How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (20 page)

My town of Višegrad has grown into the mountains in all directions. My Višegrad rises from two rivers, they've made a date here, the Drina and the Rzav, an endless date, going on forever, every second. Who was here first? I call from the estuary. And what did they look like and what did they sound like: those last ten seconds when the water was still on its way and then—suddenly—you met?

The mountains accompany the Drina, they fold her in between steep rocks, making what I say echo. The higher the rocks, the deeper the river, it seems to me, and the more lost you are, whether you're in a boat or here on the bank.

Yesterday no one could have guessed I was going to win, today I ride my bike along the Drina and I just want to go fishing. It's early morning, it's Sunday, the mist whistles around my ears, it's chilly. My mother has made sandwiches and put two apples in my rucksack. You can get some on the way, said my father, taking the apples out again and down to the studio with him.
Still
Life of a Shipwrecked Regime and a Yugo Broken Down on a Stony Road
is the name of the picture he's been working on for weeks.

Smoked ham,
kaymak,
plum jam spread thickly on rye bread. My two rods stick out of my rucksack. Two years ago Uncle Miki promised to give me an even better one every birthday. Uncle Miki is someone who has almost as good an idea of fishing as I do, and is not a man to break his promises.

I want to live to be a hundred and thirty years old beside the Drina.

I've never been this far on my own before. The fact that it's early morning and a Sunday doesn't stop the farmers from working in the narrow fields. Three women with head scarves holding hoes in their big hands straighten up and watch me go by. The rocks and the river hem the earth in; the fields are long and narrow. So is the apple orchard where, on my father's instructions, I steal apples, two red and two yellow: an unfenced strip of land between the rocks and the water. I'm just about to get back on my bike when the sun breaks through the mist, breaks so abruptly through the still thick swathes of it that its light splinters, the splinters fall on the river and cut into the rippling surface, glittering. Almost hidden by the long-haired branches of two weeping willows and the towering white cliffs, it sparkles brightest in a little bay beyond the orchard. From now on its name will be the Lagoon of Light, because unusual places need a name, it's the same as with stars. I lean the bike against the rickety fence; a lizard immediately climbs onto the handlebars and darts its tongue out at me. I tap my forehead and go through the arch of exuberant willow branches to the water, which is still racing with splinters of sun. A moss-grown tree trunk lies across the bay, rimmed on the left by rocks with peaks that you can only guess at in the misty air. A hawk takes off from the tree trunk, its slate-blue feathers disappear into the mist, the tail feathers are red;
kyu,
cries the hawk,
ket-ket,
it cries, turning head over heels in the air as if this is all great fun. The fluttering of its pointed wings dies away slowly, then there's no sound but the wind in the willow trees. The silence leans forward. I look around, from here I can't see the fence anymore, or the apple trees or the road; I'm in a room, a lagoon of light.

I unpack my rods and sit down on a stone by the water. Here the river swerves into a branching embrace; I'm sitting in the crook of its elbow. Grandpa Slavko says the Drina is a bold river. That's why I don't mind when grown-ups call me bold. I think being bold is a good thing, and I shout at the water: you bold—you beautiful—bold—river—beautiful river. The canyon echoes;
kyu, ket-ket,
replies the hawk, and something large throws up foam in the river; perhaps the hawk has dropped a stone. But the splashing is deeper and lasts longer than the usual meeting of stone and water. I can't see rings or ripples anywhere, it can't have been a stone, perhaps it was the Drina herself, clearing her throat? The wind grows stronger, the Drina takes a breath and asks: what do you mean, bold?

I scrape up some of the earth from the bank with the toe of my shoe and tread on it, because that's such a nice feeling under your sole. I don't know, I say, perhaps because you're unapproachably muddied and fast in autumn, you don't freeze over in winter, you flood everything in spring, and you drowned my Grandpa Rafik like a kitten in summer.

