Wedding Bells… Not! - Part IX
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 9 of a NINE-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Photo: Study of Yves Saint Laurent by Reginald Gray
Somehow I got myself to the hospital, parked haphazardly, and ran into the building, where I expected a receptionist to tell me where to find Werner. But there was no receptionist; the place was empty, no doctors, nurses, patients, just a few brightly lit corridors and a lot of closed doors. I opened one of the closed doors because I heard voices behind it, and struck paydirt: Werner lay on a narrow bed, blinking his eyes and looking really out of it. A doctor was attending him, a short, skinny, dark-haired man in a white coat. Another man, taller and wearing a very colorful tie, was acting as translator.
It turned out the “translator” was the iconic fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, who, we learned later, frequently traveled to Morocco in search of interesting fabrics for his clothing line. He’d been at the restaurant where Werner had passed out and decided to come along in case we needed help. Since I was a fluent French-speaker we were okay in that regard, but Yves hung around for a while, perhaps curious about what had caused Werner’s plunge from the table to the floor.
The doctor examined Werner thoroughly and couldn’t find anything wrong. Over the next few days, we had to return to the hospital so Werner could undergo a series of tests, but still nothing revealed itself. The doctor didn’t seem surprised. He asked us a lot of questions, zeroing in on the guide, the mountain village we’d visited, and the glass of tea Werner had gulped down while we were at the glaoui’s house. “You were very lucky,” he said. “Your story could have ended differently.”
And he went on to tell us about unscrupulous guides and about people -- tourists -- who had disappeared in the mountains, been beaten up, raped, had money and passports stolen from them. The expectation, he said, was that Werner would pass out, go dead to the world after drinking an iced tea heavily laced with some sort of opiate.
Once he was unconscious, the men of the house would have had their way with me, any money or valuables on us would have been taken, and we would ultimately have been dumped god knows where in the mountains.
He added that these sorts of misadventures happened all the time. And that what had saved us was both Werner’s weird, belated reaction to the drugs, and his insistence that we would return to the village the following day so he could take more photographs.
We never did return to the village. Instead we flew to Zurich a few days later, where my parents and other family members had gathered in a kind of reunion, and where, for the first time since the morning in a London registry office months before, we truly celebrated our marriage… not with wedding bells exactly, but with a good meal, champagne, and with my gossipy relatives holding back judgment and snide remarks on how my husband and father looked the same age.
Cover photo: Ante Samarzija