Little Bastards in Springtime (25 page)

Then the rattle starts again.

Mama pulls a chair close. She lays her head on the mattress, close to Baka’s, my arm between them. I feel her breath on my wrist, I feel her kiss my knuckles. In the doorway, Papa stands with his hands at his sides, his head down, his eyes closed, like he’s listening to distant music, or voices, or thunder. And there we all are, our heads together, remembering Baka in all her different stages, how she looked and sounded, what she did and how she did it. Baka rattles, Mama breathes softly, I drift off to sleep again. I dream we’re standing next to the stream, the shallow, swift-running, rocky one, the one up on Mount Igman, where we used to go for walks. Baka is crouched in the underbrush, hunting for mushrooms.

“There is so much in the forest,” she says to me, “that can sustain a human life.”

The sun is warm. The breeze is strong. I look around for goats and hawks and other wild animals. Something stirs, moves, I wake up. The pinpricks of darting light are in the air again. Mama raises her head. There is silence like I’ve never heard it before. Baka is gone.

‡

I
N THE
park, the wind roars through the branches. I can’t see much along the winding path through the swaying trees, even though the moon is up, perfectly round, perfectly white, every now and then obscured by speeding clouds. In the forest, there are only shadows of shadows. I walk and walk, blind but with ears, listening for danger. Baka walks beside me in ragged uniform, pack on her back, gun at her side.

I am on my hands and knees, following a scent through last year’s rotted leaves. Spring nettle, young shoots, herbs packed full of nutrients, like Baka said. I chew on bark. I search for nuts and ferns. I think about staying here, in the undergrowth, and never going back to my life. I begin digging a hole. But in this climate you can’t dig holes in April. Not with fingernails and sticks, not even with shovels. So I lie face up in a surface grave of last year’s leaves, the cold rising up to grab my bones, Baka lying at my side. I pull my hood over my head, I wait for the sky to turn pale blue then fade to nothing.

I
COME HOME SHIVERING, DIRT WEDGED BETWEEN
fingernails and flesh. I offered myself to death, but then the sun rose, then a dog found me and licked my face, then the dog-walker loomed over me asking questions, then I got up and headed out of the underbrush as though I’d just been having a little rest. Sometimes life abandons you and sometimes it won’t leave you alone. Baka’s body is still tucked in her bed, Mama is tidying up, getting ready for the funeral home people. She moves steadily, gracefully, doing one thing after the other with the purposeful efficiency I remember from when I was small. She seems washed clean, like she’s cried all night and now that’s done, there’s only the future stretching before her as straight and uncluttered as a desert road.

She looks at me with clear eyes. “Where were you, Jevrem?”

“I went for a walk.”

She brushes leaves and mud off my jacket.

“Why are you always out at night?” Mama asks, like she just suddenly remembered that she can just ask me if she wants to know.

“I feel suffocated indoors,” I say. I’ve never thought about it, but in this moment I know that’s the truth.

“Go to bed. You need some sleep. I’ve called Ujak Luka in California.”

Ujak Luka, I haven’t thought about him in a long time. I’m surprised that Mama has called him. But Baka is his mother too, Mama has no choice.

Baka’s expression is serene. Solemn lines between her eyes, contented curve to her mouth. She looks younger, more like her old self.

“I can wait for the funeral people,” I say. “You could have a hot bath or something. I could run it for you.”

“Thank you, Jevrem. I would like a bath.”

I run the bath, really hot the way she likes it, and throw in all kinds of scented stuff that’s in bottles on the edge of the bathtub. I don’t want to sleep, I want be awake with Mama until Baka leaves the house. I decided on the walk back from the park that I’ll show up at this funeral. The others, the nightmarish ones, were a blur, all of us crouching next to holes in the ground with the crack-crack of bullets echoing around our heads.

When I go back to the room, Mama is pulling a shoebox out from under Baka’s bed. It looks a hundred years old. I guess they bought shoes back then too.

“Baka wanted you to have it,” Mama says, brushing it with her sleeve.

“What is it?” I take the lid off and inside is a stack of old letters. The envelopes are yellow around the edges, the writing on them brown as insect blood.

“They are her letters from a long time ago. To my father. Just after the war, I think.” Mama shrugs her shoulders.

