Little Bastards in Springtime (3 page)

“I wouldn’t go anywhere. Sarajevo is our home,” I say. “Only cowards leave when they’re scared.”

“I’m not scared.” Ujak Luka gulps from his glass, then burps into his hand. “I’m disgusted. It’s so ugly, do you understand, Jevrem? It’s the ugliest way humans can behave, and it’s all been orchestrated for cynical ends. My people against your people, acting in frightened herds like animals. Have you ever asked yourself why you haven’t seen your other grandparents these past months? Why your other uncles don’t drop by and surprise you with chocolate anymore? Why you don’t go to Ilidža for visits?”

I think about it for a moment. He’s right, we haven’t been over for Sunday lunch in ages.

“We used to visit them all the time,” I say. “Stric Ivan and Stric Obrad are fun guys, big guys, not like you. They’re much younger than Papa. They throw me around and play soccer with us in the backyard. They’re soccer-crazy, it’s their religion.
They come to watch me play in my school league.”

Ujak Luka smiles, nods. “Yes, big guys, fun guys. But they’re on the other side now, my smart little dude. Let’s see how much fun that turns out to be. Doomsday has been set in motion by the powers that be. I think that sometimes you just have to pull yourself out of the muck, there’s nothing else to do.”

Mama clicks over on her heels, sits on the armrest. “Luka, stop scaring Jevrem,” she says. “Please. Jevrem, it’s time you and the twins go to bed. Who’s that girl with you, Luka? I’ve never met her before. And why haven’t you visited Mama this month?”

I actually want to go to bed for once. They’re all giving me a headache.

“Izetbegovi? stole the presidency,” someone calls out. “We’re standing between Islamic fundamentalism and Western imperialism.”

I give Ujak Luka a hug. “Good night,” I say. He squeezes me against his chest for ages, until I can’t breathe.

“I love you too, Jevrem. Keep your distance from the zombies.” His eyes are even redder than before. “If we see each other again it means the fascists haven’t won. I hope we see each other again.”

I go to Papa and tap him on the arm. “Divide and conquer always works,” he’s trumpeting. “What is it, Jevrem?”

“Good night,” I say.

Papa grabs my head and pulls it against his chest. “The end-game of the Cold War. As soon as they dismantle us, everything will be owned by multinationals, with the lowest wages in Europe as our reward.” His words are thunder in my ear, rumbling to the beat of his heart.

“Hey,” I mumble into his shirt.

“Good night, Jevrem.” Papa gives me a loud kiss on the cheek. “Where are the twins?” He looks around for them, but absent-mindedly. He doesn’t care about bedtimes tonight.

I know where they are. They’re in the kitchen sneaking sweets. I saw them go in with their trays and innocent expressions. They’ll eat sugar out of the bowl if that’s all there is.

Rachmaninov is still rattling the windows. And Mama is rushing around like crazy, using that strange, tense, happy voice of hers, talking to everyone for half a second. But she looks so beautiful in that silk dress, her red lips, her sweeping hair and glittering eyes, smelling so sweet of lilies. When the record ends, she sits down and plays the piano. More Rachmaninov.

“This music is universal,” she cries, her fingers going wild on the keys.

“It’s so German,” says someone. There is loud laughter.

“This isn’t German, you ignoramus,” says Mama, “it’s French.”

“No,” says someone else, “it’s Jewish.”

“That’s ridiculous,” says Mama, “he wrote this as a Frenchman, not as a Jew.”

“Maybe he wrote it as a European?”

“Or a man.”

“Or a romantic.”

“Or a revolutionary.”

“Or an internationalist.”

“Or a lover.”

They go on and on, with big bursts of laughter. Adults think they’re so clever. Nerds. Then there’s a moment when no one talks, they just stare into the air listening to Mama’s playing.

“Jevrem, put the twins to bed,” Mama calls over her own notes with her singsongy mother-voice.

I go to the kitchen and see the twins are spooning Nutella out of a jar.

“We have to go to bed,” I say. “And no, you can’t take the jar with you.”

They scurry ahead of me, giggling into each other’s hair. In their bedroom, they just stand and look up at me with their big eyes. I can see that Aisha has snuck something from the kitchen under her shirt. I don’t search her. They should have whatever it is. They were stuck with old Safeta all day long while we got to go to the march.

“Put your pyjamas on and go to sleep,” I say.

“What about a story?” they ask with one breath.

But I shut the door and go to my room, I’m not in the mood for a story, for all their little questions. I fall onto my bed and put the pillow over my head.

