Little Bastards in Springtime (4 page)

My baka always carried a rifle and had a grenade attached to her belt with a piece of hide—I’ve seen photos. And she knew how to set explosives too. She always starts her partisan stories with “Once upon a time, high up in the green, mountain forests smelling of black earth, pine needles, fallen leaves, there were bands of patriots who defended our country from the invading enemy and from the fascism within.” And then she says, “Did I ever tell you, Jevrem, about our beloved leader, our Joza?” And
I say yes, yes. And she says, “Well, about our beloved leader, little Joza loved animals, nature, and spent his childhood roaming mountain and forest. He knew every rock and tree. One day, he and his gang were raiding a neighbour’s pear orchard when the neighbour caught them. Our Joza dropped from the branches right onto the man’s head, knocked him out cold. He was a terrible nuisance, Joza was, but so what?”

I didn’t know the man. He died before I was born.

Mama and Papa’s idea of heaven is hiking every day, so that’s what we did on our vacation. The lodges we stayed in were full of Austrian and Slovenian hikers, all up at 6 a.m. Aisha and Berina were slow and whined a lot, Mama nagged everyone, Dušan pulled branches from living trees and argued about how early we had to get up, and Papa lectured about all the revolutionary movements around the world that we needed to support, like the working classes and the Natives in South Africa, Latin America, North America, how everything is linked in this world, especially injustice. But we were all happy, I know that now. The sun was hot every day and we had snacks with us. And after the first ten minutes everyone stopped complaining and talking and then everything was quiet, except for the forest noises. We just walked and walked, staring at each other’s backs or through the columns of tree trunks at the sun coming through the green leaves, until we came to a place where there was a good view. A view of a valley with white mountain peaks in the distance, where Croatia is and where Baka came from. Then Mama and Papa, Aisha and Berina, exclaimed about how beautiful it was. Oh, they said, over and over again, oh, it’s so beautiful, oh, it’s so breathtaking.

But in my mind, I was slinking around the mountains with Baka’s partisan comrades. We were eluding German patrols by
moving position, walking single file along the forest paths, pack mules behind us, everything we owned on our backs, liberated German Lugers in our belts, rifles over our shoulders dropped by the Allies onto a mountain meadow in the dead of night. I was a child-courier escorting American OSS officers who’d just parachuted out of the sky with their precious wireless radio set, asking questions about partisan numbers and victories to tell their commanders back home.

I begged Mama and Papa to let me sleep a night outside alone, like Baka did for years. A sleeping bag, that’s all I’d need. And maybe a knife. Dušan laughed at me, but I just walked down the steps of the lodge and into the forest. It’s a lonely place, but also crowded with something, you get that feeling, but you don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just all the animals tucked away where you can’t see them. I followed the trail, passing through sun shafts that shine down into the green forest-world like beams from a UFO, and it felt good to be just me. You can hear your own breathing loud and clear when you walk alone, it whooshes like wind in your ears while you think of many things. Will you turn into a wolf-boy if you get lost forever? Will you be able to smell your way around? Will you know which animals have just passed, how healthy they are, the state of the vegetation in spring and summer? Will you have no more thoughts or words at all after a while, just senses, using your nose, eyes, ears to get around and survive? Will you lose your human mind and gain an animal mind?

Baka said hunger is the only thing in the world that doesn’t have words, it grabs so deep inside you, deeper than your soul. When it got dark, I was hungry, but I had eaten the sandwich Mama had forced me to take along. I lay down and heard my eyes blinking in the dark. The dark was like moth wings caressing
my face, my hands, neck, wrists, crawling into my ears, nostrils. The forest is alive in the night, things move in every direction. And up in the sky is outer space with its gazillion galaxies. Space has its own sound, a huge silent sound that you can feel vibrating in your bones. I lay there wide awake in my sleeping bag and imagined partisans all around me, sleeping in hollows, or up in treehouses. Maybe my baka was up here too, only a few years older than me, with her new name, wearing ski pants before she got herself a uniform off a dead German soldier, a small one. Beautiful, tough, happy, a hardened killer. Maybe we were on our way to blow up a bridge, a railway line, or a road. Maybe we were going to ambush an enemy company. Maybe we were waiting for an airdrop. Sometimes we had to wait for days until the conditions were right, no clouds, moonlight. Sometimes we waited for weeks.

