Professor Rajko was teaching in my red brick school during the 1980s and until 1992. He was in his early thirties when the war started and when he received the call to join the army. In the spring of that year, whenever he had a few days off, he would come to the school and hold classes. A few times, he even showed up in uniform in the morning, and after teaching, he would report to his unit and head to the battlefield. At the beginning of May, he was killed near Derventa. From that year until today, there has been a rumor that every spring, toward the end of the school year, he appears in the school to finalize the grades, because he felt that he left unfinished business in his classes. One of the colleagues or students might encounter him early in the morning with the gradebook, in uniform, in one of the school rooms, where he has isolated himself and is finalizing the grades, calculating averages for the class, and separately adding up the number of A’s, B’s, C’s, and D’s. He never gave F’s, and throughout his career, he never assigned a failing grade. And every time, when someone interrupts him, he would say the same sentence:
“Colleague, do you need the gradebook to finalize your grades? I’ll be done in five minutes.”
This never happened, nor did such a professor exist, but we made up this story for a young teacher who had just started working at the school. My uncle and I were asked, as former students of the school, to fix the computers in the classroom and reinstall Windows. We spent half the day at the school. I was tasked with telling the story about Professor Rajko, and then I asked the teacher to bring the laptop that was in another classroom, as I didn’t know which one it was exactly. Actually, I knew where the laptop was, and my uncle was already there, sitting at the teacher’s desk in his hippie military shirt. When the teacher entered, my uncle said:
“Colleague, do you need the gradebook to finalize your grades? I’ll be done in five minutes.”
The teacher was terrified and almost fainted for a moment. We didn’t expect that to happen. My mother almost fainted too when she heard what her brother and son had done.
I had almost forgotten about it when Elena reminded me of it yesterday morning.
“I heard, David, that you’ve been banned from entering your former school.”
“Not exactly. I mean, there isn’t a formal ban. The principal just angrily said that I shouldn’t show up near the school anymore, but that was in the heat of the moment.”
“They haven’t published it in the official gazette yet,” Maxim chimed in.
Elena asked her usual question:
“What were you thinking?”
“Well, we didn’t really think. I mean, we thought she wouldn’t react so strongly. We thought the story was good enough, and we wondered if she would believe it. That’s mostly what we thought about.”
Elena talked about some innocent victim, and I defended that she was hired through a party, and that it’s natural not to feel empathy.
I changed the subject. I suggested we go to Little Sava’s. Elena wanted to go somewhere they dance. Max was on my side.
“Elena, dancing is a manifestation of anxiety. Poor people don’t know how to relieve stress, so they move to the rhythm of music. Mostly women. Men drown their anxiety in alcohol. That’s why they end up at the same place where everyone heals in their own way. It’s a club or a dancing, something like that, it says on the entrance. There, a synergy forms. Men start dancing a little, and women drink. In short, it’s an illness. Let’s go to Little Sava, like Davy suggested, among healthy people.”
At Little Sava, in the corner of the tavern, there was a computer connected to the internet. I liked that because sometimes I wait for news and can check my email. I was expecting my uncle to send me an email about his plans. There was nothing from my uncle, but there was a notification from oDesk. Someone had invited me to a project. Abigail, a client from Texas. She has a concept for an online strategy game and needs a programmer. She wrote that she thinks I’d be a good fit, given the previous game I worked on. It sounded pretty good. I accepted the interview. She was still online. She asked me about my previous game and said we would talk again soon.
When I returned to the table, Ian told me not to open my email on every computer I see and to change my password. He was right; I hadn’t thought about that before. I explained that I had received an invitation to make a game. This job seemed like the ideal one.
“You didn’t show that you’re excited, did you?” Maxim asked.
“I didn’t. We exchanged emails, so it didn’t look like I was thrilled.”
For the rest of the evening, I often thought about the project that was in negotiations, hoping that it would come through. For some reason, it seemed unreal to me that someone would pay me to make a game.
