MJ

An example · this person is invented

Milan Jovanović

1958 — 2019

Born in Niš, SerbiaLived in Lyon, France

About Milan Jovanović

I repaired machines for forty-one years, most of them in a workshop behind a bakery in the seventh arrondissement, where the whole street could tell the time by when I raised the shutter. I came to France at twenty-three with one suitcase and an apprenticeship that turned out not to exist. I stayed anyway. I married Colette in 1986, raised two daughters who both learned to solder before they learned to ride a bicycle, and kept a notebook of every machine I could not fix — eleven entries in four decades, each one annotated years later with the answer I eventually found. I have never been a man who says much at the table. I said it in the things that worked again.

Life

A life, in moments

  1. 17 April 1958

    Born in Niš

    Niš, Serbia

    The second of four, in a house where the radio was never switched off.

  2. September 1981

    Arrived in France

    Lyon, France

    Twenty-three years old, with an apprenticeship that had been given to someone else three weeks earlier. He found work by the end of the month.

  3. 1984

    Opened the workshop

    Lyon, France

    Behind the bakery on rue Jaboulay. He never advertised once in thirty-four years.

  4. 24 May 1986

    Married Colette

    Forty-one guests, and a wedding cake from the bakery next door.

  5. 3 February 1988

    Ana was born

    Then Sofija, two years later. Both of them could solder by six.

  6. October 2018

    Closed the workshop

    Lyon, France

    He kept the key on the same ring as his house key until the end, and the shutter still had his handwriting on the inside.

Stories

In their own words

The eleven machines

20 November 2016

I keep a notebook of the machines I could not fix. There are eleven in it, spread across forty-one years, and every one of them has a second entry in different ink — sometimes years later — with the answer I finally worked out. The last is a sewing machine from 1974, brought in the year Ana turned nine. I wrote the answer to that one in 2016. Underneath I added: forty-two years is not too long to think about something.

Sunday mornings

9 April 2017

On Sundays I did not open the workshop. I made coffee at six anyway, sat at the kitchen table with whatever was refusing to work that week, and took it apart with the radio on low so as not to wake anyone. By the time the rest of the house came down it was in pieces on a tea towel and I would say, without looking up, that it was nearly finished. It never was. That was not the point of Sunday.

What I think about money

15 January 2018

I charge people what the part costs and an hour of my time, whatever the job takes. Colette has told me more than once that this is not how a business works. The street knows what I am worth, and that is the only accounting I have ever needed. The week I closed the workshop, four people came to say goodbye who I had never charged at all.

Letters

Words left for later

For Ana

For Ana

You will want to fix everything. You got that from me and I am not sorry. But learn the difference between a thing that is broken and a thing that is simply old. I spent years on that difference and I am still not sure I have it right. Be kinder to yourself about it than I was.

For Colette

For Colette

Thirty-three years, and I never once managed to tell you anything important at the moment it mattered. You always knew anyway. The notebook is in the second drawer. The last entry is for you.

Things they loved

In a few words

A place I loved
The workshop, an hour before opening, when the light came in sideways and nothing had gone wrong yet.
Something I learned
Most things are not broken. They are dirty, or loose, or nobody has looked at them properly in years.
Advice I would leave
Do the small repair the day you notice it. Everything expensive started as something small you walked past.
Something people may not know
I wanted to be a radio engineer. I sat the examination twice and failed it twice, and I have never regretted where that left me.