Sasa Stanisic - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

All this comes back to my mind now in the inside bathroom during the thirty minutes I spend there, almost as long as GreatGrandpa, suffering horribly from my plum world record. I'm out again at last, and here comes Marshal Rooster's finger-Colt prodding me in the back — scrub those tablecloths, Great-Granny orders, scrub them, Redskin! She'd been lying in wait for me behind the door.

Unenthusiastically, I pass the dishcloth over the stains and wonder why everyone is celebrating the fact that Uncle Miki is going away. I'd rather celebrate when he comes back from the army.

Great-Granny's teeth are yellow, and brown at the tips; she laughs and nods: yes, yes. That, she says, pointing to a greenish lump of something, that's kryptovitz —kryptonite with slivovitz. You won't get your hands on that. It made a pile of money but a fearful stink too. Great-Granny winks at me and takes her finger away from the back of my neck to adjust her eye patch.

Great-Granny doesn't talk to me about Grandpa Slavko. You're all my children, oh, you don't give me an easy time, she told Father when we arrived in Veletovo. No one wants to bury the child she bore. I'm burying my own joy.

Father did not reply.

Great-Grandpa replied by searching around for words.

I miss him too, I say then, quietly, putting the cloth down. Great-Granny takes her eye patch off. Her big brown eyes. She has a thin hair growing from the mole on her cheek. Her flowered smock above her black dress. I slink away from her bad mood. The sun's shining. I climb a plum tree. Lost to the world, Father is singing a song. Mother is smiling. Nena Fatima takes off her boots. Auntie Typhoon fills bucket after bucket and pats her big belly. Uncle Miki has seized a chicken by its legs and is taking it out into the yard.

There's cured sausage with red pepper and garlic, there's smoked ham, there's smoked bacon, there's goat's milk cheese, sheep's milk cheese, cow's milk cheese, there are fried potatoes with leeks, there are hard-boiled eggs; there are toothpicks sticking in the sausage, the ham, the cheese, the slices of egg; there's white bread and golden corn bread, the bread is always broken, never cut; there's garlic butter, liver pâté, and creamy kaymak, there's cabbage soup, potato soup and thumb-sized dollops of fat swimming on top of the chicken soup, you can dunk the bread in all those soups; there's bean broth (it's horrible!), there are baked beans and bean salad; there's white cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and minced meat, there are peppers stuffed with minced meat, minced meat stuffed with minced meat, minced meat and plums — Mother and I look at each other, she asks if there's any chocolate — yes, there's chocolate, there's chicken, there's cucumber salad (I've never seen any dish go ignored the way that cucumber salad is ignored); there's warm baklava with syrup made from sugar, cinnamon, honey, and cloves, it drips from your fingers onto your trousers, onto the minced meat; so sweet, someone cries, oh, so sweet, it's Uncle Bora, he's enjoying the sweet baklava so much that he gets to his feet, so sweet! It's almost more than I can stand, stop it, oh, more! There are plums piled on top of plums, there's plum strudel with vanilla sugar and plum jam, there are baked plums with icing-sugar topping; there are melons, the five-man amateur band takes a break from playing specially for the melons; it's a mystery to me why they've been invited to play again after the failure of their performance at the bathroom inauguration party, but there they are, falling on the melon slices, slurping, slobbering, smacking their lips, all of them slurping- slobbering-smacking, and the first tune the band plays after their break is “In Višegrad, That Fine Old Town.” But Great-Grandpa cries angrily, pleasurably: aah! and spits a barrage of melon seeds in the direction of the trumpet, aah! that won't do, you don't play something so tender with melon, you amateurs! Grandpa himself reached the lamb stage long ago — he has a melon boat on his left, a shank of lamb on his right, and is munching them in turn, aah! Yes, there's lamb too, its gray meat piled up on the flowered plates, and any moment now there'll be suckling pig: Auntie Typhoon is turning the spit, pouring beer over the pig's back and wine over the pig's belly, red-cheeked with the heat and the effort, no-no-I-don't- need-a-chair, her blonde hair flying around her head. Auntie Typhoon turns the spit with both hands so energetically that ashes fly up under the suckling pig, turn-it-too-slowly-and-it-won't-roast- evenly. There's rendered, salted, pressed pork dripping with bits of crackling in it, there's fried pig's innards, there are pig's trotters and pig's ears coated with jelly, nothing whatsoever is missing.

