Little Bastards in Springtime (7 page)

Now it’s a small and dangerous cage, our city, completely surrounded by rocket launchers and maniacs, with all of us trapped in our houses and apartments, remembering how it was before. And it’s only been two weeks. We’re so bored, Dušan, the twins, and I, and all our friends, everyone wanting to be outside so badly, like we’ve never wanted to be outside before. Dušan puts on earphones and dances wildly in front of his bedroom mirror. He has his bale of weed under the bed. His room smells of jungle, skunk, field grasses in summer. I chase Aisha and Berina around the apartment pretending to be a wolf. I throw them to the floor, I pretend to eat them. They love the thrill of fear, they want me to play this game all day long for the rest of time.

“In the forest, packs of wolves sniff the earth to pick up the trail of your scent.” I say. “They follow it all the way into the city, and at night they wait panting in the stairwell, drooling with the need to eat you up. One of these days they
will find their way in here, right into our apartment, right into your bed.”

In my room I pull my stuff off the shelves, I kick it around, I trample it underfoot. Stupid, shitty stuff, locked up with me in this jail. I lie on my carpet and stare at the ceiling. I know all the cracks in it, and the little spiderweb that grows in the corner. The spider is a friend of mine. She’s tiny and clever, catching little bugs that I never see anywhere else in the room. The afternoon changes to evening but I don’t notice. When evening comes, I build a marble run. It starts way up at the top of my window, the tip of Mount Triglav in the Slovenian Alps. It runs all the way down to the Adriatic, that one place where Bosnia meets the sea.

M
AMA
and Papa are crying in each other’s arms. They press close, grasp each other’s hair, neck, back, make moaning noises. I can’t watch, it’s horrible. Someone else they know died, someone they liked a lot, a musician named Marko who played flute in the symphony. Mama played with him just a few nights ago, and she was so happy when she and Papa came home, she woke us all up. The hall was packed with people, she told us, they’re not intimidated, they’re partaking in culture, they’re continuing to live their civilized lives.

They don’t notice me standing in the hallway, they won’t notice if I leave. So I slip out of the apartment and pound down the stairs, the palm of my hand burning on the railing. The basement has been prepared for direct hits. The ping-pong table is gone. The old couches have been pushed to the edges. There are signs on the wall saying, D
ON’T COOK IN THIS ROOM,
and D
ON’T LEAVE YOUR STUFF DOWN HERE, BRING IT BACK UP
W
ITH YOU AT THE END OF THE RAID.
The teenagers are hanging out, smoking pot, kissing in the corner. Two of them look like they’re both girls, one has very short hair, but I can’t tell for sure. I stare. They tell me to get lost.

In the lobby, the old men are huddled in a tight little circle. Cena and Nezira are playing cards on the bench. I sit down next to them and see that Cena has a bandage on her hand.

“What’s that?” I ask, as though I don’t care that much, but I do. Her hand is so small and pretty.

“Oh, just a cut,” Cena says.

“One of their windows shattered yesterday,” Nezira says, slapping down a card. “And a piece of glass flew through the air.”

“Yes, it flew through the air all the way across the living room and stabbed my hand, then lots of blood ran down my fingers. It’s exactly the temperature of skin, you know, so you can’t feel it, but there’s still a ticklish trickling feeling. It felt like my skin was melting off my bones.” She says this like she thinks it’s kind of cool, like she’s describing a chemistry experiment.

“Oh,” I say. “Does it hurt?”

“Not anymore. Mama gave me some painkillers. The stuff she got for her back last year.”

“Now we feel great,” says Nezira.

“You took some too?” I ask.

“Of course,” says Nezira. “I can give you one if you want.”

“Where are Mahmud and Pero?” I ask.

“We don’t know,” says Cena.

“Probably in the courtyard playing soccer. That’s all Mahmud wants to do.” Nezira is fumbling around in her pocket.

I hope she finds a painkiller. Maybe it’ll make me feel great too.

“Mahmud’s such a little boy,” Cena whispers. “He doesn’t even like to kiss.”

I do
, I want to say, but I’m afraid to.

“Here.” Nezira puts a little white pill in the palm of my hand and winks. “The first one is free,” she says, then she and Cena laugh hysterically.

