Free Little Bastards in Springtime by Katja Rudolph Page A

they’d each be good at in a battle.
    I GO to Baka’s apartment and knock on the door. I like to visit her. She has opinions, stories, and a weird collection of food. For years she’s been hoarding tins all over her apartment.
    Baka stands at her window looking at black plumes of smoke rising slow motion in the distance. She shakes her head.
    “They’re destroying all our good work,” she says. “For centuries, engineers have made a work of art of this city. It takes intelligent people years to build it all up, and idiots and vulgar imbeciles only weeks to tear it all down.”
    I like to think of Baka barking orders at construction workers, a hard hat on her head. Baka bustles around her kitchen, doing dishes. She lives here alone, but she has many plants growing on her balcony and friends used to come over all the time. In the summer months she lies on the balcony in her bright yellow bathing suit. She’s a sun-worshipper, and a forest-worshipper, and a mountain-worshipper, those are the things she trusted when she was in the war. But what she worships most of all is Yugoslavia, our country. After the war, you could join a brigade and rebuild everything that was destroyed. You could build railroads and highways, subdivisions, schools, factories, city buildings. You could build them with your bare hands with thousands of other young people and spend months living together, playing sports, sitting around campfires, putting on plays, singing together in the evenings. That’s what Baka told me. Mama says the communists knew how to get work out of people back then without paying them, how to make it feel like a fun thing to do.
    Baka says, “If we could just get us old partisans together, we would sort this mess out in no time. We’d clear out the dead leaves, branches, animal carcasses from the cave bunkers. We’d find our old ordnance depots. We’d choose a leader to organize us. You know, when I was very young, I walked into the mountains to join the partisans. In doing so, I made a new future for myself, it’s that simple, a whole new life. I remember the exact moment when I knew everything would be different. How I felt a tingling all through my body, like I was being anointed by lifeitself. I was squatting by the roadside, my arms resting on my knees. I could see far out into the valley, a haze of green and rust punctuated by oily black smoke. I had all I needed with me: food for several days, a change of underclothing, a knife I took from the kitchen just before slipping away.”
    Her hand trembles as she lifts it to her face to brush back her hair. When she walks these days, she’s unsteady sometimes, like the floor is moving under her feet. But I can still picture her scrabbling around in the underbrush preparing a bunker or charging down a hill with gun in one hand to ambush an enemy convoy. Baka is bored by my grammar homework that Papa says I have to do, school or no school. “You know how to speak, so what’s the problem?” she says. So we play cards. She likes belot and poker, I like gin rummy. Today it’s her turn. We play texas hold’em, and place our bets with the small, smooth white pebbles she collected from the beaches of Istria.
    “Your djedica took me there when we were young, a few years after the war. We spent days exploring secluded coves and drinking crates of wine. The light is breathtaking there, bright, warm, clear. Beautiful like you can’t imagine. He said he’d show me paradise, and he didn’t break his promise.”
    “I know,” I say. “Remember, we were there last year.” Hot sun, white houses, bright blue water, fishing boats, ice cream, pizza.
    Baka bets hard, never folds. She loses more than she wins, but that doesn’t matter to her. It’s toughness that matters. The westerns we watch on TV, she plays like that, eyes squinting, blank face. Scary, that look, her face rigid like she’s paralyzed, but any minute she’ll jump up and pull a huge old gun on me.
    “Your