Girl at War: A Novel Page 3

  “But Slovenia, Dijana. How are we going to pay for it?”

  “Our daughter is sick. I don’t care how we are going to pay for it.” I carried Rahela out to her car seat.

  In Slovenia there’d been a ten-day war. They didn’t share a border with Serbia or have full access to the sea; they weren’t the wrong ethnicity. Now Slovenia was a free country. A separate country. We passed through the desolate fields of northern Croatia and my father slowed as a Slovenian police officer waved us toward a makeshift customs booth, hastily constructed to mark the new border. My father cranked down the window and my mother dug through her purse for our passports. In winters past we’d come to Slovenia to spend the day in Čatež, an indoor water park just over the border. Strange, I thought, to need a passport to go swimming. The policeman licked his thumb and flipped through our documents.

  “What’s the purpose of your visit?”

  “We’re visiting cousins,” my father said. I wondered why he didn’t just tell the truth.

  “How long will you be staying?”

  “Just for the day. A few hours.”

  “Right,” said the officer, smirking. I remembered the inky square stamps we’d gotten when we’d driven to Austria once, but the man just scribbled something in pen in each of our passports and motioned us through.

  Unsure of what to expect from a whole new country, I was disappointed to see that Slovenia looked the same as I remembered it, looked the same as Croatia did in the rural parts outside of Zagreb—flat and blank and grassy against a backdrop of mountains that never seemed to get any closer.

  “You know I don’t care about the money,” my father said, cracking the silence he’d been keeping since we’d left the house.

  “I know.”

  “I’m just worried.”

  “I know.”

  My father took my mother’s hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. “I know,” she said.

  As we approached the capital, the population thickened, a dense buildup of houses clustered around the city. At its core, Ljubljana looked like a smaller, squatter version of Zagreb, except the river ran right through the town center rather than along the edge. The difference between Croatian and Slovenian was exasperatingly mild, the storefronts and street signs filled with words that looked familiar but not quite right, rendering comprehension just out of reach.

  “This is not a doctor’s office,” my father said when my mother instructed him to turn down an unmarked alley. He was overarticulating the way he did when he was frustrated.

  “That’s it.” My mother pointed to a second-floor flat with a red cross taped to the front door. My father parked the car in front of a fire hydrant.

  —

  “Good afternoon,” a woman said in English, ushering us inside. “I’m Dr. Carson.” I’d studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly. Still, I resolved to concentrate and pick up as much as I could. Dr. Carson shook my parents’ hands, hard. The door of her flat opened directly into the living room, and she led us to her sofa, a fixture too big for the room and covered in pilling floral throw pillows. Black-and-white photos of sickly children being hugged by toothy American doctors hung poster-size on all walls. MEDIMISSION, said the posters in block lettering beneath the photos, followed by an assortment of uplifting slogans about children and miracles and the future.

  Dr. Carson was thin and blond and had the same teeth as the people in the posters, and I resolved to dislike her based on these things, the perkiness in her face that reminded me of the way teachers spoke to students who they thought were stupid. But I knew she was Rahela’s best chance at getting better; though Dr. Carson’s uniform consisted of blue jeans, rubber gloves, and a stethoscope, she still had better equipment than all the real doctors’ offices back home.

  She drew blood in her kitchen. “It’s sterile,” she said over and over, as if we had other options. I didn’t like seeing Rahela’s tiny arm pinned against the woman’s countertop, though Rahela wasn’t crying, hadn’t cried since we arrived. She looked tired. I looked away, stared at an image of an Asian girl, half her face burned, contorted like gnarled tree bark. A doctor held her on his knee and applied a bandage.

  Dr. Carson ran more tests. She and my parents conversed in broken languages, my mother translating for my father in semicoherent chunks. Rahela’s kidneys weren’t functioning properly, the ultrasound showed. It looked as if she might have only one, though the images were inconclusive even with the newer equipment.

  “There are better machines for these tests, in other cities,” Dr. Carson said. “But for now we can try medication. To stabilize.” My mother barraged her with questions. The two switched completely to English, and my father and I stood back fidgeting. Dr. Carson disappeared into her kitchen, then returned with a stack of papers and a small glass bottle of red and blue capsules.

  “Twice a day. We’ll be in touch.”

  At border control my father cranked down the window and offered our passports to the approaching officer, whose eyes flitted between our faces and ID photos with increasing curiosity.

  “Are you sure you want to go back over there?” He gestured with his head toward the border and spoke with something between condescension and genuine concern.

  My father snatched at our papers and rolled the window up so fast I thought he might close the officer’s hand inside. He opened his mouth to say something through the glass, but seemed to think better of it and accelerated across the border into Croatia.

  “What kind of question is that?” he asked after a while, his voice raw. “Of course we want to go back. Of course we’re going home.”

  —

  “You awake?” My father poked his head into the living room that night. “I have a story for you.” I sat up on the couch with my back against the armrest. My father was holding my favorite book, Tales from Long Ago. The fairy tales inside were very old and very famous, and the copy we had was so worn we’d had to tape the middle pages back in.

