Vučić resigns the presidency to outmaneuver the student movement, loses to it anyway

…(cont) I tried to picture it out in my garage, where I keep the toolbox, because some things you have to put your hands on to follow. Say a man runs the floor as foreman and the crew's been filing complaints for two years — never mind about what. Say he hands in his notice as foreman on a Sunday and puts in for crew chief on the Monday, same floor, same crew, same clipboard on the wall. I don't know if that's done anywhere else. I just know it's what the page says happened here.

And here's the part I keep setting the toolbox down to look at again. Sunday, October 25th — the day he's on the ballot for the new chair — the same crew that had been filing complaints for two years turned out to vote, more of them than in years, 69.34 percent of them, the page says, the highest turnout in years for that parliament. And the list they voted for wasn't his. Fifty-three percent of them, near enough, went to a list of first-time candidates picked by student assemblies — a hundred thirty-some seats, against a hundred and five for the party whose man had just changed chairs to get in front of them. If changing chairs was supposed to put distance between him and that crowd, what does a turnout number like that say about how much distance he got?

Because I went back to where the crowd came from, and there's a word in that part of the page I can't stop circling. Two years ago a railway station roof came down in a city called Novi Sad. Sixteen people were under it when it did. The station, the way the page describes it, had been newly renovated. Not old. Not neglected. Was that the word on the ribbon they cut?

I don't have an answer for what a family does with a word like that once the roof's already on the ground. I'm not saying the word was a lie when somebody wrote it down. I'm saying it's the word I've got sitting next to the fan belt and the dog in my notes, and it won't come loose.

Oh — before you go, one more thing, excuse me. The move from president to prime minister, the whole plan to swap chairs and keep the same hold on the floor — was there a word for that too, in their language, the way there was a word for the station? Was that, by any chance, called renovated?