Free Little Bastards in Springtime by Katja Rudolph

shudders and quakes with the hundreds of hits farther away. In Baka’s war, the Germans swept down from the north and up from the south, occupying all our major cities in less than two weeks. Like now, everything changed in such a short time.
    Baka is at our place making us lunch. Mama is out rehearsing with her ensemble and Papa is at the Holiday Inn trying to sell an article to a Western newspaper. Papa is obsessed with this. He paces the apartment day and night thinking about it, he yells hysterically into his phone about it. Those Western journalists are telling lies, he shouts, they’re telling sentimental sob stories, they’re repeating the propaganda of our fascist leaders. If the West doesn’t understand the complexity of what’s going on here, how can they help?
    Dušan is suddenly talking history. “The Serbs fought theNazis during the war,” he tells me, “and the Croats and some Muslim groups collaborated with the Nazis. So, you see. People forget that.”
    “Some Serbs collaborated as well,” I say. “The Chetniks. And anyway, the partisans were made up of everybody, all religions from all different parts of the country.”
    “The partisans murdered collaborators after the war, they’re not all heroes. And Tito hoarded money, houses, jewellery, Playboy bunnies, famous people, even though he was a communist. He’s not a hero either, whatever Baka keeps telling you.”
    Dušan hasn’t bothered to get dressed today. He’s wearing the track pants he sleeps in and a torn undershirt. He’s now hanging out the window to smoke his weed—maybe that’s the rule Papa made, or maybe Papa wanted some too to help calm his nerves, and it’s their big secret from Mama. Dušan’s eyes are stoner slits. He’s so bored he’s started to carve his initials into his thigh.
    I wander into the kitchen. Baka says to me, “Jevrem, did I ever tell you about our beloved—?” and I nod and say, yes, many, many times. “Well, our beloved Joza fell in love with a Russian girl when he was hiding from the Whites in Omsk, but so what? She was beautiful, and young, and a Bolshevik. Polka was her name. Did he care where she was from? No, he did not, because he loved her in particular, and all of humanity in general, that’s how enlightened the communists were.”
    I think about how to escape into the mountains, like Baka did when she was a girl. She just picked up one day and ran away from her parents, her brothers and sisters, her husband-to-be, her village, to fight with the partisans. That’s how she invented her new life—she somehow knew that there was a better wayto live, that her whole future would be changed by that one walk into the mountains, I don’t know how. There has to be a way for us too. If we kids could just slip up into the forest, we could get organized and take out the Chetnik firepower in the hills around the city. Kids are small, agile, fast. They can learn how to work any machine, like guns, rockets, mortars, grenades. And they don’t eat as much as adults, another advantage. The best part is kids are the future, they have no past or prejudices except the ones you teach them. That’s what Papa says. I can think of fifteen kids right now who I could recruit in this building just by knocking on doors. They’re not just from Sarajevo, their parents come from everywhere in Yugo, and from Germany, Turkey, Iran. We’d end the war in only a few days because the enemy wouldn’t be looking for us, hundreds of platoons of little kids storming their positions with guns in our hands. If we’re old enough to get shot at, why aren’t we old enough to fight?
    After lunch, I think about practising the piano. Mama mentions it every now and then, and I try, but the noise of guns and shells outside makes me lose the feel of the keys. Instead, I take the elevator to the top floor, then walk along each hallway all the way down to the ground floor, keeping a mental list of where all the kids live and what