How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (8 page)

I told Grandpa Slavko about the historian, and the next day Grandpa came to pick me up from school with his glasses on, in his overcoat, carrying the walking stick he didn't need, and wearing a hat and all his Party decorations. Out in the corridor, we'd been able to hear my grandpa's voice, but not the historian's.

Tito lived his third life on TV too. Partisan films were shown so often that I could act along with the dialogue of some of them. My favorite film is called
The Battle of Neretva
. The Neretva isn't quite as green as the Drina, and the finest bridge over it, in Mostar, has ten arches fewer than ours. I went to Mostar with my class last year. Men were jumping off the fairly high bridge into the Neretva, and everyone clapped. In the film a whole army of people sick with typhoid jump into the river. Their leader cries: follow me, all of you typhoid sufferers, over the river to freedom! Then he drowns. Another saying from
Battle
is: our people sing even when they're killed. If Marx had seen that film, maybe he would have thought of something sad to say.

I wash my hands before meals so as not to get typhoid.

In my second-favorite film, miners blow up an incredible number of Nazis with an incredible number of dynamite sticks. Colliers are left lying in the mine like sailors on the seabed, says one of the miners. A German soldier gazes into the distance and says: we are to blame for being naive and weak. The weak have no place in history. I'm only sorry that I shall die a soldier and not a miner, he says.

Tito also lived on at commemoration ceremonies, rallies, and holiday celebrations. At dismal meetings of elderly men with unironed shirts and women with dyed perms in smoky back rooms, where I spent endless hours in my mother's company. They ate ham and grumbled: in the old days, ah, the old days, well, those were the old days. Even Grandpa Slavko turned quarrelsome there, complaining of this and that, and his bad-tempered carping made him seem ten years grayer than usual. I coughed and had red eyes the next morning.

Last summer, two weeks after Grandpa's death, was the first time I refused to go with my mother to a meeting of former something or others in the basement of the municipal library. Grandpa doesn't have to go anymore either! I said. I stuck to my guns, and Mother didn't look disappointed, she looked frightened. She changed her clothes, painted her fingernails red in front of the bedroom mirror, and then closed the bedroom door. When she kissed me good-bye her breath smelled of wine. I painted our flag with the five-pointed star and kept thinking of Mother's red nails the whole time. After a while I couldn't hold out any longer. I knocked on the studio door until my father admitted to being at home and agreed to go and fetch Mother with me.

The Yugoslavian flag was hanging from a central heating pipe in the library cellar, and a man with glasses perched on the end of his nose was reading aloud from a gigantic tome. But no one turned the gramophone off. There were toothpicks bearing small homemade flags with Tito's portrait on them stuck into cubes of cheese on plates. My mother was tapping her red fingers in time with the music. She was the only woman in the room and the only person there under sixty. On the way from home she'd had her hair done differently. Father stopped in the doorway, playing with the car key. When Mama saw us she slowly stood up and reached for her bag. She didn't say goodbye to anyone. No one said good-bye to her. One man coughed; another stood up and turned the record over. That was the last meeting Mother went to. I couldn't tell if she was particularly happy about it or particularly sad, she just stopped going, the way I suppose I'll stop growing some day. And her hair hadn't really been done differently. My mother just looked unbelievably tired in the smoky light.

Pictures upon pictures of Tito were still around too—in offices, in shop windows, in living rooms next to family portraits, in schools. Tito on a yacht, Tito standing on a speaker's podium, Tito with a girl handing him flowers. You could get a jigsaw puzzle of Tito and E.T. holding hands. So when those pictures were removed from the classrooms, Tito died for the third time. Comrade Jeleni
, known to us as Fizo, still wanted to be called Comrade. He was the only teacher to leave Tito's portrait hanging on the wall that first day of the school year—Tito in his admiral's uniform with a German shepherd dog. Fizo placed himself behind his desk without a word of greeting, put on his glasses, and entered something in the register. You'd better all invest in a workbook and a formula book, said the strictest teacher in our school without looking up; you have a hard year's work ahead of you.

