Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Tonight I heard Mother sighing in her sleep, she woke up with congealed blood under her nose. There are problems with the neighbors because we're living so close to them and they don't like us living close. If they'd been given the gift of a war too, they'd have shot us at once. Religion is not the opium of the people but their downfall. So Father says, anyway. A boy in the street called me a bastard. My Serbian blood was contaminated by my Bosniak mother, he said. I didn't know whether to hit him for that or be defiant and proud. I was neither defiant nor proud, and I was the one who got hit.

I'm sending you a picture with this, Asija. It's you in the picture. I'm afraid I can't get any paint as beautiful as the color of your hair, so you may not recognize yourself. It's my last picture of something unfinished. It's unfinished because you're alone in it. I used to like unfinished things.

With love, from

Aleksandar

Dear Asija,

I wanted to write to you from the Lake Wörther — trains have names in Germany — but the Lake Wörther went so fast that my eyes couldn't keep up with the landscape, and I felt slightly unwell with so many quick fields and houses and a packet of round chocolate-covered biscuits that I polished off too quickly. For the last two weeks we've been living with my Uncle Bora and my Auntie Typhoon in a city called Essen, right next to a motorway. Granny Katarina has gone back to Višegrad. I want to be near my husband, she said.

Where he is he doesn't need anyone, said my father.

Everyone needs someone, and the dead are the loneliest of all, I said, and I had to go out of the room. We still haven't heard from Granny. Getting through on the phone is difficult.

Nena Fatima has had a secret ever since we left Belgrade. She's writing something all the time, but she hides it under her head scarf. If I could choose a voice for Nena Fatima, it would be the voice of a superior kind of witch who has something to laugh about before the fairy tale ends happily: a little rough, self-confident and full of plans. Would my Nena say clever things if she were to speak? What would her singing sound like?

New Year's Eve was a disaster. I got a pair of jeans as a present. Uncle Bora bought rockets and bangers, and we put colored hats on and turned up our music louder than usual. My mother said: whatever I cook, it doesn't taste right. My father said: whatever I drink, it doesn't help, and he buried his face in his hands. This was just before midnight. At twelve everyone hugged everyone else, then Uncle Bora and I let the fireworks off, and little Ema the baby typhoon woke up and yelled.

What was it like for you? Do you have snow there?

We do here, but only for five minutes, and it looks as if it got dirty even while it was falling, it's already brown when it lands on the ground.

Tomorrow I start at a German school. I'm going to try not to be a deaf mute like Nena Fatima, so I've learned the first ten pages of the dictionary by heart. Uncle Bora says I'm three years ahead of the Germans in math. Subtract my lack of talent for math from that and I'm still one year ahead. School marks work the wrong way around here, and there's almost no one but Turks in our part of town. You can play Nintendo in the department stores; I haven't yet managed to get locked into one and be forgotten overnight, but I'm working on it. My mother didn't feel well last week, but she couldn't tell the doctor what her pain was like, so she came back feeling even worse.

Five or six other families from Bosnia live in this building with us, twenty-five people on two floors. It's very crowded, there's always someone else in the bathrooms, and I can switch off Čika Zahid's TV set with my uncle's remote control, it sends him mad. He believes in Nazi ghosts. There's a little railway station very close, and Ci" ka Zahid waits for the green light to cross the rails there. I go bobsledding under the motorway bridge on sofa cushions with his son, Sabahudin. After he arrived, Sabahudin cleaned his teeth with shaving foam for the first three days.

Yesterday we got a permit to be in Germany. We waited at the letter K for three hours, in a big office with a hundred doors. The people waiting spoke our language, which we're not to call Serbo-Croat anymore. They gathered around the ashtrays and left slush on the floor and the marks of the soles of their shoes on the walls. Mrs. Foß was looking after us Ks. She smiled wearily, had little dimples, and a pink brooch that had bitten into the collar of her pink blouse. A mouse called Diddl grinned out at us from postcards all over the K room. Mrs. Foß was the friendliest, most patient person in the world; she smiled like her mouse and gave my mother a handkerchief. We couldn't say much but we didn't have to, Mrs. Foß knew what to do with us. We got our passports stamped because Mrs. Foß agreed to having us here. ß is my favorite letter of the alphabet now and a very good invention, because it has two letter s's in it. I'd like to be called Alekßandar Krßmanović. As I went out I said to Mrs. Foß: A, aardvark, aback, abacus, abandon, abase, abash, abate, abbey, abbreviate, abdicate, abdomen, abduct, aberration, abhor, thank you. I knew “thank you” even though I hadn't got that far in the dictionary yet.

We all sleep in this little room, Asija, and we're all a little angrier than we were at home, even in our dreams. Sometimes I wake up and make bird shadows on the wall with my fingers; a streetlight outside the window looks sternly in at us as if it were keeping watch, and Uncle Bora promised he'd knock that filthy glaring bastard down. There's no financial priority for curtains, or for a canvas and paints for Father, but Mother and he are looking for work.

Last night Auntie Typhoon woke up for a moment beside me. She's slower now, my beautiful speedy fair-haired aunt who has tears in her eyes full of love for her daughter Ema and a thousand good wishes to spare for everyone. In the bright light coming from outside I cthe beautiful creatureounted the weariness in her face, all the lines and shadows. She smiled at me and whispered: Aleks, no one else has a head like yours, my sunshine, don't be afraid.

Don't be afraid, Asija! I wish so much that I had more memories of you, I wish I had memories of you as long as a journey from Essen to Višegrad and back. You'd be coming back with me this time.

Coot is the funniest word I've learned here in Germany so far.

With love from Aleksandar

Dear Asija,

I know from Granny Katarina that you got away to Sarajevo last winter. She gave me this address too. She couldn't tell me whether you got my first two letters, she said hardly any post was arriving, and no parcels, but letters were disappearing without trace as well.

SO I AM SENDING 17 MARKS 20 PFENNINGS IN THIS LETTER, IT'S ALL I HAVE. DEAR WHOEVER-OPENS-THIS LETTER, KEEP THE MONEY, BUT PLEASE IN RETURN SEAL THE ENVELOPE UP AGAIN AND SEND IT ON. THERE'S NOTHING BUT WORDS IN IT, AND SOMEONE ELSE, AND IT DOSEN'T GIVE MILITARY SECRETS AWAY BECAUSE I'M ONLY 5 FEET, 3 INCHES TALL, SO ON ONE EVER TELLS ME ANY MILITARY SECRETS. BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT TO SOMEONE VERY IMPORTANT, AND I DON'T MIND IF YOU READ THE REST OF IT JUST AS LONG AS YOU DONT'T THROW THE LETTER AWAY AFTERWARD. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Dear Asija, my mother is working in a laundry and has less time to be unwell now. She says it's so hot in that hellish laundry that her brain boils. Mother has lost the ability to see things in a good light. She's chain-smoking, she smokes like the chimneys of Essen. Father is working in the same place as Uncle Bora. They're both out and about all day. They're working in the black economy. That means doing work that breaks your back and at the same time it makes you a criminal, even though you're not really stealing anything.