Read How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone Online
Authors: Saša Stanišić
Hi. Who? Aleksandar! Hey, where areyou calling from? Oh, not bad! Well,lousy, really, how about you?
. . . and I hate the water being turned off at midday, and the streetlights not working, and power cuts all the time, and the rubbish not being taken away, and what I hate most of all is the snow. The soldiers burned both mosques down and danced around the ruins, and now there's supposed to be a park there, only it isn't a park, it's a dismal empty space with four benches in it, and I hate everyone who sits on them, and now and then someone comes along with a watering can, but nothing will grow there. You'd say it was a gaping wound and nothing can grow from a wound. Then you'd go invoking some kind of magical nonsense, but you'd need a hell of a powerful magic spell to make things any better here. I hate school, I hate the teachers there, I hate having fifty-four of us in a class, I hate having to stand in line for everything because there's not enough of anything to go around except people and death. I hate my father, I hate his pride and defiance and his principles. For the last six months Milica and I have been trying to persuade him to leave this horrible place, and I hate the way he won't hear of it; I hate it that he's opened a tobacconist's exactly where Bogoljub had his own tobacconist's shop, but what else can he do? Basketball referees are the last thing anyone needs around here, no one plays anything anymore, the gym is crammed full of people, I don't even know if they're prisoners or refugees. I hate the soldiers. I hate the People's Army. I hate the White Eagles. I hate the Green Berets. I hate death. I'm reading, Aleksandar. I like to read. Death is a German champion and a Bosnian outright world champion. I hate the bridge. I hate the shots in the night and the bodies in the river, and I hate the way you don't hear the water when a body hits it, I hate being so far away from everything, from strength and from courage; I hate myself for hiding out up at our old school, and I hate my eyes because they can't see exactly who's being pushed into the deep water and shot there, or maybe even shot while falling. Others are killed up on the bridge, and the women kneel there in the morning, scrubbing the blood away. I hate the man from the dam in Barjina Bašta who complains because they throw so many people into the river all at once that it blocks the outlets. I hate what they're doing to the girls in the hotels—Vilina Vlas and Bikavac—I hate the fire station, I hate the police station, I hate trucks full of girls and women driving to the Vilina Vlas and Bikavac, I hate burning buildings and burning windows with burning people jumping out of them to face the guns, and I hate the way the workers work, the teachers teach, the pigeons fly up in the air, and most of all I hate the snow, the filthy hypocritical snow, because it doesn't cover up anything, anything, anything, but we're so good at covering our eyes it's as if we'd learned nothing else in all those years of neighborliness and fraternity and unity. I hate the way everyone condemns everything, and the way everyone's so good at hating, me too, I hate being good at hating even more than I hate the snow and the new statue of the bronze soldier. I hate myself for not daring to ask the sculptor why the soldier on his monument is carrying a sword and not a bloody knife. And I hate you. I hate you because you've gone, I hate myself because I have to stay here, where even the gypsies don't think it's a good idea to pitch their tents, where dogs form into packs and no one goes swimming in the Drina. You once told me you'd been talking to the Drina. I wonder what tales it would tell now if it could. What would it taste if it had a sense of taste? What does a dead body taste like? Can a river hate too, do you think?
My hatred is endless, Aleksandar. It's there even when I close my eyes.
Dear Asija,
Uncle Miki is alive! He's back home in Višegrad again, he's even living in our old building. For three years no one knew how he was, but then he sent Granny a letter. He was well, he said, he was coming back soon. Granny read the letter aloud to us over the phone. He didn't say where he was coming back from. Granny told us Miki had been seen in Višegrad in '92.
In the Hotel Bikavac? Father raised his voice, thinking of the stories. Heaven forbid!
No one shakes their heads anymore over Granny Katarina and our phone conversations with her. Father once said down the phone: I don't know, I just don't know. He pressed his lips together and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. Granny Katarina doesn't live in the present any longer and has made up a past of her own for each of us. I'm paying back the credit that time granted me, she explains. In the Granny version, we're all overtaken by our own past. Six months ago she was diagnosed with astronomically high blood-sugar levels, and the insulin treatment has turned her life into a roller-coaster ride. The days when she sounds worried and thoughtful on the phone are followed by calls to the whole family when she's in tremendous high spirits. Auntie Typhoon thinks we're exaggerating, we take it all much too seriously, after all, she says, it's nice to know what you used to be like. Since Auntie Typhoon had a call of her own from Granny she hasn't said any more on the subject.
