Little Bastards in Springtime (6 page)

They run in circles around me, giggling, and making up little poems that don’t make sense. Then I read
Snow-White and Rose-Red
to them. I like sitting on the bed with one of them on each side of me, the way they lean against me and hold hands across my stomach, the way they breathe on my neck and stroke the pages with their little fingers. When they were tiny babies they sucked each other’s thumbs—that was funny. There’s a photo of it in one of our photo albums, which I sometimes look at to remember the past.

I
WAKE
up in the dark and hear voices murmuring in the living room. I can’t stand that sound these days. Mama will start crying, Papa will shout, Mama will shout. I hear the clink of bottle against table, ice against glass. We aren’t allowed to drink; what can we do to get through this shit-time? I pull out the pack of cigarettes from under my mattress. I bartered for it with one of my comic books.

Dušan is at the door, he always knows when I’ve got something he wants, it’s like a sixth sense.

“Can I have one, Jevrem? Where did you get them?”

“I got them from Konstantin. For my Wolverine comic.”

I light a cigarette and Dušan and I sit next to each other on my bed, smoking. It reminds me of the time before Dušan became a teenager, when we played together quite a lot.

“They never stop talking,” I say.

“They don’t know what else to do. We’re all so fucked. I’m going to score some weed tomorrow, lots of it, and get baked every single day. Going to sell some of it to make back the cash. Too much bullshit around to stay straight all day long. U.S. soldiers were high during the whole Vietnam War.”

“Didn’t they lose?” I ask.

Dušan picks up one of my comics and I wander into the living room feeling dizzy. Mama and Papa are slumped on the sofa, their clothes rumpled. The room is blue with smoke.

“What are you doing up, Jevrem? Go to sleep.”

I sit down in the armchair and pretend to read
National Geographic.
I flip through the pages. Black people with spears, black people with painted faces, black people with no clothes on, poor black people in slums. Giant, weird-looking sea creatures at the bottom of the ocean. I put down the
National Geographic
and stand up. I hover over Mama and Papa, staring right at them, but it’s like I’m not here. They’re totally blind they’re so tired; they’ve had so much to drink. But they can’t get themselves to bed. I wander back to my room and there is Dušan fast asleep on my bed.

“Dušan, come on.” I grab his arm and shake. “Go to your own room.” I bend over and put my ear to his nose. I can hear his breath, faint and even, I can see the pulse jump in his soft white neck. He’s so skinny and tall. Without a shirt on he looks horrible, like a starving guy who’s about to die even though he eats all the time. That’s why he has weights under his bed.
Every evening he stands in front of the mirror and tries to pump up his muscles so they hide his bones.

He doesn’t hear me or feel me. I shake him again but he doesn’t move. Maybe he’s high already. Or maybe I somehow got killed and I’m a ghost, the first child killed in the war. I float into Dušan’s room feeling dizzy and see-through and curl up on his musty, twisted sheets, wondering what it feels like, the moment you don’t belong to your body anymore, the moment you know that all the ordinary days are over, nothing more than dim, hazy dreams.

‡ ‡ ‡

F
ROM THE BALCONY I WATCH THE TREES OPPOSITE
our building. They just stand there. The sound of explosions doesn’t seem to bother them. Some of them might be hit too, but they’re not worried. In our forests, the foresters often cut down trees. They use them for firewood, but the reason for felling them is to keep the whole forest healthy. Now the trees are a light hazy shade of green. Soon their leaves will grow to full size. In the breeze I catch the smell of pine trees and apple and lilac blossoms, or maybe I imagine it. I love this time of the year because the days get warm, spring flowers bloom, summer is just a month away. But I also hate it sometimes. All the rain, the heavy mists and fogs, the low, angry sky. Baka says that during her war, weather was very important. It could be a fierce enemy or a powerful collaborator. Spring was unpredictable in the mountains, friendly one moment, deadly the next.

I look up at the hills. Death is coming from up there, and everyone has stopped looking at them like they’re a nice piece
of scenery. The pine forests still stand, like before, but what is lurking in them? And the sweet chestnut trees. They’re still there, and the rivers still flow, fed by cold springs and mountain snow. We went fishing once for brown trout and soft-lipped trout. Papa wanted to try it for an article he was writing. He wanted to see how it felt, hurting a little creature for fun.

I sit down at the piano and begin my scales. It feels good to let the notes come out, to watch my fingers moving fast. I race through scales and exercises, fudging the bits that are hard, since Mama isn’t here to yell at me. I really want to learn the piece that I’m practising now, the Chopin Fantaisie-Impromptu, because it runs out of your hands all by itself, like water rushing down a hill toward a lake.

