How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (12 page)

The hoarse voice on the radio says: Višegrad.

The soldier with the headband says: okay, we heard, and stands up.

The voice on the radio says: fallen after a bitter struggle.

The soldier scratches himself under his headband: all right, that'll do. And he gets ready to take a run at it.

The voice on the radio rises: but our troops are regrouping!

The soldier murmurs: hm, interesting, but somehow kind of . . . irresponsible. Or do you lot want another punch in the gob? He kicks the little black box, hard, and the voice on the radio says nothing more. The soldier throws the bent aerial and one of the knobs at the grandfathers' feet: something for the do-it-yourself lot, if any of you can repair it I'll buy it off him. And you there! More bacon in the peas! I'll never get a bellyful this way! Life would be a poor thing without bacon. You—yes, you over there—you go and cut me some bacon. And he points his spoon at Amela from the second floor. Amela with the long black braids lays strips of raw meat over the soldier's hand, trying to cover it. Hey, did you make that dress yourself ? the soldier asks Amela, licking the meat, say yes and I'll kiss your clever fingers. Don't even think of saying no.

Amela bakes the best bread in the world. She says nothing. Čika Hasan and Čika Sead, who are twisting their caps in their hands as they stand in front of the plywood tables, can't answer any of the soldier's questions either.

Eci-peci-pec
. . . The soldier with the headband recites a counting-out rhyme, and ends with his finger pointing at Čika Sead, takes his glasses off him, and breathes on the lenses. A man wearing a stocking mask ties Čika Sead's hands behind his back with wire.

Another shot in the stairwell; the echo mingles with anxious people's voices. The rushing sound of the voices comes down to the cellar, like when you hold a seashell to your ear. I don't hear Asija's voice, I must find Asija. I catch up with the soldiers who are taking Čika Sead away, I'm still the fastest in the stairwell. The soldiers are chasing up and down in camouflage colors, bawling: get down! Get out! No! Papers! No! Hands up! What? Papers! What's your name? What's your name? Taking three steps or seven steps at once. Going into living rooms that smell of apple compote. Rummaging around in white bedrooms. Rocking the wardrobes, drawers, chests. Smearing the doors with their words, with crosses and double-headed birds, out out out, everybody out! I keep hearing soldiers' orders through the seashell. Faces are pushed up against the wall, arms are pushed up above heads against the cracked plaster. The soldiers call out a name, the person they're looking for. I don't know these soldiers, but I know the name very well—Aziz.

When soldiers curse the stairwell whimpers. When they get noisy, when they bellow, when they break things, when they hit people, when they shout abuse, when they call for Aziz, Aziz, you fucking bastard! the seashell in the stairwell begs: please stop! I count the steps up to the loft out loud, as loud as I can, but I still hear it all. I see. I see Čika Muharem on the second floor, Čika Husein and Čika Fasil on the third floor, their heads pushed hard against the banisters of the stairs by the soldiers. The backs of their necks are pushed from above with rifle butts, from the side with boots. Čika Fasil's cap is lying on the floor. I run past, I don't say hello to the neighbors, I go on counting, counting. No one is pushing Mr. Popovic the music teacher's head against anything. Mr. Popovic wears a suit and a bow tie, his wife Lena has a pearl necklace over her black blouse. Arms crossed over his chest, Mr. Popović asks one of the soldiers: what do you want, gentlemen? We're all honest folk here.

We want you to keep your mouth shut! Shut your mouth and nothing will happen. And Mr. Popović the music teacher keeps his mouth shut.

I just want to find Asija, and I keep my mouth shut too so that nothing will happen. I want to get to Asija as fast as I can, she'll be frightened, she'll be crying again, I'll find her in the attic with all the brooms and cobwebs in among the empty bottles and the mice that you never get to see but you always hear. I burst through the attic door; Asija gives a start and stands back against the wall. It's you, it's you! Quick, close the door, quick or they'll find us! Tell me, will they find us? Asija puts her arms out to me and asks, sobbing: did you see my Mama and my Papa with the soldiers? Did my Mama and Papa maybe come back with those stupid soldiers? They took them away because they have the wrong sort of name. Asija doesn't know where her parents would be coming back from: no one knows, she whispers, and no one must know we're here! If the soldiers find you they'll take your papers away, and if you have the wrong sort of name they'll drive you away in the truck with the green tarpaulin. Like Mama and Papa. Oh, perhaps, says Asija, suddenly raising her head from my hands and calling out, amid still more tears, perhaps the soldiers will take me to Mama and Papa if I tell them my name, do you think? Perhaps it would be good for me to have the wrong sort of name just now, do you hear what I'm saying?

