Wedding Bells… Not! - Part VII
I married well known Czech photographer, Werner Forman, on a dark rainy day at a registry office in London, largely because my mother, who had a crush on him, insisted. Her feelings for Werner, her desire to keep him in the family, were what led to his proposal of marriage and everything that followed.
THIS IS PART 7 of a NINE-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Photo: Alice Denysenko
I didn’t want to stay overnight in the mountain village our guide had brought us to. The journey there, across a roiling stream filled with slippery rocks, had been difficult -- not one to be undertaken in the dark. I knew Werner was nervous about the ride back, not only because of having to cross the stream, but also because the dirt road that led off the highway was so extremely muddy that it would be easy to get stuck. The light was leaving the sky. We would have to leave immediately if we wanted to be safe. And yet, at the last minute, Werner lingered, staring around the room and rhapsodizing about the beauty of the place. If he had had the camera he needed, we would have spent the night as guests of the glaoui, something I knew was a very bad idea.
Assuring the glaoui that we would return the following day, we prepared to leave -- the guide was summoned and the horses were brought to the downstairs door. On the way to the village, Werner had clung to his horse, terrified of being tossed off at any minute, but now he swung himself into the saddle like an experienced rider and sat as easily as if he were in an armchair. Which was crazy since we had to negotiate a steep stairway of rocks just to get out of the village, and then there was the perilous stream filled with more jagged rocks, many of them invisible in the growing darkness.
Sitting loosely in his saddle, Werner turned to me with a shit-eating grin on his face. “I can feel the moonlight on my skin,” he said.
Really? That sounded pretty weird to me, especially as the horses began to pick their way across the stream. But I didn’t say anything. Once we had traversed the stream and crossed the fields that led to it on the other side, we dismounted and handed our horses over to the group of boys who suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Our car sat proudly just there on the muddy dirt road where we’d left it. We climbed in, Werner and I in front, the guide in the back.
It was about a fifteen minute drive through the dirt to the asphalt highway leading to Marrakech. As he switched on the ignition and the car lurched forward, Werner, who’d been so nervous about getting stuck, said: “I think this is going to be the most beautiful drive I’ve ever driven.”
Photo: Irina Kalinina
Well, that was out of character, but I didn’t think much of it till Werner stopped the car and grabbed a camera from his bag on the back seat. While he busied himself setting up a shot of the mountainside village where we’d just been, the guide leaned forward and murmured, “Why do you want to be with such an old guy?” Then he kissed me on the back of my neck.
Cover photo: Kyriacos Georgiou