To show that I'd understood how serious the whole business was—the system, new forms of address, the personality cult—I came to school the next day in my dark blue Pioneer uniform, which was much too small for me, but I thought it still looked smart. I sat down in the front row of Mr. Fazlagi
c's class, my back straight and Socialist as Grandpa always demanded. I'd even scrubbed my fingernails clean. I spread my fingers out on the table in front of me as we used to do in the old days when a hygiene supervisor came to inspect the class. At the first question Mr. Fazlagic asked us, I sprang to my feet and said: now let's consider what's left of labor products. There's nothing left except the same old eerie realism, just a jellified mass of indistinguishable human labor, that's to say the expense of the labor force without any thought for what it's expended on.

Three hours' detention. Three teachers invigilated, their grim expressions speaking volumes about the social and political shift in ideology, otherwise known as radical change. If you don't see sense, they threatened me, you'll be here after school every day.

Students are left lying in school like sailors on the bottom of the sea, I said, drawing two diagonal lines in red felt pen on my cheeks; I'm only sorry that I shall die a student and not a miner.

After that there was another voluble and angry exchange, but then I was allowed to go home, because even teachers have a private life. I decided to take a closer look at the meaning of the expressions “provocation,” “family brainwashing,” and “political shifts in ideology otherwise known as radical change.” I knew the meaning of “irony” by now. Irony is when you ask a question and you don't get an answer, you just get trouble instead.

Edin turns to me and says: Jasna's shirt. Edin, Comrade in Chief of human biology, explains what's making Jasna's shirt swell out like bodywork that has to be flattened when a car's been in an accident. Friday, third period, Mr. Fazlagi
c wipes the board clean with such vigor that water drips off the sponge and runs up his sleeve. Edin and I quickly agree that Edin's explanation is not quite the right way to describe those swellings, because what's suddenly appeared under Jasna's shirt has nothing to do with car repair workshops. Nor is Jasna's red shirt in any way connected with bent axles. It is rather clearer to Edin than to me why, when he and I come anywhere near her, we act as if she were both the most important and the most unimportant thing in the world. Kneading bread, stroking a dog, trying to find a radio station, that's the best way to work on those nontechno-logical swellings under Jasna's shirt, Edin explains. You have to be gentle and precise. You have to master the art of touching and do it perfectly or girls will run away from you, whispers the Comrade in Chief of biology, and he looks dreamily at Jasna. If I could touch her just once, he sighs, then I would die happy.

I've never heard the word “precise” in Edin's mouth before, and when his voice rises a little on the word “perfectly,” Mr. Fazlagic flings his bunch of keys down on the teacher's desk with full force. Silence. All of a sudden. Precisely.

The bunch of keys is an experience. For Edin, for me, for Jasna too. Because Edin, Jasna and I are personally responsible for Mr. Fazlagic's irritation. The former Comrade Teacher is unbeatable in the irritation line anyway. At least once a week he predicts in a shaking voice: you lot will have me in Sokolac yet! By “you lot” he means us when, for instance, he catches us trying to set fire to the board, or when we've all ganged up to write the first school essay of the year in the Cyrillic alphabet, although express orders went out after Tito's third death: no more writing in Cyrillic characters. And there's a lunatic asylum at Sokolac. It's where Adolf Hitlers and people who think they're chairs go. Mr. Fazlagic might make it to the asylum too. And when his nerves are reaching Sokolac-point, he likes to bang things down on his desk. The flat of his hand, the register, the map of Turkey—a country that Mr. Fazlagic has recently taken to holding up as an example for this, that and the other. Today it's his bunch of keys, which must weigh thirty pounds. All Yugoslavia and half of Turkey could probably be opened up with those keys. The echo of the bang hasn't quite died away when he shouts: perfectly? Do what perfectly, Edin? And just what do you want to touch? Your marks are far from perfect, so you might touch your books for a change!

The noise and the shouting alarm Edin; he jumps up from his chair, performs a pirouette, thrusts his chest out, spreads his arms wide and cries: I don't want to touch anything! And when I said “perfectly,” I was talking about our move, my mother and I are moving away, Aleksandar said he'd help and I said with him we'll do it all perfectly.