How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

by Sasa Stanisic

  Oh yes, says Mr. Popović, I remember. I was friends with your grandfather when we were studying, and politically later too. Slavko was a good speaker, very few in the Party understood his ideas and almost no one thought they were any good. Which means they were excellent ideas.

  I nod, enjoying the old man's deep, thoughtful voice, the calm I see in his bright eyes, which widen as he talks. His wife sits opposite us, folds her hands in her lap and watches him as attentively as if he were the guest.

  But for Slavko, Mr. Popović goes on with his little speech, the library, for instance, would never have been extended, and to this day the schools and indeed the whole town can feel the benefit of it. How long ago that was . . .

  I spear a cube of cheese on a toothpick, the cheese is very cold and tastes of paprika. There are cupboards and chests of drawers adorned with flowers in the apartment, a large art nouveau lamp, a desk made of dark wood, Tito's portrait over it. Sheet music and records on shelves, on the floor, everywhere. The piano in a corner, a gramophone beside it. I look at Mr. Popović again. He has narrowed his eyes and is offering me his hand. I'm Professor Petar Popović, and you are . . . ?

  What did you say?

  Mrs. Popović clears her throat. Petar, she says, this is Aleksandar, Slavko's grandson.

  Slavko Krsmanović? cries Mr. Popović, and his face brightens, what a nice surprise! You've changed a great deal, Aleksandar! Do you know, your grandfather often used to bring you with him to see us. We got on very well, the Cicero of Višegrad and I. You'd have been . . . Well, at the time I'd say you were at the most . . . Mr. Popović becomes thoughtful again, rests his chin on his hand. I look at his wife, who is still smiling. You'll remember, Petar, she says quietly, you'll remember, just take it slowly.

  Mr. Popović frowns. Lena, he asks his wife, who is this gentleman?

  Aleksandar Krsmanovic, I say myself this time. I stand up and once again shake hands with the old man wearing a tank top, his hair accurately parted. I'm visiting my grandmother. You once gave me an encyclopedia of music for my birthday.

  Mr. Popović laughs, stands up too, and clasps my hand warmly between both of his. Of course, he cries, the Encyclopedia of World Music. So you're Slavko's grandson. Sit down, sit down, and bring us a beer, please, Lena. I expect you drink beer?

  Yes, indeed, I say, and Mr. Popović looks at me with a friendly expression, a smiling old gentleman among his records and books of musical scores. Grandpa Slavko always spoke highly of his piano playing and described him as the only real intellectual in our town. After his wife has disappeared into the kitchen Mr. Popović presses my hand more firmly and whispers in confidential tones: all my life I've treated my wife's beauty and kindness carelessly, otherwise it's only history and death I treat that way.

  Mr. Popović drinks a sip of water and looks closely at his glass; it is cloudy with condensation. Mr. Popović undoes the cuffs of his shirt. They're not real, he says, pointing to the gold cuff links with the silver treble clef on them.

  His kind and beautiful wife comes back into the living room with the beers just in time to see her husband offering me his hand again and saying: I'm Petar Popović, and whom do I have the honor of . . . ?

  After I've introduced myself he stands up. A little music, Mr. Krsmanovic? You look to me as if you'd know the value of Johann Sebastian, who is underestimated in this country. “I will not let thee go except thou bless me,” he suggests. I am glad, he sings, to cast off the misery of these times today. Pam-ta-tam, he sings, and he stops by the gramophone and stays there.

  Maybe it's for the best, says Mrs. Popović, taking a sip of beer from the bottle, he can hide from memory and not suffer the horrors of the present day by day.

  Mr. Popović turns away from the gramophone and goes over to his bookshelf. After a moment's thought he takes out one of the scores and leafs through it as if looking for a certain passage, pam-ta-tam, he sings.

  The way from our home to Granny Katarina's: 2,349 steps. I've made lists: distances in footsteps. Home is on the other side of the Drina. Granny is still asleep, snoring peacefully, I could wake her to ask who lives there now, but I don't know how she likes to be woken, and I don't like not knowing the answer to the question myself.

