Little Bastards in Springtime (29 page)

I dump another load of Ajax into the crisper, close my eyes and scrub wildly.

Sava is at my shoulder. “For Christ’s sake, look at you. Get a grip. We got her the food. That’s enough.”

I rinse the crisper, careful not to let the water splash.

“There’s more to do,” I say, eyeing the one bowl, the one pot, the one spoon, all resting primly in the dish rack. They’re all crusty with a thousand ancient meals.

“We’re going,” says Sava.

“What’s going on? Who is there?”

The voice comes from the darkness upstairs. Sava and I stare at each other.

“Who is there? Get out of my house, you bad people. Who’s there?”

The voice has a piercing overtone, yet it’s also unusually low and gravelly. The old lady also has a big-ass European accent of some kind. She sounds like a Nazi concentration camp guard from an American 1950s war movie. I wait for her to start barking commands and laughing fiendishly, but instead, metal
springs strain and squeak. She’s right above us, and she’s getting out of bed.

“I will call the police,” she wails. We hear unsteady shuffling footsteps, floorboards straining.

Sava laughs. This is getting more interesting for her now. I put the crisper back in the fridge. Then I fill the sink with hot water and put the dishes to soak, place the milk, bread, butter, brick of cheese, cold cuts, mayo, pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, and jam that we bought at Dominion on the top shelf of the fridge. I stare at the arrangement, then move the milk to the other side so it can all be viewed more easily in one glance.

Sava rolls her eyes. “We have to go, Andric, you’ve gone fucking insane. She may have a phone up there.”

“She doesn’t have a phone at all,” I say.

I unpack the rest of the grocery bags, leaving the cans of cat food in four neat rows on the counter. Then I grab the garbage bag, turn off the kitchen light, and creep toward the front door.

The old lady is at the top of the stairs, peering down. She’s a baggy ghost figure with her nightgown or something ballooning around her like a parachute during landing. Her hair, like sheep’s wool, so fine, so wispy, is sticking out in all directions. She’s gasping and sobbing now. “I will call the police. I will. You will not get away with this, no you won’t.”

I stop at the bottom of the stairs.

Sava punches me in the arm, grabs my sleeve, starts pulling me out. “C’mon, goddammit, let’s go.”

I want to go upstairs and reassure the woman, maybe put her back to bed. I know how to deal with old ladies, I think.

The yard looks much better, everything tidied up. The garbage can is no longer overflowing, and next to it are two full garbage bags, to which I add mine, lining it up exactly.

‡

W
E GO
back in a few days and put the garbage out on the curb. We bring pots of geraniums we’ve taken from a gardening centre and arrange them on the weathered front porch. Zijad and Geordie reinforce the porch railings with brackets and screws, Sava replaces a soft tread on the front stairs. Inside the mouldering, smelly living room crammed to the ceiling with ancient stuff, I find a rocking chair that makes my heart sing. Every old lady should be able to sit on her porch, rocking gently, contemplating flowers, clouds, birds, the past, neighbours walking by, or whatever they like to contemplate.

The others wait by the car, smoking, kicking stones, staring at the full moon flying like a dolphin through thick, foaming clouds. It starts to rain. I slink through the house room by room and find fancy stuff from fancy days long gone. It’s in boxes, cupboards, closets, in amongst mouse droppings and dust as deep as snow. Silverware, china, linen tablecloths, napkins, crystal. A side table holds ancient implements I don’t recognize for foods I’ve never seen. I set up her table for her, which has been leaning separated from its legs, up against a wall for who knows how long. I lay the table for afternoon coffee and cake, the kind my aunties and grandmothers liked in the middle of the afternoon. Then I think, who wants to eat coffee and cake alone? And there is Papa standing in the archway between the dining room and living room, a newspaper tucked under one arm, staring at me with a little smile on his face.
This is an interesting approach to life’s difficult questions, Jevrem
, he says.
Highly unusual, highly suspect, but definitely interesting, definitely creative and proactive. You get points for being literal-minded.
Whatever, I say. Look at this huge silver
tray. It’s so ornate, and it’s still pretty shiny. Nice life this lady had when life was good. There’s no reason she can’t get some of that back, with a little help from her friends, don’t you think? Oh wait, she doesn’t have any friends, that’s the thing. But Papa doesn’t comment. He turns and rifles through an open box.

