town Hall tower afforded the only such view.

Uncle Gabor's profession also influenced my fashion choices, due to circumstances. In 1959 I went to Belgrade to study and had no coat, as I had grown out of the old one. Aunt Ilona immediately came to my aid and persuaded Uncle Gabor to give me one of his fireman's jackets, because he had three, and she instantly began to alter it with my mother. They took off the lining, they shortened the collar, turned the cloth inside out, changed the double buttoning to single buttoning, removed the golden buttons and epaulets from the shoulders and put a new lining of red lame. No matter how much they alternated the jacket, however, I arrived to Belgrade as a little fire-girl; it was obvious that it was a uniform and I was ashamed, but as I had no other coat I wore it.

My hometown? In my case it is a town in the north of Bačka, as we often read when Subotica was mentioned in the papers or TV. Astrologists give great significance to the place where you arrived in this world when they determine your destiny, predicting the future as is written in the stars. I think in a different way. For me it is unimportant where you were born, but it is more important that you arrived and where you lived the first fifteen years of your life. I was lucky to have parents that didn't keep moving from one place to another, so that I lived in Subotica until my final examination. Perhaps those who moved often while growing up think that it was an advantage. I don't think that one’s native town has any significance, you can be born anywhere after all, even in an airplane – and this has actually happened. It is far more important where you learnt the first lessons of your life, about the world, about that part of planet Earth where you came to live your destiny. The town of my childhood, in which I discovered the human species, the world of plants, admired pigs, caught my first butterfly, is the suburb of Subotica and its surrounding villages.

Life work is always the mark of a writer's biography, and the more I write, I write more about myself because I am at the same time those others in whose lives I was present, whose lives rolled before me and everything that had been shaped into a novel, a story, a poem as a repeated projection of my past, above all childhood, because the principal guidelines we acquire while growing up, while we mature, determine the viewpoint of our observation of planet Earth and the people around us. Distant moments of childhood turn into sentences, pictures and, like popcorn in boiling oil, open into the crunchy whiteness of infinitive.

I have never felt that I was forced to follow my path, and I have always chosen it by myself. Until the age of eighteen I had only known what was in Subotica and its surroundings. From Mali Bajmok to Horgoš through Palić and Ludaš, I rode around on other people’s bikes as I never had my own. I spent summers with numerous relatives from Čantavir through Tavankut to Mali Iđoš. I remember summers in Čantavir, at Aunt Anuška’s, the artesian well from which water constantly poured out and mother who would argue, "We are poor, but you must also learn what is good, and we shall therefore make a true feast today, and we shall know how to starve even if we don't train for bad days".

I guarded geese in Senta, I milked cows in Žednik and I wanted to go further than that. It wasn't important that I only had a fireman's uniform when I set out on my road, as my wish to meet a new life was stronger than my embarrassment. "To belong to another race, to another nation, cannot be an obstacle, as the human race on planet Earth is one", I would say to myself. My grandmother told me a story about a Jewish teacher who pondered whether God, when he came to the other world, would tell him, "Teacher, why haven't you become Moses?" "Fool!" my grandmother would say. "The Almighty would ask him why he hadn't worked enough to become a teacher when he should have been a teacher because He had created him to be a teacher". I understood from my grandmother Mojra that I had to be myself, and I climbed the dark stairs in spite of fear, into the tower of the Town Hall where I went like a Little Red Riding Hood to bring a lunch basket to my uncle, because my longing for distant parts was stronger than fear. I desired to see the great world, to know that my street wasn't the only street, and that beyond the cultivated land and wheat fields there were many things unknown to me. I became determined when bringing quick decisions, excited but also ready to suffer defeat or victory alike.

This I learned from the people and nature I was surrounded with while growing up, at the margin of town in vineyards, on fields, in damp rooms in whose corners, under my bed, there grew mushrooms. I learned in my childhood that things are simple and that this simplicity makes them interesting. My entire literary work is based upon this fact. I always want to describe life and start from truthful and real situations, but the style I use lends the writing significance and instils value. Between descriptions of fictitious and real events in a novel, the writer's style creates a literary world that corresponds with reality. Truth is not a novel and a novel is a reflection of real life. Naturally a writer should know social conditions, and while still a child in Subotica I could recognise who was a cook, who a doctor, who a high state official and who a maid, but I knew at the same time they were equals, because a thread of marvellous life, time and space connected them, and everyone among the six billion living souls on the planet can ask who is more and who less important in discovering the secret as to why we are born, where we come from, where we go from here, and the most important question, why? Poet Dušan Matić used to say that he could spend his entire life describing what existed between his house in Vojvode Dobrinjca Street and the Botanical Garden.

You will only as much purity in your life as you absorbed in childhood, because only in childhood are words not false and only without life experience can you ask, "What has a leap year leapt over?"