For young Aleksandar Krsmanoviæ, his grandfather Slavko’s credo--“the most valuable gift of all is invention, imagination is your greatest wealth”--endows life in Višegrad, Bosnia-Herzegovina with a mythic quality, a kaleidoscopic brilliance. So when his grandfather dies suddenly, Aleks summons this gift of storytelling to see him through his grief. It is a gift he will have to call on again when soldiers transform Višegrad--a town previously unconscious of racial and religious divides--into a nightmarish landscape of terror and violence. Though Aleks and his family flee to Germany, he is haunted by his past, and especially by Asija, the mysterious girl he tried to save. Desperate to learn of her fate, he sends manic, anguished letters out into the abyss, again turning to language to conjure all that he’s had to forfeit--his homeland, his mother tongue, his innocence. Beneath the infectious vibrancy of Stanišiæ’s voice is a sweetness and pathos that will haunt the reader long after the book ends. Powerful, vivid, funny, and devastating, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone captures the catastrophe of war through a child’s eyes and shows how words have the ability to mend what is broken and resurrect what is lost.
How the Soilder Repairs the Gramophone
By Sasa StanisicGrove Press
Copyright © 2006 Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Munch
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8021-1866-0Contents
How long a heart attack takes over a hundred metres, how heavy a spider's life weighs, why my sad man writes to the cruel river, and what magic the comrade-in-chief of all that's unfinished can work.....................1How sweet dark red is, how many oxen you need to pull down a wall, why Kraljevic Marko's horse is related to Superman, and how war can come to a party.....................................................................20Who wins when Walrus blows the whistle, what a band smells of, when you can't cut fog, and how a story leads to an agreement...............................................................................................40When flowers are just flowers, how Mr Hemingway and Comrade Marx feel about each other, who's the real Tetris champion, and the indignity suffered by Bogoljub Balvan's scarf..............................................46When something is an event, when it's an experience, how many deaths Comrade Tito can die, and how the once famous three-point shooter gets behind the wheel of a Centrotrans..............................................53What Milenko Pavlovic, known as Walrus, brings back from his wonderful trip, how the station-master's leg loses control of itself, what the French are good for, and why we don't need quotation marks.....................68Where bad taste in music gets you, what the three-dot-ellipsis man denounces, and how fast war moves once it really gets going.............................................................................................73What we play in the cellar, what the peas taste like, why silence bares its fangs, who has the right sort of name, what a bridge will bear, why Asija cries, how Asija smiles..............................................82How the soldier repairs the gramophone, what connoisseurs drink, how we're doing in written Russian, why chub eat spit, and how a town can break into splinters............................................................94Emina carried through her village in my arms...............................................................................................................................................................................10526 April 1992..............................................................................................................................................................................................................1079 January 1992.............................................................................................................................................................................................................11017 July 1993...............................................................................................................................................................................................................1138 January 1994.............................................................................................................................................................................................................116Hi, who? Aleksandar! Hey, where are you calling from? Oh, not bad! Well, lousy really, how about you?......................................................................................................................11816 December 1995...........................................................................................................................................................................................................120what I really want.........................................................................................................................................................................................................1221 May 1999.................................................................................................................................................................................................................124Aleksandar, I really, really want to send you this package.................................................................................................................................................................128When everything was all right. By Aleksandar Krsmanovi, with a foreword by Granny Katarina and an essay for Mr Fazlagi.....................................................................................................13111 February 2002...........................................................................................................................................................................................................180I'm Asija. They took Mama and Papa away with them. My name means something. Your pictures are horrible.....................................................................................................................181Out of three hundred and thirty Sarajevo numbers rung at random, about every fifteenth has an answering machine............................................................................................................188What makes the Wise Guys wise, how much you ought to bet on your own memory, who is found and who is still made up.........................................................................................................193What goes on behind God's feet, why Kiko picks up the cigarette, where Hollywood is, and how Mickey Mouse learns to answer.................................................................................................199I've made lists............................................................................................................................................................................................................218Comrade-in-chief of all that's unfinished..................................................................................................................................................................................256
Chapter One
How long a heart attack takes over a hundred metres, how heavy a spider's life weighs, why a sad man writes to the cruel river, and what magic the comrade-in-chief of the unfinished can work
Grandpa Slavko measured my head with Granny's washing line, I got a magic hat, a pointy magic hat made of cardboard, and Grandpa Slavko said: I'm really still too young for this sort of thing, and you're already too old.
So I got a magic hat with yellow and blue shooting stars on it, trailing yellow and blue tails, and I cut out a little crescent moon to go with them and two triangular rockets. Gagarin was flying one, Grandpa Slavko was flying the other.
Grandpa, I can't go out in this hat!
I should just hope not!
On the morning of the day when he was to die in the evening, Grandpa Slavko made me a magic wand from a stick and said: there's magic in that hat and wand. If you wear the hat and wave the wand you'll be the most powerful magician in the non-aligned states. You'll be able to revolutionise all sorts of things, just so long as they're in line with Tito's ideas and the statutes of the Communist League of Yugoslavia.
I doubted the magic, but I never doubted my grandpa. The most valuable gift of all is invention, imagination is your greatest wealth. Remember that, Aleksandar, said Grandpa very gravely as he put the hat on my head, you remember that and imagine the world better than it is. He handed me the...