My friends are at the door. They crowd in, making faces.

“I’m going out,” I yell over my shoulder.

Mama’s hand pinches the back of my neck. She moves fast as an athlete sometimes. “You’re not going out,” she says. “It’s too dangerous.”

Everyone looks innocent, eyes big. “But Mrs. Andric, we’re all going out. Our parents say it’s okay.”

“My papa heard on the radio that it will be okay today. Our neighbourhood.” Nezira looks sad when she lies.

“Please, Mama.” Mama’s hand is touching me, in public, holding me in place. They will all laugh later. They’ll copy me. Please, Mama, please, Mama.

Mama hesitates. I duck away and am out the door.

“Be careful,” she shouts after me. She’d like to keep me home forever, where she still thinks it’s safe.

We move like one lumpy breathless animal down the dark hallway. In the yard, we kick a ball around. Cena and Nezira share a cigarette they stole from Cena’s mother. They hold it
awkwardly, but they’re cool anyway. They look identical, but they’re not even sisters. They even wear the same clothes. Adidas, Puma, Levi’s. Both their mothers like to shop, in Zagreb and Vienna. The boys always crowd around them, listening to what they have to say but pretending not to.

“Let’s get a game going,” says Mahmud.

“Yes, yes,” I say.

But no one else can be bothered. We sit in a group beside the swings in the playground insulting each other, laughing, throwing pebbles at the see-saw. Cena and Nezira turn the skipping rope, chanting a high singsongy weird poem they know off by heart, while Raza skips. She’s good at it, she could keep going for a thousand years, her feet hardly touching the ground. Mahmud takes a plastic pistol out of his pocket. He aims it first at Cena, then at Nezira, then at Pero. Right at his temple.
Pow. Pow. Pow, pow
, he shouts. Pero turns and punches Mahmud in the arm.

“You’re a fucking idiot, Mahmud,” he hisses and walks off. He’s actually angry. We stare at his back until he disappears around the corner of the building.

‡ ‡ ‡

T
HE PHONE RINGS AND MAMA ANSWERS. “OH
no,” she says. “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.”

I go into my room and close the door, then sit on the floor against my bed. There is nothing to do. I feel like I have asthma or something. I can’t breathe.

Emira was killed, Papa tells me when I come out again. Emira Subic. I remember her, a lady with fuzzy hair who always
smelled of cigarettes and laundry detergent. She came to dinner sometimes, and they talked about writing articles, which magazines paid well, which had nationalist editors, who was giving in to the fascists, that kind of thing. She’s dead? Who would want to kill her? Dušan wants to know exactly how she died. Was it a shell? A sniper? What part of town was she in? Where was she hit? Why didn’t she know to stay off the street?

“Stop it,” Mama says to him. She doesn’t want to talk about the details. “I’ll light a candle for her tonight.” As if that’s going to make things better.

The radio says that a ceasefire agreement has been reached. The EC made it happen. And it’s true, today is quiet. What a relief, Papa says. He has bursts of happiness all day long even though his friend just died. “Wow, that was scary, eh, kids?” he says. He makes us all pancakes in the middle of the afternoon, for a snack. Even Mama has one. We open the windows and let the fresh air in.

I
WAKE
up from a strange dream about the men in the lobby. They are selling chicken fat in Coca-Cola cans, and they try to force me to buy a dozen, but I don’t have any money. Your family will die without it, they shout at me, it will all be your fault. Baka told me how valuable animal fat was during the war. It was the best part of the meat. You’d eat it by the spoonful if you could get it, that white, congealed fat like creamy honey or paraffin. You’d get as much of it into you as possible. I wonder what it would be like—if I could keep it down or would puke all over the place.

I hear gunfire. I can see by the sunlight that it’s early morning. I get out of bed and walk into the living room. Papa and
Dušan are standing at the window, looking out. It started again at six fifteen this morning, Papa tells me. He looks suddenly unfamiliar, old and bent and dishevelled. The JNA, our national army, has taken up new positions in the suburbs, the newspaper says. They say they’re creating a buffer between the Serbs and the Bosnian forces, but Papa scoffs at that, bangs the window with his knuckles, lights another cigarette. “The JNA are Serb controlled,” he shouts. But the JNA command says that political leaders have lost control of well-armed paramilitary forces, therefore the army has to step in. And there are a lot of paramilitary forces, a crazy number, something like 150,000. I read this in yesterday’s newspaper. The command says that these forces are terrorizing people, looting and destroying property, and spreading fear, tension, panic among citizens.

