How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone Read online

  Zoran and Musa gravely say good-bye. Zoran shakes hands with me too, nods, and disappears into the shop. I set off for home. A long-distance bus turns the corner behind me, its driver wears a cap. His mustache, his long arms, his long fingers on the steering wheel, the dark hair coming out from under his cap above his ears—just like his son's.

  Anywhere there are stories, I'll be right there.

  How did Milenko Pavlovic, known as Walrus, the three-point shooter once feared for the number of points he scored but not quite such a good shot with a gun, come to be behind that steering wheel? And shouldn't I run straight back to the barbershop and tell Zoran that his father was back again, not too early this time, more like a year too late?

  When something is an event, when it'san experience, how many deathsComrade Tito died, and how the once-famous three-point shooter gets behindthe wheel of a Centrotrans bus

  It's an event when Mr. Fazlagic storms into our classroom. Punctual Mr. Fazlagic races up to the board with a dripping wet sponge as if he weren't a teacher at all, as if he were a firefighter in a hurry to extinguish the board because it's gone up in flames. We have Serbo-Croat lessons every day and Mr. Fazlagic is right in there every day to put out the burning board and rescue our spelling with thousands of model sentences. As a teacher Mr. Fazlagic may be a good firefighter, it's hard to tell for certain because his rescue attempts have no effect on most of us. In spite of all the Mr. Fazlagićs of this world, we'll never be able to tell ć and ć apart, and the board has never burned down either.

  Edin and I have tried to burn it down several times. First with math books, then with half a Coca-Cola bottle of gasoline that Edin pinched from his mother's garage. I was skeptical: these school boards aren't made of wood, and how much gasoline do you need to set a brass board alight? You could pour the contents of a whole fuel station on brass and the brass still wouldn't burn, I said, and I repeated the word “brass” until Edin held the Coke bottle of gasoline up to the light, examined it through narrowed eyes, and nodded: yes, I see your point. You can cut glass with brass, and glass doesn't burn either, so why would brass burn? Let's sell the stuff to Čika Spok or set fire to a frog with it.

  Gasoline is alcohol, and Čika Spok is a drunk. Every town has to have one. Čika Spok phones the stars far into the night, with his thumb to his ear and his little finger on his lips. He sweet-talks the Great Bear: one of these days, he promises, I'll have a great, proud weapon, I'll lay you low with it and make myself a Great Bearskin cap.

  Well, perhaps those aren't his exact words, but whenever his shouts wake me up I wish he'd explain the Bear's fate to him more soberly, and not keep shouting abuse and accusing him: those are my stars you're carrying off, you thieving animal! Or throwing bottles around the place night and day, and letting fly with curses about the Bear's mother and how he's going to skin him. And I wish he wouldn't puke on the park benches where he sleeps and then go to sleep in his puke.

  Edin and I decided on the frog and not Čika Spok because Čika Spok was sleeping so peacefully, sitting up straight with his back to the mosque wall. It was two hours before we could catch a frog. I lit a match, and then a second match. As I did so the frog must have been reflecting on its present life and the whole stupid situation it had got itself into. Instead of puffing out its cheeks on the riverbank and darting its tongue into the air to catch flies, here it was, sitting in a cardboard box and being doused with gasoline, while two dark-haired heads above it threw burning sticks at its back, waiting for a spectacular explosion. The fourth and fifth matches went out too. The gasoline smelled of fermented apple juice.

  If you keep throwing lighted matches at a frog sitting motionless and thinking about its fate, you soon begin to feel sorry for its captive frogginess, but still you try one more match. Only then do you let the frog have its pond back, throw the empty Coca-Cola bottle in after it, and set fire to the cardboard box.

  It was also an event when our Serbo-Croat teacher climbed a ladder on the first day of the new school year and took Comrade Tito's picture down from the wall. He clutched it to himself and announced in a solemn voice to Tito's big face, Tito's epaulettes, and Tito's officer's stripes: from now on you children will stop calling me Comrade Teacher and call me Mr. Fazlagic instead. Is that clear?

  After the silence observed by grown-ups when they've just made a solemn announcement, I snapped my fingers and stood up, like we'd been told to do when we have anything to say. Mr. Fazlagić, not-Comrade-Teacher-now, how filthy is notComrade-Tito-now, then?

