Little Bastards in Springtime (12 page)

Mama has to change my bandage every day, and when she does sometimes she cries. She tries to hide it, but I know.

T
HE SHELLS
are hitting here now. Even the air shatters apart in the blast, and the floors go soft and spongy. The foundations are too rigid, Baka says, these buildings aren’t built for war. A week ago, Mama and I dragged everything away from the windows and outer walls, we put the valuables in the bathroom. We covered the windows with Dušan’s mattress, a bookshelf, some carpets, piles of Papa’s books stacked high.

Air-raid sirens go off, like they do in wars in movies. Our ears go numb, then ring for hours. Mama shouts instructions, runs around looking for things, though everything is already packed in a big bag in the hall. Food, water, knitting, books, cards. We wait for her at the door, like Papa used to. The stairs
are crowded, everyone shuffling downward past the stairwell dwellers. We get Baka on the way and she complains. Like a herd of animals galloping off a cliff, it’s a disgrace, she says. We should be fighting back, she says. All of us, women, children, everyone.

Then there we are, in the basement with all the same people, some freaked-out mice, and a few long-tailed rats. Berina sleeps in Mama’s lap, and Aisha hums a song that has no end. It’s dark, but we have flashlights and small lamps and people murmur, sigh, wonder how long we have to stay. I can feel them moving around the room, I can feel them trying to get comfortable, rummaging around in their bags, turning pages of books. When the building shudders and shakes, the murmuring stops, and everyone waits for the plaster to come down in big chunks and suffocate us all.

Baka sings a song. Some old people join in. They know all the words. Others grumble, old communist stuff, see where that got us. But Baka enjoys herself. She remembers this, huddling together in the dark, waiting for one violent thing or another to happen, waiting to spring into action. “If our Joza could only see us now,” she tells them. “You should all think about how we’ve let him down, this man who fought so hard for our better selves. When I was very young I walked into the mountain forests to join our righteous cause. The camp was a peasant farm. There was a barnyard, several tall hay cones, a stone farmhouse to the left, a wooden barn and several smaller sheds to the right. I saw the farmer leaning in the doorway of one of them, his anxious eyes on the road; he could have been one of my uncles, one of my neighbours. I knew his wife and children were in there, waiting for their uninvited guests to leave. Fifteen soldiers were squeezed tightly into the kitchen, thirteen men, two women,
each talking loudly over the others. Propped up next to each was a rifle, different from the guns I had seen hunters carrying in the village. All at once, all present turned, looked at me, raised their mugs and shouted, ‘Welcome, Partizanka!’”

The people in the basement aren’t that impressed with this story, some turn their heads away and pretend they can’t hear. They know it as well as I do from their parents own lives, or from their grandparents, and they’re too freaked out about being stuck here in this fucked-up present situation to figure out why she’s telling it, what it can possibly mean now. Baka has a windup lamp, packs of cards, knitting, sewing, some old engineering magazines, lots of candles. She’s brought a whole suitcase of stuff, a blanket, some pillows, extra clothes, bread, cheese, her old knife from the war. She says she’s not going to rush up and down those stairs every time they throw a grenade in our direction. She sits on a pillow with her legs stretched in front of her, a plate on her lap, like she’s at a picnic on the beach. I sit next to her, and when I feel like screaming and panting, when it’s hard to breathe, when the dark edges of the room press in on me, she reaches over and holds my hand. Just before sleep pulls me out of the basement, out of the city, carries me high up to snowy mountain peaks where there are no people, no words, no stories, no booming, only clouds, birds of prey, fierce winds, I feel happy that Baka is mine.

T
HE WAR
just keeps on going and all the adults are somehow shocked about that. Nothing gets better, everything gets worse. And it feels like there are no more days, weeks, or months, just flat time passing, passing, passing, and bad things happening, one after the other, and everyone talking about a siege, about
other cities that went through it, all the terrible things you have to do to survive. The twins and I are staying in the basement to be with Baka. She won’t come up ever, even when it’s quiet, when they’re concentrating on shelling other parts of town. She likes it down here, it’s like being in a cave in the forest, or a dugout, or a well-made trench. Much better than being in a concrete box way up in the air, she says, like a sitting duck, like an easy mark, like an idiot who’s lost the will to live. But the truth is, going up and down the stairs gets her wheezing, and she has to stop to catch her breath, and she wonders what’s wrong with her soldier body, why it’s betraying her with weakness, why she gets dizzy and feels pain in her chest and arms and head.