“Why can’t we trust the JNA, it’s our army?” I ask Papa, but he doesn’t answer. He’s looking at the city like he’s never seen it before.

It’s now almost impossible to get to Baba and Deda and the uncles in Ilidža across the river. I hear Mama and Papa talking about it. Not that we’ve been trying. I miss them all. The uncles didn’t move into the city like Papa did when he finished high school; they go to college in different towns and still come home to Baba and Deda on the weekends. They go to soccer games together, and Baba makes delicious krofne, palatschinke, and chocolate tortes, and Deda lets me take drags on his pipe and shows me what is coming up in his vegetable garden. Papa must be homesick for his Mama and Papa and his younger brothers, but he doesn’t mention it. He and Mama whisper about the Ilidža house, what to do about it and Baba and Deda. He calls them sometimes, not as much as before, and afterwards he always looks sad or angry, he always shuts his door. Dušan
says it’s because Baba and Deda want us to go live with them, because it’s a Serb neighbourhood, because it’s on the outskirts of the city. But Mama and Papa say no, they won’t go, they’re Sarajevans, they won’t join the cowardly exodus.

The day goes by so slowly I want to scream. I feel headachy and a bit ill from doing nothing but sitting inside and playing cards with myself. Aisha and Berina have been fighting, shouting at each other about who gets to draw in the colouring book, who gets to read the comics, who gets to play with the Barbies they share. They have small red eyes today like they’ve been crying hard for hours, but it’s just because they’re tired. Mama says they crawl into bed with her and Papa every night and I secretly wish I could too; it’s hard to sleep with the new sounds outside, rumbling and booming and sirens and cars screeching around corners. But I’m too old now, Dušan would laugh.

Mama’s and Papa’s friends and colleagues are coming and going from our apartment all the time. They slouch on our couch for a few hours, or sit on the edge of chairs. They give each other the latest news, even though everyone knows it already, have a drink or six, get drunk, laugh hysterically, cry into their handkerchiefs, leave when the next shift arrives. Like waves, in and out, on a stormy coast, Baka says, timed around the curfew and the amount of shelling. Sometimes people stay over, but they never sleep. They’re exhausted but they just sit there and gab non-stop, or stare out of the window at the city.

“Can’t we please tell people not to come so much? Can’t we please have some normal time together as a family?” Mama asks. “I still have to practise, I still have to focus.”

“Normal?” Papa says. “
Normal?
People have to get together as much as possible now. Alone in our apartments, we lose courage. And then people just leave. People are leaving the city
by the thousands, sometimes in secret, without telling their friends. People are scared to stay, ashamed to go. This city’s glue is the best of human relationships, not family, not tribe or clan, friendship.
Friendship.
”

It’s true. Some apartments in the building are empty now, and neighbours have been asked to watch them. Pero and Mahmud and I want to break into one and just hang out there, to see what it feels like poking around in other people’s things. We wouldn’t take anything, at least not anything we didn’t really need.

‡ ‡ ‡

T
HE CITY WAS A HUGE CARNIVAL LAID OUT
between hills, that’s how I thought of it in my mind when I was a little boy. All kinds of sounds, songs, prayers rose from it like echoes close and distant. And the stones and domes and minarets and spires were many shapes, fitting together like a completed puzzle in colours of white, sand, orange, copper green. Trees were brown and black in winter and dark green puffs in summer. And the narrow, twisty streets of the old town flowed with strangers as familiar as friends. They gabbed, they joked, and birds flew in fluttering flocks around the Turkish Square. At night, a wash of lights like jewels filled the valley, and the river reflected moonlight when it was in the mood. Even the crappy parts were beautiful, because of the grandeur of our geography, Papa said, with hills and mountains on three sides, always visible no matter where you look, the frame to the picture. When I was little, delicious smells pulled you into bakeries and fishmongers and restaurants and the kitchens
of friends’ mothers. Hookah, ?evap?i?i, pizza, burek. The bazaars, markets, souks had everything in them from all the countries of the world. And the city had many sneaky corners to be discovered when you became a teenager, like bars and discos where the punk bands played that Dušan told me about, the underground city painted black. And in Ilidža, there were nature walks by the wide river, the Roman Bridge, the waterfalls, Big Alley with the fat old trees on either side like giant living columns, the fields that Deda walked over in the autumn reciting poems about peasants. And there are other places that I will know about when I am a man. I’m vague about them, but they’re there, I know they are. I’ve already been to three concerts that Mama played, one in the National Opera House with the whole symphony. I had to wear a tie to that one.