Tile and wedding

"And you, groom, have found the day when you will get married, three meadows", uncle Fabijan slapped future son-in-law Dragan on the back, on the latifundia line.

"What to do, when the tile arrives a little before the fateful YES", the younger actor returned a sleepy look to the older one, knowing that the construction initiation does not ask for a place and time and cannot be announced from the altar as a sacrament of marriage.

"We will reach Gornji grad by evening, don't worry, pregnant women," Father Josip joined in the story. Wedding in the church of St. Marko probably could have waited, but the arrival of the blankets for the holiday home in Turopolje - it didn't.

So the actors, some with diplomas, some without, spent the wedding morning in preparatory work, and later in unloading tiles and placing them on the roof of the country house.

"We came down from the roof, looked back, looking at our victory", exclaimed Fabijan, looking forward to the latifundia residence as much as to the marriage of his daughter Anja, urging the workers to finish tidying up the tools as soon as possible, so that the groom, his brother-in-law and other relatives around could have a bath and change clothes for the ceremony of exchanging marriage vows.

I participated without lines in said comedy, ready to step in only if the main actors failed.

The couple in love decided to get married after only four days of love, and the house of the old man had been waiting for a roof tile for years.

"Well, my Mostar, you won't have a good time with the Slavonians," encouraged the father of the soon-to-be groom, expressing a specific family welcome.

Celebrating the overall victory, they left the latifundia and in the evening, in the same composition, with the obligations prescribed by the church protocol, met at the church with the Croatian checkerboard and the coat of arms of the city of Zagreb. Dragan's parents met Anji an hour or two before leaving up the hill from Mesnička Street, in amazement that muscle inflammation is a prerequisite for a good entry into marriage.

Strikan, deftly as when laying tiles, handed over his daughter and actor's heir to her chosen one, whom he had seen in high school while Dragan played Romeo in a poisonous drama at the Dubrovnik Summer Games.

The guests showered the new acting family, after the first kisses from the upper town, with songs and gastronomy in the Society of University Professors, a baroque apartment unusual for collective celebrations, during which the wedding guests eat and drink separately, each in their own room, and from time to time they go out into the corridor to sing with a musical group. the stars of the evening, no more and no less than the "Dirty Theatre".

Inspired by the success of the album "Zlatne godine", relying on the faster things of the punk past, avoiding the first wedding night ballad "Ma kog me Boga za tebe pitaju", Jasenko Houra, Mladen Bodalec and company cheered up the spouses, roof helpers and the Herzegovinian-Slavonian-Dalmatian mixture dialects and customs.

The national charge of the roof evening with the Croatian flag and the "Fairy of Velebit" suddenly chased a well-loved actor home, which did not disturb the good atmosphere in the least. After Tito's death, people spoke and sang a little more freely, no matter how carefully they kept quiet about it.

"A daughter doesn't get married and doesn't lay tiles every day," Josip's nephew patted his uncle, confirming the material of the expert committee that made joint decisions in a coordinated manner.

Sister Eva also encouraged herself, as the evening progressed, to sing with "Prljavci" as a backing vocalist, even though she was not seventeen, but only six years old, and even though it was not ice cream time, but a Hungarian woman with eight crusts, wafers and "cat's eyes". .

The bride, sure of the correctness of her hasty decision, called to the dove's song, until the traditional midnight gift-giving began, dancing with the first lady, to the rhythm of the shepherd's scent and the inevitability of the fajrunt.

The trio from the first roof line held their own with Riesling and wedding plum wine, but it was time for the children to go to rest, because they had already seen and heard too much.

The only problem, it seemed, was the loss of his father's driver's keys.

"Uncle Vanja will take you," Fabijan offered to his mother.

"Who is Vanja, uncle, what are you talking about?", Jadranka was confused.

"I see that Josip is out of the machine, and my year is ready to wait," he pointed to his acting companion, and only then did we realize that we should be taken to Jarun - Comrade Pooh from "Inspector Vink".

A native of Slavonia, a companion in the radio, television and theater buzz, he readily accepted the assumed duty, and, no matter how hard it was to say goodbye to Jaja and sister Eva, as well as the rest of the motley wedding party, we soon left the wedding party, looking for "uncle's" car.

"I left him there somewhere, his mother, he must be in this row", in the same style, the actor asked my father for a white octane friend, while the mother refrained from hiding her nervous puffing in front of the other Pooh, because she could wait until the old man found it keys, lost indefinitely.

"Now Uncle Vanja is going to take you to Nanati," said the friend of Strikan in a kind, albeit pointed voice, and I no longer knew whether it was a play, a hidden camera, a larger-than-life role, because with actors you could never tell the truth from a lie, yet from the invasion of the "Balkan Spy" ensemble on Šibenik's birthday, with costumes from the play and a wedding mood.

Driving with Vanja Drach was like that, unpredictable, winding, no less risky than Fabijan, who never looks in front of him, but rather to the right or to the left, depending on which object catches his eye, always more important than traffic lights and more decisive than "traffic signs , of our heroes".

More talkative than the old man, "uncle" recalled Sławomir Mrożek's "Emigrants", performed in the Ladimireva cinema on Valentine's Day in 1976, when Fabijan, after countless "cubicles" of brandy at his brother Šamuka's, later also at Đura Ivanović's Bircuz, connected to the venue of the play , took the stage with that famous opening line:

"I'm coming..."

"You don't say došo, but came", replied the intellectual Drach to the illiterate guest worker Šova.

The driver talked about home-made ham and sausages, pretzels and jam, one long-ago winter evening in a Slavonian village while both of them were traveling by train and shoe, rescuing pedestrians from their driver's wanderings, soulfully investing in each subsequent character, chronicling the announced accident.

The sister, although under the impression of the concert with "Prljavci", managed to fall asleep, the mother pretended to listen, and I absorbed the huge glasses and the broad smile of a man borrowed for half an hour, on Saturday night, October 11, 1986, and who would normally believe that the morning of the actor's wedding started with the tile, continued with the wedding, and ended in emigration with "Uncle Vanja".

Miraculously, we arrived under the roofs of Jarun without a traffic accident."