Little Bastards in Springtime (19 page)

“What are you saying? Don’t you joke about these matters,” she hisses in my ear. “You young thugs, what do you know
about pain and suffering. You’re just crazy teenagers, you care about nothing.”

It’s possible that she’s just scared of us because we’re big, rude kids. It’s possible she didn’t use the word
Chetnik
at all. Zijad gets up slowly. He towers over his aunt. He looks like he’s going to say something, but then he doesn’t. He’s too nice to tell her to fuck off, so Zijad’s aunt stares us down, one after the other. She can’t understand how it’s possible that we don’t care about the things she cares so much about. Here, on her nephew’s bedroom floor, Serbian legs over Croatian arms, Muslim heads against Christian torsos, teenage body parts, boys and girls, all nestled comfortably into each other. But it’s also possible she just thinks we’re pigs, since the last time we were here we drank all the pop and beer in the fridge, seeded the carpet with chip crumbs, and smoked five packs of her cigarettes.

“I’m calling the police if you don’t leave,” Zijad’s aunt says. She sounds sad. “I’ll have them charge you with trespassing.” She marches out of the room, and Zijad runs after her.

Five minutes later we’re outside, huddled and blinking in front of the huge, dingy apartment building in the bright sunshine of an icy April day.

‡ ‡ ‡

A
ND HERE I AM AT SUNDAY DINNER AGAIN. IT’S
the same as last week, and the week before, and the one before that.

Milan and Iva came early with three of their friends and watched Mama cook. And two of Mama and Papa’s acquaintances from Sarajevo, Stefan and Jasmina, arrived from the airport,
they’re visiting everyone they know. They tried to stay and make it work, they say, but it’s too hard. The atmosphere is broken, it’s not how it used to be, the wounds won’t heal, the nationalities are partitioned, the economy is bad, the politicians are corrupt, the criminals are in charge. It will get better, Milan says, it’s early days. Not until they reverse the Dayton Agreement, Stefan says. That European High Representative, ruling us like bad little children, a colonial model without the usual colonial benefits. Like security and employment.

“They’re after our coal and oil,” Stefan says.

“Yes, the Dayton disaster,” Jasmina sings. “A shameful apartheid.”

I stare at them all and think strange thoughts. Why is it
these
people I’m eating with today? Why these ones and not some others? Why
this
brand of peppers-out-of-a-can, and
that
kind of bread? Why this table, these chairs, why exactly at 7 p.m., and why this conversation about nothing new? I think, we survived for this? And then I wonder, what else should we have survived for? That’s what survival means. So that you can sit around a table with your family and random acquaintances stuffing yourself with peppers and bread, supa and sarma, pickled everything, surrounded by objects you collect and arrange to tell yourself you’re home. That’s when I lose my grip, I can’t help it. I stand up and shout, like a dog suddenly barks. I don’t know what I shout, or why. Mama gets up quickly and rushes to my side. She sits me down on the chair and cradles my head in her chest and says, “Shh, it’s okay, Jevrem, you’re safe, you’re safe.” Lie. She doesn’t do that. She watches me carefully from her chair. She’s alert, she’s ready to jump.

And then there’s Papa, standing by the fridge, patting his chest with one hand the way he did absent-mindedly when he was thinking or gabbing, or when he was stressed. He’s telling
me that I should get off my ass, get interested in life. He’s repeating Baka’s endless mantra,
do some good for once, do some good, do some good.

You have to love something in the world to really have survived
, he shouts.

He has other phrases too. Lots of them.

“Jevrem, Jevrem. It’s okay,” Aisha whispers at me. “Sit down. We’re all safe here together in the kitchen.”

I notice that everyone is staring at me, forks halfway to their mouths.

Mama looks exhausted. “Yes, please sit down, Jevrem. We’re eating. Can we please have some peace.”

I sit down feeling a bit dazed, and there opposite me is Baka staring at nothing just to the left of my head, a startled-sparrow look on her face. I want her to get up and rush to my side too, but those days are done. These days she hardly has the energy to breathe. I feel a pressure in my chest, get up, stumble around the table to the stairs, and crash down to my room. I light up my tenth joint of the day, lie on my back, smoke, wait for the shakes to pass.

