How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (3 page)

Sitting there saying nothing today, my father looks as if he doesn't have any muscles. He's been staying with Granny since Grandpa died. Granny phoned late yesterday and asked how the boy was doing. She thought it was my mother who'd picked up the phone, so I said nothing. We're going to wash Slavko now, she added, and said good-bye. I imagined Grandpa being washed and dressed for his own funeral. I didn't see any faces, just hands pulling Grandpa about. The hands threw all the bed linens out of the bedroom and boiled the sheets, you do that when there's a dead person in the place. Little veins in your eyes burst from washing your dead father; your hands get smaller and you have to keep looking at them. My silent father sits on the edge of my bed with his red-rimmed eyes, hands on his knees, palms turned up. When I'm as old as Father I'll have the lines on his face. Lines show how well you've lived. I don't know if lots of lines mean you've lived better. Mother says no, but I've heard the opposite too.

I get up. Father straightens the sheet and plumps up the pillow. Do you have anything black to wear?

Not: Grandpa.

Not: Grandpa's dead.

Not: Aleksandar, your grandpa won't be coming back.

Not: Life can never be as quick as a sudden heart attack.

Not: Grandpa's only asleep—I'd resent that even more than the way he opens the window now and hangs the blanket out to air.

I take a black shirt off its hanger. Suddenly I realize that my father is counting on me. He understands that magic is our last chance. We can start right away. I say, I just have to fetch something from Grandpa's apartment first. Something important.

On the way in the car he says: Granny and your uncles have gone ahead. Hurry up, everybody else is already there. “There” he calls it.

Not a word from him about the funeral, and I don't say that I'm the most powerful magician-grandson in the nonaligned states. Don't worry, step on the accelerator and I'll get my grandpa back for me and your father back for you. I don't say anything because suddenly being a child seems so difficult.

Grandpa's apartment. I take a deep breath. The kitchen. Fried onions, nothing left of Grandpa. Bedroom. I press my face against the shirts. Living room. I sit down on the sofa. That's where Grandpa was sitting. Nothing. I go into the corner behind the TV set. Nothing. The cobwebs are still there. I look out of the window into the yard. Nothing. Our Yugo with its engine running. Father has got out. My magic hat on the glass case. I climb on a chair, carefully fold up the hat and put it in my rucksack. The rucksack! I search it for the magic wand, and voilà! I was going to show the wand to my best friend Edin, I remember, and for demonstration purposes I was going to break some unimportant bone in our history teacher. He skips almost every lesson with Partisans in it, even though there've never been better battles than the fighting of the People's Liberation Army and Red Star Belgrade's matches. Red Star Belgrade is my favorite soccer team. We almost always win and when we lose it's a tragedy. Grandpa's death has saved the history teacher for now.

Like all the others I wear black, but wearing black can't be all you have to do at a funeral, so I imitate Uncle Bora and my father in turn. When Uncle Bora bows his head, I bow mine. When Father exchanges a few words with someone, I listen to what he says and repeat the words to someone else. I scratch my stomach because Uncle Bora is scratching his own big belly. It's hot; I unbutton my shirt because Father is unbuttoning his. That's the grandson, people whisper.

Auntie Typhoon has caught up with the pallbearers and has to be called back. She asks if she can help. Oh-this-slow-creeping-about, she says, it'll-be-the-death-of-me.

Great-Grandpa and Great-Granny walk behind the coffin. Great-Grandpa isn't wearing a hat on his long white hair. When I get to be as old as he is, mine will be even longer. I'd like to tell him about my magic plan because he's a magician himself, but I can't find a good opportunity. Grandpa Slavko once told me that long ago Great-Grandpa mucked out the biggest stable in Yugoslavia in a single night because in return its owner promised him his daughter's hand in marriage—today she's my GreatGranny. Grandpa wasn't sure just when it all happened. Two hundred years ago? I suggested, and Uncle Miki tapped his fore-head: there wasn't any Yugoslavia back then, midget; those were the royal stables after the First World War. I liked Uncle Miki's version because it made Great-Granny into a princess. Grandpa said Great-Grandpa didn't just muck out the gigantic stable; on the very same night he helped two cows to calve, he won an immense sum of money against the best rummy players in town, and he repaired an electric lightbulb in his father-in-law's house—which I thought was the most difficult task of all, when you remember that nothing in the world is deader than a dead lightbulb. None of it could have been done without magic. Princess GreatGranny said nothing about it, but smiled a smile full of meaning. You should have seen his arms, she said; no one ever had eyes of a color that suited his arms as well as my blue-eyed Nikola.

