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Apparently I’d found myself in the middle of an
enduring siege between the uniformed army at the
restaurant, and the Gypsy guerrilla children; wrestling for
supremacy of the muddy path linking the improvised
parking lot and the improvised restaurant. Just then a
Volkswagen Golf with Bulgarian plates pulled in, and the
little Gypsies forgot the unhappy waiter and ran off with
their slop buckets. The waiter returned to his sentry duty
by the door, and continued his smoke break.
I sat at a table covered in a white cloth, as well as aged
coffee stains, which lay over an even dirtier red
tablecloth. A plastic ashtray sat in the middle, alongside
a vase containing plastic flowers from the Yugoslav
Mesozoic period. I had to wait, of course, to earn the right
to pay for a sour coffee, hand-mixed with a disposable
thin plastic spoon, amidst this particular ambience. It
was my first time in such a setting. The honorary waiter
extended one smoke to two, spoke with a comrade who
stood behind a stainless steel bar, and managed to
somehow get lost on the way from there to my table.
It seemed as though I were experiencing the genuine
tradition of southern hospitality that I’d heard so much
about. Others, far wiser than I, had tried and failed to
change this mode of behaviour, so it was futile for me to
do anything but absorb it. I tried once to communicate
with these local human-like creatures, asking the
innocent question, ‘How far is it to Brčko?’ To which