Little Bastards in Springtime (24 page)

“But then my premium goes up,” the construction worker says, making wild hand gestures.

“Yes, but only by a few dollars. I’m sure you can afford it,” says Zijad. “You’re a construction worker. In Canada.”

“But … but … but …” the construction worker stutters. He’s very indignant but he can’t think of an argument against that. He knows he makes a ton of money compared to most unlucky suckers on the planet.

“C’mon,” says Sava. “What are we doing? Let’s just take the bed and get the hell out of here. Since when did we start to debate with people?”

“But it’s not right,” says the construction worker.

“What do you mean, it’s not
right
?” I say. “There’s lots that’s not fucking
right
in the world that you don’t give a shit about. For instance, you stole that bed from the workers who made it. They didn’t get the full value of their labour in pay.”

The construction worker clutches his head. “No, I didn’t steal the bed. The middlemen stole the bed, maybe. I’m just the customer.”

“Exactly, that’s just it, you’re the customer. You know how much evil shit happens in the world because of that attitude? I mean, who got the value of that mattress? If not the worker, who?” I’m channelling Papa. I look around quickly to see if he’s here, to see if he’s enjoying this moment of political debate.

“You’re not helping any,” the construction worker says, jabbing his finger in my direction. “I mean, how does stealing this bed from me help all of those, you know, international labour issues?”

“It’s like this, fuckhead,” snarls Sava. “We’re all stealing from each other all of the time. Some of us are just better at hiding this fact, so stop your whining.”

As we drive away, with the mattress crammed into the back of the van, Papa’s head pops into view in the rear-view mirror. He’s crouching awkwardly on the wheel hub.
Capitalism
, he says,
obscures the fact that labour is the source of economic value. Workers are paid much less than the value their labour gives to the product they make. The difference, which can be astronomical, is what capitalists suck into their greedy maws, and they will go to any corner of the planet where the difference is the greatest. Welcome to the former socialist Yugoslavia, shit wages for the people, more profits for the multinationals.

None of the others pay attention, they stare off into the distance, or shut their eyes and sleep, but to me it’s interesting. I say to him, Papa, keep going, tell me more.

B
AKA
is on her side. Her face is grey as crushed rice-paper, her eyeballs rolled up as though she’s peering into her own brain. I’m sitting on the chair in her bedroom, feeling antsy and wasted at the same time. Mama has put a forty-watt bulb in the lamp, draped a scarf over the shade. A candle burns on the night table, and Aisha has arranged a bunch of white roses. Frankincense wafts into the corners, lit by Mama as though she believes in holy spirits. Now it’s just me and Baka, and the bedroom like a chapel with trembling light and coiling smoke.

Time goes by and I think and dream and try to figure stuff out in my head because Baka is right, my life is a ridiculous pile of crap, I’m not doing anyone any good, and something’s got to give or I’ll do something really fucking bad. This possibility makes me truly scared, more scared than back home, because knowing you can terrorize people and get away with it feels
worse, if I’m honest, no lie, than anything I felt waiting to die in the city of many religions. Because there is no end to that shit, the sky is the limit, and all you’re doing is surviving, you never get beyond it. That’s the truth about us Bastards, the family, we haven’t made it to the next level of the game.

Baka doesn’t make a sound, or even the smallest movement, but after a while I have this feeling that she’s looking right at me, watching me, that she’s as awake as she’s ever been. Her blind eyes are saying,
it takes the same energy, Jevrem, plundering the world as it does uplifting it. Did I ever tell you about our beloved leader, how he, a simple country boy, spent his youth organizing workers, leading strikes, reading works by great philosophers, thinking day and night about how to lift people out of misery, about justice and injustice?

Yes, yes. I nod. “Many, many times,” I whisper.

He could have spent his life drinking, complaining, stealing, adapting to worse and worse conditions, hurting others to get by, dying bitter and resentful at the injustice of life. Or just sat around scratching his you-know-what.

“I get it, Bako,” I croak softly. “I hear you.”