I stand beside the grave and I know it can be done. After all, I magically made it possible for Carl Lewis to break the world record. So not all Americans are capitalists; at least Comrade Lewis isn't because my wand and pointy hat work magic exclusively along Party lines. I stand beside the grave where Grandpa, formerly chairman of the Višegrad Local Committee, is going to be buried, and I know it can work.

Great-Grandpa climbs down into the grave and tears roots and stones out of the earth walls with both hands. Oh, what a sight! he says. My son, my son!

It's hard to imagine Grandpa Slavko as anyone's son. Sons are sixty at the most. In fact, almost all the people saying goodbye to Grandpa today are around sixty. The women have black scarves over their hair and wear perfume because they want to drown out the smell of death. Death smells like freshly mown grass here. The men murmur, they have colored badges on the breast pockets of their black jackets, they clasp their hands behind their backs and I clasp mine too.

Father helps Great-Grandpa out of the grave and stands behind me. His hands press down firmly on my shoulders. The speeches begin, the speeches go on and on, the speeches are never going to end, and I don't want to interrupt anyone making a speech with my magic spells, that would be rude. I'm sweating. The sun is blazing down; cicadas are chirping. Uncle Bora mops the sweat off his face with a pale blue handkerchief. I mop my forehead with my sleeve. Once I secretly watched a funeral where there weren't any long, boring speeches, just a short incomprehensible one. A bearded man wearing a woman's dress sang and waved a golden ball about on the end of a chain. Smoke was coming out of the ball, and death smelled of green tea. Later I found out that the man was a priest. We don't have priests—the people who make speeches at our funerals are sixty years old with badges on their breast pockets. No one tells any jokes. They all praise Grandpa, often saying exactly the same thing, as if they'd been copying from each other. They sound like women praising the virtues of cake. As the dead can't hear anymore when they're in the ground, the last thing they hear up here ought to make them feel good. But correct as my grandpa was, he would always put anyone who tried sweet-talking him right. No, Comrade Poljo, he would say, I have not been busy reforming our country every single day, last Friday I did nothing at all to lower the rate of inflation, I slept in late on Saturday instead of going ahead to implement the plan in our regional collectives, and on Sundays I go walking with my grandson the magician. We always go a different way and think up stories, that's the great thing about Višegrad, you never run out of new ways to walk and stories to tell—little stories, great ones, comical and tragical, they're all our stories! And where else would you find a place where a grandson knows more stories than his grandpa? When he was this big, Grandpa would say, raising his thumb, forefinger and middle finger, he thought up stories about the later life of Mary Poppins. Comrade Poppins gets tired of her silly queen, changes her name to Marica, moves into our high-rise building in Yugoslavia and marries Petar Popovic the music teacher. He's already married, and allergic to umbrellas, but he plays the piano so well that Marica can't resist him. She enchants him with her singing and her tightly laced boots. Marica flies over the town with her umbrella, she doesn't want to be a children's nanny anymore, she gets a job on the assembly line of the Partisan machine-tools factory, whereupon it exceeds the planned production quota twice over, month after month.

But I'm straying from the subject, Grandpa would say, snapping his fingers, I really had something else to say: I don't always have good advice for everyone. For instance, for young people—I really don't know what to tell them to do, except perhaps to trust us less and listen to Johann Sebastian more. It's also not true that I carry coals down to some old widow's cellar for her, Grandpa would say, dismissing the notion, I'm not particularly fond of old widows! In one thing, however, you are right, Grandpa would have said, taking Granny's hand and running his thumb over the back of it. I help my Katarina do the dishes, I vacuum the apartment, and I love to cook. Katarina has never had to spend all day on her feet, not as long as I could stand on mine! And why shouldn't men cook? Best of all, I like cooking catfish for my grandson and my proud wife Comrade Katarina. With lemon, garlic, and potatoes with chopped parsley. And there's one thing I treasure above all others, Comrade Poljo: Aleksandar is the best angler from here to the Danube, his grandpa's sunshine, that's what he is.

