Swan Dive

by Brenda Hasiuk

  I didn’t bother asking her why VHS tapes were a luxury and not department store make-up because it only wound her up.

  I told Budgie that CristElle actually had to go on hiatus for a while because Elle went to her dad’s for three months in the middle of grade six. But the truth is she’d been drifting away from the music for a while. Instead of practicing she wanted to spend all our time making videos with the knock-off video camera Mindy picked up at Liquidation World. I asked her what was the point when we didn’t even have a recording contract yet, but she had an answer for everything.

  Have you ever heard of something called fun? We are now in middle school. Mi-Dull schoooool. Our days of sitting around and being stupid kids and dreaming up fun shit are numbered. As soon as Mindy will sign consent, I’m getting a part-time job so I can buy mics and amps and all the equipment we’re going to need. So enjoy this while it lasts.

  I tried practicing on my own, but it wasn’t the same.

  Budgie wanted to know what I did with myself while Elle was gone, and I told her Mama stuck me in swimming lessons, which was not good since I never made it past the shallow end.

  Swimming was the worst because even after the lessons were done the water stayed inside my ears, swishing around like there was a kiddie pool in there. I’d be sitting at the kitchen table doing some assignment on the cardiovascular system and there’d be this gurgle every time I turned my head, like the stale pool water was whispering to me, You can’t escape, Cris, you are made of water, we are all made of water.

  Budgie asked how I found doing schoolwork in a second language and I said it was okay, except I never had math homework because the thing I liked best I did the quickest.

  Back before the siege, sometimes Tata would throw out matematika problems for me on the way to school and I figured them out all in my head and even though he didn’t pat me on the head or put an arm around my shoulder, I always knew this made him happy.

  That winter, when Elle was gone and I nearly drowned every Wednesday night, I tried to start this up again and Tata tried to play along. But I could tell he was tired from climbing up and down ladders, and Mama kept nagging him to learn the English numbers and nagging me to teach him, so in the end it wasn’t worth the trouble.

  Whenever Elle went to Jimmy’s for a month or three, it was like putting life on pause. I got up and went to school and went to bed, but nothing ever happened to move the story along.

  Budgie wanted to know if I’ve been writing in this notebook. Could you share with me the kinds of things you’re writing about? No details, but just categories. I told her I didn’t follow. Not to be an a-hole, but because I didn’t follow.

  Well, let’s see. Are you writing about the past, the present, the future?

  I thought we were going to talk about the talent contest, I said.

  She smiled the same kind of smile that Hana smiles when she’s dealing with someone like Mindy.

  Okay, let’s talk about the talent show. So I told her Elle was still away when I found out about it and I needed to tell someone and Amina was the perfect person because she’d decided that as the youngest child and only grandson, I should also begin a letter-writing campaign to Mama’s parents, convincing them to leave Belgrade, the degraded and globally disgraced capital of Serbia, and join us in Winnipeg. Tata actually spoke up then, put a number of sentences together maybe for the first time since we arrived.

  They made their choice when they closed the cinema at the first sign of trouble. Ran off to the devil because they could. Now they’re safe enough in their soul-dead capital. Besides, your Baba Ilić would find this city too provincial for her tastes.

  I told Budgie the contest wasn’t just for grade six but the whole school, and first prize was a short-haul WestJet flight for two. Hana wanted to know what kind of school gives children such an expensive prize and I told her the principal’s wife works for WestJet and Amina said maybe they want to give the kids some real incentive. Otherwise it would be nothing but lip-syncing and half-baked piano solos. Hana told her it was still ridiculous and Amina asked why she was putting her nose in. Then Hana said, I thought you spurned such extravagances on behalf of suffering Bosnians, and Amina said, Did I hear you right? Are you really accusing me of betraying our people? And Hana said, Oh, Christ, Amina. Shut. Up.

