Little Bastards in Springtime (35 page)

In my dream, Dušan grabs me by the hand and we fly down the stairwell of the apartment building and burst out onto the street, but the street is nothing like a Sarajevo street, it’s like a Toronto street, wide, straight, with tidy concrete sidewalks on each side, and he says,
look, isn’t this great, I love it here, so much space, so few people, thank Christ we moved.

When day comes, I have no appetite. I eat no breakfast, I drink no coffee. I sit at the cafeteria table and grip its edge hard with both hands. In our session, Dr. Ghorbani tells me that violence, substance abuse, inconsistent parenting, weak attachment to family and school, poverty, bad housing, and under-resourced neighbourhoods are why the crazy boys are in this place. She says that this is what the youth workers and therapists think, but that the guards and detention managers think the boys are bad seeds, defective kids rotten from birth.

“Why is this, do you think?” she asks me, raising her eyebrows, the way she does. “Why do some people see that violent kids are the result of violent backgrounds, and other people think that violent kids are just wilfully bad?”

I think about this question for a while, and then I answer. “Because you youth workers are here to heal us and the guards are here to punish us, so you invent boys that can be healed, and they invent boys that need to be punished.” Then I put
my hand over my mouth, turn my chair away. I see her sneaky game, I see how clever she is in baiting me with questions.

She floats other questions like balloons and bats them gently my way, while I think about food, supplies, garbage, sewage, repairs. Things that come in and out of this house of rehabilitation and retribution, things that could carry me with them.

“How are your classes so far? Maybe we can talk about that.”

They’re for infants, as usual, I think. Don’t they know that we crazy boys are smarter than other kids? That’s why we’re here, we get what’s really going on, we see through everything. They should teach to our level. I slouch lower in the chair, let my head fall forward, close my eyes, fold my hands over my stomach. Time goes by. I hear Dr. Ghorbani moving around. Then, when my breathing gets deeper and my body thinks it’s asleep, I feel her standing next to me.

“I understand that you’re angry and cynical,” she says very quietly, her head close to my ear. “That’s a normal response to the abnormal events you’ve experienced. But at some point you’ll find it to your advantage to take the leap beyond reactive feelings and put yourself on the road to your own freedom. For yourself.”

Baka once told me that famous men used their time in prison to educate themselves and prepare to change the world. Tito, her hero. Gandhi, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Trotsky, and so on. Hitler, too, of course, got a lot of preparatory work done in jail. But I’m with Dr. Ghorbani. I’m going on the road.

I
DREAM
that I am high up in the Yugoslav mountains with a view of other, distant peaks and a pale blue horizon that curves down on either side, like I’m seeing the shape of Earth itself. I have the feeling that I’m at the top of it all, at the highest point
on the planet, where I can see every approach, where no one can creep up on me unexpectedly. In my dream, the sun, the wind, the banks of white clouds rise up in me and I become the mountain, the sun, the wind, the clouds. This high up, there is only thin air and green rocky pastures speckled with small, tough wildflowers that have a strange scent, like daisies, and mountain goats climbing upwards, always upwards. Lower down, there are narrow rivers that flow fast through deep crevices, and slower, wider stretches too. There, the deep waters appear dark olive green. They hold fish that quiver and dart and sometimes splash upwards, breaking the water’s surface. It’s a dream I never want to leave because the forests are full of bears. When I was little, Papa told me we had the largest concentration of bears anywhere in the world, except Canada.

In the morning, I attack the pans like they’ve personally wronged me. I listen to gangsta rap with the cooks, sweat like a boxer, flood the floor, splash the walls. And I watch, I observe. Prison is alive like a beast, it takes nourishment in through one hole and lets waste out another hole. Nothing on this earth stays alive if it’s completely sealed off from its surroundings. Always, there’s a way in and there’s a way out. Back home we had our tunnel.

In the group session, the counsellor talks some more about violence, but he’s a soft man with soft hands, soft face, soft voice, soft ideas. His violence is from textbooks, it smells of paper.

“But the violence in your life was different, wasn’t it, Jevrem?” he says. “Would you like to share your story?” He’s reading from Dr. Ghorbani’s notes, I can hear her voice.

I decide not to share, not today. I have other things on my mind. The rest of the boys look away, shuffle their feet, cough
into their hands. No one puts me on the spot by looking at me, they know better. There’s a pause, a brief moment when the room is completely silent.

