Little Bastards in Springtime Read Online Free PDF Page B

leave you, he says. He’s always turning things around like that, to be clever.
    That was last summer. This summer’s going to be different. We probably won’t go on a vacation, Papa says.
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    T HEY ARE SHELLING THE AIRPORT REGULARLY now. Also Baš?aršija, which is full of mosques, minarets, souks. The television tower was hit, and some of the markets. I hear this from the old men in the lobby when I hang around to see if anyone will come out to play. They used to go to the park to play chess with big chess pieces, but now they can’t, they’re stuck in here with their stories and their pipes. They list all the next targets because they know about war; they were in the last one. The
Oslobodjenje
newspaper building, the Holiday Inn, the public transportation system, the presidency and parliament buildings, the flour mill, the bakery, the brewery, and the Olympic complex, of course. The post telegraph and telephone building, Alipasin Most, the Jewish cemetery, the Lion cemetery. The tobacco factory, the Dobrinja apartment complex, the central district, Stari Grad, New Sarajevo, Maršala Tita, the shopping district at Vase Miskina. To me it sounds like the whole city is one big bull’s-eye. They say the train and bus stations are jam-packed with people, all desperate to leave the city. They’ve packed a toothbrush and left all their stuff behind, even their cats and dogs with a huge pile of kibble and the toilet seat up.
    Fighting is noisy, that’s something you don’t think about in peacetime, the non-stop rumbling and thudding and exploding. I hear machine-gun fire rat-a-tatting and grenades going boom all day long. Sometimes I think I can hear high voices screaming with fright, girls and women as they run through the streets. Snipers fired on another bunch of peace demonstrators in front of the government and parliament buildings yesterday. More than ten people have been killed, and those are the ones we know about. They’re still whispering about all these things, Mama and Papa, trying to protect our little ears. As if we kidsdon’t know what’s going on, as if our little ears can’t figure out what’s loud and clear every minute of the day.
    Papa’s trying to write an article about a siege. It’s coming, he says, Sarajevo totally surrounded and cut off. The Serbs in the hills around the city don’t have the numbers to match our defenders, so they won’t be able to capture the city, only imprison it. But I see him looking out of the window all the time, pacing up and down the hallway, making himself more coffee, fiddling with an electric pencil sharpener that stopped working ages ago, not writing a single word. He’s very stressed out, I can tell by how he rubs his fingers through his hair all the time and pats his chest and his trouser pockets with the palms of his hands, like he’s looking for lost keys.
    Mama is teaching at the conservatory. Music must flourish now, she says, even more than before. Papa calls the receptionist a hundred times all through the morning asking about conditions in the area. Schools have closed for now. Mama and Papa told us to stop cheering when we got the news, it’s not a good sign. We still have to do our homework, they said, we still have to practise. Aisha and Berina play scales and violin duets for a while but Papa isn’t paying attention so they stop pretty soon. When we’re hungry we fish through the fridge; when we’re bored we listen to music or half read whatever’s lying around. We’re not allowed to watch TV; it only broadcasts the war back at us like it’s a TV show and that is freaky and deranged. The twins steal halva from the kitchen, Dušan pours rakija from the sideboard into his flask. It’s a weird kind of holiday.
    When evening comes, we all sit at the table without Mama, who is late, eating whatever we feel like, Papa smoking like a demon. Dušan says he heard that the tobacco factory is about to stop working, then sniggers at