Since it’s almost Halloween, every commercial on TV right now is trying to be spooky, even ones for dish detergent and minivans. No matter what Mama says about Belgrade and Sarajevo being nothing but terrible phantoms of their former selves, part of me wishes I could go visit my grandparents in the crazy Balkans because at least they don’t do the whole Halloween thing.
I’m not sure who came up with such a stupid holiday but even when we were back in grade six and Elle couldn’t wait to show me all the plastic skeletons and fake blood that Mindy picked up at Liquidation World, I didn’t get it. I didn’t get the big thrill of pretending to be scared or pretending to be someone else and Elle said that’s because I’m too literal for my own good. Since when are you afraid to let your freak flag fly? she said. I asked what she meant and she just groaned and said I was not a creative person.
I keep thinking of the Halloween party in Amanda-P’s church basement, which was only a year ago but feels like ages, like way back when the Serbs were still poor victims of the Croatian Nazi Ustasha or the relentless Ottoman Empire, instead of the bad guys out for revenge.
When the invitations came out I told Elle I didn’t feel like hanging out with Amanda-P’s super-friendly Catholic Church Alliance friends, and Elle called me a fricking jam tart. But I stayed home anyway, even though there were no games coming out for the Sega anymore and there was no way I was getting my hands on a Nintendo until birthday/Christmas. Mama asked why I wasn’t going to do the trick or treating and I told her that was only for kids and then she came over and rubbed my cheek with her onion-smelling fingers and said I shouldn’t be in any hurry to grow up and I pushed her hand away and she turned to Tata and said, You see that moodiness I’m telling you about. And he just sighed and said, You should be out with friends your age, enjoying yourself.
Then there was a knock at the door and Amina let in Elle and Ivan.
I didn’t know who they were supposed to be at first — Elle in a short red wig and black suit and Ivan with a sketchy beard and sunglasses in the same suit — so Elle started singing “I Saved the World Today,” which I was supposed to recognize. She gave me her duh? look, then said, the Eurythmics? Like I was supposed to know some duo from the early eighties who hadn’t played together in years.
But that was the thing with Ivan. His dad wasn’t just a symphony musician, he also collected jazz records and had been in a hard rock band called Juice Me. Ivan knew about songs from way before we were born and about songs that hadn’t even come out yet.
He made a peace sign and Elle gave me her duh? look again and explained their new album was called Peace. Ivan told Amina that they’d gone with Annie and Dave’s current incarnation because Elle suited red better than platinum and there was no way he was going with Dave’s blond perm. Amina said they looked great but she was getting tired of pop stars who go on and on about how concerned they are about global conflict while sitting in their obscene mansions in their hypocritical countries.
Ivan and Elle ignored her and told me to get on a costume because they weren’t going without me. I said I didn’t have anything to wear and Elle went around the apartment looking through closets and drawers with Mama until they wrapped me in Tata’s bathrobe and drew a shaggy beard on my face. Ivan made a sign that said The End Is Near! Jesus Saves! and when Tata asked what I was supposed to be, Elle said, A crazy street person and I said, We’re going to a church, and Tata laughed until he choked on his bread and had to go have something to drink.
Then we were in the church basement that was decorated like a haunted house and there were homemade brownies with about three times too many walnuts and games like everyone trying to pass an orange around a circle only using their necks. I passed it to Elle no problem because we were the same height and neither one of us is ticklish and we know how each other move, but Elle took maybe twelve tries passing it to Ivan and they had the whole place cheering for them because Izzie told me later she heard they’d smuggled a few beer in Ivan’s guitar case.
Then Ivan and Elle, who insisted we call them Annie and Dave, sat talking together most of the night. He was in charge of the CD player and kept playing a Cincinnati band he’d discovered called Ass Ponys, whose singer couldn’t sing and the lyrics were just stupid. Everyone kept asking for more and when I asked how they could listen to that shit, Elle asked if I’d ever heard of irony.
I was eight when I overheard Tata tell a joke. What’s the difference between Sarajevo and Auschwitz? Auschwitz at least had a regular gas supply. When I asked him what Auschwitz was, he didn’t tell me it was a concentration camp where Jews were sent to the gas chambers. He just said, Never mind. Just remember, irony is for amateurs. It’s the black humor that cuts deep.
I had no clue what he was talking about, of course, because I was eight. But years later in that church basement, I knew Elle had crossed the line and officially defected from CristElle forever.
Afterwards Amina asked me if I knew Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart used to be married and I said no, and she said Ivan had the untrustworthy air of a lot of Russians and I told her I didn’t think he was actually Russian, his parents probably just liked the name. She said that was so typical, whatever that meant, and also did I know that the reunited Eurythmics had the nerve to launch their Peace album on a Greenpeace ship, as if that made them some kind of heroes.
Maybe Elle was right about me being too literal about Halloween. Maybe you can just overdose on pretending. Like let’s pretend we’re all one happy Yugoslav people. Let’s pretend we’re all ancient enemies who would rather blow each other up than share a sidewalk. Let’s pretend everything is okay and light the candles on a tasteless cake.
