Little Bastards in Springtime (10 page)

I nod my head uncertainly. “Yes,” I say.

“You tell us, what is it? What is it that these animals the Serbs are doing like the animals they are?”

I feel winded, like I’ve been playing soccer for ten hours, and there’s more blood flooding into my eyeballs. I see red, jumping to a steady beat.

“It’s, like, a kind of war,” I say.

“Yes, yes,” the men say. “He’s a wise boy. It is like a kind of war. It’s a war on our future.”

I jump up. I don’t want to hear any more of their depressing talk, but I don’t want to go home either. Mama is crying all the time now, stumbling around the apartment, her eyes seeing nothing. She’s sleepwalking, I tell the girls, that’s why she’s so strange. She’s probably having a nightmare, we should wake her up, Aisha says. Berina doesn’t say much since Papa and Dušan left, Aisha does the talking for both of them now.

I walk up the stairs to Baka’s apartment and knock on the door. She waves me in as perky as ever but she looks wrinkled and tired. We eat tuna out of a rusty can, and for dessert, toffee that’s as tough as old tires. I stare out the window at the afternoon sky. I haven’t been outside for days.

“Well,” Baka says, “the men have gone off to fight, Jevrem.
That’s what men do in a war, there’s no avoiding it. And in my time, when we were more enlightened, also the women.”

I nod my head. I don’t know why she’s telling me these obvious things.

“Let me cheer you up with a story,” Baka says. “In the time between the world wars, the Triune Kingdom dominated by the Serbs went after communists and threw them all in jail. But our beloved leader Tito still managed to agitate in the countryside where he was the mechanic for a mill in the small town Veliko Trojstvo. Do you know where that is? It’s in Croatia, but so what? So what that it’s in Croatia, to him Croatia wasn’t a country of Catholics, it was a country of exploited working people and peasants just like all the other South Slav countries. He had long talks with the peasants waiting to mill their grain, talks about their pitiful conditions, about the greedy capitalists sitting rich in the cities. He knew that security is what human beings need the most in life, physical and social security, everything else grows out of that. So, our hero showed us that great good can come of hard times, that new worlds are built from anger. You remember that, Jevrem, when you’re feeling sad, when you’re feeling angry—”

Suddenly I want to go outside more than anything else in the whole wide world. I say goodbye to Baka before she gets to the end of her sentence. I say, I’m going up to see how Mama is. I run out the door without looking back and plunge down the stairs for the hundredth time today. The lobby is strangely empty now, the men gone. I stand by the front door for five minutes, then I walk out. Just like that. It’s a warm evening, with a hint of early summer. May is almost here. The light is fading, the shadows are black and long. I hear the breeze rustling
around the front door like a dog sniffing for garbage. I feel my lungs open wide as butterfly wings, sucking it in. I stumble around the front court, giddy with oxygen and smoke, the smell of green things growing and man-made things burning.

Then I walk down the street. It’s deserted, like it’s been abandoned for decades, shop windows shattered, glass everywhere on the sidewalk. The sun is setting. It’s dark around me, but bright red on the western horizon. I can still see smoke rising in dirty puffs from four places in the city centre. I get to the corner, look for the tram. The main station has been hit by shells, and most of the trams are destroyed, but I peer up and down, anyway, like a man who’s late for work. Only a few cars race by, driving crazy fast like bank robbers escaping the scene of the crime.

I decide I’m going to go see what shelled buildings look like up close, what their skeletons are like, are they wood, are they metal? What happens to brick and plaster when it’s shot to hell, it’s a good question. So I begin to walk, why not, there’s nothing else to do. Then I have an idea, I stick out my thumb. A few minutes later, a car squeals to a halt. It’s banged up, with black ragged holes all over the side, and it’s full of our soldiers.

“Where are you going, Little Man?” someone shouts.

“Can we fit the little man in?” There is laughter. Cigarette smoke billows out the windows like there’s something on fire in there.

“I’m very small,” I say.

Then I’m sitting on a soldier’s lap. He smells metallic, also of sweat. His breath is hungry, and bitter with cigarettes. But they’re all laughing and joking.

“Where are you going, anyway, Little Man?” the driver asks.

“Where are
you
going?” I ask.

“To Stari Grad. We’re stationed there. We’re meant to stop the shells with our bare hands.”