There was a party yesterday. Uncle Bora called it “The Dayton Peace Agreement Party” and wrote a speech full of jokes about war, peace, vegetarians and my long hair. I can braid it now. My father said: there's no need to make jokes about Dayton, Dayton itself is the biggest joke ever. A peace agreement giving political accreditation to ethnic cleansing! Father will say almost anything and almost never do anything all his life. We're very alike in that respect, Father and I, only I say rather more than he does, and I do even less.
I imagine there's even more rejoicing over the peace agreement where you are. To be honest: I'm very glad of it, but now I'm afraid of what will happen to us. It looks as if we'll have to go back to Bosnia. But I don't want to go back to the town after everyone was driven out of it. Not wanting to go back is the one point on which my parents and I agree. When they were talking to Uncle Bora and Auntie Typhoon about it, and Mother said: I'd sooner die than look those murderers in the face, Nena Fatima stood up, wrote “Thank you and good-bye” on the low-cut bosom of the woman on the cover of the TV magazine, tore the piece of paper off and stuck it on her forehead.
Nena Fatima only wears her head scarf when it's drizzling out of doors now, but it's always drizzling in Essen. She's made a huge garden in the middle of the inner courtyard. Tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers. The caretaker came to look, and so did the police; they looked at Nena's garden, and we're all expecting to be reported to the authorities. Nena Fatima is the only one in my family that I get on well with. All the neighborhood terriers shit in the garden, and I don't eat lettuce anymore these days.
I was sitting in the garden with Nena when she told me her secret. She reached under her head scarf and put a limp, torn piece of paper down between us. She handed me a comb and turned around. Nena's long hair. I combed it. When I'd finished she stood up and left the note there.
With love, from
Aleksandar
i want to talk again i want to talk
i want to talk i want to talk again but i need a reason
it has to be a good reason and that's a fact
i want to see everything
even in the grave i want to go on seeing i'd like to go on seeing even in my
sleep
i need a good reason not to see and death isn't a good reason
i want to see what i'm cooking
i want to go into the world that's what i want
the filthy war came just at the right time for me
there was nothing to be done with my husband not with rafik
he carried his crooked back around in his head his whole life was crooked
he ducked down low there was nothing to be done with him
i want to be young still for a while i'm not all that old i could only be old
with rafik i had to stay at home he was working and i was at home and
he didn't want men to see what beautiful hair i have
i want to have beautiful hair always it takes a lot of caring for
i want to go out in the world that's why i've gone away from rafik
because he had principles all the way from the drina to china
i want to be friendly
i want an unmasked sun but who can stop the clouds coming
if i were a magician like you rain and progress would all be different and
the
megdan
would spit fire we'd have quite different worries from the
ones we have now
i want to be a bit useful to you all for a while yet but i want to be useful to
myself even more
i don't want to be kind to everyone all the time i'd rather wait
i want to know what you'll be like at twenty and what you'll know
your grandpa was that age when i had to marry him
there was a walnut tree in my village it snowed under that
tree in summer about as often as you found unmarried
girls there
i want to find another husband or maybe not
i never want to herd cattle again or look after courteous birds
i want to be proud of breaking something
i don't want to die of loneliness or guilt or a fishbone or a river i want to
have the feeling when i'm dying that i'm wearing a lot of jewelry that's
how it is
i want to fly someday and climb a volcano and throw a stone
into it.
nena fatima
Dear Asija,
Forgive me for not writing for so long. Do you ever get my letters? Are you still there? I go on writing, I'm alone a lot just now anyway, but I don't mind that.
My parents have been living in the USA for a year. In Florida. They've gone there for good, they say. Father picked a coconut and painted his first picture in seven years. He calls it
Self-Portrait with Coconut,
and the colors he chose are a duet of ochre and brown on a lush green summer meadow. Mother started work in an attorney's office, she says it's not difficult, the laws there are a lot easier to understand than ours. She's bought skates, she goes to the ice rink every Sunday, and she'd like to watch a soccer game in the stadium, without my father. She thinks the soccer players' shorts fit them nicely.