After a while, I grab my coat and walk out of the house. Mama comes to the back door. Jevrem, she calls, with a small, cracked voice. Jevrem. But I’m already around the corner, I’m already gone. I walk to Oakwood, then down to St. Clair. I stand there, shivering, waiting for a cab. In the cab, I sit back and take deep breaths. I tell the cab driver to drive me around for a while. I tell him to crank the heat.

“It’s bloody cold here, isn’t it,” he says, his English singsongy like he’s from India or something.

“Yes,” I say, “it’s bloody cold.”

“The cold never ends,” he says.

“Yup,” I say, “it never seems to end.”

“Where you from?” he asks me. “Is it Germany? I have relative in Germany. It’s good place, Germany. My relative is engineer, he has good life. But Canada is good place too. Toronto is good place, lots of good things, schools, hospitals. But it is cold too much.”

“Yes, damn cold, even in spring.” I think of my first week here in Toronto, how there was a huge storm and we all went outside and stood in a foot of powdery snow in Milan and Iva’s backyard wearing the winter coats they’d organized for us even though it was March. We gazed at the white trees and roofs, at the buried cars, at the orange night sky full of fat snowflakes. Back then I was thinking, everything here is so big and sprawling, the roads, the houses, the city, the suburbs, the sky, even the snow. It’s so big it has no shape, it’s so big people can wander around forever without bumping into anyone they know.

I stare out of the cab window at the cars, the trees, the storefronts glowing dimly in the night. The streets are mostly empty of pedestrians, everyone’s gone home to rest on this moody night. Then I see Papa briefly from behind, head down, shoulders hunched, turning in to a convenience store. I shout, “Stop the cab!” like a man in a movie and the driver skids to a halt at the curb. I run into the convenience store and check each aisle. There is Papa by the magazines, standing with an open newspaper at arm’s length, reading intently, his head held back, his eyes squinting without his reading glasses. Papa, I say, and he turns his head, he looks at me in that way he does when his mind is elsewhere. Papa, I say again, I need some advice. What do I do when I can’t breathe anymore? And he says,
you’re doing the right thing, go for a drive, see some sights, the world is a bigger place than the inside of your head, remember that.
Then his face morphs, and another man is standing there, and this other man is saying,
sorry, what do you want, kid?

So me and the cabby keep going. We drive down Bathurst to the Gardiner, then up the narrow on-ramp and east across the city. He turns up the radio and we’re blasting Bollywood rhythms as we cut through the heart of downtown Toronto on this elevated ribbon of concrete, towering skyscrapers and condos sliding by on either side, all jumbled together, a tight cluster glittering confidently. The CN Tower reaches high into the sky like a giant flagpole, and then we pass it and we’re on the other side, going down toward residential neighbourhoods again, the lake somewhere close but invisible on our right. When I’m warm and breathing normally, I tell the driver to take me to Madzid’s apartment building. I like it there, his mom and dad don’t hate me, I can crash on his floor.

Madzid’s parents are out visiting relatives. So we get high in Madzid’s room and lounge around eating halva and burek and chips and Mars bars, watching endless bullshit on his tiny TV, the volume turned low. We hear his mom and dad return and get ready for bed, the soft murmuring of their voices reminding me of apartment-sounds back home. I fall asleep late and dream of Papa in his study, of Dušan returning from the front, of little creatures with tiny wolf-heads swarming out of the basement like rats and invading our stairwells and hallways, knocking on our apartment door with little bony hands, shouting,
alarm, alarm.

Madzid and I wake late, feeling groggy and suffocated and craving adventure. We pile into Madzid’s car and shoot across Bloor to get Sava and Geordie, up Dufferin to get Zijad. Sava takes the wheel, muscles up the Allen Expressway, deking in and out among the other cars like the racer she is, screeches around the west ramp to the 401, hurtles west to the 400 in four minutes flat. We manoeuvre onto that huge, straight highway heading north and fly like we’re airborne toward the
giant supersize lake that lies an hour and a half out of the city, its craggy pink and black rocks, its endless expanse, its wind-swept pine trees reminding me of those paintings that Canadian painters like to paint.

“Let’s just keep going,” Madzid says. “Let’s drive all the way around Lake Superior. Why not? It’d take days, so what? Let’s keep going up to the Arctic, or west across those giant wheat fields everyone talks about. You can get to the Arctic from here, it’s just straight north through thousands of scarcely populated miles.”

