Little Bastards in Springtime (18 page)

“You know why I’m doing that,” Mama says. “I’m supporting my family. My English is not good enough yet. We have to eat, to pay rent, pay off loans. Milan and Iva and the other families can’t lend us much anymore, everyone’s generosity has limits. They gave so much when we first got here, Jevrem, you know that. Everything we have.”

“I’ve got money,” I yell. I’m sick of this endless debate. “Lots of it.”

I get up and march to my closet. There’s a coat in there stuffed with money, the pockets and two bulging sleeves pinned at the bottom. I grab a handful of colourful Canadian bills and hold them up for Mama to see. Sometimes you have to do whatever it takes to survive, fuck whatever anyone else says.

“Why don’t you ever take any of it? It’s here for you. It’s for
real stuff, you know, food, rent, those loans and bills. It’s a fucking disgrace what you have to do for shit pay.” I feel my lower lip trembling, I know she can see it.

“I must be employed, those are the rules, and I’d rather clean rich people’s dirty bathrooms,” Mama says so softly I can hardly hear her, “than take money from a hoodlum and a bully. We left Sarajevo to get away from people like that.”

I drop the money on the floor, march back to the bed. “That’s the problem with your generation,” I shout. Mama’s quietness can’t shut me up. “All these principles, all these big fucking ideas about life and art, and then you end up turning on each other, just like the leaders want you to, and killing each other.
Killing each other.
But you won’t take my money so you can feed us, so you can play your music again? Oh no, because that would be bad.
That would be wrong.
Well, I’m not going to sit around waiting to be saved again, waiting for cast-off shit and embarrassing handouts. Tell that to Papa.”

“What’s going on?” Aisha is standing in the door, a pen in her hand, a wary look in her eyes. It’s Saturday, which means she’s spending the day in her room, sitting at her desk, doing giant piles of homework. She’ll sit there all day and into the evening, with a break in the afternoon to practise violin for hours.

“Nothing,” I say. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I do worry about it,” Aisha says, her face completely serious like she’s a fifty-year-old nun praying for my soul.

“It’s okay, Aisha.” Mama sighs. “It’s between Jevrem and me.”

Aisha looks back and forth at us, then turns and walks back up the stairs. Now I feel bad. I get back into bed and lie face-up, staring at the ceiling. There are tears running down my temples into my hair. I pray Mama can’t see this, I close my eyes, turn my face to the wall, wait for her to go away. But she doesn’t. She
sits down beside me again and puts her hand on my cheek, my forehead, pulls on my arm so I’ll turn toward her. But I don’t turn, I feel tired, I have nothing more to say, I have nothing more to give her. The little shit that I am.

I
SIT
in class and stare out of the window. The teachers take one step forward, two steps back. That’s how they walk through a lesson over here. The other kids seem to be used to it, which explains why they’re a bit stupider every day. During the two steps back, I watch the houses opposite the school. Some have clapboard or vinyl siding, others the original, orange-brown brickwork with some frilly bits along the eaves. They’re big and primped, with Yuppie families floating around inside like astronauts in all that space. I see them coming and going with their new cars and shiny bikes and fancy strollers, I see them clearing dead leaves from their pretty front yards, digging in their gardens, planting their flowers and bushes. Not like our tiny falling-apart house north of St. Clair, with its rotting front porch and small patch of matted, cratered lawn. Nurseries are expensive, that’s the difference between poor and rich neighbourhoods. I know, I checked it out because Baka liked planting on her balcony back home, and Mama used to garden with Baba and Deda in Ilidža on Sunday afternoons. I thought I could buy them some gardening happiness, but Mama shouted, no, no, I don’t want anything from you, when I mentioned it, really freaking out and acting like I’m the number-one criminal of the whole fucking universe.

Afternoon sun turns brick houses into big chunks of red rock lined up straight by some highly motivated ancient people, like with Stonehenge. I follow the mailman with my eyes as he
walks up to each house, goes up the stairs, stuffs paper in the mailbox, goes down again. Then I slump low in my chair. My brain is suffocating with boredom. Sava, Geordie, and Madzid are breaking into lockers in the west corridor. All the students here are rich. Lie. Not all of them are, that’s just what we tell each other to feel better about robbing them, but a lot of them act like they are. Their parents give them money for nothing, an allowance just for existing. We know because they spread it around every week like they’ve won the lottery. They go to movies, to the mall; they buy CDs, cigarettes, pizza, pop, new clothes, and weed by the truckload from me and the gang, like every day is a big party.

