Yesterday's People by Goran Simic

Author:Goran Simic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2011-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

That second December Sinan showed up carrying in his arms the lifeless body of a boy. One side of the boy’s face was covered with frozen blood. At first, struggling with my own nightmares, I wanted to push Sinan out. I was afraid his gambling had taken a perverted turn. But Sinan was not smiling and the bleeding boy was hardly breathing. I took off the boy’s torn jacket by the stove, and struggled with the frozen shoelaces. Sinan told me that he’d found him by the locked staircase door, a victim of street gangs. He was seven or eight years old, at most, and his scratched arms and legs were nothing compared to the bruises on his back. Sinan turned his head away as I cleaned the boy’s wounds, as if he’d forgotten that he’d ever been a dentist. The boy woke up for a second under the warm blankets, stared at Sinan’s face and, before his hand managed to reach the bandage on his head, fell asleep. He was feverish the whole night and didn’t wake before noon next day.

I had never had children, and found myself at a loss. We tried to make some compresses from odds and ends in my kitchen, but Sinan was so confused that he was more a nuisance than anything else. He spilled warm water over the stove, and then dropped the sugar bowl, which shattered. When I asked him to hold the boy’s leg so that I could put on some vinegar compresses, Sinan shook all over.

“What are you putting on his legs,” he asked, averting his gaze.

“It’s a blend of owl’s eye, bat’s wings, and mouse ears. . . .”

I didn’t finish. Sinan lunged into the bathroom and threw up. Lovely, I thought. Instead of one patient, I now have two.

During the night, the boy raved. From his broken sentences I inferred that bandits had set his house on fire and that he had tried to reach the city with his mother. They had tried to cross the frozen river at night but his mother had fallen through the ice. The boy hid in the cellar of a demolished house for two days. He kept mentioning a knapsack with photos and addresses. He’d struggled to survive in a city where you could get attacked for less than a child’s knapsack.

The Kid woke up the next day and did not stop crying until Sinan appeared with a funny metal toy, a bear with a drum. At night, he continued to rave—or was it the truth?—about fire, ice, his mother’s coat and his knapsack. He did not speak a word during the day; I never even managed to find out his name. I gave him markers and paper. He used only the black one.

Sinan noticed this and brought him a dozen black markers the next day. I unkindly asked him if he’d bring the boy a bomb if he sketched it. I scavenged some clothes from my neighbours and took the boy to see a doctor.

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