I hear what she's saying—and I hear footsteps coming closer. I hear heavy boots, and I know I have the right sort of name. And although the soldier with the yellow beard is grinning, although he doesn't smell of sweat and schnapps like the others, although he only wants us to go back into the stairwell, I shout at him: my name is Aleksandar and this is my sister Katarina, this is Katarina, she's only my sister Katarina!

My granny's name can't be wrong, I'm sure of that. The soldier looks around the attic, the floorboards whimper under his boots. Out of here, you two! He speaks quietly; his fingers are working away in his beard, a thick yellow beard eating its way over his face. Asija hesitates. The soldier crouches down in front of her; his beard touches her cheek. She turns her head away. The soldier breathes into her face. The soldier whispers: stand up! I think: stand up, oh please, stand up! Slowly Asija stands up and goes out of the loft. I follow her, the soldier closes the door, you two don't move from this spot, understand?

We're in the fifth-floor corridor and we don't move from the spot. Asija rubs her cheek. My mother calls my name up the stairs. Aleksandar, come down at once!

You two stay here, the soldier orders.

It's not the mothers telling us what we need to know now, it's the soldiers. I call back: Katarina is with me.

Mother asks no more questions.

We wait. Everyone is waiting. How long and what for no one knows. Grown-ups and older kids won't let go of the really tiny children. They are rocked back and forth in the crook of an arm, they whine. “Ssh” is the answer they get to everything. A fat soldier looks at us as if we've stolen something. Shots are heard somewhere close by, there you go, says the fat soldier. We nod and sit down beside Čika Hasan, who is tied up.

Night hangs in the window at the end of the corridor. Engines are revving up and soldiers are singing outside. Čika Hasan says: they're going on west, farther into the interior, in theory. Čika Sead isn't there to contradict him.

The bridegrooms in our building aren't in a mood to celebrate anymore. They wearily walk up and down above us and among us and under us. One of them sings a sad song, they all know it; he sings alone and falls asleep singing. Two more soldiers come up to our floor with a plastic bag and a pan, one of them shows his crooked teeth and puts his finger in the sleeping singer's ear. He takes bread, salt and beer out of the bag. He unwraps the aluminum foil from two roast chickens. The pan is steaming; boiled potatoes. Large knives with jagged blades and notched handles; they don't need plates.

All the doors on the fifth floor are either open or lying flat—you have to walk over the doors to get into an apartment. Two soldiers are going into the one where Čika Sead used to live. Table legs scrape over the wooden floor but the table won't fit through the door frame. So the soldiers stand around, two inside, one outside, now what? The hungriest of them is already gnawing a chicken leg as he stands there. The two who are inside Čika Sead's apartment sit down at one side of the table and the other one sits down at it out in the corridor. That's the way to do it. Soldiers dig their fingers into the chicken meat, pick it up with their jagged knives, eat the chicken off the points of their knives.

Every couple of minutes the light in the stairwell goes off. We wait enveloped in darkness for seconds on end. Not enough time to get used to seeing outlines in the dark. Someone switches the light straight back on again. Each moment of darkness is a small disappearance, a small convalescence. In one of those dark moments Asija whispers: don't forget me! The forgetting tickles my earlobe. I don't know why she says that, why she says it just now; I don't know what to answer. The light comes back to life, Asija is winding hair around her finger. Tears have drawn dirty veins on her cheeks.

Every time the neon tubes come on there's a powerful blinking but nothing really wakes up. The soldiers don't go away; they take off their boots and look at their toes. The waiting never comes to an end.

Asija and I are thirsty; they let us into Čika Sead's apartment. Nothing in it is closed, no door, no window, no cupboard, no dresser, no drawer—there's not a single secret left in here. Knives and forks and plates and cups and seasonings are lying on the carpet, and a single large shoe. Someone's poured milk into it.

I wash Asija's face.

Asija washes my face.

When we're back in the stairwell a woman soldier with a delicate nose, green eyes and bright red hair is standing where we were before, beside Čika Hasan, reading a book. The moments when the light goes off annoy the beautiful soldier and she hits the light switch. She pushes a sofa out of an apartment into the corridor and sits down right below the switch.