Near death, she sounds sure about things again, like she’s back to believing in the overall progress of humanity, even after our cosmic cluster-fuck back home. Maybe she’s even accepted that she has to die in a strange city on an alien continent, that she ended breathing her last breaths in a place that never even existed in her imagination for most of her life. Maybe she even sees some meaning in it. If so, I wish she’d let me know. I wonder what disaster could side-swipe my life now? Where is there to go when you’ve already escaped to Canada? I try to imagine the last place on earth I’d expect to die. Bhutan, maybe. Or Kiribati.

‡

M
Y HEAD
is down on the desk, cheekbone squashed against scarred wood. I’m dizzy and nauseated from lack of sleep, but Mama told me to go to school, to take a break. Somewhere above my head, Mr. Duff, the grade eleven English teacher, drones on like a radio in an empty room about something called
verisimilitude.
My lying mind tries to perk up because it’s an interesting idea, how writers use tricks to make things seem real on the page even though they can’t possibly be. No real human being ever talks or thinks the way writers write, no book ever captures the actual passing of time. Is it possible, Mr. Duff asks, to determine which false depiction of reality is truest? He paces the room preacher-style, I can feel each footfall vibrating in my skull. It’s a problem of interest to scientists as well as writers and philosophers, he says, stopping at the window, tapping a pen against the windowpane. Whether it’s possible to determine if one false theory is closer to the truth than another false theory. Degrees of falsehood, so to speak. Because science is one long history of false theories.

I wish I could focus, sometimes it’s worth it, and I actually feel sorry that Mr. Duff doesn’t have an audience that gives a shit. He really deserves one. But his words fade out and I’m back with Baka, watching her lie still as a statue in her bed. I sat beside her all night, and all that time she didn’t move an inch.

“Mr. Andric,” Mr. Duff says. He’s standing next to my desk, I can feel his heat, hear him breathing. I don’t lift my head, open my eyes, or move at all. I’m waiting for his lecture. Instead, he crouches down and says quietly, “I’d like to talk to you after class.”

The bell rings and the zombie kids file out. Mr. Duff sits at the desk next to mine.

“You know that you write exceptionally well, even with English as your second language.”

Of course I learned it really fast. English is the world’s language, Papa was right. It’s all over everything in every freaking corner of the planet.

“Or at least, this was my impression of the one half-finished assignment you handed in this term—on torn paper with doodles, I might add. I can imagine you’re very talented in your own language. You should take it seriously.”

I just sit and wait for the lecture about cultivating your gifts and all that crap to end.

“But that’s not why I want to talk to you.” He pauses and gives me a searching look. “I want to know how you’re doing.” He asks me like he actually really does want to know.

“Great!” I say, and wonder why I’m lying to this guy, who’s pretty decent, caring so much about verisimilitude in books and nerdy stuff like that.

“Because you seem very tired all the time. Do you work after school?”

“Yes, you could say that.”

“Working and going to school is tough. I know some kids have to, but it does interfere with learning. Is it worth it, do you think? Minimum wage doesn’t add up to a lot.”

“I know, you can’t do anything with minimum wage. Pay rent, buy groceries, survive. But I’ve got a decent job, it pays pretty well.”

“Well, that’s good to hear, but there are ways to help you and your family find additional support, just so you know, so you can concentrate on school. I can point you in the right direction. Mrs. Bairradas, the guidance counsellor, has information in that regard.”

“Thanks,” I say, and I mean it, for what does it matter to him if I pass or fail, live or die? I think of telling him about the
ten thousand government forms we filled out before we came here, about the thousands we filled out when we got here, about how Mama fucking cried her eyes out over each one of them, how it all added up to so little, how it made her miss our life before so much, how we had to borrow and beg and scrounge from friends and church groups, just like in the war. But what would that change, what could he fucking do about it?

“You know, my brother was over there, with UNPROFOR,” Mr. Duff says.

“Over where?”

“In Bosnia.”

“Oh,” I say. I want to be polite, I like this guy and his sermons about truthlikeness and suspension of disbelief, but his brother didn’t do us much fucking good at all. They’re all meant to be like Mother Teresa or something, those UN guys from all the different countries, but they’re just normal boys, or maybe totally abnormal, since they’re soldiers and soldiers are trained to be cranked-up assholes with no morals of their own, getting local girls to suck their dicks and sit on their faces for scraps of food. And they didn’t even keep their promises. They couldn’t even prevent one single death.

