Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

I'm against endings, I'm against things being over. Being finished should be stopped! I am Comrade in Chief of going on and on, I support furthermore and et cetera!

I find a picture of the bridge over the Drina in the last photo album. The bridge looks the same as usual except that there's scaffolding around its eleven arches. People are standing on the scaffolding, waving as if the bridge were a ship about to sail away down the river. Despite the scaffolding the bridge looks finished. It's complete; the scaffolding can't spoil its beauty and usefulness. I don't mind the gigantic completeness of our bridge. The Drina is fast in that photo and rushes along, the broad, the dangerous Drina — a young river!

Flowing fast is like shouting out loud.

Today it rolls lazily by, more of a lake than a river; the dam has discouraged the water so much — the slow Drina, with driftwood and dirt near the banks as if it's fraying at the edges. I carefully take the bridge out of the photo album. The surface is cool and smooth, like the once wild, untamed river is today. I put the photo in my trouser pocket, where it will get crumpled and dog-eared.

I want to make unfinished things. I'm not a builder, and I'm rather bad at math except for mental arithmetic. I don't know how you make bricks. But I can paint. I get that from my artist father, along with my big ears and his constant cry of: not now, can't you see I'm busy! I'm going to be the artist of the lovely unfinished! I'll paint plums without stones, rivers without dams, Comrade Tito in a T-shirt! Artists have to create pictures in a logical series; that, says my father the spare-time artist, is the recipe for success, he told me about it in his studio. As well as his canvases and paints there are tubs of sauerkraut stored there, boxes of old clothes, and the child's bed I've grown out of. My father spends entire weekends in his studio. A painter must never be satisfied with what he sees — painting reality means surrendering to it, he cries when I knock at the door to say the air's leaking out of my soccer ball again, or the inner tube of my bike tire. Artists have to reshuffle and rebuild reality, says my father in his beret as he pumps up the soccer ball. He isn't really talking to me, he doesn't expect any answer. There are French songs playing in the studio, Pink Floyd late in the evening, and the door is locked.

Logical series are the answer. Other people can fly planes and delouse the pelicans in the zoo, but I'm going to be a soccer-playing, fishing, serial artist of the Unfinished! None of my pictures will ever be painted to the end; there'll be something important missing from every one of them.

I get my painting things, my paint box; I borrow paper from my father. I put water in a jam jar and soften my brushes in it.

The empty sheet of paper lies in front of me. The first picture of something unfinished must be the Drina, the mischievous river before it had a dam. I put blue and yellow on the plate where I mix them; I make the first green brushstroke on the paper, the green is too pale, I darken it carefully and paint a curve, I lighten it, too cold, I add ochre, green, green, but I'll never get a green like the green of the river Drina, not in a hundred years.

The dead are lonelier than the living ever can be. They can't hear each other through coffins and the earth. And the living go and plant flowers on the graves. The roots grow down into the earth and break through the coffins. After a while the coffins are full of roots and the dead people's hair. Then they can't even talk to themselves. When I die I'd like to be buried in a mass grave. In a mass grave I wouldn't be afraid of the dark, and I'd be lonely only because my grandson will be missing me, the way I miss Grandpa Slavko now.

I don't have any grandpa now, and the tears are building up behind my forehead. Everything important in the world can be found in the morning paper, the Communist Manifesto, or the stories that make us laugh or cry, best of all both at the same time. That was one of Grandpa Slavko's clever sayings. When I get to be as old as he was I'll have his clever sayings, I'll have big veins like the veins on my father's forearms, I'll have my granny's recipes and my mother's rare look of happiness.

On the morning of the fourth day after Grandpa's death Father wakes me, and I know at once: it's Grandpa's funeral. I dreamed everyone in my family was dead except me, which felt like being suddenly very far away and unable to find my way back.

Pack your things, we're leaving.

My father wakes me up only when there's some kind of disaster; otherwise Mother comes to kiss my hair. Father doesn't kiss me on principle. It's awkward between men. He sits down on the edge of the bed as if to say something else. I sit up. So there we are now, sitting. Papa, I look at you the way you look at someone when you're listening, look, I'm not getting up, it's a good thing for you to tell me everything I already know, explaining what I already understand, because the thing isn't complete until a father has told his son and explained it all. But I don't say that, and Father doesn't say anything either. That's the way we talk to each other. We often talk like that. He goes to work, then after work he goes into his studio and spends the whole night there. He sleeps in late on weekends. If he's watching the news there's a ban on talking. I'm not complaining, he talks to other people even less than he talks to me. I'm content and my mother is happy that she can bring me up on her own, without interference from Father.

Sitting there saying nothing today, my father looks as if he doesn't have any muscles. He's been staying with Granny since Grandpa died. Granny phoned late yesterday and asked how the boy was doing. She thought it was my mother who'd picked up the phone, so I said nothing. We're going to wash Slavko now, she added, and said good-bye. I imagined Grandpa being washed and dressed for his own funeral. I didn't see any faces, just hands pulling Grandpa about. The hands threw all the bed linens out of the bedroom and boiled the sheets, you do that when there's a dead person in the place. Little veins in your eyes burst from washing your dead father; your hands get smaller and you have to keep looking at them. My silent father sits on the edge of my bed with his red-rimmed eyes, hands on his knees, palms turned up. When I'm as old as Father I'll have the lines on his face. Lines show how well you've lived. I don't know if lots of lines mean you've lived better. Mother says no, but I've heard the opposite too.

I get up. Father straightens the sheet and plumps up the pillow. Do you have anything black to wear?

Not: Grandpa.

Not: Grandpa's dead.

Not: Aleksandar, your grandpa won't be coming back.

Not: Life can never be as quick as a sudden heart attack.

Not: Grandpa's only asleep — I'd resent that even more than the way he opens the window now and hangs the blanket out to air.

I take a black shirt off its hanger. Suddenly I realize that my father is counting on me. He understands that magic is our last chance. We can start right away. I say, I just have to fetch something from Grandpa's apartment first. Something important.

On the way in the car he says: Granny and your uncles have gone ahead. Hurry up, everybody else is already there. “There” he calls it.

Not a word from him about the funeral, and I don't say that I'm the most powerful magician-grandson in the nonaligned states. Don't worry, step on the accelerator and I'll get my grandpa back for me and your father back for you. I don't say anything because suddenly being a child seems so difficult.

Grandpa's apartment. I take a deep breath. The kitchen. Fried onions, nothing left of Grandpa. Bedroom. I press my face against the shirts. Living room. I sit down on the sofa. That's where Grandpa was sitting. Nothing. I go into the corner behind the TV set. Nothing. The cobwebs are still there. I look out of the window into the yard. Nothing. Our Yugo with its engine running. Father has got out. My magic hat on the glass case. I climb on a chair, carefully fold up the hat and put it in my rucksack. The rucksack! I search it for the magic wand, and voilà! I was going to show the wand to my best friend Edin, I remember, and for demonstration purposes I was going to break some unimportant bone in our history teacher. He skips almost every lesson with Partisans in it, even though there've never been better battles than the fighting of the People's Liberation Army and Red Star Belgrade's matches. Red Star Belgrade is my favorite soccer team. We almost always win and when we lose it's a tragedy. Grandpa's death has saved the history teacher for now.