Swan Dive Read online

One day she just appeared again at my locker like she’d never left.

  Mindy says I should invite you over to our place.

  I said something dumb like, You’re back, and she leaned in really close to my face.

  Nooooo, Cris. It’s my ghooooost. I was killed in an aaaaaavalanche out weeeeest.

  Budge said I had a very good episodic memory and I said I’m mostly good at remembering math and stupid things.

  I keep thinking about the first time I went to Elle’s. It was only about six blocks but Mama wouldn’t let me go on my own because it was too cold. It’s nearly Easter, but you freeze your ears in ten seconds. She was speaking in English because it was Saturday and she wasn’t too tired. I asked how her or Tata coming with me in the deep freeze would keep me warmer and she said, Don’t be cleber with me, and I told her she meant don’t be smart with me. And Tata actually spoke up in Bosnian and told me to obey my mother, and besides he wanted to try out the new mittens Dajdža Drago had given them. They were called garbage mitts and they were big and leathery. I remember on the way to Elle’s, Tata clapped his hands together and the boom made me jump. Our breath was like fog in the clear cold and each clap echoed against the snow banks.

  When Elle rang the buzzer to let us up, Tata turned away and said, You go on now. I’ll tell your mother you’re safe and sound.

  Elle and I played Monopoly and I kept landing on all the good stuff, collecting $200, buying houses and railroads. She ate round crackers that I learned were called Ritz and that melt in your mouth, and small squares of gouda cheese, and she told me I’d never survive in the real world of capitalism. Luck only gets you so far. You also need to be cut-throat. You need to be ready to step on the little people and I can tell you wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  She was wrong because I’d destroyed plenty of anthills with Arman when we were small, even pulled apart a moth once, and I told her I was trained in karate. She said, Let me guess, you lasted one class, and when I didn’t say anything she knew she was right and jumped up and down like she’d won the lottery.

  I told her she only lasted three gymnastic classes and she said at least she had a philosophy toward life and knew how to walk the walk, and then she explained what walk the walk meant.

  Elle took me for my first Slurpee even though it was so cold in March that no one back in Sarajevo would believe it. She wanted to know if I was ever planning to invite her back to my place and I said I didn’t know and she aimed her straw at my face and shot blue raspberry Slurpee. She said, You’re such an a-hole, and then she explained what an a-hole was and said she liked me because I was honest.

  Looking back, maybe this would be funny if I didn’t feel like my life was over and I will never laugh again.

  Amina said the Bethlehem Prophecies also predict that on December 31, 1999, massive solar flares will torch the sky and millions of people will be blinded. So maybe first blind, then dead from the plague because it can’t actually work the other way around.

  * * *

  —

  When Tata came to pick me up that day, Mindy was at the store buying frozen pizzas.

  He was so bundled up I couldn’t really see his face but he never said anything about Mindy leaving us on our own. Elle asked him to clap in his garbage mitts like she read our minds and he did and we all laughed like idiots until I could see Tata was starting to sweat in the stuffy apartment doorway.

  Before that day I’m not sure I even liked Elle, but maybe instantly liking someone isn’t always what adds up to something because after that, we were best friends.

  There’s something else about Mindy and Elle’s apartment. Every inch is covered in stuff because every weekend Mindy goes shopping at Liquidation World and buys a king-size throw pillow or an abdominal crunch bench that’s supposed to fold down and slide under the couch or a cafeteria-style food warmer. Elle says she buys a lot as “presents,” like the time she brought home an oversized dog basket for her friend’s chocolate lab who died before she could give it to them.

  I guess that’s why Elle always found a reason to come to our place. Sometimes Mindy drove us to a movie or something and she asked about my family, how they were doing, did the girls need her to pick up any great buys on salon shampoo or lilac-scented microwavable heat packs.

  I’ve been making time in the morning to read the stories, she said one time. When I think of those blackouts, having to cook over a fire in your own kitchen or having to scoop your shit into a plastic bag because there’s not enough water to flush. I mean, the least I can do is have you all over for a casserole. Elle said when Mindy cooked, she was pretty good and there’d be a whole month of waking up to pumpkin raisin buns in the bread-maker and coming home to Polish-style goulash in the slow-cooker.

  But there was no way I could invite Mama and my sisters to that apartment. In their kitchen they managed to fit a table and chairs and water cooler and washer and dryer and all the blenders and ice-cream makers and waffle irons that Mindy collected and never bothered to dust or sweep around. Hana would have faked some kind of stomach bug rather than eat there and afterwards Mama would make cleber remarks. When was the last time that woman read one of those recipe books stacked like bricks on top of the kitchen cupboards? If she takes one from the bottom, the rest tumble down right on her head.

  So we never went there, and I never thought of it until now. I keep thinking about Elle crowded in there with Mindy. I’m watching over them like a ghost, wondering what it must be like to live in such a mess by choice.