  Budgie kept that stupid smile on her face and said she was still waiting to hear about the contest. I told her when Elle got home, she was pumped about it but not as much as I thought she’d be. Jimmy’s new girlfriend, Frieda, owned a salon before she moved to Northern BC to become a found-object artist and she gave Elle these tiny little braids she called cornrows. For the first week back, it seemed all Elle wanted to talk about was Frieda and people’s hair. Yours is so thick and wiry, I’m not sure I could do much with gel. Maybe you should shave it down to peach fuzz or something. At least it would be a statement. Hana always said I was born with a dark shag rug on my head and got out the scissors whenever it passed the tops of my ears. One time, Heath Kamp, who sat behind me in math, slid a chewed-down pencil into my hair. Observe! The object has disappeared into thin hair!

  It’s not thin, I said. It’s thick.

  Whatever, man, he said.

  Sara told Mama that it’s not good to let me sit around like a vegetable even if I’m doing what Budgie asked, so Mama made me help her make grah for supper. I don’t remember Mama cooking as much when I was small since she had a good job in a government building and Tata or the girls would often pick up something at the market or the kebab stand on the way home. Now she makes pljeskavica and sarma and all the things Baba Ilić used to. She says it’s because we’re on a tight budget but Amina says it’s because it reminds her of home. During the siege, Mama first started making grah without the meat, and then without the beans, until it was nothing but brown sludge with some rice.

  I told Budgie that in the end, CristElle only had the last week of May and the first week of June to prepare for the contest and Elle and I couldn’t agree on a song. I wanted to do “Only Wanna Be With You” by Hootie and the Blowfish, but Elle said it was the worst video ever made in the history of humanity. Also there wasn’t much of a part for her. She wanted “Candy Rain” by Soul for Real. When Amina suggested “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by UB40, Elle said that song was so last year, but Amina said, Then might as well kiss those plane tickets goodbye, and even Elle was no match for her because Amina was right. Elle’s alto isn’t terrible but there’s not a lot of range there.

  We practiced with Mindy’s karaoke machine from the Liquidation World Last Chance Bin and watched the video about a thousand times. Elle let me do the chorus and take the lead, which seemed a little strange because it wasn’t like her to give up the spotlight. And she would lose focus over the stupidest thing. Like when Amina brought up the fact that Mama and Tata had been Communists, we pretty much lost a whole hour of a Saturday afternoon.

  Seriously? I thought they were Bosnies.

  It’s Bosnians. But also many Yugoslavians belonged to the Communist Party.

  Okay, but were they Yugoslavs or Bosnians?

  Both. Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrens. They were all Yugoslavs. And many Yugoslavs belonged to the Party.

  Jimmy would totally love that because he said these days you have to move to the boonies if you want to escape the clutches of capitalism.

  Not so in Yugoslavia. Our leader, Tito, was a savvy diplomat and held the different nations together with his own give-and-take Balkan style of social democratic idealism.

  Tito sounds like some perverted clown who liked kiddie parties a bit too much.

  Only in English. In Yugoslavia, we had a saying, because people were very worried about what would happen to the country after Tito died. We said, After Tito, Tito.

  That doesn’t make sense.

  At that point I kind of lost it because the contest was in five
days and this was getting us nowhere. I said, No, turns out it didn’t. Tito’s big happy family of Yugoslavia ended up as dysfunctional as they come.

  Elle also kept on about shaving off my “rug.” She said Jimmy liked this band called Fine Young Cannibals a few years back and the lead singer had a perfectly buzzed head. I asked her what Fine Young Cannibals had to do with UB40 and she said, They’re British, like I was an idiot. Of course, once Amina weighed in, it was as good as gone.

  First they used scissors, then switched to Tata’s electric shaver, and by the time they were done you could have stuffed a pillow with all the trimmings on the floor. Elle even wanted to use a razor so my head would be so shiny it created its own light show on stage and I actually got really mad at her. Like really mad, for the first time. I wanted to know why she kept treating this whole thing like a big joke.

  Easy, there, she said. I think doing lead vocals is going to your head.

