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How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

July 20, 2009 • Comments Bosnia and Herzegovina

How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić

The beginning is deceptively simple. Childhood memories, with fascinating family members. Later, after the war, past and present flow into one another. The writing's effectiveness lies in its description and its lack of judgement. Like poetry, the words themselves make their own associative explosions. They carry an eerie simplicity.

It's written from the point of view of Aleksander, an eleven-year-old from Višigrad, a town made famous by Ivo Andric's The Bridge over the Drina. Ten years after the war, Aleksander, who has been living in Germany with his parents and maternal grandmother, returns to Višigrad. He meets up with his uncle Miki, who had been a soldier in the war. He describes how Miki begins to shout in anger. He states it, rather. Building up to this explosion, he records hints of what others say about Uncle Miki, his part in the war and his behaviour, and how in the present, his colleagues treat him with extreme deference.

“But that won't do, he suddenly shouts, it won't do, that's not right! He shouts and shouts and shouts that won't do, it won't do! Miki hammers on the gate behind which the fire engines stand with his fist, a single blow.”

Aleksander doesn't say that he felt disgusted, horrified or frightened when he goes back to Višigrad. He allows rather, the descriptions of how people have changed, to tell the story.

“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....great-grandpa's voice is a hoarse file scraping the strength away from his words. Great-granny sits...on the large stone by the empty pigsty. She stays sitting there when I greet her, she stays sitting when I hug her...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.”

During the years spent in Germany Aleksander writes long letters to his childhood friend Asija, but never knows if they reach her or not. He tries to find out what happened to her when he comes back to Višigrad ten years later. He can't forget that he promised to look after her, but was not able to keep his promise for he had to leave with his parents without even a chance to say goodbye to her.

When the soldiers turned up at their apartment block, he was worried about Asija, in case she had the wrong name. The soldiers were after people who 'had the wrong name'.

The child's perspective (Aleksander was about eleven at the time) is all the more chilling for it has no rationalizations, only a very basic sense to it. The wrong name – you were born with it, there was nothing you could do about it. Just try to hide it, as he did, with his young friend, who'd already only barely survived a slaughter in a nearby village and her uncle had managed to save her and bring her to Višigrad.

His child's perspective is ours too, because who can truly make sense of brutality, or rationalize it? Deep down we know there's no justification, but as adults we follow the convoluted logic, the crazy-paving pathways it takes and we pretend to make sense of it, from a safe distance. In the close-up view, the soldiers peering at the names on doors, reading them out, kicking down doors (if the names they read there were 'the wrong names'), sitting at a table to eat. The table is half in and half out of an apartment, because they can't get the table out. They've flattened most of the apartment doors, knocked them in. The table where they sit and eat, straddles the threshold. We see the truly terrifying, without it being named as such. We are all children, watching incomprehensible actions of solders, jagged images, clear images (he and Asija holding hands, as the lights go on and off) and the way these images and emotions form a kind of tide in him which pull him back ten years later.

The past and the present, the remembered past, the remembered fantasies about being a magician with a special hat, wanting to make everything alright, remembered play-acting, remembered and present hopes, all run into each other, like the water of the Drina. We're swept back and forth in some tidal energy, now a present image, now a childhood memory. Saša Stanišic captures so well the way our consciousness works, a flickering of images that include what we see hear and smell in the present, what we feel in the present, and this massive undertow of memories that slap against bulwarks in our mind, or flows out to sea, becoming fainter, or makes choppy little washes that go on and on, recurring unrest, discomfort, pain.

We get glimpses of what has changed (the bus station, the school playground) we hear what neighbours say, we hear the silence that they've come to live with too.

Different traumas are given physical characteristics. There's the Three Point Ellipsis man who cannot finish his sentences. There's his great- grandmother sitting rooted to a rock, his maternal grandmother's deafness and silence after her alcoholic husband's death by drowning in the Drina.

As a counterpoint, his maternal grandmother's liberation: after she leaves Višigrad, her explosion in written words of plant- like tendrils of incredibly beautiful desire for life and possibility after her imprisoning life with her husband. Escaping from the war and the country where she's endured such traumas, something begins to sprout in her and she finds release.

“i don't want to be kind to everyone all the time i'd rather wait....

i never want to herd cattle again or look after courteous birds

i want to be proud of breaking something

i don't want to die of loneliness or guilt or a fishbone or a river i want to have the feeling when i'm dying that i'm wearing a lot of jewellery that's how it is”

The earlier part of the book has wonderful cameos of family, school friends, teachers, neighbours, including the Italian, Franco, football games, fishing in the Drina. They are thrown into relief by the post-war scenes, eventually merging into them in Aleksander's consciousness, his memories and his present perceptions flowing like the Drina, accepting everything, denying nothing, but like the river's occupants, being changed and transformed.

While Ivo Andric's Bridge Over the Drina gave us the historical and narrative perspective, while including many vivid and individual portraits of actual persons, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone brings us right up against the grit on the arches of the bridge, gives us the texture of the water itself, both clear and fish-filled as well as polluted with corpses. And perhaps most of all it gives us the gaps between the past and the present, gaps in meaning, however great the flow of memories into present awareness. These gaps are experienced as an unbridgeable sense of loss. As Saša says in his afterword 'In my opinion, every displaced person carries a gap between his old self and his displaced self.' This brilliant work weaves its fragmented images with humour and tenderness, as well as pain and confusion, a splintered litter of beauty, like a shore after the tide has swept out again.