When I wake it’s dark outside. The party’s still going, but it’s quieter now. Most people have gone home. Now, someone is reading from a book or magazine. It sounds like poetry.

“… gashes across the landscape … red earth exposed, like a wound … who sees the sly farmers of disunity? …”

They’ll probably go all night with that kind of thing. I stare out of the window at the small square of night sky that glows with reflected light from the city.

M
AMA
has a hangover. “What a depressing day,” she moans. Drizzle is spraying the window with tiny droplets. She plays scales in her nightgown every morning.

Papa is in his office. He’s trying to get his latest article into a foreign magazine.

“But the spring flowers love this weather,” I say, hopefully.
That’s what she usually says.

“What?” Mama barks.

“The spring flowers …” But Mama isn’t listening.

“But they don’t want to hear from actual Yugoslavs on the ground.” Papa is talking loudly into the phone in his office, a pencil in his mouth. He does that, he chews pencils all the time. “No, that would be too much information. That would be too much like real journalism. They say it to my face. Too convoluted, your piece. Too complex, too technical, readers can’t follow. They want a dramatic narrative, they want simple-minded theology. Good against evil.”

Papa can get so mad at the stupidity in this world that his face turns purple and the veins in his neck bulge out. Maybe I’ll be a journalist like he is when I’m old enough. Then I’ll know what’s going on too. I go into the kitchen and Dušan is there. His eyes are little slits, his face all swollen from sleep. He’s got the cereal box and empties it slowly into a bowl right in front of my face.

“You pig,” I say.

He sniggers. “Here, eat the box, it’s good for you. Extra fibre.”

“Dušan, give me some cereal.”

Dušan holds the bowl above my head. “Sure, take what you can.”

“
Dušan.
”

“Enough,” shouts Mama from the living room. “No fighting in this house. There’s enough of it outside.”

Dušan slouches to the living room and eats on the couch. Mama stumbles to the bedroom to get dressed. Instead of cereal, I make toast with jam, two slices. Then I throw myself on the armchair next to the couch and listen to the radio on my
Walkman while I eat. It’s the usual music that’s everywhere, evil ‘80s technopop, that’s what Dušan calls it, making vomiting sounds. But it’s better than the horrible folky polka music the old people love.

A whole Saturday stretches in front of me. I can’t decide what to do. There’s always soccer in the yard, which is usually the most fun. Pero, next door, wants to play a game of chess. But even though it’s morning, I feel very tired. I can hardly sit up.

Mama returns, sits at the piano, breathes deeply.

“I’m practising all day. Dušan and Jevrem, go outside and play with your friends. Aisha and Berina, be very quiet in your room.”

Play with my friends
, Dušan mouths, rolling his eyes. Punks like him don’t play with their friends. They lie around, drink their faces off, smoke, get high, listen to Nirvana or whatever.

I’d rather lie on the couch and stare out the window, dream about the summer, my favourite season. I love hot sunshine and swimming in rivers and lakes. But I search for my shoes without complaining. Mama and Papa aren’t normal these days, they’re like crazy people, talking too fast, too loud, fidgeting, pacing the hallway, mumbling under their breath, shutting themselves in the bedroom, the office, whispering fights they think we can’t hear, snapping at us kids before we’ve even done anything wrong.

W
E’RE
all in the courtyard. Everyone’s feeling lazy and trying to decide what to do. Cena, Nezira, Zakir, and Pero sit on the half-wall that juts out from our building. I say “Let’s play a game,” but nobody moves. I miss my practices, I miss the
league. I kick the ball against the wall over and over again, trying to hit the same place with the same force every time. I’m a good striker. My thigh muscles have the same shape as the professionals’, just smaller.

“You kick like a girl,” says Pero.

I hold the ball in my hands, take a good look at Pero, then shoot really hard right at his chest. He catches the ball, teeters, then falls backwards off the wall. There’s a thump, then a gasp, then swearing.

“You little bastard,” he shouts. “That hurt.”

Zakir laughs, then falls backwards too. “Ow,” he whines, “ow, I’m hurt.” Pero punches him, then they’re rolling around wrestling, swearing, grunting.

Cena and Nezira cheer them on. Their voices are high, like a song, like foxes barking in a pine forest. They have the same straight wheat-coloured hair with a metallic glint. Dry, flyaway. I know what their hair smells like. Like outdoors, like charcoal-grey sky.

We hear thunder and look upwards, but the sky is clear blue.