I didn’t have new clothes when I arrived in this city, one of the problems with my first day of school. The second-hand stuff from our sponsors was a pile of rags from the ‘80s, fished out of someone’s mouldy attic. Acid-washed, padded, pleated, baggy, neon, I looked like a little Eastern bloc freak, like a bastard refugee from the past. When Mama dropped me off, she waved and tried to act upbeat. She said, just look, listen, and copy what the others are doing. Well, that was bad advice because people were doing all kinds of random things in the classrooms, and going in all different directions in the hallways. The stuff on the blackboard didn’t look familiar even in math class, and the teachers spoke fast, and I couldn’t follow them even when they remembered to slow down. And when I learned to speak in sentences, I was attacked by a thousand creepy questions. Tell us, Jevrem, teachers asked in every class, where are you from, what is your background? Share with us, it’s important, your roots, your culture, your people, your flag, your food, your God. I said nothing, I pretended not to understand, I didn’t get why they wanted to know, why it mattered so much, because this is how
it started for us, with questionnaires and sorting everyone by religion and teaching us who were our own kind and who were the others, forcing us to decide, to choose a side, and next came interrogations, beatings, house-torchings, evacuations, transports, concentration camps popping up all over the countryside. So I got depressed—what did they all expect? Couldn’t they ask me some fucking normal questions, like what music I liked, what sport I was good at, what books I read or television I watched, who my friends were back home, Pero and Zakir and Mahmud? About Cena and Nezira? I could talk about them, how much I missed them, how we played soccer in the courtyard all the time. But no one asked me about those things, so I put my head down and began to think of other ways they could get to know me. How I could show them the force of my brilliant personality, shining brightly all on its own.

O
UTSIDE
the school entrance, I stop in the noisy crush of students, light a smoke, think about what I’m going to do with the rest of the day. I hear someone calling my name. I look around. The music teacher, Mr. Green, is walking down the entrance steps. He’s looking at me and waving. I wonder what they’re going to haul me to the principal’s office for now. I pat my pockets to assess what criminal goods might be lurking there. But when he’s standing in front of me he doesn’t looked pissed off at all, he looks really freaking happy to see me.

“I just realized that your mother is Sofija Andric, the wonderful Yugoslavian pianist. That’s fantastic. I heard her play in Vienna when I was there on a trip in ‘89.”

He has this huge smile on his face. I just stand there and stare at him, cigarette hanging from my mouth.

“I bet you play an instrument too, then. All children of musicians take lessons, isn’t that true?”

“Nope,” I say. “Not me. My sister plays the violin really well, though.”

“Do you think your mother would come and play for us, for my music students? I’d organize a concert.”

Mr. Green has a neatly trimmed beard and wears John Lennon glasses. He’s looking at me like he’s found a long-lost friend. I want to tell him that she’s not here, that Sofija Andric the Pianist never made it out of the ruined city.

“We’d be very grateful and honoured,” Mr. Green continues.

“She doesn’t play anymore,” I say.

“
What?
” His eyes pop out, he looks really upset. I agree with him, it is very upsetting.

“Why?” he asks. Then he takes a sharp breath in, puts his hand to his mouth. “I’m sorry, was she injured in the war?”

“Yes,” I say. “She was very badly injured. Both her hands. And her head. And her chest.”

Mr. Green looks like he’s going to burst into tears.

“I have to catch a bus,” I say, and move off toward the street, though I’ve never been on a Toronto bus in my life.

I walk away fast and don’t pretend even a little to catch a bus. I head down Oakwood toward home, but I don’t want to end up there. Mr. Green has made me think about Mama and her music, and that’s pissing me off a lot, a feeling that grows and grows in my throat like a hard knot of food that’s not going down. I light another smoke and think about whose place I’m going to crash at, what kind of mayhem we’ll get up to once night sets in.

