Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

The track through the vegetation leads to a meadow, this is where the path ends; it never went any farther, dew lies on the ground here, snow lies on the mountain peaks. We go uphill through the plum orchard to my great-grandparents' house. It's a long time since the trunks of the plum trees were smoothed down, scab and moss have eaten into their bark, fungi sprout at their feet. What are we all thinking? I wonder as Granny, my uncle and I stroke the bark of one of the trees in turn.

There's a table out in the yard between the sheds and the house, the white tablecloth weighted down with stones. At the head of the table Great-Grandpa Nikola is holding on to his long hair.

The wind, children, the wind, he sings, taking my chin and then my head between his bony fingers. Aleksandar, my sunshine, he sings hoarsely, Miki, come here, hold me tight, he wails.

Great-Grandpa has grown strangely elongated, he is barefoot, trying to stand upright on damp grass, fighting the wind. His overcoat, stained and crumpled, hardly covers his hips, his dark face is overgrown by moss and fungus — or no, they're only shadows. He sings out a welcome to us, but it refuses to turn into a song. Great-Grandpa's voice is a hoarse file scraping the strength away from his words.

Great-Granny has braided her hair and wound the braids into a dark silver crown around her head. She sits there in her sheepskin coat, flowered apron and woolly stockings above rubber boots, sits there with her legs apart on the large stone by the empty pigsty. She stays sitting there when I greet her, she stays sitting when I hug her, she's all soft, I hold her close, how do you hug someone who's as light as a feather and as old as the hills.

Great-Granny? I touch her shoulder. Great-Granny? Glued to her rock, my great-granny is chewing some invisible morsel with her mouth open, scratching the rock with her fingernails, her big brown eyes seeing through everything.

Still Marshall Rooster to you! she'll cry, putting her eye patch on, if I turn my back to her. I turn my back to her, and thunder rolls above the mountains.

There's some kind of smoked meat in thick, jagged slices, there's crusted sheep's milk cheese, there's the bread; the bread is warm and soft and sweet, there's cloudy plum juice, there's kaymak . Granny Katarina washes the cutlery again and then we eat with our fingers after all; there are boiled potatoes, there are bits of peel left on the boiled potatoes, there are seven toothpicks. Uncle Miki cuts the bread, Granny takes the knife from his hand. There's dripping with bits of crackling in it, there's salt, there are two onions, there are peppers stuffed with minced meat, there are pickled gherkins, there's the diabetic jam from Germany, there's schnapps and sweet wine, it would restore sight to the blind, says Great-Grandpa hoarsely, raising his glass.

To my Slavko, he says, drinking, and stays on his feet. GreatGrandpa stands at the head of the table the whole time, and Great-Granny eats on her rock with the plate on her lap.

How's your sciatica, Father? Granny asks; what's that? says Great-Grandpa, and have I ever told you, he asked, how I was a bridge against the Austrians in 1914?

There are cracks on the facade, there's no grunting from the pigsty, Petak's grave is in the middle of the yard. There's boiled celery, there's a hunger I can't satisfy.

Where are the neighbors? I ask.

Home, feeding each other, says Great-Grandpa, letting their illnesses tell them whether they're head-up or ass-down.

My Mileva and I will survive the sky above, says GreatGrandpa.

We go off to the little graveyard with the food in baskets. You eat twice on the day of a requiem mass, Granny tells me, first without the dead person, then with him.

Grandpa wouldn't have thought much of such customs, I say.

It's about being with each other, says Granny.

The cloud cover hangs heavy and black over the plum trees, their thin branches reach out to the lightning.

Great-Grandpa's white hair is like a veil in the wind. I catch up with him, I ask what's the matter with Great-Granny; she wasn't to be prized away from her rock.

My Mileva has the lightest head in the world, he says, suddenly leaping aside, striking out around him with his hands and bending his arm as if to take something in a headlock, whereupon the wind suddenly drops. My Mileva, he says breathlessly, wrestling with some large thing under his arm, gets off that rock only when there's something important to be done, or it's night and time to sleep.