M
AMA
and Papa come back from another demonstration. They’re strangely quiet this time. I think they’re really scared, I can see it in their faces, in the way they move around, bumping into things, standing for no reason in the kitchen or living room, like they’ve forgotten what a day is for. I wasn’t allowed to go to this one even though I whined and begged. But Dušan went with a bunch of his friends—it’s not fair, he gets all the action. He’s still not back.

While they were gone, I leaned over the balcony railing, trying to see what was going on, but our building is too far
away. I could hear pops and loud bangs, and other new sounds that must be weapons, guns and artillery. Every now and then, Baka came out and stood behind me muttering, I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. I wanted to sneak out of the apartment with my bike and go all over the place like I always do, me and the others, flying down the steep narrow streets like little thunderbolts, even down the ones with stairs, bumping all the way, our heads coming loose on their stems and all our bones jangling together like sticks in a sack. We weave around all the walking people, their shopping bags and baby strollers, past the shops, their awnings and curved windows, the market stands with fruits and vegetables, slaloming the tables and chairs of the cafés, old men shouting at us, crazy boys, go home!

“The war’s started,” Papa says. He lights another cigarette. He has one smouldering away in every ashtray in the house. “Fifty-one years to the month since the Nazis invaded, forty-seven years to the month since we kicked them out, sacrificing a whole generation in the process. And for what?” He grasps his head and shakes it.

“Shh,” says Mama. “Please, Lazar. The children.” She sits on the chair in the hallway that no one ever uses. “Things can still be resolved.”

“They shot real guns at us.” Papa isn’t listening to her. “As thousands of us were chanting,
Put down your arms.
The Chetniks are back. People were killed.
Killed.
On the bridge.”

Mama is shivering; she’s cold from being outside in the street for so long. I go to the bathroom and run her a bath, boiling hot the way she likes it.

“You can’t take a country apart with all this fear and fascist rhetoric around. What are the Germans and Americans thinking, it’s total insanity. Civil war was sure to follow—did they
want
that?” Papa holds a bottle of vodka. He pours big slugs into a glass, then hurls them into his mouth.

I’m not worried. I’ve heard a million stories about war. It makes life interesting, tests your courage and your cleverness, and you get to defeat the enemy. When Baka was a partisan, fighting the Nazi and Italian invaders during World War Two, they also fought the bad Serbs called Chetniks and the bad Croats called Ustasha. That’s the thing about the partisans, they were a mix of everyone, and they fought and vanquished the internal and external enemy all at the same time. Now the leaders tell us we should forget what we did together and stick with our own people, Catholic, Orthodox, or Muslim. A while ago kids at school started asking each other that new strange question, What are you? Because we really didn’t know. But lots of people don’t have a religion and are a mix of everything, like us. What should they say? I say what Papa tells me to say: I’m a boy. Anyway, I’m not scared. Adults are always getting upset about the news.

But there’s something funny about Mama’s face when she comes out of the bath. She has this blank terror look, the sort of look people get in scary movies when it’s nighttime and they’ve just seen a face staring in the window at them. And they live in an apartment building like ours, ten floors up.

‡ ‡ ‡

B
OSNIA IS NOW INDEPENDENT, THAT’S WHAT
everyone is saying. The EC recognized us as a country yesterday, and the Americans today, so it must be true. But nothing’s changed as far as I can see. There are forests covering
the hills surrounding the city. Often they’re filled with fog. It’s strange how fog makes sounds quieter and sharper at the same time. Branches crack, birds twitter, water drips, animals call out to each other. In April, the forest floor is covered with tiny flowers, ferns, mosses, fungi, shoots of all kinds. It smells delicious, like the first day of the world.

Last summer, we all went on vacation up in the mountain forest. It’s like a fairy tale up there. Real life goes away and you walk forever along a path looking for things that are invisible. I saw ancient baba yagas, trolls, fairies, talking wolves. They all waved to me as I passed by. And partisans, lots of partisans, quietly marching in single file, guns over their shoulders, just like in Baka’s stories. She told me about the child guides from the local villages who led the partisans along the mountain pathways. It was probably fun for them, all that adventure, running around the forest, doing what they wanted, looking after themselves, feeling so useful. Without them, the partisans couldn’t fight, because those children knew about enemy positions and manoeuvres; they could lead whole units to perfect hiding and attacking places and then go back to their villages innocently, carrying school books and doing their chores and things like that. They knew those mountain forests like the back of their little child hands.