The first of January

Who likes New Year's Eve - that's fine, just don't let anyone force me to be cheerful and have fun, and especially that no one gropes me at midnight, nor expects me to grope him (or anyone). From a young age, with the approach of midnight, I felt a growing anxiety before the certainty that I would be the subject of drooling and slurred courage that surely, guarantee, the next year would be better (it wouldn't). Wishing someone, with a thick tongue and eyes clouded by alcohol, all the best and most wonderful in the coming year, is very similar to orgasmic declarations of love: it lasts a short time and means nothing. Okay, I admit, when I was a little older, I used to wait for midnight with a little more enthusiasm to see if I could even touch the cheek of the girl I liked and try to kiss the corner of her lips with that kiss, but somehow it always turned out that they were , those wonderful and unattainable girls, were less enthusiastic about kissing than I was, so soon I started to hate the reception even more. The first of January, however, is something completely different.

Parents (in the early and mid-seventies) slept longer than usual that morning, before noon we could scratch our heads for some Disney cartoon on TV (instead of Polish or Hungarian ones), around 10 o'clock we would eat proja with young cheese and sour cabbage sprinkled with allspice, followed by hot brandy and cold brine with a broadcast of jumps from Garmischpartenkirchen, at noon a concert from Vienna (then grandma would appear with with a new and ironed scarf on their head and their grandfather in a suit, as if they had gone straight to the Viennese opera, they would sit in front of the TV as straight as candles, sipping hot brandy and listening to Strauss's waltzes with understanding), there would be a reverent silence for ten minutes due to the cultural elevation, and then the adults would also get sick of it, so we would all go for a walk together, for lunch the sarmas from yesterday, and in the afternoon, with a light nap, some of those long and long-awaited films by Sergio Leon, for example, beside aunts and uncles whom I adored. In the evening, a walk in the frost and dinner with nice conversations, then another American movie. Milina. And no one is trying to get at you, no one is drunkenly rambling, and they are not going to grope you.

In the 1980s, things changed as the television program was richer, the mornings were similar, with everything brine, hot brandy and a concert from Vienna, but now we have grown up enough to, after the obligatory pranks from yesterday, once again organize a session with a lower intensity. Personally, as an incurably antisocial type, I preferred the afternoon film program, but it could have been good in the cool Muja's cellar with Woodstock, say, Dorse or Azra.

In the twilight of Yugoslavia, at the end of the eighties, on the first of January, we played preference games until the evening, when, instead of the wildness of the previous night, we would have difficult conversations with Catherine the Great, Discipline of the Spine, Partibrejkers, suspecting, I guess, that we were living the last years of a life whose carelessness would never be we won't find it.

And then the first of January became the dark harbingers of lack of freedom and anxiety, which would have been as unbearable as it is if one circumstance had not occurred, at least in my case: it happened to me ona. On the first of January in those terrible nineties, we would sit in her little room, as if in some kind of bubble, completely surrounded by fear but, at the same time, separated from reality, we would love each other and (if my diaries are to be believed) read A man without qualities Robert Muzil (1993), a biography by Elias Canetti (1994), Words and things Michel Foucault (1995), Loser Tomas Bernhard (1996), demolished Milošević (1997), listened to Goldberg Variations performed by Glenn Gould (1998), and it's the first of January 1999, after a sleepless night - not because I was celebrating, I wasn't, I cried all night because a it was no more - I waited in a small room on Studentski trg, clinging tightly to Proust, so that I wouldn't go crazy.

A lot had happened in the meantime, I began to hate greetings even more passionately and dawned on the first of January with more relief, assuring myself again and again that that day was not exceptional in any way, but that somehow - in what way, I had no idea - could give me a sign of what the year that had just begun would be like. I stopped following the ski jumps in Garmischpartenkirchen (that's why English football is there), you can watch cartoons on at least eight channels, I don't drink hot brandy, there's no one to make pickles, the only thing that still persists. I like to walk on the first of January in the morning while there are still no people, Belgrade is quieter and goes deep (whatever that means), I am sure to encounter a lot of fresh vomit, I want to go to a bookstore (the best ones are closed), get a coffee on the way (I regularly burn my palate with the impatient first sip) and I try to enjoy the truce that, for a few hours, was established by general hopelessness and that first January.