Once, just after the red-haired soldier has switched the light on, Asija nods in her direction and begins counting in a whisper. At a hundred and seventeen the light goes off. The redhead hits the switch. Next time we'll be faster, whispers Asija, and she glances at the switch on our side and begins counting again. Surely we just have to be ready for our switch to be faster, but we count, and later we can have a wish for every time we whisper the number at the same time the light goes off. At a hundred we put our hands behind our backs and on our switch, I never take my eye off the redhead on the other side of the corridor, at a hundred and five there's a burst of gunfire outside, at a hundred and eleven I whisper: we can't forget each other as long as we don't lose one another, at a hundred and seventeen the redhead laughs out loud, then darkness catches up with her laughter, I take Asija's hand, we press our switch together. In this victory, which makes her clap her hands in delight, Asija's smile is brighter than any light.

Quiet over there!

The woman soldier with the red hair wants to read.

How the soldier repairs the gramophone, what connoisseurs drink, how we're doing
in written Russian, why chub eat spit,
and how a town can break into splinters

The mothers pour water into the hollows they've made in the flour, the soldiers shake hands saying good-bye, one soldier, with a gold canine tooth, asks: why don't we all wait for the warm bread? another says no, adding, to us: we're posting guards, I don't want anyone leaving this building after eight, don't make the street your grave, there are better graves to be found. Tired soldiers thump sleeping soldiers on the shoulder, nudge their noses with the sights of their rifles, up, up, time to march away, get up! The man with the gold tooth doesn't want to march away, he wants warm bread. But hands can't form the dough any more firmly, fingers can't knead it any faster, doesn't he know that? He doesn't know it, and it's no help when he asks Amela for soap, rubs the soapy water into his hands with a metal scourer, and buries his own fingers in the dough. He puts his arms around Amela's waist, he clasps her hands in his fists and kneads the dough that way. Amela with her hair in braids, and now some strands falling over her face too. With flour on her cheek and now an anxiously furrowed brow as the soldier listens to the nape of her neck, puts his ear against it, and from under Amela's braided hair tells the other women: you go out and close the door behind you—all of you, now! They close the door, lean against the wall, give each other cigarettes, spit on their forefingers, put the spit on the cigarette ends and wipe the tears from their cheeks. Amela, they whisper, Amela, Amela.

The soldiers were with us for an evening and a night, they stormed the building and then went straight off to see what they could find in cupboards and drawers. They drove everyone into the stairwell, shooting and yelling. The small children were crying all the time anyway, what with the noise in the stairwell and the plaster crumbling off the ceiling. The little ones cried for their mothers even though they were lying in their arms, were sitting on their laps, were already hugging them. Yells and fine plaster dust. And for Čika Hasan, ropes tying him to the banisters and a rifle butt at his neck: where's your son, old man, where's that misbegotten bastard?

The soldiers were with us through a twilit evening and an unquiet sleep; they slept on our beds, we slept in the stairwell. The guards woke us in the middle of the night; they were playing in the corridor with a chicken bone, two of them against two others. They had parked their tanks in the yard; their dogs had no names and were bad-tempered and fond of children.

The victors march away while the mothers bake bread. One of them comes out of Čika Sead's apartment, ducks his head under the door frame, no helmet in the world would fit that head, it's the biggest head ever, it would need a tub to cover it. A victor's skull like that must weigh as much as two stone slabs, and when the victor blinks a rockfall rolls out of his eyes. The victor shouts at his men and the red-haired woman soldier: there's some fun coming now, men, time to enjoy yourselves.

He's dragging a gramophone along behind him, he's taken hold of it by its trumpet and lifts it over the threshold as if taking a goose to be slaughtered. The gramophone is toy-sized in his great paw. Any moment now, men! He has Čika Sead's gramophone in his left hand, his shiny, polished Kalashnikov in his right. Any moment now, now, now . . . his voice echoes in the stairwell, and the armed men and people who've been tied up listen. The victor with the biggest head in the world puts the pickup arm on the record, but nothing happens. Don't you dare! he shouts, hitting and kicking the gramophone. Right, men, I'll get it working in a minute! and he pulls at the knobs, works the switch, shakes the pickup arm, looks hard at the record, thinks it over and sticks the barrel of his gun in the horn.

If only I were a magician who could make things possible.