The birds were loud early in the morning and when I woke my hands smelled of dirt. The light was grey and flat at first, but the sun came up after a while and I trudged back along the trail. Papa says different generations of people, in different places on the earth, get to experience different kinds of lives. Baka got to spend three years in the forest worrying about life and death. You, he says, get to watch sixty-five channels on TV, ski in winter, swim in summer, study in Germany or France or England. But, I tell him, I will never go away, I will never leave this country with its mountain forests. Maybe this country will leave you, he says. He’s always turning things around like that, to be clever.

That was last summer. This summer’s going to be different. We probably won’t go on a vacation, Papa says.

‡ ‡ ‡

T
HEY ARE SHELLING THE AIRPORT REGULARLY
now. Also Baš?aršija, which is full of mosques, minarets, souks. The television tower was hit, and some of the markets. I hear this from the old men in the lobby when I hang around to see if anyone will come out to play. They used to go to the park to play chess with big chess pieces, but now they can’t, they’re stuck in here with their stories and their pipes. They list all the next targets because they know about war; they were in the last one. The
Oslobodjenje
newspaper building, the Holiday Inn, the public transportation system, the presidency and parliament buildings, the flour mill, the bakery, the brewery, and the Olympic complex, of course. The post telegraph and telephone building, Alipasin Most, the Jewish cemetery, the Lion cemetery. The tobacco factory, the Dobrinja apartment complex, the central district, Stari Grad, New Sarajevo, Maršala Tita, the shopping district at Vase Miskina. To me it sounds like the whole city is one big bull’s-eye. They say the train and bus stations are jam-packed with people, all desperate to leave the city. They’ve packed a toothbrush and left all their stuff behind, even their cats and dogs with a huge pile of kibble and the toilet seat up.

Fighting is noisy, that’s something you don’t think about in peacetime, the non-stop rumbling and thudding and exploding. I hear machine-gun fire rat-a-tatting and grenades going boom all day long. Sometimes I think I can hear high voices screaming with fright, girls and women as they run through the streets. Snipers fired on another bunch of peace demonstrators in front of the government and parliament buildings yesterday. More than ten people have been killed, and those are the ones we know about. They’re still whispering about all these things, Mama and Papa, trying to protect our little ears. As if we kids
don’t know what’s going on, as if our little ears can’t figure out what’s loud and clear every minute of the day.

Papa’s trying to write an article about a siege. It’s coming, he says, Sarajevo totally surrounded and cut off. The Serbs in the hills around the city don’t have the numbers to match our defenders, so they won’t be able to capture the city, only imprison it. But I see him looking out of the window all the time, pacing up and down the hallway, making himself more coffee, fiddling with an electric pencil sharpener that stopped working ages ago, not writing a single word. He’s very stressed out, I can tell by how he rubs his fingers through his hair all the time and pats his chest and his trouser pockets with the palms of his hands, like he’s looking for lost keys.

Mama is teaching at the conservatory. Music must flourish now, she says, even more than before. Papa calls the receptionist a hundred times all through the morning asking about conditions in the area. Schools have closed for now. Mama and Papa told us to stop cheering when we got the news, it’s not a good sign. We still have to do our homework, they said, we still have to practise. Aisha and Berina play scales and violin duets for a while but Papa isn’t paying attention so they stop pretty soon. When we’re hungry we fish through the fridge; when we’re bored we listen to music or half read whatever’s lying around. We’re not allowed to watch TV; it only broadcasts the war back at us like it’s a TV show and that is freaky and deranged. The twins steal halva from the kitchen, Dušan pours rakija from the sideboard into his flask. It’s a weird kind of holiday.

When evening comes, we all sit at the table without Mama, who is late, eating whatever we feel like, Papa smoking like a demon. Dušan says he heard that the tobacco factory is about to stop working, then sniggers at Papa’s horrified expression.
Just joking, he says, but now Papa is even more stressed out than before; he’s scratching his chest really hard with one hand like he’s got a rash.

“There have been firefights all day long,” he says. “Between Muslim paramilitaries, Croatian paramilitaries, the JNA, Serbian police, and irregulars. It’s a real shitty mess. They stormed the police academy yesterday.”

