How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

by Sasa Stanisic

  The soldier picked dry bread dough off his fingers. He sat there with his wet, bare torso beside old Musa, playing with Musa's handcuffs. Emina, Emina, he whispered, Emina.

  26 April 1992

  Dear Asija,

  If my Grandpa Slavko were still alive, I'd ask him what we ought to be most ashamed of now.

  I'm writing to you because I couldn't find you, I was ashamed of the earth itself for carrying the tanks that came to meet us on the road to Belgrade. My father hooted at every tank, every jeep and every truck. If you don't hoot, they stop you.

  They did stop us at the Serbian border. A soldier with a crooked nose asked if we had any weapons in the car. Father said: yes, gasoline and matches. The two of them laughed and we were allowed to drive on. I didn't see what was so funny about that, and my mother said: I'm the weapon they're looking for. I asked: why are we driving into the enemy's arms? and then I had to promise not to ask any more questions for the next ten years.

  The rain never stopped, the road was jammed, we kept coming to a halt. Once armed men wearing masks and white gloves were walking along behind two other men, beside the column of vehicles. The men were gagged, their eyes were blindfolded, and I wanted to promise to wipe that memory out for the next ten years, but Granny Katarina wasn't in favor of forgetting. To Granny, the past is a summerhouse with a garden full of twittering thrushes and twittering women neighbors, and you can draw coffee from a well while Grandpa Slavko and his friends play hide-and-seek. And the present is a road that leads away from the summerhouse, swarming with tank tracks, smelling of heavy smoke, killing horses, dogs, houses, people. You have to remember them both, Granny whispers to me from the backseat, the time when everything was all right and the time when nothing's all right.

  We got away, Asija, and our acquaintances in Belgrade embraced us, first as if we were oak trees, then as if we were the most fragile glass, and I hope all of you in Višegrad can get away and be hugged too.

  Višegrad was on the TV first but the people who are defenders on our TV at home are the aggressors here, and the town didn't fall, it was liberated, because a madman and not a hero was trying to blow up the dam.

  Nena Fatima cast the beans for Granny Katarina, and read Granny Katarina's future from them without words.

  I asked my deaf-mute granny what she really wants. Nena took no notice of me. I said: not telling me now could mean traumas for me with far-reaching consequences later. When Mother asked me where I got that from I told her: no idea.

  Asija, can you read the beans?

  Granny Katarina wants to go back to her home and her friends in Višegrad. Father didn't try to persuade her not to, Mother shouted when she heard that Father was keeping quiet about it.

  Father wants to keep quiet about it.

  Mother wants to shout.

  I wonder what Uncle Miki wants. No one knows where he is.

  I want to listen to a story from another world or another time, but everyone just keeps talking about now and asking: now what? If I were to tell a story of this time and this world, after I'd told it, I'd have to promise never to do such a thing again for the next ten years. It would begin like this: The mothers have only just called us, in a whisper, to come for supper when soldiers storm the building, asking what's on the menu; they sit down beside us at the plywood tables in the cellars.

  I don't have to invent anything to tell a story of another world and another time.

  Tonight I heard Mother sighing in her sleep, she woke up with congealed blood under her nose. There are problems with the neighbors because we're living so close to them and they don't like us living close. If they'd been given the gift of a war too, they'd have shot us at once. Religion is not the opium of the people but their downfall. So Father says, anyway. A boy in the street called me a bastard. My Serbian blood was contaminated by my Bosniak mother, he said. I didn't know whether to hit him for that or be defiant and proud. I was neither defiant nor proud, and I was the one who got hit.

  I'm sending you a picture with this, Asija. It's you in the picture. I'm afraid I can't get any paint as beautiful as the color of your hair, so you may not recognize yourself. It's my last picture of something unfinished. It's unfinished because you're alone in it. I used to like unfinished things.

  With love, from

  Aleksandar

  9 January 1993

  Dear Asija,

  I wanted to write to you from the Lake Wörther—trains have names in Germany—but the Lake Wörther went so fast that my eyes couldn't keep up with the landscape, and I felt slightly unwell with so many quick fields and houses and a packet of round chocolate-covered biscuits that I polished off too quickly. For the last two weeks we've been living with my Uncle Bora and my Auntie Typhoon in a city called Essen, right next to a motorway. Granny Katarina has gone back to Višegrad. I want to be near my husband, she said.

