Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

What did you say to that?

Zoran gathers the mucus in his throat with a hard, grating sound, and spits on the ground. I said: right, Mother, okay, but what I'd have to say to you is worse than anything the people here are saying. That's why I'll never move in with you and you'll never move in with me — because I'd be telling you those things every day till the end of my life, and I'd have to see you bobbing your head about like a chicken every day when you answered me.

The bell inside the shop door rings, and Maestro Stankovski's bald patch appears around the door: Zoran, I said take a break, not a holiday!

Comin', says Zoran, leaning the broom against the handrail. We can hear the clip-clop of hooves. Musa Hasanagic is leading his mare Cauliflower across the square by her reins. Zoran and he shake hands. Musa takes off his top hat, and Zoran pats the white blaze on the mare's forehead.

Zoran doesn't know many stories. It's because so many incredible things happen in his own life that he doesn't have to invent anything. He can always tell the tale of his cuckolded father's revenge on Bogoljub Balvan again and again. Sometimes the story takes less than two minutes — there's no Tetris playing and nothing gets thrown into the river, Zoran's father spends all day polishing his shotgun and weeping over it and then polishing his tears away and weeping and polishing again. That version ends with Zoran on his knees, begging his father to take the barrel of the gun out of his mouth.

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?

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.