Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

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 he 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?