‡

V
EILS
of white fog rise from the grass, which turned from brown to green at ten fifteen yesterday morning. That’s how it seemed, anyway, or I’m not getting enough sleep. I was walking to school and I saw it happen right in front of my eyes, which was kind of mind-blowing and trippy. But today it’s still green, so uniform it looks painted on, so I guess I just happened to be looking at exactly the right moment. Spring has finally arrived.

I’m standing at the back door inhaling my cigarette after being away for a few days, looking at the trees fading in and out of sight. I see Mama at the far end of our weirdly long, narrow backyard. She’s on her knees facing the back fence, near the scraggly red-twigged bushes, where she’s built three little mounds, where she sits with our dead. Papa’s has a fist-size stone on it, Dušan’s has a piece of driftwood, and Berina’s has a seashell from the Croatian coast. Mama says they’re the elements that make up human bodies. They came over from home in a suitcase. Even in winter months she’s out there, on a blanket in the snow, wearing two coats, shivering, praying, lamenting, cursing, forgiving, who knows what, because we all keep clear, Baka and Aisha standing at the kitchen window, whispering and worrying.

I keep watching her even after my cigarette is done. She can kneel completely still like a statue for half an hour, an hour, two hours, half a day; it’s amazing, freakish, like she becomes the tombstone holding them all in place. Sometimes Papa is out there with her, standing a few feet away in the shadow of a tree, a puzzled expression on his face, like he’s surprised Mama is the type to turn into stone. I think about tombstones and waiting and if I have Mama’s patience, if I can suffer like her, full time, with total commitment, not hearing or seeing any other goddamned thing, just floating without struggling on an ocean of misery and pain. But of course I can’t, I’m not strong like her,
I don’t have the guts, the loyalty, I’m the pussy who scrounges around for pleasure wherever I can get it, I’m the asshole who gets pissed off instead of sad.

‡ ‡ ‡

W
E MEET AT ROGERS ROAD AND OAKWOOD
, smoke up in the alleyway with the Jamaican kids, their skateboards, bikes, cat-calling, and chatter. Then we drive to the filthy twenty-four-hour Coffee Time on St. Clair, drink nasty coffees and inhale a thousand stale doughnuts. After that, we drive around town endlessly, parking here and there to drink and smoke our faces off and talk and kick cans around on the sidewalk. Hours go by in a haze this way and we’re pretty happy doing nothing, just existing. We drive to Zijad’s when the city is deserted, every street like Sniper Alley, making this the most fun time to try to get from A to B, just you and the cops and a hundred temptations. We fly along Dundas Street, over the highway, past the strip clubs and whores, the junkies and homeless guys like piles of rags on benches, across Yonge Street, past the Eaton Centre, through Chinatown, where we sometimes eat late at night, blinking in the bright light surrounded by drunken clubbers, back to the west end and straight up Bathurst Street to the underground parking lot of Zijad’s apartment building. We stare at ourselves in the elevator mirrors as the elevator bings up to the tenth floor. We’re vampires in the dim light, lost souls in a cruel world, with dark circles under our eyes and yellow, splotchy skin.

Inside the cramped apartment, we eat leftover potatoes and chicken stew from the ancient fridge and through the rest of
the night we talk and laugh and smoke and toke and drink some more. We don’t feel like sleeping. The sun’s first light is shining in our eyes when finally we fall asleep in Zijad’s closet-size bedroom.

‡ ‡ ‡

W
E WAKE UP TO ZIJAD’S AUNT SCREECHING AT US
from his bedroom door. Zijad scrambles up, looks confused. The sun is shining at a late-morning angle into this tiny concrete box in the sky. It seems we’re late for school.

She says, “Get out of here all of you good-for-nothings. Zijad, I don’t want to see any of these Chetniks here again. Never. Never again. Do you understand?”

Zijad just stares at her and doesn’t say anything.

“Have you no shame to bring people like this into our house? Respect your grandparents and your dead parents.

“Her,” shouts Zijad’s aunt. “And him.” She points at me and Sava. “And her.” She points at Geordie. “You are animals. Animals.”

“Hey,” I say, “we come in peace for an innocent pyjama party. Remember, we’re only sixteen years old. We were just little kids when you adults made your war and nearly got us all killed.”

The others nod earnestly. Zijad’s aunt lunges toward me over legs, arms, torsos, and crouches down to grab my wrist. Her palm is damp. I can look deep into her wrinkly cleavage and smell coffee on her breath.