Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

The army sings, no one stops them, they sing two to the right and one to the left:

Niška Banja, topla voca, za Niš lije živa zgoda Sve od Niša pa do Banje, idu cure na kumpanje, Mi Nišlije meraklije ne možemo bez rakije, Bez rakije šljivovice i bez mlade cigan[ice

Isn't that true, men? sings the dance song. Isn't that just the way it is? Girls take a hot bath, we connoisseurs drink slivovitz, we men can't do without slivovitz. The soldier with the gold tooth sings along too, the one who wanted warm bread, the one who held Amela's hands in his and dipped them in the dough. He comes out of Amela's apartment, the song on his lips, his shirt unbuttoned. Amela is kneeling behind him with a veil of wet hair over her face. The hungry soldier sings louder than any of them: we connoisseurs can't do without a young gypsy girl. There's yellow dough on his fingers and his knuckles and under his nails. He unscrews his hip flask and puts it to his sore lips. Isn't that so, men? We can't do without schnapps and gypsy girls!

If only I were a magician who could make things possible. I'd give objects the gift of defiance: banisters, gramophones, guns, the napes of necks, braided hair.

Fish bite best early in the morning. I gave the worms coffee grounds, I tell Edin, now they're all on a high like Auntie Typhoon. Let's go down to the Rzav to catch some chub first, then we can go to school and see if the place is still standing.

We spit down from the bridge into the little tributary of the Drina. The chub come close to the surface of the water and lick it from below with their fishy lips. Edin spits again, says: a school like ours isn't wrecked so easily, why do you think fish eat spit?

It's going to rain any minute, I say. Maybe this is the last time we'll cross this bridge. Why don't they build a bridge like the one over the Drina? That stands up to anything.

This one will make it, says Edin, it stood up to the tanks.

Want to bet it'll be gone by the day after tomorrow at the latest?

Living at the mouth of two rivers. Learning to swim well and early, learning to fish well and early, learning early how to pump meltwater out of flooded cellars. Last night was a nonstop cloudburst — the soldiers gave us blankets, but the walls of the stairwell breathed out the cold of cement, and I woke up several times. Light fell into the corridor from Ci" ka Sead's apartment, I made bird shadows fly over the wall with my fingers, and hoped real thunder would break the constant rushing of the rain, but there was only thunder of explosions in the distance. Grandpa Slavko had shown me how to train the shadow animals you make with your fingers. Long ago I'd magically given the birds the power to fly my sleeplessness away to the south. The rain stopped in the morning, just before the dancing, singing soldiers left the building, but the clouds didn't clear.

If our mothers find out we've gone, I say, you can bet we won't be allowed down to the Rzav when the floods carry the bridge away. What are they afraid of? If their own soldiers are in our town they can't shoot at it.

Edin shrugs his shoulders. Raindrops are making the first ripples on the river. We go and stand under the bridge. I put a worm on my hook and cast it out. Edin pokes around in the mud with a stick for a while, imitating the noise of the rain falling on the river. Our floats drift with the current, it rains harder, and the soldiers ask: are they biting? Three bearded men and the victorious soldier with the biggest head in the world. Where did they spring from?

No. Only minnows. Too much noise for the fish these last few days. They go down into deeper water.

Ah, yes. Hiding. Let's see how well they hide.

The hand grenade sinks at once. The soldiers are wearing raincoats; they bend forward as they speak. It's bucketing down, it's raining in torrents, more rivers are raining on the river, and now the rain is falling on the fish scales and fish bellies drifting downstream too. No use trying to collect them, the Rzav is too deep here and too fast, still too cold in April as well, and a catch like that would definitely not taste good.

A mongrel emerges from the undergrowth on the opposite bank, drinks from the river.

Want to bet, boys?

No!

The first volley doesn't hit the dog. The dog starts, jumps up, dances sideways, stops and raises its pointed muzzle. Has it caught the scent of the bet?

Bet you fifty I get it this time, says the victor to the bearded men, one of them spits in his hand and shakes on it. How can a head be so big and a bet smell of schnapps and earth?

The second volley of shots.

It must have been a catfish! Two hundred pounds, maybe four hundred, Edin guesses on the way to school, spreading his arms wide as if hugging someone: it must have been that big, at least that big!

I know about catfish and I don't believe a word of it. Another reason why your line can break is if the hook gets caught somewhere at the bottom, and catfish are conceited anyway; they're not going to bother with a little river like the Rzav. We've caught two chub, and I wish I knew who's stirring up the clouds like that — the rain has soaked us to the skin.

Soldiers on the porches of buildings, soldiers behind sandbags, soldiers in bars acting as landlords and guests combined. Outside the biggest department store in town we ask: are we allowed in? The soldier clambers out of the display window, says: mind the broken glass, and straps a TV set into his passenger seat. We avoid the splintered glass, although it makes a good crunching noise. We're out shopping, the soldiers, Edin and I. We two take as many pencils and exercise books as we can carry. By the time we get to school they're all wet. We stack the limp paper on the radiators, but what are we going to do with five hundred pencil sharpeners? The way our school looks, we won't be needing those again. We lay a trail of pencil sharpeners down the dark corridors, over splintered glass and rubble, through devastated classrooms. There isn't an intact window in the staff room, there are towers of tables and a tangle of chair legs in front of the broken windows, and ten thousand empty cartridge cases among a hundred thousand splinters of glass. Our trail of pencil sharpeners meets a trail of blood. Edin and I follow it to a large window and look out at the town in the rain; still no thunder. In the middle of the room there's a mountain of red volumes, shabby class registers. Some teachers asked questions in alphabetical order, others opened at a random page.

Want to see how we're doing in oral Russian? I ask, but there's a huge pile of dried shit on top of the mountain, with two flies performing in rectangular formation above it, so we content ourselves with discovering that our mark for written Russian is four, which is kind of all right.

Hey, Edin, why did they shoot the dog like that?

Edin shrugs his shoulders, picks up several cartridge cases and throws them through the broken window one by one. Last summer, he says, I drew a goal down there on the front of the building. With red chalk, standing on tiptoe. The crossbar was so high that I had to lower my arm twice and shake the stiffness out of it. I'd just finished when Kostina the caretaker came out and asked: what's that supposed to be? A goal, of course, I said. Wipe it off, he said, it'll be detention for you.

Didn't you get to shoot at it even once? I ask.

Not once, says Edin, unwedging a couple of chairs. Well, I could have broken a window.

In the lab, our physics teacher Fizo is kneeling in front of another carpet of fragments, and when we get down on the floor beside him he says: there'll be lessons, we just have to clear up first. I've found three intact measuring beakers and two burners. All the pinhole cameras but two are broken, the spring pendulum's all right, most of the lightbulbs aren't. Put gloves on and be careful of the glass. Don't touch anything with blood on it.