Prologue

DON’T FORGET THE VALUE OF WHAT YOU’VE GOT
Peppers

In the hills above the Drina, Momo Kapor hungrily bites into a red bell pepper and warm homemade bread. It is summer, our feet in the stream, our glance wandering down the river towards Lozničko Polje. It is the year 1988, stirring everywhere, but we are still not aware of the scent of war.
”See, when I’m in the US, in their frivolous and selfish ‘consumer paradise’, this is what I long for”, says Momčilo and closes his eyes, crunching the pepper with his teeth. ”The wine with grapes and peppers that smell like peppers. There, in their supermarket, all peppers are big, with the same length, shiny as if just painted, but, when you bite into them, it seems that you are chewing a plastic slipper, like a trained dog.”
”You’re exaggerating, Momo”, says the young poet. ”You are loading ideology into peppers.”
”You, my son, are still green and naive”, sighs Momo Kapor. ”I hope you will find that out when you travel there, that there will never come a time to have to realize it here.”
Autumn of 2016, already over its half. Only somewhere you can still find one of the two most beautiful scents in Serbian suburbs (besides the scent of blossomed linden trees in June): the scent of peppers grilled for ajvar and pickles. However, for several autumns now, peppers that smell like peppers can only be bought under the counter. Genetically manipulated plastic vegetables, voluminous and deadly, threaten to cover everything. Peppers with the taste of a slipper, cherries which even worms refuse, grains which make even the cows mad. For the higher profit of rapacious suburban peasants and traders, for a huge commission fee of corrupted politicians. When we had a serious state, such things led to a death penalty. At least symbolically.
That poet dropped to our editorial offices yesterday and said: ”Momo was right. It’s horrible when you don’t know the value of what you’ve got.”