A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to the Post-Conflict Research Center (p-crc.org), which is dedicated to restoring a culture of peace in Sarajevo and other places with a history of conflict.
Copyright © 2019 by Brenda Hasiuk
Published in Canada and the USA in 2019 by Groundwood Books
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press
groundwoodbooks.com
We gratefully acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Canada.
Financial assistance provided by the Manitoba Arts Council.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hasiuk, Brenda, author
Swan dive / Brenda Hasiuk.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77306-146-7 (hardcover).—ISBN 978-1-77306-147-4 (EPUB).—ISBN 978-1-77306-148-1 (Kindle)
I. Title.
PS8615.A776S93 2019 jC813’.6 C2018-904185-4 C2018-904186-2
Cover design by Michael Solomon
Cover illustration by Natalya Balnova
For the people of Sarajevo — long live your magnificent city.
And for my fellow travelers — Duncan, Sebastian and Katya — who loved it there almost as much as I did.
1
August 30, 1999
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject line: WHBS
I need to talk to u … u owe me that. Mindy won’t say your name anymore. She just calls you that WEIRDO HALF-BAKED SHIT or WHBS, which isn’t even any shorter.
I know it’s my own fault for telling her anything but I’m blaming you anyway.
August 30, 1999
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject line: ignore last message
Forget it. DO NOT fricking answer this message. I meant what I said.
August 31, 1999
I’m writing this because Budgie said I have to. She didn’t actually say that — Laz-Aaar, you have to — but that’s what she meant. She actually said, You might want to try writing things down, Laz-Aaar. Try telling yourself the story of your life over the past fifteen years. I told her I’ll be sixteen in three months and she pretended not to hear me. You’re the hero of your story, Laz-Aaar. What does that mean to you? What kind of challenges have you faced? What kind of hero do you want to be?
She throws questions at me one after the other sometimes but says my name slow enough to sound like a movie pirate. I don’t even care enough to tell her that name in my file barely belongs to me anymore or that it’s pronounced more like laser, as in gun.
I know what Elle would say. She’d say it’s better than Aidan Snow calling me Crist-Off, as in Hey, I have an idea for you, Crist-Off. Let’s say you fuck off, Crist-Off. Hey, that sounds like some Russian ballet faggot my mom likes. It’s Fuck-Off Crist-Off, everyone.
I was named after my baba’s favorite Serb actor, Lazar Ristovski, but then she decided I had weirdly bushy eyebrows for a two-year-old and started calling me Krysztof, after the famous Polish film director, Krysztof Kieślowski. My whole family started calling me that and when I enrolled in school in Canada I decided to go with Cristoff, which I thought was simple enough, but in the end I became just Cris.
I call Dr. Brunotte Budgie because her eyes are bulgy and small, and her nose is kind of beak-like and she wears this green sweater that’s so tight you can see the outline of her bra. The old Elle would have said that woman just needs to accept she’s no size 4. Most people would probably think she looks okay. Especially if they like budgies.
Writing can be helpful for all of us, she said, but especially for those who are struggling. Trauma and cancer patients, for instance, often find it very helpful, Laz-Aaar.
She was the one who said we should wait to talk about the cancer and then went ahead and brought it up right away. Maybe it was her strange birdie way of trying to be nice. Cancer patients, crazies, crazy cancer patients. It was all the same to her.
When Mi Nismo Andjeli or We Are Not Angels played in the cinema, Mama lost it on Baba Ilić and my sisters for letting me watch such an inappropriate movie for children. I always remember how the Devil kept trying to get Nikola to dump the girl he got pregnant and the Angel kept trying to get him to marry her.
That was just a comedy, but it’s like the Devil wants me to get up and walk out on Budgie like an a-hole, and the Angel keeps playing Mama in voiceover. After all we’ve been through. Surely, son, after all we’ve been through. The doctor is being paid. She is a professional. You must try.
I don’t have to see what you write, Budgie said. No one does. It’s your own private story.
My sister Amina likes to joke about the year 2000 being the end of the world. She says something called the Bethlehem Prophecies is predicting an epidemic that will kill everything on earth. Tata and I told her the new millennium isn’t until 2001 but who knows. When you divide 2000 by 3 using integer arithmetic you get 666, the number of the Antichrist.
So in a few months maybe I’ll be saved.
September 2, 1999
When you think of your childhood in Sarajevo before the war, what do you think of?
This is the kind of pointless question Budgie asks. I told her the usual — birthdays, wasting time with my sort-of friend Arman, watching TV after school.
But she wanted details, moments, memories that still feel alive, and I tried to look like I was thinking really hard, and Budgie said there was no rush or right answers, which didn’t help, but I finally came up with smells.
I told her spicy meat mixed with sweet cream makes feel like I’m back in our old kitchen ready for lunch, kicking the underside of the table until Tata tells me to stop and Mama tells him to let me be, the boy is growing and hungry. Or I catch a whiff of something like old Drina cigarette ashes in an empty soup can and then I’m sitting cross-legged behind the snack counter at the cinema and Baba Ilić is popping a Kakao Krem into my mouth with her nicotine yellow fingertips.