  “Which one?”

  “One day,” he read, “a young man stumbled into Stribor’s Forest. He didn’t know the forest was enchanted and that all kinds of magical creatures lived there. Some of the forest’s magic was good and some was evil, and the whole place would stay enchanted until the right person entered it to break the spell—someone who preferred his own life, even with its sorrows, over all the ease and happiness in the world.” My father snapped the book shut and I pretended to be patient, knowing he would continue, that he didn’t need the words in front of him.

  “The young man was headed home to his mother after chopping wood when”—my father jumped up and feigned stumbling—“he crossed the threshold into Stribor’s kingdom. Inside, everything seemed to glow with little flecks of gold, as if it were coated in fireflies.”

  I tried to think of a place in Zagreb where everything was clean and twinkling, but the city did not feel very magical of late.

  “And the woman who appeared before him in the clearing was no exception. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.”

  “She wasn’t!” I said. “She was faking!”

  “You’re right. The woman was really a snake in disguise. But the young man didn’t know it. He was willfully blinded by her beauty.”

  “His mother knew, though.”

  “When the young man brought her home, his mother saw right away that the woman had the forked tongue of a ssssssssserpent!” My father stuck out his tongue in a reptilian hiss. “The young man’s mother tried to warn him, but he ignored her. He was happy, he insisted. Soon, he and the serpent-woman were married.

  “The new daughter-in-law treated the young man’s mother very badly. The mother was old, but the daughter-in-law made her work hard, cooking and cleaning and tending the garden. At night, the mother sat in her room and cried, wishing for a way out of her predicament—”

  “And?” I interrupted here, my favorite part.
“The fairies!”

  “The fairies had heard the cry of one desperate for help. So, in the middle of the night, they flew up the mountainside to the village and into the house through the kitchen window.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “They were surrounded by a cloud of yellow light, and they each had two sets of paper-thin wings that fluttered so fast you could barely see them! Like a hummingbird’s.” I’d seen a hummingbird on TV once. He looked much too heavy to be hovering in midair like that.

  “The fairies picked the old woman up by the sleeves of her nightgown and carried her out of the village, down the mountain, and through the tall white oaks, where Stribor, Lord of the Forest, was waiting for them. Now Stribor lived in a golden castle inside the hollow of the biggest, strongest oak tree—”

  “How did he fit the castle in a tree?”

  “Magic, Ana. When the fairies had delivered the mother to his tree, he stepped outside. ‘I AM STRIBOR, LORD OF THE FOREST! WHO GOES THERE?’ ” my father bellowed in his best Stribor bass.

  “ ‘I am Brunhilda, and my son has married an evil serpent-woman!’ ” he squeaked.

  “Brunhilda?” I said. I laughed at the silly name, one my father changed in each retelling.

  “ ‘Ah, yes, Brunhilda, I know of your situation and I can help you. As you know, I am very mighty and have many powers.’ ” My father stuck out his chest and put his hands on his hips. “ ‘With my supermagical powers, I can return you to your youth. I’ll subtract fifty years from your age, so you’ll be young and beautiful again!’

  “The woman was excited by the prospect of being young again, and out of the clutches of her evil daughter-in-law. She agreed.

  “So Stribor stirred all the magic of the forest into motion.” My father paused for dramatic stirring pantomime. “And a giant gate appeared before them. Stribor told the woman that when she passed through, she would go back in time. The woman had one foot over the threshold when she had a thought:

  “ ‘Wait! What will happen to my son?’

  “Stribor scoffed at this question, which he thought was a stupid one. ‘He won’t be there, of course, in your new life, in your youth.’

  “The woman shied away. ‘I’d rather know my son than live happily as a young woman without him,’ she said. And just like that”—my father snapped his fingers—“Stribor disappeared and the magic of the forest was gone. The evil daughter-in-law became a snake again. The one who preferred her own sorrows to all the joys in the world had entered the forest and broken the spell.”

  My father pulled the blanket up around my chin.

  “Do you understand, Ana, that sometimes hard things are worth the trouble?”

  “I think so.” Suddenly I was very tired again.

  “Good.” My father kissed my forehead. “Laku noć,” he said. He reshelved the fairy tales and turned out the lamp as I shrank down into the creases of the couch.

  4

  The Presidential Palace was rocketed two days later. In the shelter my schoolmates and I waited for the all-clear to release us from the confines of mildew and shadows. This shelter had bunk beds stacked three high, and while waiting for our turn on the generator bike we’d made a game of clambering to the top level and jumping off, measuring our success by the volume of the smack our sneakers made against the cement floor. Our teacher, normally quick to snuff out such athletic outbursts, gave us a stern command not to break any bones but let us continue. Something was taking longer than usual. I glanced sidelong at the butcher, self-nominated guardian of the door, his flabby form swaddled in a bloody apron. A handheld police scanner protruded from his front pocket, and he whispered with the cashier from the shop next to his. Then, almost frantically, he spun around and fumbled with the door latches, his thick hands moving faster than I’d ever seen them work behind his counter.

