ONE FOR HISTORY (May 6, 2014)

As I was having my morning coffee at Marko’s, a bunch of motorcyclists and their wives sat at several neighboring tables. It was clear that most of the wives were accompanying them by car, but a few of them wore the motorcycle gear. They were quite loud. Showing pictures on their camera screens to each other, they kept laughing. Although I was not sure of their language at first, I realized soon enough that it was Hebrew. All of them from Israel, most of them had Ashkenazi features, but a few looked distinctly Sephardic. One of the motorcyclists got up at some point and strolled toward the loggia. In his late sixties or early seventies, he struck as someone interested in the hilltwon’s history. After a while, though, I heard Stanka Babić’s voice. She was shouting. She sounded pretty angry, too. When I turned around to see what was going on, I saw that she was shouting at the Israeli motorcyclist. “Go to the restaurant!” she repeated several times and pointed toward the front door of Marko’s. A short while later, she came to my table. “Imagine,” she told me indignantly, “I caught him peeing into one of the flower pots on the loggia!” One for history, indeed.