  Where he is he doesn't need anyone, said my father.

  Everyone needs someone, and the dead are the loneliest of all, I said, and I had to go out of the room. We still haven't heard from Granny. Getting through on the phone is difficult.

  Nena Fatima has had a secret ever since we left Belgrade. She's writing something all the time, but she hides it under her head scarf. If I could choose a voice for Nena Fatima, it would be the voice of a superior kind of witch who has something to laugh about before the fairy tale ends happily: a little rough, self-confident and full of plans. Would my Nena say clever things if she were to speak? What would her singing sound like?

  New Year's Eve was a disaster. I got a pair of jeans as a present. Uncle Bora bought rockets and bangers, and we put colored hats on and turned up our music louder than usual. My mother said: whatever I cook, it doesn't taste right. My father said: whatever I drink, it doesn't help, and he buried his face in his hands. This was just before midnight. At twelve everyone hugged everyone else, then Uncle Bora and I let the fireworks off, and little Ema the baby typhoon woke up and yelled.

  What was it like for you? Do you have snow there?

  We do here, but only for five minutes, and it looks as if it got dirty even while it was falling, it's already brown when it lands on the ground.

  Tomorrow I start at a German school. I'm going to try not to be a deaf mute like Nena Fatima, so I've learned the first ten pages of the dictionary by heart. Uncle Bora says I'm three years ahead of the Germans in math. Subtract my lack of talent for math from that and I'm still one year ahead. School marks work the wrong way around here, and there's almost no one but Turks in our part of town. You can play Nintendo in the department stores; I haven't yet managed to get locked into one and be forgotten overnight, but I'm working on it. My mother didn't feel well last week, but she couldn't tell the doctor what her pain was like, so she came back feeling even worse.

  Five or six other families from Bosnia live in this building with us, twenty-five people on two floors. It's very crowded, there's always someone else in the bathrooms, and I can switch off Čika Zahid's TV set with my uncle's remote control, it sends him mad. He believes in Nazi ghosts. There's a little railway station very close, and Ci" ka Zahid waits for the green light to cross the rails there. I go bobsledding under the motorway bridge on sofa cushions with his son, Sabahudin. After he arrived, Sabahudin cleaned his teeth with shaving foam for the first three days.

  Yesterday we got a permit to be in Germany. We waited at the letter K for three hours, in a big office with a hundred doors. The people waiting spoke our language, which we're not to call Serbo-Croat anymore. They gathered around the ashtrays and left slush on the floor and the marks of the soles of their shoes on the walls. Mrs. Foß was looking after us Ks. She smiled wearily, had little dimples, and a pink brooch that had bitten into the collar of her pink blouse. A mouse called Diddl grinned out at us from postcards all over the K room. Mrs. Foß was the friendliest, most patient person in the world; she smiled like her mouse and gave my mother a handkerchief. We couldn't say much but we didn't have to, Mrs. Foß knew what to
do with us. We got our passports stamped because Mrs. Foß agreed to having us here. ß is my favorite letter of the alphabet now and a very good invention, because it has two letter s's in it. I'd like to be called Alekßandar Krßmanović. As I went out I said to Mrs. Foß: A, aardvark, aback, abacus, abandon, abase, abash, abate, abbey, abbreviate, abdicate, abdomen, abduct, aberration, abhor, thank you. I knew “thank you” even though I hadn't got that far in the dictionary yet.

  We all sleep in this little room, Asija, and we're all a little angrier than we were at home, even in our dreams. Sometimes I wake up and make bird shadows on the wall with my fingers; a streetlight outside the window looks sternly in at us as if it were keeping watch, and Uncle Bora promised he'd knock that filthy glaring bastard down. There's no financial priority for curtains, or for a canvas and paints for Father, but Mother and he are looking for work.

