Little Bastards in Springtime (34 page)

“You’re a fighter because you’re a survivor.”

She can tell me about myself for a hundred years and I’m still not saying a word to her because I won’t be here for long. What’s the point of getting into a deep, meaningful conversation, it’s always a trick to get you to do what they want. I’m already outside, my mind is circling over vast blocks of city, counting chimneys, antennas, trees, cars, basketball hoops, mingling with the spring breeze that cajoles the dead to rise again.

Then, after lunch, we sit in a room in a circle and the group counsellor gets us to talk by making outrageous, provoking statements, like, what is the most violent thought you’ve ever had and why did you have it? All around me the boys grunt
out their pornographic fantasies and laugh like louts. But I still don’t say anything. I won’t be seduced by language into this web. This web is not sticky enough for an insect like me.

I get the next boy in his bed at four in the morning. Unfortunately for him, he’s in the same dorm as me. I shove a toothbrush in his mouth like it can do some damage, and I say, why is it that objects and orifices are tools of war, but he has no answers, he just gags a few times and agrees to my proposition of an armistice. Peace, that’s all I want, I say, and hum a little communist tune I learned from Baka.

And then I’m in Dr. Ghorbani’s office again, because that’s how time works in this place. She sits in front of me and stares at my face for minutes, hours, days, centuries, her eyes moving over its peaks and valleys, its perfections and imperfections, and into its pools and voids. I feel my heart pumping faster and faster and sweat springing out of every pore in my body. I want to cry like a widowed woman. I’m tired of the fighting, I’m tired of the surviving.
Make it stop
, I ask the universe silently. But I don’t say a word with my breath, my mouth, my tongue. My face is a rock.

T
HE LAST
skinny, gangly boy has survival instinct, but my hunting instinct is sharper. I get to him in the lineup of the cafeteria, and what better place, I figure, than surrounded by all the crazy boys and their beefed-up arms and chests and their spindly twig legs, they all need to see what I can pull out of my sleeve when I have been wronged. I stand behind the boy, whose blondish hair grows down his neck like peach fuzz, who hangs his head on a long stem to hide his open-book face. You allied yourself with the wrong boys, I say, the losers, the weaker ones,
and now you must be punished. This is the law of the world, look anywhere on our globe.

The boy turns quickly to face me, his mouth a thin line, his eyes two cosmic black holes, expressionless with an emotion beyond fear. And in the moment that I let the pen slide out of my sleeve and I gouge his skinny belly with its sawed-off end, I see that he’s already been sliced open a thousand times in the course of his short, panicked life, that my incision isn’t teaching him anything new. So, there he is bleeding on the cafeteria floor, holding his skinny ribs with shaking hands, eyes blinking rapidly, his face blank as an animal’s, and there I am standing over him looking at all the crazy boys in that pale green cafeteria, showing them my invincibility, my mad martial heritage, feeling not too good about it all, that it wasn’t really fair to that skinny little kid, and wondering, suddenly furious, why is he in a fucked-up place like this, anyway? I slip away just as the guards turn their heads and peer like startled chickens in our direction. I wash off the blood on my hands in the bathroom sink. I gag, I shiver, then I walk quickly to the library. That boy will bear his wound without complaining. He will nurse it alone. He doesn’t know any better, doesn’t expect anything else, that’s how it’s always been for him.

The next morning, Dr. Ghorbani asks me if I did the stabbing and I sit in front of her with a small smile on my face, feeling defiant and like a monstrous villain both at the same time.

“Nobody would give up your name, someone else even confessed, someone else is in solitary today. That’s not a good thing, Jevrem. It means they’re scared of you. I know things can be tough in here, but it’s not the answer. It’s not a good way to live, people fearing you. It never ends well.”

I wonder how she knows for sure it was me, and what she really knows about fear and intimidation and the need to survive. But I’m not about to start asking questions, since conversing is no use to me.

“Anger management,” she says. “Anti-criminal thinking, life skills, cognitive therapy, anti-gang education, relapse prevention, family therapy, substance abuse treatment.” She stops, and lets these options sink in. “Mental health treatment, including PTSD, high school education, vocational training. You get the picture, Jevrem? Like I’ve said, I know you’ve got a sharp brain in there. All these and more are available to you. You are seventeen, so can choose not to go to school. But, of course, I would advise very strongly against that. Education is the key to every new beginning.”

