Little Bastards in Springtime (17 page)

We hear him shouting up, “Mom? Dad? What’s going on?”

And here he is, wearing a sweatshirt, torn jeans, his longish hair matted at the back.

He sees us, freezes, then sprints for the back door. But Geordie is standing there. Small Geordie, with her bat. One swing and he’s sprawling on the floor.

“No, no, no,” says Andrew.

“Yes, yes, yes,” we say.

We drag him outside onto the front lawn, then across it over purple and white crocuses to the tree. We surround him and begin our work, beating him up with rhythm. For about a minute we go at him, bats, the butt of my gun, fists, boots. Blood and snot fly out of his nose. His face twists and crumples. He begins to cry. We hear neighbours shout from across the street. We wave. “He’s an asshole,” we call to them. Then we hear hoarse shouts from Mom and Dad. Stop, we’ve called the police, the police are coming, they shout from the safety of their front door. When we’ve made our point, we sprint for the car, hop in, squeal down the street.

The cops will arrive in four minutes. They’re always four minutes too late.

W
E DRIVE
north on Dufferin, east on St. Clair, then park on a side street for a few hours of drinking, toking, and smoking our faces off. It’s after 1 a.m. when I direct Sava to the street
that I’ve chosen, our diversion. The rest stare silently out the windows at the occasional dog walker, the overachieving jogger at the end of a long day. And there is Papa walking down the street, his hands in his pockets, his head down, his shoulders hunched over like he’s deep in thought. I say,
look, there he is, the one with the newspaper under his arm
—but he turns a corner, he disappears into the night.

“What?” says Sava.

“Nothing,” I say. One day they’ll see him too, and they’ll hassle me for not pointing him out sooner.

We turn onto a Forest Hill street that I’ve marked on my map as a perfect score. The houses here are mansions, pampered, tricked out, strangely close to Andrew’s low-rent neighbourhood. We choose the house with the birch grove on the side, two fake marble lions guarding the front door, no lights showing inside. “Quick in and out,” I say. The others ignore me. They know what to do. We spring up the pathway. I break a small side window and glass falls to the ground tinkling like high piano notes on the stone below. I shiver weirdly, like I always do at this part, then I open the window, slide through, and I’m inside. A comfortable gloom greets me, and good smells, wood wax, after-dinner coffee.

I open the door for the others and we search the first floor. Heavy velvety curtains. Persian rugs. Dazzling vases. China in display cases. The light bulbs in the lamps are still warm, the family has just gone to bed. Madzid and I sprint upstairs to see what’s what. We hear a woman’s shrill, breathy voice from the upstairs hallway.

“Who are you? What are you doing? What do you want? Who are you?”

Why does a grown woman’s fear come out in the voice of
a small girl? We see her standing in a shiny nightgown in the dim lights that illuminate greasy paintings in heavy frames, and behind her a man of medium height with tussled hair in his slippery dark blue PJs. He croaks, “What the hell? What’s going on?” as we charge toward them for a flying tackle.

Geordie and Sava have followed, they’ve checked all the rooms. “We have a silk and satin couple in this house,” Geordie sings out. “And a couple of flannel kids.”

Madzid, Geordie, and Sava look after Mom and Dad in their room, so I visit the kids. The girl’s room is a fluffy pink nightmare and she’s Aisha’s age. She’s sitting perfectly still on the edge of her bed staring at me and Geordie with big shiny eyes. I feel huge and wild in with her stuffed toys and lace curtains and frilly cushions. I want to say, I’m not going to hurt you or rape you or anything fucked-up like that, I’m not a fucking barbarian, I’m only here to redistribute some wealth so we can all get on with our lives. You see, my mom the artist is cleaning toilets for rich people, the bullshit war that brought us here was everyone else’s war too, your parents are a couple of spoiled, ignorant mofos, and, so, to conclude, what goes around comes around. But there’s no time for informational or sentimental speeches of that sort. Geordie asks her if she has brothers and sisters.

“Yes,” she whispers, “a brother.”

“Call him,” I say. “Go stand by your door.”

“Zac, Zac, Zac,” she calls in a soft, scratchy voice. Her lips are quivering. In a few seconds there is Zac, a big boy, about twelve, face pale, eyes wide and darting.