Now and then there’s something like the dust of crumbling plaster or somebody burning varnished wood and I want to throw up, which probably isn’t exactly normal.
Budgie does not want me to talk about Elle yet. She told me we have to work up to it, kind of like when Elle said I should start with Hana’s five-pound weights to get buff for our CD cover. Budgie says maybe I still haven’t made my peace with the violence of my early years and we should spend some time there, which is a total waste of time. I don’t tell Budgie that, but that’s what I think.
Because when I think of Sarajevo, I think of all the normal kid stuff — like my sisters, how they used to argue over who got to take my hand while crossing the street or try out their make-up on me and how I pretended to hate it. All three of them were teenagers when I was still potty training so it was kind of like I had four mothers. If I was sitting at home and said I was cold, someone just didn’t get me a sweater. I got hot tea that wasn’t too hot. I got slippers. I got hugs. Elle told me once I was the apple of a whole bunch of eyes, which is why I am both a spoiled brat and a pleaser.
All I know is that when I think about my life before Elle, it feels like it’s i
n two parts. From 0 to 9, it’s all in slow motion. There’s my sisters and Baba and Deda Ilić’s cinema and my neighbor Arman and being all carefree-happy-la-la-la.
Then it’s like the next year or so are in fast forward. There’s the siege and the tunnel and Dajdža Drago and the new apartment in Winnipeg.
And then along comes Elle.
Budgie pointed out that Tata’s family was Muslim and Mama’s was Serbian Orthodox, like this was news to me. She wanted to know if it was hard on my family, especially during the war. This was obviously a biggie for her because she looked disappointed when I had nothing much to say. It made me wonder what else Mama and Tata have told her, and if maybe they’ve been meeting behind my back. I told her lots of kids at my old school back in Bosnia had families like that. The war made everyone crazy for a while, which is why we left.
Tell me about your dad, she said, when you were little.
I wanted to say why don’t you tell me since you seem to know more than I do, but I’m not an a-hole, so I told her my tata, Mirza, was a math teacher in the older grades of the elementary. We walked to school together and we ate lunch together and I had no worries. Lots of the kids called him Matematika Mirza, which Mama thought was disrespectful but I don’t think he minded. I told Budgie maybe it was because Tata grew up learning the Qur’an, how everyone should be humble and quiet about their good deeds. He was the first in his family to graduate from a university.
But Mama’s parents, my Baba and Deda Ilić, ran a cinema right in the middle of the city, and now and then when I hear something outside kind of like the squeal and rumble of a Sarajevo tram car, I’m right back there. I’m eating Kakao Krem in the lobby and smiling at customers who pat my head and shake cigarette ashes in my hair. I’m taking my middle front row seat even though Baba Ilić says too close is bad for my eyes.
Tata’s mama, my Nana Spaho, was really old but Mama called her The Tank behind her back and she’d wrap me in her fat halal butcher’s wife arms and call me our blessed little zakašnjela misao, or afterthought. But Baba and Deda Ilić knew everyone — Serb, Croat, Muslim, Jewish — and everyone knew them. They were like the movie king and queen of Sarajevo, and I was the prince.
Do you ever think about the war? Budgie wanted to know. About how it affected your family? About how it affected you?
I told her I don’t remember it much, which is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I know she might not believe this if Mama or Amina has already gotten to her, held her wrists tight as handcuffs, explained how their hearts broke right in two when they witnessed their magnificent home come crumbling down around their ears. Amina actually wrote a story for the Winnipeg Free Press about how Sarajevo was the Jerusalem of Europe and how watching all our mosques, cathedrals and synagogues end up at the mercy of homicidal maniacs left her with post-traumatic stress disorder. She says her story won an award because she has experiential empathy. Hana and Sara say Amina suffers more from middle-sister syndrome, since everything in her life must be high drama or it’s not worth her time.
But surely you must have been frightened at some point, Budgie said. I remember watching reports of the siege as a young woman. Your street was bombed, Laz-Aaar. Your family was short of food and water. You lost your beloved dog.
I definitely had not told her about my little dog Sima. I’d never said anything about pets of any kind — not Hana’s pet gerbil who ate her own babies, or Sara’s pet rabbit that made her and Amina’s bedroom smell like pee and newspaper ink, or Elle’s pet African dwarf frog who won’t stop growing. Mama must have told her.
Sima was old, I told Budgie. He went to live with Baba and Deda Ilić for a while, where it was safer and then his bowel got obstructed from eating a rope. But there was no way I could just stop there, with Sima having a good long life. Budgie talks a lot, but she also waits and stares down at her notes and looks like she might sigh but doesn’t. I told her that I was scared sometimes, but it didn’t feel real.