“Oh,” I say.

“She wanted you to have them. She was clear about that. And she wanted you to read them too. It was important to her.”

“Oh,” I say again. The box is not heavy. It smells of dust and, very faintly, vanilla.

T
HERE
are all kinds of people in the chapel of the crematorium, Milan and Iva and all their friends and the old Croatian ladies who tried to get Baka to visit with them, their once a week gossip fest, but Baka refused, she wouldn’t meet them even once. Reactionary Catholic housewives, she called them, what would I do with them?

Milan leans on the lectern and gives a eulogy. He says Baka was a nice, friendly grandmother who loved her children and her grandchildren, that she lived a good life, balanced her family and her career. He doesn’t mention that she was a soldier, a communist, that she killed a thousand Nazi invaders with cunning and bravery, that she never lost faith in Tito and her Yugoslav comrades. When he’s done, when he sits down, everyone waits for Mama or Ujak Luka to get up, but they don’t. And neither do I. I have nothing to say to these people, there are no words to explain how it was being Baka’s grandson in war and peace, I’m not even going to bother. Then there is Aisha, standing in front of the lectern, holding her hands together, her chin in the air, reciting an English poem from memory in a loud, forceful voice. It’s one they studied in school, I guess.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
, it starts, and she keeps going for quite a while. I catch a few words here and there,
winter’s rage, worldly tasks, tyrant’s stroke, oak
and
reed, joy
and
moan, witchcraft
and
ghosts
, and lots of references to dust. When she finishes on the word
grave
, there’s a moment of silence while everyone wonders what she just said, if it’s appropriate at a funeral, and when Aisha turned into a regular Canadian girl with a head full of flowery English nonsense-words.

Then we’re all standing waiting for Baka’s coffin to be lowered into the floor with the hydraulic lift and shunted off into the flames. I’m thinking of ways to do some good, for Baka, because that’s what she wanted, but it doesn’t help. No matter how much I distract myself, rows and rows of coffins rise up in my memory, each with the same nightmarish bunch of plastic-wrapped flowers on top, each draped with the Bosnian flag, and I’m kneeling beside one of them, I’m tapping the pale wood, I’m trying to take the lid off. And Mama, grey-faced and stooped, is telling me to be still. She’s saying, let’s have a quiet moment to be with Papa. But I can’t believe Papa is in there. It doesn’t even look like he’d fit.

Mama, Aisha, Ujak Luka, and I shake hands with each member of the congregation as they file out. Mama is wearing sunglasses, even though it’s a grey day with clouds bursting with snow looming overhead. Ujak Luka flew into Toronto from L.A. last night, but Mama isn’t warm toward him at all, there is no family spirit. He’s staying in a hotel near the airport, and this morning before the ceremony, he tried to sit Mama down for a conversation, but she kept running off, she said she was too busy.

When it’s all over, the funeral, the reception, Ujak Luka takes me and Aisha out for dinner to a little Italian place near his hotel. Mama says she has a headache, so we drop her off at home with Ujak Luka’s rental car. At the restaurant, he stares at both of us with glistening eyes, pushes aside the bread basket, reaches his hands over the white tablecloth, grabs our hands with both of his. “You’ve grown so big,” he keeps saying over and over again. And, “What has happened to time, what has happened to us?” Aisha tells him everything about her life, and what she says sounds awesome, her friends at school, her
teachers, the subjects she’s interested in, her music lessons, what she wants to be when she grows up, a concert violinist and a war doctor. A big smile on her face, like she’s the happiest girl in the world.

Ujak Luka has a soft face for a gangster, a pale chin and jaw where he says his beard had been. He shaved for the funeral, for Baka, he said, she wasn’t one for hairy men, and I wonder, do L.A. playboys wear beards just like crazy-ass Chetniks? He keeps asking me questions like, How are you, Jevrem? Is it hard settling here, such a different place? Do you think about back home? Who are your friends? Do you like school? Do you have nightmares about the war? Everything’s cool, I say, because what’s the point of telling him things when he’ll be gone in an hour and I’ll never see him again? I say, be happy living it up in Hollywood, and he shakes his tanned head, says he doesn’t live in Hollywood, he doesn’t know how that rumour arose. Such a liar, this warlord of L.A., this crazy Yugo outlaw of the west. Then he tries to speak about his life, about some piece of property on the outskirts of the city, about how Mama won’t forgive him for leaving her with Baka, for abandoning his own mother, his city, his country, for not dying in battle like Papa and Dušan. He says she never returns his phone calls, that’s how it is, that he tries to make contact all the time, that he talks to Baka and the rest of us every day in his meditations, or some such weird thing.