“Look after your sister,” I tell him, even though it’s a ridiculous thing to say. He may be big, but he’s just a kid.

“Don’t follow me,” I tell him. “Stay in this room.”

In the master bedroom, the silk and satin couple are duct-taped together on the bed. “No, no, no, no, no,” the woman cries. They’ve probably not been this close in years. They buck and writhe and we all watch, it’s impossible not to, these two struggling without any hope of success.

Madzid empties out the jewellery cases. We hear Zijad crashing around downstairs.

“The basement’s loaded,” he shouts up to us.

We race down to the basement and are amazed. It’s an electronics superstore, every kind of entertainment equipment known to man, most of it still in boxes, arrows pointing up.

‡ ‡ ‡

W
ITH MY SHARE OF BOOTY PILED HIGH IN MY
bedroom, I lie on my bed, light a joint, drift into dreamland, to the place where wolves roam, sometimes as big as horses, sometimes tiny as rats, their furry wolf-heads bristling with teeth sharp as shrapnel. And there is Baka’s face hovering right over mine, like it does when I’m tired, when I’m still, when I crash after a fix of adrenaline. Her teeth are out, her thin hair held in that net she used back in the first weeks of the siege when we had to rush down the garbage-strewn stairs to the basement every two minutes. Why do people stop cleaning in a war? Even a little sweeping would have made things better.

Now, hovering over me, she is whispering,
why don’t you boys do some good for once?
She’s hovering there, whispering into my ear, like she used to do. Telling me how much better the world was when she was young, singing a Dalmatian folk song about taming a pigeon. When I was a little kid in the basement, I liked
that song with the pigeon. I danced with her when she was singing, we danced and sang and the pigeon cooed and pecked and burst into flight and flew up into the clear blue sky.

Baka’s songs were like a witch’s spell against the shells that just wouldn’t stop raining on the city from the hills around, wouldn’t stop ever, not for an hour, or half an hour, or a quarter of an hour, or five minutes, even if you screamed and cried and threw yourself on the floor. On those endless nights, you closed your eyes, you clenched your teeth, you prayed to ghosts and martyrs floating around in the sky, and none of it changed anything. Baka’s voice didn’t bewitch the men in the hills and quiet their guns, but it made me feel better. It probably saved my mind.

Now Baka is singing to me again, “
Bad deeds breed bad deeds . .
.”—a new song she’s invented in English, a language she never bothered to learn when we arrived here. I’m too old, she cried, when Milan suggested English-language courses, I don’t want to be here, I want to be at home, in my own country. That’s why Mama got Milan and Iva to find a Bosnian doctor for her, because she didn’t sound like herself—she, the big warrior adventurer—she sounded like a sick person. That’s how we found out her heart was shot, that’s why Mama forces her to take the pills. Because she’s only seventy-two and that’s not too old these days to learn a new language, to start a new life. I guess she only had one new self in her.

Those are really bad lyrics, I say to her, I must be dreaming.
But she brings her finger up to her mouth and says, shh. She sings the words again, this time using a different tune: “
Bad deeds breed bad deeds . .
.” Stupid old communist, stupid, ridiculous saying, I’ve seen how the world works. Nice, law-abiding people lose everything, criminals and warlords take what they want, ignorant motherfuckers believe what they see on TV. It was on television that we all first heard how much we hated each other, and the rest of the world believed it in an instant because they’re lazy, spoiled, stupid idiots who know nothing and don’t bother to find out. And now some other family lives in our apartment in Sarajevo and I wonder who they are, did they come into the city from the countryside after the war, can they hear Mama’s piano playing in their sleep? I picture the details of the apartment, all our little knick-knacks, the ones we picked up on our vacations, the ones that were precious and not to be touched, the ones that belonged to our ancestors. I see our books and pictures, where the scissors were kept, the elastic bands, string, glue, batteries, tape, and ballpoint pens, where the sunlight fell on the wall at certain times of the day. I smell the different smells of food Mama cooked, of perfume and soap in the white bathroom. I run from room to room, and I see that everything’s still here just like it’s always been. And outside, on a sunny afternoon, Sarajevo is like it’s always been, a fairy-tale city with birds flying up in clouds, smoke rising from chimneys, clay tiles lying unbroken on roofs, narrow streets filled with strolling people, green domes nestled comfortably next to skinny spires, trees flowering triumphantly like the first spring. That’s what my mind does sometimes when I’m drunk or stoned out of my mind and drift into sleep. It fixes everything.

