A wireless lapel microphone has one button and one rule: it comes off the guest the moment the guest finishes the toast. I made that rule up myself, wrote it on a strip of tape stuck to the inside of my case, and kept it at a hundred and twenty weddings. At the hundred and twenty-first I broke it, and that is the only reason people in Sarajevo recognize me on the street today.
The company is called Wedding Live, and that is me, one camera on a stand, one in my hand, a laptop, and a cousin who carries the cables. I stream weddings for relatives who cannot come: to Malmö, to St. Louis, to Linz, wherever someone arrived in ninety-two with one bag and stayed. That Saturday, at the Biser banquet hall in Stup, Emin, an engineer from Hrasno, was marrying Alena, an economist. There were three hundred guests in the hall and a little over a thousand on the stream. The Biser has chandeliers bigger than my car and a sound system from the nineties, so for the toasts I bring my own microphones. Uncle Šefket, the groom's paternal uncle, had paid, six hundred marks, on one condition: that in America everything should sound as if they were sitting at the head table.
The groom's mother, Razija, gave her toast right after the first dance. I clipped the microphone to the lapel of her burgundy jacket, showed her the button and asked her not to touch it. She spoke beautifully. She read the toast from a sheet of paper, but not once did she look at it. She said she had not gained a daughter-in-law but a daughter, that Alena was a sun that had come into their house and that she would guard her like the apple of her eye. The guests wept, and in the comments two hundred hearts appeared, along with an aunt from Malmö who wrote that she had not heard such beautiful words since her own wedding. Then the music started, the couple went out onto the dance floor, and I ran after them with the camera. The microphone stayed on Razija.
It took me two songs to realize. In my headphones, under the accordion, I heard water running and a door closing. Then Razija's voice, very close, as if she were speaking into my ear. She was in the ladies' room with her sister Sevda, fixing her makeup. "A daughter," she said, and laughed. "Thirty-four years old, Sevda. When is she going to give me grandchildren? She has a degree, and she can't even make coffee. Her mother came to the wedding in sneakers. And you'll see, she married him for the apartment in Grbavica. I will put up with her until she gives me a grandchild, and then we'll see."
The stream kept running. One thousand one hundred fourteen people watched the newlyweds spin under the lights and listened as the groom's mother, in the ladies' room, listed her daughter-in-law's faults. The comments started slowly, then came faster and faster. "Razija, the microphone!" wrote some cousin in St. Louis. "We're recording this," wrote someone in Linz. An uncle in Salzburg asked whether it could be rewound. The aunt from Malmö deleted her hearts. I stood in the middle of the dance floor with the camera on my shoulder, searching the laptop for the channel I needed to turn off, and by the time I found it, Razija had already got to the sneakers and the apartment.
I cut the sound after one minute and forty seconds. I measured it later, because everyone asks me. One minute and forty seconds is enough for a clip to get into three Viber groups in Sweden and one in Sarajevo, and from there onto the phones at half the tables in the hall. Uncle Šefket came to my table red in the face and demanded that I delete the recording. I told him I could delete mine. The others he could delete himself, all over America.
Alena was the last to find out, the way it usually goes. Through the lens I saw the moment her bridesmaid handed her a phone. She did not cry. Emin stood beside her looking at the floor, like a man who has heard his mother's name on the news. Alena watched the screen to the end, handed the phone back, straightened her veil and looked toward the head table, where Razija, knowing nothing, had just sat down and was reaching for a tufahija. The hall grew quieter and quieter, table by table, as the clip traveled. Aunt Sevda came back from the ladies' room only then, lipstick in hand, and could not understand why everyone was turning to look at her. Only the accordion player kept on playing, because he has no phone.
Then Alena came over to me. "Give me that microphone," she said. I asked her if she was sure. "You forgot it on her," she said. "Give it to me on purpose." I clipped it to the lace under her veil and turned the sound on. Eleven hundred people in Sweden, Austria and America watched the bride cross the hall and stop in front of her mother-in-law.
"Mama Razija," she said calmly, and the hall went silent down to the last fork. "I am thirty-four, that is true. I can't make coffee, that is true too, which is why Emin makes the coffee in our house. My mother is in sneakers because since five this morning she has been baking the baklava you are eating now. And the apartment in Grbavica has a mortgage, and the mortgage is in my name, because Emin does not have the kind of salary the bank wants. I did not want to tell you any of this at the wedding. But you started it, so let them hear it in America too." Razija held the tufahija in her hand and neither put it down nor ate it.
That was when Nana Đula stood up, Emin's grandmother, eighty-eight years old, who had sat silent all evening at the head of the table. She held out her hand toward Alena and said: "Give that to me." Alena took off the microphone and clipped it to the old woman's black vest. Nana looked at Razija. "Everything you said tonight, I said about you," she said into the microphone. "In eighty-seven, in a hall just like this one, only without a camera. About your age, and the coffee, and your mother. And what happened? Of my three daughters-in-law, you are the only one who brings me my medicine every Saturday and stays for the coffee you make yourself. And yours is nothing special either."
The hall burst out laughing, one table first, then everyone. Razija put down the tufahija and covered her face with her hands, and nobody could tell whether she was crying or laughing, until she stood up and hugged her daughter-in-law so hard that Alena's veil fell onto the chair. She spoke into her ear for a long time. That I did not hear, because the microphone was on Nana, and it is just as well I didn't.
Until the end of the evening Uncle Šefket kept coming to my table and demanding that I delete the second recording too. I did not delete it. By morning Nana's speech had more views than the whole wedding, and nobody was sending the first clip anymore. I took the microphone off Nana at two in the morning. She would not give it to me until she had commented on every dance, every dress and the accordion player, and in Malmö they stayed up to the end so as not to miss anything.