How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

by Sasa Stanisic

  Aleksandar Krsmanović

  When Everything

  Was All Right

  with a foreword by Granny Katarina

  and an essay for Mr. Fazlagić

  For my Grandpa Slavko

  Contents

  Foreword

  Ice cream

  Wish

  Parade

  1 May 1989, or, The Chick in the Pioneer's Hand

  There are no Partisans now

  A wonderful trip

  How to disappear

  Why Čika Doctor cut the calf of someone's leg open

  Why Vukoje Worm whose nose has been broken three times doesn't break mine

  Why Čika Hasan and Čika Sead are inseparable, and what even those who know most about catfish can't count on

  How the game of chess relates to world politics, why Grandpa Slavko knows revolutions may come tomorrow, and how things can sometimes be so difficult to say

  The promise a dam must keep, what the most beautiful language in the world sounds like, and how often a heart must beat to beat shame

  Why houses are sympathetic and unselfish, what music they make, and why I want them to stay sympathetic and unselfish, and above all to stand firm

  What victory is the best, what Grandpa Slavko trusts me to do, and why people act as if your fears are less if you don't talk about them

  How the bold river Drina is feeling, how the lipless Drina is really feeling, what she thinks of little Mr. Rzav, and how little you need to be as happy as a falcon

  Foreword

  Aleksandar,

  You were four years old. You were sleeping with us, in bed between Grandpa and me. That's the way you liked it best. Grandpa had to go out early. A Party committee meeting. You were whining, you wanted to go too. He whispered something to you. You quieted down. You laughed, yes, you laughed. Your mother came to our place later, wanting to take you to the barber's. She knew Grandpa wasn't there. He usually took you to the barber's with him, and then didn't allow him to cut properly. When people are deep thinkers their hair falls over their foreheads, that's how it was with your grandpa. Mama and I went for a coffee nearby, at Amela's. Waste of time, you said. You stayed behind upstairs and sorted out your little cars. You never really played with them, just changed the places where you'd parked them. You made up a story about each car. Where it came from, where it was going. The problems of the driver's prim and proper wife. The exhaust of the Porsche was belting out Partisan songs. We came back an hour later. The cars hadn't been put in any order, they were just lying there. You were lying there too, in front of Slavko's sofa. You were watching TV. The volume was turned down, then you switched the TV off. You pushed your hair back from your forehead. The cars were just lying around. I noticed the vase at once, I noticed that it wasn't on the windowsill. Or anywhere else. You hadn't got the Hoover out because you were scared of vacuum cleaners. Washing machines too. Those tiny little pieces on the carpet.

  You never said anything about the vase afterward; I never said anything about the vase afterward. And Grandpa probably never noticed the vase. I mean, that it wasn't there anymore. Even though it had been his present. You knew that. He had spent three days picking flowers for me. He had filled the whole apartment with flowers. I'd never seen so many flowers at once, either before or afterward. And there'd been red poppies in the vase. The cars lay there. You dressed yourself. I watched you. You said the two of you would go to the barber's now. Your mother was surprised, I didn't say anything. I didn't kiss you on the forehead. I didn't tell you there'd be hot milk in the evening. You always used to wait exactly twelve minutes before you drank the milk while it was still warm. I didn't tell you it was all right. I didn't tell you you were only a child. I didn't tell you that you were our sunshine, and there was no need for you to feel scared over a few bits of broken china. I didn't tell you how much I liked it when you slept between Grandpa and me. And I didn't tell you how much I liked the way you began every day with five questions. Five questions be fore saying good morning. Whatever had you been doing in your dreams? I didn't tell you everything was all right. The two of you went out. I put the milk on the stove. I rearranged your little cars. The Ferrari in front. It had a driver who's a desert nomad with a very sick grandfather lying in a tent in a nonaligned African state. He tells his grandson in a faint voice, My boy, you're my sunshine, I'm going to die soon, but I have one last wish. There's a place far away where the water is solid. You can throw it like a stone. If you hold the stone in your hand long enough it turns to cold, soft water. I want to drink a stone like that before I die. Bring it to me, my sunshine. And ever since then the young nomad has been roaming the world in his Ferrari, looking for a way to bring the stony water to his grandpa in the desert. That was your story, the story you told at a time when no one thought anything was wrong. A time when everything was all right.

  With love from Granny Katarina

  Ice cream

  There's always ice cream, but there isn't always this particular ice cream, it's my favorite and its name is a favorite name of mine: Stela. If I have a little sister, I tell my mother, digging the little blue plastic spoon into the ice cream carton, we'll call her Stela, okay? Have I been putting on weight? asks my mother in alarm, and I say: no, but I've a right to join in family decisions, haven't I?

  My father slept all through my birth, and my mother fainted immediately after it, she couldn't stand the sight of so much blood and shit all at once, so the only person present who was still conscious, my Uncle Bora, had a perfect right to say at once: ugly little dirtbag, we'll call him Aleksandar.

  It's true that I was still very small at the time, but you never forget a remark like that.