  Budgie asked why I thought Elle wasn’t as “into the contest” as I expected. She actually made air quotes with her little birdie claws. I told her I didn’t know. Elle always dreamed big and maybe a school talent contest was too small potatoes. Maybe it never occurred to her that it was just a stepping stone and those free plane tickets could get us to the Star Search set in Orlando. I didn’t know then and I still don’t. All I know now is that WestJet short-haul flights don’t get you to Florida.

  Maybe, even all the way back then, I’d already started losing her.

  September 26, 1999

  I just thought of something. After the girls turned my head into a lumpy peach, Elle said I needed to play sick for two days until the show. You come out on that stage with your new look and bam, we’ve got some wow factor. But if they’ve already seen you, it’s old news.

  I told her I didn’t want to worry Mama and she said it was just two fricking days because after she got back from Jimmy’s that time, fricking became her favorite word. And maybe my family didn’t see school like everyone else because after the shelling started, you never really knew if classes would be on or not. Some weeks it would feel almost normal. You put on your backpack and go the usual route, sit in your usual spot, learn the usual things, except Tata and the other teachers weren’t always there because things weren’t really normal. Some were always missing, especially the ones who’d grown up hunting and knew how to handle a gun. Tata said those poor bastards felt obliged to join the defense forces, with their crappy homemade rifles and crappier ammunition because the UN had basically decided the Sarajevans should be sitting ducks against the entire armory of the former Yugoslav forces based in Belgrade.

  Any kind of school days were still the best, though, because you weren’t stuck inside watching TV, which sounds good until that’s all there is. Or later, when the electricity was off most of the time, playing Žandari with sisters who were so jittery they didn’t even care if you could see their cards from across the table.

  Or even later, when Arman got hit when he was standing in the schoolyard yelling at some UN white helmets sitting in their truck to grow some balls and give us some guns so it would be a fair fight. I wasn’t there, but Amina said the UN soldiers didn’t even go get Arman right away, and she didn’t know who she hated more, the peacekeepers or the Belgrade-backed lunatics, and Mama told her to shut her stupid mouth and stop upsetting me, then took me in her arms and pointed out that Arman would probably just lose his leg, like this made him the luckiest boy in the world.

  After that there was no more school and Mama pretty much kept me as a prisoner.

  You show your face at school, Elle said, and you sentence our wow factor to death. I told her she didn’t understand and she said, Understand what? You’re not going to tell them you have cancer. Just tell them your fricking throat hurts.

  I swear those were her words. And this is what Tata told me the night we left through the tunnel. I never believed in fate, Krysztof. But this tragedy, this destroyed city, these destroyed lives, it’s like some madmen pushed a boulder down the hill and there was no stopping it. Our beautiful Sarajevo was fated to die at the hands of hate and intolerance.

  I was nine. What kind of father tells their kid this and then stops talking altogether? What kind of math teacher believes in fate instead of chance and probabilities?

  Maybe that’s what war does to you. It makes you superstitious as an old baba. And now it’s happening to me too. Because how else do you explain what Elle said way back then like she had some kind of crystal ball?

  September 28, 1999

  Budgie seemed all wound up today, like she had an itch she couldn’t reach. She kept jumping from one thing to another so I reminded her we were talking about the contest.

  Elle always said it was a turning point for us, that nothing was really the same afterwards, and Budgie said, Yeah, the contest, okay, let’s finish that up. I told her I faked sick Wednesday and Thursday and on Friday morning Amina helped me convince Mama I should sleep in so I was fresh to take an exam in the afternoon. The only problem was Amina finally got a job at Robin’s donut shop but she called in sick so she could come watch and Hana overheard her so there was a big fight about earning money and loyalty and fingernail clippings on the toilet seat.

  Amina told me she didn’t care, some things were more important than family unity, so she was there when the whole school gathered in the gym, students on the floor, everybody else in chairs. There was no curtain on the stage but they strung up blue camping tarps on wires and brought in a couple of high school students to do the lights.