  September 16, 1999

  Today Budgie was wearing a red shirt with two square pockets right over each sisa. She looked like some a-hole dressed up his pet bird in a cowboy shirt. Elle said it’s cruel to dress up animals because they’re like, Is this food on my head? Why are you doing this to me, my food-giving friend? Please, if this is not food, I’m not interested. I told her that when we came to Winnipeg I thought Halloween was just as dumb. You dress up and go out after dark in the freezing cold and people give you candy so you don’t trick out their house with eggs and toilet paper? And she said, So what, the Chinese burn money and cook food for their dead relatives.

  Budgie wanted to know if it was hard to adjust to normal life, especially with Elle and other kids my age, and I told her nobody at my school had any idea about Dikan or Kobra or any of the other old comics Deda Ilić used to bring me when the electricity went out for good. I read them so much I could act out each panel and it finally drove Amina crazy.

  Do you really not have any clue what’s going on here? Do you think this is all some kind of game? Do you know that normal guys, like Bog Durić and Miro Popovic, who Hana let feel her up last year, are now murderers? They’re hiding up there in Trebevic Mountain, shelling away, and three children younger than you died in a rain of shrapnel today. They don’t care if you’re Muslim, Serb, Croat or Martian. If you don’t agree that being a Serb is more important than your friends, or your family, or your city, they want you D-E-A-D.

  Then Mama came down on her for talking about that in front of me, like Amina was as awful as one of the crazy Chetniks who shot little kids.

  Or like one day in Sarajevo I woke up to the noise of wheelchairs and old carpets and toboggans being dragged over cobblestone. People used all kinds of stuff to haul jugs of water once the taps went dry, but I just got used to it and fell back to sleep, because what else was I going to do anyway?

  Budgie said she read that Bosnians are a fatalistic people because for most of written history they’ve been in the path of great empires vying for supremacy. I told her she should talk to my sister Amina about that because I wasn’t good at history. I was more of a math whiz like Tata.

  She told me not to sell myself short, but I didn’t think I was.

  September 17, 1999

  I woke up thinking about that time not long after the grade six talent show, when I slipped on some ice in front of the school
and a bunch of crumpled old papers and a container of Mama’s white bean soup dumped out. It was just before the morning buzzer and Elle told me no one laughed but no one really came to help either, and she said it was like I was Charlie Brown and she was Lucy. I didn’t know what she meant.

  You know? Peanuts? she said.

  But I didn’t know and I asked what was she talking about. What nuts?

  Forget it, she said, like I was trying to be a jerk or something. Just let it go, okay?

  And I did, I let it go, maybe because I was used to Elle explaining everything to me and I was too lazy to do it myself. I even saw something about an old Charlie Brown show in the TV guide a few times but I didn’t bother tuning in.

  So yesterday I asked Budgie what she knew about this Charlie and Lucy and she said they were characters from a comic strip and Charlie had a famously cheeky dog named Soopy. And I asked, Why Soopy? and she said, No, Snoopy. And I asked, Why Snoopy? and she started to look the same way Elle did that morning.

  I don’t know. Maybe because dogs like to sniff around and get into things.

  But Elle said I’m like Charlie and she’s like Lucy. Why would she say that?

  Budgie said that was a good question, but Elle may be the only person who could answer it. Which was not helpful, so I asked her about Charlie.

  I guess he was what you’d call an underdog. He always hoped for the best, but things didn’t always turn out.

  I asked about Lucy and Budgie rubbed the bridge of her beak. Lucy thought she knew what was what. She was vain and she liked to … Do you know the expression “push someone’s buttons”?

  I told her I knew because Sara said Amina did it to her. So this was part of the joke?

  Yes.

  Were they friends?

  She thought about it. That’s a good question.

  I waited, and then she looked at her watch and jumped up because we were eight minutes past our time.

  September 21, 1999

  I’ve been going to see Budgie for exactly a month and she’s only mentioned the Big C once, which is fine with me, except it’s kind of like knowing that someone is going to punch you in the face. Part of you just wants to get it over with. There’s no way there’s not intelligent life somewhere else in the universe and if I’m lucky maybe aliens will take over the planet sooner rather than later.

  One time I tried to explain to Elle about the Zoran Čalić comedy franchise, how in the last movie the two dumb cops meet up with an alien posing as a politician and she said it sounded totally not funny and I told her you had to be Yugoslavian and Sara said she was Yugoslavian and she thought they were the worst movies ever.

  Budgie wanted to know what kinds of things Elle and I used to do together as kids and I told her most of the time we obsessed about CristElle. She had no idea what I was talking about, of course.

  I said I wasn’t even sure how it all started, except Elle liked to say she was a music geek even though she didn’t know how to play an instrument or read music or worry if she was a little flat during the bridge. We also watched a lot of videos on TV because when Elle really loves something, like pop moves and pop riffs and pop divas, she really loves something. Like before CristElle, she was really into the TV show Friends, so we’d spend a lot of time coming up with our own sitcom plots, like Chandler and Joey are kicked out of their apartment because Joey forgot to pay the rent and they have to move in with Phoebe, who keeps walking around in the buff.

  Or Elle went through this thing where she really, really wanted a waterbed because she heard they were good for super-imaginative dreams, so we spent tons of time coming up with ways to earn money, like walking dogs or shoveling driveways. In the end we spent more time thinking up jobs than actually doing any, and whatever we did make went straight to Slurpees, which was good, I guess, because there was no way they were ever getting a double waterbed frame in that apartment.

