Trafika Europe 5 - Slovenian Interlude

and that, in front of the ‘honest world,’ they would all marry her if she so wished, and that he was ordering Nedelko Borojević to marry this brave comrade. Nedelko himself seemed to be wrestling with his own neck muscles, but he finally nodded. Dusha dropped her two small suitcases and jumped into his confused arms. My mother asked my father to marry her on 9 March 1978, and the big event came two days later, on Saturday, 11 March, despite a brief intervention from best man, Captain Emir Muzirović. He was still nursing the worst headache of his life and, while the bride and groom kissed, he swore to himself that he would never so much as smell grape schnapps again, deciding to only drinking plum brandy from that day forth. In the middle of one of the longest nights of my life, our chauffeur, Shkeliqim Idrizi, noticed that I couldn’t get to sleep, and started explaining to me, in a whisper, that the lights to our left came from Hungary, the lights to the right from Bosnia, and that Serbia and Vojvodina were straight ahead of us, where there were no lights to be seen. He went on to tell me that if you drive on from Belgrade, taking the road past Niš and Užice, you’d reach Kosovo and his village, where Fadil Vokrri’s father had also been born. My blank stare disappointed Shkeliqim – I’d never heard of the greatest of Kosovan football players. His whisper-tour of our *

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