Smilja Gavrić

WEDDING UNDER SIEGE

Well, that wedding of mine, the decision itself, to get married in the middle of the war was just as normal to me at that time, regardless of everything else. I mean, it was total poverty. How we would arrange the wedding, how we would entertain the people, our dear friends that would be there and so on. Nothing could discourage us, not even the fact that I had no wedding dress, nothing to wear, nor my husband who was also a refugee, but he got shoes from a dear friend of ours, a jacket from a relative of mine, and a pair of pants. And I say: ‘What am I going to do?’ He says: ‘Well, look into your closet, you’ll find something.’ And so it was, I found a little dress that I bought a long time ago somewhere in Athens and of course I had to wash it. There was no dry-cleaner’s, anything, but after all, after washing it I couldn’t iron it, you know. So dressed like that, in my crumpled dress, I received the wedding party and everything. I still remember to this day, how my husband’s best friend, Goran, said to me: ‘How can you go to your wedding in such a creased dress?’ But I really didn’t mind, nor did it bother me, or mean anything to me, that creased dress. We were still in all of that, we were so… how shall I put it, in that lovely atmosphere. And even as we were going, we went on foot, you know, to the wedding. We didn’t even have a car, there was nothing, we all went on foot, and when we were coming back unfortunately, they shelled, so that we had to…we ran in different directions just after we got out. We ran apart and then we went to a little restaurant, where my husband’s company organized a sort of luncheon for us and there we even had real meat.