  I told Budgie that one time Elle came back from visiting Jimmy in Vancouver and talking about the buskers in Gastown and how some guy named Aaron who could dislocate both his shoulders had been couch-surfing at Jimmy’s. He traveled across North America getting paid to turn himself into a human pretzel. I told Elle that in Sarajevo music students used to sing opera or play violin sonatas for customers in line outside the cinema and she just kept going as if I hadn’t said anything. My point is, you come up with an act, you put out a hat and voilà, a few bucks in your pockets.

  So after that we started blasting Mariah and Janet and Destiny’s Child, playing them over and over until we could sing not just the chorus but the entire song straight through.

  Budgie wanted to know how we practiced the pop hits at our place with five adults and one teenager all living there. I told her Tata didn’t even notice since he was out working for Dajdža Drago all the time, and Mama was her usual self, offering us homemade potato salad or cherry strudel, being all sweet and nice until Elle was gone, when she’d say things to my sisters so I’d overhear. If she had a voice, she could at least specialize in classical, where fatties are the norm. Shouldn’t our boy be outside with other boys doing boy things? Perhaps he was traumatized in ways we cannot see.

  Then Sara and Hana would reassure her because they worried about her blood pressure. Yes, we know, but give him time. He was never athletic. He’s learning English. His marks are fine. Everything will change after puberty.

  The funny thing is, they were right about all of that. Except for the part about Mama not having to worry.

  I didn’t tell Budgie that. I noticed she likes to suck on the end of her pen, and it kind of looks like she’s slurping up a worm.

  What did you enjoy about singing?

  That was easy. It was the first time I was good at something besides math. And when I started singing American pop with Elle, Amina got all excited. When CristElle was just starting out, Amina was the only one besides me who didn’t have a job. She still spent her days writing letters to the Winnipeg Free Press about the mortar attack in the city’s Markale that killed 68 people, about how many Sarajevo families like ours were of mixed Serb, Croat and Muslim backgrounds, about how mass murderers like General Mladić were getting away with war crimes because the Americans and NATO refused to step in with some serious air power.

  One time Elle was reading over Amina’s shoulder and she said it might help our cause if those crazy-ass names didn’t make you want to give up and read the funnies instead. I thought Amina might lose it on her, like when Elle complained that our apartment smelled like cigarettes because Tata sometimes smoked in the living room with the window open and Amina told her if she didn’t like it she could just leave because a man who has lost everything should be able to do what he likes, including perfectly legal if unhealthy habits in his own home.

  This time, though, Amina just laughed and squeezed Elle’s arm and told her it was our people’s fate to be misunderstood.

  Maybe she knew deep down that she needed a break from the crusade because for a while it’s like she became CristElle’s biggest fan. She loved to talk about how I’d inherited my phenomenal musical talent from our artistic Bosnian Serb side. Our great-grandmother Vanja sang in German cabarets in her youth and her husband Teodor played the piano during silent movies.

  All I know is that CristElle became everything for a while. Elle said we were a team of two, hungry for success, and all we had to do was put in our time, groove ourselves up, master our tunes and then unleash ourselves on the world. You have to put your heart and soul into it, Amina told us. You can’t fake that. There is nothing more moving than watching a child put their heart and soul into something.

  Then she told Elle the story about Zlata, the Sarajevo girl who kept a diary during the siege, which was then published by the French and became a bestseller and so her family was released through diplomatic channels.

  What about everybody else, Elle wanted to know. Her fami
ly got to go, and the rest of the city is still stuck?

  Amina told her that civil war was like that. Some people lived and some people died and there was no fair or unfair.

  I thought it was funny that Elle didn’t ask about us. Why were we here in Canada and other families still back there? But the thing about Elle is she’s all about the here and now. She doesn’t mind if she thinks one thing one week and the opposite thing the next.

  I asked Budgie if she ever watched Star Search, and she looked blank. On TV? I told her, Yeah, on TV, and she laughed — a slightly crazy Amina laugh. Forgive me, Laz-Aaar. I have a toddler, so all I do is wipe bums and not sleep.

  I told her it went off the air in 1995, and she laughed again. Well, I would have been doing my Master’s, so no TV then either.

  Okay, I said. But it was this show where anybody could go on and do their talent and if the judges liked them, then they got their shot.

  They’re shot? she asked.

  You know, I said. Like you win the best vocal group or best comedian and you get a manager and your shot at making it big.

  Budgie’s pen was back in her mouth and I wondered if she got this from spending too much time with her kid. I said I never really thought we’d go on Star Search. More like it was our inspiration.

  Because in the end, we just did the grade six talent contest.

  September 23, 1999

  I’m trying to remember what else Elle and I did those first couple of years besides plan our rise to stardom. Because there was a lot of stuff besides the actual singing, like designing stages and mapping out tours and thinking about how we were going to spend our millions. We watched a lot of the usual TV, like Friends and ER and Party of Five. And we watched movies after Hana got the job at the post office and bought a new VCR. Amina was the only one who refused to go to the video store because how could she enjoy such indulgence when so many loved ones were still living without electricity?