Little Bastards in Springtime (11 page)

My belly has a wide bandage on it, and I’m wearing huge old track pants and girls’ sandals. Some old lady next to me is rocking back and forth, talking to herself, her head resting in her hands.

“The boy is awake,” she’s saying. “The house is locked up, the boy is awake. The house is locked up, the boy is awake. Maybe he’ll live. Tarik is in Italy, thanks be to Allah. I don’t know where Emira and Fadila are. I don’t know where Abdulah and Mirsad are. Maybe they’ll tell me tonight. Bobo ran into the ravine, I saw him go. He knew to run away into the ravine. What do dogs eat in the wild? My patients will miss me. I have to follow up. Who can I call? The boy is awake, the house is locked up.”

A man hisses at her,
shut up
, but she doesn’t listen.

“Guards, we need water,” she shouts. “The boy has to get out of here. I don’t know where Emira and Fadila are. Water, please. We need
water.
This boy has a wound. It’s seeping. He needs more attention. Guard.
Water.
Tarik is in Italy, thanks be to Allah, Bobo is in the ravine. I’m asking you, what do dogs eat in the wild?”

A young soldier with a gun shouts at her from the small door at the front. “Be quiet, lady! No talking!”

“There is no medical treatment here, boy,” she whispers. “Your wound will get infected. You must leave. You need to get more help. I’m a doctor, I know.”

She reaches for my bandage with trembling hands. I jump up and move away, stumbling between bodies, stepping on people’s fingers, forearms, ankles. They snarl at me. I fall down, I wrench my wound, my bandage suddenly has a patch of red on it. For a while I sit and hold it with both hands. Then I cover it with my shirt.

“I want to go home,” I say to the soldier at the door. “I’m a
Serb from Ilidža, I just got lost, my name is Jevrem Andric, I’ll give you my grandparents’ address.” When I say this the room spins around me, like I’m on a ride at the fair.

W
HEN
I wake up I’m not in the gym anymore. I’m in the back of a moving truck with wooden sides and a canvas top that makes loud flapping sounds in the wind. It feels like we’re going crazy fast along twisty roads, up and down hills, around steep corners. It’s murky in here but I know it’s full of soldiers, they’re laughing and swearing and I can smell damp clothes and sweat and alcohol-breath. I’m leaning against one who is holding me up with one arm, like I’m his little brother, but he doesn’t say anything to me and I’m too scared to ask where we’re going. The thing is, they’re not our soldiers, they’re Chetniks, but they sound and smell like our soldiers. I think of saying, is anyone here Pavle or Obrad or Ivan Andric or any of their neighbours, but for some reason no sound comes out of my mouth so I just press my belly wound and try not to puke. It seems like we’re driving for hours in all different directions, and when we stop and the back gate opens and two soldiers jump out, I expect to be way up in the mountains somewhere, with only trees and mountain silence surrounding us.

“Come on, Little Man,” they say. “This is your stop.”

It’s a sunny afternoon and I see houses. I blink as the soldiers help me out.

“Get home safe,” they say as they pile back in. “And stay home, don’t wander off again. Life is a dangerous motherfucker right now.”

I look at their faces and not one of them is my uncle, but they could be.

The truck roars off and I look around me and I know exactly where I am. They’ve put me down at the end of Baba and Deda’s street. I’m so happy my legs wobble and I can hardly walk. But somehow I get down to their gate and I open it and I’m in their garden, so cozy and green and bursting with spring flowers, and I run up to the front door not caring that my belly hurts. I try to open the door but the door doesn’t move. In all the years I’ve visited, it’s never been locked.

“Deda, Baba,” I call out. “Deda, Baba.”

There is no answer. I know right away they’re not here, the house has that empty feel hovering all around its windows and walls. So I sit down on the front step and wait and shiver and shake because I’m not wearing a coat. I look at my bandage and it’s completely soaked, bright red in the middle and brown at the edges. It’s weird to sit on these steps with a wound, hungry and sick and dizzy with a headache, waiting for Baba and Deda to come home while time goes by. They’ve always been here when I’m here, and Mama and Papa, and the uncles, and Dušan and the twins, they’ve never been somewhere else.