If they hadn't emigrated, she'd have been sent back to Bosnia. It's called voluntary repatriation. I don't think something you're told to do can be voluntary, and you can't really be repatriated to a place where half the original population is missing. It's a new place, you're not returning to it, you're going there for the first time. I can't even imagine what it would be like, going to school in Bosnia now. All I see is my old classroom and Edin on the bench behind me. Tito's picture is still hanging on the wall. I was allowed to stay here because of school. My parents thought it was sensible for me to take my final exams in Germany. Mother wrote down eleven recipes for me, ten easy ones plus the recipe for minced-meat-and-plum schnitzel. She explained how to boil clothes that need it before you wash them.
The last year in Essen was a little better for us. Mother gave notice to the laundry. She signed on for a course in German and studied every day for three months. After that she wrote seventy job applications. In the seventy-first, she didn't mention that she came from Bosnia and she got a job as a cashier.
I talked to Father so little here that I was sometimes surprised to hear him speak my name. Mother fell sick and then got better, Father got quiet and then grew older, and now he's sitting in the sun, painting still lifes again, and even selling them.
You see, Asija, I haven't gone to any trouble. All this time I haven't gone to the trouble of wondering or maybe even asking what my parents think or what they want or how I can help them so that we'd feel better here. It was embarrassing for me to go to their interviews with them; it was embarrassing for me to translate the questions they were asked: how good is your German? I was never ashamed of my deaf mute Nena Fatima, although she laughed at jokes and talked in her sleep. She had more friends here than I'll ever make. She listened to her women friends when they were talking, they asked her opinion, she would nod or shake her head. But then she'd sit out on the pavement in front of the building cutting her toenails. She was happiest of all about Florida. She gets up early and swims in the neighbors' pool, one more length every day.
I sometimes wish my name was spelled “Alexander” and I often wish people would just leave me alone. For a long time I thought I was just playing at being a teenager so as not to make my parents anxious. But a time came when I really didn't want to see war or know about suffering and flight anymore.
Today is the first of May, and Granny Katarina wants to send me a package from Višegrad. Granny Katarina always wants to send me a package on the first of May. Photos of Tito, Grandpa's speeches and decorations, my Pioneer uniform. Every year at this time Granny tells me how I especially liked wearing the uniform on church feast days, how I knew whole passages of
Das Kapital
by heart, and I understood what they meant.
Now my father buys himself chewing tobacco and says: Coconuts! I'm the first Bosnian to know how to chew tobacco, and Mother says: the Jacksonville Jaguars have a good team this season. In the evening, they invite other Bosnians, they grill homemade
[
evap
[
i
c
i
and supermarket hamburgers on the veranda, and the crickets chirp; the asphalt cools down and smells of cinnamon. A man called Dino Safirovic tells them how he and his troops played soccer against the Serbs in the trenches, and how he stopped the shot that would have decided the game with his face, but ever since then there are certain sounds at the ends of words that he can't pronounce properly. He tells them how he was going to light a fire in a hollow tree trunk where a hand grenade was lying. My mother says she misses me. She buys Slovenian wine, and Father thinks our crickets would knock the stuffing out of the American kind.
I tried looking for your name on the Internet, Asija, and then I realized that I'm not at all sure of your last name, even though I always write one on the envelopes. I read pages full of lists of missing persons. An Asija was mentioned twice, but that doesn't mean anything. At least I found out what your name means.
If I look for my own name I get a single hit:
Midsummer
Night's Dream
in the school theater. I played Puck. Puck is an elf whose king gives him the job of finding a special flower; if its nectar is put on a sleeping person's eyes, the sleeper will fall in love with the first living creature he or she sees on waking up. Not a great story, but Puck can work magic. At some point in the play everyone gets to be loved, even a man with a donkey's head, and it all has to be a dream because that's what the audience decides in the end.
Asija, I can make Nazis think I'm from Bavaria just by using the words Bavarians like. I can make Frisian jokes, they're a bit like Montenegrin jokes at home—if the Frisians' flies aren't open today they'll wait until tomorrow to pee. I back five national teams. If anyone says I'm a good example of integration, it really freaks me out.
Asiya (Asija), f.
1. As Arab. name: healing, tending the sick; peacemaker.
2. Traditionally the name of Pharaoh's devout wife who rescued Moses from the Nile.
My father asks if I knew that more people are killed by coconuts than sharks every year. Coconuts are murderers, he says.
I decide to have dreamed everything.
With love, from
Aleksandar