Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Kamenko pushes the trumpeter away and turns to GreatGranny. Ah yes, the house. . And at once the fathers behind him get to their feet. I'll pay for the mortar in your wall, but who, Kamenko asks, is going to compensate me for the injury done to my ears by these bastards? Kamenko with his pistol pushes in between Great-Granny and the musicians huddled in the corner. Great-Granny's fingers are playing impatiently with the forks in her skirt pocket. Kamenko doesn't stand a chance against Marshal Rooster, the fastest gun in Veletovo. Miki is my blood brother, his family is my family — all honor and respect to this blood! says Kamenko, turning out his forearm, because when you're talking about blood and brothers you are bound to think of a wrist. Miki stares straight ahead, pulping bread in his closed fist. He has turned his sleeves up; he bites the bread so hard that the muscles in his lower jaw tense. The fathers hurry toward Kamenko, my own father moves fastest — but Kamenko raises his pistol even faster, turns, and mimics a shot at each father as they stand in a semicircle. Bang, bang, bang, he says.

I put my hands over my ears; the fathers stand there. My father has stopped in midstride, arms bent, leaning forward the way he did when chasing the runaway pig.

But, but, but! Kamenko turns in a second, slower semicircle, waves his pistol as if shaking his head. Each “but” is for one of the fathers, and the fourth is for Great-Granny: but didn't my grandfather sacrifice his shoulder and calf for his country and his people? While we sit here the Ustashas are plundering our country, driving our people away, murdering them! Didn't my grandfather fight the Ustashas too? He did, Mrs. Krsmanovic, he did! I'm not having gypsies give me Ustasha songs and Turkish howling anymore! I want our own music for our own Miki! Songs from the glorious days that once we knew and that will come again! Kamenko strikes his chest with his free hand. Let's start now! I'm not here to talk or dance. Get on with it!

However, it is not the fat singer who starts performing. Instead, Great-Grandpa wakes up. All of a sudden he raises his head from the table and continues the song of Fair Emina at the very place where Kamenko shot it dead. Loud and sorrowful, as if the vain girl Emina were standing in front of GreatGrandpa's balcony and won't return his greeting:

. . ja joj nazvah selam, al' moga mi dina, ne šć e ni da čuje lijepa Emina. .

Great-Grandpa's voice rings out, and Petak joins in, howling. Bemused, Kamenko looks at the white-haired singer. Emina's hair, worn in braids, smells of hyacinths, she has a silver dish under her arm, in the song she is standing under a jasmine bush but in Veletovo it's under a plum tree:

. . no u srbren ibrik zahitila vode pa po bašti dule zalivati ode. .

Great-Grandpa spreads his arms wide and throws back his head. Kamenko and I both let the song distract our attention, and when I look at him again the fathers have got him down on the ground and my father is kneeling on Kamenko's pistol arm until he lets go:

S grana vjetar duhnu pa niz ple ć i puste rasplete joj one pletenice guste. .

The wind plays in Emina's thick hair. Only one person is heard above Great-Grandpa's singing, Petak's howling, and Kamenko's scream of pain when the fathers turn him over on his stomach, face to the ground, and that person is Uncle Miki. Not because he raises his voice, but because this is the first time he's said anything at all since the pistol first went into the trumpet—

zamirisa kosa ko zumbuli plavi, a meni se krenu bururet u glavi. .

Emina's hyacinthine hair has my enamored Great-Grandpa totally confused, and Miki says: let him go at once!

Good heavens, Miki, the man's sick! Nataša's father, an unshaven farmer with bushy eyebrows, twists Kamenko's arm behind his back. My father picks up the pistol between his thumb and forefinger—

. . malo ne posrnuh, mojega mi dina, no meni ne dode lijepa Emina.

Emina smells so sweet that you can hardly keep on your feet when she comes close.

I said: let him go! shouts Miki, bending over his friend. Kamenko, you wouldn't really have shot anyone, would you?

But there's no time for questions and answers. The fathers look at each other, pick Kamenko up, hold him against the wall, there's saliva and blood on his chin. Cheek pressed to the wall of the house he gasps: it's okay. . let go. . it's okay!

