Then, as now wood fires are burning. Unfortunately the beautiful, old cast-iron or ceramic heat engines have been replaced by ugly “modern,” metal grejalice painted a faux copper or brown. Thankfully, I can still dry my socks and underwear on these new furnaces without scorching them and even lie down on the top of the stove in the sredna soba at night to sooth my aching back. But the romance of the woodstove is gone. There is no grate to open and read and dream by late at night, no villages of red hot coal to watch crumble and remake themselves in front of your eyes.

The people who live here are older now too, in need of much care. They are crooked and okrivenje, moving slowly with stapice. (canes). Even the young couple whose presence animated the wide yard in December 1968, who danced the kolo in the snow and feasted with their guests have changed. We are now older than the villagers who threw us one of the last great weddings in the three-day, three-night Macva tradition of wild indulgence.

Deda Anta, a survivor of WWI and now long gone on to greener pastures, kept a list of the gifts received at our wedding along with the food consumed. He counted 55 pigs, half of which were roasted and grilled in the field oven, or furinor; several bura , or wooden casks of plum brandy (sljivovica), many kettles of steaming, sugared sumadinske caj (hot brandy toddies with sugar and water to sweeten and lighten the mix); 30 wedding cakes and miles and miles of stuffed cabbage and beets with ren (horseradish). Cauldrons of steaming noodle soup arrived followed by round bread loaves straight from the field oven, bread to be broken and passed along in a special white linen napkin to your neighbor on the klupa. There was wine, the last of my husband’s 1950s harvest, a kind-of-light-on-the-brain apricot rose wine. Our cheeks got rosy after several toasts, but neither our minds nor our footwork became sloppy. At least that’s how I remember it.

Lipolist in 1968 was a village of about 3,000 households, famous for its linden-lined main street, its corn, its poetry and its roses – cultivated then, as now, by the Topalovic and Marinkovic families. There were about 300 guests at this three-day affair, with many more people coming into the yard to see their first-ever Amerikan in the flesh.

At times, I felt my presence was an awesome responsibility. I was only 21 and never before in a place of such hospitality, albeit without running water or a proper inside WC. Every half hour or so I would come outside to the yard – festooned in my bridal finery – and wave to the gathered crowd, much like I imagined a Greek or Serbian or English princess might do. Then I would abandon all formality and run out to dance a kolo in the falling snow with the scores of villagers who had come to gawk - accompanied by Mirko Stojkovic, a storied violinist and his local Roma band. This went on for several nights and days. I was a wreck. Finally my new husband and I retreated to the bridal bedroom – a modest room down the hodnik (hall) of this typically modest three-room Macua farmhouse – for some much needed SLEEP. I was a bit taken aback when I saw the Gypsy band was following right along. The musicians waited outside our door, for what I was not sure. They thumped and strummed and sang their fabulous tunes with the bass’s insistent thrum getting louder. Guests were clapping and shouting. When one particularly rousing song finished I felt basic etiquette dictated I should whistle my loudest in appreciation of the mighty musical effort expended. My new husband silenced me with his hand. “If you whistle now, they will burst into the room!”

So, ja sam cutila. Snajka ucila vrlo vazno lesson on her wedding night.
The villagers in Lipolist gave me a first-class welcome. Something I will never forget and could never repay them for. This was a time when Amerikans were admired and even liked in the world community of nations. Kennedy had been dead only five years. The Americans were sky-walking in space in preparation for the 1969 moon landing. And we watched and cheered their crazy feats in the galaxies above on Kum Rajko’s tiny tv, the only one in the village in 1968. This same Kum Rajko gave me a wild ride on his horse-drawn cart that was straight out of Tolstoy. He stood on the front lashing the horse team. I sat petrified in the back, a wool blanket over my lap, as we thrashed our way through the winter forest and down the main street to the stari bagram – on what was sort of a wild pre-nuptial initiation ride.

Kum Rajko is gone now as are most of the people who threw this great party; the backbone of the village is broken. How village life will continue is a velika pitanje and surely one repeated and worried about in EVERY village across the Balkans. And across the globe as agricultural workers migrate to cities in search of jobs and a better life.

***

Lipolist today is a barren place, a village of octogenarians, a few young, ambitious agricultural hangers on, and several families of rose growers. There is no butcher, no cheese shop, no Internet café, just a Saturday market in summer with slim offerings of mostly Chinese-made goods. What Lipolist does have in abundance is pubs and kafanas and places to gamble away one’s time. And, yes, a radio station and the bus, which still marks the hour for villagers, with its arrival from Sabac several times a day.
What bright, young, educated woman in her right mind would chose to work like generations of women before her, bent over in the fields, sowing and reaping raspberries or plums, or making cheese by day, warming beds by night, and waiting for men to return month after month from the fields, the vineyards, the krcma, or tavern or from war?
Many young women with educations have left already to nearby Sabac, Loznica, or Beograd to work in retail, at professional office or pharmacy jobs, or to help keep the small sections of Fabrika Zorka that still work afloat. The rest eek out a village existence in the same hard way their parents did before them: working the fields and orchards, tending to livestock, picking raspberries or blackberries and hoping for a good export marketprice, selling cheese and trading with neighbors for the things they need to survive.
Village life today is not the romantic, naive slika, or picture I saw in my 20s. It is hard work to chop and carry wood, to light the finicky stove each day, to feed the chickens and clean the pig sty, to shear the sheep and card the wool, to bring beets, potatoes and carrots from one root cellar to the pantry or to the winter kitchen. That is not to say there are not still high moments – times when villagers gather to feast, to tell stories or to share the latest political jokes. BUT rarely do villagers break into song like they did in the era before television eviscerated the local musical culture. Now television is king, blaring its Spanish soap operas or quiz shows non-stop in the living room when one visits another family. Television is like the loudest, uninvited guest. It erases the need for communal talk, much less song or old-fashioned music and merry-making. I know this lament makes me sound like a cranky old fart, nostalgic for something that some days existed only in my imagination.
However an outsider, a foreigner, but also as snajka or daughter-in-law, I feel Serbian village life needs an infusion of aid – some kind financial investment or agro-tourism subsidy like Italy, Switzerland, Austria and France make their farmers— some kind of attention so that all the traditional folkways of village life will not be lost. For decades, the cities of Novi Sad, Zagreb, Sarajevo and Zadar have depended on peasants to fill their marketplaces – Kalenic, Bajlonova, Zeleni Venac to name just a few of Belgrade’s finest open-air pijace – with the cheap fruits of their labor. I am not sure what form this aide or “attention” to the villages might take. But I do know that today more and more leaders in the developed world lament the loss of their green areas, their stari nacin.
Before it is too late, before village life is just another dream buried in the snow, it might not be bad idea to think about creative ways to preserve its vestiges for generations to come.