(Reading time: ca. 3 min)
The age of the corona virus in Serbia. The Serbian PM, Aleksandar Vučić a.k.a. Wolfie, and his friends imagined that a pandemic and the inevitability of spreading the disease could be avoided by self-isolation and draconic fines (up to €5000 if the police cathes you without the permit on the streets during the first wave of the COVID-19). In the break between curfews which could last up to four days at a stretch, my best man went down to the local market place in a Belgrade suburb of Mirijevo, to replenish groceries and supplies ahead of another lockdown. He stood in line at the butcher’s. People wore masks properly and kept a distance of two meters. Meanwhile, just as my best man reached the middle of the row, he saw his mum, shopping for vegetables at nearby stalls. He asked the gentleman behind him if it was okay to keep his place in line for him while he went over to say hi to his mum.
– Of course, the gentleman replied.
My best man said hi to his mum, exchanged a few words and headed back to his place in line. As he was arriving to his place in line, there stood a middle-aged guy, who obviously was very efficient, since he quickly filled the gap left behind by my best man. My best man tried to be as eloquent as Shakespear would be, when explaining to him nicely, why it was wrong for him to take his place and that he should return to the end of the line.
– Eat shit!
– Oh, I’m supposed to eat shit? Right.
So my best man grabbed a man of fifty-odd years by the ear, like a small kid, and dragged him to the end of the line while he squealed like a pig.
After my best man finished his shopping at the butcher’s, he continued down the hill to the supermarket, to get some wine. He filled the basket with groceries and wine and came to the cash register. At the register the same story – faces covered in masks, a distance of two meters, etc. When my best man came up and just as he was about to start putting his groceries on the belt, a woman cut in line in front of him with her shopping cart, filling the gap left between my best man and the customer at the checkout. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about the fact that the line was at least five people deep.
– Ma’am. Where to?
– Zup? Did you see how I pulled that one off?
Grin on her face. Untouched by the fact that my best man’s face started shifting colours like a traffic light by then, she started to arrange her things on the belt. Then the godfather put his basket nicely on the floor and slowly started to remove her groceries from the belt and put them back into her cart. He then walked away calmly with the lady’s shopping cart all the way to the other end of the store and left it there. The woman followed him without a word. She knew that she flipped his lid. People were watching, frozen, waiting for my best man to return. He came back and politely addressed the dumbstruck people in line:
– I’m sorry I kept you waiting.
The cashier who witnessed the whole thing thanked him and added that people are really going nuts.
My best man is a patient, polite, nice and a guy with a good sense of humour, but his bar of tolerance is getting lower every day, especially when it comes to rudeness and someone trying to screw with him. He’s a kind of guy that would gladly offer to carry that lady’s bags to her car and wave her off if she had asked him nicely to cut in line because she was in a hurry. He’s something like Mirijevo’s anti-Don-Quixote – an idealist, a dreamer but in collision with the reality that surrounds him. He doesn’t necessarily fight windmills, windmills appear to have turned into zombies, so they attack him. These reckless fools didn’t actually realise how lucky they were because they came across my best man. The guy is a rastaman. They could’ve come across someone who was disinfected with Slivovitz (a strong Serbian plum brandy) from inside and out. Both against the corona virus and the evil spells. Now that would’ve been a sight. This way, they fared quite well.