There's a crackling from the gramophone. When a hawk kisses a sparrow carefully so as not to hurt it, there must be a tiny sound like that. The needle engages in the groove: accordion! The tune is lurching along too fast, but now the victor adjusts the controls. It's the song everyone knows—nothing can stop you, you have to hug straight away. Normally you have to cling to each other, here and now while the music plays, holding each other tight as you keep in step! But no one moves, only the soldiers raise their guns above their heads and howl along with their dogs. Wailing and rejoicing: yoo-hooo! Shrill whistles, shouting in competition, yoo-hoo, louder, rata-rata-rata- ta. Soldiers take each other tenderly around the waist, two steps to the right, one to the left, yoo-hoo! The victor takes the beautiful redhead by the shoulders, shoots a question mark in the ceiling above her head—they all shoot in answer along with the refrain, and yoo-hoo!—in wild enthusiasm for the song. They're already swaying in a semicircle, four of them, five of them. Holding on to waists and shoulders: two steps to the right, one to the left, seven of them dancing down the narrow corridor. Two steps to the right—yoo-hoo!—one to the left, past Čika Hasan who whispers, sitting tied up there: what times are these when you have to fear dancing and close your ears to songs and music?

The accordion draws the soldiers further into their furious dance, caps are thrown on the floor—yoo-hoo!—now the voice of the woman singer is briefly heard and the soldiers join in: we're the voice! We're the gramophone! No one can hear the small children crying anymore—a whimpering among the throaty, thunderous sound of the army singing along, raging with joy.

The army sings, no one stops them, they sing two to the right and one to the left:

Ni
š
ka Banja, topla voca, za Ni
š
lije
ž
iva zgoda
Sve od Ni
š
a pa do Banje, idu cure na kumpanje,
Mi Ni
š
lije meraklije ne mo
ž
emo bez rakije,
Bez rakije
š
ljivovice i bez mlade cigan
[
ice

Isn't that true, men? sings the dance song. Isn't that just the way it is? Girls take a hot bath, we connoisseurs drink slivovitz, we men can't do without slivovitz. The soldier with the gold tooth sings along too, the one who wanted warm bread, the one who held Amela's hands in his and dipped them in the dough. He comes out of Amela's apartment, the song on his lips, his shirt unbuttoned. Amela is kneeling behind him with a veil of wet hair over her face. The hungry soldier sings louder than any of them: we connoisseurs can't do without a young gypsy girl. There's yellow dough on his fingers and his knuckles and under his nails. He unscrews his hip flask and puts it to his sore lips. Isn't that so, men? We can't do without schnapps and gypsy girls!

If only I were a magician who could make things possible. I'd give objects the gift of defiance: banisters, gramophones, guns, the napes of necks, braided hair.

Fish bite best early in the morning. I gave the worms coffee grounds, I tell Edin, now they're all on a high like Auntie Typhoon. Let's go down to the Rzav to catch some chub first, then we can go to school and see if the place is still standing.

We spit down from the bridge into the little tributary of the Drina. The chub come close to the surface of the water and lick it from below with their fishy lips. Edin spits again, says: a school like ours isn't wrecked so easily, why do you think fish eat spit?

It's going to rain any minute, I say. Maybe this is the last time we'll cross this bridge. Why don't they build a bridge like the one over the Drina? That stands up to anything.

This one will make it, says Edin, it stood up to the tanks.

Want to bet it'll be gone by the day after tomorrow at the latest?

Living at the mouth of two rivers. Learning to swim well and early, learning to fish well and early, learning early how to pump meltwater out of flooded cellars. Last night was a nonstop cloudburst—the soldiers gave us blankets, but the walls of the stairwell breathed out the cold of cement, and I woke up several times. Light fell into the corridor from Ci" ka Sead's apartment, I made bird shadows fly over the wall with my fingers, and hoped real thunder would break the constant rushing of the rain, but there was only thunder of explosions in the distance. Grandpa Slavko had shown me how to train the shadow animals you make with your fingers. Long ago I'd magically given the birds the power to fly my sleeplessness away to the south. The rain stopped in the morning, just before the dancing, singing soldiers left the building, but the clouds didn't clear.

If our mothers find out we've gone, I say, you can bet we won't be allowed down to the Rzav when the floods carry the bridge away. What are they afraid of ? If their own soldiers are in our town they can't shoot at it.

Edin shrugs his shoulders. Raindrops are making the first ripples on the river. We go and stand under the bridge. I put a worm on my hook and cast it out. Edin pokes around in the mud with a stick for a while, imitating the noise of the rain falling on the river. Our floats drift with the current, it rains harder, and the soldiers ask: are they biting? Three bearded men and the victorious soldier with the biggest head in the world. Where did they spring from?

