Read How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone Online
Authors: Saša Stanišić
At 2:22 P.M. they radioed a cease-fire through to the Bosnian Territorial Defense trenches. The third this month. At 2:28 P.M. the ball rose from the Serbian trench on the northern outskirts of the forest and flew through the air, tracing a high arc, toward the clearing that separated the opposing positions by about six hundred and fifty feet. The ball bounced twice and rolled in the direction of the two spruce trees, now shot to pieces, that had served as goalposts before, when hostilities were suspended.
The commander of the Territorials, Dino Safirović, nicknamed Dino Zoff, jumped up on the edge of the trench, cupped his hands around his mouth like a megaphone and bent his torso back as he shouted to the other side: how about it, Chetniks, want another hiding? He reached for his crotch and thrust his hips back and forth, back and forth, then went about six feet in the direction of the ball, to the place whereĆora lay with a huge hole in his head.
Mujahideen cunts, we've already fucked your mothers' arses twice, roared a hoarse voice from the Serbian trench, while Kiko—Kiko number nine, Kiko of the prodigious headers, Kiko the iron brow of the gentle river Drina—joined Dino Zoff, tookĆora by the ankles and dragged him back to the trench. He covered him up with his coat and pulled the bloodstained strands of hair back from his forehead, oh, look at you now, friend Ćora, he whispered, grass and earth everywhere.
Beside him, Meho clicked his tongue, dug the red and white Red Star Belgrade shirt out of his rucksack and put it on over his jacket. He ceremoniously emptied his jacket pockets: a Swiss army knife, a lighter, two hand grenades, an opened can of meat paste. He kissed Audrey Hepburn's photo several times, enraptured, and then put it away again. He grinned in reply to Dino Zoff's enquiring gaze, said: we all have our lucky charms, did you know about Maradona's underpants . . . and then he noticed Kiko, and Ćora's dead body, and stopped short. He shouldn't have gone out, never mind how dark it was, began Meho, both apologetic and accusing, but then he met Kiko's eyes, sighed, and offered him a pack of Drinas. Everyone in the troop knew Meho still had cigarettes; there were even rumors that the pack was half full. Kiko took the last but one. He passed it over his upper lip and breathed in the fragrance.
Mirabelles, he murmured, closing his eyes, Hanifa's throat when she's brought me home from training, coffee, real Turkish coffee. That's the way of the world, friendĆora, you've snuffed it and I get a cigarette. Kiko passed his fingertips overĆora's eyelids and put the cigarette behind his ear. For after the game, he said with his head bowed.
The Serbs had won the last two cease-fires five-two and two-one. A man called Milan Jevric, nicknamed Mickey Mouse, had scored three of their five goals in the first match. Mickey Mouse was a farmer's boy aged twenty, six feet, nine inches tall and weighing two hundred and twenty pounds, maybe as many as sixty-six of them in the great rock of a head with its projecting nose and sparse tufts of hair all carried on his bull-like neck. He was really an inside defender, and surprised himself more than anyone with his goal-scoring prowess when he stormed ahead at the beginning of the second half, took aim from a distance of one hundred feet and hit Dino Zoff right in the face. Dino didn't come around until Marko, one of the Serbian forwards, held some schnapps under his nose, and for the next two hours he spoke nothing but fluent Latin, quoting several Ciceronian maxims. After that direct hit Mickey Mouse played as a midfield attacker, hammering the ball from every conceivable position. When he fired off one of his right-footed shots and the ball made for the goal like a bullet, Dino Zoff regularly threw himself not fearlessly but bravely into its flight path, and was just as regularly floored, lying there dazed, or with his face twisted in pain. Probably because there was no other way of keeping out Mickey Mouse's mighty shots, or perhaps hoping for the return of Marko's schnapps. There was no art in Mickey Mouse's shots; they didn't spin or come off the outside of his foot, and after the first time they no longer took anyone by surprise. In their lack of finesse and sheer strength they reflected Mickey Mouse's straightforward thinking, which he seldom expressed in words.
There was just one drawback to the force of Mickey Mouse's right foot, and the Territorials mercilessly exploited it. After every shot, the giant gave vent to his delight with a shout that, in musical terms, was somewhere between a bull rutting and a twenty-five-ton truck and trailer braking on a steep downhill slope. Eat your heart out, Monica Seles! cried Kozica with the goatee beard, the Territorials' outside left, after one such cry of exultation, and he roared with laughter.
