Little Bastards in Springtime (14 page)

Downstairs in my bedroom after supper, I smoke a joint, then a cigarette, play with my computer, smoke another cigarette, smoke another joint. Do some good? To her, doing good is dressing neatly, getting a buzz cut every two weeks, studying lame old textbooks about a past that is dead and gone. Saying please and thank you, following orders given by your superiors: teachers, doctors, politicians, priests, the ones who will lead you into the next disaster. By her definition, the Nazi SS did some good just by keeping their uniforms clean, washing behind their ears, standing straight, modelling good posture to the rest of the world.

Lie. Lie. Lie. Baka isn’t like that at all. I’m describing someone else’s baka. Mine doesn’t give a rat’s ass about posture or haircuts, never has, which is why when she looks at me in that disappointed way, it feels like daggers in my heart. You see, if you were a partisan in World War Two, lived in the forest for years, kicked the shit out of the Nazi and Italian invaders, you’d be the definition of good too, it doesn’t matter what you did with the rest of your life. How can anyone compete with that shit?
Our
war was just a bunch of maniacs killing each other, and people in faraway places watching and making the decisions. They say that Sarajevo was a lie. But Sarajevo was the truth, it was multi-religious for hundreds of years. Then the lousy lie that it was a lie and all was ruined. And here I am
rotting in a basement in a city a world away. It’s so flat here. No mountains, no river valley, no spring.

My room is freezing, but I’ve got a space heater, one of the first items I ever liberated, from a huge creaky house in Bloor West Village with a hundred rooms. I go over to it and crank it to high. I think about that space heater quite a bit, and also about the word
liberat
e. The space heater, just that little box, plus just a couple of hours of electricity each night, makes a big difference to the outcome of things, a life-and-death kind of difference. People don’t think about that stuff enough, how people need just a few basic things to keep on living. It might have saved Berina’s life, that little shitty box of a space heater and two hours of motherfucking electricity. That’s all it would probably have taken to keep her from fading away as the war years piled up. One day, she just didn’t wake up in that rank basement, she just lay there unmoving on her mattress, her little hands curled at her side, like a wax doll on display, everyone wailing and moaning over her. I think about all those people crowding around her, how no one could believe it, a little girl dying in her sleep in this day and age. I can hardly remember what she looked like, which is strange since she looked exactly like Aisha. I don’t remember her funeral either. I was there, they say, it was a sunny day, not a cloud in the sky, remember? But they must be wrong.

And
liberate
, well, that’s just another word for “steal” in the English language.

Outside, a vicious wind makes the tree branches crack. What was the sound of the wind back home? What was the smell of April, of May? What I recall is the stink of burning furniture, tires, metal, brick; the stench of smouldering clothes, shoes, curtains, sheets, books. What I’m forgetting is the feeling of
buildings jammed close together, of walkways, cars, parks, markets, statues, fountains all jig-sawed into place, every square foot tended over centuries, every square foot accounted for. Now there’s a new feeling for a new city. The feeling of the space between things, of structures standing solitary amidst weeds, of millions of square feet of concrete sidewalk, of vast lawns that no one uses. The relief of that, so much emptiness for everyone to breathe into their lungs without getting on each other’s nerves.

D
UšAN
shows up from the front, and strange things happen. That’s the dream I have over and over again, about once a week. He’s eating dinner with us in his dirty uniform, and then he drags me out of the apartment building and around the city looking for jars of honey to take back to his comrades. We find some jars of honey, but when we open them we see that the honey has gone bad, it’s scaly and brown and smells of crap. I want to throw the jars away, but Dušan says no, he says we should bring them up into the mountains and leave them for the wolves. He says the wolves are starving because of the war. He says,
the animals don’t deserve to suffer because of us.
And I think, of course, Dušan is genius: we can leave the city and give the jars to the wolves.

