Fifteen dashes for the fifteenth of March

In the story Black rooster Marcela Emea the fox persuaded the rooster to run away to the forest together with the flock and get rid of the master. After liberation, the rooster loses one hen from his suite every day. The fox (translated by Vladan Desnica) defends himself as follows: "It will happen that the marten or the weasel broke their promises, but I will restore order." One day, however, the rooster catches her in the act: the chicken's feathers are stuck to her snout. The guilty party declares: "This time, exceptionally, I had to show a certain severity. The chicken I ate was very stubborn and would end up causing us trouble. It's good to give some exemplary punishment from time to time."

After each paragraph I stop and snort. Eme's words get an unexpected echo: the fox becomes the symbol of the main villain in our current drama, and the rooster... the blackmailed "boys". There are no more universal authors than children's writers.

- Until the last moment, it is not certain whether we will go to the protest. Passenger trains were canceled until further notice as early as Friday morning. During the day, all bus departures from Pazova were suspended. Sounds like we're going to spend "family Saturday" listening to beeps on the phone. I wouldn't find it difficult to stay, nor would my conscience bother me. The only thing that would make me itch: to listen to the broadcast of the protest. It would be like imagining a football match with "Sport and leisure time".

- While we are climbing Nemanjina, I insist that we stop somewhere on the side, on the sidewalk, because "what could I see from the core?" More often than "pumpaj", you can hear "čaci, čaci" in domundjavanje. I hope they include that word in Dictionary of the vernacular and literary Serbian language - "ćȁci" (singularia tantum, šalj. according to "pupils"): bad student, ignorant, sold soul". He has time to be canonized and enter one of the last volumes: I certainly won't see him myself.

How much sense does it make to watch the rally from here? Will I be able to see anything coherent from the frog's perspective? I already know I will. I enjoy an old, incurable vice: a mass of faces and voices alternating before me. Each face is unique, all voices in unison. Girls with signs on a banner or a T-shirt smile, sure to make a good impression, and keep their eyes on it. Authorized acquaintances by sight approach and shake hands like friends. General kinship rules without words. I don't have the feeling that I am among the insane, that a sudden change of mood, a stampede, can happen. With each step I believe more and more, the precaution loosens. At that moment, someone lit two torches in front of us.

As soon as he took off the torch, it was as if it suddenly got dark. "Was it blue?" asked the woman when they turned it off. "Students report that blue flares are a signal for batterers". I didn't see it. I applauded the arsonists as if they were born to me.

- "Can I take your banner to take a picture?", the guy shouts to the lady. The generation gap requires her to justify herself: "I'm here, I can't move anywhere anyway". The lady hands him a banner as if lending it to everyone. The girl casually takes a photo of him: "Are you happy?"

The banner reads: "Students lie down like bears". A park, a few tents, a camp fire and – the most disgusting thing – prefabricated toilets were drawn.

- Before he whistles, the young man with the whistle plugs the girl's ear with the index finger of his left hand. She looks around and hums: she implies that perceptive gesture.

- At Mek na Slavija, the speaker roars from the heels of her veins even though she is speaking with a microphone. I try to make out her words. Even though I'm close, the furious hissing it produces takes precedence. I hear the emotion, but the content is unfathomable.

However, then it reaches me: "... the people only get illusions, shadows of shadows!" Despite the triumphantly shouted finale, the allusion to Plato is met with a lukewarm reception. The standing ovation is late.

- I want to look at this crowd like a world traveler who routinely, somewhat blasély, visits revolutions or like a foreign married couple on the terrace above us who squint and gaze with wonder at every detail. But how can I look at her without embracing what she came together for? How can I stand above, beyond, beyond? There is no room anywhere but inside. Nor is there any point in objectivity. Here, a couple from the terrace starts waving at us. The ramps fell in front of them as well.

- I'm eating greens in a crowd and I wonder if I'm chewing regretfully like my uncles. Next to us: closed shop windows of "Hleb i kifle" and "Trpković" bakeries. The mice jumped out of the ship in time.

