Little Bastards in Springtime (31 page)

Tonight I’m alone. Sava and the others have given up on me, they’re doing their thing in the rich parts of town. The evening is clear, almost warm. I walk up to the group and introduce myself.

“Hey, people,” I say. “I’m Jevrem.”

“Hey, Jevrem,” everyone shouts. They are in party mode and make a lot of hosting kinds of comments. “Come on in. Have a seat. Got some smokes? Relax, have a laugh. Wanna swig?” Leather-tough hands thrust toward me holding bottles and inch-long butts.

“Is it good times?” I ask.

“Yeah, it’s good times, man. It’s real good times.” Deep brown faces crack wide with smiles.

“Why are you here all the time?” I ask.

“Having good times,” a guy shouts, “like you said.”

“But you don’t look very well,” I say. They all laugh like
happy people at a fair. “I mean, really, you guys look like hell, you’ve got injuries all over, you’re filthy, and you don’t seem to have anything to do.”

More laughter, hooting, whistling. “Whoa, this guy’s real perceptive.”

“No, I mean, I’m serious. You look really bad, all sick and beat-up. No one mentions this when they walk by, but they’re all thinking it. If it were them, if they were in your shape, they’d expect someone to call an ambulance immediately, they’d expect that of their fellow human being. It would be a highalert emergency. So, what gives?”

“As long as the bastards leave us alone,” a guy wrapped in a sleeping bag says, “what’re we gonna do? Work for some white motherfucking asshole who disrespects us, for no pay, get treated like shit all day long?”

“Too much fun partying,” says an old woman, a skeleton with sagging skin, no teeth, shaking hands.

“No, I’m serious,” I say. “What do you want from life?”

“We want to be fucking left alone, like Buddy said.” A guy with a giant purple swollen jaw is narrowing his eyes at me. He’s not smiling anymore. “You got a problem with that?”

“A hot bath,” says the old woman, who might also be about thirty. “That’s what I fucking want.”

“So, you want a hot bath?” I say. I’m on a mission, but it’s harder alone, without the Bastards and our work camaraderie. And Baka is fading in and out of range.

“Yeah, but, you know, like in a hot spring or something. A spa. Yeah, I wanna go to a spa.”

More laughter. These guys are so cheery. I haven’t heard this much laughing ever.

“So, you mind that you smell?”

“You got a big frigging mouth on you, boy.” The man with the purple jaw stands unsteadily. “Are we gonna ask this boy to move along?”

“No, I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” I say. “Everyone wants to ask, they want to know how you got here, if it’s their fault for being white settlers or what. But no one does. Ask, I mean. I, however, am really interested.”

“We’re all frigging drinkers and sniffers, boy. What do you think the story is? Mansions and butlers and private schools? We’re here because we see through you. The whole big pile of shit called society, the one you’re a part of, we see it for what it is. You think you live good? You’re just crawling to the top of that pile of shit, slithering and sliding and swallowing the crud, you and everyone else. You think that don’t smell?”

“I don’t think I live good,” I say. “I live bad, really, really bad.”

“Oh yeah, boy? You don’t know what bad is.”

“Yes, actually I do,” I say. “I know what bad is. I’ve seen bad. But the point here is that this fine lady wants to go to the spa. Anyone else?”

I
T’S LATE
and I’m searching for one of those big vans, like a small school bus. I drive around various neighbourhoods and up and down a lot of tree-lined streets. I finally find one outside a small bungalow off Keele Street, north of Lawrence. Maybe a bus driver’s house, one who parks the bus in her own driveway every day after doing the rounds.

I park Madzid’s car a few streets over and drive my hotwired bus downtown, behaving like a good boy, stopping at stop signs, signalling every turn. When I pull up at the intersection,
the mangy group is there as always, on their steps, sitting in a perfect circle.

“Oh man, it’s the boy with the mouth. Hey, you, boy.”

“You came back, man. That never happens, man. Wanna drink? Come on over.”

“It’s the pickup for the spa,” I say, jumping down the steps onto the sidewalk. I feel like an actor on TV. “I have room for twelve.”

“What the hell?” They point and shout and don’t move from the steps for quite a while.

It takes me about an hour of chatting and cajoling to convince them that I’m for real, I’m here to take them to paradise, I’m not an asshole Indian-catcher here to cart them out of town. Finally, they pile in with high spirits, feeling safety in numbers.

