Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Do you know Miki Krsmanovic? he asks.

Yes, he's my uncle.

Your uncle, is he? Boris looks around, hitches up his trousers and puts on a huge pair of sunglasses. He reaches for my bag. I withdraw my hand and take a step into the waiting room. We're going the same way, he says.

Don't you have to drive any farther?

Yes, he says, but I don't like driving on an empty stomach. Come on, I'll help you with your bag.

That's all right, it's not heavy, I say, taking it from him. Do you know my uncle?

No, he says, spitting through his teeth, no, I don't know him, thank God.

I've made lists. Nicknames. The man with the uncontrollable leg. Top Hat. My sad man. The three-dot-ellipsis man. Typhoon. The man who climbed the mountains singing and never came back. Walrus and Ladybird. Potato Aziz. Massacre. The soldier with gold in his mouth.

Boris and I pass the soccer stadium. Young men are training, doing headers, I think of Kiko's head. A man with a long braid throws them balls to be headed into the net. The man wears a suit and a silk scarf. There's no one in goal. Boris and I walk side by side in silence, the slap of the ball against the woodwork behind us. Boris shrugs. We cross the bridge over the Rzav where Edin and I fed the fish with spit on the day when the soldiers sang and danced. The river is shallow, white islands of foam drift with the current. I spit. The bridge has stood up to all high tides.

I've made lists. Barbel, chub, roach, gudgeon, dace, Danube salmon, carp, sunbleak, catfish with spectacles and a mustache.

We say no more about Uncle Miki. When I ask a question, Boris waves it away and brings up other subjects. He distracts me from the smells and colors of the town, asks how old I was back then, where exactly I've been living in Germany, whether I can get him a visa, what I think of the rumors about Madonna and Guy Ritchie. As we part outside the apartment building where Granny Katarina is living, he says: don't take offense, but it's like this. If you don't know anything you're an idiot. If you know a lot and admit it you're a dangerous idiot. Višegrad always knows just how much it may know, and how much it should tell.

In the yard outside the apartment building six black-haired boys are playing soccer, using their school satchels as goal-posts, the ball rolls to my feet; I put my bag down. After a moment's shyness they join in, who's on my side? I call, who's on my side? One of them runs clear on the left, Ci" ko! he calls, I pass it to him running; he has only the goalie ahead of him and feints.

There's no light in the stairwell; the light switches have been torn out, wires stick out of the holes, thin red and blue necks without any heads. The corridors are narrower and the flights of steps shorter than they used to be; the air smells as overpoweringly of bread as if everyone in the building were baking at the same time. No name by the bell where Teta Amela, the best baker in the world, used to live. My granny coughs behind the closed door with the name “Slavko Krsmanovic” beside the bell. The bell doesn't ring, no power, I knock.

I've made lists. The mosques. One of them is supposed to be being rebuilt. There are concrete plans for it, and concrete protests against it. Death notices still hang on the chestnut trees not far from the square where the minaret of the larger mosque once pointed to the sky. The ones with green rims are in Arabic letters, the ones with black rims have the cross on them. It's fourteen to one for the dead Christians. Very few Muslims have come home.

Aleksandar, says Granny Katarina, I've been baking bread. I'll put the milk on in a minute.

Our hug is a brief one. Granny comes up to my throat, she kisses me on the throat, I'm horrified by her and horrified by myself because I'm slightly repelled by her moist mouth and the tickling little hairs on her top lip. Come on, she says, you're tired, let's have a look at you. Oh yes, your Grandpa.

Granny's hair is dyed black, white roots show, she has a sourish smell like damp maize and is trying to pick up my bag. Do you drink coffee these days? she asks.

Leave that to me, I say, taking my bag into the bedroom. I can see the mark on the door frame telling me how tall I was on 6 April 1992: five feet. As the first shells were exploding, my father sharpened his pencil and called to me. Still time for this, stand here. Today I measure myself and cheat by standing on tiptoe, just as I cheated Father back then by one or two inches. I mark the wood of the door frame with a pencil line just above my hair. I smell milk in the kitchen. I wait, five feet, eleven inches tall, twelve minutes, and I drink the milk still warm.

I've made lists. The green house with the peculiar roof is still a green house with a peculiar roof. A bonsai in the single large window. A satellite dish on the peculiar roof. The roof slopes steeply almost all the way down to the ground. I peer through the window. A young woman is sitting cross-legged on a bamboo mat in the middle of the small room. She has closed her eyes. Her hands are resting on her knees, palms upward. Her thumbs and middle fingers are touching.

The old locomotive stands in the little park near the building. It's been restored and repainted. I pass my hand over the front of it: smooth, cool iron. Grandpa Rafik, gray, railway engine. An elderly couple of tourists ask me to take a picture of them in front of the engine. They wear panama hats. They're buying souvenirs made of wood, the bridge and the mosque as pendants, a mini Ivo Andric; there are no limits to my imagination.

I unpack. Diabetic cherry jam. Granny Katarina laughs heartily, I don't eat any jam I haven't made myself! She wraps the jam up again and asks me to put it away in the pajz .

List of smells: the cellar smells of peas and coal. The graveyard in Veletovo: freshly mown grass. Zoran's Aunt Desa: honey. Soldiers: iron and schnapps. The Drina: the Drina. The pajz , the larder: sour bread and rotten wood — and in it the bread box, cans, sugar, flour, bags inside more bags, moths, bottomless boxes and rusty mousetraps. My fishing rod has been lying behind a shelf ever since we left. I'll have to oil the spool; the hook is rusty. Granny, I call from the little room, since when have mice eaten corks?

We go everywhere now to drink coffee, says Granny, leaving the apartment. I respect a clever mouse, I call from the stairs.

To Granny coffee isn't just a drink: coffee is praising her neighbor's white net curtains to the skies because they're so well washed. I drink the first coffee of my life with my grandmother at Teta Magda's on the fourth floor. I've made lists. People living in the apartment building. Legend has it that I took my first steps in Magda's arms. Neither sweets nor plums nor minced meat were necessary on that occasion. With her long neck and long nose Magda looks like a stork. Magda from the fourth floor is now a weary and mythical figure; she has to prop her head up because it can't hold itself straight anymore. She puts her hand under it, which makes her look dreamy and exhausted at the same time. Her cheeks are hollow, her thin hair is strands of silvery lead. Oh, Katarina dear, says Magda, I could sleep and sleep until the cows come home. You've grown, Aleksandar. She examines me with her green eyes.

You're looking well, I say, not sure what I mean by that.

Yes, yes, says Magda, pulling a leaden strand back from her forehead. Back then, but you won't remember it anymore, she says, and Granny and I lean back, because now the legend is about to be sung in her worn old voice, back then you walked into my arms, tottered over to me without holding on to anything, a smile on your face, your conquests were just beginning, hello big world, I'm ready for you now, you were enchanted by your own strength, you'd found your sense of balance there in my arms.