I don't know how long I stood, deep in thought, beside Grandpa's coffin. I don't know when I freed myself from my father's heavy hands and ran around the grave with the smell of summer rain rising from it. Or when I put on my hat with its blue and yellow stars turning around the crescent moon, although on the day of the evening when he died a death that proved stronger than any magic, Grandpa had told me that stars didn't turn around moons, moons turned around stars. How long did I point my wand at the five-pointed star at the head end of the coffin? How often did I hit out when people tried to carry me away? What curses did I utter? How much did I cry? And will I ever forgive Carl Lewis for using up all of my magic power on his world record, leaving none for Grandpa? All of it went during those 9.86 seconds on 25 August 1991, the day before the day before the evening when someone on the
megdan
might not have heard a mother whispering to her son: you had a loving grandpa, and he will never come back. But his love for us is never-ending, his love will never be gone. Aleksandar, you have a never-ending grandpa now.

We made a promise about stories, Mama, the son said, nodding, and closed his eyes as if he were working magic without his hat and magic wand, a very simple promise: never to stop telling them.

How sweet dark red is, how many oxen
you need to pull down a wall,why Kraljevic Marko's horse is relatedto Superman, and how war can come to a party

I can't eat any more, I let myself drop and lie there among the buzzing sweetness of the crushed fruit. Little flies buzz around my head; the dark red sweetness of the plums is sticky in my mouth, around my lips and on my hands; I'm feeding the flies as if they were birds. We're billing and cooing.

Plum-picking time in Veletovo: Great-Granny Mileva and Great-Grandpa Nikola have invited us to the village harvest festival. The whole family are here, some of them still wearing black in mourning for Grandpa Slavko. Black is the opposite of summer and so that grudging bastard the sun feels insulted, says Great-Granny, feels insulted and burns down on their backs. She wipes the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand.

Grandpa's death is the very opposite of summer, the most opposite of all.

I get my love of plums from my mother. Recently, when she saw how I was looking forward to the plum harvest, she told me that in the last months of her pregnancy she did nothing but watch figure skating and eat large quantities of plums: plums all through the day, she said, minced meat and chocolate in the evenings, now and then carrots, and coffee by the liter when I was thirsty.

And a cigarette now and then, right? finished my father, without looking up from his newspaper.

Father slept through my birth.

I'm like my mother in my fondness for plums and minced meat, and I've painted a plum without a stone surrounded by minced meat for both of us. Mother has sweet dark redness all over her face like a beard too. You'll have to eat some lunch, all the same, she warns me from up on the ladder, don't eat so fast!

Don't eat so many would have been better advice, because I've just broken the world record for plum eating, and now I hold two world records for indigestion. I lie there and let the flies buzz around me.

Plums are dusty fruit.

That's the first thing you've laughed at, Aleksandar, said my mother when we were talking about the harvest. She didn't add: since Grandpa died.

These roads are made for an arse, not a car! cursed my father yesterday morning on the way to Veletovo, looking under the hood of our yellow Yugo and shaking his head.

Yugos are made for four, not six, replied Mother, lighting a cigarette.

That's not the trouble; its contrary nature is the trouble! This is not a car, it's a donkey on wheels! Father kicked the wheel rim.

A donkey . . . Mother began to answer back, but then luckily she went away to smoke her cigarette in the company of the flowers by the roadside.

Even on its very first drive our Yugo, which was brand-new at the time, had stopped on the winding road to Veletovo with its engine still running, as if it just wanted to take a quick look at the view: the brambles covered with ripe blackberries, the stream under the fir trees, ferns the color of my mother's bright red perm. Father had taken his hands off the steering wheel and shrugged: stepping on the accelerator didn't work. Ever since then we've always had to walk part of the way to my great-grandparents' house. On the way home the Yugo will start the first time. The only one of us who can never get used to it is my father.

Yesterday, while he was busy repairing the engine until his fingers were black, I tried to tell my uncles and Nena Fatima that they didn't have to let me win at rummy. The days of giving me a toddler's privileges are over, I cried, I'm only pretending I can't cope with fourteen cards at once to lull you into a false sense of security!

I threw my hand of cards down hard on the middle of the rock around which we were sitting, so as to make a loud sound without raising my voice. My mother was expert at such gestures, she was Comrade in Chief of them. She could leave the table with just a shake of her head, she could put her hands on her hips and frown, and the sound was so loud I felt like stopping my ears.

And, Uncle? I said, tapping Bora's shoulder with my forefinger, if you're going to look at my cards then please hang on to the jack you yourself need, and don't discard it on my behalf, I'm not incompetent!