By the time I step out the front door into pouring rain, I’ve made up my mind. This old lady needs some people. I’m going to call Social Services or whatever they’re called. I see a gossipy gang of crones in that dining room exchanging war stories and knitting baby blankets for orphans in far-off places, or whatever it is old ladies like to do. But Sava and the others don’t want to hear about it. They’re sullen and insist on holding up a gas station for drinks, chips, gum, cigarettes, on the way home, which pisses me off, as we sneak through Toronto’s empty, tidy streets waiting for dawn.

A
T HOME,
Sava and I creep in the side entrance and down to my room. Thunderous piano music crashes through the ceiling from above. I check my watch. Mama is up again at 4 a.m. She’s working up her repertoire. The Romantics. Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Liszt, Scriabin. Now that Baka is not sleeping next to the living room, Mama says she can audition again. I don’t see what Baka has to do with it, since she loved to listen to Mama play, but some story in Mama’s mind tells her that this, this final death, has freed her, and so she plays all day long and through the night. No more visitors, no more Sunday dinners, no more dragging herself around pretending ordinary life is okay but hating every minute of it. “Creativity,” says Mama, “is all we really have, in the end, in
the final instant, when everything else has passed. And it is everything, it is the world.”

“How the hell are we going to sleep through this?” Sava asks, falling onto the bed.

I run upstairs. “Mama,” I say. Only the small lamp is on, so Mama is playing in shadows. “Mama.” I walk into the living room and stand right next to her. Her eyes are closed. “Mama,” I say. But she doesn’t respond, she’s listening for something other than a human voice.

I go to Aisha’s room and carefully open the door. I wonder how she deals with the all-night practising. By the night-light I can see that she’s squeezed herself into one side of the single bed, as she always does, leaving space for Berina. I see everything neatly laid out for the morning, clothes, knapsack, stack of books, violin, music bag, everything on her desk lined up at right angles. I walk right up close to her, listen to her slow, steady breathing, watch her chest rising and falling. Then I see her trick. She’s wearing earplugs, there’s a box of them on her night table.

Downstairs, the window is open. The room smells of spring mud, stormy lakewater, wind that’s travelled a thousand miles over thawing farmland. I sit on the chair, which is uncomfortable, and stare at Sava. I still want to strangle her, shake her until she breaks, until she looks at me and says,
Jevrem, come closer, what are you waiting for?
Instead she says, “You’re both fucking nuts. Your mom quit her cleaning job, didn’t she? And you’ve lost it and aren’t bringing anything in either. How are you going to survive? What about Aisha?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll look after her and Aisha, and honour Baka’s last words to me.”

“Oh please, Jevrem. There were no last words. There just weren’t any. Why do you keep lying about that?”

I throw earplugs at her and she stuffs them in her ears and crawls under the quilt. I stare out of the window, which is a square of black. In a couple of hours the sky will lighten suddenly to neon blue, and yet another day will be upon us. Why? For what purpose? Maybe there was transcendental telepathy between Baka and me, because last words are definitely ricocheting around in my skull, causing quite a bit of damage. Last words that I can’t quite decipher, that just won’t leave me alone.

I perch on the torture chair for a long time, thinking, smoking, drinking my face off, watching Sava sleep. I’m exhausted, but it’d be far more torturous to get into bed with her. After our last fight about it, Sava didn’t move back to her own bed, to her own house. I don’t know what she wants me to do, but I’m done with that bullshit, lying there with my pathetic heart pumping blood like a motherfucker, my poor lonely peripheries itching to make a move. Finally I get up, grab my coat, and sway out of the house.

In Cedarvale Park, trees weave by me like drunken dancers. I have no idea what they are, maple, ash, birch, fir, pine, poplar, walnut, mulberry. Wood and leaves, roots and branches. The forest floor bounces and ducks as well, and maybe I’m dancing too, because my breathing is a kind of ugly rasping and wheezing. I stagger my way up a steep hill, a heavy pack on my back, a rifle at my side, a grenade on my belt, a knife in my boot. Baka, I say, tell me what it feels like to be as purposeful as a soldier of resistance and revolution. But she’s not talking to me now, and I don’t find a pine tree that will keep me warm through the night, like she did when she was my age. After an hour, my dark thoughts whither and die in the blustery cold and I leave
the park and walk the pre-dawn streets making random turns, edging closer to home and my bed.