  I thoughtfully placed my thumb under my chin and laid my forefinger on my pursed lips, observing the silence that suggests that the next thing you say will begin with the words: suppose . . .

  Suppose Tito isn't totally filthy dirty, then you wouldn't have to take him down? We, I said, his Comrade Pioneers, and here I spread my arms out like a folk singer, we can scrub our former president clean in the toilets in no time at all!

  I could positively hear the eyes of those Pioneers rolling in an uncomradely way, so I scored more points on the eccentricity scale, where I was well ahead of the class anyway. Edin swallowed a raw egg during break every day, collected insect legs and did ballet dancing, but all the same he was way behind me. Even Edin's physical appearance scored him points: slight, bony, pale, with little blue veins showing at his temples and eyes that bulged like a horse's. None of his movements was ever fluid, I had no idea what he learned in ballet classes—he darted jerkily along like someone made entirely of secrets, looking to the left, to the right, up at the sky, all because he wanted to be a special agent. Aleksandar, women always fall for 007, and I can imitate any sound except the sound of a heartbeat. Sure enough, sounds of some kind were emerging from Edin's mouth all the time—even when he was standing still he wasn't silent; he was whistling, breathing heavily, yapping and twittering, but always so softly that you wouldn't notice unless you put your ear quite close to his mouth. When the two of us were on our own he stopped all that stealthy darting about, he looked healthier, spoke more slowly, and knew a lot about biology and the female body. For instance, he knew it had a wound that bled every thirty days, which could be really dangerous if, for some reason, the earth took it into its head to turn thirty times faster than usual.

  Mr. Fazlagić was still looking at me. And the class was still looking at me, so they wanted me to go on. The Party Committee would certainly approve of scrubbing Tito clean too, that is if the Party Committee still existed, I said, encouraged by all the attention. And I'll ask my granny to lend us one of her tapestry pictures while Mr. Broz, not-Comrade-Tito-now, is absent from school. There's a really nice one with a ship in a storm. It would look better than the mark on the wall.

  Vukoje Worm, who was proud of having broken his nose three times, threw a crumpled-up death threat that hit me on the back of the head. It listed the various tortures waiting for me after school and called me a “smahrt aleck” and a “Commie” swein.

  My crumpled-up reply just missed him.

  Strictly speaking, Tito hadn't left any mark behind on that first day of the school year. Marks are dirty, but the wall behind Tito's back was clean—a white rectangle surrounded by the rest of the wall, which was beige. Tito had been protecting the paler bit, that's how it had stayed clean.

  And Tito protected us too, his Pioneers.

  Well, that's what they say, although Tito never actually stood in front of us dealing out Bruce Lee kicks to any dissidents with a grudge against us or the Red Star. He thought young people were progressive in the cause of progress and the well-being of Yugoslavia, he even moved his official birthday to the Day of Youth. He was often seen with Pioneers in photos, he was laughing and the Pioneers were laughing, and the caption under the picture told you that Tito and the Pioneers were laughing.

  I once met Tito, but it hardly counts because I was still a baby at the time, and a meeting you can't remember isn't much of a meeting. Tito was visiting Višegrad, and when his white open-top Mercedes drove by h
e waved to me, or so Grandpa Slavko claimed. He also claimed to have spent an hour arguing with Tito about the closure of the railway line, but even he was powerless against Tito. Soon no more trains came through our town and Grandpa Rafik lost his job.

  When I'm as old as Tito I'll have a white limousine too, the kind where you can stand up in the back. Edin will be my driver, my loyal Party Secretary and best friend and special agent, responsible for bird imitations and also for the Ministry of Biology because he knows so much about the female body.

  Our framed Comrade wasn't cleaned up at all. Everyone understood that, even people whose mothers were not former political advisers to the local committee of the Communist League of Yugoslavia and whose grandpas couldn't explain everything. Something else happened to our Comrade Tito. Our Comrade Tito died. Again. Josip Broz Tito died for the third time when his pictures were taken down from classrooms.

  Edin tapped me on the shoulder. Psst . . . Aleks, what did you write to Vukoje Worm?

  Nothing. I was only correcting his spelling.

  Tito died his first death at five past three in the afternoon of 4 May 1980. But it was only his body that died, and year after year everyone in the world and in space would stand still to remember Tito at five past three on the afternoon of 4 May, except in America and the Soviet Union and on Jupiter, because no life is possible on Jupiter. Sirens would howl, cars would stop, and I would search my memory for a suitably sad quotation from Marx with which to conclude the minute of silence and impress someone, anyone. I never managed to find my quotation.