But what I want to know is how does that fit with all the lies that came later?
Is pretending the same as lying?
October 16, 1999
It was almost the end of November when Mama made me go to the doctor. I remember because there still wasn’t any snow, which almost never happens, and Ivan and I were walking around with Elle every day after school. The flat Winnipeg lawns were brown and the giant elm trees were gray and their favorite topic was the choir trip to Toronto which wasn’t going to happen for another six months.
Ivan went on about other things, too, like how when the Advanced edition of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual came out, it showed the harpies and succubi with naked breasts so some Christian group tried to shut the whole thing down. Or how recent studies show that group singing can be therapeutic even when the sound produced is of mediocre quality. Or how his dad met the original drummer from Black Sabbath before they fired him for being a drunk.
I told them the Yugoslav group Riva came to my grandparents’ cinema once and Ivan asked if he’d know any of their stuff. I told him “Rock Me” won the 1989 Eurovision Song Contest and Elle said, What the hell is a Eurovision Song Contest? and I tried to explain but they’d already moved on to something else.
This whole time, though, when we were walking around the ugly November streets and Elle had little purple weights velcroed onto her ankles for an extra workout and Ivan talked and talked so we couldn’t listen to music, Mama kept worrying that there was something wrong with me. She said I was too skinny and pale, and that I should find some sport to take up or some girl to court, like young boys the world over. Mama always said that I was going to be a late bloomer, which turns out was maybe just a polite way of saying I was behind. Because once Elle was skinnier and blow-dried her hair every morning and wore washed-out jeans from the mall, it was like Mama suddenly thought she was good enough for her son. It didn’t matter that I was the youngest in my class or looked young for my age. Elle was a pretty girl who put up with me so what was I waiting for?
I told the doctor I was walking a lot and not drinking as many Slurpees and junk so I’d probably lost a few pounds. He told Mama that I was built slim and it wasn’t abnormal for boys to not see hair or penis growth or have the
ir voices change until fifteen. Mama said, He’s fifteen in a few weeks, and the doctor said, As I said …
All I knew was that every morning I woke up with my kurac hard as a Eurovision microphone except I couldn’t tell Mama that.
So I was thinking that last Halloween, that was the end of the end of CristElle.
But that doctor’s appointment. That was the beginning of the end of me.
3
October 15, 1999
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject line: oh my fricking god your hair
I found a pic of us from Hana’s wedding stuck in the case of that stupid Susan Powter video you gave me. I look like some cheerleader chick posing on the cover of People because she took her special needs classmate as a date to prom. You’re the only person I know who would actually look better after chemo. Your hair is so fricking stupid. It looks like somebody glued clumps of steel wool all over your head.
October 15, 1999
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject line: u know shit
You know what gets me? U don’t even have any idea that Frieda has breast cancer, even after spending all that money on supplements, so she and Jimmy bought some shack in Manzanillo to be close to a holistic healing clinic but I won’t be visiting any time soon because tortillas are super fatty and I don’t think there’s any room for me to sleep. Mindy says he’ll probably get executed for drug trafficking down there.
U don’t even know that Ivan is leaving. His mom hates Winnipeg so she made his dad take a second horn job in Seattle for her own professional sanity, whatever that means. He said her public relations freelance gig was going nowhere here and she needed an excuse and he thought Winnipeg had an edgy neglected vibe and he wanted to stay put for once. He also said he always envied u and me and I was like, what the fricking hell? He said it just always seemed like nothing mattered more than CristElle no matter what. What a fricking joke.
October 16, 1999
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject line: blind
U should know Mindy met some balding ginger who drives charter buses and she told me last night that maybe you did what you did out of love. So I told her that number one, her gay-dar sucks, and number two, love must really make u blind because since when was she ready to cut u any kind of slack about this? She’s walking around like all is right with the world, humming to herself and dyeing her hair, and mostly I want to punch her in the stomach.
October 16, 1999
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject line: happy ending my skinny ass
U should also know that just because Ivan is buggering off, I’m not lonely, I have other friends. But it’s like u really did die and your ghost is haunting me.
Lots of people do that. They talk to their dead loved ones like they’re still right there beside them.
Here’s the thing. For a while it was like in a movie, except just the happy ending. CristElle was da bomb and everyone was like, whoa! and I got in the choir and I got skinny and everything just kind of fell into place. I had my girls and my fly boyfriend and my gay best friend and everything was peachy. Then u get sick after all the shit you’ve already been through with that Bosnie fricking war, and here’s the really crazy part … things were still really good for me! I was sad, but I was still fricking great!
Which doesn’t mean I don’t hate you. I meant what I said. It just means you’ve managed to make me hate myself too. So nice fricking job.