I know the word “incompetent” from my father. He uses it when there's something political on TV, or when he and Uncle Miki are quarreling about something political they've seen on TV. Incompetence means doing something even though you haven't the faintest idea how to—like governing Yugoslavia, for instance. “Fellow traveler” is another important term, and several times already it's led to me being sent to my room, or the brothers not speaking to each other for days on end. If I had a brother, we'd be the exact opposite of my father and Uncle Miki. We'd talk seriously to each other, and no one would have to be afraid we'd raise our voices.

Uncle Bora said okay, picked up the cards, shuffled them, and we let Nena Fatima win the next game. Behind us, Father slammed the hood of the car down and Bora offered him his pack of cigarettes. We started to walk the rest of the way.

My father was a Veletovo smoker. He smoked the only cigarettes of his life on the way from our stalled Yugo to my great-grandparents' house. He did it again yesterday—two packs in two hours. When we had to take a rest for Uncle Bora's sake, because he was so badly out of breath he couldn't go on, I imagined our Yugo minus its exhaust on the road to Veletovo. Early morning, dew gleaming on the grass, birds twittering, and the rest of our family, whose Yugos never break down, hooting as they overtook us.

I'm doubled up with stomach cramps under a sky full of ripe fruit on bending boughs, and I badly need to go to the bathroom. Quick, up the hill, across the veranda where Uncle Bora is nailing plastic tablecloths to the tables. This morning, when we were deciding who'd stay here to pick plums and who'd go and put the furniture up on the veranda ready for the party, he was the only man who ponderously turned to go. A-little-tree- climbing-would-do-you-good, Auntie Typhoon called after him, all in a rush. How fast her tongue went! Her words first overtook what she was saying herself, then anyone listening.

It might do
me
good but think of the poor trees, said her husband, dismissing this idea, and he dragged his three hundred and thirty pounds up the hill. As if to express his opinion of plums in general he polished an apple on his sleeve and bit into it so hard that the apple broke right apart, and juice ran down both his double chins. Undeterred, the big man made a face and closed his eyes with relish.

This-is-the-end! This-is-the-end! Auntie Typhoon was tearing her hair. Fascinated, we stared at Steamroller and his pregnant natural catastrophe, ah, how delightful love must be, sighed Great-Granny, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.

My aunt speaks at the speed of a German autobahn. For years Uncle Bora has been pounding tar with a steamroller in Germany to make the fastest autobahns in the world, while Auntie Typhoon is a waitress at a service station. If anyone asks me what my uncle does for a living, I don't mention the roller. I say he's a guest worker. Although it puzzles me that there are places where guests have to work, in our family we don't even let a guest do the dishes, but our neighbor Čika Veselin once called Bora a steamroller, that fat skinflint wouldn't need to use any machine, he'd only have to lie down and roll the roads himself. I asked my mother to get Uncle Bora to go on a diet so that he wouldn't grow any fatter and people would stop saying nasty things about him. She thought she was too fat herself at the time, so she was on a diet of plums and minced meat. People say nasty things, she said, not because Bora is fat himself but because they think he has a fat wallet full of deutschmarks.

Guest workers aren't welcome anywhere except in their own families.

Now Uncle Bora is nailing the tablecloths to the tables in slow motion, while down at the foot of the hill Auntie Typhoon is racing around among the trees shaking their branches: we-don't- need-any-rest-go-on-go-on-go-on! Bora is wheezing with a sound like Father's circular saw when it's about to run down.

The cutlery clatters in the plastic bucket that Great-Granny bangs down on the table beside the stack of plates. She plants herself four-square in my way, looking just like her hero the Comrade in Chief of all cowboys, Marshal Rooster, although with forks at her hips instead of Colts: where are you going, jailbird? She's even wearing her eye patch. Every time we visit Veletovo I have to sit with Great-Granny and watch that grumpy drunk Rooster and Mattie Ross quarreling.

That was how I used to look, just like that, only my skin was pinker, sighs Great-Granny, pointing to Miss Ross. GreatGranny's tears as the final credits roll are followed by High Noon on the veranda. In winter when the grasshoppers don't chirp, Great-Granny takes over from them. She presses her lips together, chirping fit to terrify you. She keeps her finger pistols low, she's always quicker on the draw than any tenderfoot around. Great-Granny is faster than the wind, and with her eye patch she can look even more cynical than John Wayne.