  My favorite Stela ice cream is vanilla. It comes in a blue carton. There are little colored spoons in a plastic bag in the ice cream vendor's fridge. If you buy a Stela ice cream you can have a little colored spoon for free. Blue is my favorite. Stela is a pregnant ice cream with a secret inside it. Buried somewhere in the vanilla ice, sometimes near the top, sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the bottom, an icy, dark red, sour cherry lies hidden.

  Wish

  My parents don't know anything about it. I'm in the mosque. I know what to do: you get down on your knees and think of something nice that hasn't come true yet. You wish for the nice thing every time you bow down. Make it come true! There are colored rugs spread on the floor of the mosque; from the outside it looks like a rocket, on the inside it's a belly. I'm afraid. I'm out of the ordinary here, because I'm the only one wearing shoes. It isn't April in the mosque, it isn't spring. I bow down and bow down and bow down.

  Dear Mosque, let Red Star win the championship. Dear Mosque, let Red Star win the championship. Dear Mosque, let Red Star win the championship.

  Dear Mosque, let Mama forget how to sigh.

  Parade

  I wear my Pioneer cap tilted sideways. I'm a wild Pioneer. I sit in front of the Red Flag, exhausted and content. The choir sings the “Internationale.”

  1 May 1989, or, The Chickin the Pioneer's Hand

  I climb up on the armchair, push my hair back from my forehead and clear my throat:

  It is the First of May

  the wind caresses the red flags

  fluttering your name: Tito.

  The mother bird lays an egg

  in our nest of brotherly love,

  she lays it in my hand.

  The chick slips out in the Pioneer's hand

  at once it's as muscular as Rambo 1

  with red, white and blue feathers and Adriatic eyes.

  It's a dove of peace

  it's an eagle in war

  it's a chicken for lunch.

  It's a dinosaur for the children

  the dinosaur sings the “Internationale”

  for Tito and the working class.

  The bird eats up the first of May

  and because the first of May is the future

  the bird grows big and full of the future

  li
ke our country Yugoslavia.

  I read, I pull the hair back from my forehead, I thank the audience, and I climb down to Grandpa Slavko's applause.

  There are no Partisans now

  There are no Partisans now. There are commissars. There are uniforms with soldiers inside them and machine guns and generals in front of them. There's the five-pointed red star. There are parades, there's the National Liberation War, there are records of songs that everyone knows by heart. There's black bread, people stand in line for the black bread, and there's Grandpa who helped the Partisans to liberate everything possible and impossible. There are the Pioneer caps that look like Partisan caps except that they're blue, and I wear mine even when I don't need to. There's white chocolate with nuts in it, there's the big orange gas bottle in the kitchen, we play basketball, the ring for the gas bottle is the basket, I'm Drazen Petrovic and I always score three-point shots. Granny is boiling milk on the stove. I always wait exactly twelve minutes and drink the milk warm. Granny is boiling sheets on the other gas ring. There are band-aids in the bathroom, there's a gigantic trash can in the yard that isn't often emptied, there are American Indians, there are bikers in leather jackets who sometimes stop off in our town and look at the girls the same way our own boys do. There's the green building with the peculiar roof around the corner from us. There are the Japanese, the only Japanese who ever lost their way and came to our town; they went into the green house with the peculiar roof and nobody saw if they ever came out again. There are swastikas drawn in secret, so strictly forbidden that every piece of paper with a scribbled swastika on it is crumpled up and thrown into the rubbish. There's the river Drina. There's hours and hours of sitting by the Drina fishing. There are catfish in the Drina; I know one with whiskers and a pair of glasses. There are computer games called Boulder Dash or Space Invaders or International Soccer; I break all the records. There's a bicycle for my birthday, my first: a Pony, green and fast. I ride in circles, I'm a sprinter with muscular legs and a close-fitting jersey. I get laughed at for the jersey, but what do ignorant people know about aerodynamics? There are plastic bags. My Granny never throws plastic bags away; she washes them out if whey has run into them from the sheep's milk cheese, she keeps them in a bottomless space called the špajz. She keeps everything, she says: you never know what times are coming. That gives my father an idea, he says: I'll open a shop selling artists' equipment. There's the artists' equipment, there's the Sunday afternoon in the megdan cemetery behind a gravestone when Nešo's sister Elvira showed me what the difference between me and her looks like.

  It doesn't look good.

  There's me, acting as if I hadn't known all about it for ages.

  There's a Partisan on the gravestone, in a small round photo frame, looking serious and wearing the cap with the five-pointed star.

  But there are no Partisans anymore.

  A wonderful trip

  I go to Igalo with my parents every summer. The entire factory where my father works goes to Igalo. The syndicate moves people from a small town without any seaside to stay for a month in a small town that does have a seaside. There's an artists' colony in Igalo, so the only person who looks forward to going to Igalo is my father. The men and women in the artists' colony wear their hair long and nothing else, and Father is depressed when he has to put a tie on again at home. It's hard to say whether my mother looks forward to Igalo, or anything else at all.

