Little Bastards in Springtime (8 page)

After lunch, I think about practising the piano. Mama mentions it every now and then, and I try, but the noise of guns and shells outside makes me lose the feel of the keys. Instead, I take the elevator to the top floor, then walk along each hallway all the way down to the ground floor, keeping a mental list of where all the kids live and what they’d each be good at in a battle.

I
GO
to Baka’s apartment and knock on the door. I like to visit her. She has opinions, stories, and a weird collection of food. For years she’s been hoarding tins all over her apartment.

Baka stands at her window looking at black plumes of smoke rising slow motion in the distance. She shakes her head.

“They’re destroying all our good work,” she says. “For centuries, engineers have made a work of art of this city. It takes intelligent people years to build it all up, and idiots and vulgar imbeciles only weeks to tear it all down.”

I like to think of Baka barking orders at construction workers, a hard hat on her head. Baka bustles around her kitchen, doing dishes. She lives here alone, but she has many plants growing on her balcony and friends used to come over all the time. In the summer months she lies on the balcony in her bright yellow bathing suit. She’s a sun-worshipper, and a forest-worshipper, and a mountain-worshipper, those are the things she trusted when she was in the war. But what she worships most of all is Yugoslavia, our country. After the war, you could join a brigade and rebuild everything that was destroyed. You could build railroads and highways, subdivisions, schools, factories, city buildings. You could build them with your bare hands with thousands of other young people and spend months living together, playing sports, sitting around campfires, putting on plays, singing together in the evenings. That’s what Baka told me. Mama says the communists knew how to get work out of people back then without paying them, how to make it feel like a fun thing to do.

Baka says, “If we could just get us old partisans together, we would sort this mess out in no time. We’d clear out the dead leaves, branches, animal carcasses from the cave bunkers. We’d find our old ordnance depots. We’d choose a leader to organize us. You know, when I was very young, I walked into the mountains to join the partisans. In doing so, I made a new future for myself, it’s that simple, a whole new life. I remember the exact moment when I knew everything would be different. How I felt a tingling all through my body, like I was being anointed by life
itself. I was squatting by the roadside, my arms resting on my knees. I could see far out into the valley, a haze of green and rust punctuated by oily black smoke. I had all I needed with me: food for several days, a change of underclothing, a knife I took from the kitchen just before slipping away.”

Her hand trembles as she lifts it to her face to brush back her hair. When she walks these days, she’s unsteady sometimes, like the floor is moving under her feet. But I can still picture her scrabbling around in the underbrush preparing a bunker or charging down a hill with gun in one hand to ambush an enemy convoy. Baka is bored by my grammar homework that Papa says I have to do, school or no school. “You know how to speak, so what’s the problem?” she says. So we play cards. She likes belot and poker, I like gin rummy. Today it’s her turn. We play texas hold’em, and place our bets with the small, smooth white pebbles she collected from the beaches of Istria.

“Your djedica took me there when we were young, a few years after the war. We spent days exploring secluded coves and drinking crates of wine. The light is breathtaking there, bright, warm, clear. Beautiful like you can’t imagine. He said he’d show me paradise, and he didn’t break his promise.”

“I know,” I say. “Remember, we were there last year.” Hot sun, white houses, bright blue water, fishing boats, ice cream, pizza.

Baka bets hard, never folds. She loses more than she wins, but that doesn’t matter to her. It’s toughness that matters. The westerns we watch on TV, she plays like that, eyes squinting, blank face. Scary, that look, her face rigid like she’s paralyzed, but any minute she’ll jump up and pull a huge old gun on me.

“Your djedica spoke Italian and tried to teach me, but I was a bad student. His family moved from Italy to Istria after
World War One, when Italy took it over. They were winemakers and bought a small vineyard that overlooked the Adriatic. The family did not turn fascistic when Mussolini’s army invaded during World War Two. But after the war, they still had to flee back to Italy because the Croats chased them out. They couldn’t prove their patriotism. Even a partisan hero for a son didn’t help.”

“They had to leave the vines?”

“Yes. Picked up and left it all. But Haris—Horatio is what his mother called him—he didn’t leave with them. He knew he was a true Yugoslavian, a fierce fighter for our nation. He wasn’t going to be chased anywhere by anyone. So that’s why he came here, to Sarajevo. We came together.”