That’s one of the dreams. But sometimes the dream is a nightmare. Dušan shows up from the front and he’s just been badly wounded. A leg is missing, his guts are hanging out, half his face is gone, something like that. I turn away, I can’t face the flesh, the blood, the jagged ends of his broken bones. He screams at me to look at him, to not be such a fucking coward, but I wander off and get distracted by some unimportant thing
like finding my school books or a pack of smokes. Everything is such a mess in the apartment, all our stuff thrown together on the floor, that I spend forever picking through books and clothes and random objects before I remember Dušan and go back to where he is lying and find there’s a loud party going on. Ujak Luka and his girlfriend are hosting it, and a hundred people have shown up in tuxedos and fancy dresses, all laughing and drinking and shouting happily at each other. And there is Dušan, propped up in a corner soaked in blood and bleeding out, a bottle of beer standing in the black sticky pool around him. He’s talking and joking with a girl, but I can tell that he’s in agony, he’s sweating and shivering, his hands are white-knuckling his thighs, and between bursts of conversation, he pants softly like a little dog. It’s an eerie sound, a sound that follows me when I wake up, when I’m trying to get through the next day.

Dušan did show up one day, standing at the apartment door a few months after he went missing. He looked like someone else, someone much older, with deep, pimply lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. He chain-smoked and told us about trenches filled to the knees with water, about boredom and cold, but left out the fighting parts, he didn’t want to talk about that, not in front of Mama. He told her he hadn’t really disappeared, there’d just been some confusion about what sector he was meant to be in.

When we were alone, just the two of us huddled in his bedroom smoking our faces off, I asked him again, where did you go missing to? I want to know. But he wouldn’t tell me either. He said it doesn’t matter. I asked him what happened to Papa, how did he die, was he there when it happened? And he snapped,
Papa got shot, Jevrem, what do you think?
And I tried some other questions.
What was it like at the front, what was it like to actually fight in a battle? Has he killed anyone yet? What was the food like? Where did they go to the toilet? I thought he’d want to tell me all the gory details, he always liked to freak me out. But now he said nothing, he just fiddled with his Walkman, turning the dial, listening, turning the dial. I whined and begged, I wanted to know, it wasn’t fair. Finally, he turned on me and grabbed me by the throat and crushed my head against the wall. He had a weird expression on his face, like his head was about to explode, and his eyes were squeezed shut tight.
Shut up
, he hissed.
Shut up, shut up, shut up.

The evening before he had to leave again, when we were sitting with Mama on her mattress, he told us about seeing our uncle, Stric Pavle, on the other side, that Stric Pavle held his gun in the air and waved and smiled, that he shouted something that Dušan couldn’t hear. This story made Mama cry and turn over to face the wall for the rest of the day. I think about our uncles quite a bit now, wondering where they are, if they feel bad they fought against us, if they’re pissed off that we fought against them. I think about Stric Pavle’s motorcycle, a good one from Germany, how he raced up and down the hillside roads with us on the back after Sunday lunch. Maybe the motorcycle is still sitting in my grandparents’ garage on the other side of the river, maybe the people who took over their house use it now. After the motorcycle ride, we would lounge around in the backyard with all the colourful flowers my baba planted and they’d smoke pot and cigarettes, take swigs from a flask, crack jokes and laugh so hard they’d cry. Sometimes they gave me a puff. Those were good times. The garden was full of butterflies.

I think about it quite often, Dušan hissing
shut up
at me over and over again. How strong his hand was, how I couldn’t breathe at all, that terrible look on his face. The morning that
he left I really wanted to say something to him, something nice, I wanted to bring up some funny story about when we were younger, but I couldn’t think of any funny story. All I could picture was watching soccer on TV with him, with Papa there too, how we jumped up and slammed our palms together and shouted every time our team scored, which wasn’t really funny, or much of a special story, since we had watched games together about fifty thousand times. But Dušan ate breakfast with his head down, his eyes focused on his hands, and I couldn’t find a way to break his bubble. Mama sat silently at the table, watching every move Dušan made. When he left, he dragged me with him down the hall to the elevator. When the elevator came, he dragged me into it and as it descended we watched the light travel down the numbers over the door. At the front door, Dušan finally said something to me. He said, “When all of this is over, let’s do some things together again, okay?” And he sort of ruffled my hair with one hand in a way he’d never done before.