  Last night Auntie Typhoon woke up for a moment beside me. She's slower now, my beautiful speedy fair-haired aunt who has tears in her eyes full of love for her daughter Ema and a thousand good wishes to spare for everyone. In the bright light coming from outside I cthe beautiful creatureounted the weariness in her face, all the lines and shadows. She smiled at me and whispered: Aleks, no one else has a head like yours, my sunshine, don't be afraid.

  Don't be afraid, Asija! I wish so much that I had more memories of you, I wish I had memories of you as long as a journey from Essen to Višegrad and back. You'd be coming back with me this time.

  Coot is the funniest word I've learned here in Germany so far.

  With love from Aleksandar

  17 July 1993

  Dear Asija,

  I know from Granny Katarina that you got away to Sarajevo last winter. She gave me this address too. She couldn't tell me whether you got my first two letters, she said hardly any post was arriving, and no parcels, but letters were disappearing without trace as well.

  SO I AM SENDING 17 MARKS 20 PFENNINGS IN THIS LETTER, IT'S ALL I HAVE. DEAR WHOEVER-OPENS-THIS LETTER, KEEP THE MONEY, BUT PLEASE IN RETURN SEAL THE ENVELOPE UP AGAIN AND SEND IT ON. THERE'S NOTHING BUT WORDS IN IT, AND SOMEONE ELSE, AND IT DOSEN'T GIVE MILITARY SECRETS AWAY BECAUSE I'M ONLY 5 FEET, 3 INCHES TALL, SO ON ONE EVER TELLS ME ANY MILITARY SECRETS. BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT TO SOMEONE VERY IMPORTANT, AND I DON'T MIND IF YOU READ THE REST OF IT JUST AS LONG AS YOU DONT'T THROW THE LETTER AWAY AFTERWARD. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

  Dear Asija, my mother is working in a laundry and has less time to be unwell now. She says it's so hot in that hellish laundry that her brain boils. Mother has lost the ability to see things in a good light. She's chain-smoking, she smokes like the chimneys of Essen. Father is working in the same place as Uncle Bora. They're both out and about all day. They're working in the black economy. That means doing work that breaks your back and at the same time it makes you a criminal, even though you're not really stealing anything.

  Nena Fatima fits in best. She cooks for us all, she takes long baths, and I can't see any sorrow in her face. Once I caught her whistling, and it sounded amazingly beautiful, considering that she doesn't really make any sounds at all. She's made friends with the girls at the supermarket and takes them coffee at their cash desks every day. In return, she can pinch things that cost less than five marks and the girls at the cash desks pretend not to notice.

  I still haven't found out her secret, she writes and writes, the paper is scribbled all over right to the edges. When my parents are talking about things we don't have, like health and money and our home in Višegrad, I always have to go out of the room, and Nena Fatima stands guard at the doorway to make sure I don't listen. The things I'm not allowed to hear are the worst of all.

  If I'm asked where I come from, I say that's a difficult question, because I come from a country that doesn't exist anymore, not where I used to live. Here they call us Yugos, they call Albanians and Bulgarians Yugos too, it's simpler for everyone.

  I've had my first school report, still without any marks except in math, and that's not worth mentioning. It's enough to say that my head start over the others disappeared very quickly. In German we had to write an essay on the subject of “Essen, I love you,” and I wrote about how we make börek at home. We all had to read our essays aloud, and when it was my turn the class laughed itself silly. To understand that, you have to know that in German Essen means hrana, food. I knew that, but because I don't like the city of Essen, I thought I'd write about börek made with minced meat and yufka dough. And that was quite difficult, because I didn't know the German for minced meat, and just try explaining minced meat to someone if you don't know the word for it. The other Bosnians in the class copied down the recipe and took it home, because they thought there ought not to be onions in börek, and you should use flaky pastry. Josip and Tomislav, two boys from Croatia, said there wasn't any börek where they come from. Can you imagine that, Asija? A country without any börek?

  I miss the moody Drina, Asija, Apparently there's a river here, it's called the Ruhr, but I don't think just any watercourse that happens to flow along deserves the name of a river.

