Swan Dive

by Brenda Hasiuk

  Amanda-P tells me that my name was on her church bulletin’s prayer list and Elle points out that my family were practicing Tito Communists who believed blind faith in an afterlife distracts the masses from fighting oppression here and now. I guess she got this from Amina, but Amanda-P looks like she’s going to cry and so we do a group hug, with me as the middle of the sandwich.

  I buzz up to Mindy’s apartment and when Elle comes down I throw a fistful of snow in her face and then outside we’re scooping up slush in our bare hands and throwing it at each other like kids splashing in a pool. We end up on the ground and I am sweeping the wet hair from her eyes, which are river-at-sunset brown against the gray snow, and I almost tell her.

  But she scrambles to her feet and says it’s not good for me to get all cold and wet like this.

  We’re on the risers during choir practice. Elle is behind me and runs her pointer finger down the notches of my spine.

  You know what I hate? she whispers. Here’s my list. Country-western crossover pop singers. The sound of people talking German. Sourpusses. Rice pudding. Fakers. Humidity. Leukemia. I officially now hate leukemia more than anything.

  I almost tell her, but some a-hole has asked Ivan to sing Joseph’s big song, “Any Dream Will Do.”

  December 15, 1999

  I’ve been adding it up and I betrayed CristElle over and over. Not just three, like Peter the disciple. I was thinking about Deda Ilić and the picture Bible he gave me without telling Mama and Tata. The one with the painting of Abraham ready to stab his son to prove his faith, or Judas standing behind Jesus like a mafia gangster at the last supper. But the one that bothered Deda Ilić most was the one of Peter looking not really sad, but more like surprised. Deda said it was because he couldn’t believe what he’d just done to his hero.

  December 16, 1999

  Budgie wanted to know how I’ve been sleeping and I said okay because I didn’t want her to bring up pills again. Elle said I have an irrational aversion to mind-altering chemicals but this is coming from someone who got high at her dad’s when she was thirteen. She said she was glad that she didn’t really like it because who knows, she might have an addictive personality and I said all I know is that before the war Bosnian Serbs and Croats and Muslims always got along until they were drunk.

  Budgie said I didn’t look like I’d been sleeping okay and I told her that I’d been thinking that as long as I had cancer everything was better than great and worse than terrible at the same time. And maybe that’s how the Serbs felt when they knew they had this dream but first they had to destroy everything.

  You’ve been thinking a lot, Laz-Aaar, Budgie said. She was wearing a creamy beige shirt that matched her new hair. I told her the whole time I kept saying to myself, Okay, this is it, this will be the day the craziness ends. But now I think even Milošević, with all his speeches and waving of the Serbian flag, didn’t know it would lead to ten years of war crimes. Once these things get going they take on a life of their own.

  All through April, Ivan is still off practicing for his stage debut and Mindy says Elle is a better nurse than she would have guessed in a zillion years and Mama keeps phoning to assure me they’re safe and giving me updates on how Milošević is kicking all the poor Albanians out of Kosovo, which is all over the news and I don’t even care about it, and senile Deda Ilić who I don’t even feel sorry for because I keep thinking that sometimes losing your mind can be a good thing especially when you’re old and your world is gone. I felt almost jealous because I was still young and the world was waiting, only I’d decided to light things up and watch things burn.

  So April turns to May and Mama and Tata finally book their flights home and the flames start spreading out of control. They’re an inferno licking the sky and I’m not cut out for that kind of heat.

  I don’t tell Budgie this last crazy bit. I told her when I told Elle I was feeling too weak to go to opening night of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat she called me a crappy friend because all I had to do was sit there.

  Ivan reserved front row seats for us, which sounds good, but for a Broadway kind of musical all you see is feet. Part of Scottie’s beard wasn’t glued on right and kept flapping in the dance numbers and Amanda-P was way too excited up there to be playing one of The Wives.

  When the curtain finally closed, the parents gave a standing ovation and when the clapping was done, Ivan came out by himself and pulled off his hair.