  “Did you hear the signal?” Luka asked. I hadn’t, but the door was open and the push of the crowd toward the stairs overpowered the spindly legs of children. Besides, we didn’t want to miss out on the excitement. My classmates and I pressed against one another as we mounted the steps toward daylight.

  At first, the smell. The earthy scent of burning wood, the chemical stink of melted plastic, the stench of something sour and unfamiliar. Flesh, we’d learn.

  Then the smoke: three burgeoning columns above the upper town, broad and dense and dark red.

  It was not anxiety or excitement now, but real fear. I felt dizzy, as if someone had tied a rope around my middle and squeezed out all my air. Somewhere behind us our teacher was shouting instructions for us to go home. Still, everyone who’d emerged from the shelter moved as one toward the explosion. I grabbed for Luka’s hand; a girl beside me clutched a clump of my T-shirt, and the others joined until our whole class had formed a disorderly human chain. It was scarier now to separate than to walk into a city on fire.

  We reached the base of the stone steps that led to the upper town, toward Banski Dvori. The police had already blocked off the stairways, so we weaved through the adult crowd, pushing ourselves up onto a cement ledge to get a better view. My father worked in the transportation office in the upper town some days, though now I couldn’t remember which. It wasn’t close enough for him to have been hurt in this explosion, was it? In the haze it was impossible to tell, and I scanned the faces of all the broad-shouldered men in sight, but did not find him.

  Fragments of conflicting reports churned around us:

  “Have you heard? The president exploded right at his desk!”

  “Come on, they’ve had him in a bunker since last week.”

  “Have you heard? His wife was inside, too!”

  A voice from behind: “Are you kids up here alone?” My classmates and I were startled to find someone talking to rather than over us, the same shock of nerves firing as if we’d been caught sharing answers to a math test. I spun around to see a newsman wielding a large microphone and fiddling with a wire in his ear. He wore a gray vest with a sheen of nylon and metal.

  “We’re not alone,” I said. “My dad just—”

  “What’s it to you?” Luka cut in, puffing out his chest to mimic the man’s bulky vest. The reporter, whose cameraman had come over to get a shot with the children, now stuttered.

  “You should be at home,” he said, his apprehension exposing a French accent. His revealed foreignness dissolved any remaining authority.

  “You should go home, stranac,” I said, emboldened. My classmates giggled, and I reveled in the girls’ acceptance, if only momentary. I was brave, powerful even.

  “Stranac, stranac,” my classmates chanted. One of them threw an apple core, and it bounced off the newsman’s padded shoulder.

  “Oh, what do I care if you all blow up, you gypsy vermin!” he said. He motioned his cameraman to move a few feet over so we were out of the picture and began to refilm his report.

  Another explosion rumbled near the palace, then rippled down the hill through the concrete. A crack, thin as a strand of hair, bloomed across the ledge beneath our feet. Home suddenly didn’t sound like such a bad idea. We took off, Luka and I sprinting down Ilica Street before our paths diverged.

  “Good luck!” I called as we split. It seemed afterward like a stupid thing to say, but another string of ambulances rounded the corner, sirens screaming as they passed, and if he replied I didn’t hear.

  I arrived home hyper and smelling of fire, swinging the door open with such force that I enlarged the dent, born of similar displays of overzealousness, in the opposite wall.

  “Where were you?” my mother yelled from her bedroom, sounding frantic.

  “At the shelter. Haven’t you heard about Banski Dvori?”

  I had expected her to hold me tightly like she had after the first air raid, but instead she looked me over and said, “You stink. God, Ana, why can’t you play with girls?” then slipped back into her room. I followed her a few steps and leaned in her doorway. Though it seemed like an odd reaction,
I recognized it as the bait to engage in a well-worn argument; she wanted me to chat and jump rope, bake things; I wanted to ride my bike, swim in the Sava, play football. I loved the feeling of dry mud cracking on my arms and the grass-stained knees of my jeans, felt important when my clothes carried the traces of my daily activities. Almost all my possessions, including my bicycle, were castoffs of a boy who lived one floor up in our building. If my mother was disappointed by my tomboyish tendencies, she may have found solace in the fact that nearly everything sustaining my existence was free.

  The path of hand-me-downs was a complex web that connected neighbors and strangers across the city. I always wondered who it was that was buying everything in the first place, imagined some royal family at the top of the chain purchasing piles of clothes and spreading them throughout different family networks. In the streets we occasionally glimpsed familiar T-shirts within our circles of friends, though we had an unspoken agreement not to mention it. On the weekends we spent our mornings scrubbing the stains from our new old clothes, wringing out each other’s memories.

  “Girls were there,” I said under my breath.

  But my mother didn’t fight back, continued flitting around her room looking busy. She moved a pile of student work from her nightstand to her desk, straightened the pencils standing at attention in a coffee mug nearby. This was a surefire indicator that something was wrong. I’d noticed Rahela lying on my mother’s bed before, but now I took a closer look. She was propped against a stack of pillows, the bib at her neck stained slightly red.

  “Mama? Is that blood?”