I know the story. He was a city engineer, just like her. Baka gets up and goes to the kitchen. I listen to her rummaging. A shell lands somewhere north of here with a deep thudding sound. The vase on the windowsill shivers, then jumps sideways a fraction of an inch. Baka comes back with bags of chips and cookies, all opened for some other card game or visit, then carefully rolled up and sealed with a neat row of paper clips. But still everything’s stale. Baka doesn’t notice. Her taste buds disappeared in the forest during the war. Anything with fat, sugar, salt in it tastes good to her, even if it’s a hundred years old. She grabs fistfuls of chips, shoves them into her mouth. She munches, while studying her cards, glaring up at me occasionally to see what she can read on my face.

“We floated down the Krka River in a small boat, we camped in Dalmatia,” she says. “Swam in clear pools. Picnicked on the shore with bottles of delicious wine. Splashed in the clear water, looking for shells. During the days we dove into waterfalls, lay on rocks in the hot sun, hiked hand in hand along the magnificent
coast. He was courting me, you see, your djedica. He paid so much attention to me, it was a dream. I knew life would be wonderful after the war, Tito building our great country up from the ashes, a handsome, dashing man to love me, a beautiful city to call our own. But it was better than wonderful, it was heaven. Studying all day long, evenings with friends, drinking and discussing the future late into the night. And to think my parents were going to force me to marry an ugly old man in the village before the war. And have his ten ugly babies.”

She tells stories to distract me, but I win three hands in a row. Baka finds a box of chocolates and opens it slowly in front of my nose. Each chocolate is white with age. Baka says there’s nothing wrong with them, just fat or sugar, the best parts, coming to the surface, so we eat every one of them with tea while the building rumbles and shivers around us.

“Istrian olives. Istrian oysters. Ancient coastal towns, clusters of red roofs on white buildings, small, shapely ports, schools of fishing boats. Grilled fish and truffles. Sunsets like the light of God’s eyes.” And Baka doesn’t believe in God. “Your djedica, he had the vitality and devilish wit of a prince.” And Baka doesn’t believe in princes.

I never knew the man. He died of cancer in 1981, a month before I was born.

There is a rattle of gunfire not too far away, but I can’t tell which neighbourhood. A deep rumble of shells landing farther away vibrates in my chest, and my teeth buzz like I’m getting my hair clipped. Baka cocks her head, listens, then barks, “Airport.”

“The man I loved so much now dead and gone,” she says. “And the other man I loved, too, dead and gone. But I don’t complain. 1941 to ‘81. Forty years of pure happiness and good,
hard, productive work. No one imagined that at my birth, in our poor village hut, just a ragged peasant girl.” And Baka puts her hand on her chest and sings a bit of a song, like she sometimes feels like doing. “
Arise ye workers from your slumber. Arise, ye prisoners of want.
”

“Do you know that I chose my own name? The day I chose the life I wanted to lead?”

I nod my head, yes, yes, I know, I know, you’ve told me a thousand times.

“I was very young. It wasn’t a very special name, Andjela, but it was my very own.” Baka looks at me meaningfully. “Sometimes one has to begin life again, somehow. It’s not easy, but it’s possible, always remember that.”

B
LACK SMOKE IS RISING FROM FIVE PLACES IN
the city. It billows upward slowly in tall snaking columns, way higher than the rain-filled clouds that brush their bellies against the hills. Sometimes the columns don’t seem to move at all. Papa says they’re like sculptures hanging over the apartment buildings. Like some crazy art-piece, he says, like that guy makes, the one who wraps buildings and islands.

I run down the stairs to the lobby in the early evening. The old men are standing around talking loudly. The Chetniks have captured the radio station. Or maybe they are about to capture the radio station, shut down the transmitter. Or is it the hospital? The electricity is down in some of the suburbs, no one is sure which ones, and there are rumours of looting. I think of Baba and Deda, then force myself not to. There are tears stored up in the back of my eyes and I don’t want them to come out. JNA soldiers are the ones who are looting, the old men say, and criminal gangs. Ordinary Sarajevans would never loot their neighbours, their own city.

Nezira, Pero, and Zakir are sitting in the stairwell. I sit down next to them.