No. Only minnows. Too much noise for the fish these last few days. They go down into deeper water.

Ah, yes. Hiding. Let's see how well they hide.

The hand grenade sinks at once. The soldiers are wearing raincoats; they bend forward as they speak. It's bucketing down, it's raining in torrents, more rivers are raining on the river, and now the rain is falling on the fish scales and fish bellies drifting downstream too. No use trying to collect them, the Rzav is too deep here and too fast, still too cold in April as well, and a catch like that would definitely not taste good.

A mongrel emerges from the undergrowth on the opposite bank, drinks from the river.

Want to bet, boys?

No!

The first volley doesn't hit the dog. The dog starts, jumps up, dances sideways, stops and raises its pointed muzzle. Has it caught the scent of the bet?

Bet you fifty I get it this time, says the victor to the bearded men, one of them spits in his hand and shakes on it. How can a head be so big and a bet smell of schnapps and earth?

The second volley of shots.

It must have been a catfish! Two hundred pounds, maybe four hundred, Edin guesses on the way to school, spreading his arms wide as if hugging someone: it must have been that big, at least that big!

I know about catfish and I don't believe a word of it. Another reason why your line can break is if the hook gets caught somewhere at the bottom, and catfish are conceited anyway; they're not going to bother with a little river like the Rzav. We've caught two chub, and I wish I knew who's stirring up the clouds like that—the rain has soaked us to the skin.

Soldiers on the porches of buildings, soldiers behind sandbags, soldiers in bars acting as landlords and guests combined. Outside the biggest department store in town we ask: are we allowed in? The soldier clambers out of the display window, says: mind the broken glass, and straps a TV set into his passenger seat. We avoid the splintered glass, although it makes a good crunching noise. We're out shopping, the soldiers, Edin and I. We two take as many pencils and exercise books as we can carry. By the time we get to school they're all wet. We stack the limp paper on the radiators, but what are we going to do with five hundred pencil sharpeners? The way our school looks, we won't be needing those again. We lay a trail of pencil sharpeners down the dark corridors, over splintered glass and rubble, through devastated classrooms. There isn't an intact window in the staff room, there are towers of tables and a tangle of chair legs in front of the broken windows, and ten thousand empty cartridge cases among a hundred thousand splinters of glass. Our trail of pencil sharpeners meets a trail of blood. Edin and I follow it to a large window and look out at the town in the rain; still no thunder. In the middle of the room there's a mountain of red volumes, shabby class registers. Some teachers asked questions in alphabetical order, others opened at a random page.

Want to see how we're doing in oral Russian? I ask, but there's a huge pile of dried shit on top of the mountain, with two flies performing in rectangular formation above it, so we content ourselves with discovering that our mark for written Russian is four, which is kind of all right.

Hey, Edin, why did they shoot the dog like that?

Edin shrugs his shoulders, picks up several cartridge cases and throws them through the broken window one by one. Last summer, he says, I drew a goal down there on the front of the building. With red chalk, standing on tiptoe. The crossbar was so high that I had to lower my arm twice and shake the stiffness out of it. I'd just finished when Kostina the caretaker came out and asked: what's that supposed to be? A goal, of course, I said. Wipe it off, he said, it'll be detention for you.

Didn't you get to shoot at it even once? I ask.

Not once, says Edin, unwedging a couple of chairs. Well, I could have broken a window.

In the lab, our physics teacher Fizo is kneeling in front of another carpet of fragments, and when we get down on the floor beside him he says: there'll be lessons, we just have to clear up first. I've found three intact measuring beakers and two burners. All the pinhole cameras but two are broken, the spring pendulum's all right, most of the lightbulbs aren't. Put gloves on and be careful of the glass. Don't touch anything with blood on it.

We have to leave most of it lying there. Fizo removes his glasses, takes a handkerchief out of his shirt pocket, wipes first his eyes and then the glasses. Edin finds an unbroken pipette, holds it up, says good-good-good, and laughs. Fizo nods, yes, good, and gets the broom. We'll go on with lessons in a minute, do you have your exercise books with you? I want to dictate some formulas to you. After that you can go home, right?

Nothing in the lab is in its usual place except for Tito over the board. The more quietly I try to put my feet down, the louder the glass crunches under them. Tito's white admiral's uniform. Tito's German shepherd dog. Tito's right eye: a bullet hole in it. Tito has died yet again, for the fourth time. Shot dead this time.