The Groom Behind the Camera

In Trebinje people still tell the story of Vasilije Lalović's wedding in three versions, depending on who sat at which table. In all three, someone else is to blame. In one it is the father, in another the best man, in the third Germany. The version closest to the truth is the one in which everyone is a little to blame, and it begins two years earlier, at a birthday party Ostoja Lalović did not even attend.

Ostoja had a small wine cellar below Crkvina hill and never said good when he could say the best. Thirty years earlier he had worked a season on construction sites in Munich with Radoslav, who stayed there and now had his own construction firm. When Radoslav celebrated his sixtieth birthday, Ostoja congratulated him over a video call, glass in hand, and in front of all the guests in Munich he said: "You have the most beautiful daughter in Germany, and I have the most handsome son in Herzegovina. It would be a shame to let that go to waste." The guests laughed. The next day the mothers started exchanging pictures.

Anastasija was twenty-six, worked as an architect, and had no intention of getting married by arrangement between two fathers. But in his pictures Vasilije had calm eyes, and in his messages, once they began writing to each other, he wrote the way nobody in Munich wrote. She asked him what he did in winter. He answered that in winter the Trebišnjica sounds like someone in the next room turning the pages of a newspaper. She agreed to a first video call, on Sunday at eight.

Ten days before that Sunday, while they were distilling rakija, Vasilije opened the still too early. The flame caught the left side of his face, from the cheekbone to the neck. His eyes were unharmed, and the doctors at the hospital said he had been lucky, but also that the skin would stay red and tight, and that the scars would fade over the years, only never completely. Ostoja looked at his son's face in the hospital bed for a long time, and then said the worst sentence he could have come up with: "What am I going to tell Radoslav now?"

Vasilije solved it himself, and that was the first part of the problem. His best friend Relja worked as a waiter in a café under the plane trees and was the most handsome man in town, the kind tourists from Dubrovnik left tips and phone numbers for. "Just the first few calls," Vasilije told him. "Until my face heals. You sit in front of the camera, and I write you what to say." Relja did not want to. Then he agreed, for a friend. Ostoja agreed even faster, as if he had thought of it himself.

That was how it started. Every Sunday at eight Relja sat in Vasilije's room, in Vasilije's shirt, and Vasilije sat on the bed, out of the frame, with a tablet on his knees. He wrote in large letters, and Relja read from a screen taped below the camera. Anastasija asked what no one had ever asked: which song he could not listen to all the way through, what he had last repaired with his own hands, whether he was afraid of silence. Vasilije answered, Relja spoke, and her parents, who sometimes sat beside her, watched the face. Later she would say that from the first day she had noticed how the young man on the screen paused before every beautiful sentence, as if he were reading it. She thought he was shy.

Winter passed, then spring. The scars faded as much as the doctors had said, and no more. Every week Vasilije decided he would tell her, and every week Ostoja talked him out of it. "After the wedding. Once she is here and gets to know you, she will love you. Who walks out of a wedding?" Relja, meanwhile, had grown used to the role. He started adding sentences of his own, mostly about himself, and Anastasija's mother adored him. The wedding was set for June, in Trebinje, with two hundred guests. Relja was to be the best man.

The plan was for Vasilije to tell her everything the evening before, as soon as they arrived. But the family from Munich was six hours late because of the line at the border and came straight to the hall, a convoy of cars with German plates, horns blaring, while the band was already playing. Radoslav came in first, looked around the hall, and saw the face he had watched every Sunday for nine months. Relja was standing by the head table, a carnation in his lapel. Radoslav embraced him, kissed him three times, and put into his hand an envelope and the keys to a new car, the gift for the groom, as he had promised back at Christmas. Anastasija's mother kissed Relja as if he were her own son. Relja gave back neither the envelope nor the keys. He stood there and smiled, because he did not know what else to do.

Anastasija stood in her white dress and looked at Relja, then at the man beside him, with a red scar from his cheek to his neck, who was looking only at her. The registrar opened his book and, as is the custom, called the groom by his full name. "Vasilije Lalović." Relja did not move. It was the other man who stepped forward. The hall went so quiet you could hear a waiter in the kitchen setting down plates.

Anastasija's mother was the first to speak. "Then who is this?" she asked, pointing at Relja. Ostoja started explaining something about the still, the rakija, and the bad weather, and nobody understood him. Radoslav turned red and asked Relja for the keys. Relja closed his fist around them. "He gave them to me," he said. "I sat in front of that camera for nine months. I am the one he was looking at." Vasilije turned to his best friend and looked at him for a long time, the way you look at someone you will never call again. Then he held out his hand, and Relja, without looking at him, opened his fist. Vasilije set the keys down on the table in front of Radoslav.

Then he took the microphone from the singer. In front of two hundred people he told them everything: the still, the hospital, the tablet on his knees, every Sunday at eight. "Every word you heard, I wrote," he told Anastasija. "He only had the face." He could see she did not believe him. "You wrote to me at three in the morning that at your grandmother's house in Bileća there is a fig tree that has never borne fruit. You never said that on camera. I was there last week. This year it has figs."

Anastasija was silent for a long time. Then she went to the table, picked up the keys and the envelope, and gave them back to her father. "You lied to me for nine months," she said to Vasilije. "I did." "And all of you knew." She looked at Ostoja, who lowered his head, then at Relja, who was staring at the floor. "I cannot marry a man I have never seen," she said. That night the convoy with German plates left Trebinje without a single horn. The registrar closed his book and, as people said afterward, for the first time in his career left a wedding without tasting so much as an appetizer.

Ostoja paid for the hall, the band, and two hundred portions of lamb, and all summer he did not show himself on the square. Relja went to Dubrovnik for the season, and he was never seen again at the café under the plane trees. Vasilije stopped turning his head to the left when someone came up to him. He worked in the cellar and welcomed the tourists himself, and when one of them stared at him too long, he said it came from rakija, which was the truth.

In December, on a Sunday, at exactly eight, his phone rang. A video call, from Munich. He looked at the name on the screen for a long time. Then he switched on the light in his room, sat down at the table so that the left side of his face was turned toward the lamp, and answered. Anastasija looked at him without a word, so long that he thought the connection had dropped. "Turn a little," she said. "I cannot see all of you." He turned.