I wait. The Drina is silent. The rocks aren't silent. Stones come away and tumble into the river. The Lagoon of Light grows darker. There's a rumble farther up the mountains. The Drina does not reply. I get my can of bait and my rods out of the rucksack.
Kyu. Ket-ket.
I am angry because the Drina is silent. Aren't you going to say something? Don't you even remember Grandpa Rafik?

I push the ball of bait down below the surface, briefly, then angrily I throw it out. Breadcrumbs, gingerbread and ground licorice, oat flakes, chopped maggots. The ball lands with a hollow splash, and where it falls the Drina asks: what did your grandpa look like?

You should know better than I do, I say, dipping my hands in to wash them. You saw him last, and I was still very little.

I'm sorry.

Well, I
was
very little.

Would you like to swim?

Thanks, but not so soon after talking about death.

I decide on a plain hook, size six. Do the fishhooks hurt you? I ask.

Why don't you ask the fish?

I put the first worm on the hook and cast it out. The float moves slowly with the current.

What does it feel like, fish swimming about in you?

It tickles when they jump.

I pass my hand over the surface. Does it tickle when someone throws an old washing machine into you too?

Those bastards!

I straighten up and pull the line in. The worm is still on the hook. I cast again, a little farther to the left, closer to the rocks. Drina? How come you don't speak in dialect?

Do you?

I look at the float and don't answer. If I say no, the river will reply: well, then! Perhaps if I don't say anything she will go on of her own accord, telling me what good friends she really is with the Rzav, how much the dam bothers her, and whether rivers feel afraid too. I don't say how much I envy her because she can see so much, from her source to the river Save, up to the sky, down into the ground, right, left, it's quite a view.

The Rzav is a fine gentleman, she says, a good colleague, although he has his fits of anger every spring and bursts his banks. And the dam closes my mouth, flowing fast is like shouting out loud. Yes, she admits, she does feel fear. She defies the winter cold, the autumn rains don't bother her, but she's afraid the shooting will infect us with war too. Up against the rocks she complains, she's been through countless wars, each more dreadful than the last. She has had to carry away so many corpses, so many blown-up bridges lie at rest on her bed. I must believe her, she says, her waters are murky by the bank, nothing in the world suffers like the stones of a bridge without their bridge. And she has never been able to hide, or close her eyes to crimes, she says, foaming angrily, I don't even have eyelids! I know no sleep, I can't save anyone, I can't prevent anything. I want to cling to the bank, but I can't hold fast to anything. I'm a horrible state of aggregation! Look, no hands, not in all my long life! When I fall in love I can't kiss, when I'm happy I can't strike the accordion keys. Yes, Aleksandar, I have a wonderful view, a wonderful view and all for nothing.

Once or twice the float jerks. I stand up, I guess, at a third bite, the float goes right down. I pull in and immediately feel the weight on the rod. I give out a little more line, pull it in again—and I know I have him. He tires quickly, a young Danube salmon. I give him back to the Drina, and she lets him leap above the surface.

Drina, I need a bigger one. If Grandpa Slavko is going to cook, we need a proper fish. What do you think? Will Carl Lewis win the hundred meters? I ask, casting again, but the river gives no more answers. The wind blows more strongly, or is it a sobbing from the ravine, or would the mist like to say something too? It disperses, and now the sun is there for the lagoon again, the grasshoppers are there for the lagoon,
ket-ket,
calls the hawk, plunging into the ravine,
ket-ket,
and I wonder if the Drina has goose bumps at this moment—look at the ripples on the surface—
ket-ket, kyu, ket-ket.

11 February 2002

Dear Asija,

Did I make you up? Did I guide our hands to the light switch together because of some touching story about children in wartime? You never told me your last name, but all the same I've addressed every letter as if I knew it. I remember the morning of the soldiers' dance. The architecture of the town was rain clouds, camouflage colors and splintered glass. Edin and I wanted to do something completely normal, we wanted to feel something as simple as the weight of a fish on the line. You don't come into that part of the story. You don't come into it, frightened on the stairway, or throwing stones into the river, I don't see your beautiful hair among the soldiers looting at their leisure. You didn't come with me, we never said good-bye, Asija.