Hey, is Monica playing with you today? Dino Zoff's men would mock the Serbs after that, or: Monica, Monica, come play on my harmonica! And they groaned out loud whenever Mickey Mouse got the ball. This great mountain of a man, so large that no uniform fit him and he had to wear his enormous dungarees from home, was thrown off balance by these digs. In the second game he toned down his shouts, and promptly his long-distance shots became less decisive, causing Dino Zoff no more headaches. If an opposing player yodeled near him, Mickey Mouse would jump, his massive head would rock on his comparatively slight shoulders, and his narrow brow would furrow. If he'd been given a little more time, Mickey Mouse would have liked to say what he was thinking, but then play shifted to the other side of the field and his tormentor ran off.
Today, as before, Kozica yelled at the Serbian side during warm-up: what a shame Miss Graf couldn't come to Mount Igman! She's in Wimbledon but she sends Monika her best wishes. Ho, ho, ho, cried Kozica, and his companions joined in.
Two halves of forty minutes each, a Territorial ref for the first half, a Serbian ref for the second—if there was going to be any sharp practice at least it would be fairly distributed. Mickey Mouse tied a rope between the goalposts on the southern end of the clearing to serve as a crossbar. The other goal consisted of the remains of the fence that used to stand beside one of the two cart tracks. The wire netting between the fence posts had been cut and the posts extended using boards up to eight feet high. Whoever had control of these cart tracks could reach the mountain more rapidly, no need to forge a path through dense, poorly mapped forests with more mines in the ground than mushrooms. That was what it had all been about here for the last two months: two cart tracks. Lower down the valley one of them turned into a paved road leading to Sarajevo. In normal times, flies flew here in square formation over dried cowpats, but now there were no fresh cowpats; the farm cattle that hadn't been driven higher up into the mountains had been slaughtered long ago, and humans buried their own shit. These days the flies circled above corpses that couldn't always be placed in the earth quickly enough.
At 4:00 P.M. the teams met roughly in the middle of the soccer pitch; the rest of the soldiers sat down in long rows on the grass to form living touchlines. No one was visibly carrying weapons; there were some guns propped against trees. The players passed the ball to one another, warming up in silence. The Serbs won the toss for choice of ends.
Standing a little way from the others, Kiko and Mickey Mouse gave each other a friendly hug. They knew each other from school, where they'd both had to repeat the eighth grade twice, which was unusual. It was even more unusual for someone to have had to repeat the first grade twice as well, and then the fourth grade and the sixth grade. Once, in the middle of a math test, the boy with the ever-open mouth had asked exactly how you set about learning things. His fellow pupils considered him to be a quiet, kindly colossus who, when asked the date of Columbus's discovery of America, had looked out the window and replied, Colorado beetle. Kiko, on the other hand, was soon among the country's most promising soccer players. While the first-division clubs were vying with each other to recruit Kiko, Mickey Mouse was toiling day and night on his parents' farm, and there was nothing to suggest that better days and better nights would ever come for him.
But come they did—with the war. Where's the war? Mickey Mouse had asked. His mother said: still far away, thank God. Good, he said, whose side are we on? You're a Serb, his father told him. So the next day there was Mickey Mouse, standing in the doorway with a rucksack that, on his broad back, looked like a makeup bag. He told his father, his father's ten fried eggs, the pale blue tiled kitchen, the notched cherry-wood table, the dusty yard, the stink of muck from the cowsheds, the plow that had strengthened the muscles in his back, and the countless sacks of maize that he kicked hard night after night because he was angry with his father, with the ten fried eggs his father ate every morning, with the table into which he had carved his name, with the yard where his father had knocked him down in the dust and kicked him, with the muck through which he'd waded all his life, with the plow because he wasn't an ox—good-bye, he told them all, good-bye, I'm going away, I'm going to war.
Mickey Mouse walked for five days, asking the way and saying he was Serbian, until he was given a gun. Can I go shooting now? he asked, and he learned how to load the gun and take the safety catch off. He was sent to Mount Igman, where the Serbian troops were preparing for the siege of Sarajevo. Mickey Mouse never complained. He liked these remote places better than his home, although his comrades said God had abandoned them long ago, and a God like that doesn't come back again. This place lies behind God's feet, they said.