And Mama has stopped coming down, she says it’s ridiculous, walking every night into your own grave. What if everything catches on fire, she asks. Then we’ll roast to death like lambs on a spit, like potatoes in an oven. And what if the ceiling collapses. We’ll all be crushed to death like cockroaches hiding from the light. Baka sends me upstairs sometimes to keep Mama company, so I sit on a chair or lie sleeping on the floor in the hallway of our dark jumbled apartment where it’s safest, while Mama practises non-stop for the Shostakovich recital. She’s the only performer left. Two escaped the city. One was wounded. One is dead.

Both places make me think of prison and people who are caged for years, looking out of small windows at the sky, a few treetops, dreaming about their old life.

Asleep or awake, we’re thinking of food, the feasts we had before, the weird meals we’ll have today, made from old stuff from Baka’s apartment, random things Mama gets from the empty markets with Deutsche Marks she saved in her concert
suitcase. Asleep or awake, we’re floating in an ocean of dead air. Like in an underwater dream, there is no oxygen, but we do not die. We open our mouths like fish, and we keep on existing.

‡ ‡ ‡

M
AMA IS TELLING US THAT PAPA IS DEAD. SHE’S
sitting on the chair trying to light a cigarette, the three of us lined up on the couch in front of her. She looks like someone I don’t know, so skinny, with bony hands that shake. What I notice is how bright the cloudy sky is beyond the dirty, broken windows. So bright I have to squint and shield my eyes with my hand. I notice that the old camera Papa was fiddling with is still on the coffee table, that his coat is still hanging on the back of the door, that the ashtray he stole from the Holiday Inn is still on the coffee table. I notice that the building is shaking, that Aisha and Berina are crying. I watch as fine dust seeps down from the ceiling.

Mama’s not finished. “And Dušan is missing,” she says. “Not dead, but missing.”

My arms and legs won’t move, like they’re someone else’s, and I feel very tired, and my stomach wound hurts. I want to slide down onto the floor and go to sleep right here in front of them all. I stare at Mama, waiting for her to do or say something more, or go away. But she can’t get off her chair. She too wants to lie down on the floor, I know, I can see it in her eyes. Lie down and close her eyes and never get up again.

I can’t think about Papa. “Dušan is missing? What does that mean?” I say. Dušan has always been everywhere I’ve been, listening to his music, stinking up his room with smoke, guffawing
on the phone with his friends. The way he used to shove his dirty clothes under his bed, smell his fingers compulsively, eat ten pieces of toast in one go, with butter and jam, or cheese and peppers. He’s too unimportant to be missing.

“They just don’t know where he is.”

“Why is he dead?” Aisha asks.

“He’s not dead, he’s missing.” Mama’s voice is a whisper.

“Papa,” Aisha says. “I mean Papa.”

“He was killed on the front. There will be a funeral on the hill.”

“What hill? Where?” I ask. We all stare at Mama, but she can’t seem to say more.

“Did it hurt?” Aisha asks.

Berina sits slumped over, fiddling with her fingers, as though she’s bored, as though she’s not heard a single word.

But Papa is not dead, he’s in the room. I can feel his presence, tight, tense, wound-up, his big body always moving, legs jittering like springs, arms like wild branches in a high wind, hands playing with anything that happens to be sitting in front of him. Mama telling him to stop. The salt shaker, the butter dish, knives, forks, spoons, jar lids, jars, spinning them around on napkins, clinking them against each other. I can see the shape of his fingernails. They are round and even. His fingers are thin and long, but strong. He can open cans, glass jars, bottles, no matter how tightly shut they are. He fixes mechanical objects, like the blender, the DustBuster, the camera. He takes them apart to see how they work.

“When are they coming back?” Aisha asks. Mama is trying to get up from the chair.

“We don’t know when Dušan is coming back,” she says. “We just don’t know.”

“Maybe tomorrow?” Aisha asks.