I take the bucket of melon rinds off to the pigsty and throw the rinds over the pigs; the pigs don't mind, they have thick skins, they eat the rinds and burrow their soft snouts in the mud. I hit the fattest sow on the belly. She grunts, but she isn't bothered about anything but the rind, my tooth marks on what she's eating, that's a pig's life for you. Great-Grandpa promised me today, next time we kill a pig I can chase it too, help to get it down on the ground, put it on the spit — you run the spit in at the back, along under the backbone and out through the mouth. And I can scrape and wash the stomach out too, but I wouldn't want to put my hands in where there might be melon rind. I'd rather leave the bit with the knife to my father or my uncles. Cutting a pig's throat is the best way, says my father, but Uncle Bora shakes his head: in the heart is the best place. Uncle Miki doesn't mind which, as long as the pig ends up good and dead.

If it was up to Great-Grandpa I could do a lot more things anyway, not just pig killing. I could eat whatever I liked and I wouldn't have to go to school. Great-Grandpa says: boys don't get to be men in town, schools don't teach stupid lads to be fine men. You lose your sense of smell in town and you see six feet less ahead of you.

Great-Grandpa got no further than the letter t when he was at school, because there's nothing important after that. He left his village only three times, twice to go to war, once to win a wife. He won three victories. Proud, robust, always singing, always close to tears or laughter. The family like to tell every guest how last Easter — it is always last Easter — Great-Grandpa seized one of his oxen by the horns, forced it to kneel with one hand, while he picked the first lily of the valley of the year for Great-Granny with the other, and then plowed his fields in just four days. The ox that a human being can humiliate like that, he's said to have announced, patting the ox's nostrils, doesn't deserve to set hoof on my land. If he's asked his age GreatGrandpa says: oh, I'm still young, I've never yet seen a ship and I've never yet taught a liar to be an honest man.

Someday, when I'm as old as my great-grandpa Nikola, I will have set sail in a ship, I'll have met a liar and left him an honest man, I'll have persuaded a donkey to go the way I want, and I'll have sung like Great-Grandpa, with a voice as powerful as a mountain range, a ship, the habit of honesty and a donkey all rolled in together.

Back to the table, because there's coffee, and Great-Granny reads everyone's future in the grounds. She promises me an unfulfilled yearning and three great loves in the next three months. Mother laughs and interrupts: but he's much too young. GreatGranny tells me off for drinking coffee while I'm still so young, and she changes the details to two great loves and one affair — but the affair will be with an uncomplicated woman artist, you never saw such green eyes!

She doesn't need more than two minutes for anyone's future except Uncle Miki's, and she takes thirty minutes over his, rocking back and forth and never ending a sentence; then suddenly there's stuffed pastry börek, there's pita filled with potatoes, pita filled with young nettles, pita filled with pumpkin, there's walnut cake and a sip of red wine for me; the courses aren't served one by one in any special order, there's always someone saying he can't eat any more, he couldn't possibly force another morsel down, hands gesticulate, fending off any more, and no one takes the gesticulations seriously; there's no stopping now, there are hurt expressions if someone seriously threatens to expire after the next half-chicken; the wine will fortify your blood, says Great-Granny, pouring more for me when no one's looking. There's white bread with everything, Uncle Bora puts warm white bread on top of cold white bread: I'm in white bread heaven, he says, and then I'll move on to cider paradise — although that will lead to problems on plum-picking day, as Uncle Bora knows, and he laughs when Great-Grandpa holds a glass of slivovitz in front of his face: how are you going to drink it, then, of your own free will or through the nose? There's beer, there's brandy, there's cognac; ice clinks in glasses. There are never any empty plates. And there's Nataša, that girl Nataša in her flowered dress, with bare feet and red cheeks as if she has a fever. Nataša's been around all evening, chasing me and chasing me and chasing me, come and be kissed! she keeps calling, come and be kissed! She finds all my hiding places. I escape under the table, determined to stay there for a hundred thousand years until she gives up, Nataša with the gap in her teeth and her pouting lips, come and be kissed, come and be kissed! Marshal Rooster, of all people, is mean enough to speak out and give me away: he's under the table, catch him, why don't you? That's town boys for you, they're afraid of us, they crawl away under the table legs! So Nataša dives down and crawls toward me, and the way she crawls makes me think of Petak, Great-Grandpa's sheepdog, falling on the squealing, bleeding piglet today. Come and be kissed, come and be kissed, and the loud trumpet and the family singing and no one there to give Nataša a kick. I retreat, my back's up against my mother's legs when I hear the roaring. A man's voice is roaring, and the music suddenly stops. The singing stops. There's silence.