‘But what did you say?’ Matjaž asked her, while her sister was still holding her tight.
‘I said that he was socially inept and didn’t understand what went on around him,’ Sonja said, crying.
‘But that’s not so harsh,’ he comforted her.
‘Besides, it’s fairly accurate,’ added Brigita, clearly relieved of the hiccups after the fortunate encounter and the hugs.
‘It’s the worst thing you could say to Lovro. Once, when we had a similar argument, he said he wouldn’t stand for that accusation – for the words “socially inept” and the claim that he didn’t understand anything, especially not in the presence of others.’
‘Well, in any case he’ll understand that you’re struggling and under pressure with both sets of parents around, and it just slipped off your tongue,’ Brigita said.
‘No, he won’t’, Sonja burst into tears, ‘because I said it spitefully, with the intention of hurting him. He told me that he wasn’t going to put up with me being spiteful. I promised him that I’d never be spiteful … and now I’ve been spiteful.’ She cried helplessly. Brigita had to embrace her again and stroke her hair.
Matjaž, standing to one side, said that being spiteful was an extension of being a woman, and all men knew that and were prepared for it. This only made Sonja cry even more, until Brigita got cross. ‘Enough wailing now. You love this guy and I’m not going to let your spiteful behaviour ruin a perfectly beautiful love affair!’ she said decisively.
‘Especially as Brigita has to ruin those for everyone else around as it is,’ added Matjaž.
Brigita gave him a furious look and said, ‘Why don’t you go and see if you can find Lovro. These two aren’t usually very far apart!’
That sentence set Sonja off crying again, and prompted her to take another swig of whisky. Matjaž obeyed his order and walked a little further on, past the nearby supermarket and towards the pharmacy. As he passed the police station, he thought he saw someone sitting by the side entrance. Discreetly, he drew closer and tried to work out who it was.
‘Who’s there?’ a stern voice startled him. For a moment Matjaž panicked, before he remembered that any Croatian policeman would probably be speaking Croatian. Then he knew whose voice it was.
‘Lovro! Thank God!’ Matjaž cried out.
‘Some God,’ said Lovro bluntly, holding his bottle of cognac. Matjaž sat down uninvited and helped himself to a glug of the strong stuff.
‘Well, that was quite a fallout!’ Matjaž said. ‘You had us all really worried.’
‘And so you should be – there won’t be any wedding! I’ve had enough. I can’t take any more! As if it’s not already enough that she’s got parents like that, and, well, a difficult sister who’s probably going to be living with us her whole life, and then she goes and calls me socially inept!’
‘I know,’ said Matjaž. ‘Unbelievable! Is there anything I can say to make you change your mind and take back that beauty?’
‘No chance!’ Lovro snapped back, taking a swig.
‘Well, I guess you’re right. Who gets married these days anyway? And to a woman like that. She doesn’t even know how to cook!’
‘That’s true, but she makes really good coffee,’ Lovro corrected him passionately.
‘Fine, but she gets up really late when she’s on holiday,’ Matjaž prompted him.
‘On holiday that’s fine, because normally she’s always up before me – to make me coffee.’
‘She drinks a shameful amount of alcohol,’ said Matjaž, provoking him further.
‘Always within normal limits,’ the groom-to-be replied, defending her again.
‘And she smokes even more to make up for it.’
‘But she’s so hot when she does,’ Lovro smiled softly.
‘Don’t forget about her parents, though!’ Matjaž was slowly running out of counter-arguments.
‘I know, but she’s normal. We’re really similar in our political beliefs, you know,’ Lovro explained to him.
‘Fine, well, then there’s also, as you said yourself, that insufferable sister of hers!’
‘Who you’ve fallen in love with!’ Lovro retorted, getting cross.
‘OK, I like her, but she’s hard work for you,’ said Matjaž, calming him.
‘She’s no trouble at all. If it weren’t for her, Sonja would never have realized that I’m actually socially inept and that I don’t understand anything.’