  But it wasn’t his hair, it was a wig. He was completely bald and he said the night’s proceeds would be donated to Cris Spaho, who was heroically engaged in the fight of his life. He called me up to the stage and Elle made me go and she came with me and she kept kissing Ivan’s head, which was kind of flat at the back. Holy shit, Ivy! I can’t believe it! You are amazing! All your beautiful hair! And Cris almost didn’t come! Can you believe that? He almost didn’t come!

  Budgie waited for me to keep going. But I was suddenly so tired it felt like my mouth was full of socks. She asked how I felt about what Ivan did, and I told her it was like he was so alive that he was too good for pesky old death. And in the end him shaving his head and thinking to donate the musical money, all that was more about him than me.

  Budgie asked if I wanted to know what she thought, like she could see how tired I was. I think generosity is almost never pure, or selfless. It’s up to each of us to look hard at ourselves and then decide how to be a good person. Some of us get it right, some never do. Most of us just keep trying.

  I waited, because I was so tired.

  And you know what growing up is? It’s figuring out how to think about someone other than yourself. That’s basically it.

  I said I thought it was just getting hairy in your privates and she laughed like we were old friends sharing a beer.

  December 17, 1999

  Hana used to say that I could sleep through anything, that I wouldn’t notice if a meteorite hit the apartment next door, but now it’s like everything wakes me up.

  My kurac was at half attention because I was dreaming of Elle except she was still as debeo as when we met, and it got me wondering about Fat Elle and Skinny Elle. She always said that I was the only person who didn’t give two shits about her weight and I always thought she was right, only now I’m thinking the truth is never that simple no matter how many times Elle or Budgie say it is.

  I think maybe Fat Elle, the one who made me go swimming and who was going to be a pop star, she let herself eat all the junk she wanted because she thought she deserved to eat all the junk she wanted. And maybe Skinny Elle, the one who looked like Annie Lennox’s little sister, she cared about who showed up at her birthday party because she thought everyone should love her. I think they’re both just Elle to me, but what I want to know is does my kurac care. I never thought of her that way when she was debeo and maybe not just because we were kids because I know during the siege my kid kurac noticed things sometimes.

  Like one time Hana thought I was asleep with everyone else when Goran, who used to sweep the floors in the cinema, snuck in from the balcony. The streetlights hadn’t been on for weeks but the moon was big and bright and the muscles in his arms were strained from climbing up three stories. It was like he was trying to devour Hana’s tongue and I knew I should turn around and go back to sleep, but I didn’t. I watched them sucking and licking at each other while Hana said, You coulda died, you coulda died, and my kurac came to life even though Goran could have died. And I never really felt like that again until the first time I saw Ivan and Skinny Elle wrapped up together like a pretzel. So maybe my kurac does care.

  Maybe it only wants the Elle who only wanted me if I was dying.

  December 18, 1999

  I just remembered something. Hana’s sweeper, Goran, he was there the night we left through the tunnel. We had to sit for what seemed like days, crowded on top of each other in that stuffy little garage dressed up like an old
lady’s sitting room, waiting with all our bags and boxes and packs, while Baba Sida, who once owned the house, kept trying to hand me a ball of old bread. We ate, Tata kept telling her. Save it for a hungry soldier. By the time we finally got the A-OK and gathered up our stuff and trudged through what she called her garden because I guess stuff grew there once, I was so happy to be moving I would have followed that line of people straight into a pack of hungry wolves or a rushing mudslide or a hail of bullets — as long as it meant we didn’t have to wait anymore.

  I overheard Tata and his friends gossip about the tunnel all the time. The Dobrinja side was shored up by metal from bombed-out Sarajevo factories but the Butmir side used wood from Mount Igman. The whole thing was taken over for a while by black market thieves smuggling alcohol and stolen UN packages.

  I got it in my head that it must be really big like a railway tunnel through a mountain, maybe because that’s the only kind of tunnel I’d seen. When I was five, I overheard the girls talking about how babies come through a tunnel between a woman’s legs and I imagined Mama with a little tiny cupboard door down there that the doctor opened to let me out.