If they are a sinking ship, what are we? Centrifuge.

- Respite at the Academy 28. Both departments are crowded, some are sitting on the stairs. Only now is this a real workers' university! "Only one drink per guest!", decrees the waiter; in terms of him, there is a state of emergency. I open the window to let the smoke out. All the faces nearby turn to me. Fifteen minutes of silence is about to begin in Nemanjina. An elderly lady is waving a flashlight, signaling me. The woman next to her cuts the air across with her thumb and forefinger as if to say "zip it!" I close the window.

- Around 19.20 - detonation. Although I've never heard it, I think, precisely like in some action movie "water cannon!", but I'm ashamed to share it with the crowd. Maybe, like in the movie, there is an artillery expert in the room. Guests run to the windows, shocked. My wife, pseudo-phlegmatic: "Oh, I hear such shots every day." Since the beginning of the protest, all the networks have been suspended, except for the internet, but only for me: something caught fire near Pionirski Park. I'm calling my brother, I hope he's not near the epicenter, he's not, the signal is immediately lost again. People are pouring down Nemanjina faster and faster, Slavija is suddenly emptying. That they are not pursued by the police? Is everyone else hanging on the window offline too? We leave around 19.45. The owner of the bar personally stands at the threshold and closes the heavy black door behind us. He doesn't let anyone in anymore. It was as if immediately, after euphoria, panic set in.

- "How did they," says the woman as we race down Knez Miloš, "nicely draw the pump on that balloon!" As we pass by the owner, he adds in a whisper: "I wouldn't be able to do that."

- Rows of pedestrians on the Gazelle. "The bridge is shaking, it is overloaded!" "But that's normal, the bridge has vibrations." "People, stand in one lane, vehicles will go in the other." "Who says it's busier now than at rush hour when all the live vehicles are there!" "Such decisions are really made by students!" "People, stand in one lane, we won't argue among ourselves now that we have destroyed Vučić!" "Left lane! Left lane!" it soon becomes a chorus, we repeat it in chorus while the orderly arranges us into groups. We arrive at the threshold of the bridge. Will an invisible ramp fall before us? The warden argues with everyone alive, but people listen to him less: he no longer wears a green vest.

- "God willing", said the woman when we finally got into the car, "that the next protest will be in June and that you will wear a thug. And that I, bless us, sing true colors. "

- Tiredness in the evening. The feeling that the past six hours outside have been short. It seems to me as if I just rushed through the crowd, as if I didn't see anything. I don't want to read the news. Flashback to the fourteenth of March: in the morning in Pazova, I am the only one sitting in the garden of the cafe next to the municipality and leafing through the newspaper. I learn that train traffic has been canceled due to an alleged bomb threat. The village idiot stands next to me and begins to stamp his feet. To the waiter's "not bad" I moodily answer "the same"; it's my fault that we're not good enough to open up to him more precisely. The dissatisfaction is so general that every now and then I have to share it with anyone, I want to stick it on my forehead. The whistles of the protestors at the Protestant church are overpowering lounge in the bar. Against that background, together with vuvuzelas and sirens, they resound like genuine music.

Everything that goes through my head, and what I think is most intimate - anger, resentment, but not helplessness - is now a universal feeling. I need to do something radical, in my genre: to get up right now and walk to Belgrade to get to the protest. I need to become a soldier, to go into the woods, to be spectacular connect, to sacrifice myself. When hands are tied, only fighting is right. Only now, when the enemy thinks that everything is over, in fact everything begins.

- The next day, apathetic from the media bombardment. Rumors are already circulating in the pubs of Pazovac that people invented that detonation. Spin news in the sea: at the door of the KCB gallery, where Nina Todorović's exhibition is on Discontinuity log, the sign "Stop NATO culture" is dreaming. "Fools", writes Nina, "they just made me a bigger advertisement".

The author is a writer and translator.