Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

With love from Granny Katarina

There's always ice cream, but there isn't always this particular ice cream, it's my favorite and its name is a favorite name of mine: Stela. If I have a little sister, I tell my mother, digging the little blue plastic spoon into the ice cream carton, we'll call her Stela, okay? Have I been putting on weight? asks my mother in alarm, and I say: no, but I've a right to join in family decisions, haven't I?

My father slept all through my birth, and my mother fainted immediately after it, she couldn't stand the sight of so much blood and shit all at once, so the only person present who was still conscious, my Uncle Bora, had a perfect right to say at once: ugly little dirtbag, we'll call him Aleksandar.

It's true that I was still very small at the time, but you never forget a remark like that.

My favorite Stela ice cream is vanilla. It comes in a blue carton. There are little colored spoons in a plastic bag in the ice cream vendor's fridge. If you buy a Stela ice cream you can have a little colored spoon for free. Blue is my favorite. Stela is a pregnant ice cream with a secret inside it. Buried somewhere in the vanilla ice, sometimes near the top, sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the bottom, an icy, dark red, sour cherry lies hidden.

My parents don't know anything about it. I'm in the mosque. I know what to do: you get down on your knees and think of something nice that hasn't come true yet. You wish for the nice thing every time you bow down. Make it come true! There are colored rugs spread on the floor of the mosque; from the outside it looks like a rocket, on the inside it's a belly. I'm afraid. I'm out of the ordinary here, because I'm the only one wearing shoes. It isn't April in the mosque, it isn't spring. I bow down and bow down and bow down.

Dear Mosque, let Red Star win the championship. Dear Mosque, let Red Star win the championship. Dear Mosque, let Red Star win the championship.

Dear Mosque, let Mama forget how to sigh.

I wear my Pioneer cap tilted sideways. I'm a wild Pioneer. I sit in front of the Red Flag, exhausted and content. The choir sings the “Internationale.”

I climb up on the armchair, push my hair back from my forehead and clear my throat:

It is the First of May

the wind caresses the red flags

fluttering your name: Tito.

The mother bird lays an egg

in our nest of brotherly love,

she lays it in my hand.

The chick slips out in the Pioneer's hand

at once it's as muscular as Rambo 1

with red, white and blue feathers and Adriatic eyes.

It's a dove of peace

it's an eagle in war

it's a chicken for lunch.

It's a dinosaur for the children

the dinosaur sings the “Internationale”

for Tito and the working class.

The bird eats up the first of May

and because the first of May is the future

the bird grows big and full of the future

like our country Yugoslavia.

I read, I pull the hair back from my forehead, I thank the audience, and I climb down to Grandpa Slavko's applause.

There are no Partisans now. There are commissars. There are uniforms with soldiers inside them and machine guns and generals in front of them. There's the five-pointed red star. There are parades, there's the National Liberation War, there are records of songs that everyone knows by heart. There's black bread, people stand in line for the black bread, and there's Grandpa who helped the Partisans to liberate everything possible and impossible. There are the Pioneer caps that look like Partisan caps except that they're blue, and I wear mine even when I don't need to. There's white chocolate with nuts in it, there's the big orange gas bottle in the kitchen, we play basketball, the ring for the gas bottle is the basket, I'm Drazen Petrovic and I always score three-point shots. Granny is boiling milk on the stove. I always wait exactly twelve minutes and drink the milk warm. Granny is boiling sheets on the other gas ring. There are band-aids in the bathroom, there's a gigantic trash can in the yard that isn't often emptied, there are American Indians, there are bikers in leather jackets who sometimes stop off in our town and look at the girls the same way our own boys do. There's the green building with the peculiar roof around the corner from us. There are the Japanese, the only Japanese who ever lost their way and came to our town; they went into the green house with the peculiar roof and nobody saw if they ever came out again. There are swastikas drawn in secret, so strictly forbidden that every piece of paper with a scribbled swastika on it is crumpled up and thrown into the rubbish. There's the river Drina. There's hours and hours of sitting by the Drina fishing. There are catfish in the Drina; I know one with whiskers and a pair of glasses. There are computer games called Boulder Dash or Space Invaders or International Soccer; I break all the records. There's a bicycle for my birthday, my first: a Pony, green and fast. I ride in circles, I'm a sprinter with muscular legs and a close-fitting jersey. I get laughed at for the jersey, but what do ignorant people know about aerodynamics? There are plastic bags. My Granny never throws plastic bags away; she washes them out if whey has run into them from the sheep's milk cheese, she keeps them in a bottomless space called the špajz . She keeps everything, she says: you never know what times are coming. That gives my father an idea, he says: I'll open a shop selling artists' equipment. There's the artists' equipment, there's the Sunday afternoon in the megdan cemetery behind a gravestone when Nešo's sister Elvira showed me what the difference between me and her looks like.

It doesn't look good.

There's me, acting as if I hadn't known all about it for ages.

There's a Partisan on the gravestone, in a small round photo frame, looking serious and wearing the cap with the five-pointed star.

But there are no Partisans anymore.

I go to Igalo with my parents every summer. The entire factory where my father works goes to Igalo. The syndicate moves people from a small town without any seaside to stay for a month in a small town that does have a seaside. There's an artists' colony in Igalo, so the only person who looks forward to going to Igalo is my father. The men and women in the artists' colony wear their hair long and nothing else, and Father is depressed when he has to put a tie on again at home. It's hard to say whether my mother looks forward to Igalo, or anything else at all.

“Right, family this year we're going to. .,” cried my father last week in the tones of an enthusiastic TV presenter, waving the hotel prospectuses.

“Oh, Papa, you're only talking like that because I'm supposed to show Mr. Fazlagic, not-Comrade-Teacher-now, that I know how to use quotation marks.”

“Yes, and what's more, I never talk like an enthusiastic TV presenter.”

“Igalo-o!” said my mother with the voice of a weary TV presenter announcing misery to come, and unable to do anything about it, she went to pack.

It might really have been a wonderful trip that year if Mr. Spok had come with us. A nice trip for Mr. Spok, Comrade in Chief of the town drunks, who never goes away anywhere. When I see Mr. Spok staggering across the street I can't help thinking of my Grandpa Rafik, which isn't easy, because I don't remember his face, all I know is a story about a drowned man. I feel sorry for a frog because it doesn't realize we're about to set it alight, I feel sorry for Uncle Bora because he makes himself do knee bends but can never manage it, I feel sorry for you, Mr. Fazlagic, because you'll soon forget how to laugh if you don't stop looking so grim. And I feel sorry for Mr. Spok, who says: “I'm worse off than a mongrel dog, I don't even have a pack of other dogs to run with. Everything around me is made of stone — streets, mountains, hearts. I'm never near the sea.”