Prologue

EVERYTHING IS EXPENSIVE, ONLY LIFE IS CHEAP
We’re Perfectly Fine

A lot has accumulated. Notebooks full, everything up to here, and we’re empty. It’s not easy to swallow a year such as 2015. And the digestive system is one of the important defense mechanisms. Public life in Serbia turned into a vulgar skit, into terror of marginal and trivial. Almost everything is like that, from the state to the football championship, from the diplomatic chorus to the Academy of Sciences and cultural awards. A farm of terrifying proportions.
This is not Serbia, it’s a model of running it. From the outside. And it’s not easy to fire two skits a week. From the inside.
Perhaps life is not a game, but a lot has to be played. We ask Potrčko, the courier who takes the post from our editorial office every day: ”How are you?” ”Fine. I pretend nothing’s wrong”, he replies. Smiles and leaves. Asked the same question, Komšo from Bajloni’s Market says: ”I remember better times. That’s a problem only those who remember have.” Then he becomes quiet, rubs his chin, gazes somewhere into the distance. Old man from a Serbian enclave in the southern province: ”We are waiting, son. One must know how to wait.” At the Theater Square, a seller of books for killing time and people: ”Humiliation, every day, every step we take. Hard. Who was it, Remark or Hemingway, who said: war was better.”
If we were engaged in ordered opinion polls, we could hardly make a living. Between two editions, we visited the encircled Serbs in Kosovo, spent time in the Dobri Potok oasis near Krupanj, discovered why Belgrade has the richest kafana culture in Europe. We learned Far East dancing and philosophy, reminded of the street of Serbian book in Novi Sad and the Slovenian who composed the Serbian anthem. We followed the activities of our partners, without whom all this would be a mission impossible.
”We’re alive. And this, for a start, is not a small thing at all.”