But then, a week after he went back to the front, Dušan was killed too. Mama told us. It was like a punch in the face. When the ringing in my ears stopped, the whole world was changed forever. There was another funeral on the hill, in the rain, people sobbing and wailing, I can’t remember who. Mama was frozen like a statue, and Aisha and Berina faced the wrong way, their little chalky faces staring across the valley at who knows what. And everyone thinking about snipers aiming at their own skulls, that was the problem with funerals on the hill. And me? Well, I couldn’t concentrate on everyone’s pitiful sadness, it seemed pointless and pathetic to me, it made me furious. What did everyone expect would happen if you send a kid off to war? What was wrong with all the fucking stupid, sobbing, bullshitting adults? Making wars, then wailing about the dead children. They were
ridiculous, absurd. They made me sick. Instead, I was thinking about other things, about food and the things people need to live a proper life, how stupid and humiliating it was to be huddled in this little city, burning our furniture, our socks, our underwear, our sports equipment, pencils, art projects, everything we own, for heat, hungry all the time, while the rest of the world went right on living their normal happy piggish selfish ignorant lives all around us in every direction, not giving a damn, buying cool new stuff, throwing half of it away again, going on vacation, playing soccer, swimming in lakes, having barbecues with neighbours, watching crappy TV shows for six hours every night, maybe watching us on the news for five seconds. Well, I wasn’t going to sit around crying my eyes out like a moronic little bastard, I was going to look after myself in this city full of smugglers and thugs and movers and shakers, and when I got out, I’d look after myself some more, no matter what.

I wake up suddenly, my hand numb, crumpled against my cheek. I’m lying on my bed. They’re still at it upstairs. Coffee and rakija, voices shrill, everyone sitting on shitty furniture in our second-hand living room. You could almost say they sound happy, like in the old days when Mama and Papa sat around forever after the plates were cleared talking, talking, but I see how Mama prepares for these Sunday dinners, dragging herself out to shop with the money Milan gives her, moving around the kitchen in slow-motion, her face expressionless and pale, her shoulders slumped forward. She invites Milan and Iva over because she has to, because they rescued us and sponsored our start in Canada, because they’re old friends from university back home, because it’s the right thing to do. And other friends and distant relatives too, to show we made it out in one piece. But it’s a lie. She wants to crawl into bed in the afternoon, pull
the covers over her head forever. She wants to let herself come apart in a thousand separate pieces, each sharp as a shard of glass. I know because I read her like a book, I hear her sobs every single night, and every morning I see her crumpled face, I see her washed-out eyes and everything that’s gone. I know Papa and Dušan visit her in her dreams. And little Berina too.

As for the rest of the family, Ujak Luka never shows up for a visit. He’s in L.A. with a tan, a fast car, some teenage porn star on his arm, living life big like a movie director or a pimp or a criminal mastermind, or that’s what I imagine, anyway, from the way Mama and Baka talk about him. He’s a hedonist, Baka says, which sounds like a pretty good solution to life’s bullshit, but no one knows how he makes a living. Does he ever do any acting or producing? Does he run a gaggle of whores? We don’t know because Mama won’t talk to him. He’s a coward, she says, he’s a traitor, he’s a bum, and she doesn’t even want to hear his name. And no one from Papa’s family made the big move over the Atlantic. Baba and Deda never left Belgrade, never saw their house again, Stric Pavle is in Australia, Stric Obrad got killed right at the end, after four years of fighting. We don’t know what happened to Stric Ivan, if he’s dead or alive. Milan’s reliable source back home says Ivan, Papa’s own brother, was one of Arkan’s bodyguards, making him a member of the worst bunch of crazy vicious killer Chetnik motherfuckers around. I think about this quite a bit. I know brothers can be different. I think about Dušan and me, how much I’m like him now, how close he is to me when I’m asleep, how the feeling of him is with me all the time. How I would let him come out with us at night sometimes, if he was here.

I sit up feeling dazed and look around the dim room strewn with junk. The others will be here soon. Then I hear someone
creeping slowly down the stairs. And there is Aisha poking her head in the door.