Mickey Mouse didn't mind his nickname. I like the duck and the dog too, he said, though Pluto is rather clumsy. He hadn't been called Mickey Mouse at school though, so Kiko still called him Milan.
Milan, said Kiko, putting his hand on Mickey Mouse's upper arm, your lot fucked up Ćora last night.
By way of answer Mickey Mouse raised his eyebrows, ducked his head and took a deep breath. His face lost any kind of symmetry. It looked like unhewn stone, pale and scarred with acne. Kiko was waiting for some kind of response, but Mickey Mouse just breathed out and closed his ever-open mouth.
A shrill whistle signaled the end of warm-up.
Mickey Mouse took Kiko's hand off his arm. Kiko, they told me: Mickey Mouse, you're playing in defense again. He didn't add that he was the only man who had fired a shot that night.
A heavy bird flew up from the woods, and the big man went back to the defenders.
Gavro, the key player on the Serbian side, a black-haired, curly-headed man with a raven tattooed on his shoulder, whistled as the bird flew away. Gavro never stopped whistling or humming tunes except to talk or eat. Even in his sleep he would snore a resonant “Blue Danube” through his mustache. The bird flew over the clearing and soared south toward the valley beyond the trees. Gavro picked up the ball and went over to the ref, who was gazing at his watch as if spellbound.
Fuck the sun, man, what are you waiting for, a sign from Allah? We don't have all day!
It had been quiet on Mount Igman more frequently over the last few months, particularly at night when the guns in the clearing and the valley fell silent. But there hadn't been such peace and quiet here behind God's feet as there was now, before kickoff, as Gavro began to whistle something that could have been Glenn Miller.
General Mikado, commander of the Serbian unit, slapped the back of the whistling man's head, took the ball away from his foot, whistled shrilly through his own fingers and made the first pass. You can whistle for the end of play seven seconds early, called the sturdy commander with the slanting eyes to which he owed his nickname. He raced past the ref and swerved to the right wing, where he was to set up a score of one-nil for the Serbs less than two minutes later—a ball centered toward the head of the whistling Gavro.
Mickey Mouse made it two-nil for the Serbs with one of his mighty shots. He captured the ball near the corner flag—a gun rammed into the ground—and forged through the enemy ranks accompanied by shouts of derision. He didn't seem to mind the insults this time. He was still in his own half when he aimed for Dino Zoff, his mouth wide open as always. A one-two, a feint, the shot at goal,
uh!
, and Dino Zoff couldn't deflect the ball properly. Mickey Mouse stopped abruptly and watched the ball sail through the air with his arm raised, as if waving an old friend off on a long journey.
The Territorials had their one good chance of a goal at the end of the first half, when Kiko finished a solo run through the opposing defenders with a shot that hit the woodwork of the spruce goalpost. Gavro countered this shot by passing to Marko, who then went on the attack, but Meho from the Terri-torials got to the ball just a tad faster and hammered it with all his might out of their penalty area, off the playing field, out of the clearing and into the forest.
Oh, fuck the forest fairy, said Meho, shaking his head and crouching down as if he wanted to throw up. The referee whistled and pointed first at Meho, then at the forest—a gesture unlikely to be seen in any other soccer game in the world—meaning: Meho bungled this, so he has to retrieve it. But no one could give him a plan of just where the mines were planted; presumably no such thing existed. The mines, however, most certainly did exist. Even before the front lines were entrenched around the clearing, the Serbs had lost two men in the forest during an attempt to come up on the Territorials from behind, and a third man had lost a leg. That's right, they'd shouted from the Territorial positions at the time, take 'em all back like good lads and don't leave any of them lying around, shame about losing the goats though.
Dino Zoff took Meho's arm. For God's sake, Meho, he whispered, haven't we been over this a thousand times? A good defender doesn't knock the ball away! Good clearance behind, short passes, it can't be that difficult.
Can't be that difficult, Meho whispered to himself as he arrived at the edge of the forest with two paramedics in attendance. All the players and both touchlines were looking his way. Someone waved and Meho waved back. The ball, about sixty-five feet inside the forest, was lying peacefully on a bed of moss under a reddish fern. The sun was flooding the woodland with bright light that slanted across the slight rise of the forest floor, which concealed dozens of mines from the trembling man in the Red Star shirt. The shirt! In panic, Meho took off the red and white strip of his favorite team, kissed the star, folded it carefully, and laid it on the ground.