I feel sleepy and dreamy all afternoon and time doesn’t go by so slowly, or I don’t mind that it goes by slowly, I can’t tell which one. After supper, Dušan lets me have puffs from his joint. He can’t go out with his friends so I’m all he’s got. Just don’t talk to me, he says, so I lie next to him on his bed while he listens to his music in his headphones. I think about all kinds of crazy things, my mind roaming around the city, the countryside, my memories, my daydreams and fantasies, like it’s a camera that I can send wherever I want it to go just by flicking my thumb on a remote. The room is a helicopter, the moon is a lighthouse, clouds are sponges dabbing the earth’s surface, trees are partisans coming down from the mountains to fight. Gunfire is popcorn popping over a crackling fire. Dušan is a large dog that scratches its matted fur with giant human hands.

I wake up blinking through a fog. Someone is at the door. Papa comes in, his hair all ruffled and standing up, which is how he looks after hours of writing. He sniffs the air and tells me to go to my room. I get up, sway, then wobble slowly to the door. Papa watches me with a frown, then closes the door behind me. Dušan is going to get a talking-to. I listen in the hallway, but Papa doesn’t shout and Dušan doesn’t shout. This is a good sign for the weed. Papa comes out, stares at me, shakes his head, leads me to my room, and lies down next to me on the bed. He doesn’t yell, he doesn’t say anything. We lie side by side for a while and stare at the ceiling.

Then Papa reads from
Oliver Twist
, which is what I’ve been doing all day, his arm around my shoulder, pulling me tight. As
I listen, I watch his chest moving in and out, his mouth forming the words. I stare at the hairs curling out of his ear. Mama is at the door, watching us with shiny eyes. After a while, she comes in and sits down, one hand on Papa’s foot, one hand on mine. She listens all the way to the end of the chapter with eyes that are far away, then she leaves and comes back with a candle. She lights it, switches off the lamp, and pulls the blankets up to my neck. She kisses my cheek, she kisses my forehead. Mama and Papa sit next to each other on the bed like they did when I was little and tell me a story from the olden days, like they used to when things were normal—the story of when they met way back when.

In those days they dressed like hippies and were students at the university, and there’s a funny photograph of Mama with long straight hair next to a sign saying P
ROLETARIANS OF ALL COUNTRIES, WHO IS WASHING YOUR SOCKS?,
which always made us laugh. They went on a university trip to Prague and fell in love. In those days, they tell me, our dreams were as big and sparkling as galaxies and one of those dreams was you. And here you are, you came true, you are as big and sparkling as a galaxy. They sing one of their favourite songs, which is my favourite too, and while they sing, they smile at each other and sway back and forth in that silly way they sometimes do. The song is about the moon, the seventh house, Jupiter and Mars. It’s about harmony, understanding, sympathy, and trust. Peace guiding the planets, love steering the stars.

I
N THE
morning, Mama is all tense again, I can tell by how high and fast she’s talking. When I come out of my room, she makes me a bowl of cereal and tells me to go back in. But I leave my door open a crack. I can hear everything they say.

“We should go,” Mama says. “Olga is leaving. She’s taking her two daughters.”

“Go where?” Papa says. He’s tense too because he’s writing an article on the Yugoslav-wide peace movement, why it was ignored by the international press, the EC, Germany, and all the other stupid foreigners who are somehow involved in sorting us out.

“We should just go.”

“Go where?”

“Just GO.”

“Go where?”

They’re prodding each other with their worries, Baka says. She tells me to just ignore it, they’ll be okay eventually, when they get used to how things are, that’s the way of war.

“The children, anyway, should go,” says Mama.

“
Go
where?
”

“What does it matter where? Away.”

“It matters where. They are our children. We’re going to send them to complete strangers in Germany or England?” Papa says.

“They are shooting at us.”

“That’s why we are needed here.” Papa’s voice gets louder. “It’s a matter of principle. They want us to run away.”

“Shh, please, the children,” Mama says, but she’s not any quieter. Her whispers can pierce your eardrum. “We’re needed here as, what, as targets?”

“No, to show them they can’t terrorize us into going.”

“But what are you going to do about it, just sit waiting to be hit?”

“No, fight back.”

“You Serb men, all you think of is fighting,” says Mama.

I creep out of my bedroom and crouch in the hallway. I want to get closer to them, to get them to stop arguing, to tell them that I don’t want to go anywhere. I won’t.

“I don’t believe my ears,” Papa shouts, “why are you saying such ridiculous things? We must all stand strong and stick together, especially now. To fight Serb extremism and Croat extremism and every other kind of nationalist extremism as well, that is the goal. Why would we leave now? It makes no sense.”

“I love you,” Mama says in a low voice. “I won’t survive without you.”

I suddenly feel like I’m going to choke, like an invisible hand has grabbed my throat and is squeezing hard. I lie on my back on the hallway floor and pant. I can hear Papa’s lighter. He’s lighting his thirtieth cigarette of the day, since he’s been up a couple of hours. I know, I’ve counted how many cigarettes you can smoke in an hour if you’re my dad and you don’t take a break.

