PART 6

This year’s celebration was set to be memorable: with a bit of help from the student association, the guys had rented a whole wing in the local agricultural institute. Lost in the middle of the countryside, the building looked like a haunted mansion, especially thanks to the decrepit church next door and its delightfully spooky graveyard. A nocturnal expedition through the tombstones was planned as a welcome activity. I had the best role: I was going to be the guide who, with a hood on my head and a burning torch in my hand, was in charge of – hehe... – making the guests tremble.

But now I was missing all that. The only thing I had to look forward to was a much less exciting graveyard tour, full of watering dried-up flowers and long periods of silence in front of dilapidated steles with unreadable inscriptions. My mum had a gigantic family: the suffering was probably going to prolong itself from village to village…

What time was it? Quarter to nine. The party was probably going strong while I, like a damned soul, had to resolve myself to suffer through the unstoppable flow of Eugene’s brainless rhetoric, stuck to my chair in this dining room that smelled of cabbage…

The only consolation was that my mum herself seemed to find the evening rather boring. She watched the crackpot with a funny look on her face and yawned wide enough to unhinge her jaw. I looked at her from the corner of my eye with a look that said: Serves you right.

As if she had just read my mind, my mum turned towards me and elbowed me in the ribs. Then she whispered something that could not have been more appropriate:

– Stop looking so gloomy. You’re not at a funeral.

(Go to PART 7)