‘You mean that you’re not socially inept and that you understand everything!’ Matjaž corrected him.
‘That’s what I said …’
‘Of course you did,’ said Matjaž, and took a swig from the bottle. ‘So, what’s the problem, then?’
‘You’re the problem,’ yelled Lovro, somewhat inebriated.
‘True. Shall we go and console your future wife, then? The one who hasn’t been able to stop crying since you fell out?’
Lovro looked at him anxiously. ‘What, why didn’t you tell me? The poor thing. I thought she’d be hanging out with those girls, slagging me off. If I’d known she was crying …’
‘She’s in a real state, and completely regrets saying what she did,’ Matjaž told him.
‘And so she should!’ Lovro insisted. He stood up suddenly and started to waver, so that Matjaž had to hold him up.
‘Anyway,’ concluded Matjaž, shifting Lovro towards the direction of Sonja.
When husband-and wife-to-be caught sight of one another, they rushed into each other’s arms; a torrent of words, incomprehensible to normal mortals, poured out from the two of them.
‘Where did you find him?’ Brigita asked Matjaž, smiling.
‘At the police station.’
‘What?’ Brigita asked, worried.
‘Don’t worry,’ Matjaž smiled. ‘He wasn’t locked up, although he seemed like he was heading for it. He was sat drinking outside.’
Brigita smiled at him and Matjaž drew her gently into his arms. ‘I think we’ll remember this as one of the good days by the sea.’
‘Definitely’, said Brigita, shirking away from the hug, ‘but it’s already morning and we have to go home if we’re going to get these two jackasses married.’
‘I know,’ said Matjaž, ‘and call those older jackasses to make sure they haven’t already drunk everything today unnecessarily.’
‘Ah, it’s probably already too late …’ Brigita said. ‘Samo’s got his own adventure, though.’
Sonja and Lovro walked up to Brigita with their arms around each other, as if to say that – at two in the morning – they really ought to be getting home, if they were planning on getting any sleep at all.
‘See you tomorrow!’ Brigita said, and stretched out her hand to Matjaž.
‘Paganini at eleven, right?’ Matjaž asked. Lovro stopped in his tracks and turned around like one of the Furies. ‘What do you mean, Paganini? It’s Laganini, you have to be at Laganini at ten!’ Sonja burst out laughing at the bridegroom’s discipline. Turning towards Matjaž, she mouthed him a ‘thank you.
Matjaž gave a slight bow and waved to Brigita, who was walking behind the two lovebirds and looking back with an expression that was probably a concoction of melancholy, intoxicating substances and tiredness. She raised her hand to wave goodbye.
‘Don’t worry!’ he called after her. ‘I’ll find it.’ He could still hear her chuckle as she slowly disappeared into the dark.
SATURDAY
He arrived at the Palmižana resort a minute or two before ten. There weren’t many people on the small boat – probably because it was September, he thought. During his walk through the forest on the other side of the island, where the main event was due to take place, the familiar scent of this island’s pines had momentarily catapulted him to some other point in time. One when some young guy was here, searching for shelter from the scorching heat for his girl, whose salty curls were peeping out at him from beneath her covered head. He sensed himself becoming nostalgic, and so he tried ag
ain to redirect his thoughts. But to where?
A solution presented itself in the form of a small café in the middle of the island. There sat Brigita, alone and reading something. She seemed utterly calm and relaxed, immersed in her book. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders, and got on her nerves every now and again by getting in her eyes. With a calm gesture she drew it back, only for the game to be repeated a few minutes later. The sight of this caused a friendly smile to appear on his face – something that he wasn’t in the habit of doing ordinarily. He sat down next to her and lit a cigarette without saying a word. Brigita caught sight of him, but she pretended as if she hadn’t, and Matjaž acted as if he hadn’t seen her pretending.
He fiddled with his camera, preparing it for action, and without looking at her eventually asked, ‘And where is everyone?’
Without lifting her eyes from her crime fiction, Brigita replied, ‘Around here somewhere.’
