Twenty years of global travel has made me pretty choosy about souvenirs, but Milo is too green to resist the siren song of the colourful wares festooning the tourist trails. Not that his acquisition lust is confined to the kitsch cranked out for foreign visitors. It started in a Budapest subway station, when he caught sight of some Yu-Gi-Oh-ish trading cards in a kiosk window. “How would you have played with them?” I reasoned, as I frog-marched him, howling, toward the turnstile. “They’re in Hungarian.”
“Yeah, and money doesn’t grow on trees, you know,” Inky chimed in, helpfully repeating a shopworn mantra she must have picked up from me. I worry about her, remembering how reticent I once was about expressing anything resembling material desire. If one day she decides to haul off and really want something, loudly, unequivocally, the way her brother does, I don’t think I’d mind.
Meanwhile, her brother’s magpie tendencies were dragging us all down. Things came to a head in Sarajevo’s Turkish bazaar, a charming warren of tea shops, coppersmiths and souvenir stalls. I’d call it a minefield, but that seems a tad insensitive, given what the citizens of this city went through in the early ’90s. Any Sarajevan schoolkid who endured the siege understands the true meaning of deprivation. For the record, deprivation doesn’t mean your mom refusing to buy you a giant pencil fifteen minutes after buying you an expensive handicraft octopus carved from a palm nut.
I like to think I’m not the only mother who cares whether her child is perceived as a brat. It’s not so much a problem with the girl, but the boy is a trickier prospect, particularly in any setting where money is exchanged for goods. Both children had already been promised a souvenir from the Turkish bazaar, and as far as Milo there was nothing to be gained from delayed gratification. I decided that the best way to avoid a scene would be to purchase the first thing he claimed he wanted, with the understanding that there would be no do-overs, no begging for the next inviting item that caught his eye.
There was one other stipulation: I wasn’t going to shell out for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or any flimsy plastic doodad easily procured in Chinatown. This ruled out everything in the toy store’s window display save a just-for-pretend Glock that looked way too much like the real thing to take on a plane (not that I’d have bought the damn thing anyway).
Although the handicrafts spilling out of the shops weren’t exactly hand-crafted in the traditional sense, I still extolled the virtue of choosing something reflective of the local culture, like a brightly painted flute, or some curly-toed slippers, or a poorly-made plaque featuring a shoddy reproduction of the circular brass knockers one sees on the old city’s heavy wooden doors. This last seemed to hold some appeal for my frantic son, who set to banging the first one he could reach as if his life depended on it.
Greg was dubious. “Thirty-seven konvertible marks for that? You think it’s worth it?”
“To avoid a scene? Yes! Look at him. He’s totally stressed out.” I put my hand out for the money.
“Ayun—”
“Greg, he’s on the verge of total meltdown!” I know how this sounds, but bear in mind that we were in a very small space, presided over by an older woman whose parenting skills were no doubt unimpeachable.
“Let’s think this through.” Steering me by my elbow, Greg herded the entire family to a bench several storefronts away. Milo was one monofilament away from losing it, but Greg implemented some horse-whisperer techniques and laid out a counter-proposal. The way he saw it, each child should be given a set amount, a sort of seed grant to spend as he or she saw fit. I immediately conceded the superiority of his plan, which was not only brilliant, but also educational. It would let me pretend we were reinforcing the homework they weren’t doing. It sounded good to the kids, too, even Milo, who pocketed his ten-mark bill with something like relief.
After fifteen minutes trolling the bazaar, peacefully pawing at the merch, we decided that we’d be more effective, i.e. we’d get to the museum Greg and I wanted to visit sooner, if we split up, each parent escorting one child. I got Milo. “Is it okay if I know what I want now?” he asked.
“Sure, it’s your money. Do you remember where you saw it?”
He described a newsstand we had passed earlier that that displayed a few toys and other non-touristy tchotckes behind glass. I remembered it because Milo had found it so painful that I wouldn’t agree to any of the items at which he pointed. All former bets were off, though, now that he had his own money to blow. I navigated the ancient maze as Milo skipped by my side, alternately singing and fretting that I wouldn’t be able to find it, or that someone else would have beaten him to the punch, snapping up the one thing on which his heart was truly set, a made-in-China, plastic play set featuring two muscle-bound commandos and a toy grenade.
You heard me.
Greg’s plan had utterly failed to address my long-standing no-guns policy. To invoke it now would have been dirty pool. “Do I have enough?” Milo asked hopefully.
“You tell me. It’s eight point seventy-five.”
He held his breath and calculated. “I do!” he screamed joyfully.
“That’s right, you do. Now, are you sure this is what you really, really want?”
He flung his arms around my thighs. “Oh, thank you, mama! Thank you! Thank you!”
“Well, it’s your money,” I smiled. Or rather, your money and my reputation — though, technically, the Special Forces Combat Forces gift pack is a gun-free plaything. Unless one counts a flimsy walkie-talkie with a conveniently barrel-like antenna and a lurid cardboard backdrop featuring a realistic, fiery explosion, that grenade is its only weapon.
Still. We were in Sarajevo.
The newsstand vendor didn’t betray any particular opinion she may have had regarding the little American boy’s choice, but neither did she offer to bag his purchase. Fortunately, I never travel without a nylon shopping bag, and the one I had on me was just big enough to contain this blister-packed monstrosity. I let Milo carry it himself, telling him that though I was happy for him, he should be discreet. “See, some really bad things happened to the people here. There was a war, and there were real explosions and real guns and a lot of people got killed. So, while you and I know it’s just a toy, it might be the kind of toy that could make the people who live here feel bad. And I know you wouldn’t want to make anybody feel bad.”
Dumbing things down in that way makes me cringe, but Milo, bless his heart, seemed to get the message. When he handed his treasure off to Greg, who would be dropping stuff off at our guesthouse before our excursion to the Siege of Sarajevo Museum, he gave explicit instructions that the contents should be kept under wraps. He didn’t want to hurt our hostess, who had introduced him to her pet Dalmation and invited him into the kitchen to help her make pancakes.
As to the museum, it was excellent, though perhaps not so much for children. There are plenty of photos of children there, of course, but also photos of people lying in their own blood, their bicycles toppled nearby. Again, Milo, who initially was quite taken with the displays of munitions used by the Bosnian Resistance, seemed to get the message. “I don’t like this museum,” he announced in a quavering voice, and retreated to the stairwell with one of his sister’s Archie comics.
Later, in the privacy of our own room, he spent the better part of two hours happily maneuvering his plastic commandos around the bedsheet frontlines, the danger of their missions implied by a non-stop stream of whispered sound effects. Even though I’ve never been able to make those noises myself, I could appreciate this for the peaceful situation it was.
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