Little Bastards in Springtime (15 page)

“Jevrem,” she says, “can I come in?” She’s almost as tall as I am, and thin as a runway model. She stopped eating when Berina died.

“No,” I say, “go back upstairs.”

“Oh, Jevrem.” Aisha’s head droops.

I stare at her, feeling sorry, the kind of sorry that rises up and chokes your throat like a nightmare.

“No, I don’t have time. My friends are coming over soon.”

“Oh, Jevrem, you never say yes.” Her eyes are two dark pools of feeling I don’t want to see.

“On the weekend,” I say. I lie. I know I won’t hang with her then, or any other time; she reminds me of the others, of the way things used to be.

“Okay,” she says, “maybe we can play chess or something.” She turns slowly and walks back up the stairs.

The school social worker, Ms. Markowski, says I’m a pathological liar. Well, maybe she doesn’t use those exact words but I know that’s what she means when she says I tell stories to protect my inner self. She gets a kick out of digging around in my life, asking a thousand nosy questions with her eyebrows raised to show how much she cares. She asks about Mama, Papa, Dušan, the twins, back home, the siege, what it was like, why I don’t care about school. Do I do drugs? Am I in a gang? How do I feel? Do I have flashbacks, bad dreams, frightening thoughts, sweaty palms, a racing heart? Do I feel on edge, angry, numb, disconnected, sad, or constantly in danger? Can I get to sleep at night? She says, you can tell me, it helps to talk about it. She really wants me to tell her all about the war; she keeps asking, almost salivating for those blood-soaked sob stories. I see her
wet lips and gleaming eyes. But I tell her I have a brain injury from being dropped on my head as a baby, that’s my problem, the war was nothing, that my father, brother, and sister live in a mansion on Lake Constance, the Swiss side, my parents are separated but not divorced, that I have a trust fund waiting for me when I turn eighteen. From the tobacco fortune my father smuggled out of the country just before the war. And a whole bunch of other things that feel like they could easily be true, that become truer and truer the more I talk about them, while she raises her eyebrows, nods her head, writes her notes.

The thing is, I leave her office looking forward to visiting Papa on Lake Constance during school vacations, to drinking cocktails with them on the family yacht on sunny Sunday afternoons, to partying all night with rich slutty German girls, to water-skiing drunk and doing lines of coke off the hood of a Rolls-Royce. I can picture it all, Papa, Dušan, Berina all tanned and preppy, wearing Ray-Bans and topsiders, jumping off the boat for a swim twenty times a day, playing cards anchored out on the lake under a huge full moon. The thing is, a deliberate liar knows when he is lying, but a pathological liar may not. I looked it up. A pathological liar lies all the time, without cause, which after a while could get really confusing and disappointing.

I get out of bed and brush my hair with my hands, take a gulp of warm beer from a bottle that’s been sitting there for days. The thing is, I paid attention after she told me I was a liar a few months ago, and sure enough I walked out of that office and told my first lie half a second later to this guy Chris who was on his way to lunch. He asked me where I’d just been because I wasn’t in English class and I said I was in the car with this girl Marni. I mean, why didn’t I say I was with the social worker? It’s not like I’m ashamed of it. Everyone knows I see the social worker.
Everyone sees the social worker. Chris sees the social worker. It’s cool to see the social worker, because it means that you’re fucked up, and being fucked up is cool in this country because it means that you’ve lived a little. In this country, the worst thing is to have a boring life, but everyone does—they don’t know what excitement is.

I lied for no reason this afternoon when I sat down in the cafeteria with the gang and Madzid asked when we’re going to get that guy Andrew who called Madzid a rag-head and sand-nigger right to his face because Madzid asked that girl Silvia or Silvana or whatever her goddamn name is out for a drink. And I said, I don’t know, what dude called Andrew? But that wasn’t true. I did know. I knew exactly.

When someone lies it tells the truth about them, about their psychological state, so it’s not really a lie. That’s what Sava says, and Sava’s truly smart. Last year she had a zine called
Propaganda
and in it she told lie after lie but each one was also the absolute truth, if you looked at things from a different angle. She was trying to make some kind of complicated point, but we’re too busy for that kind of nerdy stuff now. Most nights we’re out roaming the city, taking what’s necessary, seeing what’s to be seen, looking after ourselves.

