Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

A wonderful trip, and it has to be an experience — not just an event! Mr. Fazlagic looks at us. Vukoje, I shall stop reading after the twentieth spelling mistake. Faruk, anything illegible will lose you marks. And Aleksandar, I don't want to know anything about your great-grandma uprooting oaks, or inauguration parties for the family bathroom, or your Auntie Whirlwind running a race with Carl Lewis over the bridge and ending up in Tokyo. You've wandered off the subject in every essay you've written this year, so kindly restrain your imagination! Mr. Fazlagic comes up to my desk and bends down toward me. And we use quotation marks for direct speech, he says, leaning his fists on the desk top, you know that, I don't have to explain it to you every time. Now, you all have an hour!

Mr. Fazlagic sounds cross. When he was still Comrade Teacher he once gave me a punishment because I did restrain my imagination, and my essay on “My Native Land” was seven pages of geographical and economic statistics about Yugoslavia that I'd learned by heart. We were given “My Native Land” for an essay at least twice a year. So I wrote a footnote referring to my previous essays on the subject, and added that, despite inflation, I hadn't changed my mind and wasn't likely to change it in a hurry. In a second footnote, I suggested to Mr. Fazlagic that he might like to look at my poetry collection, particularly the poems “8 March 1989, or I Send My Political Adviser Whole Spruce Woods Full of Motherly Love,” “1 May 1989, or The Chick in the Pioneer's Hand” and “Comrade Tito, in My Heart You Will Never Die.”

Grandpa Slavko had liked my inappropriate choice of subjects, Mother wasn't quite so keen on my bad marks, and Father didn't think school mattered much. Just don't get into fights, he said.

I open my exercise book at the first blank page. “A Wonderful Trip.” I go to the Adriatic every summer, always to Igalo. It's organized by the workers' syndicate at Varda, the firm where my father wears a shirt and tie. Hundreds of the people of Višegrad who work for Varda pack their suitcases, gather their families together and tell them: we're being put up in this hotel, though we'd rather have the one where we stayed in '86. All Varda goes to Igalo, its people are moved from a little town without any seaside to a little town by the sea for one month. I know my way around Igalo as well as I know my way around Višegrad, and not just because of the annual trip there, it's also because the hotel beds and shelves, in fact all the furniture, even the wooden floorboards and the wooden paneling, are made by Varda, exactly the same as we have in our bedrooms and on our walls at home. So if you want to write about a wonderful trip you don't write about Igalo.

Thinking about Igalo, I've drawn a head in one corner of the sheet of paper. The corners of its mouth are turned down, I give it a mustache. Now the head gets two long arms instead of ears. Walrus. A wonderful trip for Zoran's father, Milenko Pavlovic, the three-point shooter once feared for the number he shot, but not quite such a good shot with a gun! Walrus's wonderful trip to a new wife and new happiness!

Secure in the knowledge that a good story is never an inappropriate subject, I write the title:

. . the reason being that anyone can say anything, or think it and not say it, and what would be the point of quotation marks around thoughts you don't say, or something you do say that's a lie, or thoughts that aren't important enough to be said out loud, or something said out loud that is important but no one hears it?

Drunk and deceived as he was, Milenko Pavlovic, known as Walrus, had taken his son aside and said: Zoran, I'm going away now, I have to get everything new for us: Das Kapital for me and a new mother for you. He had got into his car and driven out of town, hooting the horn. No one knew where he was going.

Yesterday, one year later, Walrus came back. He drove into town still hooting, just as he had left, but this time at the wheel of a Centrotrans bus. These days everyone was leaving town, no one knew where they were going, only Walrus came proudly back, no one knew where from, and the first thing he said when his shoes touched the ground of Višegrad was: anyone want to buy a bus?

You won't sell a bus like that in a hurry, I told Walrus, breathlessly. I'd run after the bus as it drove down the street at a slow and victorious speed. I wanted to see what Walrus had brought back from his journey.

That bus isn't quite straight, said Armin the bus stationmaster, scratching his head under his stationmaster's cap. He didn't mean the bus itself, he meant the way Walrus had parked it — with the front right-hand side up on the pavement. Armin crouched down, his knees creaking, he looked underneath the bus, he ran his finger over rusty metal, opened the baggage space and kicked the tires. Nodded three times and said: a good bus, I know this bus, you can't sell it to us, it's ours already.

Of course you know it, said Walrus, throwing his hands up jubilantly in the air, but are you and the bus related? I'm not selling you your uncle, and the days when you could only sell what's yours were over in this country long ago.

A young woman appeared in the doorway of the bus behind the grinning Walrus. He forgot about doing any kind of deal and tucked his shirt into his trousers. Red hair with black slides in it, a red scarf with black stripes, red high-heeled shoes with black buckles, size four at the most; a low-cut blouse and a miniskirt with a pattern of red and black dots too. The ladybird laughed, and it was a great relief to see that her teeth were plain white.

Walrus offered the redhead his arm, which she took with a smile. Her red shoes hardly touched the cracked asphalt. Batting her eyelashes and practically hovering in the air, the young woman looked at the little group that had gathered to welcome the miracle of Walrus's return, and insofar as it consisted of men, the group lowered its eyes, and insofar as it was wearing a cap, it took the cap off.

Wouldn't you like to sell her? was the thought that shot through Armin's mind, or at least he was staring at Walrus's new girlfriend in a greedy way that suggested it. As if she were a Sunday evening Western that had never been shown before. Armin whistled through his teeth, barely but still audibly, the way you whistle at the sight of something really expensive. The redhead's eyes, bright blue in the middle of all that red and black, had something to do with Armin's whistle. And her long, slender neck! Armin kicked the hot right-hand front tire for about the twentieth time; he didn't have that leg under control anymore.

This is my Milica! said Walrus, introducing his Milica in a voice as solemn as if he were really announcing: listen, all of you, I want everyone to know that this is my Milica! Milenko's beautiful Milica!

Everyone knew about Walrus's misfortunes; everyone had heard how he was cuckolded before the eyes of his only son, and how a tobacconist had humiliated and soiled his bookcase along with Das Kapital . All the same, no one applauded when the ladybird tripped along beside Walrus. We weren't impressed by all that red and black, the bus station isn't a cinema, and from a purely medicinal viewpoint such a heavy dose of lipstick can't be good for anyone's mouth.

Walrus put Milica's baggage down carefully and flung his own sports bag onto the pavement, sending dust flying up. He handed Armin the key of the bus as if it were the stationmaster's birthday, and there was nothing Armin could do but thank him and finally stop kicking the tires. Walrus's new girlfriend put her scarf around her slender neck, and I'd never seen such a tiny handbag as hers; her lipstick might fit into it but then there'd be no room left for her headache tablets.