I’m pretty sure she wanted me to break down, start banging my head against the wall because I was having flashbacks of exploding windows and sniper shots and dead kids in the street. I could have done it, maybe. I could have pulled it off because most days I do feel like slamming my head or punching my own face or slitting my wrists. Only not about any of that.
Elle told me one time that I was the most non-threatening male she’d ever met, and that included her hippie-dippie peace-love-and-understanding dad, Jimmy. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for violence except maybe the movie kind, where you can just sit back and enjoy the show. My neighbor in Sarajevo, Arman, was always heading footballs at substitute teachers like it was an accident, or throwing stuff at cats to make them hiss, or punching me hard in the stomach just to say hello, and I wrestled with him now and then so he could get sick of pinning me and then just come over to play cards or watch a movie. Mama said I quit soccer when I was seven not because I was hopeless at hoofing the ball but because I hated all the shoving and tripping and elbows in your face. Amina says only North Americans who don’t have a clue about the game call it soccer, but when I call it football here, people look at me like there’s no way that kid ever played football.
Maybe Budgie would like this. When we arrived in Winnipeg it was the kind of windy cold that makes your skin feel like screaming, and the whole way to Dajdža Drago’s van in the airport car park, Hana wouldn’t shut up with her so-so English. She went on and on about how she was the only one old enough to remember our uncle, Mama’s beloved younger brother who’d somehow gotten us out of hell and was now taking us to his beee-u-ti-ful home, which she knew was beee-u-ti-ful because she’d seen pictures, and on and on and on until I wanted to punch her in the mouth.
Sitting in the van’s heated leather seats, I remember feeling sick because I could actually imagine the blood trickling down Hana’s chin and onto her white jean jacket that was no match for Winnipeg at the end of November.
September 7, 1999
Budgie was distracted today by the floods of mucus pouring out her nose.
One time when I had a bad cold, Elle said it was like the Snot River Dam had exploded in my head. She always got mad when I came to school sick because why drag yourself in and infect everyone else when you can stay in bed and take a break from the daily grind?
I bet Budgie is like Hana, the kind who likes to make lists and memorize the rules so she can tell you all about them. Amina says people like that are the first to crack in a siege because the rules don’t apply, like a rabbit is your pet one month and dinner the next. Last year Amina told me I’d been oblivious because Mama was so good at faking the rules for me. Like we always had snack at the same time even when the bread was basically cardboard. Or she always told me a story before I went to sleep even if we were in the cellar and there was shelling.
Even Tata did math with me sometimes, especially at the beginning, and the rules in math are always the same.
What I remember most about the siege is feeling bored out of my mind and Amina says that’s because I was sheltered and obviously not a very perceptive child. In grade eight, after Mr. Beacon asked if I was being intentionally obtuse, Elle told him I wasn’t stupid, I just lived in Crislandia. She said I couldn’t help it if I was dreamy and self-absorbed.
Budgie wanted to know what it was like adjusting to a new home. The nose wiping made her look like she’d been pecking away at cherry-colored bird seed. I told her at first Mama refused to look out our windows in Winnipeg, like she was still afraid of being shelled by Chetniks hiding up in the non-existent hills. But she said it was because there was nothing to look at. Back in our flat halfway up the hill in Kovači you could see green grass cemeteries and tile-covered domes and pointy minarets and the old snaking walls of the Yellow and White Fortresses and more terracotta roofs than you could count.
Out our second-floor apartment in St. James there were gray tree branches and cold blue sky.
Dajdža Drago said we’d learn to appreciate the clean lines and wide-open spaces of the prairies, but getting used to something and liking it are two different things.
Budgie wrote something down and then asked how I found learning a new language. I told her I came knowing some English because back in Sarajevo, Hana wanted to be a travel guide and so she listened to ESL tapes day and night for two years straight. Mama still goes on about what a tourism mecca the former Yugoslavia was, the only Soviet country where backpackers came to party. But when things went bad and the barricades went up, she was the one who banned the tapes because who in their right mind would want to holiday in our godforsaken graveyard of a region ever again?
After we got to Winnipeg, Amina kept telling Mama that she needed to be patient with Tata, because it’s hard to master new syntax and pronunciation when you aren’t one for chatter and only speak up when you have something meaningful to say. Even Hana and Sara agreed that it was only natural for a quiet man to grow even quieter in this situation.
He didn’t have an Elle saving his bacon by explaining English expressions like save your bacon.
Except I wasn’t supposed to talk about Elle yet.
What about school? You came to Winnipeg in grade five?
Mama or Tata must have told her some of this, or it must be in some kind of file, so I told her it’s funny, if you’re watching an American TV show, they would say fifth grade. Everyone in Europe thinks Canadians and Americans are the same, but they’re not. Like they say college when Canadians say university. Or they say handbag when Canadians say purse. Sometimes they call a purse a pocketbook. That doesn’t even make any sense.
Were you scared to start a new school?
Elle said she remembered seeing me in the halls those first few months and I was a deer in the headlights, a fish out of water, a ship without a sail. And I had a geek target on my back.
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