No more letters. I'm getting drunk and calling Bosnia, so forgive the theatricality. The clock on my laptop says 11:23 ÇÃ.ÇÀ., Monday, 11 February 2002. What day was it when we switched the light on? No more letters, Asija, did you ever really exist?

I'm Asija. They took Mama and Papaaway with them. My name has a meaning.Your pictures are horrible

Father is waking me up: Aleksandar, there's no school today, we're going to Granny's, get dressed, I'll tell you what to take.

People grow in their sleep.

Any moment now there'll be a flash. I wait to be turned back to a day—and yes, the computer shows it; a Monday—when I'm afraid of my father. Afraid of his list of things I'm to pack, afraid of his warning: only what you need. Afraid because he doesn't say why.

What do I need?

Any moment now there'll be a flash, and an almost forgotten feeling will become the sight of cobwebs clogged with dust on the cellar walls as we wait for the next hit. I make a list of all the things I can remember in my grandmother's cellar. Worn-out ironing boards, headless dolls, duffel bags containing shirts that smell of old pumpkin, coal and potatoes and onions, moths and cat's pee. Lightbulbs flickering as shells explode. Goose bumps and yet more goose bumps. Not because the fear is so great, but because going to sleep in peacetime and waking up at war is so unimaginable.

“7:23 A.M., Monday, 6 April 1992.” There's no school today. My mother sits in the living room sewing banknotes into her skirt.

My father will give the signal for everything that was unimaginable before we woke up, both through what he says and through the nervous state he's in. Father's uncertainty and the first shells make everything that was good before the unimaginable happened retreat into the distance. Thinking of setting fire to a frog is further away than Japan; dreams of the curves under Jasna's shirt are so out of place that I feel ashamed of them; plum picking is suspended for now, the secret signs showing how Edin should run toward the invisible defenders in our games are pointless. What's going to happen is so improbable that there'll be no improbability left for a made-up story.

I make a list of things I was never punished for. Setting fire to the board in school. Putting frogs, pigeons and cats in Čika Veselin's apartment after he called Uncle Bora a steamroller. Looking through the window when Zoran's Aunt Desa visited the tired laborers working on the dam. Throwing snowballs at windshields. Phoning presidents of the local Committee and saying in a disguised voice: this is Tito speaking, you're useless. Stealing those pencil sharpeners and exercise books from the department store. Breaking Granny's vase.

Why aren't you at work, Papa?

Father presses the drawing pins on my Red Star poster more firmly into the wall with his thumbs. Pack the biggest rucksack, he says. Seven pairs of underpants. Rainproof jacket. Cap. Stout shoes. Wear your sneakers. Two pairs of trousers. A thick pullover, two or three shirts and T-shirts, not too many. Your green fishing jacket, the one with all the pockets. A towel, toothpaste, toothbrush, soap. I've put handkerchiefs and your passport on the table downstairs for you . . . do you have a favorite book?

Yes.

Good, nods Father, he smooths out my no-one-could-have-guessed-you'd-win certificate and doesn't close the door when he goes out.

“7:43 A.M., Monday, 6 April 1992.” There'll be a pocketknife lying beside the handkerchiefs and a notepad with the addresses and phone numbers of all our friends and relations. Father will be in his studio. The canvases, the pictures, the paints, the brushes—he stacks everything in a corner and covers it with blankets. I crouch on the stairs, watching. He pushes my old mattress in front of the canvases and puts his beret on top of the lot. He closes the door. We drive to Granny's; the tall apartment building has a large cellar. The sound of the first shell is cramped and polished in the big cellar. That's what I think: cramped and polished. Not like in a film, not exploding seriously, no shaking, nothing trickling down. Something heavy without enough room to break into pieces properly—cramped. And free of any rushing noise, clear, clean, metallically smooth—polished. The cramped thing is injected into the cellar walls and Emilija Slavica Krsmanovic burps in the silence after the fiftieth shell.