  It's 2,250 steps today, and the name by the door says: Miki. I stand on concrete, the garden has had concrete put down over it, how are the worms doing? I don't ring the bell. It says just Miki.

  I've made lists. Our street. I go from building to building, I know this balcony, I know that swing in the yard made from an old tire, I know the taste of mirabelles pinched from that garden, I don't know a single name on the mailboxes except the name of Danilo Gorki.

  Danilo and I sit on his veranda, the table and rocking chair just as I remember them from Francesco's time. The garden is neglected, the cherry tree has been cut down; old Mirela, Danilo's mother, is dead. Danilo lives alone in the big house, gets up at five every day, goes fishing, and if he can't sell his catch he eats it himself. His freezer is stuffed full of fish. Better fish all day and get nothing on your hook, he says, than toil all day and get nothing in your pocket. A lot of people these days think you can't be happy unless you have a job, it doesn't even have to be a paid job. To hell with that kind of happiness, I say.

  I ask Danilo if he knows where his colleague from the Estuary Restaurant went, the man we children called Čika Doctor. List: myths and legends. I tell the tale of the lemonade for the leather-clad biker.

  Danilo says yes, he knows. I wait for him to go on, and when he doesn't, I ask: where?

  I was in the same unit as your uncle, he says, setting the table. That's why you're here, right?

  Čika Doctor, who cut a man's calf open because the man had compared his sister's teeth with the teeth of a horse.

  What with all the fish, says Danilo, you don't even smell fish anymore.

  The muted cries of children playing make their way in to us from outside. Danilo asks if I'm married, pours oil into the pan and puts two fish in.

  Just as well, he says, women are devils with pretty skin. Oh yes, says Danilo Gorki, opening the window that looks out on the street, I ought to know.

  From home to school: 1,803 steps, counted on the day of a math test for which I'd studied heroically, and even so I handed it in without a single correct answer. Today it's 1,731. The students are standing about in small groups, all talking together in loud voices. I pace out the penalty area of the little soccer field, which has lost its goals. This is where Kiko won the bet with me and Edin. I go across the yard to see Kostina the caretaker. The thin man in his blue dungarees with a pencil behind his ear is leaning against the wall.

  Mr. Kostina, I say, the goals have gone.

  The goals have gone, he repeats, scratching the thick veins on his forearm. Laughing girls' voices in the yard.

  What would you think if I drew a goal on the wall?

  Not much, mutters Mr. Kostina.

  A bell rings, slowly clattering. Like saucepans clashing, I think. The children wash around us, a torrent of brightly colored backpacks streaming noisily into the building.

  New bells? I ask, since there's nothing to say but the obvious.

  The same we've had these thirty years, just a bit slower. The caretaker speaks slowly; he's as durable as the bells.

  The school hall always smelled of damp cardboard and nougat. I stop at the entrance.

  Mr. Kostina, is Fizo still here?

  Home-comer, are you? He never came back after break one Monday. Mr. Kostina pushes himself away from the wall with an effort and slouches into the building. The yard is quiet now, except for a boy anxious not to be late racing across the goalless soccer field.

  I've made lists. I'm sitting on the fifth floor with Radovan Bunda while his wife gives me the first coffee of my second day in Višegrad. It's early morning, I had to make an appointment, seven in the morning was the only time he had free. Bursting with vigor, never ill in his life and never at a loss for a curse, Radovan Bunda
used to be a welcome guest at my great-grandparents' parties in Veletovo. In the winter of '91 he left his village, where they were afraid of electricity, blue denim and the full moon, and moved to Višegrad. On his first day in town he sold his sheep and rented the fifth-floor apartment. He couldn't get his two cows up the stairs, so he sold them too. With the money from the cows he bought a chair, a table, his first vacuum cleaner, his first fridge, and his first carbonated mineral water. He raised chickens on the roof; his rooster crowed even before the muezzin and woke the entire building. But then, on the first day of the skirmishing around Višegrad, a shell fell from above, and none of the chickens ever cackled again. When Radovan saw his silent hens he decided to leave town. He loaded his chickens into the fridge, and the fridge onto his back, and left. He couldn't think of a safer place than his old village, he tells me, adding sweetener to his coffee. Eyes on his cup, he says: but my village wasn't a village anymore. You need people for a village. I went from door to door, all the locks were broken off, and they weren't asleep in the bedrooms, they just lay there dead. In bed, on red pillows. All of them Serbs, except for one house we'd all been Serbs.