“Thousands of Canadian soldiers were over there. It was hell for them, poor lads. Their hands were tied and there weren’t enough of them to deal with the situation. How can you keep the peace when there is no peace to keep?”

Mr. Duff looks at me as if he’s expecting forgiveness or something. I shrug my shoulders like I don’t know anything about it and glance around for Papa.

“It was an unfair expectation,” he continues. “The killing went on anyway, the scale was massive, so savage, neighbour turning on neighbour, such a difficult history, it was like an
out-of-control bushfire millions of square miles wide, with a handful of firefighters running around with buckets.”

I nod my head. “Thank your brother for me,” I say, like an idiot. I don’t feel like having this conversation with this do-gooder teacher in this suffocating classroom. I crave fresh air and a cigarette more than life itself.

And all at once there Papa is, bending over Mr. Duff, his face an inch from the teacher’s nose.
You idiot
, he shouts.
European, especially German, diplomacy legitimized the fascist leaders and led directly to war in Bosnia. Their premature recognition of independence doomed us to a bloody, vicious civil conflict, and the U.S. promise of intervention kept the war going. The UN should never have intervened. What were they there for? To help a republic secede from its own sovereign state? What bloody business was it of theirs, except that’s their MO, they play their neoliberalizing geopolitical games to serve their own interests and hundreds of thousands of people suffer and die, including their own soldiers.
Papa’s hands are waving in the air, like they do when he’s furious.

“Terrible,” Mr. Duff is saying. “Many Canadian soldiers came back with PTSD. So sad, a tragedy.”

I stand up suddenly. “I have to go,” I say, and crash out of the classroom with cold sweat running down my sides.

“Jevrem,” Mr. Duff calls after me. “Go see Mrs. Bairradas. She really can help you.”

‡ ‡ ‡

Z
IJAD, MADZID, SAVA, AND
I
FLOP OUT IN MY
room, which is weirdly neat. None of them wants to go home, and we all toke up a storm. My bed has sheets on it, a couple of new, thick blankets. Sava slides into them and goes
to sleep. I feel a warm wet bubble of air forcing its way up my throat. It’s painful, makes me dizzy, I think it could be a small burst of happiness. I got the bed for her, and here she is in it, maybe dreaming something sweet. That was a good thing to do, I tell Baka in my head. But I know it’s small-scale good in Baka’s world, it doesn’t help anyone except me and Sava.

I wake up suddenly, surprised I was asleep. Mama is at the door. She’s wearing a housecoat I remember from back home, a deep green silk that shimmers like fish scales in clear water. She wears it like she used to, she’s solid and calm and in charge again. There’s love and concern, a motherly combo, in her expression.

“Jevrem,” she says, “I think you should come upstairs.”

I’m now wide awake. The others have fallen back to sleep. Sava is beside me in the bed, her eyelids sealed, her hand curled next to her cheek. I get out of bed carefully and follow Mama up the stairs.

I stand in the middle of Baka’s room. She’s making a crazy noise, too loud for her small body. It comes from deep in her throat, or even deeper, deep in her chest, the bottom of her soul. Her eyes are still rolled back, but they’re half open now. She’s looking up, way up, past the craggy lump that is her brain, into the space beyond the stars and moon, into the space beyond space. Her mouth is a shrivelled hole, her skull shines through thin dandelion hair. It will fly away with the next breeze.

I move closer, stand over her. I put my hand on her forehead and stroke upward. I put my other hand on her chest, and I feel everything, thin blood pooling in her tiny heart, water gurgling like a spring in her shrivelled lungs, windswept, sundried bones ready to collapse into coarse grey powder. But still, a fiery heat comes out of her. I lean down and whisper into her ear.

“It’s okay, Bako. You can go now. I’m here.”

It’s the kind of thing people say in movies, but I really feel like saying it, I actually believe it’s true. I’m here to help her go. I take off my shoes and move to the other side of the bed. I sit down on it very slowly, then swing my legs up and lower myself down beside her. She’s a small child cradled against my belly, against my scar, my legs pressed against the back of hers, my chest supporting her back. I drape my arm over her, place my palm on her forehead. I feel her shrinking and cooling, and the rattle stops. I lie there, holding my breath, waiting.