Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Nena Fatima fits in best. She cooks for us all, she takes long baths, and I can't see any sorrow in her face. Once I caught her whistling, and it sounded amazingly beautiful, considering that she doesn't really make any sounds at all. She's made friends with the girls at the supermarket and takes them coffee at their cash desks every day. In return, she can pinch things that cost less than five marks and the girls at the cash desks pretend not to notice.

I still haven't found out her secret, she writes and writes, the paper is scribbled all over right to the edges. When my parents are talking about things we don't have, like health and money and our home in Višegrad, I always have to go out of the room, and Nena Fatima stands guard at the doorway to make sure I don't listen. The things I'm not allowed to hear are the worst of all.

If I'm asked where I come from, I say that's a difficult question, because I come from a country that doesn't exist anymore, not where I used to live. Here they call us Yugos, they call Albanians and Bulgarians Yugos too, it's simpler for everyone.

I've had my first school report, still without any marks except in math, and that's not worth mentioning. It's enough to say that my head start over the others disappeared very quickly. In German we had to write an essay on the subject of “Essen, I love you,” and I wrote about how we make börek at home. We all had to read our essays aloud, and when it was my turn the class laughed itself silly. To understand that, you have to know that in German Essen means hrana, food. I knew that, but because I don't like the city of Essen, I thought I'd write about börek made with minced meat and yufka dough. And that was quite difficult, because I didn't know the German for minced meat, and just try explaining minced meat to someone if you don't know the word for it. The other Bosnians in the class copied down the recipe and took it home, because they thought there ought not to be onions in börek, and you should use flaky pastry. Josip and Tomislav, two boys from Croatia, said there wasn't any börek where they come from. Can you imagine that, Asija? A country without any börek ?

I miss the moody Drina, Asija, Apparently there's a river here, it's called the Ruhr, but I don't think just any watercourse that happens to flow along deserves the name of a river.

Yesterday I was playing the city-country-river game with Philipp, Sebastian and Susanne, and I didn't come in last with Duisburg, Denmark, Drina, daylily, dentist and Dalmatian. I'm not sure how to explain a daylily to you, and yesterday for the first time I couldn't remember a Bosnian word, the word for a birch tree, I had to look it up: “ breza .” There are birch trees in a park here called the Kruppwald. All Essen is really one huge garage, you have to be grateful to the weeds between the paving stones for growing at all.

Birch trees and daylilies and water milfoil and gentian and the Ruhr. I'm noticing everything, Asija. I'm collecting words in my new language. Collecting helps to make up for the hard answers and sad thoughts I have when I think of Višegrad. It's hard to put them all into words without having Grandpa Slavko near me, but I'm trying. You didn't know Grandpa Slavko, he was the only person who could have explained your hair.

On the morning of her return to Višegrad, my granny gave me an empty book. She had written on the first page herself. Together with the story by Andric in which Aska dances with the wolf until the wolf is dizzy, and so escapes alive, I treasure that one page by my granny more than anything I've ever read.

Asija, I don't remember the birch trees. I feel as if one Aleksandar stayed behind in Višegrad and Veletovo by the Drina, and there's another Aleksandar living in Essen and thinking of going fishing in the Ruhr sometime. In Višegrad, back there with his unfinished pictures, there's an Aleksandar who began and never finished. I'm not Comrade in Chief of the unfinished anymore, the unfinished is Comrade in Chief of me. I don't paint any more unfinished pictures. I'm writing stories in Granny's book about the time when everything was all right, so that later I can't complain of having forgotten it. If I were a magi cian who could make things possible, Asija, memories would taste the way Stela ice cream tasted back then.

Do you remember me?

Aleksandar

Dear Asija,

Nancy Kerrigan's knee got injured with an iron bar in figure-skating practice. Her rival Tonya Harding had something to do with the attack. It was on the news just now, and my mother left the living room in a temper. After that news item Somalia was next. Somalia and Bosnia, they come to the same thing these days, except that we don't have any black children with short hair and guns over their shoulders. We don't have any oil either, says Uncle Bora, that's why Americans are not helping.

My mother has bought herself Ice Magic 1–6, six video cassettes of figure-skating championships and Olympic events, Sarajevo among them. In the evening she sits in front of the TV set murmuring: loop, salchow, lutz and toe loop, double and triple. Sometimes Nena Fatima switches the TV off and hides the cassette. And Mother still sits there saying: axel, flip. Her hands are so wrecked by the laundry that wrecked is the only word I can find for them.

We have a new apartment, just for our family. The police came to the old one three times. The police wear green here, and they're different from ours in other ways too; they put their hands on their pistol grips and they don't want a schnapps. They don't just look serious, they are serious too, and they twist your arm behind your back if you get close to them too quickly, like Čika Zahid did. We had extended deadlines and let them run out because we didn't know where to go. On the morning when the police came for the last time, more of them than usual, and didn't ring the doorbell but knocked hard instead, my father said: we're moving. He finished eating his slice of bread, and we packed. I've found us somewhere, he said, the landlord just wants to take his sofa out and then we can move in.

We have much more space in the new apartment, and we're away from all the dirt and gossip and noise and the screeching sound of the motorway and the feeling that you could never, ever, be further away from a real home. Where's your home, Asija? I've no idea where you are. Are there still any addresses in Sarajevo?

I've phoned Višegrad. I couldn't reach anyone except Granny Katarina and Zoran. Granny Katarina talks about the old days a lot. We listen to her and we don't contradict anything she remembers, we say: that's right, Granny.

Do you remember Zoran? A friend of mine from Višegrad, a silent rebel. He says the town is full of Serbian refugees. They're living in the school, or else they've simply taken over the empty buildings and the apartments of the Bosniaks, the Bosnian Muslims, who were driven out. And maybe those Bosniaks are living in Serbian apartments now. In the end no one will be where they were before. There's a family living in what was once our home too. Granny says that's all right because they have small children. Zoran says the Višegrad people can't stand the newcomers, he hates them himself. I never heard Zoran talk so much before. Zoran's hatred is enormous.

Schalke 04 is my favorite soccer team, I have a fishing license and my best friend here, Philipp, has lent me the Sensible Soccer game. I listen to Nirvana and I dream in German. I dream of having a PC so that I can play Sensible Soccer properly and I won't have to tell Philipp lies about the number of goals I've scored against Brazil.

I'm letting my hair grow.