  Yesterday I was playing the city-country-river game with Philipp, Sebastian and Susanne, and I didn't come in last with Duisburg, Denmark, Drina, daylily, dentist and Dalmatian. I'm not sure how to explain a daylily to you, and yesterday for the first time I couldn't remember a Bosnian word, the word for a birch tree, I had to look it up: “breza.” There are birch trees in a park here called the Kruppwald. All Essen is really one huge garage, you have to be grateful to the weeds between the paving stones for growing at all.

  Birch trees and daylilies and water milfoil and gentian and the Ruhr. I'm noticing everything, Asija. I'm collecting words in my new language. Collecting helps to make up for the hard answers and sad thoughts I have when I think of Višegrad. It's hard to put them all into words without having Grandpa Slavko near me, but I'm trying. You didn't know Grandpa Slavko, he was the only person who could have explained your hair.

  On the morning of her return to Višegrad, my granny gave me an empty book. She had written on the first page herself. Together with the story by Andric in which Aska dances with the wolf until the wolf is dizzy, and so escapes alive, I treasure that one page by my granny more than anything I've ever read.

  Asija, I don't remember the birch trees. I feel as if one Aleksandar stayed behind in Višegrad and Veletovo by the Drina, and there's another Aleksandar living in Essen and thinking of going fishing in the Ruhr sometime. In Višegrad, back there with his unfinished pictures, there's an Aleksandar who began and never finished. I'm not Comrade in Chief of the unfinished anymore, the unfinished is Comrade in Chief of me. I don't paint any more unfinished pictures. I'm writing stories in Granny's book about the time when everything was all right, so that later I can't complain of having forgotten it. If I were a magi cian who could make things possible, Asija, memories would taste the way Stela ice cream tasted back then.

  Do you remember me?

  Aleksandar

  4 January 1994

  Dear Asija,

  Nancy Kerrigan's knee got injured with an iron bar in figure-skating practice. Her rival Tonya Harding had something to do with the attack. It was on the news just now, and my mother left the living room in a temper. After that news item Somalia was next. Somalia and Bosnia, they come to the same thing these days, except that we don't have any black children with short hair and guns over their shoulders. We don't have any oil either, says Uncle Bora, that's why Americans are not helping.

  My mother has bought herself Ice Magic 1–6, six video cassettes of figure-skating championships and Olympic events, Sarajevo among them. In the evening she sits in front of the TV set murmuring: loop, salchow, lutz and toe loop, double and triple. Sometimes Nena Fatima switches the TV off and hides the cassette. And Mother still sits there saying: axel, flip. Her hands are so wrecked by the laundry that wrecked is the only word I can find for them.

  We have a new apartment, just for our family. The police c
ame to the old one three times. The police wear green here, and they're different from ours in other ways too; they put their hands on their pistol grips and they don't want a schnapps. They don't just look serious, they are serious too, and they twist your arm behind your back if you get close to them too quickly, like Čika Zahid did. We had extended deadlines and let them run out because we didn't know where to go. On the morning when the police came for the last time, more of them than usual, and didn't ring the doorbell but knocked hard instead, my father said: we're moving. He finished eating his slice of bread, and we packed. I've found us somewhere, he said, the landlord just wants to take his sofa out and then we can move in.

  We have much more space in the new apartment, and we're away from all the dirt and gossip and noise and the screeching sound of the motorway and the feeling that you could never, ever, be further away from a real home. Where's your home, Asija? I've no idea where you are. Are there still any addresses in Sarajevo?

  I've phoned Višegrad. I couldn't reach anyone except Granny Katarina and Zoran. Granny Katarina talks about the old days a lot. We listen to her and we don't contradict anything she remembers, we say: that's right, Granny.

  Do you remember Zoran? A friend of mine from Višegrad, a silent rebel. He says the town is full of Serbian refugees. They're living in the school, or else they've simply taken over the empty buildings and the apartments of the Bosniaks, the Bosnian Muslims, who were driven out. And maybe those Bosniaks are living in Serbian apartments now. In the end no one will be where they were before. There's a family living in what was once our home too. Granny says that's all right because they have small children. Zoran says the Višegrad people can't stand the newcomers, he hates them himself. I never heard Zoran talk so much before. Zoran's hatred is enormous.