Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

It's 2,250 steps today, and the name by the door says: Miki. I stand on concrete, the garden has had concrete put down over it, how are the worms doing? I don't ring the bell. It says just Miki.

I've made lists. Our street. I go from building to building, I know this balcony, I know that swing in the yard made from an old tire, I know the taste of mirabelles pinched from that garden, I don't know a single name on the mailboxes except the name of Danilo Gorki.

Danilo and I sit on his veranda, the table and rocking chair just as I remember them from Francesco's time. The garden is neglected, the cherry tree has been cut down; old Mirela, Danilo's mother, is dead. Danilo lives alone in the big house, gets up at five every day, goes fishing, and if he can't sell his catch he eats it himself. His freezer is stuffed full of fish. Better fish all day and get nothing on your hook, he says, than toil all day and get nothing in your pocket. A lot of people these days think you can't be happy unless you have a job, it doesn't even have to be a paid job. To hell with that kind of happiness, I say.

I ask Danilo if he knows where his colleague from the Estuary Restaurant went, the man we children called Čika Doctor. List: myths and legends. I tell the tale of the lemonade for the leather-clad biker.

Danilo says yes, he knows. I wait for him to go on, and when he doesn't, I ask: where?

I was in the same unit as your uncle, he says, setting the table. That's why you're here, right?

Čika Doctor, who cut a man's calf open because the man had compared his sister's teeth with the teeth of a horse.

What with all the fish, says Danilo, you don't even smell fish anymore.

The muted cries of children playing make their way in to us from outside. Danilo asks if I'm married, pours oil into the pan and puts two fish in.

Just as well, he says, women are devils with pretty skin. Oh yes, says Danilo Gorki, opening the window that looks out on the street, I ought to know.

From home to school: 1,803 steps, counted on the day of a math test for which I'd studied heroically, and even so I handed it in without a single correct answer. Today it's 1,731. The students are standing about in small groups, all talking together in loud voices. I pace out the penalty area of the little soccer field, which has lost its goals. This is where Kiko won the bet with me and Edin. I go across the yard to see Kostina the caretaker. The thin man in his blue dungarees with a pencil behind his ear is leaning against the wall.

Mr. Kostina, I say, the goals have gone.

The goals have gone, he repeats, scratching the thick veins on his forearm. Laughing girls' voices in the yard.

What would you think if I drew a goal on the wall?

Not much, mutters Mr. Kostina.

A bell rings, slowly clattering. Like saucepans clashing, I think. The children wash around us, a torrent of brightly colored backpacks streaming noisily into the building.

New bells? I ask, since there's nothing to say but the obvious.

The same we've had these thirty years, just a bit slower. The caretaker speaks slowly; he's as durable as the bells.

The school hall always smelled of damp cardboard and nougat. I stop at the entrance.

Mr. Kostina, is Fizo still here?

Home-comer, are you? He never came back after break one Monday. Mr. Kostina pushes himself away from the wall with an effort and slouches into the building. The yard is quiet now, except for a boy anxious not to be late racing across the goalless soccer field.

I've made lists. I'm sitting on the fifth floor with Radovan Bunda while his wife gives me the first coffee of my second day in Višegrad. It's early morning, I had to make an appointment, seven in the morning was the only time he had free. Bursting with vigor, never ill in his life and never at a loss for a curse, Radovan Bunda used to be a welcome guest at my great-grandparents' parties in Veletovo. In the winter of '91 he left his village, where they were afraid of electricity, blue denim and the full moon, and moved to Višegrad. On his first day in town he sold his sheep and rented the fifth-floor apartment. He couldn't get his two cows up the stairs, so he sold them too. With the money from the cows he bought a chair, a table, his first vacuum cleaner, his first fridge, and his first carbonated mineral water. He raised chickens on the roof; his rooster crowed even before the muezzin and woke the entire building. But then, on the first day of the skirmishing around Višegrad, a shell fell from above, and none of the chickens ever cackled again. When Radovan saw his silent hens he decided to leave town. He loaded his chickens into the fridge, and the fridge onto his back, and left. He couldn't think of a safer place than his old village, he tells me, adding sweetener to his coffee. Eyes on his cup, he says: but my village wasn't a village anymore. You need people for a village. I went from door to door, all the locks were broken off, and they weren't asleep in the bedrooms, they just lay there dead. In bed, on red pillows. All of them Serbs, except for one house we'd all been Serbs.

Revenge on revenge. Back and forth. That was good old Mehmed's house. I knocked, he opened the door, he said: Radovan, old friend. He showed me his hands and embraced me like a brother.

Radovan pauses, stirs his coffee, takes a sip. The hum of car engines rises from the street, calls, a whistle. A terrible night, says Radovan, pressing his lips together, Mehmed told me, they poured gasoline over the dogs, tied them up and set fire to them. My grandmother was a poor sleeper and used to sit wearily on the swing on the veranda every night; they hanged her next to the swing. All the others had been shot, but she was still dangling there. Was it supposed to look like suicide? She'd never have thought of such a thing of her own free will, a stupid thing to do, she'd have said, I've only got this one life!

Radovan Bunda buried the village and set off with the chickens to take his own revenge. On the way, he collected fourteen sharp stones for each of the fourteen victims, and he wept for seven days. He didn't close an eye for six nights, and on the seventh he admitted to himself that he couldn't be a killer. I know about hatred, not bloodshed. I'll get rich, I told myself, and then we'll see. I moved back in here and kept well clear of all of it, that's what I did. I learned to write from Mr. Popović the music teacher, and to speak better, to think faster, I learned the art of sweet-talking from him too, I took lessons from Mr. Popović every day for a year, in the end he was always playing the piano. Then he forgot Mozart, then he forgot Brahms, then he forgot Vivaldi, in the end there was only Johann Sebastian left. If you want to get rich, Radovan, you have to master rhetoric, that's what the music teacher told me when he was still all right.

Radovan sold everything except the chickens. With the money he invited smugglers and thieves to dinner, he listened when politicians and loudmouths were talking, he watched a doctor playing poker with three of the United Nations blue helmets and gave the doctor secret signs.

And when I'd found out enough about the way things were going, says Radovan, spreading his arms wide, I stopped a truck and had a little argument with its driver, nothing too bad. The thing was stuffed full of medicinal drugs, it was on its way to a mayor who was going to sell them on. I left the truck with one of my smuggler friends and told the poker-playing doctor: over to you now.

Today Radovan's fridge is the kind a large American family would have. A walk-in fridge, extra living space. His blond wife has PRINCESS BITCH in silver glitter on her close-fitting top. A second woman comes in, a redhead, and kisses Radovan on the mouth. I'll have to think about these complicated relationships. Radovan introduces both women to me by their first names, they both end with a “y”, he pats both their bottoms. Princess Bitch and the redhead smoke by the window, leaning out into the Višegrad morning.