We all imagine a road that long, we imagine that emptiness compared to Europe, anyway, and most other places on this planet. We consider driving without turning back, we smoke and toke and think about time going by, people left behind, messy histories, cutting free and moving on, shaping life and being shaped by it. We stop after a while and walk on the beach of a smaller lake ringed by dollhouse cottages and suburban lawns, big shards of ice still in the shallows, enormous leafless trees swaying on the shore, lawn chairs scattered around like driftwood. We look in windows and dream of sunny summer afternoons, fishing in little boats, bonfires, hot dogs on sticks, about summer vacations back home. We each have those memories, we share the same ones. The mountain lake our family went to, the river for rafting, that beach in Croatia year after year, the trees and white buildings and orange roofs and turquoise water and gently rising and falling boats. We all know that feeling of leaving hot dusty Sarajevo behind, pollution hanging like an orange veil over the valley, of driving through the cool green mountains toward timeless days of water and sand and playing that unfold like heaven when you’re a kid.

Lake Simcoe is as far as we get; we never reach Georgian Bay, a thousand times bigger than our lakes back home, because we’re hungry and the day is fading away. We drive south again through sloping farmland, past brown fields with patches of snow, red-brick farmhouses, wooden barns, stout white silos, to Geordie’s house, the one her family just moved into. It’s in a brand new suburb north of the city called Dufferin Pine Ravines, a neighbourhood without pine trees or ravines, with construction waste still lying around in bare yards waiting for the landscapers to turn up. Her house is huge, a movie set of a house, all perfect seams, right angles, fake brick stuck to plywood, the kind of house that shady money from the old country can buy, and legit money too, I guess. We have to take off our shoes outside on the front step, not even the front hall can get dirty.

And there is Geordie’s mother, standing in the foyer, hands on her hips. Slinky blouse, slippers with heels, pearl earrings, shiny lipstick, she has money carved into her face and smells of an exotic-flower hothouse. She’s looking us over with assessing eyes. She doesn’t miss an inch.

“So these are your friends, Gordana?” she says. “Welcome to our home. You are very welcome.”

We’ve never met Geordie’s parents before, she’s always kept us away, maybe because they’re rich.

“Thanks,” we mutter, looking sideways at expensive vases, fragile side tables, glossy paintings, giant silk rugs, checking out window fastenings.

She says, “Oh, you all speak our language, isn’t that nice. Come in. What do you want to eat?”

We follow her into a hotel-size kitchen with white glistening surfaces and space-station appliances and we know exactly what
we want to eat but are too polite to say it, for Geordie’s sake. Zijad is dying to make a monstrous sandwich, he has that look on his face, and the rest of us are thinking about steaks and shrimp cocktails. Also, electronics in the basement, TVs in the bedrooms, jewellery in the safe. We can’t help it.

“We’ll just grab something, Mom,” Geordie says. “Don’t worry about it.”

“But I’d like to cook for your friends.” Geordie’s mom pretends to pout. “Well, okay. You know where everything is.”

Geordie opens the fridge and stares at its contents, waiting for her mom to go away. But Geordie’s mom doesn’t go away, she leans against the counter looking at us with question marks in her eyes.

“So, where are you all from?” she asks, finally.

Geordie slams the fridge door closed and marches to the fridge-size, opens the door. “Ice cream, steaks, chops, ribs, vodka,” she reports.

“Hmm?” her mom says.

“What does it matter?” snaps Geordie. “Leave them alone.”

“Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it?” Mom’s smile is dazzling. We don’t know where to look, her expression is blinding. “If you can’t tell by how they look, how they talk, doesn’t that say something? They’re all from home, you know that already. Who cares about the rest,” Geordie answers.

Geordie’s mother laughs gaily. “She is so cynical, my Gordana,” she confides in us. “Roots are all we have, my dears. You remember that. That’s who you are, your blood. Only your people will stand up and defend you when the time comes. Like with like, that’s a law of nature, nothing more or less.”

“You can have your swastikas, Ma. We’re going to eat something, okay?”

“Oh, Gordana, you’ll feel differently when you grow up, just wait and see. When life gets serious, when it’s a matter of your very survival, your right to exist as a people in your own land. Don’t you think?”