“12:21 A.M., Tuesday, 12 February 2002.” I make a list of Granny's neighbors who came to shelter in the cellar, like us. I add all the neighbors from our street that I can think of. On another sheet of paper I write “Bars, restaurants, hotels,” and under that: Café Galerie. Estuary Restaurant. Hotel Bikavac. Hotel Višegrad. Hotel Vilina Vlas.

I surf through search-engine entries:

“višegrad genocide
handke
shame responsibility”

“victim innocent bombardment of belgrade”

“milošević international interest fades”

I scroll through discussion groups, I read diatribes and nostalgic reveries, click and click and click and note down other people's memories, Montenegrin jokes, cookery recipes, names of heroes and enemies, eyewitness accounts, reports from the front, the Latin names of the fish in the Drina. I download new Bosnian music, I click on the first link: “
den haag
own goal european union
srebrenica
.” I read that the war criminal Radovan Karadžic is in Belgrade, and here my computer crashes. I press the Restart key. My face is reflected in the black screen and I suddenly don't know what I'm looking for, here in my apartment with a view of the Ruhr, thousands of miles from my river Drina. The screen saver of the bridge in Višegrad comes up, but I didn't even take that photo myself.

“4:14 P.M., Thursday, 9 April 1992.” The truck drives up. Six men get out. Two stay there drinking Coca-Cola. They're wearing boots. Four peer through the ground-floor windows. They cross the yard. Krsmanovic and Spahic. Two families? Mixed marriage? A case of subletting? The lock gives way. Two of them search the living room. Two of them go down to the cellar. They shoot the cellar door open. They pull the blankets away. They tear holes in the still life titled
The Snake and the Optimistic Letter
to a Young Democracy
and
Portrait of B. as Virtuoso on the Tender
Violin.
They push the old mattress aside. They go to the trouble of breaking every single brush. They paint each other's faces with acrylic paint. They're wearing sneakers. They kick through the canvases. One of them puts the beret on his head.

I phone Granny. I wake her up. She sounds worried: why are you calling so late?

Granny, is the green house with the peculiar roof still there? Is the gym still in use, what's being played there, what league are we in?

Aleksandar . . . ?

Granny, it's important. I read about the building in Pionirska Street in the paper. Has it burned right down? What happened to Čika Aziz? Did the soldiers ever find him? Are Čika Hasan and Čika Sead still alive?

I've made lists. Granny doesn't answer.

What about the bridges? Has there been another flood since we left?

You always used to count your footsteps, says Granny in a calm, sleepy voice. You measured the whole town on your walks.

Two thousand, three hundred and forty-nine steps from your place to our home, I say, surprised that I still remember that after ten years.

Your legs are longer now, says Granny, come here and walk around again.

I've written about the two mosques, although I know they were torn down. Friends, pages of names, pages of nicknames, lists upon lists, betting on my memory. I've made lists, and now I have to see it all.

I'm booking a flight this very evening.

You ought to wait for the plum blossom and come by bus. Granny's voice has none of the crazy lighthearted tone of her earlier phone calls. Don't expect a holiday, Aleksandar. We can wait.

Granny?

You're late, and I'll have to tidy up. You've never been here to help me, and soon it will be spring.

I'm sorry. We all are.

Granny?

I'm looking forward to it, Aleksandar, I'll fry you minced meat and warm up the milk.

“harry hitler potter miloševic
gotovina deli
c
”

“there is no absolute evil and no absolute memory”

“WHERE WERE YOU ALEKSANDAR KRSMANOVIĆ?”