‡

S
AVA,
my Sava, is reserved and powerful. Her face is always composed. Even when she’s delivering a vicious left hook to the jaw of some surprised-looking guy, or binding arms to the back of a chair with duct tape, she has this stony face that tells you everything you need to know. I dream about her almost every night. Sometimes we’re driving really fast in the car, squealing around corners, accelerating through mountain bush, getting away from the cops, or from bombs falling like hail from the sky. Sometimes we’re in an apartment looking for something and there are strange, shady characters there with us, Celo’s mafia goons who have looted every store in the city and are busy selling food to starving people at monster prices. Sometimes Sava is wrapping her arms and legs around me, and I’m so big inside her, moving so slowly and rhythmically like waves on Paradise Beach. And she’s saying, yes, yes, yes, oh yes, oh God—that kind of pornographic thing. But it isn’t like porno, it’s like choirs of angels singing songs that make your heart explode over and over again and fly in a million different pieces throughout the universe..

I wake to find Mama standing over my bed, it must be morning. Jesus, I wish she wouldn’t do that. I check to make sure I’m covered up. Then I look out my small high window at a patch of white frozen sky. I’m sick of winter, and spring in Canada is winter part-two, with icy nights and snow-squall days. When I was a kid, winter was fun and short and not too cold, and we had mountains close by, and we went skiing whenever we wanted. Trees fluffy with snow, a clear view across the valley, a basin full of glittering holiday lights. I frown up at Mama.

“Get up, Jevrem,” she says. She stands over me rubbing her hands the way she always used to, to loosen them up for playing, to bring creative blood into her fingertips.

“What do you want?” I say.

“Where were you last night?” She stops rubbing, and puts her hands on her hips. Even when she stands tough like this, she looks thin and empty.

“Out with friends.”

“Because I got a call from the father of a school friend of yours,” she says in that quiet, flat voice she uses these days. “And he was shouting at me that you went over there and did terrible things to him, his wife, and his son. What is wrong with you? You’re lucky they’re not going to press charges. You’d be deported.”

Mama should be angry, she’s trying to be, but she’s standing over me like an uncertain ghost, fading in and out of my sight. There is so much she doesn’t know about me and the gang it’s ridiculous. As if Andrew would let his parents go to the police. He probably begged them not to on his knees, he probably said it was his fault, that it would all come back to him, that he’d be thrown in jail, or some stupid shit like that. That’s the power of power—he’d admit to all kinds of things he didn’t do rather than piss us off again. I think about being deported, I’ve never considered that before, how I’d fit back in that old, fucked-up city now that there’s peace. I look up at Mama and realize I actually feel something for Toronto, for this country, this continent, for how you can get lost here, in the streets, on the open road, how you can sense the emptiness, the vast swaths of land where no people have ever lived. I’d probably feel suffocated back home, and that would be a real problem.

I sit up. I wish Mama would go away. I don’t like it when she sees me in bed, just waking up. It reminds me of when things were different, when she smiled in the mornings, when she held out her arms and kissed me on both cheeks, when she played scales and arpeggios and exercises for hours, her gusts of music
mixing in with the toast and coffee smells, with the church bells and muezzins echoing up into the sky.

“Mama, that’s ridiculous,” I say. It’s a good lie, protecting her from the hard realities of life. “I mean, why would they think that?”

Mama sits down on my bed. She’s not elegant anymore, not glittering after a night of performances, conversation, drinking, and laughing. She’s bony and stiff all over, her clothes are everyday clothes, clothes to endure waking nightmares in.

“Jevrem,” she says quietly, voice tense. “I know that you’re a hoodlum, roaming the streets, stealing, lying. I know it, and I’m ashamed. What would Papa think of you now?”

I look around quickly but Papa isn’t here, standing in the door’s shadow, listening thoughtfully. I’m happy because I don’t want to bother him with this crap.

“I’m proud of you too, Mama. Housecleaning. Very good. Your pianist’s hands in a stranger’s filthy toilet.”