How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (16 page)

Aleksandar, I really, reallywant to send you this package

I packed it up myself—for you. Karl and Friedrich and Clara and Tito. The whole bunch of them are in it. Do you remember? You liked Karl. And I really, really want to send you Slavko's Party book. His speeches on special occasions. His articles. What picturesque handwriting your grandpa had! Capital letters twining like tendrils! No one writes by hand anymore. I'm sure you type everything too. It's not right! How do you find out who you're dealing with through a machine? I mean, do you want to kiss only a girl's lipstick and not the girl? I really do want to send you some newspaper articles about Grandpa! You used to sit on his lap and do crossword puzzles with him! Oh, Slavko and his crossword puzzles! What else? You really must have the photos of Vladimir Ilyitch and the photos of Tito! What have I got here? “The Mission of Revolutionary Youth”? Yes, wonderful! You're the youth in the title! Oh, your Grandpa's handwriting in those crossword puzzles! Tito's uniform, and we thought we had it so good then, sheep that we were! I only couldn't stand all the fuss they made. I didn't marry my Slavko for his minutes of Party meetings and his reports. Politics and kissing don't go together! What am I supposed to do now with workers' songs and Clara Zetkin postage stamps and leaflets explaining how people have to act when Tito comes to town? Point One: we're to decorate our front gardens and put out as many green plants as possible! Everything except the green plants—for instance underpants, bedclothes, etc.—is to be taken out of the front gardens! Did you ever hear of such a thing? Then there's Point Four, that's a good one too: everyone must bring at least one flower to throw into the street three hundred feet in front of the first car in Tito's column. Whatever happens, nothing must be thrown at Comrade Tito's own car. I could never be doing with any of that, Aleksandar, but I expect you still have ambitions of that kind. You and Slavko may never have got beyond the chapter on goods and commodities in
Das Kapital
without nodding off, but you could quote whole passages by heart. And you wore your blue cap and red cravat of your own free will even when it wasn't a festival day. Even when wearing the Pioneer uniform wasn't a duty anymore, hands clasped behind your back the way your grandpa always clasped his. At the end-of-year celebrations in Class Four you carried the flag. Half the school marched behind you and the Red Flag. Your ears were glowing with happiness and excitement. The flag was huge. During a break in the marching, a poem was recited about some commandant or other, and you sat down and laid the flag on the ground. There's a photo of you resting in front of the flag. I really do want to send you that photo. Tell me, do the Germans still open all packages from Yugoslavia? Are they still keeping tabs on us? I wouldn't like to put you in the awkward position of having to explain why you need these things. Slavko would have made a speech at the Ninth Congress of the Communist League of Yugoslavia. That was in nineteen-seventy and quite something. But then unfortunately none of the speakers fell ill, so no sub stitute was required. I really would like to send that speech—it's for you. “The Role and Perspectives of Marriage and the Family in the Proletariat”! Oh, Slavko and his perspectives! The maternity question! The education question! The sexual question! All so topical! Slavko was annoyed by hypocritical bourgeois virtues! And I . . . I was his proud comrade! Oh, my Slavko . . . Aleksandar, when are you finally going to get married?

Contents

Foreword

Ice cream

Wish

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

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.

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.

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
like our country Yugoslavia.

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
š
pajz
. 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.