The thing is, I didn’t appreciate the way Ms. Markowski said pathological lying is connected to other bad behaviours like conduct disorder, antisocial personality disorder, inappropriate aggression, destructiveness, and serious violations of rules and laws. Apparently, this condition is caused by either “challenging situations in the home” or a lack of serotonin in the head, in which case Prozac or Zoloft can help. And maybe psychotherapy. That’s what she said. I told her I don’t have any of those bad behaviours, not one. But of course, I was lying. And I don’t tell her how I often see Papa early in the morning
after a long night of drinking and hunting and gathering. He’s walking along the street, hands in his pockets, head down. He’s about to duck into a doorway, or turn a corner, or disappear into a park and be lost from sight. Or he’s fixing things on the driveways and front lawns of strangers’ houses. Bikes, swings, porch railings.

My room is in the basement, the story of my life. There’s fake wood panelling, peeling paint, a mildewy old carpet, a mattress without sheets, what’s the point, I’ve got my old sleeping bag from when I was a kid. There are clothes and garbage all over the floor, and random crap stuffed in the closet, CDs, magazines, some broken toys from when I was young that we brought over for some reason no one can think of. It’s a complete mess down here, everything’s junk, except for some of Papa’s things that I picked out of the rubble in the apartment before we left. The old camera he was fixing, his old hat, which still has the alive smell of his head, his Holiday Inn ashtray, a couple of stubby pencils with his tooth marks on the end, the wooden box with the frog on top. It held coins and paper clips and thumbtacks then, and still does today. And two of his notebooks, one filled with his handwriting and one almost empty. It has only one line in it:
Camus wrote: ‘There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.’ Can this really be true?

I’m hungry again, but I don’t want to go upstairs, to face that sad scene. I check chip bags for crumbs. I light a smoke. Ms. Markowski asked me about Papa’s things, if I’ve made a shrine out of them, and I said, why would I do that, that’s creepy fucked-up shit. He wasn’t a god. But I lied, I did make a shrine out of them, sort of, all his things arranged on a milk crate beside my bed. She said, use his notebook to write about the war and about life now, what you’re feeling and doing every
day. It will help you make sense of life, it will make things easier. As if a few scribbles could do so much. I never write a single word. And that’s a big fat lie too.

Mama didn’t bring much from the wrecked apartment, only some clothes, a few papers that didn’t get burnt, Papa’s old typewriter from the early ‘80s and his favourite lighter, which stands on her chest of drawers like a tiny solitary tombstone in a big unfriendly field. When we moved in, Baka put out her framed photos and blankets and tablecloths to make the place less depressing. But Mama said no, she didn’t want to see the photos, the one with Papa holding Dušan and me up in the air by the straps of our life jackets, a river flowing behind us; the one with the twins curled up together like newborn puppies in a little basket the day they were born; the one with Mama and Papa after a concert, their fancy clothes and their flashy, superstar smiles. She said, please Bako, take them to your room.

I look at the clock and it’s 8:20 p.m. Where are those motherfuckers? They’re late. We call ourselves The Bastards of Yugoslavia, as a joke. We like the word
bastard.
It’s got a ring to it, and has a lot of different meanings. It’s what the nationalists who took over our country called us, the offspring of women in mixed marriages. They meant it as an insult, but we feel proud. It’s why we’re here, together, in this flat, endless city next to an abnormally large lake. They didn’t want us back home, not really, in all their new separate little cleaned-up countries, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia. And Bosnia, split completely in half, Croats and Muslims on one side, Serbs on the other. Where were we beautiful mongrels meant to fit?

