Girl at War: A Novel Read online

  “Tata! Where are you?” I yelled down the hallway, hoping at the very least I could incite a neighbor to come out and chastise me for making a racket. No one appeared. I was beginning to think I was the only one left in the building when someone from the flat across the hall murmured my name.

  “Psssssst. Jurić kid,” the voice hissed. It was Rahela’s ancient babysitter. Her door was open a crack and I pushed my way in. She was hunched over her kitchen counter, entwined in her phone cord, whispering. When I looked her way she covered the receiver with a hand so pallid and veined it looked green.

  “They’re all down there,” she said to me. She tapped a bony index finger to her window. I took off for the stairs.

  Outside, what looked like the residents of the entire building were huddled in tight conversational knots in the courtyard. Handkerchiefs, hugging, rivulets of mascara. I spotted my parents, Rahela wiggling in a tangle of blanket in my mother’s arms, and felt relief, then an uprush of anger that they’d forgotten about me.

  “Tata!” I slipped my arm around his leg. My father put his hand on my shoulder but remained immersed in a discussion with one of the main door guards.

  I squirmed from my father’s grip and pushed my way into the center of the circle my parents and neighbors had created. I tried my mother this time, tugging at the pocket of her apron. The fact that she was in her apron outside was indicative of the weightiness of the morning’s events; she wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing it in public otherwise. “Mama,” I said, on tiptoe now. “Why’d you leave me upstairs?”

  Again neither of my parents acknowledged me, but I learned of the news through a collective murmur that floated through the court, at times so synchronized it seemed intentionally in unison.

  “Vukovar je pao.” The sound of such a large whisper was haunting, in keeping with the message it carried. Vukovar had fallen.

  Vukovar had been under siege for months. The people from the string city now living in Sahara, the boys who’d joined our class mid-lessons, had gotten out early. We knew the stories of their families who were marched to displaced persons camps and never heard from again; we’d heard about the people who’d stayed behind, men and women with do-it-yourself weaponry gunning at the JNA from their bedroom windows. But I didn’t understand what it meant, that Vukovar “had fallen,” and tried to come up with a comparable image. First I thought of an earthquake, though I’d never experienced one. Next I pictured the cliffs of Tiska, where we had spent the summers, imagining the side of the mountain crumbling and dropping into the Adriatic. But Vukovar wasn’t a tiny village and it wasn’t near the sea. The rocket at Banski Dvori had collapsed part of the Upper Town, but that was only a little piece of Zagreb. I knew a fallen city must mean something much worse.

  After a while it became clear that the clusters of people were not static, were instead moving in a circular crush toward something I wasn’t tall enough to see. Eventually the whirlpool of people pushed out from the courtyard onto the main street, and I caught sight of the center of attention: a shivering band of men and boys awash in a brand of terror so unique even I could identify them as refugees. They looked more desperate than those from the first round, wild-eyed and concave in all the wrong places. They clutched scraps of paper marked with the addresses of in-laws, cousins, family friends, anyone who might be willing to take them in, and thrust them in the faces of my parents and neighbors, exchanging bits of information about the front lines for directions to their relatives’ houses.

  One man from the group reached out and grabbed my father’s forearm, holding his address close to my father’s nose with a shaky hand. His face was shadowed, empty troughs beneath his cheekbones.

  “They’re killing them,” the man said.

  “Who?” said my father, studying the paper for clues.

  “Everyone.”

  “Would you like some soup?” said my mother.

  —

  Inside, on television, I saw what it meant for a city to fall. The footage was foreign. Any Croats in Vukovar were either fighting or being captured, so the Croatian news network had intercepted a German broadcast, their correspondent narrating in a mix of unfamiliar consonants. The feed was live and the voice-over untranslated, but the refugee, my parents, and I stared at the screen, as if looking at it hard enough would somehow advance our German skills. The cement façades of homes were disfigured, scarred by bullets and mortars. JNA tanks barreled down the city’s main street, followed by convoys of white UN Peacekeeping trucks. Alongside the road, in a place that had probably once been grass but was now trampled and muddy, lines of people were lying facedown, their noses pressed into the dirt and their hands behind their heads. A bearded soldier with an AK-47 walked between the rows. He fired. Somewhere, someone was screaming. The camera jerked up and away, capturing instead a collapsing church steeple. The dull roar of a distant explosion rumbled through the TV speakers. In the background more bearded men with black skull flags marched down the empty street, singing, “Bit će mesa! Bit će mesa! Klaćemo Hrvate!” There will be meat; there will be meat. We’ll slaughter all Croatians.

  “Please turn that off,” the man said.

  “One minute,” mumbled my father.

  Just then Luka burst into our flat, the doorknob coming to rest in the same dent I’d made.

  “Ana! Vukovar je pao!”

  “I know,” I said. I gestured to the television and the hunched man at the table with his back to the screen, who was devouring the soup that was supposed to have been my father’s lunch in quick, greedy swallows. Luka reddened and greeted my parents. He thrust his hands in the pockets of his jeans and the four of us stood around the TV, surveying each other’s reactions to the on-screen carnage.

  “Does your mother know you’re out?” my mother said.

  “Yes,” Luka said, a little too fast. He grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the door.

  “Maybe you should both stay here. I’ll make you a snack.”