“Well, I think it’s okay to reveal that you lived through a terrible war,” the counsellor says.

The boys’ faces remain expressionless, they make no signal that they’ve heard. This isn’t news to them, they’ve never cried a river for me.

“That’s something to think about,” he says. “What we’re dealing with generally is immediate caregivers letting you down, sometimes due to their actions and sometimes through no fault of their own, but in this case it was the whole society. The whole society broke down, turning on each other, this is a different phenomenon. It must be tough seeing violence like that, not just your dad or your uncle or a teacher letting loose, but all men being compelled to fight, and to fight each other.”

No, I think, you’re an idiot, it’s all the same thing, in the living room, on the battlefield. It all comes from the same place, the struggle for survival, power, place, someone to love you for who you really are, all that shit. Where do you think all those badass militiamen and macho soldiers come from?

The counsellor keeps going with a deep vibrating voice about cooperation, trust, conversation, empathy, working together for the benefit of the family, the community, the society, the whole. I feel sorry for this earnest dude, almost sorry. All his education but no brains, it’s very sad, one of those guys who thinks you’re agreeing with him when you don’t say anything. And all the boys are quiet, not a word from them. But we’re all thinking, the benefit of which family, which community, which society, which whole? The corrupt ones? The fucked-up ones? Why would we want to benefit
them? But I fast tune out of this inspirational monologue. Instead, I think about the fence, getting over it, and alternatives, the possibility of expelling myself from this noble place of healing and rehabilitation in the garbage truck at 5 a.m., of escaping on the way to hospital with a broken arm purchased from a kick-boxer.

‡ ‡ ‡

W
HEN I COME INTO THE VISITORS’ ROOM, MAMA
and Aisha are sitting at the same table where we sat, Sava and I. To me this feels like a sign, but of what I couldn’t say. The room is empty except for one guard, who doesn’t once look in our direction. Instead, he files his nails with a small piece of sandpaper and sucks lunch out of his teeth with a squelching sound.

Mama looks more like I remember from the time before than she’s ever done on this side of the Atlantic. Her hair and face and eyes are shining again, the way she moves smooth and sure and relaxed. She’s wearing her coat for Sarajevo winters, grey and tailored, and her favourite silk scarf, the one she brought back from Paris and wore all the time back home. But everything else is new, bright, unfamiliar. She’s dressing for a fresh life, I can see this clearly, and smell it too, she has a new perfume. Aisha is fresh too. A whole new person has showed up in the past year, taller, curvier, as composed as an adult. It’s the way she sits, her hands folded on the table, her eyes focused without wavering on whatever she’s looking at, which right now is me. She jumps up and rushes over, saying my name like it’s a spell. She’s wearing a necklace around her
neck that says
Berina
in curved writing. Berina is no longer inside Aisha, she’s moved out to the surface of her skin.

“Hey, Aisha. How are you?” I give her a hug.

“Hi,” she says, smiling with her eyes and whole face. She holds onto my hand with both of hers, pulling it tightly against her chest.

Mama stands also, slowly, looking at me with her motherly eyes. “Come here,” she says. She wraps her arms around me. She keeps me there for a while, until it’s awkward, until we can no longer pretend we’re not in a jail. I sit down opposite the two of them, my eyes on the table.

“Jevrem,” Mama says. “Please look at me.”

And I try, I want to do this right, but they both seem so happy and I feel even more like a huge fucking loser in my overalls and this ragged brush cut they keep giving me. I stare over Mama’s head, out the window, at the walls, the clock, the ceiling, anywhere but into those familiar eyes looking at me from the past.

“Jevrem,” Mama says, leaning forward, “I know you feel ashamed. Can you get past that? Please? I want a real conversation with you. You’re seventeen now.”

“I don’t feel ashamed,” I say, reading the graffiti on the side of the table:
S.O.S. You’re an asshole, Dad I love you, girl, get me out of here.
“I’ve told you that.” I glance at her face, but there’s something about her that disturbs me.

“The only time you didn’t look me in the eyes was when you felt ashamed,” she keeps going. “From the age of two. Ashamed about the trouble you made.”

I didn’t make trouble back then, I think. That was Dušan, Mama is confusing us. But I’m not surprised, he’s living through me.

Aisha smiles some more. She says, “Kids who make trouble are the most creative.”