He jumps up and bangs dishes around. Aisha and Berina are pale and tiny, they look more exactly like each other when they’re tired and scared, with their long black hair curving around their faces and all the way down their backs. They want Mama, I can tell by the way they slouch in their chairs, blue smudges under their big eyes like bruises.

“What does that mean?” Aisha and Berina whisper. Papa doesn’t notice them. He doesn’t remember to be a father when he’s talking about politics.

“We’re so fucked,” Dušan says. His face is an oily shade of green, and he’s got a huge pimple under his nose.

I look at Papa but he hasn’t heard Dušan either. I guess we can all swear as much as we want from now on.

“What does that mean?” Aisha asks again. Berina pushes a spoon around the table. Sometimes when she’s scared and tired, she lets Aisha do the talking.

Papa ignores us all. I’ve never seen him this way. He throws back more shots of vodka.

“Well, we’re going to have to fight for the city. Unbelievable. I’d never in a million years have ever imagined I’d say those words.”

We stare at him like he’s a crazy person. He’s telling a story about some other people in another city in another time, Baka’s time.

“Goddammit, where’s an ashtray?”

Papa’s rummaging around in the cupboard above the stove. We all stare at the two ashtrays on the kitchen table, his favourite Zippo standing next to them like a loyal friend.

“Explain to them what’s going on, Papa,” Dušan says. “So they can understand.”

“How can you not know what’s going on here since every possible shit is going on?” Papa yells. “There are newspapers spread all around this apartment.” And it’s true, Papa is a newspaper junky. He’s reading one all the time, at breakfast, at lunch, on the toilet. He even walks places, his office, to meet a friend, to the dentist, with one rolled up under his arm.

“They’re six,” I say.

“Some”—Papa glares at us—”
some
of these states, Croatia, Slovenia, us in Bosnia-Herzegovina, are declaring independence from Yugoslavia, prematurely in all cases, I might add, illegally in at least two, with the prodding of Germany and America, and are becoming their own countries; but not everyone in them wants to break away, they will be the minorities in their own country and they don’t feel safe because no one feels safe in someone else’s backyard. Because that’s what nationalism does, it creates insiders and outsiders, enfranchised and disenfranchised. The Serbs, the largest group in Yugoslavia and spread all around in all the different states and provinces—”

Aisha slips down in her chair and hides her face in her hands.

“What?” sighs Papa. “Okay. How about this? A few terrible fascistic people are stirring up grievances and myths from the past, that’s always how it starts, as a way to grab power, reconstructing ethnic identities, dividing us from our Yugoslav identity, our humanistic identity. There is a spreading of fear, there is a revival of national symbols and flag-waving, scapegoating,
there is a manipulation of the media, of foreign actors. It’s all incredibly stupid and dangerous and fascistic and it’s not what any progressive Yugoslav wants—”

“They can’t understand that, Papa,” Dušan says, his voice all hard and serious. I’ve never seen him care this much about the twins. “This is how it is, you two.” He stuffs some bread in his mouth—he likes to chew and talk at the same time. “In our country, there are these people, the Croats, the Serbs, and the Muslims, who’ve lived together forever and are all basically the same, except for some little things, like maybe cuisine and religion, you know, food and prayers, but their asshole leaders have been getting power by setting everyone against everyone else. Basically, it’s like kids arguing about what’s better, roast lamb or cabbage rolls. If people are fighting about that stupid stuff, the politicians don’t have to sort out the real problems.”

I stare at Dušan. I didn’t think he ever thought about this stuff.

“The Serbs in Bosnia are scared that when we separate, the Muslims will take over and put them down, like in Ottoman times,” he continues.

“What are we?” Aisha whispers.

Berina is sneaking huge spoonfuls of sugar, then looking at Papa to see if he notices.

“Aisha, that’s exactly the main issue here.
It doesn’t matter.
We’re citizens.” Papa rubs his face very hard so it gets all red.

“It matters now,” says Dušan. It’s weird that he’s even here sitting with us. Usually he takes off right after we’ve eaten. “Papa’s family is Serb and Mama’s is Croat. That’s how it is. Half of us can escape to Serbia, the other half to Croatia, just cut us right down the middle, blood and guts spurting everywhere—”