‘The bride and groom?’
‘They’re getting ready.’
‘Everything under control?’
‘Absolutely,’ Brigita replied in a manner of complete calm, although it wasn’t clear if there was an ironic undertone hiding in her response. By the time she’d finished telling the tale, it was clear to Matjaž that she had been extremely restrained in her response.
‘Yes, everything’s under control, leaving a few details to one side.’ She looked up at him. ‘At eight o’clock the florists delivered the bouquets, but they looked nothing like wedding bouquets and an awful lot like funeral wreaths. Sonja’s Croatian clearly isn’t as advanced as she thought it was.’ Brigita fell silent again for a while, and then summed up the morning’s events. ‘When our dad heard about the flower situation, he started elaborating on his infamous theory of the backward Croats and how incompetent they were. He said we should call off the wedding, as the wreath was a clear sign that the day would be a catastrophe with a capital C. The Croats didn’t deserve our money for the ceremony. The beauty of Hvar had nothing on the beauty of Slovenia, and it would therefore make sense to invest in our own beautiful homeland.’
She coughed, and calmly continued, ‘As you can imagine, Zofija did not agree with this. She was of the opinion that the Balkans were home to a civilized people, who at the time of the Enlightenment were just as progressive as the Slovenes. She felt that it all clearly came down to misunderstanding, and that matters were by no means as grave as people tended to make out. She added that she, personally, was highly predisposed to the idea of the ceremony on Hvar, as the best place to be in September was by the sea and consequently Croatia was fully entitled to all the funds they were going to invest in it. And as soon as my father got the chance to point out, according to his misleading logic, that the wedding funds were mainly coming from one single source – i.e. the bride, or rather, her family – my mum jumped in and asked Zofija if she’d help rearrange the miserable wreath into something that resembled a wedding bouquet.
‘It seemed like all of this was of little comfort to the bride. She ran back to her room, the groom running after her, too, trying to rescue her from the floral torment. What he said to her exactly I don’t know, but it sounded like a few thoughts on the insignificance of the bouquet, which even though it might seem like a crucial wedding artefact would not make the wedding any less valid if the bride were without it. Judging by the cry of desperation that followed, Sonja had not appreciated the groom’s conciliatory efforts.
‘Anyway, a good half-hour later I was summoned to the bride’s room. She was half-dressed in her normal clothes, and the expression on her face indicated that we had found ourselves faced with a new challenge. Clearly, our Sonja had let herself go a bit on holiday, probably even before that too, making her dress rather too tight on her; so tight, I’m afraid to say, that we lost a button while squeezing her into it. Mum jumped to the rescue once again, and it turned out – perhaps for the first time in our lives – that her thirty-year “career” as a housewife, an opportunity afforded to her by her conservative husband, was not entirely for nothing after all. She had clearly developed her sewing skills over the years, and she showed that wedding dress and its troublesome button what for.
‘However, this rather elegant fashion rescue effort did not satisfy my dear sister’s latest attack of hysteria. She even started questioning what it was all for, what all the effort was for, what was the point in life, love, etc. The groom, who had forgotten that according to popular culture he was not allowed to see his bride in her wedding dress before the event itself, didn’t have any luck in easing the hysteria either. His declarations of unconditional love, even if she were fat, somehow didn’t go down so well. So Zofija also had to intervene, reminding the bride that many men prefer their wives on the slightly rounder side. God knows what effect that was supposed to have on Sonja, but it didn’t work either; in fact I’d go as far as to say it made the situation even worse. It was a fairly desperate state of affairs, as our bride was now convinced that she wasn’t worthy of her wedding vows.
‘Luckily (or perhaps unluckily) new guests knocked at the door at this point. Our cousin Eva, Sonja’s competitor ever since they were tiny, had clearly overheard the clothing debacle and took full delight in it. Just as Sonja had finished declaring the end of everything, Eva remarked that it really wasn’t worth rushing things when it came to weddings and that, anyway, Sonja wasn’t really the marrying type. Everyone there was staggered by Eva’s comments, but somehow it helped to focus the bride, who chased everyone out of the room except me, and started to do her make-up. “I’m not going to let myself be ruined by that jealous, boring conservative!” she said, looking into the mirror, to which I could only nod my head.
