Free How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic Page A

the carpet.
    The first shots had woken me and I followed Father through town, first alone, later with some of the old men of Višegrad who went out angling at this time of day. They were eating salted sunflower seeds and laying bets. Not many were betting on the TV set. I bet ten thousand dinars on my father's talent for Tetris—in her haste Mother had forgotten her purse—and I won forty-five thousand. Just as Father was taking his trousers down and straining over Bogoljub Balvan's carpet, the two policemen—Pokor and Kodro—arrived, sleepy, pale and unshaven. Their uniforms smelled of fried liver and they were smoking. Papa hadn't thought to bring any toilet paper, but Bogoljub's scarf proved useful. He wrapped the soiled scarf around the TV and the policemen asked him to wash his hands now, please. This kind of thing won't do. Private property. Willful damage. Fire. A fine. Come with us.
    Father listened to what Pokor and Kodro had to say, leaned on his shotgun, and agreed with them in every particular. But then he told them, sadly and truthfully, what that bastard had been doing in his house, how broken trust hurts worse than broken ribs, how many sparrows he'd left alive because sparrows are tormented so much anyway, and how very badly ashamed he felt, how ashamed he would feel all his life, that his only son had been forced to see these shameful things with his own fair eyes.
    The policemen took off their caps, scratched the backs of their necks with the peaks of the caps, nodded, and shook their uncombed heads. Finally Father shrugged his shoulders and showed them the palms of his hands: go on, tell me again this won't do, it's private property! I'll pay any fine you like, but I'm not going with you until I've settled accounts. I'll never get back what was taken from me, not the way it was before. Everything I'm going to take from him can be replaced, so I'm taking plenty.
    Pokor and Kodro retreated to Bogoljub's kitchen, had breakfast and consulted together. The anglers unpacked their stools and offered me apple juice out of unlabeled cans. When Pokor and Kodro put their caps on again and went off without a word to drink coffee, the old men nodded approvingly. The policemen had lost their bet—they didn't take Father away.
    Bogoljub had guessed what was coming to him. He was a tobacconist through and through, he always wore the same dark red smock, and he could get hold of anything for his customers—instantly, or by the day after tomorrow at the latest. He had salvaged what he could carry and driven away with it from the tobacconist's shop. My father cleared out what was left. He knocked the window panes in, threw all of Bogoljub's wares off the bridge into the Drina one by one, down to the very last pen. Drawers, the shelves from the walls, newspaper stands—everything that hadn't been screwed down landed in the river, and later on so did everything that had been screwed down. No one stopped him; over twenty men were watching when he finished by tearing the door off its hinges and chucking that into the river too.
    Word had gone around town of what had happened to us in our own home. People gave Father schnapps and leeks, Amela brought him warm bread and salt. Amela baked the best bread in the world. Old men patted me on the head and looked as if they were going to curse and cry at the same time. Drunk as he was, my father took me aside and said: Zoran, I'm going away now. You can stay with Aunt Desa. I'll be coming back, but first I have to get everything new for us: Das Kapital for me and a new mother for you. He put two hundred deutschmarks in my shirt pocket and rubbed the back of my neck by way of saying good-bye. He rammed the car into the tobacconist's shop twice and then drove out of town, hooting his horn.
    So now what? I ask Zoran, although I know the answer: Zoran's mother ran off to Sarajevo with Bogoljub the same day as his father went out of town. She left some money for him with his Aunt Desa,