“Yes, maybe tomorrow, but maybe also not till the next day. Or next week. We have to be patient.” Her voice is just breath now.

Mama gets up from the chair, then stands in the middle of the room. We watch her. She stands there for a long time, looking at nothing. Then she walks to her room. I hear the bed creak.

We don’t move. We sit on the couch. After a while I notice that the girls are asleep, their arms intertwined, their eyeballs moving behind their eyelids. And I remember that beside them, it’s just me, and I’m meant to be Dušan, to look after things, and I wonder what he would do in this moment, but the answer isn’t clear. He never had to do that much around here, he was just a regular teenage kid. So I ask Papa what I should do and he says,
cover the girls with a blanket and go and see how Mama is.
So I find a blanket for the girls and then I go into Mama and Papa’s dim bedroom and there is Mama lying on the bed, very still, a scarf over her face. I get on the bed and curl up against her and try to keep her warm.

T
HE SCAB
on my belly itches like crazy. Sometimes I spend whole mornings scratching it, very lightly at first, and then sometimes harder. When I’m upstairs, Mama doesn’t nag me to stop, she doesn’t notice, her eyes don’t see and her ears don’t hear ordinary things anymore. In the basement, Baka searches through her suitcase for a soothing ointment, but she never finds one.

Upstairs, I stand for hours by the covered window and look through a crack. All I see is dirty grey sky, puffs of smoke here and there, the place where a shell landed in the fourth floor in
the opposite building. A bed, a wardrobe, some flapping clothing, it’s all in the open for everyone to see. I try to think about nothing, I try to keep my mind high up in the sky somewhere, with clouds and birds and a vast open view, but it always circles around closer and closer to the place where Papa lies dead. When I’m just above him, I hover there on currents of nightmarish feelings, staring at his body until it stops looking like anything I recognize, until it’s just another lump of rubble in the wreckage.

I’ve read all the books in the apartment that I can understand, and in other people’s apartments too. There are no strangers’ voices or musicians in our rooms anymore, no radio, no television, no singers, or famous pianists. Even when the electricity works, Mama doesn’t play records or tapes, doesn’t want to hear the news. She shouts, no, when I try to turn something on. She says, turn it off, leave me alone. I guess she likes silence better now, the silence of guns and shells. I wander along the hallway of every floor of our building, working my way from top to bottom, hunting for smells of cooking, picking through ruined apartments. I carve my name over and over again in the plaster of the stairwell. I gouge round hollows that look like shrapnel craters and bullet holes.

In our apartment, when Mama’s gone out for food, I go through piles of our stuff that used to look so good arranged on bookshelves, hanging on walls, everything in its right place. In Papa’s study, I sit on the floor and pick up one thing after the other just to hold it and touch it. Things that used to be on his desk. A notebook, his pencil holder, his small Buddha carved from stone, his carved wooden box with the little frog wearing a crown on top, his stapler, erasers, hole-puncher, pencil sharpener. The four perfect seashells, each a little bigger than the
others, just like us, that we found on the beach of Istria and gave to him. The big map that used to be on the wall behind his desk. It has the whole world on it and Papa used to give me cities to find when I was bored and he was busy writing, cities and rivers and seas and mountain ranges. Sometimes he forgot I was there because he had to concentrate, and sometimes he forgot he had to concentrate and told me about history. How the Ottomans took over half of our country before it was a country, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire took over the other half. How we, the South Slavs, struggled for hundreds of years to kick out invaders and imperialists, how we had to get together to do that. How imperialism starts wars.

I take his fancy new laptop that cost a fortune from its case, take a notebook, a pencil, one of the books from the windowsill, and place them all on his dusty desk, standing crooked in one corner. I find him an ashtray, I get him a mug from the kitchen. I drag his chair across the room to the desk and he’s all set up to work. He says,
where are the drawings you kids made, I taped them all on the wall, those are what I want to see the most.
And I know where they are. Mama took them down and put them with Papa’s tower of papers as high as my chin in the closet. She took everything off the walls, for some reason, and off the shelves, the tables, all surfaces of our home.

It’s a thick stack of drawings, and I bring them to Papa, and he lays them out one next to the other on his desk and on the floor around it.
That’s better
, he says.