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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