Mama says, “Shh, Aisha. This is serious.”

Aisha winks at me. She’s even sweeter than I remember, which somehow makes me sad.

“I’m with Aisha on this one,” I mumble.

“Jevrem,” Mama says, looking at her watch, then at the guard. “We don’t have time for this.”

So I look directly into Mama’s eyes and see what’s bothering me. She looks just like Baka. Baka’s back, her old chipper self, full of opinions and energy and ideas about how I should be, out there saving humanity. For a moment I feel disoriented. I look around the room and wonder where I am, what the hell is going on. I think, I was the dreamer of the family, maybe I’m hallucinating this whole second half of my life, maybe I’ll wake any moment in my bed back home, the sounds of Sarajevo coming in my window.

Mama leans toward me. “Jevrem. Tell me how you are.” And time keeps piling on top of itself with its idea of an interesting plot.

“How are
you
?” I say. I really want to know. I want to know that she’ll be okay when I run away. I want her to be inside her own life, to stop thinking about me. I want to be sure she won’t fall apart when I’m gone.

“I’m fine. Everything is coming together,” she says.

Mama puts her arm around Aisha’s shoulder. I can see in this moment exactly how their life is, how they’ve made it work, how the future has finally arrived to greet them with open arms.

“Life pulls you forward,” Mama continues, “and when you finally let it, when you decide to go with it, it rewards you well. My music is always there for me, Jevrem, and Aisha will be going to a private high school in September, one that can meet both her musical and academic abilities. She received a full
scholarship, isn’t that wonderful? It’s in Montreal, and I’ll be moving there too. But this doesn’t mean we won’t visit, Jevrem. It’s only a little farther away.”

Oh, I think, of course Aisha got a full scholarship, she’s going to rule the world one day, and thank God for that, maybe we’ll all get some peace and quiet for once. And then I have a realization. That man who took Mama out for Ethiopian food, the French musician, Leo Something, he lives in Montreal. In my mind’s eye, I see a glossy full-colour image of Mama and this guy sitting at a sunny table eating baguettes and drinking strong coffee, like it’s a memory of a moment already lived, or a photograph I saw stuck to Mama’s fridge door. They’re leaning in toward each other, they’re laughing, his fingers are circled around her wrist. I feel dizzy seeing all of this and I know it has happened, our past is no longer our present, it has finally gotten away, it has jostled free. I see our Sarajevo life floating downstream, Papa, Dušan, Berina, and all our relatives and friends perched on a little raft, getting smaller and smaller by the second. Papa is standing up, a barge pole in one hand, looking back at us, waving. He’s so far away I can’t see the expression on his face. Is he sad, is he angry, is he glad to be moving on? Papa, I want to cry out, Papa, Mama still loves you, I know she does. But Mama and Aisha are staring at me, and I don’t want to worry them with strange behaviour right now.

“It’s good, Jevrem, things are really improving for us. But with you in here, well … I want to know, how is it? How do they treat you? Do you get enough food? Enough sleep? Are you in school? Please tell me. I know how hard our first year here was. I wasn’t myself, I wasn’t present, you thought I didn’t care. I do care. I care very much.” Mama pauses, looks at her hands,
smoothes her hair. Then she whispers, “I’m your mother and you are on my mind every minute of every day.”

I want to say,
I’m happy that your life is better, I really am, it’s the most important thing.
And I want to let her know somehow that I’m going to be leaving, that she shouldn’t worry. But Mama is suddenly shaking. She grabs my hands and pulls them toward her, she bends her head and kisses my knuckles, her eyes pouring saltwater tears onto them. I try to get my hands back, but Mama is strong, she won’t let go. And I can’t help it, I start to lose it too. Then suddenly I’m sobbing, crazy and wild, listening to animal sounds coming from my chest. It feels strange, like I’m in a storm and there’s a tidal wave hitting me from behind. I’m knocked down, flattened, and the room fills with water, rising fast right up to the ceiling, and I feel Mama’s hands slipping away, I see her reaching for me, calling out to me with a silent underwater mouth, but it’s too late, she and Aisha are floating off in slow-motion, twisting slowly around each other, swimming in slow circles, the guard is drifting with them like a whale with no concern for small fish like us, and then they’re at the far end of the room, hair undulating like rubbery seaweed in a tropical ocean. In a flash of light they’re sucked out of the door upward to the surface of the outside world.