Little Bastards in Springtime Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
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    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 coveringthe 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.
    My baka always carried a rifle and had a grenade attached to her belt with a piece of hide—I’ve seen photos. And she knew how to set explosives too. She always starts her partisan stories with “Once upon a time, high up in the green, mountain forests smelling of black earth, pine needles, fallen leaves, there were bands of patriots who defended our country from the invading enemy and from the fascism within.” And then she says, “Did I ever tell you, Jevrem, about our beloved leader, our Joza?” AndI say yes, yes. And she says, “Well, about our beloved leader, little Joza loved animals, nature, and spent his childhood roaming mountain and forest. He knew every rock and tree. One day, he and his gang were raiding a neighbour’s pear orchard when the neighbour caught them. Our Joza dropped from the branches right onto the man’s head, knocked him out cold. He was a terrible nuisance, Joza was, but so what?”
    I didn’t know the man. He died before I was born.
    Mama and Papa’s idea of heaven is hiking every day, so that’s what we did on our vacation. The lodges we stayed in were full of Austrian and Slovenian hikers, all up at 6 a.m. Aisha and Berina were slow and whined a lot, Mama nagged everyone, Dušan pulled branches from living trees and argued about how early we had to get up, and Papa lectured about all the revolutionary movements around the world that we needed to support, like the working classes and the Natives in South Africa, Latin America, North America, how everything is linked in this world, especially injustice. But we were all happy, I know that now. The sun was hot every day and we had snacks with us. And after the first ten minutes everyone stopped complaining and talking and then everything was quiet, except for the forest noises. We just