“I want to go to Vrbanja Bridge,” I say. “The old men say that’s where our soldiers are stopping the Chetniks from coming over. Do you know a man named Lazar and a boy named Dušan? They are my papa and my brother. They might be there with their unit. Can I have a cigarette?”

“He’s fearless, our little man,” one of the soldiers says. “This is good. We need little men like him. We’ll drop you off close by. The challenge is not to get killed, do you understand? Give him a drink for strength and good luck.”

“Where do you live?” I ask. Someone hands me a lit cigarette and a glass bottle. I inhale the smoke and feel invincible. I drink and gasp for breath. I love the feel of my burning stomach, then warmth spreading all over my body.

“We come from the suburbs, Little Man, from Vogoš?a, but we can’t get to it. There’s no way. We’re in exile a mile away from our own beds.”

“What about your moms and dads?”

“And brothers and sisters and cousins? Haven’t seen them since the war started. We’re fighting so that we can go home for Sunday lunch.”

The car lurches to a halt. “Here, get out here,” the soldiers shout. The cigarette and slugs of brlja make me feel funny in the head. I sway when I get out, then I fall to my knees. The soldiers laugh and point. “He’s wearing his slippers,” they call out to the night sky, “he’s wearing his slippers, long live our children.” Then the car squeals away, its headlights off.

It’s completely dark now, no street lights, no lights from windows, or cars, or shops. The gunfire is so loud my ears explode, my bones vibrate, my heart skips beats. I see nothing
but fast-moving streaks of fire nearby, and glowing surfaces in the distance. I know I’m inside the war zone and the war zone is inside me. Just like Papa and Dušan.

I sit for a long time in the middle of the street, my legs stretched out in front of me, my hands gripping pavement, each cell in my body vibrating inside this timeless vortex of noise. Then I raise my head, I see water. The Miljacka River glitters orange. I’m not far from the bridge, it’s a dark line across the fiery water. Streaks of light flash as guns fire from both sides. I get up, I move closer on shaky legs. The air hisses with bullets. I watch the bridge and think of Baba and Deda on the other side. I want to go to them, but there is no way over, so I move away from the river, up one of the streets, looking for Ulica Maršala Tita. Our street branches off from it, but nothing is familiar, the city’s shape is disappearing, there’s only rubble, shattered glass, fire, smoke, noise. Concrete shattering sounds like the end of the world.

A man calls to me, he’s very close. “Who goes there? Make yourself known.” He must be a soldier.

“It’s Jevrem,” I say. I look around, but I can’t see him.

“Jevrem who?”

“Jevrem Andric.”

“Which Jevrem Andric?”

I laugh very loudly, it’s like we’re playing a game.

“Stop that, boy,” the soldier shouts. “You’re out after curfew, it’s the front line, the enemy is just over the river. Are you crazy?”

I move away from him into blackness. If I keep going, I’ll run into another street eventually, that’s how cities work. But two minutes later I hear, or maybe I feel, footsteps right behind me, so close I think I can sense hot breath on my neck, a hand
on my shoulder. It’s the soldier, he’s coming to arrest me. Or a criminal or a thug or a mafia killer. The city is full of them, that’s what the old men and Papa and Mama say, full to bursting. Outlaws running wild, murdering their rivals, running their rackets, making millions off our misery. I walk faster, but there is that breath in my ear this time, those fingers clawing at my shoulder blades. So I start running fast and keep running for a long time, around corners, between buildings, falling over debris, scraping my hands, knees, nose, forehead, banging into walls, falling into shell holes, panting, gasping, panic squeezing the air out of my lungs. I’m trapped in a maze in a deep black cave, in a nightmare that has no waking. I’m blind, I’m deaf, I lose all sense of direction, what’s up, what’s down, what’s in the four corners of existence. My mind stops thinking, my body takes over. I feel it beating its way through space. And still the footsteps keep coming behind me, still the hand is almost around my neck.

‡ ‡ ‡

W
HEN I WAKE, GREY LIGHT IS GLIMMERING ON
me, the reflection of a cloudy day in a mirror propped up against a chair. I’m on a bed, but the house around the bed is gone, except one wall and half the ceiling. I see past the mirror into the neighbour’s house, which has no walls either, just jumbled furniture, shattered doors and windows. I see a bookshelf, and books spread evenly across the floor like they’ve been deposited by receding flood water.