“You don’t have to. We are here together, we
are
the city. I am not going to run off without a word, like Bozic and Jokic and Zec. I’m a journalist.”

Aisha and Berina come out of their room. They stand at their door and stare at me with their big round eyes.

“A dead man is no good to a woman.” Mama sounds like she’s going to cry.

“Women, always so melodramatic.” Papa is suddenly standing in the hallway, looking at the three of us. “Come in here,” he says to us. “I thought I heard breathing and snuffling.”

I get up off the floor and the three of us trail in after him. Then Papa hugs Mama tight, kisses her on the forehead, cheeks, mouth, chin.

“You keep playing and I’ll keep writing, it will count for something, it has to, goddammit.” He breathes her in like she’s
a forest breeze in springtime. “You three,” he says to us. “Want to play a game of quartet? Want to wipe the floor with your old Papa like you always do, with your sharp, cunning little minds?” He doesn’t seem to be annoyed that we’ve been lurking in the hallway, watching them, listening to them, that we follow them around the apartment like shadows.

‡ ‡ ‡

T
HE SHELLING IS PART OF THE CITY NOW, ONLY A
couple of weeks after it all began, and there’s a pattern to it. We know when the men in the hills go home for dinner, when they get washed up to go to their workplace or tend their farm, when they’re fresh from a full night’s sleep in their beds and in the mood to pound the living shit out of us. Our neighbourhood has not yet been hit, but it shudders and quakes with the hundreds of hits farther away. In Baka’s war, the Germans swept down from the north and up from the south, occupying all our major cities in less than two weeks. Like now, everything changed in such a short time.

Baka is at our place making us lunch. Mama is out rehearsing with her ensemble and Papa is at the Holiday Inn trying to sell an article to a Western newspaper. Papa is obsessed with this. He paces the apartment day and night thinking about it, he yells hysterically into his phone about it. Those Western journalists are telling lies, he shouts, they’re telling sentimental sob stories, they’re repeating the propaganda of our fascist leaders. If the West doesn’t understand the complexity of what’s going on here, how can they help?

Dušan is suddenly talking history. “The Serbs fought the
Nazis during the war,” he tells me, “and the Croats and some Muslim groups collaborated with the Nazis. So, you see. People forget that.”

“Some Serbs collaborated as well,” I say. “The Chetniks. And anyway, the partisans were made up of everybody, all religions from all different parts of the country.”

“The partisans murdered collaborators after the war, they’re not all heroes. And Tito hoarded money, houses, jewellery, Playboy bunnies, famous people, even though he was a communist. He’s not a hero either, whatever Baka keeps telling you.”

Dušan hasn’t bothered to get dressed today. He’s wearing the track pants he sleeps in and a torn undershirt. He’s now hanging out the window to smoke his weed—maybe that’s the rule Papa made, or maybe Papa wanted some too to help calm his nerves, and it’s their big secret from Mama. Dušan’s eyes are stoner slits. He’s so bored he’s started to carve his initials into his thigh.

I wander into the kitchen. Baka says to me, “Jevrem, did I ever tell you about our beloved—?” and I nod and say, yes, many, many times. “Well, our beloved Joza fell in love with a Russian girl when he was hiding from the Whites in Omsk, but so what? She was beautiful, and young, and a Bolshevik. Polka was her name. Did he care where she was from? No, he did not, because he loved her in particular, and all of humanity in general, that’s how enlightened the communists were.”

I think about how to escape into the mountains, like Baka did when she was a girl. She just picked up one day and ran away from her parents, her brothers and sisters, her husband-to-be, her village, to fight with the partisans. That’s how she invented her new life—she somehow knew that there was a better way
to live, that her whole future would be changed by that one walk into the mountains, I don’t know how. There has to be a way for us too. If we kids could just slip up into the forest, we could get organized and take out the Chetnik firepower in the hills around the city. Kids are small, agile, fast. They can learn how to work any machine, like guns, rockets, mortars, grenades. And they don’t eat as much as adults, another advantage. The best part is kids are the future, they have no past or prejudices except the ones you teach them. That’s what Papa says. I can think of fifteen kids right now who I could recruit in this building just by knocking on doors. They’re not just from Sarajevo, their parents come from everywhere in Yugo, and from Germany, Turkey, Iran. We’d end the war in only a few days because the enemy wouldn’t be looking for us, hundreds of platoons of little kids storming their positions with guns in our hands. If we’re old enough to get shot at, why aren’t we old enough to fight?