I think, but what kind of education? They were educated back home and what good did it do us? All those communist apparatchiks turning into fascists at the drop of a hat for a bit of power, they all went to school, they all read books. It didn’t make them good people. Everyone knows that, but everyone still sends their little children to whatever school happens to be on the block. But I don’t say anything. I can’t have a conversation with someone if I’m not here.

“You can continue grade eleven, starting on Monday. The teacher will assess your level with a series of tests.”

Dr. Ghorbani looks at me; I look at the window, the wall, the ceiling. The window, the wall, the ceiling have no eyes to look back.

“And you and I will continue to have sessions, during which we will work together to identify your issues and struggles at the individual, family and community levels. I know you are a special case, Jevrem, and I know that child refugees and
children suffering war trauma are underserved in our schools and health-care system. I will work with you to help you focus on your strengths, help you gain your feet …”

I stop listening to Dr. Ghorbani. She makes it sound like it’s me who’s got the problems, it’s me who needs fixing. She goes on for quite a bit longer about steps we’re going to take together. The sound of her voice isn’t bad, it’s quite friendly and soothing and I take the time to think about who I need to see before I make my move. Mama, Aisha, Sava, and the Bastards.

“But whatever you decide to do or not do, Jevrem, everyone here helps run the centre together. It’s a good experience for the future. I’m putting you on pots in the kitchen. Work is good therapy.”

Great, I think, it’s like the brigade cookhouse, all of us pitching in selflessly to build an incredibly useful thing for the whole of society. I think about suggesting this to her—put us to some good use, let us build your roads and bridges and city halls. But I guess that wouldn’t go over so well in this day and age. Child labour and exploitation, and all that. Better to keep us locked in cages.

Dr. Ghorbani walks me down echoing hallways, nodding at each guard we pass. They look like giant savannah animals next to her, enormous, slow-moving hippopotamuses. She’s thin, tense, formal, a gazelle with sleek coat, quick movements, alert face. In the kitchen, the crazy boys are sauntering and strutting, trying not to look panicked. The kitchen boss, an old biker dude with a walrus moustache the colour of ash, bangs a spoon against a metal garbage can. “Speed things up, ass-wipes,” he screams, then stares at me like I’m a hairball in his drain.

“Okay, Jevrem,” says Dr. Ghorbani, looking around the kitchen coolly. “I will see you on Wednesday.”

I realize then that she doesn’t usually escort her boys around the joint, that she’s doing me a favour.

The sink closest to the ovens is where you sweat the hardest and that’s where I go. They’re cranked high to heat food made of plastic waste shipped in from Chinese factories manned by too-skinny humans with small hands and bony cheekbones, or that’s how I picture it anyway. I scrub pans, sweat, swear, splash water. And think and scheme and plan for what is to come.

T
HE GUARD
doesn’t forget to dig his powerful sausage fingers into my neck before he shoves me into the visitors’ room. The room is a dead-man shade of beige. There are tables with chairs arranged neatly around them, two squat windows showing clouds dark grey with rain, a red-brick wall, part of the fence that curves inward at the top, a playing field, a basketball hoop. Like a high school but with barbed wire.

I spot Sava right away. She’s slouched at a table and looks more like a juvie than the juvies, hard face, hunched shoulders, not like a visitor at all, the mothers with their toxic halos of perfume, the freaked-out siblings, the awkward, shifty fathers in their dress shirts, collars undone. But I know it’s an act. I see all of her revealed in her shining eyes, and she looks different than before, less hard, less hostile, closer to the surface. When she sees me, Sava stands up fast and lunges at me, kissing me, her lips mashing into mine, tongue sweeping the inside of my right cheek. The guards shout, Sava pulls away, and I’m left with a mouthful of plastic that I gag on for a moment, then cough into my hand. Out comes a large lump that my palm can barely conceal. I want to do that all over again with her, I want to merge with her bones, her heat, her breath, but the guards are watching us closely now, and Sava wouldn’t agree, anyway.

“Hey,” I say. “You look great.”

“Thanks,” Her voice is low, she sits again. “I’m sleeping more.”

An image of Sava in some other guy’s bed sears itself onto my mind. I miss those nights of torture with Sava more than any other part of my life outside.

“Are you seeing anyone, Sava?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Andric.” She scowls at me.