  I wore a white button-up shirt and black pants that Mama brought home from the tailors because it had been three months and the owner never picked them up. Elle said I looked like a waiter until Amina turned up my collar and they agreed bald Elvis might make a statement. Mindy went to Liquidation World and bought Elle shiny red tights that made her legs look a little like sparkly sausages and an extra-large man’s dress shirt. Because she was backup and because of all the brass in the song, Elle talked Mr. Pahl, the band teacher, into lending her a tambourine and a trumpet and a trombone to pretend to play, just like in the video.

  We all had to wait backstage, wedged between bins of game pinnies and some cardboard palm trees left over from a pirate play. Elle looked around and decided there were only three real contenders besides us — Natalia Grady, who was in grade seven and supposedly joining the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s professional student program next fall; the band Soulgroan, aka Matt Cohlmeyer, Evan Labun and Darius Khan, who were all in grade eight and huddled together in a corner like the rest of us might be contagious; and Ursa Chipman, who was in my homeroom and went to circus camp last summer.

  When Mr. Alexander came on stage there was some problem with the lights so he had to introduce the judges in the dark. There was Mr. Pahl, the band teacher, and Mrs. Dubé, the choir director/librarian, and some lady named Aretha who owned Rising Star Dance Studio and was a friend of our gym teacher. Elle said Muscle-Head Gawronsky was obviously shtooping the dance teacher, which she had to explain to me. I told her I was really nervous and then Mr. Alexander said that the judges’ scores would count for half of a performer’s mark, and student applause would count for half, and that’s when Elle lost it. She sank down into a squat, kind of like a bullfrog in red leggings.

  A fricking popularity contest? That’s what this is?

  The armload of instruments went clanging to the floor, and everyone turned and looked. Even Soulgroan who never looked at anybody.

  Budgie asked if I was embarrassed, like when I dropped my backpack in front of the school, and I said no, and I never said I was embarrassed when I dropped my backpack. I told her that maybe Natalia actually didn’t look, maybe she was too busy staring at her pink slippers, getting into her dying swan zone. When I first started school, she came up to me in the hallway because she loved the Bolshoi Ballet and thought I was Russian. Amina would have told her we’d rather be d
ead than backward ruthless Russians who only encouraged Serbia’s backward ruthless nation-building, but I just told her I was Bosnian and she looked confused so I told her a Bosnian was someone from Bosnia-Herzegovina, and she said, Bosni-herzo-where? I told her again and she said, Isn’t there a war there? I told her that’s why I was here and she said, Lucky for you, I guess, and that was it.

  Budgie wanted to know if Elle was embarrassed and I told her all I knew was that she was mad because she’d been worrying about the judging since we signed up. A few of the kids in her homeroom had looked at the list and made some snide comments about “really looking forward” to CristElle and I told her lots of people in my class said being famous was one of their top ten life goals so what was the big deal? How was CristElle any different except that we actually had a plan? And she acted like I was the one who said whatever it was they said. Hello? Are you listening? I don’t care what they think. I’m just not their monkey. I just don’t want a bunch of little fricking followers to tell me whether I’ve got the stuff. Most of them wouldn’t know talent if it hit them in the face.

  Backstage, she looked like she might throw up. A fricking popularity contest. Nobody told us this was the deal. This is fricking nonsense.

  I told Budgie I always thought it would be me who’d get stage fright because Elle wasn’t afraid of anything, but standing there in the dark wings that smelled of gym sweat and nerve sweat and Natalia’s hair gel, I wondered if Elle was ready to walk.

  I’d only ever seen ballet from Baba’s balcony seats in Sarajevo’s National Theatre and watching Natalia it seemed way harder from up close. About halfway through, the music cut out and Natalia kept going like she didn’t notice a thing. She just kept floating like a plastic bag in the wind while her feet thumped and squeaked across the stage.

  Budgie asked if I still thought Elle wasn’t afraid of anything. I said I didn’t know, but now I’m thinking I should have said popularity contests.