  Revenge on revenge. Back and forth. That was good old Mehmed's house. I knocked, he opened the door, he said: Radovan, old friend. He showed me his hands and embraced me like a brother.

  Radovan pauses, stirs his coffee, takes a sip. The hum of car engines rises from the street, calls, a whistle. A terrible night, says Radovan, pressing his lips together, Mehmed told me, they poured gasoline over the dogs, tied them up and set fire to them. My grandmother was a poor sleeper and used to sit wearily on the swing on the veranda every night; they hanged her next to the swing. All the others had been shot, but she was still dangling there. Was it supposed to look like suicide? She'd never have thought of such a thing of her own free will, a stupid thing to do, she'd have said, I've only got this one life!

  Radovan Bunda buried the village and set off with the chickens to take his own revenge. On the way, he collected fourteen sharp stones for each of the fourteen victims, and he wept for seven days. He didn't close an eye for six nights, and on the seventh he admitted to himself that he couldn't be a killer. I know about hatred, not bloodshed. I'll get rich, I told myself, and then we'll see. I moved back in here and kept well clear of all of it, that's what I did. I learned to write from Mr. Popović the music teacher, and to speak better, to think faster, I learned the art of sweet-talking from him too, I took lessons from Mr. Popović every day for a year, in the end he was always playing the piano. Then he forgot Mozart, then he forgot Brahms, then he forgot Vivaldi, in the end there was only Johann Sebastian left. If you want to get rich, Radovan, you have to master rhetoric, that's what the music teacher told me when he was still all right.

  Radovan sold everything except the chickens. With the money he invited smugglers and thieves to dinner, he listened when politicians and loudmouths were talking, he watched a doctor playing poker with three of the United Nations blue helmets and gave the doctor secret signs.

  And when I'd found out enough about the way things were going, says Radovan, spreading his arms wide, I stopped a truck and had a little argument with its driver, nothing too bad. The thing was stuffed full of medicinal drugs, it was on its way to a mayor who was going to sell them on. I left the truck with one of my smuggler friends and told the poker-playing doctor: over to you now.

  Today Radovan's fridge is the kind a large American family would have. A walk-in fridge, extra living space. His blond wife has PRINCESS BITCH in silver glitter on her close-fitting top. A second woman comes in, a redhead, and kisses Radovan on the mouth. I'll have to think about these complicated relationships. Radovan introduces both women to me by their first names, they both end with a “y”, he pats both their bottoms. Princess Bitch and the redhead smoke by the window, leaning out into the Višegrad morning.

  They wiped out my whole village, says Radovan, but I can assure you I still had a life! I invested in medicinal drugs, then in scrap. But a time came when everything was scrap, the town, the whole fucking country was scrap, and scrap wasn't worth a thing anymore. I rented a room, sold coffee and grilled meat and called the whole operation “McRadovan's.” One bar among many, but it was the first where you could place bets. They all came, my doctors, my blue helmets, my refugees, my politicians, my inventors, my smugglers. But I was the outright winner, me, Radovan Bunda.

  Radovan is a sturdy man, well shaved, suntanned. All that remains of his dialect is the way he tends to emphasize long words on the first syllable. His hair oil smells of apples. Radovan doesn't smoke, and when he talks about money he mimes a circle in the air with his hands, fingers spread wide. He owns the whole fifth floor of the building. He's demolished partitions, combined apartments into large rooms, and glazed the whole facade that looks out onto the street. He's put in offices, a grand bedroom with a four-poster bed and gilded mirrors, and there are two guest rooms. You can't expect anyone to stay in our hotels, says Radovan Bunda. He shows me everything; he thinks the pictures in the offices are kitsch, but his colleagues like them.

  Radovan smiles. My girls sing, he says. They're not making music now, but there's a video. He plays it for me, Princess Bitch and the redhead dancing. Radovan features in it, Radovan in a hat.