On Bloor Street, I pass the old church that’s never open, the Shoppers Drug Mart that’s never closed. I stop in front of the second-hand bookstore and peer in the window. Dusty coffee-table books on display. Orchids. Turkey. Poor People. Chagall. Eastern-Orthodox domes. World War Two, still the most popular. And, of course, Sarajevo. Sarajevo happy, Sarajevo sad, and Sarajevo roses, all different shapes, the spray of blood on ancient stone. I think about gunshots, pedestrians running, the athletic ones sprinting like Olympians to live another day. I turn and there, a long way ahead of me, is Papa striding quickly toward Bathurst, his shoulders hunched, his hands in his pockets. He hears my footsteps, he turns, he waves. Then he disappears into a doorway.

At home, my feet aching, I crawl into bed next to Sava. She’s a million miles away in another galaxy of existence, I can tell by her breathing, but her body is here, warm, heavy, unmoving. I lie an inch from her, suffering in ecstasy, soaking up her heat like a sand lizard at high noon.

‡ ‡ ‡

I
T’S EVENING. I SLEPT THROUGH A WHOLE DAY, MY
body glued to the place where Sava had lain. Upstairs, Mama is playing a sonata. She’s on fire, bouncing around on that piano bench like Ray Charles on speed, I can tell by the tempo. Sometimes, she and Aisha play together and I stop to listen on the way to wherever I’m going, because they sound like that Ashkenazy and Perlman record we had, they sound like
a freaking concert at Carnegie Hall. Aisha in her new wardrobe of performance clothes, our family’s little ambassador, winning competitions, acing her classes, going on a trip to the freaking UN in New York City.

Meanwhile, in my subterranean world, Zijad is in pill-land, slumped against the wall. We watch as his eyes flutter and his head dangles next to his shoulder like it’s about to fall off. Madzid is playing a game on his new computer, recently liberated, chewing his lips, scratching his neck, rubbing his bloodshot eyes until they’re puffy slits. We sit around all evening, smoking, sleeping, not saying much. We start drinking coffee at around midnight and creep out of the house at 2 a.m. It’s raining again. Icy, sleeting rain. One day, hot sunshiny weather will appear to sooth our souls or maybe we’re cursed to live in the butt-end of winter forever, what they call spring here, as a punishment for our terrible sins. We hop into Geordie’s car, but Sava takes the wheel.

Tonight we’re after a man. Old, one shoulder higher than the other, yellow, waxy face. An ugly, insecure, confrontational look to him. The others are joining in because there promises to be some action, but once again I don’t feel much joy from them, not much enthusiasm at all. And Papa says to me,
you may very well be entering that part of the life journey that comes just before getting totally lost.

Sava says, “You’re targeting too many from your own neighbourhood, Andric.”

I ignore her. Of course, I think, that’s where I watch them, that’s where I see them living their lives.

“This guy,” I say, “leaves that shitty bar on the corner, where the Pizza Pizza is. Bad beer, bad lighting, bad sound, fucked-up TV. So, what’s the draw? Lots of other men like him. They talk and talk. About what? Nothing good, I guarantee that. Nothing fucking uplifting.”

“So, we’re getting him for being a stupid ass from some nasty primitive backwater?” Madzid asks.

Sava is shaking her head, rolling her eyes. She says, “There is this house I saw over by Mount Pleasant and Eglinton. Lots of big packaging in the recycling. You know, electronics, furniture, appliances. Just moved in. Just married. Wedding gifts, lots of stuff they didn’t even pay for. Perfect.”

“This guy,” I say, “I don’t like the way his wife walks ten steps behind him, carries all the groceries home from the store. He stops to talk to some guy, chest stuck out, cigarette smouldering in the palm of his hand. Stops and talks for as long as he wants, his wife just standing there a few feet away, staring at the sidewalk. When he’s ready, he barks at her to follow.”

“Oh please, Andric. That’s lame, that’s none of your business.” Sava screeches around a corner. The car slides into the intersection, bucks, jerks, then straightens out. It doesn’t matter. There are few cars on the road in the early mornings, not much to crash into. But we all instinctively listen for sirens.

“Right here,” I say. “All the way down, south of St. Clair.”

Sava slows. We look into a bar with third-world lighting. It’s empty.

“I’m going in,” I say. My blood is lava exploding in fiery cascades behind my eyeballs. I feel primed to do a bit of good. I describe the man to the bartender, who sighs and points vaguely at the street. “Left about five minutes ago.”