  Karl Marx never wrote a single sad thing in his life.

  After his first death, Tito moved into our hearts with a little briefcase full of speeches and articles and built himself a magnificent villa there out of ideas. Grandpa Slavko described the villa like this: the walls are made of economic projects, the house is roofed with messages of peace, and you look out through the red windows at a garden full of poppies, flowering slogans about the future, and a well from which endless credit can be drawn. As the years went on, more and more people did as they liked and took less and less interest in Tito's ideas, and when no one is interested in an idea anymore, that idea is dead.

  So Tito died for the second time.

  But he lived on in poems and newspaper articles and books. Soon, however, it was correct not to own those books and not to have read the poems. Then it was even more correct to put books on your shelves that used to be banned, and the time came when the most correct thing of all was to write newspaper articles and books yourself of the kind that would once have been banned. After Grandpa died it was my mother who told me all these things. She was a political scientist and knew what she was talking about. Grandpa called her a Marxist, and was pleased about it. She wasn't too pleased herself. In the old days when people asked what my mother did for a living, I didn't hesitate for a moment. I used to say, at Auntie-Typhoon-speed: political adviser to the local committee of the Communist League of Yugoslavia! She writes speeches for those dimwits the secretaries and president of the local committee. I didn't say “those dimwits” out loud, but I knew that's what they were, because my mother had moaned and groaned over and over again about their many kinds of dimness. Their empty heads, their poor memories, the gulf between what they promised and what they did, the holes in their purses, and moreover, she would say: they can drink like a fish, all of them, but they can't get a reasonable sentence down on paper.

  If people ask me now what my mother does for a living I usually say: she's tired. You get to be especially tired if you're always working too hard and always talking about how you're always working too hard. Working makes you old. My parents come home from work and talk about work. Father takes off his shirt and washes his feet in the bathroom. He works in a factory that makes wooden furniture, but he's not a woodworker; he sits in a room with pocket calculators and a desk diary and he wears a shirt. At home he never wears shirts and he works in his studio, but he doesn't call that work. He says he can't abide figures any more than he can abide our government. Father cleans his glasses and makes a face when he's looking closely for marks on the lenses. When I'm his age, I'll have hair that's going gray at the temples myself. When I'm my mother's age, I'll be able to talk about troubles for an hour on end, all by myself without stopping, but the troubles won't be my own. Mother would really have liked to be a figure skater. Now she races around our local law court all day until she's tired. She says: this legislation is so clumsy you almost grow fond of it. In the evening she makes sandwiches for work. I'll make the sandwiches for work—she always says this in just the same words, it's like Father washing his feet. I wonder why she doesn't make the sandwiches for herself and Father—work doesn't have to eat, I once pointed out, and my mother replied: oh yes, it does, my work is eating me up day after day.

  I always preferred talking to Grandpa about putting Marxist ideology into practice, Socialist self-government, Tito's foreign policy, or the best way to gut a fish. Conversations like that are very difficult with my father. He is inclined—if he feels like talking to me at all—to think up all kinds of ways of not revealing his incompetence on such subjects. He will talk not about Yugoslavia but some unnamed kingdom where there are words for things that don't exist, and things for which there can't be any words.

  You inherit the ability to tell good stories, but it sometimes skips a generation.

  Tito lived on longest in our school textbooks. History, Serbo-Croat, even math couldn't get along without him. The distance from Jajce to Bihać is one hundred miles. A Yugo drives from Jajce to Bihac at a speed of fifty miles per hour. At the same time Josip Broz Tito is walking from Bihac to Jajce at a steady speed of six miles per hour. At how many miles from Jajce will they meet?

  To conceal my total ignorance of the calculation, I protested that obviously you couldn't have a Yugo and a Tito on the same road at all, because if our president had wanted to go for a walk, the road would have been closed to everyone else. As a safety precaution, I added, and I for one would have welcomed it.

  But math teachers are unrelenting about such things.

  A new teacher once got so angry about Tito's life as told in the history textbook that he could be heard from the corridor, shouting away in the headmaster's office. I'm a historian, he shouted, not the presenter of a children's story hour on TV!

  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 co
mpany. 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.