Little Bastards in Springtime (26 page)

I sit up and look at the letter in Sava’s lap. There is Baka’s handwriting and I recognize it like she’s risen from the dead and is standing right in front of me. She feels so close that goddamned tears start slipping out of my goddamned eyes. I lie back down again and pull the sheet over my head.

“
June 5th, 1947. Samac—Sarajevo
,” Sava translates out loud. “
My dearest H., my love, my …
something, I can’t read that word …
my lion … I’m sitting on the wooden step of our …
um, I’m not sure …
barracks,
I think …
which were built by German POWs before the brigades arrived …
something, something.
Our workday is done and now we have time to write letters or nap or lie in the sun before dinner. The surveying for the line started in January already, done by experts. But the actual building has been going for only a month. The line is organized into 10 Sections, and it’s being run smooth as clockwork by our youth organization, you should see. Some young pioneers slipped in, only 14 years old, who act as messengers, and one boy in the Triestine Brigade apparently is only 12 …
something, something.
Thousands of foreign youth crossed our borders not to invade us but this time in solidarity to help us build our new country. The World Federation of Democratic Youth sent brigades from many countries, too many to list. The evening sun is still warm, and it’s shining splendidly on all of us as we go about our evening tasks and …
something, something …
fun and
…
something …
serious work. Every evening so far we’ve …
something …
other brigades to our camp, or gone to theirs, and there we sing songs, dance the kolo around big campfires. In the first days, our brigade busily cleaned and decorated our camp and our artists painted murals and slogans on the buildings and made five-pointed stars in red and white stones on the ground.
”

“You see,” Sava says, “she was like my granddad, all this Boy Scouts stuff made them really happy.”

I sit up, hold out my hand for the letter. “Can I read it? Please, Sava. I want to read them first, maybe there’s some secret message in there for me. Then you can read them, okay?”

Sava hands me the letter, shrugs, but I can tell that she’s hooked by those tough kids with tanned muscly bodies hauling rocks fifty years ago. “Okay, whatever. I’m going home.”

“She was a girl from a village,” I say. “You know what that meant? There was no school for her, she was illiterate. That was the whole point of the communists; they taught the peasants to read and write in the middle of battle.”

I touch the paper. It’s brittle and sand coloured, like it’s been baked at high temperatures in an oven.

“I bet she can write better than most morons at school. People here learn to read and write at age five, then are too fucking lazy to ever read and write again,” I continue, but Sava’s gone. When she leaves, she just goes. No goodbye, no see you tomorrow, just a breeze where she used to be.

I run upstairs and poke around the fridge. Mama and Aisha have been cooking all day. There are containers full of food from back home, all different dishes. Mama comes in all dressed up, looking like an exact earlier version of herself.

“Good morning!” she says.

I look at the clock on the stove. It says 3:37 p.m. There’s
some colour in Mama’s face, more than I’ve seen in a long time, and she stands a bit more like a pianist again, back straight, chin down, forearms slightly raised. You’d think she’d be even sadder now that Baka’s gone too, but I guess Baka was just a reminder of Papa and the good time before everything went to shit. Now maybe there’s less to regret and feel bad about, or some such complicated psychological thing. I look at her out of the side of my eyes as I heat ?evap?i?i in a frying pan, trying to figure out what’s going on.

“Now I’m hungry,” I say.

“There was a big dinner at Milan and Iva’s yesterday,” Mama says. “In Baka’s honour. We tried to wake you, but we couldn’t.”

Milan and Iva’s condo in North York is the last place on earth I’d want to be, with all those musty old ex-Yugos standing around the kitchen gossiping, but still I feel a sting of regret. I promised I’d be present for this one, that I’d face it head-on. I guess I shouldn’t have taken all those fucking benzos, or washed them down with vodka. I make another vow to myself on the spot to clean up, get alert, pay attention, be more of the good boy that Baka wanted.

“It was nice,” Aisha said. “There was singing, dancing. Mama played rousing marching songs for them all.”

“That’s good,” I say.

Mama and Aisha fold a tablecloth in exact mirror image, like it’s a routine they’ve practised for a show. I recognize the tablecloth. It’s one of those ethnic ones from Central America or somewhere like that, from the days before I was born when Mama and Papa worked with a committee for solidarity with a revolution, in Nicaragua or something, those times that they told us about. They had a lot of different things going on before we were born.

“Milan set Mama up,” Aisha says to me.

“What?” I say, like I don’t care too much.

“Milan set her up. There was this man, a musician.”

“At Baka’s funeral reception?”

“No,” Mama says and frowns. “There was no set-up. He’s just a friend of Milan and Iva’s.”

Aisha winks at me. “He’s from Quebec. He played the guitar and sang a French peasant song about being oppressed for Baka. Mama cried.”

Mama says, tsk, tsk, tsk, shakes her head, and I steer for the stairs because I’m not even going to imagine Mama with some random guy. What would Papa think as he lurks around our house, watching and listening and reading the newspaper?

Downstairs, I turn on the lamp, reorganize the bed, then sit up in it like a school teacher at nine on a school night. I eat the food slowly and begin to read Baka’s letters from fifty years ago. I think, what’s spelling, grammar got to do with telling a story? She’s her old chirpy self in the letters, like I remember, bouncing off the page like she’s chatting away at her kitchen table. And she’s in a surprisingly good mood describing a camp for labourers. What do they call those? A labour camp, which has quite a bad ring to it, kids building whole railroads for free with their bare hands, then singing and dancing and feeling good about it in their spare time.