The boards in the graveyard fence are crooked, the wood is rotting and cracked, the nails eaten away by rust. There's constant lightning, thunder rolls as if the clouds must be torn apart before it begins to rain. Miki shakes his head and laughs, although no one has said anything. The first heavy drops fall.

Grandpa's grave is clean and solid, the only white patch anywhere around. I put down the potatoes, the schnapps, the wine, the glasses, the marble gravestone is already shining in the rain. There are no Partisans anymore, I tell Miki. He isn't listening.

There's an oval picture framed in the stone: my Grandpa in black and white looks out at me, looks inside me, listens with his eyes, and he already knows how everything will turn out.

Granny digs a hole in the earth with a spoon at the place where I imagine Grandpa's head must be, and sticks a cigarette into the hole.

But Grandpa didn't smoke, I say.

He did in secret, says Granny, and Miki lights his father's cigarette and his own.

The grave is a festive table; it's raining more and more heavily, we sit on the edge of the grave and eat for the second time. The ash on Grandpa's cigarette curls and bends over. Rain falls on the onions, falls on the potatoes, hits the lid of the pan of peppers. I eat as if I've gone hungry for days, sometimes someone puts something down on the grave, a gherkin, a slice of bread and dripping, I salt the bread and salt the earth too, I dig a hole myself and fill it with schnapps.

Yes, this is good, four of the Krsmanovic family in the same place, says Great-Grandpa.

The rain it sweeps over us in waves, and when Granny says: how much luck my husband deserved! and I say: how many stories my Grandpa gave me! and Great-Grandpa says: how much schnapps is left? and Miki feeds Grandpa some damp bread and says: there's nothing we'd be proud of together, Father, there's nothing we blame ourselves for together, when we say all this no one can know who will shed tears, or just how hard. And I don't know when Great-Granny joined us. I only see her kneeling on the gravestone and kissing Grandpa's photo, kissing each eye once.

My child, my child, if I'd borne a thousand children no heart would have been as close to me as yours. Great-Granny kisses the damp grave and then, with earth on her mouth, she kisses her husband, who is getting taller and taller in the rain. Standing on tiptoe, she can only kiss his shoulder. She combs his wet hair with her wooden comb, she keeps combing its strands, they're tangled in the wind.

I eat and drink and eat and drink and eat, rain runs down the back of my neck, Grandpa's cigarette is smoked to the end. GreatGranny hands me my magic wand and hat. The hat still fits me, the wand, like the whole world, is smaller than I remember it. Miki grins at me, I go over to him, our rib cages touch, I can see the pores of his cheeks, I take the hat off and try to put it on Miki, he knocks my hand away, someone pushes someone else, the hat and wand land in the mud. There's thunder above me and behind me and to the left and the right all at once, shut up, will you? I cry. Miki loosens his tie.

Grandpa, I haven't remembered all your stories, but I've written a few of my own and as soon as the rain stops I'll read them to you. I got the idea from Nena Fatima, I got Grandpa Rafik's voice, I got the veins on your son's upper arms, he's painting coconuts now, I got my mother's melancholy. But still I don't have all the things I'd need to tell my story as one of us: I don't have the courage of the river Drina, or the voice of the hawk, or the rock-hard backbone of our mountains, or Walrus's infallibility or the enthusiasm of the man who misses, honorably. And I don't have Armin the stationmaster, Čika Hasan and Čika Sead in their eternal argument, Kiko's leg, Edin who forgets he's imitating a wolf and takes fright at the sound of his own voice, Cauliflower, the names of trees, a stomach for schnapps, the goals scored in the school yard. But most of all I miss the truth, the truth in which we are no longer listeners or storytellers, but we give and forgive. Now I'm breaking my promise to you to go on telling stories.