nostalgia

Yet another trip of nostalgia.
I had a long break in the middle of my day today. I wanted to use it efficiently, but as usual in this city, I was prevented from doing so by the force of a squad of iron babushka, this time around in the form of librarians.
Librarian babushki are among the worst. When I was in uni, they used to stop us from taking our coats into the library in winter, even though it was often (nearly) unheated inside. Taking in drinks or “printed matter” was of course out of the question. In all, going to the gorky library (as it was called) was a miserable experience.
The Lenin library isn’t that different. Like gorky, it is not computerised and features a whole hall of card catalogues, many of which are written in one of the evil baba’s indecipherable handwriting. Shit, even in the Serbian national library they have computers!
So naturally, by the time I filled out all the pieces of paper correctly, it was too late to expect to get any reading matter the same day…I will have to go back.
After putting in my requests, I still had several hours to kill, so I decided to make the trek down to my alma mater, mgy. It was a beautiful day: 30 degrees and sunny, my favourite combination. So I walked over to vtoroi gum, my old building, where we used to have classes. Besides a little remont, not much had changed. The students looked the same, only I didn’t recognise their faces any more. They had sandblasted the wall where a persistent student had spray painted love messages to his katya in latin. Every corner reminded me of the past: the stairwell where I used to smoke with masha, shurik, Robert, viktor and and ivan, the last 4 of whom I have not seen since graduation. the buffet where we got tea. The unspeakably vile toilets. The bulochka lady. The lady who sells magazines and was once probably beautiful, but now only gets fatter and sadder looking year after year (she has been there as long as I can remember, which is to say at least since 1997) everything was there, just like I remembered it. But I fear something changed with my eyes. I struggled to believe I had spent years of my life between those walls, studying, smoking, panicking before my flipping Serbian class. I remember everything in exact detail, but when I actually see it in front of me, it is like watching a film: that wasn’t my life it was someone else’s, someone else running up 5 flights of stairs not to get yelled at by an evil Serbian teacher, someone else waiting in the hallway to be called for an exam. It wasn’t that long ago, but so much has happened since, that it seems so much longer.
I tried to go to my old kafedra, but no one was there and the door was locked. So instead I ended up in the antikvariat book places on the first floor, where I was unable to restrain myself from buying four books…. including the latest by lapteva, and 800 page epic. No doubt it will take me the whole year to get through it.