  So maybe I’m just not good at imagining things I haven’t seen with my own eyes.

  But really the tunnel was nothing more than a narrow cellar like in the traditional farmhouse we visited once for school, just tall enough for a kid like me to stand. This one just happened to be dug into what once was Baba Sida’s kitchen and kept going for 800 meters.

  Maybe I was the only one who noticed Goran because I wasn’t carrying as much. Tata told Mama and the girls over and over to take less stuff and they were determined to make it seem like it was not a problem. They could wear a heavy pack and drag a heavy bag while bent for two hours in the damp. Maybe Sara and Mama were already struggling down the stairs trying not to huff or slip or look back when I saw him off to the side out of line whispering to his mother, who was teetering on the edge of a wheelbarrow, shaking her head like a two-year-old who doesn’t want to take a bath. I can’t, she said. I can’t breathe.

  Only as I followed Tata down I could still hear Goran’s voice, the last voice I heard in Sarajevo. Maaaa, be reasonable. It’s perfectly safe. Maaaa. The next thing I really remember is hurrying across the tarmac and the wind blowing my hair in crazy directions and the sky above the mountains turning dusky blue, a light soft enough to touch as Baba used to say. My whole family remembers the wind and Mama doing up my seatbelt because I was asleep before the plane took off.

  But Goran, and the sky, they’re all my own, and I have no idea if I just imagined them. Maybe the whole thing with Goran and Hana in the moonlight was my first perverted wet dream about my own sister.

  * * *

  —

  Mama just got off the phone with Baba in Belgrade and started crying like she believed the predictions were right and the world would end in a couple of weeks. Tata told her that her father wasn’t the first old man to forget what his wife looks like and he wouldn’t be the last, so she should get a hold of herself for pity’s sake. She even came into my room and sat down on the bed and talked in Bosnian even though I was pretending to be asleep. When will it end, son? That’s all I want to know. Because I was not prepared for this, you know. My girlhood was unusually blessed. Maybe too blessed. I used to think I was a strong person. Stronger than your father and his numbers and his loneliness. But no one told me life would be this pitiless.

  I kept my breathing slow and even, even gave a little twitch, but she didn’t stop. My mother, the dearest of mothers, should not have to go through this alone. She said the only one he seems to recognize is one of the food servers, some girl with freckles on her chest and crooked teeth. He calls for Filipa, where is Filipa? He wants to tell her again about his sister, Anka, how she died fifteen years ago from ovarian cancer that the doctor had misdiagnosed as irritable bowels. Can you imagine?

  And I realized I can imagine, I can, because for the last while I have been losing my mind as fast as poor Deda Ilić in that old Belgrade care home that Amina says was a historic building but now has nothing but drips and drafts. Just like Deda Ilić I barely notice my own mama and tata tiptoeing around me. Since I sat down with Budgie, since I started filling these pages, it’s like the past is more real than the present, like some bird lady who has her own problems is more important than my own family.

  If I were there he would know me, son. He used to call me his slatki because he had such sweet-tooth just like you. You both like the candy and the movies and the romantic songs. It’s like you are both too soft for this hard world.

  I let her go on, talking over her son who wished he was old and senile or better yet a corpse but was only a ghost who happened to be alive.

  Until I think even she got tired of her own voice and left me alone.

  I never thought birthdays could get much worse than during a siege, but maybe they can, because I turn sixteen in less than a week. I wish I could go back and tell that little Luke Skywalker wannabe to chase his dog across a checkpoint and get shot in the head. That happened to a boy in ’92 and Amina told Mama they just named a park after him.

  I’m not sure I really want to die. I would miss some things like music and math and missing Elle. It’s just I’m so tired of being a ghost and no matter how much I yadda-yadda-yadda, no matter how much I think, I’m still too afraid to read Elle’s messages because then maybe that will be it. I’ll want to die.

