Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

We made a promise about stories, Mama, the son said, nodding, and closed his eyes as if he were working magic without his hat and magic wand, a very simple promise: never to stop telling them.

I can't eat any more, I let myself drop and lie there among the buzzing sweetness of the crushed fruit. Little flies buzz around my head; the dark red sweetness of the plums is sticky in my mouth, around my lips and on my hands; I'm feeding the flies as if they were birds. We're billing and cooing.

Plum-picking time in Veletovo: Great-Granny Mileva and Great-Grandpa Nikola have invited us to the village harvest festival. The whole family are here, some of them still wearing black in mourning for Grandpa Slavko. Black is the opposite of summer and so that grudging bastard the sun feels insulted, says Great-Granny, feels insulted and burns down on their backs. She wipes the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand.

Grandpa's death is the very opposite of summer, the most opposite of all.

I get my love of plums from my mother. Recently, when she saw how I was looking forward to the plum harvest, she told me that in the last months of her pregnancy she did nothing but watch figure skating and eat large quantities of plums: plums all through the day, she said, minced meat and chocolate in the evenings, now and then carrots, and coffee by the liter when I was thirsty.

And a cigarette now and then, right? finished my father, without looking up from his newspaper.

Father slept through my birth.

I'm like my mother in my fondness for plums and minced meat, and I've painted a plum without a stone surrounded by minced meat for both of us. Mother has sweet dark redness all over her face like a beard too. You'll have to eat some lunch, all the same, she warns me from up on the ladder, don't eat so fast!

Don't eat so many would have been better advice, because I've just broken the world record for plum eating, and now I hold two world records for indigestion. I lie there and let the flies buzz around me.

Plums are dusty fruit.

That's the first thing you've laughed at, Aleksandar, said my mother when we were talking about the harvest. She didn't add: since Grandpa died.

These roads are made for an arse, not a car! cursed my father yesterday morning on the way to Veletovo, looking under the hood of our yellow Yugo and shaking his head.

Yugos are made for four, not six, replied Mother, lighting a cigarette.

That's not the trouble; its contrary nature is the trouble! This is not a car, it's a donkey on wheels! Father kicked the wheel rim.

A donkey. . Mother began to answer back, but then luckily she went away to smoke her cigarette in the company of the flowers by the roadside.

Even on its very first drive our Yugo, which was brand-new at the time, had stopped on the winding road to Veletovo with its engine still running, as if it just wanted to take a quick look at the view: the brambles covered with ripe blackberries, the stream under the fir trees, ferns the color of my mother's bright red perm. Father had taken his hands off the steering wheel and shrugged: stepping on the accelerator didn't work. Ever since then we've always had to walk part of the way to my great-grandparents' house. On the way home the Yugo will start the first time. The only one of us who can never get used to it is my father.

Yesterday, while he was busy repairing the engine until his fingers were black, I tried to tell my uncles and Nena Fatima that they didn't have to let me win at rummy. The days of giving me a toddler's privileges are over, I cried, I'm only pretending I can't cope with fourteen cards at once to lull you into a false sense of security!

I threw my hand of cards down hard on the middle of the rock around which we were sitting, so as to make a loud sound without raising my voice. My mother was expert at such gestures, she was Comrade in Chief of them. She could leave the table with just a shake of her head, she could put her hands on her hips and frown, and the sound was so loud I felt like stopping my ears.

And, Uncle? I said, tapping Bora's shoulder with my forefinger, if you're going to look at my cards then please hang on to the jack you yourself need, and don't discard it on my behalf, I'm not incompetent!

I know the word “incompetent” from my father. He uses it when there's something political on TV, or when he and Uncle Miki are quarreling about something political they've seen on TV. Incompetence means doing something even though you haven't the faintest idea how to — like governing Yugoslavia, for instance. “Fellow traveler” is another important term, and several times already it's led to me being sent to my room, or the brothers not speaking to each other for days on end. If I had a brother, we'd be the exact opposite of my father and Uncle Miki. We'd talk seriously to each other, and no one would have to be afraid we'd raise our voices.

Uncle Bora said okay, picked up the cards, shuffled them, and we let Nena Fatima win the next game. Behind us, Father slammed the hood of the car down and Bora offered him his pack of cigarettes. We started to walk the rest of the way.

My father was a Veletovo smoker. He smoked the only cigarettes of his life on the way from our stalled Yugo to my great-grandparents' house. He did it again yesterday — two packs in two hours. When we had to take a rest for Uncle Bora's sake, because he was so badly out of breath he couldn't go on, I imagined our Yugo minus its exhaust on the road to Veletovo. Early morning, dew gleaming on the grass, birds twittering, and the rest of our family, whose Yugos never break down, hooting as they overtook us.

I'm doubled up with stomach cramps under a sky full of ripe fruit on bending boughs, and I badly need to go to the bathroom. Quick, up the hill, across the veranda where Uncle Bora is nailing plastic tablecloths to the tables. This morning, when we were deciding who'd stay here to pick plums and who'd go and put the furniture up on the veranda ready for the party, he was the only man who ponderously turned to go. A-little-tree- climbing-would-do-you-good, Auntie Typhoon called after him, all in a rush. How fast her tongue went! Her words first overtook what she was saying herself, then anyone listening.

It might do me good but think of the poor trees, said her husband, dismissing this idea, and he dragged his three hundred and thirty pounds up the hill. As if to express his opinion of plums in general he polished an apple on his sleeve and bit into it so hard that the apple broke right apart, and juice ran down both his double chins. Undeterred, the big man made a face and closed his eyes with relish.

This-is-the-end! This-is-the-end! Auntie Typhoon was tearing her hair. Fascinated, we stared at Steamroller and his pregnant natural catastrophe, ah, how delightful love must be, sighed Great-Granny, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.

My aunt speaks at the speed of a German autobahn. For years Uncle Bora has been pounding tar with a steamroller in Germany to make the fastest autobahns in the world, while Auntie Typhoon is a waitress at a service station. If anyone asks me what my uncle does for a living, I don't mention the roller. I say he's a guest worker. Although it puzzles me that there are places where guests have to work, in our family we don't even let a guest do the dishes, but our neighbor Čika Veselin once called Bora a steamroller, that fat skinflint wouldn't need to use any machine, he'd only have to lie down and roll the roads himself. I asked my mother to get Uncle Bora to go on a diet so that he wouldn't grow any fatter and people would stop saying nasty things about him. She thought she was too fat herself at the time, so she was on a diet of plums and minced meat. People say nasty things, she said, not because Bora is fat himself but because they think he has a fat wallet full of deutschmarks.