After a while, I decide I’m going to get into the house even if the door is locked. Baba and Deda wouldn’t mind, they’d want me to if things were desperate. I get up and check the back door and all the windows. Everything is locked. I find the garden shovel and bang it against the small side window. It feels both terrible and exciting at the same time, trying to shatter their window, trying to break in, like all the rules of ordinary life are gone and anyone can do whatever they like. My heart beats fast and for a moment my belly doesn’t hurt. It takes a few times before the glass breaks into shards and falls to the ground, tinkling like the sound of a piano’s high notes on the stone below. I get my hand
in and open the window, then I pull myself up and over the sill, my belly wound burning like crazy. But then I’m standing in the house, and it’s all silent and dim and warm around me.

“Baba, Deda,” I say quietly, in case for some reason they’re asleep in their bed in the middle of the afternoon. But only quietness echoes back at me, and peacefulness. Then I walk into every room on the first floor, one after the other. They’re all empty and neat like no one has lived here for ages. There are no coats hanging by the front door, no shoes and slippers tucked into the shoe rack. I walk into the kitchen and it’s empty and tidy, like I’ve never seen it, no Baba bustling around cooking up a storm. But Baba’s aprons are still hanging on the door handle, and I go up to them and smell them and they still smell of her breakfasts and lunches and dinners, all of us squeezed around the table in winter, or out in the garden under the tree in the summer. Then I look in the drawer for halva and chocolate and dried fruit, but it’s empty, with just a few mouse droppings where crumbs used to be. This makes me think of Fidel the parrot and I run to his cage in the living room, but the door is open and Fidel is gone.

There’s a noise at the front door. The door is opening. I hear scuffing of feet on the door mat. They’ve come back from a walk, from shopping—they’re here, they’re here.

“Baba, Deda,” I shout, feeling the tears at the back of my eyes and a sob revving up in my chest. I run into the hallway but stop suddenly. It’s not Baba or Deda, it’s Mr. Petrovic from next door. He stares at me with his mouth open, like he’s trying to remember who I am. He’s looking scared with his rifle under one arm, half crouching like he’s getting ready to shoot or run, like he’s expecting a sudden blow on his head.

“Mr. Petrovic, it’s me, Jevrem,” I say.

“Jevrem. What are you doing here? What happened to you?” I look down and see that blood is flooding through my shirt and down my pants.

“I got lost at night in the dark and was wounded and lying on a mattress in a ruined house and they brought me to a gym with all these other people and then they brought me here,” I say.

“Oh my good God, Jevrem. We have to get you to a doctor. I heard glass breaking and thought some hoodlums were in here looting. Your grandparents have gone to Belgrade.”

Mr. Petrovic picks me up, as though I can’t walk, as though I’m a baby, and carries me huffing and puffing over to his house. Mrs. Petrovic looks at my wound and says, oh dear Lord, that’s terrible, you poor boy, what is happening to our world, then cleans it out with lots of cloths and liquid that burns and I shake, I shiver, sweat drips down my scalp. We have to go to the hospital, they say, we must leave right now. But I don’t want to go to a hospital, not over here, I want to go home. So I scream and I cry and I call out for Mama, I call out for Papa.

Mr. Petrovic is on the phone with Mama. His wound isn’t deep, he says, but it’s long. I can hear Mama’s voice very loud on the other end. There are stitches, it was treated, he says. And more of Mama’s muffled words, and he says, yes, yes, I will, I will. You should leave, Sofija, he says. Come here. I’m telling you, things won’t get better. It’s difficult now, but soon there will be no way to get into or out of the city. They’re going to blockade it. I’m telling you, Sofija, very soon, in a week, maybe. No way to get in or out at all, do you hear, like a siege. You must leave now. Pack some things, come here with the girls, and we can get all of you to Belgrade. I’ll drive you, if there’s no other way.

I sit on a chair in the kitchen and sip soup that Mrs. Petrovic
gives me. It’s warm and delicious but I can only eat a few small spoonfuls before feeling weak and tired. Mama’s going on and on to Mr. Petrovic and he’s frowning and shaking his head and pacing up and down the hallway, the phone cord bouncing behind him. When he hangs up he rubs his face and looks sad.

“Your mama wants you back home,” he says.

“What?” Mrs. Petrovic says. “Is she crazy?”

“Shh.” Mr. Petrovic points at me. “She has her reasons, Grada. Lazar and Dušan have joined the civil defence. Can you believe it?”

I can hardly hold my head up anymore. I think of Baba and Deda packing up, all by themselves, locking the door, getting on a train. In ordinary times, we’d have come over for a farewell lunch, we would have helped them to the train station, we would have prepared food for their trip and given it to them in a cloth bag. I wonder when I will see them again.