‘Eva was just the first casualty to hamper our morning. Her parents, my aunt and uncle, hadn’t managed to make it to Hvar in the end, so we had the pleasure of the company of some other guests instead. Out of our relatives the relatively normal Uncle Drago and Aunt Dragica arrived; both of them are very reserved, and probably not too clever either, not that it shows too much. My Grandma Evridika arrived, too – when you know she brought my father up it’s no surprise to learn that she isn’t exactly the most progressive liberal of all time. It has to be said that she possesses a few more emotions than my father, though.
‘Out of Lovro’s lot, Leon the seducer appeared at the least convenient moment possible, and his and Lovro’s uncle – so that’s Borut’s brother Edvard, and his much younger and – how should I put this – not exactly quick-witted wife Linda. She has such a cute name, doesn’t she? To complete the joyful occasion they brought their five-year-old son Anže to the wedding with them. Zofija’s mother also arrived: Grandma Katarina, as they call her, and it quickly became clear that she was just like Zofija in every way possible. Full of opinions and convictions, the only difference being that she was a little skinnier and with slightly more direct, colourful language.
‘Anyhow, shortly after the arrival of this mass of people, it took the youngest member of the family a relatively short period of time to remind us that children can also be an inconvenience sometimes. I don’t know how that little ray of sunshine managed within a mere ten minutes to find chocolate, scoff it, get it all over his hands and mouth, and then in that filthy state leap into the arms of his cousin Lovro. What had seemed delightful to his parents brought about a look of sheer horror on the groom’s face, as his light-coloured suit was now adorned with brown stains. At this point I ought to point out that nothing that I’ve just said – well, apart from the bouquet and the tight wedding dress – would have happened if all relatives had followed the original instructions and met on the boat, just as Sonja had planned.
‘But my Grandma Evridika had clearly made up her own rules. As early on as the ferry to Hvar, where all the aforementioned guests had met, she had started to persuade everyone that they ought to surprise the newlyweds and their parents – because what in the world would make the bride and groom happier than old traditions, specifically the one that dict
ates the bride’s family must accompany her to the altar? And so, on the spur of the moment, we had to redirect boats to the Pakleni Islands on which one family clan and the other were of course going to travel separately. Granny Evridika was very obviously unimpressed when Sonja pointed out that she and Lovro had already seen each other in their wedding outfits several times by this point, and therefore it made no difference whatsoever if they travelled in the same boat.’
‘Where were Samo and Sonja’s friends while all this was going on?’
‘Thanks for bringing that up, I was just about to broach that problem.’
Matjaž leaned in attentively and waited for an answer. ‘We couldn’t locate Samo or the girls anywhere,’ Brigita said dryly, and just carried on looking at a page in her book.
‘You lost the best man?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And where did you find him?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Please,’ said Matjaž, gesturing elegantly and giving the floor to Brigita.
‘I have to go back a bit in order to explain it to you. As you probably remember, we left off at how we’d freshened up the bouquet situation and fixed the wedding dress; the groom’s outfit was beyond salvation so he’d changed into some perfectly reasonable chinos. So, just as Granny Evridka had changed the plan, Lovro said, “Fine, we’ll do it that way. But we really ought to start making a move now, otherwise there won’t even be a wedding today. Samo! Samo!” he called but received no reply. “Where is that Samo?”
‘ “Who’s Samo?” I heard Evo and Edvard enquiring.
‘ “Samo is Lovro’s best man,” my mum explained.
‘Meanwhile Lovro started chasing all over the house, disappearing off somewhere and returning in an even greater state of panic. Again and again he ran in and out. Within a few moments we realized we had a problem.’
Jela Krecic Page 31