I lean back against my pillows, stare at the stained ceiling tiles, think about railway ties, crushed rock, steel tracks, about dust, diesel fumes, ear-splitting noise, about the massive coordination effort, so many hundreds of thousands of kids, each with a specific task or skill. No government on earth could get me to work on a railroad, I know that for sure, I’m not a sucker, or sing songs and play games around a campfire like a freaking kid at a summer camp. But some little part of my mind feels sorry about it, that it would be kind of thrilling to have something useful to do with my time, with life. I
imagine building something real, something usable, with my breathing, sweating body, how it might feel satisfying at the end of the day. In Canada they had peasants from China built our railways across this huge country. That’s free enterprise for you, I guess, getting foreigners to do your back-breaking dirty work for pennies.

‡ ‡ ‡

I
’M LATE FOR SCHOOL, SO
I
STAND WITH THE OTHER
smokers by the front steps until Period 2. It’s a warm, sunny day for a change and all kinds of kids are outside standing and sitting in clumps, mostly sorted by colour and language like they do over here, Blacks and Asians and Portuguese and Italians all hanging with their own kind beyond the classroom walls, what they call multiculturalism, I guess. The school is huge, solid, red brick, with giant windows framed by moulded concrete, lots of trees scattered around, a Canadian flag flopping on a white pole.

When the buzzer goes, everyone shuffles inside and along the hall to their classroom. There they slouch back in their seats and try to find a comfortable way to doze off. Our room is stuffy and damp from the last group of teenagers herded together to learn some stuff in a forty-five-minute slice of time. It’s English class again, and Mr. Duff starts pacing and speaking right away—that’s what he loves to do the most.

“One of Canada’s most well-known and well-loved writers …” he begins, and I stare out the window, wishing someone would open it since it’s impossible to breathe in here. How do they expect us to learn anything without oxygen? How
do they expect our minds to open when we’re trapped in buildings against our will? I feel an old kind of panic rising but I try to focus on him, what he does with his hands when he talks, fiddling with his glasses, shoving them in his pockets, playing with a pencil. He reminds me of Papa, how he wants to put that pencil in his mouth and chew, how he cares so much about things that happen in the world and on the page. Yesterday, I gave Mr. Duff a fat present in an unmarked envelope for trying to help me, since they don’t pay teachers enough here. I asked the secretary to put it in his box, I told her it was from someone else. Now, I take a moment to imagine how his mouth opened and his eyes popped out of his head when he saw the contents, how he looked furtively over his shoulder in the faculty room, how he threw the envelope in his briefcase like it was hot to the touch, how he sweated all night deciding what to do about it. I hope he kept it.

“After she graduated from Winnipeg’s United College in 1947,” Mr. Duff sings, “she married John Fergus Laurence, who was an engineer. She travelled with her husband to Africa …”

As much as I want to support Mr. Duff’s storytelling efforts in this fucking airless room, he fades out fast and I’m back with the thousands of tanned teenage labourers sweating and grunting together in the open air on the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, singing and calling to each other in the construction zones of New Skopje and New Belgrade. I’m with them as they set explosives and shift giant boulders, as they haul pieces of track and cart thousands of pounds of gravel to where it’s needed. I’m with them at night, when they sit around large campfires and tell stories about the war, and I’m with them in their memories of war, the thousands of girls who harvested, threshed, and transported wheat, potatoes, and beans for the
fighters and civilians in the liberated zones, the tens of thousands of young men and women in the mountains who tracked the invaders’ movements, who waited to pounce, who pounced over and over again. All these kids, doing so much, risking all. And they believed that it was right, it was good. And so I ask myself again, watching Mr. Duff’s winding progress up and down the aisles of tables, what Baka thought I should be doing all those times she said,
why don’t you do some good for once.
But do something good now, here, today, by myself? How? Where? These are questions I would like answered in school, but they never come up, so no one even tries. Baka had fascists to fight, Mama and Papa had fascists to fight. What do we have, us Bastards, and the rest of these loser kids?

The chair is not comfortable at all. Sleeping here takes concentration and endurance. I thrash around, sticking my legs out to one side, then to the other. I want to scrabble at my collar, my tie, but I’m not wearing a collar or a tie. I’m just wearing a sweatshirt that says
Run for your life
on it, as a public service announcement to all who come near. Mr. Duff has a high singsongy voice that is good to daydream and fall asleep to. Sava and Zijad have managed it, they are out cold, heads down, hoods up. It was a late night last night. And I think about that, how busy we were, how little we slept, how we hunted and gathered for the greater good, how Baka wouldn’t agree, how she’s got something else in mind for me.

There were more people in the house than we expected. Three of them were giant men with meaty arms sticking out of their shoulders like extra legs, a father and his two sons. Then there was the mother, the grandparents, three teenage daughters, a male cousin, three cats, a very small ridiculous-looking dog. These are facts we read about in the
Toronto Star
this
morning. It was chaos, pandemonium, a fun challenge for us all. There we were checking out the basement stockpiled with enough electronic equipment to outfit a large and bored platoon. Three huge TVs, three VCRs, five computers, five very good quality sound systems, extra speakers, amps, a keyboard, headphones. We were dazzled, mesmerized. Then the big men came charging into the room, all flexed in white wife-beaters, massive necks holding up puffy, creased faces. They couldn’t believe their eyes: five skinny teenagers, two of them girls. So it goes.
What the fuck
, they kept screaming over and over again.
What the fuck you think you doin’?
The women wailing upstairs, and someone calling the police.