  December 19, 1999

  I spent the last few hours trying to not remember anything. I watched some Law and Order: Special Victims Unit with Mama, and she was so excited it made me feel like an a-hole. Tata came and asked her how she could watch that Hollywood violence after what we’d witnessed ourselves in the flesh and she just ignored him. She’s getting a bit of a bulgy stomach, the kind that make old ladies like Baba look a little pregnant even though that’s impossible. She kept scraping nail polish off with her teeth while the beautiful detective kept discovering more female prisoners who’d been raped and tortured, maybe by their prison guard.

  Mama hasn’t been making me go to the tailor shop because she hasn’t been working there as much. She said Amina isn’t coming back from Sarajevo for the holidays and Hana is spending the day with her in-laws and Sara is going to Cuba with a friend so there’s no point in putting up a tree. The only sign that it’s Christmas in here are cards on the TV with snowy Bosnian mountains or Orthodox cathedrals with nativity scenes.

  Turns out though that Tata has started working for some guy named Farik, another Bosnian refugee who’s trying to start his own drafting business. And he’s tutoring Farik’s son in math because he only has a B average and wants to be an aeronautical engineer, which Tata thinks is a long shot. He told me that mastering calculus requires a certain kind of brain wiring which Hana and I both have but Sara and Amina don’t.

  December 21, 1999

  Budgie was wearing a top and pants that were attached and kind of looked like pajamas. She seemed like a kid waiting for her bedtime story.

  During the siege I knew I was getting too old for stories and I knew it was hard for Mama but I made her keep telling me the one where an American actor stars in a detective show and then starts solving mysteries on the side. One time she said, Not tonight, my Krysztof. Please don’t make me do it. Please, if you love me you won’t ask again, and I felt bad because I was a kid but I wasn’t an a-hole.

  Budgie asked if I’d read Elle’s messages yet and I wanted to say, Please, if you love me, you won’t ask again. Except I know Budgie doesn’t love me. I’m just a patient. I asked if she wanted to hear how it all ended because I don’t know what Mama and Tata told her and they didn’t know much anyway and she said, Yes, whatever you like.

  If life was a movie maybe I would have rushed up on stage when Ivan gave me the proceeds from the musical and said the joke was on him. I lied. I didn’t have cancer and he’d shaved off his Johnny Depp
hair for nothing.

  But instead I shook his hand and let him rub my scalp like I was a good dog and posed for a picture and tried to look as sick as I felt.

  Budgie uncrossed her legs and leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and I noticed that her outfit really pulled in the crotch area. I also noticed she didn’t have her wedding ring on anymore and I must have sat there for a while because she finally said, The school called your mom.

  So Mama had told her about the phone call from the office saying the check was ready for me to pick up, about the school secretary telling Mama the story of her sister’s husband’s cousin who beat leukemia but unfortunately died of liver failure three years later. About how Mama thought we’d hidden my cancer from her because one woman can only take so much.

  Budgie already knew that with one phone call I went from hero to hell.

  I told her maybe I did need something to help me sleep. She put her hand on mine like when Jesus touches the leper in Deda Ilić’s picture Bible.

  I know this is tough stuff, Laz-Aaar.

  It’s hard to say what it feels like because it’s not really a feeling. It’s more like an out-of-body experience like in the movies when someone’s soul shows up to check out their own funeral only in this case you’re not dead. You’re still talking out of your same old mouth, still seeing out of your same old eyes, still needing to open a door to get out of a room. But you’re off to the side watching the one who came up with the lies, who let it go on, who didn’t even try to get out of the trap he’d made.

  Cris the Crazy has not just lost his very own cinema to the Dark Side. He has not just lost Elle to Ivan. He’s lost everything and it’s all his fault. And yet he keeps going! He goes to Giesbrecht the guidance counselor who looks more scared than Cris the Crazy because this is his first year on the job and all he’s had to deal with so far is stuff like vandalism and truancy and family break-ups. So Cris the Crazy ends up spending the last few weeks of school at home in his room, on the waiting list to see the kind of doctor who deals with what Elle calls bonafide wack jobs.