I roll down the window and drive sedately along the city streets, cursing one-ways, hoping no cops cross our path.

“Are you some kind of religious nut?” asks the guy with the eggplant jaw, sitting on the seat behind mine and poking his head into the aisle. “You know that clean isn’t just soap and the laundromat, boy. Clean and dirty go right down to the fucking soul, man, and believe me, we’re not the dirty ones. I’ve got a name, by the way, it’s Robert.”

“Hey, Robert,” I say. “I’m Jevrem and I know all of that, you don’t have to lecture me like I’m some freaking little kid. I don’t care about cleaning you up. I see a need, I try to fill it, that’s all, I try to spread a little joy. I’m, you know, changing my ways.”

“Where you from, Yvy? You speak like a fucking Kraut, man.”

“A Kraut? Jesus, no way,” I say. “I’m from Bosnia. Very different than Kraut.”

“Oh yeah, Bosnia, man? You guys finished killing each other yet?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “We have to wait and see.”

“Fucking white guys, man. Slaughter on the mind all the time. Just wanna kill, kill, kill. You should think of socializing instead, hanging out with your friends, partying, having a good time, live and let live, to each his own, exist in the moment. It’s healthier that way, man, way healthier, way less deadly.”

He’s got a point, I guess, in his lecturing I’m-down-and-out-therefore-I’m-a-wise-man kind of way. Drinking, sniffing, shooting up, living on a Canadian street probably is healthier than a civil war.

The bus scrapes through a narrow alleyway and I pull up to the butt-end of the community centre I know for certain has a fine new swimming pool, saunas, steam bath, the whole deal. I did my research. In the back of the van are two garbage bags full of good clothes and towels that Sava has collected from houses in the last weeks. Annex clothes. Forest Hill clothes. Even Bridle Path and King City clothes. I haul these out and tell the revellers to be quiet. They’re staggering all over the place, shouting, laughing, singing.

“We’re going in there,” I say. “I don’t know about the security system. It may go off, but I don’t think so.”

I aim my beat-up handgun at the lock in the metal door. My group stands around watching warily, less chipper now.

“Whoa, who the hell are you, man? This is too fucking intense. I don’t know. Don’t like guns, they’re wicked, they’re white-guy stupid.”

“Just getting the door open, nothing to worry about.”

The lock shatters with a godawful bang. But the door swings open and I don’t hear an alarm. I look around the frame and
along the baseboards and can’t see any kind of security wiring. There are no cameras.

We’re inside, walking along murky utility corridors in single file.

“Jesus Christ, man. What kind of fucking loser spa is this, man?” One of the guys falls down and seems suddenly to be in deep sleep.

“Just leave him there. We’ll get him on the way out,” says his buddy, crossing the guy’s arms over his chest to make him comfortable.

After about ten minutes we find the right door. In the gloom, we hear the stirring and rippling of water, we feel humidity circling around us then grabbing hold of our skin and sinking in. Echoes tell us we’re in a big space and everyone piles through the door, stepping carefully on tiled flooring to where the pool begins. Exotic bird calls erupt, the fluttering sound of a flock landing on open water.
Helloooo there
’s shoot up into the rafters to float back down like the honks of fogbound fishing boats. I walk back into the hallway and start hunting behind the scenes for lights. I find the switches in an unlocked closet and turn on the hallway lights, leaving the pool room dark. When I re-enter, I can now see the large swimming pool shimmering dark blue in the half-light, like a lake on a windy day. All my wretched of Canada’s earth are crouching at the water’s edge, hands submerged, looking down into the sparkling depths. Then we all strip down and plunge into the tepid water.

For a few minutes, there’s complete silence except for the lapping of water against the tile edge. We glide around each other like water animals, otters or dolphins or beavers maybe, everyone as agile and whole again as small children, eyes skimming the glowing surface, mouths opening and closing like fish,
long-buried lake-memories forcing their way to the surface like tiny, sparkling air bubbles. We float on our backs and watch faint water reflections flicker on the ceiling.

I drag myself out, lie on a towel on the pool deck, and drift off. Splashing and laughter are the sounds of my dream, like they’re the sounds of childhood, and we all had one of those, we were all playful, trusting little creatures once, at least to begin with. Soon I’ll look around to see if I can find and turn on the saunas and steam baths. Every good spa needs that kind of thing, hot after cool, cool after hot.

