Little Bastards in Springtime Read Online Free PDF

walked and walked, staring at each other’s backs or through the columns of tree trunks at the sun coming through the green leaves, until we came to a place where there was a good view. A view of a valley with white mountain peaks in the distance, where Croatia is and where Baka came from. Then Mama and Papa, Aisha and Berina, exclaimed about how beautiful it was. Oh, they said, over and over again, oh, it’s so beautiful, oh, it’s so breathtaking.
    But in my mind, I was slinking around the mountains with Baka’s partisan comrades. We were eluding German patrols bymoving position, walking single file along the forest paths, pack mules behind us, everything we owned on our backs, liberated German Lugers in our belts, rifles over our shoulders dropped by the Allies onto a mountain meadow in the dead of night. I was a child-courier escorting American OSS officers who’d just parachuted out of the sky with their precious wireless radio set, asking questions about partisan numbers and victories to tell their commanders back home.
    I begged Mama and Papa to let me sleep a night outside alone, like Baka did for years. A sleeping bag, that’s all I’d need. And maybe a knife. Dušan laughed at me, but I just walked down the steps of the lodge and into the forest. It’s a lonely place, but also crowded with something, you get that feeling, but you don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just all the animals tucked away where you can’t see them. I followed the trail, passing through sun shafts that shine down into the green forest-world like beams from a UFO, and it felt good to be just me. You can hear your own breathing loud and clear when you walk alone, it whooshes like wind in your ears while you think of many things. Will you turn into a wolf-boy if you get lost forever? Will you be able to smell your way around? Will you know which animals have just passed, how healthy they are, the state of the vegetation in spring and summer? Will you have no more thoughts or words at all after a while, just senses, using your nose, eyes, ears to get around and survive? Will you lose your human mind and gain an animal mind?
    Baka said hunger is the only thing in the world that doesn’t have words, it grabs so deep inside you, deeper than your soul. When it got dark, I was hungry, but I had eaten the sandwich Mama had forced me to take along. I lay down and heard my eyes blinking in the dark. The dark was like moth wings caressingmy face, my hands, neck, wrists, crawling into my ears, nostrils. The forest is alive in the night, things move in every direction. And up in the sky is outer space with its gazillion galaxies. Space has its own sound, a huge silent sound that you can feel vibrating in your bones. I lay there wide awake in my sleeping bag and imagined partisans all around me, sleeping in hollows, or up in treehouses. Maybe my baka was up here too, only a few years older than me, with her new name, wearing ski pants before she got herself a uniform off a dead German soldier, a small one. Beautiful, tough, happy, a hardened killer. Maybe we were on our way to blow up a bridge, a railway line, or a road. Maybe we were going to ambush an enemy company. Maybe we were waiting for an airdrop. Sometimes we had to wait for days until the conditions were right, no clouds, moonlight. Sometimes we waited for weeks.
    The birds were loud early in the morning and when I woke my hands smelled of dirt. The light was grey and flat at first, but the sun came up after a while and I trudged back along the trail. Papa says different generations of people, in different places on the earth, get to experience different kinds of lives. Baka got to spend three years in the forest worrying about life and death. You, he says, get to watch sixty-five channels on TV, ski in winter, swim in summer, study in Germany or France or England. But, I tell him, I will never go away, I will never leave this country with its mountain forests. Maybe this country will