“low-cost flights to sarajevo”

I ring 00 38 733 for Sarajevo, and then add a string of digits at random. I ask for Asija. There's no Asija anywhere, usually I don't even get a connection. Several times I raise voices that are sleepy first, then angry. An answering machine. Hello? It's me, Aleksandar, I'm coming. Are you there? Are you there, Asija?

“10:09 A.M., Saturday, 11 April 1992.” On the fifth day of the siege, shells land in the mountains, sailing down into the town only occasionally. Cows and sheep crowd the yard outside the apartment building; hooves tread the concrete in among the Fiats and the Yugos.

Refugees have moved into the cellar and the stairway overnight. Old people and mothers and babies wrapped up in pieces of cloth like hot rolls. They're looking for shelter in the big building because there are no buildings left to shelter them in their villages—no big ones, no little ones, not one is left intact. Only half walls, soot and cellars, and what does a cellar look like without a building? With my paper on my knees, I paint an uncracked glass.

Let them stay! The more the merrier! Walrus decides, and his voice echoes right through the stairwell. He's become something like the mayor of the building, second only to President Aziz, who has the right kind of gun to be a president. Walrus wins at Uno against the farmers; I learn the rules by watching.

Our horses have been taken away from us. Our sons would have been taken away from us too if they hadn't already gone to war, sighed the farmers, mourning their horses; they lower their eyes thinking of their sons; they lament for their girls.

They won't stop at our villages, says a man with a twirled mustache. I ask his name. I write “Ibrahim” on a mug and pour him water. The toothless women chew bread with their mouths open. They smell sour and lie down in the corridor to sleep. You have to climb over them; they wake up and curse you feebly. I don't call them refugees, I say: protégées. They themselves have been protecting a girl with such bright hair that I have to ask my father if there's a color word to describe such brightness.

He says: beautiful.

I say: beautiful isn't a color.

Beautiful and her uncle with the twirled mustache eat in the cellar with us. Ibrahim waits until Beautiful has gone to sleep with her head on his lap, and then he quietly tells us about their flight. He and his niece were weak and hungry when they met the other farmers. They fed them and put Beautiful, who wasn't well, in a half Lada that was being pulled by two donkeys. We are the last of our village, says Ibrahim; he thinks for a moment, we are the last of nowhere. Our houses are gone. I'm telling you all this so that you will know who you're dealing with, but first I want to sleep. And then, good people, then I want to shave, my beard is full of memories of the worst night of my life. Ibrahim strokes Beautiful's hair. The child has lost everything, he says, everything and everyone.

He doesn't have to say any more. I'll never let Beautiful out of my sight, I won't let anything happen to her ever again. Beautiful says nothing. Beautiful can sit so still that she's invisible. When Beautiful isn't near me I look for her. Beautiful is clutching a shabby old bag. A dirty, scruffy teddy bear dangles from the strap of the bag.

My name is Aleksandar. I paint unfinished pictures, look, here are books without any dust, there's Yuri Gagarin without Neil Armstrong, there's a dog without a collar. That's Nena Fatima with her hair unbraided. My name is Aleksandar, and there's always something not so beautiful that's left out of the pictures. Do you like boys with big ears?

I'm Asija. They took Mama and Papa away with them. My name means something. Your pictures are horrible.

Where are Asija's parents?

Do I know any of the soldiers out there? Could Uncle Miki be with them?

What do we need? A pocketknife costing fifty marks and a little luck, is that all?

How heavy do memories weigh in a beard?

“5:09 A.M., Tuesday, 12 February 2002.” I've written down all the names of streets in Višegrad, all the children's games. I've made a list of the things that you could find in the school, including the five hundred pencil sharpeners that Edin and I sprinkled over the rubble left by the bombing, like Hansel and Gretel. I want to trace the patterns of the past. There's a box in my grandmother's bedroom containing ninety-nine unfinished pictures. I'll go home and finish painting every one of them.