  The loft where Asija hid is a lumber room now. Radovan opens the skylight to the roof, and I immediately hear chickens cackling. They got over the shock in the end, he says, scattering a handful of grain. Radovan Bunda goes to the edge of the apartment building roof and looks out at the town waking up.

  I've made lists. Zoran Pavlovic. My friend Zoran. Walrus's Zoran. Owner of Maestro Stankovski's barbershop. I sit on the old barbershop chair. Zoran stands behind me, a hair grip in his left hand, a large pair of scissors in his right. Zoran's long hair, Zoran's narrow lips, Zoran's serious, immobile expression.

  Where did you train? I ask, passing my hand through my hair.

  Here and there, mostly with Stankovski. I'll start now, okay? You want it all off ?

  Yes, all of it. I remove my hand and hide it under the smock. Zoran clamps my hair back with the grip and applies the scissors.

  Aleks?

  Yes?

  Oh, wow, man . . .

  What is it?

  I mean, look at us! Look in the mirror!

  Zoran has my long hair held back, our glances meet. If it's a problem . . . ? I say.

  Oh, come on, what do you mean, a problem? You want it all off ?

  Get on with it or I might change my mind.

  My Zoran. Walrus's Zoran. The scissors snip, he shows me the bunch of hair. We say nothing while the Panesamig razor hums away. I am Zoran's last customer. He closes the shop and turns up the collar of his jacket. You'll eat with us this evening, he says. I run my hand over my head. Zoran puts his hands in his pockets, hunches his shoulders in the cool evening air; it's windy and there are no stars.

  The red facade and black window frames were Milica's idea, of course, and immediately after Walrus's house had been renovated hardly anyone could pass it without laughing or standing there shaking his head. I had to paint over the shame, the big man told everyone who asked about it; we've decorated inside too. Zoran, his father, and his stepmother moved into the house when Walrus threw Desa's seasonal workers out on the very first day he was back. As we ate the moussaka with egg to which Zoran had invited me, Milica said, smiling: Desa did act up a bit, but then I had a word with her. Milica is wearing a red and black lumberjack shirt, black jeans, and there still isn't a single line under her big blue eyes.

  It's all new, you young rascal, Walrus tells me. He stands up, still chewing, and spreads his arms wide in the middle of the living room. My Milica and I turned the whole house upside down in three months. Walrus has shaved off his mustache. I stare at what's gone from between his nose and his upper lip, I can hardly say a word.

  Zoran spent those three months in prison in Graz, waiting to be deported after he'd tried to cross the Austrian border one
misty March morning. Walrus tells the story while Zoran salts potatoes, eyes bent on his plate the whole time. Walrus tells me how thick the mist was in which his son tried to hide, how very nearly Zoran had given the border guard the slip, how bad the food was in prison. That mist, he says, mopping his mouth with bread, there's always mist in our stories.

  Mist like cement, Zoran murmurs, putting his half sister, Eliza, on his lap. Eliza is two years old and already has her father's drooping cheeks. Milica looks me over, crosses her legs, jiggles her foot up and down. Zoran is helping Eliza with her jigsaw puzzle.

  You won't believe this, you young rascal, says Walrus, but do you remember Francesco? The gay Italian I took apart at boccia? Well, just wait for this!

  He goes to a biscuit tin full of photos—I catch a quick glance of a basketball game, and Walrus and Milica in front of their bus—and takes out a letter. Half a page in Francesco's broken Serbo-Croat. Is Walrus well, Francesco has been worried, he's kept sending food and medicine to Višegrad, has any of it arrived? My name comes up in Francesco's hopes too. A photo came with the letter. It shows Francesco, a young woman, and a little girl on a dam. Would you believe it? says Walrus, tapping the photo. On the back it says, “My wife, Kristina, and my daughter, Drina.”

  Austria . . . says Zoran when we go out into the cold late that evening and put our caps on. Ankica never wanted to come. I frightened her too much.

  The night smells of burnt coal, I try to find something reasonably sensible to say to Zoran, you can always come visit me in Germany, I say, and Zoran takes a deep breath and claps me on the back.