“Three children wandered across the front line while trailing a wounded bird,” Nezira tells me, fast and breathless. “And they were raped and killed and strung up on lamp posts, dripping blood like butchered cattle. The old men just said so.”

“No, Nezira. They said they were taken prisoner and transported to a camp in Serbia,” Zakir says. “You didn’t hear right.” He has a small rubber ball and he’s bouncing it against the grubby wall.

“No, you guys weren’t listening,” Pero says. “They were returned with notes pinned to their shirts telling their parents to watch them more carefully. You see, they ran into their uncle, who’s fighting with the JNA, and he brought them home after his shift on the front and they ate a big family dinner together.”

“No, that’s not what happened,” Nezira cries, and the three of them begin to argue, as if it matters what we think. Those three kids are either dead, in a camp, or at home by now, and arguing about it won’t change anything.

I ask the old men on my way upstairs and they say each version could be God’s own truth, and each version could be a deliberate evil lie, there’s no way of knowing, that’s the problem with this cursed war. You’ll tell the version that makes the most sense to you and makes you and yours look innocent, like victims, they say, that’s how war stories work.

I slip quietly into our apartment. I can tell the moment I’m inside that Mama and Papa are in a bad mood. They’re trying not to look out the windows at the columns of smoke, at the fires that flicker brightly at their base now that it’s almost dark. Mama is banging pots around the kitchen. Papa is pacing the hallway. And Aisha and Berina are awake in their bedroom. I can hear them singing a sad song to themselves like they’re little orphans in an orphanage. Dušan is in the stairwell two floors
down, smoking up with friends. I passed them on the way up and he told me to get lost.

“This city,” I tell Mama and Papa, repeating Baka, “has survived eight hundred years of foreign occupation, fires, bombardment, and other bad things. It’s not going to be destroyed now even if some of us have to die.”

“Please go to bed,” Mama says, as though it’s way past bedtime. But it’s only eight o’clock.

In my room I lie on my bed and hang my head over the edge. I peer underneath and am face to face with clumps of dust and some old junk. Two toy cars from when I was younger, an elastic band, a sock, a chewed-up ballpoint pen, some candy wrappers, a comic book, the cover torn. I’m meant to clean my room, but I never do the places no one can see. I hear the TV in the living room. Mama and Papa watch it sometimes just to see how bad things are. I crawl under the bed and lie there to see if it helps me fall asleep. I’m jittery because of doing nothing all day long. We sit on our beds, slouch on the sofa, loll on the floor, like the bones in our bodies are dissolving and we’re turning to jelly. I want to be outside so badly, I think about jumping off the balcony. The few seconds down would feel so good, the cool fresh air, the wind in my hair.

The forests of Yugoslavia are mixed, deciduous and coniferous. They cover the mountainsides like a shaggy fur. Oak, birch, beech, pine, that’s what the encyclopedia says. Foresters for centuries walked the pathways, cutting and pruning and clearing as their ancient knowledge told them to. Early farmers cleared fields and pastures as far up as one thousand metres. Their descendants still farm the upper meadows. They raise sheep, goats, cows, chickens, pigs. They cultivate large vegetable patches. They harvest apples in hardy orchards. Without the peasant
farmers, the South Slavs would not have gained their independence from imperialists and invaders. The partisans would have starved to death. Or maybe they would have turned into wolf-men and wolf-women, those partisans. Maybe they would have stopped fighting fascist invaders and disappeared into nature, hunting in packs for rabbits, pheasants, foxes. I hunt with them in my mind, the wind and rain on my face, smelling the ground with my nose, while the city shakes and crumbles.

I
LEAVE
the apartment early in the morning and wander through the building for no reason, listening to people’s morning sounds, smelling coffee and toast. There are no egg smells or meat smells anymore, people ran out of those fast. On the fourth floor, I see Nezira walking slowly along the hallway, hugging the wall. Her clothes look crumpled, dirty. I walk fast until I’m next to her.

“Are you okay?” I ask her.

“Yes, I’m okay.”

“Where is Cena?”

“She got hurt.”

“Again?”

“It’s much worse this time.” Nezira suddenly grimaces weirdly, one of her eyelids fluttering like she’s winking at me over and over. “She might be dead.”