Great-Grandpa needs no music, the amateurs wouldn't be able to sing for him anyway now, they're looking at their trumpeter's ear with concern. Great-Grandpa has risen to his feet, he's singing the last couplet:

samo me je jednom pogledala mrko, niti haje, al č ak, š to za njome crko'!

And he's dancing: Emina has nothing but dark looks for Great-Grandpa; she doesn't want his love. Great-Grandpa dances around the table and snatches Kamenko's pistol from my father. He dances to the stables and shoots at the big muck-heap until the shots are mere clicks. Then he pushes the pistol into the muck with his boot until it's out of sight, straightens his back and says: that's it!

There's no explanation for a lot of things, there's the that's it; there's a furious Kamenko on a tiny veranda in a tiny village in the mountains above the little town of Višegrad; there's longhaired Kamenko holding his painful arm, as they lead him away from the veranda and throw his camouflage jacket on the floor; there's Kamenko breathing heavily as he rummages around in the cow dung for his pistol; there's Kamenko bellowing: I'm rummaging in the shit now, but when our time comes it's the traitors who'll be eating shit! There's a sudden shower of rain, a two-minute summer shower, there's the fat amateur singer wanting double pay from Great-Grandpa Nikola, and he'll get it too if, says Great-Grandpa, with a hand to the fat man's cheek, if you wake my hyacinth tomorrow morning with — and he whispers something in his ear. Great-Grandpa drops a kiss on his hyacinth's face below the eye patch. Ahead there's the army for Uncle Miki. There was a quarrel in spring between father and son, Grandpa and my uncle, and an order: Miki, these are not times to become a soldier. We'll have no discussion about it. I was in the next room, and now Grandpa Slavko is gone. I didn't tell anyone about the quarrel, you don't tell tales on your own family. There's been a party, there were threats, there was a brawl, there was a shot, maybe that's how it has to be when someone joins the army; before you even really get there the war comes after you. There's the fear of Miki being sent somewhere they don't just shoot into muck-heaps, there's a sad good-bye to Miki, there are tears for Miki and a slap in the face for Miki: you shameless brat! The slap is because tomorrow's soldier says: Kamenko is right, we don't have to take this kind of thing, it's high time we faced up to the Ustashas and the mujahideen; that's the reason for the slap, and there are surreptitious glances at my mother and my Nena Fatima, deaf mute Nena Fatima who looks around, ashamed and sad, as if she's understood every word, every gesture and every shot. Sides are taken, you belong or you don't belong, suddenly the veranda is like the school yard where Vukoje nicknamed Worm asked me: what are you, really? The question sounded like trouble, and I didn't know the right answer.

There's no Kamenko on the veranda now; only his threats are left, he went off without finding his pistol, which GreatGrandpa takes out of his boot, all nice and clean now, as he says to Miki, but what you are doing is not right. There's such a thing as shame. I'm ashamed of myself, and not because Uncle Miki says a man who doesn't have all his marbles is right. I'm ashamed of myself on my own account, because I thought it was brave of my uncle to stand up for his friend. But I'm also ashamed because Mother is ashamed, and is stroking Nena Fatima's back as if she were a cat. Across the table Mother says, so quietly that I don't think Miki can hear her: oh, Miki, what's all this. .? There's my father, saying nothing as usual, there's the color of his face — if I looked like that they'd give me a penicillin injection. There are the Ustashas, there's the history book that says the Partisans defeated those Ustashas the way they defeated the Nazis and the Ce" tniks and the Mussolinis and everyone who opposed Yugoslavia and freedom. And there are the mujahideen, they ride through the desert wearing sheets. There was that question from Vukoje Worm in the school yard, I thought it was a threat and I thought my mother's explanation was a joke. I'm a mixture. I'm half and half. There was everyone in the school yard wondering how I could be something so vague, there were discussions about whose blood is stronger in your body, male or female, and me wishing I could be something not so vague, or a made-up thing that Vukoje Worm didn't know about, or maybe something he couldn't laugh at, a German autobahn, a flying horse that drinks wine, a shot in the throat of a house.