And he says we should come and visit him, that we’d love it out there, the light is so clear, it’s like paradise, we’ll see. But I’m tired, I fade him out, I stop listening to his stories and his questions, I avoid his eyes. Instead, I stare at his gnarly, rough hands, his dirt-lined fingernails, and wait for the moment I can go.

B
ED
is my grave. I fall into it, and I never want to get out again. Turns out that Sava is in there already. The new bed works, she has slept over every night since we got it, which has made it my own sweet perfect torture hell since I’m on crazy fire for her, but there are no more jerk-off extravaganzas for this hungry boy, except shivering in the bathroom or some such fucking uncomfortable place like a kid, and that’s the biggest sacrifice for love I can think of. But we can sleep the century away together in it, why not, since Sava seems comfortable with that.

Voices murmur and I wake to find Aisha and Sava sitting next to me. Baka’s old letters are spread all over the bed, like an ancient, crumbling quilt.

“Her writing is so round and curly,” Aisha is saying.

“Like a young girl’s. She wasn’t very old when she wrote these.” Sava is setting them side by side in an orderly way.

“Jevrem,” Aisha says into my ear. “These are an incredible primary source, the raw data of history. My teacher says that primary sources are fundamental to the writing of history. Can I bring them to school to show her?”

“Oh Jesus,” I say and turn around, put a pillow over my head. Since when are Sava and Aisha best friends?

“I used Papa’s notebooks, the ones Mama saved, for a history assignment.” Aisha is talking to Sava now. “Papa was a historical materialist. Do you know what that is? People always look to the superstructure of society, its beliefs, values, ideas, cultural practices, to explain terrible historical events, when they should instead look at its base, the economic structure of society.” Aisha pauses, then adds, “They just need to follow the money and everything will be revealed.”

“Jesus, Aisha, how old are you?” Sava asks.

“Eleven,” Aisha says. “Why?”

I groan and dive back under waves of sleep and dream that Papa is also sitting on the bed, that he’s reading the letters out loud in a language I don’t understand. It’s Spanish, maybe, or Chinese, though the sounds he makes are more like animal noises, barks, yaps, clucks, peeps, grunts. I can tell that he expects me to know what he’s saying, that he’s going to ask me why I’m not contributing any raw data to history. I wake suddenly to the smell of food, the sound of clattering dishes. I open my eyes. There are plates on a tray, glasses, cutlery, napkins, but only Sava is here, propped up by pillows. Mama and Aisha are upstairs. I can hear them talking, water running, pots rattling like it’s an ordinary day, nothing terrible is happening.

“Look what your mom made, Andric,” Sava says, and she sounds pretty happy.

But I’m not ready for a picnic in bed with Sava, even if that is my idea of paradise. Right now, today, I’m not ready for paradise, or any other state of mind.

Sava shakes me. “Listen to this. It’s kind of interesting, they’re all about those youth brigades, remember that? When the young people built the country up again after the war—my grandfather went on and on about it all the time. But your Baka couldn’t really write for shit, no sentences, completely misspelled words.”

“Leave me alone.” I feel suddenly angry, I want to kick her out. She’s taken over my bed, and now my life, when I can’t even move close to her, even when we’re high together, even when we have no bodies and are floating through space connected by dreams, hallucinations, prophesies, and visions.

“Those are my letters,” I say. “Baka left them to me.”

“Whatever, it doesn’t matter.” Sava is strangely perky.

“I’m serious, Sava. Fuck off. Those are my letters.”

“Relax, Andric. They’re Baka’s letters. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”

“What do you know about her? Why do you care? What are you on, anyway?” But I know, she doesn’t have to say. Ritalin or Concerta, taken from the home of some tripping little rich kid. “Do you have some more?”

“No. Just get a cup of coffee or something. And listen to this, it’s interesting. They’re love letters to someone called H. I can’t read her handwriting that well, though.”