Dje–si–brate – moj?!
Where you be, brother mine?!… Spaced & heavily accented.
Risen to the feet to receive the chap, a middle-aged priest or monk, fine black beard likely undyed.
A café on the narrow, lower road at Novi, indoors screened from the passing traffic.
Within a couple minutes of being seated, the other, the tall chap who had awaited the Divine, began in the time honoured way.
Jebem ti… Jebem mu majku…
No joke; bitten off with plenty venom, reporting on an outrage perpetrated by some fellow.
Fuck your… Fuck his mother…
Oh yeah. Not good. Some ugly something had badly annoyed the man.
Didn’t appear any batting of eyelid at all from the Cassock, not in the slightest; though peering too closely from 3.0m away on the other side of the room was not really possible.
But we have leapt ahead. Re-wind to the first part of the greeting; from the get-go.
Briskly up the steps and across the narrow balcony, in the beard had bounded.
The tall had not been kept waiting long, under five minutes.
Greeting of the Cherished before the entryway, two paces from the table they will assume.
The clasp here was of the contemporary, masculine form, where the hands meet vertically and at shoulder level.
Brief shake. Following which the Tall draws up their hands to his chin, where a short, smacking kiss was given.
Phwuuh!
In a church and ordinarily there was no shake of hand of any kind with a priest; rather the hand of the said was clasped low and a bow necessary toward the latter’s waist, before the honour was completed.
Strange only forty short years later. Even sixteen years ago on the last visit the priests were much less prominent anywhere along the coast in Boka Kotorska.
The main road and the square at Novi still bore the name of the local head of the Communist Party during the war. There was a bust and possibly head too somewhere along the road there.
Executed by the Italians from memory, Nikola Djurkovic, a lawyer from Pode, a settlement not in fact of the town itself, but above on the hill. (The hill people higher up had always claimed as more properly one of theirs.)
Narodi hero once and not straightforward to remove from the plinth now.
Herceg Novi, Montenegro
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