Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

But her grief-stricken madness silenced me. The louder she cried: leave me alone! flailing around, the less courageous I felt in my hiding place. The more the neighbors turned away from Grandpa and went to Granny instead, trying to console someone obviously inconsolable, as if they were selling her something she didn't need, the more frantically she defended herself. As more and more tears covered her cheeks, her mouth, her lamentation, her chin, like oil coating a pan, I cut out more and more little details of the living room: the bookcase with works by Marx, Lenin and Kardelj, Das Kapital at the left on the bottom shelf, the smell of fish, the branches of the pattern on the wallpaper, four tapestry pictures on the wall — children playing in a village street, brightly colored flowers in a brightly colored vase, a ship on a rough sea, a little cottage in the forest — a photograph of Tito and Gandhi shaking hands, right above and between the ship and the cottage. Someone saying: how do we get her off him?

More and more people came along, one taking another's place as if to catch up with something, or at least not miss out on anything else, anxious to be as lively as possible in the presence of death. Grandpa's death had been too quick. It upset the neighbors, it made them look guiltily at the floor. No one had been able to keep up with Grandpa's heart running its race, not even Granny: oh no, why, why, why, Slavko? Teta Amela from the second floor collapsed. Someone cried: oh, sacred heart of Jesus! Someone else immediately cursed the mother of Jesus and several other members of his family. Granny tugged at Grandpa's trouser legs, hit out at the two paramedics who appeared in the living room with their little bags. Keep your hands off him, she cried. Under their white coats the paramedics wore lumberjack shirts, and they hauled Granny off Grandpa's legs as if prizing a seashell off a rock. As Granny saw it, Grandpa wouldn't be dead until she let go of him, so she wasn't letting go. The men in white coats listened to Grandpa's chest. One of them held a mirror to his face and said: no, nothing.

I shouted that Grandpa was still there, his death didn't conform to the aims and ideals of the Communist League. You just get out of the way, give me my magic wand and I'll prove it!

No one took any notice of me. The lumberjack-paramedics put their hands inside Grandpa's shirt and shone a flashlight in his eyes. I pulled out the electric cable, and the TV turned itself off. There were loose cobwebs hanging in the corner next to the power socket. How much less does a spider's death weigh than the death of a human being? Which of her husband's dead legs does the spider's wife cling to? I decided that I would never again put a spider in a bottle and run water slowly into it.

Where was my magic wand?

I don't know how long I stood in the corner before my father grabbed my arm as if taking me prisoner. He handed me over to my mother, who hauled me down the stairs and out into the yard. The air smelled of mirabelles mashed to make schnapps and there were fires on the megdan. You can see the whole town from the megdan, perhaps you can even see into the yard in front of the big five-story block, practically a high-rise building for Višegrad, where a young woman with long black hair and brown eyes was bending down to a boy with hair the same color and with the same almond-shaped eyes. She blew some strands of hair off his forehead, her eyes filled with tears. No one on the megdan could hear what she was whispering to the boy. And perhaps no one could see that after the woman had taken the boy in her arms and hugged him for a long, long time, he nodded. The way you nod when you're promising something.

On the evening of the third day after Grandpa Slavko's death I'm sitting in the kitchen, looking through photograph albums. I take all the photos of Grandpa Slavko out of the album. Out in the yard our cherry tree is arguing with the wind, it's stormy. When I've fixed it so that Grandpa Slavko can come alive again, for my next trick I'll make us all able to keep hold of noises. Then we can put the wind in the cherry-tree leaves into an album of sounds, along with the rumble of thunder and dogs barking at night in summer. And this is me chopping wood for the stove — that's how we'll be able to present our life proudly in sounds, the way we show holiday snaps of the Adriatic. We'll be carrying small sounds around with us. I'd cover up the anxiety on my mother's face with the laughter she laughs on her good days.

The brownish photos with broad white rims smell of plastic tablecloths, and show people with funny trousers that get wider at the bottom. There's a short man in a railwayman's uniform standing in front of a train, looking straight ahead, upright as a soldier: Grandpa Rafik.

Grandpa Rafik, my mother's father, died for good a long time ago — he drowned in the river Drina. I hardly knew him, but I can remember one game we played, a simple game. Grandpa Rafik would point to something and I'd say its name, its color, and the first thing that occurred to me about it. He'd point to his penknife, and I'd say: knife, gray, and railway engine. He'd point to a sparrow, and I'd say: bird, gray, and railway engine. Grandpa Rafik pointed through the window at the night, and I said: dreams, gray, and railway engine, and Grandpa tucked me up and said: sleep an iron sleep.

The time of my gray period was the time of my visits to the eye specialist, who diagnosed nothing except that I could see things too fast, for instance the sequence of little letters and big letters on his wall chart. You'll have to cure him of that some how, Mrs. Krsmanovic, said the eye specialist, and he prescribed drops for her own eyes, which were always red.

I was very scared of trains and railway engines at that time. Grandpa Rafik had taken me to the disused railway tracks, he scratched flaking paint off the old engine; you've broken my heart, he whispered, rubbing the black paint between the palms of his hands. On the way home — paving stone, gray, railway engine, my hand in his large one, black with sharp scraps of peeling paint — I decided to be nice to railway trains, because now he had me worried about my own heart. But it had been a long time since any trains had passed through our town. A few years later the first girl I loved, Danijela with her very long hair who didn't return my love, showed me how silly I'd been to protect my heart from being broken by trains.

Peeling scraps of paint and the gray game are all I remember of Grandpa Rafik, unless old photos count as memories. And Grandpa Rafik is absent from our home in general. However often and however readily my family like to talk about themselves and other families and the dead over coffee, Grandpa Rafik is very seldom mentioned. No one ever looks at the coffee grounds in a cup and sighs: oh, Rafik, my Rafik, if only you were here! No one ever wonders what Grandpa Rafik would say about something, his name isn't spoken with either gratitude or disapproval.

No dead person could be less alive than Grandpa Rafik.

The dead are lonely enough in the earth where they lie, so why do we leave even the memory of Grandpa Rafik to be so lonely?

Mother comes into the kitchen and opens the fridge. She's going to make sandwiches to take to work, she puts butter and cheese on the table. I look at her face, searching it for Grandpa Rafik's face in the photos.

Mama, do you look like Grandpa Rafik? I ask when she sits down at the table and unwraps the bread. She cuts up tomatoes. I wait and ask the question again, and only now does Mother stop, knife blade on a tomato. What kind of grandpa was Grandpa Rafik? I ask again, why does no one talk about him? How am I ever going to know what kind of a grandpa I had?

Mother puts the knife aside and lays her hands in her lap. Mother raises her eyes. Mother looks at me.