‡ ‡ ‡

T
HE COPS COME FOR ME ON A TRUE SPRING DAY,
gloomy clouds and cold rain in the morning, bright hot sunshine in the afternoon, steam rising in puffs from soaked lawns. They come right to our front door. I feel so relieved that I stretch and sigh like a cat. It’s a strain holding things together without Sava and the others, without much certainty that I’m making Baka proud.

When they knock, I’m sitting on the living room floor listening to Mama’s Emperor Concerto, which she plays like it expresses everything there is in the world. Aisha is sitting next to me on the couch with her rulers, sharpened pencils, protractor, calculator lined up like surgical tools on the coffee table. She’s making a blueprint of our apartment back home, mapping every wall, door, window, all the furniture, accurate to the last millimetre, perfectly to scale, and beneath that is the building that was there before our apartment building was built, and beneath that, what was there a thousand years ago,
and beneath that, a million years ago. This isn’t a drafting project, it’s for her history class. We think of time like a road we move along through space from one place to the next, she tells me. But it isn’t like that, history piles up on top of itself in the same place, it doesn’t move forward, and you can’t look backward at it either. It’s always right here. Think of it as a fixed camera shooting time-lapse film, time transforms the scene completely but the scene itself always stays put, it’s always right here. And the camera is our own mind, she says. History is something that exists only in the mind of whoever happens to be alive on planet Earth at any given time. It’s a vision of the present. These are the things that my thirteen-year-old sister thinks about while I’m about to be taken to jail. She’s very precise, stacking her history in layers, giving space to Papa, Dušan, Berina, Baka, and all the others she only sort of knows about who aren’t here, our djedica, the other grandparents, the Ilidža uncles, Ujak Luka, friends of the family, great-grandparents, great-aunts and -uncles, cousins she’s heard about once or twice in stories. Ancestors, tribespeople, wild animals, vegetation, geological rock formations, she gets it all on the page.

There are two police officers, and like cops on TV, they say they’re going to drag my ass downtown. And they do, but we’re not going downtown, we’re going up to 13 Division, by the Allen Expressway, that building we drove by so many times, the Bastards and I, checking it out, wondering what it was like inside, snickering at its fortress bricks and mortar as we sailed by free as scavenger birds. We even mooned it once, Madzid and I, those were the days, when we were as high and ridiculous as frat boys.

I slump in the back seat of the cop car, in the cage like the animal I am, and watch Oakwood go by, that functional
uninteresting residential city street with its big trees on some stretches, its run-down shops on others, which told me every day how far from Sarajevo I was, with its ancient, narrow, cobbled streets, its sticky layers of world history on every corner. I say goodbye as our school slides by, its serious facade reminding me of how little I did with all those teachable hours, sleeping and dreaming, what a waste that probably was. Already my time in Toronto, this flat city beside the lake as large as a sea, with all its trees and peaceful neighbourhoods, its leafy parks and one thousand cultures, way more than Sarajevo ever had, has slipped into the past tense in my mind. Easygoing, ambitious, pretty, ugly, shambling, friendly, irritable, young, and all the other good city qualities I’ve ignored.

I think of the look on Mama’s face, when she finally stopped playing, when she turned and saw the cops. She was waiting for this too, but the uniformed officers still shocked her into silence, still drew that veil of suffering over her eyes, the one that had just lifted. It was Aisha who tried to talk to them, tried to explain who her brother is, why he’s crazy, why he’s fragile. “He’s got post-traumatic stress disorder, he’s a war refugee, be careful with him, you can’t blame kids for the trauma adults inflict on them,” she said. And all kinds of other things that surprised the hell out of me, talking like she’s a social worker, a lawyer, a fighter way beyond her years.

The division is a maze of narrow corridors, and small square windowless rooms where they do different things to me: search me, interview me, show security tapes featuring me as the star. As I well know, a house I did a week ago was conveniently located opposite a bank and its security camera. So, there I am centred perfectly in the frame, hauling items off the porch at 3 a.m., the light of the street lamp giving me
a radioactive glow. There I am a few days later, breaking in through the front door, carrying boxes of groceries and five giant chocolate Easter eggs, since that silly little bunny didn’t come to this house this year.