For 58 years, Sebastian cleaned shoes at the corner of Njegoševa and Marshal Tito, Serbian rulers, King of Milan. In SFR Yugoslavia, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro, Serbia.
Times changed, governments changed, everything changed, but Sebastian was there. As far as my memory goes. Like a constant. With the wooden box in which he kept the shoe shine kit. Later he also sold shoelaces.
He was there when I went to get my hair cut as a child, when I went to concerts at SKC as a teenager, when I went to protests, went to a pub, when I walked the dog, drove my children in strollers, when my father died.
When my daughters started school on their own, I asked him to follow them with his gaze along Njegoševa. When they went out at night, he informed me who he saw them with, whether the boys in their company were decent. He praised them for being well-behaved, for always contacting him.
At the end of every summer, he always had the same joke: "What the hell, neighbor, I'm a Ganci, and you're black like the blackest gypsy!"
Photo: Milorad Roganović Rogan
An honorable man
I often saw him in the summer in the "Poleta" garden, drinking beer with his friends. I know that earlier with the journalists of Studio B, while journalists were still working there, he went to "Polet" and the "Arilje" tavern in Njegoševa, which has disappeared like most Belgrade taverns.
Upon receiving the news of Sebastian's death, colleague Veljko Pajović wrote: "The man who saved his face, cleaning the shoes of others, is gone." That's how I found out that Sebastian passed away two months ago. I did notice he was gone for a while, but I didn't think it was forever.
For me, a neighbor who I saw almost every day for decades, and with whom I only sat down once to drink a beer, left. What remained was a pang of conscience, that I was constantly running somewhere, that I only exchanged a few words with Sebastian in passing, that I reacted so lightly a few months ago when he told me that it was not very good. Not that he is sick, not that he is unwell, but that he is "not very well".
Living monument
I regret that I didn't talk to him more, that I know practically nothing about him, a witness of my time. Even at the age of sixty, after all the deaths, I can't learn to stop here and there and stare at people while they're still there. While we're still here.
He complained in recent years that his work was not going well, that something had changed since the corona virus. That there are fewer and fewer people who want a professional to clean their shoes, to shine them so you can see yourself in them. If there were more and more people, he could not remove the mud of the province from their shoes even with all his brushes. They looked through him, while he looked at them.
About thirty meters from the place where Sebastian sat for 58 years, on Cvetni trg, there is a monument to Borislav Pekić. I would like to see at least a small monument to the Belgrade shoe shiner erected on the corner of Njegoševa and Kralj Milan, near "Polet". He was there even before Beogradanka began to be built - a living monument of the former city whose soul began to die.
He grew up together with Belgrade and died in Belgrade, which was occupied by anti-citizens. A man in inhuman times. Our fellow citizen who exuded gentleness in the utter confusion that befell us. An observer of our lives who could not miss anything.