October 17, 1999
I woke up from a dream where Elle was running in a forest and wearing her yellow dress from the wedding but it was all ripped up so you could see the top of her thigh and part of her chest. Since she got skinnier her grudi have actually gotten smaller and she calls them her little titties. In my dream she was running to Ivan who was riding a horse and wearing a big furry Cossack hat. They met on the path and he slung her up onto the horse and they rode away to “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” the UB40 reggae version, and then fancy script wrote out The End like in the old movies Baba and Deda Ilić used to show for Wednesday matinees.
Last year I usually woke up with my kurac at attention whether I dreamed something or not but during the day it was different. My brain played all kinds of tricks, like maybe Elle was wrong about me and my imagination and I could become one of those gamers who lose their grip on reality and start to think they’re more elf than human. When it was gray and ugly outside and it was always the three of us, Elle and Ivan would pretend to argue over something stupid like whether the oboe sounded creepier than the piccolo and then they’d sort of start wrestling on the brown grass and I’d imagine jumping in the middle and all of us making a Cris sandwich, and then I’d have to turn away and imagine something totally different, like massaging Mama’s feet before her spring pedicure to get my kurac to behave.
October 18, 1999
I can’t sleep because I keep thinking about last year, like how Mama talked Dajdža Drago out of getting me the Nintendo for last birthday/Christmas. He handed me a white envelope and said my mama told him I needed an activity. I think baseball might suit you. Forget the Old World sports. This one’s slower and you can follow the statistics and things. One ten-week tutorial at the Dome and you’ll be hitting them out of the park.
Then Amina gave me another envelope with a certificate for private voice lessons, which was a low blow since she knew CristElle was as done as Yugoslavia. And then I started thinking about how things went downhill from there because on Boxing Day the phone rings and Nana Spaho is dead and there’s nothing but wailing and arguing for the rest of the week about whether someone should fly home to be the family mourner and who it should be and who should stay home with the boy.
So by the time New Year’s came, I guess I was not in the mood for any more noise and walking down into Scottie’s stepdad’s stuffy rec room, and Scottie on his new drums and Ivan on his new Fender were like the last straw. Only they weren’t because Scottie’s mom brought down bottles of champagne so we could experiment in a safe environment and it tasted like the fizzy water Tata used to drink when I was small but with an aftertaste of pee. And the girls kept toasting Ivan’s new guitar and Ivan and Elle were sitting on the couch like the conjoined twins in our biology textbook.
Then Ivan told everyone about his dad’s friend Stan who was an Olympic-caliber skier for the former Czechoslovakia.
Picture this. It’s still the Cold War and no one’s allowed to leave. But Stan has seen the other side, he knows what freedom looks like. So one night he hikes up to the border, which is guarded with security armed to the teeth. He straps on his skis and races down to Austria in a hail of bullets.
I was sitting on the floor, or that green indoor/outdoor carpet that seems harder than floor, and I told everyone we escaped Sarajevo through an underground tunnel.
Elle sat up then and swatted the top of my head. You never told me that! I’m his best friend, and he never told me that! Scottie wanted to know if we were shot at and I said it was hidden underground and one of the girls asked if I was scared shitless and Ivan said, Aren’t you listening? It was secret. The enemy was going about their dumb-ass business up above. Why would he be scared?
I almost told them about the moths but by then Elle had her head in Ivan’s lap and my kurac wanted to say Happy New Year! and so I went to the bathroom and spilled out the champagne and stayed there for a while.
October 19, 1999
Elle has been sending emails. For weeks. Amina just told me.
I was dreaming that Budgie was sitting in her usual office chair except in the middle of the tunnel and she was fat like a bird all puffed up to face the cold. I asked Budgie what she was doing there and she said
, Waiting for you to tell me about it and I said, Tell you about what? and she said, You know.
Then I opened my eyes because Amina was standing over me, waiting.
How long you going to sleep? I have something to tell you.
Amina said she was looking for Baba’s dolma recipe in the general family account and she wasn’t sure if Mama and Tata just hadn’t been checking messages or if they thought it was best for me not to have contact with Elle. I asked her if she’d read them and she said no, which probably wasn’t true, and I asked her if Elle still hated me, which is a stupid question, and she said it was not her business and I should read them myself.
But I can’t. I can’t do it. Even Amina looks at me these days with the same sad eyes as Tata when he decided there was no reason left to stay in his beloved city.
October 21, 1999
This whole week I’ve been waiting to talk to Budgie because I don’t know what else to do. But when she was finally there right in front of me, sort of fidgety and swiveling back and forth in her chair, more like a ptica than ever, I just wanted to get out of there.
I never really liked birds, even though I know some of them are pretty smart, like parrots and crows, and I know they’re the last surviving dinosaurs. In Sarajevo, Tata used to leave food for the doves on our windowsill and during the siege he complained that there were no more doves, no more songbirds in the trees, but it didn’t really bother me. I didn’t miss their beady eyes and fidgety necks.
Except I couldn’t get up and walk out on Budgie because I’m not an a-hole, and because I had nowhere to go.
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