They still haven’t left the kitchen table upstairs. In my mind’s eye, I see Mama sitting stiff and silent at the table, a cigarette
in one hand, the smoke rising slowly above her head, her face pointed at whoever is talking, but her gaze somewhere else, seeing some other scene in some other time. And Aisha, hovering over the table, serving food, mixing drinks, arranging dessert on a plate, making coffee, doing dishes, like she always does. Every weekend it’s the same depressing thing. Don’t Milan and Iva and their friends get bored? Don’t they notice that Mama can’t wait for them to be gone, for their yacking to stop? Every time, it’s the same old gossip about other Yugo immigrants. Who insulted who, which fascist bastards are keeping the war alive on this side of the ocean, who are still old Tito communists, who were undercover agents for which side, who appeared with whom at which Sunday service at the Croatian parish, or the Serbian diocese. Mama’s not interested. She wasn’t into that stuff back home, why would she be here, like we’re in some tiny peasant village in the countryside? But the guests can’t get enough of it. They go on and on about the lovely folkloric dancing at the hall. Oh my God, Mama sometimes says very quietly, please, not folk music, we’re cosmopolitan people, let us live in this century. But no one listens to her, they just keep on yapping—what’s happening at the pavilion, the hall, in the Serbo-Croatian newspapers. What famous people are actually Croats or Serbs but have changed their names? Who gave the most money to which side during the war? Who was in the arms-smuggling business? And, they say, I should join the Serbian community theatre group, or a Croatian choir. Are they fucking out of their minds? You’ll love it, they say, giving you a wholesome connection to your people and your homeland. I’d rather be burned on the forehead by a thousand shitty wartime cigarettes.

At some point in the evening they always ask Mama to play for them, and she always makes some excuse. I think of how
gorgeous she was sitting at her baby grand back home in her satin dresses, with her sweeping hair, red lips, glittering eyes, a sensation in our living room and on the stage. But the truth is, she hasn’t played at all since we landed here, even though Milan and Iva put a lot of work into finding her a piano, raising the money to buy it, moving it into our cramped little living room. This old church-basement wreck, Mama said when it arrived, tears streaming down her cheeks. They’re so generous, I’m so grateful, but what do they think I can do with this pile of kindling? Mama was going to break into the North and South American orchestra and ensemble scene, she was going to teach at the conservatory. Or that’s what everyone thought. But the conservatory doesn’t need another teacher, her agent isn’t calling, her old contacts have lost touch. The thing is, if you don’t perform for four years because you’re trapped in an exploding city, it’s easy for everyone to forget about your genius. And anyway, how is she meant to play the most beautiful music ever composed when her soul is hollowed out by death like a rotten tree, when her playing would bubble up from somewhere deep under a stagnant, filthy lake of corpses.

And in my mind’s eye there’s Baka sitting opposite me ignoring the ridiculous table talk, looking at me in that way, like she wants to catch my attention, to say something really important. Like she wants to repeat it one more time: why don’t you boys do some good for once? She can hardly lift her fork these days, let alone her voice. She wouldn’t go to the hospital during the siege, even though she had a hard time breathing, even though she couldn’t walk up a single stair. Hospitals in wartime are for soldiers and wounded civilians, she said, that’s the first rule of war. So now her heart is damaged beyond repair, and without a working heart you begin to fade away, like houses in war zones that
look like shit, grey and stained and abandoned-looking, even if fifteen families live in them, after only a couple of years or so.

She was so much younger back home, and so was I. She was a warrior, I was “open and enthusiastic.” That’s what my grade four report card said, anyway. I know that because Mama saved our reports and brought them over and I read through mine after Ms. Markowski told me I’m a pathological lying fuck-up. I wanted to see when that lying thing slithered into my life, when it got a hold of my mind. Probably it was only a year ago, when I was fifteen, soon after I got off the plane at Pearson International, when I told my grade ten class, in my ridiculous English, that I was a survivor of four years of war and the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern war, and my teacher told me not to exaggerate, and I told her it was the truth, I was shot in the stomach, a big long wound needing thirty-seven giant spidery stitches. When I said that, all the kids rolled their eyes and sniggered, which I thought was weird, but the thing is, they thought I was telling the most stupid kind of lie, the kind that couldn’t possibly be true. And I said, I have a scar to prove it, and I pulled up the itchy second-hand sweater they hassled me about along with my name, which no one can pronounce because of the
j
-like-a-
y
sound,
Yevrem
, and showed the scar on my belly, which was still kind of shiny and purple back then. There I was with my white stomach exposed to the teacher and all the students with their smallish, red-rimmed eyes, and for a moment I thought I was going crazy. I thought, maybe I’m wrong, maybe World War Two was the war-to-end-all-wars-two, maybe my own war happened in my head somehow, that it came out of my own filthy imagination. So I said, okay, I didn’t get the scar in a war, I got it falling off my bike going down a steep hill. We’ve got steep hills back home.