Very old people live two lives. In one life they cough, they walk with a stoop, they sigh: oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! In the other life, their eye-patch life, they talk to stinging nettles about the neighbors, they believe they're sheriffs, or they fall in love with deck chairs or bees.

Where are you going, jailbird? Great-Granny's hand moves down to her hip; her thumb takes the safety catch off the fork. I feint to the right, then storm past her on the left and into the house. Oh wow, Great-Granny! High Noon in my guts! Only seconds to go before I break the world record for an accident in my trousers, out of the way!

The new bathroom. The inside bathroom. Great-Grandpa and four oxen demolished half the wall for it, four oxen can do that kind of thing well but two would have been better, then no one would have had to think what to do later about too much hole in the wall and the ripped-out banisters. Great-Grandpa soon found the answer; he fitted the new bathroom next to the balcony—which is smaller now, but the bathroom is bigger, and you can get into it from the balcony through a curtain, fresh air thrown in for free, says Great-Granny. At the same time the four-hundred-year-old outside toilet was jettisoned, and no one ever had to go standing up again. They had the first TV set in the village, years ago, black and white, two channels, the second channel showing busy little scurrying dots for Great-Granny to watch before going to sleep, now the first inside bathroom—my great-grandparents were always twenty-five miles ahead of the times in Veletovo.

There was a party to inaugurate the new bathroom. Abroad they think we have parties here the whole time, says my uncle the guest worker. Which is not entirely right, because we have to spend time clearing up after the parties too. And a party costs a lot, so parents have to go to work in the day. However, it's a fact that my great-grandparents see anything as an excuse for a party. Once they partied through two whole nights because Great-Granny had found a meteorite the size of a man's fist among the carrots. That was an hour after they'd been showing
Superman
on the new TV set. Great-Granny made soup out of the meteorite, six pounds of carrots and seven secret seasonings of her own. The whole village, she cried around midnight when her eyes were glazed and she was trying to uproot an oak tree with a judo hold, the whole village smells of kryptonite! She failed, because Yugoslavian oak trees are stronger than super powers.

All the neighbors came to the party for the bathroom. Even Radovan Bunda from the high mountains, who knew about electricity only by hearsay and who talked to his chickens. By neighbors they don't mean the same in Veletovo as they do in Viegrad. In Veletovo even the Peics count as neighbors, though it's half a day's walk for them to visit my great-grandparents. Not because they're too poor to own a car—they
are
poor, yes, but there isn't any road to drive a car on where they live. The grown-up Peics are all over six and a half feet tall, including the women and the old folk. Once, long ago, I visited their place. I remember the sourish goat's milk, and the wooden toys, and wondering why they didn't build higher ceilings, with all of them being so gigantic. When a baby is born or someone gets married in the Peic family or in ours, we exchange visits. The families are godparents to each other's children and witnesses at weddings. My mother says I didn't have a Peic godparent, though, it has something to do with her and the religion on her side of the family. Nothing bad, says my mother, and she asks: would you have liked to be baptized?

What's that? I ask.

Well, there you are, she says.

Lining up for the new bathroom, the neighbors were shifting restlessly about with bladder pressure and anticipation. Great-Grandpa had first go. He was wearing his black frock coat, he tapped his stomach and he crowed at the top of his voice: haven't gone for four days now! Bong bong, tom tom, bong bong, he beat out a rousing rhythm with the toilet lid.

Some people, including me, clapped along. Everyone was in good humor waiting for the inside bathroom, sixteen spectators, a five-man band to play music, perfect bathroom weather, I said, presenting the show. Great-Granny gave Great-Grandpa a bottle of spirits as solemnly as if she were handing him the Baton of Youth. He put the shot glass on top of the bottle like a hat and stayed sitting on the toilet for forty-five minutes. Outside, the neighbors and relatives began talking in loud voices so as not to hear all the noises inside the new bathroom. When he wasn't groaning and crying out and clattering like a moped, Great-Grandpa sang. I put my ear close to the door so that I could hear his deep voice. How the door vibrated! My GreatGrandpa sounded like the lowest string of a double bass! In his songs, someone called Kraljevic Marko jumped across the river Drina astride a wine-drinking horse and butchered some Turks. So many that I couldn't keep up with the head count. But more exciting than the poor wretched Turks, I thought, was the question of whether all horses who drank wine could fly. When Great-Grandpa came out after forty-five minutes, triumphantly raising his clenched fist, the bottle of spirits was half empty and the shot glass was gone for ever.