I sit up slowly. My hands are smeared with dark sticky stuff, and I hurt all over, like someone beat me everywhere with a
stick. The floor is covered with plaster and broken bricks and glass. I try to get off the bed, but I see that my slippers are gone. My stomach aches, a deep, weirdly numb pain, and my head, and my hands and arms look strange, blue from cold and covered with scrapes, bruises, splotches of bright red smears, more dark sticky stuff. And I wonder, how long have I been here? I lie back and breathe. I close my eyes.

When I sit up again I find I’m stuck to the mattress, I’m welded down, I can’t lift myself up, I can’t pull free. I must be in a dream. I look around for Mama, I look around for Papa. Suddenly I see there’s blood everywhere, all over the mattress, in splashes on the floor. I bend my legs and strain and pull, I need to get off this mattress, I need to go home. Mama. Mama will be worried about me. And then I see where my shirt is torn. The blood, fresh, warm, is spilling like a miniature fountain out of my belly.

A voice is calling. I hear it in the distance, echoing from another world, but then it gets closer and louder. Then it’s just downstairs.

“Anyone in here? Is there anyone in the building?”

I want to call out but my voice doesn’t work. I try not to sob, but I do, a pathetic little animal sound that I’ve never heard before.

“We’re coming up,” the voice says. “Hold on, we’re coming up.”

My feet are cold, my head feels hollow. I hope they don’t find me, I’m a wreck, I don’t feel well, I shouldn’t be here. But they charge in, three huge men wearing dirty white jackets. I can smell their clothes, their hands, their hair, fresh air and cigarettes and sweat. I can feel their warm breath on my face.

“Careful,” one of them says, “the floor looks unsound.”

“It’s just a young kid.” One of them has got his big hot hands all over me, feeling here and there, pressing rags onto my belly. “He’s just been dumped here.”

“Oh shit. We need to stop this bleeding.”

“Where do you live?”

I think about home, my bedroom, the kitchen table, the living room couches, our kettle and fridge, cereal, how I’d like some, the piano and the coffee table, how far away they all seem, another life, a daydream. I don’t want to tell them where.

“On the other side.”

“We’re medics, we’ll get you out of here. How did you get on this side of the river?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I was running, then I woke up here.”

“You must have run over the bridge. A big fucking miracle you survived that.”

Suddenly I think of Mama all strange and absent-minded. Even she’s going to notice this. I fight back more sobs. There’s a hole in my belly, I saw it where the blood was seeping out. The ambulance men haul me down the blown-out stairs on a stretcher. I don’t know where they’re taking me, they could take me anywhere. I have to tell them that I have to get home.

“I’m okay,” I croak.

“You’re not okay,” they say.

“Are you Chetniks?” I ask.

“We’re citizens of Yugoslavia,” they say.

“Where are you taking me?”

“To the hospital.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“You don’t have a choice. A bullet glanced your stomach. You’re very lucky it didn’t go right through. And you may have hit your head quite hard. Concussion.”

“But I have to go home. I can’t breathe.”

“You’ll go home after the hospital.”

“I can’t breathe.”

“He may be having some kind of asthmatic episode.”

“He’s scared we’re going to take him somewhere and do bad things to him. They think we’re all animals.”

“We’re medics, boy. We save lives. We’re taking you to the hospital to get your wound fixed. Okay?”

I don’t want to listen to them anymore, I just want to sleep again. Maybe I should tell them that Papa is one of them and Baba and Deda and the uncles in Ilidža too, and half of me as well. I just won’t say that Papa is fighting on our side of the river, that he calls himself a cosmopolitan Sarajevan of the world community. Maybe they’ll take me to Baba and Deda. I picture the front door to their house, how it smells inside, the kitchen window looking over the garden, the roughness of Deda’s wool vest when he hugs you hard. But I can’t lift my head, I can’t even open my mouth, and anyway, Papa would not be happy with me if I did; we’re all just human beings, a complex multiplicity of aspects, he said over and over again, big words I used to ignore. I hear his voice in my head. We don’t use ethnic labels reductively even as shields, it’s disgusting, it can only lead to evil.

I
’M LYING
on the floor of a school gym, I can see basketball nets on either side, and a scoreboard in the middle. Hundreds of people are pressed around me, breathing and talking and coughing and sighing, dazed and wondering what’s going on, just like me. The thing is, there is no air, it’s too hot, there are too many people and no windows. The whole place stinks of shit, piss, puke, blood.