Mr. Petrovic tells me I’m going to sleep for a few hours and then he’ll find a way to get me home. He’s a truck driver, so he can get anywhere. I love truck drivers, they travel all over the place, through all kinds of terrain, over mountains, along valleys, through night and day, thinking, picking up hitchhikers, seeing the world. Mrs. Petrovic leads me by the hand up the stairs to their bedroom. I lie on the soft bed in the still, sunny room, listening to a fly buzz against the windowpane and feeling my body vibrate like an engine. Then, suddenly, I’m very heavy, I’m very dizzy, I’m falling down a black well toward the centre of the earth.

T
HE BOYS OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD PLAY WAR
whenever it’s safe to be outside. They have guns of their own, some of them real. I have one too, but it’s not real. Mine is a perfect likeness of a Tommy gun, made of plastic. I traded two cans of beans and my Adidas jacket for it. I stole the cans from the kitchen. Mama cried for an hour when she found out, then didn’t speak to me for a day. “There is no food in this city, don’t you understand, Jevrem? When we’ve eaten our last reserves, we’ll have to stand in line for hours to survive each day, we’ll have to beg from the religious charities, we’ll live off humanitarian-aid lunch packets if we’re lucky. All for a plastic gun!” But the jacket was way too small, she didn’t care about that.

I long for a real gun. I want to shoot the person who put the hole in my belly. I look down the gun’s sight and press the trigger. I could hit Mahmud right between the eyes if I had a bullet. I feel a shiver running over my shoulder blades and up my neck. My body shakes itself, suddenly, violently. I want to be a sniper. The sniper gets to kill people from the safety of his little nest. I want to be the killer, not the loser scurrying like a hunted rabbit through the city streets waiting for the sting of the bullet against the side of his head.

We talked once on the phone with Papa and Dušan after they left, then nothing. They sounded far away, even though they’re just a few miles from our apartment. Every day we wait for news. Every day, Mama plays the piano for them. It sends out life energy, she says to me, it’ll help protect them from harm. That’s obviously not true but it makes her feel better.

In our war games, no one wants to be the Chetniks, but I volunteer, I don’t care. When we play, the Chetniks always lose, which means I get beaten up. When I feel the boys’ fingers
in my hair, their knuckles against my ears, I relax a little, the worst has come. The blood in my mouth tastes like the ocean, and I’m with Papa and Dušan in a trench somewhere, because maybe they’ve also tasted blood, no matter how hard Mama plays. After they’re finished thrashing me, the boys are always in a good mood, it’s a law of human nature when victory has been claimed.

Mama leaves us with Baka when she goes out to play or teach. She’s out every day, even though it’s dangerous, even though she vomits in the toilet before she leaves. I know, I can hear everything through the bathroom door. Lots of people want her to accompany them, ensembles, soloists, dancers, actors in their plays. And she’s doing it, because she can’t travel to give her concerts, she can’t be a star on the stage. We’re making music as an act of resistance, she says, all of us together, that’s what Papa wants me to do, he’ll be proud. And in between she hunts for food like a beggar on the street, like a hunter in the forest, like a scavenging animal, going to all the places where food could be, lining up, waiting and seeing.

Sometimes Mama asks me where I went that night on the other side of the river. And what happened when I got there. But I can’t remember anything, except stepping out the door and how nice it was to walk across the square of ragged grass and feel the breeze, to smell it, how loud it was and the streaks of light in the sky, the fiery water. How I ran and ran. And something about men’s shiny red faces, their drunk breath and loud shouting voices. And some girls were there too, they were screaming, crying, moaning, but maybe that’s all part of a nightmare, the men standing over those girls, holding them down, banging into them like crazed, frenzied zombies, grunting, swearing, and twitching like they were being electrocuted.
Baka asks me too. She says, you don’t have to have secrets from me, you know that, Jevrem, you and me, we’re friends. I know everything that happens in a war so you don’t have to protect my feelings. But I still can’t remember anything, except for the feel of the cool night air on my face and the sound of things shattering close by, the stench of things burning, those sweaty men, those wailing girls, their straining, grimacing faces, the pain in my belly, the room with no walls, lying there waiting, the three huge medics coming to get me, how they looked sad and angry when they saw me, how cold my feet were. I remember those things, or maybe I’ve created them in my mind when I daydream, those visions that start out happy and end up all twisted and weird, overrun by savage wolves and dead ends, places I’ve run to but can’t get out of, like a jail. So I say nothing to either of them.