Relief is sweet, it sort of floods my mouth like I’m salivating. And then I think, why not? She’s hot, she’s not religious or anything, and she can get whoever she wants. But she’s never had a boyfriend.

“Andric,” she says. “Drop it. Men are pigs, all of history proves I’m right, that’s all I’m going to say. More importantly, I want you to know that’s all I’m giving you. I’m not muling for you again. It’s a stupid risk. Ask one of the others next time.”

“Sava, don’t worry, there won’t be a next time. I’m getting out of here.” I’m happy she thinks men are pigs, she has a right to, she had all those nightmare images in her head when she was a kid, and it’ll rule all the others out. But maybe one day, when I’ve worked on becoming exceptionally un-piglike, she’ll give me a break.

She gives me a look of pity before she scans the room, studying the guards studying us.

“You have to finally accept reality.”

“What does that mean? Reality is a motherfucker.” I speak loudly. The guards don’t care what I say.

“I mean, Jevrem, that you should stop fighting the wrong battles. Use this situation to your advantage, don’t just keep banging your head against the same wall. What’s the point of that? Just step around it, step around the goddamned wall.”

“I’m going over,” I say, dropping my voice. “Not around, over. It’ll work.” The guards might be interested in this news.

“The wall I mean is in your head, Jevrem.”

“I know what you mean. But the wall I mean is just over there.” I point to the window, to the fence beyond it, so unguarded, so climbable. I change the subject. “So, what’s new?” I try not to stare at her too hungrily. She looks different on many levels, more impatient, not so angry. She moves in her chair as though she’s an athlete warming up for a race. She’s pumped like I’ve never seen before.

“I’m moving out,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s time to get my life going.”

“Yeah?” I say.

“I’m going to do it fast, I’ve wasted enough time. I’m going to get all my degrees by the time I’m twenty-five.” Sava coughs, looks over her shoulder, leans in toward me over the table, looks into my eyes. “You could too. Get started in here, without any distractions.”

“Why?”

“You can do things with an education,” Sava says. “You can make things happen.”

“You don’t understand. After this year here, I go on to do two more years in an adult jail full of vicious, fucked-in-the-head hardened criminals. I can’t do that, enclosed, buried, caged, too many people in small spaces, waiting. It gives me nightmares, it makes me insane, don’t you see? There will be no hope for me at the end, I know it. I will end up the meanest motherfucker Canada has ever known. Or dead.”

Sava doesn’t say anything. She knows what I mean, our survival instincts are too good, our ability to adapt, to keep going
in shitty circumstances until the day the sniper meets his mark or we become the sniper. We sit without talking. I study every detail of her. She looks out the window, letting me get my fill.

“You see,” she says after a while. “One day, I was sitting in Madzid’s car just before doing a house and a thought dropped into my head, you know, all by itself. I realized it takes just as much energy being a pointless badass victim scurrying around in a shit-pile as it does being a rebel with a cause.”

She sounds exactly like Baka, it’s a conspiracy.

“What are your plans for your future, Andric, besides breaking out of this place? I mean, years down the line? You could start by writing it all down, what’s happened so far. That’s what I’m doing. It’s pretty fucking clarifying.”

A future? I think.

“You could call it ‘The Difficult Springtime of My Life,’ or something cheesy like that.”

I
GET
the pills to the crazy boys and a layer of friendly feeling piles onto their new-found respect for me. They give me
yo-nigga
punches in the arm, they get me my tray at lunch and say
it ain’t no thing
like American corner-boys. And I have cash in my pocket, which is important for breaking free.

Early in the morning, I lie awake, my head turned to the square of grey moonlight on the wall. I think about Baka, the night she died, how it felt like time stopped for a while. Mama and her piano, how I used to lie on the couch looking out of the apartment window while she played, how I didn’t see much, a bird passing, a cloud floating, the flash of an airplane, how my daydreams became one with that small patch of sky while Mama’s notes filled the room with other worlds. I think about
Sava and her body and her face and her eyes and her hair and her voice and her movements and her smile, how I wish she was beside me like always, sleeping close, pushing me away. I wait for Papa to show up, to pace beside my bed, to tell me what he thinks of NATO bombing the shit out of Baba and Deda in Belgrade, the new money called the Euro, Clinton’s bent penis, important news that makes its way through bars everywhere, or whatever else is on his mind. But I fall asleep before he does.