  “Right, family this year we're going to . . . ,” cried my father last week in the tones of an enthusiastic TV presenter, waving the hotel prospectuses.

  “Oh, Papa, you're only talking like that because I'm supposed to show Mr. Fazlagic, not-Comrade-Teacher-now, that I know how to use quotation marks.”

  “Yes, and what's more, I never talk like an enthusiastic TV presenter.”

  “Igalo-o!” said my mother with the voice of a weary TV presenter announcing misery to come, and unable to do anything about it, she went to pack.

  It might really have been a wonderful trip that year if Mr. Spok had come with us. A nice trip for Mr. Spok, Comrade in Chief of the town drunks, who never goes away anywhere. When I see Mr. Spok staggering across the street I can't help thinking of my Grandpa Rafik, which isn't easy, because I don't remember his face, all I know is a story about a drowned man. I feel sorry for a frog because it doesn't realize we're about to set it alight, I feel sorry for Uncle Bora because he makes himself do knee bends but can never manage it, I feel sorry for you, Mr. Fazlagic, because you'll soon forget how to laugh if you don't stop looking so grim. And I feel sorry for Mr. Spok, who says: “I'm worse off than a mongrel dog, I don't even have a pack of other dogs to run with. Everything around me is made of stone—streets, mountains, hearts. I'm never near the sea.”

  I wanted to give Mr. Spok the sea, that would be the most wonderful trip imaginable for him. I wrote “Prizewinner!” on a picture postcard, and “Mr. Spok,” and “Igalo.” I congratulated Mr. Spok, but I didn't shake hands with him. That was the most difficult bit. I invited Mr. Spok to our place so that he could shower and comb his hair. After the first shower, I asked him to shower again. I asked the now showered and combed Mr. Spok if he knew how to shave, but he didn't. As part of the prize I gave him one of the two suits in my father's wardrobe and four ties, because I knew how much Father hated ties. I put on the trousers that my parents thought were my best pair. Thus prepared, showered, combed and sober, Mr. Spok and I waited in my parents' living room. I asked Mr. Spok if he could cry at will.

  My mother came home first, and she just asked if Mr. Spok was a vegetarian. “I eat anything,” he said, so I gave him an apple, two slices of bread and two eggs, he could cook those for himself later, there wasn't any time now, Father was already coming through the door. I called out in a TV presenter's voice, “Family, we're going to Igalo this year, and we're going wi-i-ith . . .” I pointed to Mr. Spok, who began to cry dreadfully. I raised my eyebrows, pleading, and hugged my father, which certainly struck both of us as odd.

  “Aleksandar, go to my studio!” he ordered, and Mr. Spok stopped crying. “This is really a social question,” he told me. “The fact is, I'm afraid that only family members can benefit from the syndicate's offers. Mr. Spokovic can't come too. I'm sorry.”

  “Couldn't you and Mama adopt Mr. Spok? That would solve two problems at once. He could come to Igalo with us, and I wouldn't be an only child anymore.”

  “Those aren't real problems, son.”

  “This isn't a real conversation, Father.”

  “Give my regards to Mr. Fazlagic.”

  “I will.”

  “All the same, you haven't written about a wonderful trip.”

  “But technically speaking I've done everything right.”

  Aleksandar Krsmanović

  How to disappear

  A wall has fallen down in the better part of Germany, and now only the not-so-good part of Germany is left. The wall was bound to come down sooner or later, that's what everyone says. Uncle Bora the guest worker, every family should have one, says the not-so-good part of Germany is better from his point of view because it pays him, and because there are a hundred houses all the same in a row there, no one feels envious, and there are traffic rules you can understand, and the traffic lights don't just stick, they really can go green, and there's Lothar Matthäus, and there are tampons for Auntie Typhoon. Tampons are little cotton-wool sticks, Auntie Typhoon puts them inside her to slow her down a bit. We can sometimes get tampons here too, but maybe they don't work with people who move really fast, I'm not sure about that.

  Now that the business about the wall has been settled, we have AIDS here and a power failure. Happy people are waving black, dark gray and pale gray flags on top of the high wall, which doesn't look at all as if it has fallen over. While they're having a good time up there, other people are still working down below, knocking little stones out of the wall. My Uncle Bora says: the Germans work the whole time.

  Germany looks very congested, people everyw
here, you can't even see the street anymore.

  Here comes the news broadcaster with the neat and tidy hair again. Epidemic, he says; USA, he says; sexually transmitted diseases, he says; another four cases confirmed in Yugoslavia, he says. AIDS, he says, raising an eyebrow. Astronauts are looking through little telescopes now, and someone says: “virus” and “blood” and “fatal.”

  Now that the wall has fallen over in the better part of Germany, all the bad things are coming our way! The power failure comes our way too—Granny is alarmed, there's no sound, the TV set just crackles and goes black. It must be something like this when you're alive and then suddenly you're not alive anymore. You feel a bit frightened, and then someone lights a candle. Grandpa does that here, and in the candlelight the faces around the table turn the color of baked potato halves suffering from AIDS.