  “Mama.” I slumped my shoulders in protest. I knew Luka had come because he’d deemed the desecration of Vukovar a good reason to skip class, but our chances of leaving were better if we acted as if nothing had changed. “We have to go to school,” I said. “We’re gonna be late.” But my mother, who refused to negotiate with whining, ignored me and began mixing Rahela’s formula. Luka and I skulked into the living room.

  Having downed the soup and eager to escape the television, the refugee followed us and sat on the far end of the couch. His face was coated in stubble and mud, dirt smeared across his shirt and lodged beneath his overgrown fingernails. He made me nervous, and I wished my parents would be more attentive to their guest, but they were busy trying to get Rahela to eat something—an effort that had essentially become force-feeding—and neither of them noticed.

  “He took my wife,” the refugee said. “I heard her screaming through the wall.”

  Luka and I just stared, afraid to move.

  “He had a necklace strung with ears. Ears off people’s heads.” The man cupped his head in his hands, pressing his fingers to his ears as if to check whether they were still attached. I yearned to go to school. After what seemed like much too long, my father poked his head around the corner.

  “You’ll be back straight after class is through?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes,” I said, unaccustomed to curfews but willing to compromise.

  “Go on then.”

  We sprang from the couch under cover of clattering pans and collapsing building footage, and my father winked at us as we slipped out the door.

  —

  When I got home from school the refugee was gone. My parents didn’t say anything about where he went, and I didn’t ask. At sunset my father and I walked to Zrinjevac to look at the weather column at the edge of the park. He was wearing his mechanic’s jacket and I’d donned a coat and scarf, but it was balmy for November and soon we unzipped. My father pointed to the thermometer, explained the barometer, and lifted
me up so I could run my fingers on the glass case that housed statistics for seasonal temperature averages and wind measurements.

  “Maybe you’ll grow up to be a weatherwoman,” my father said. “You’d have to study hard, though.”

  “Yes, Tata,” I said, but my mind was elsewhere. I climbed onto the rim of a nearby fountain, grabbing my father’s hand for balance as I strutted the perimeter of the now stagnant pool. “What’s going to happen to Rahela?”

  “If she doesn’t get better she might have to see a doctor far away. But she’s going to be fine.”

  “What’s going to happen for Christmas?” It was still more than a month away, but winter had always been my favorite season, the Trg ablaze with fairy lights and filled with vendors selling roasted chestnuts in paper cones, snow layering up on our balcony and in the streets below, the days off school. I was getting too old to believe in Sveti Nikola, but I still looked forward to leaving my boot on the windowsill and waking up to find presents stashed inside. This year, though, I wasn’t so sure; nothing seemed totally out of reach of the air raids and our dwindling food supply.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are we still going to have it?”

  “Full of worries tonight!” my father said. He grabbed the fringe of my scarf and brushed it against my face, tickling my cheek. “Have you got your scarf tied too tight? Of course we’re going to have it!”

  There was something about talking with him that made me feel better, no matter the conversation. My mother used to say my father and I thought in the same circles. I never understood it until I watched us later, in memories—when we were gazing at the sky (and we often were) we could unconsciously turn in the same direction and extract the same face from the clouds. At the park, I laughed and my father lifted me up off the fountain rim and I was skinny from biking and rations and he carried me on his shoulders the whole way home.

  —

  The electricity faded in and out in fits that sometimes coincided with air raids but often seemed related to nothing at all, the whim of a damaged wire. When it happened during the day we didn’t notice at first. Then, when the shadows edged inward, one of us would reach for a lamp in the fading afternoon sun and be met with disappointment. Eventually we got used to its intermittent presence, and after a while didn’t even bother to light the candles we’d stockpiled, instead resigning ourselves to those activities to be carried out in darkness.

  Then the water went. We’d had periods of outage before, but now it was gone often, and for longer stints. A twist of the faucet released a coppery sludge, then the angry hiss of air pressure. One morning before school, my mother woke me early and sent me to the courtyard with a pair of gas cans to bring back water from the pump for soup and bathing. City officials and other grown-ups called it the “municipal pump,” as if it had been designed for this purpose, but it was really a fire hydrant rigged with a wrench and some piping by one of the men in the building.

  Down in the concrete clearing I swung the cans by their handles. The air was crisp, but in the sun it still wasn’t too cold. The landscape had transformed into something desolate: the cigarette and newspaper kiosks were all boarded up, the old man and his chocolates packed away, his folding table leaning against an alley wall, abandoned. The pump at least livened the place up again, if only for a few minutes at a time. When I came to the corner, I saw that most of the building’s residents were already outside clutching an odd collection of containers and broke into a run; the water often ran out and I’d been late the day before and only got half a canister. Two girls I knew from school were at the pump and they waved me to the front.

  “Don’t cut the line, Jurić!” an old lady yelled at me, but I called back an excuse about Rahela being ill and went ahead to meet the girls. When I got there a stream of water hit me in the chest, the wetness spreading down my torso; Vjera—the perpetually pigtailed girl—had pressed her hand over the spigot, and the water shot out through her fingers like pent-up rays of sunlight.

  “It’s cold!” I yelled, but already I was laughing. She aimed the water at my face now, and I caught it in my mouth, spraying it upward like the angel fountain in Zrinjevac. I grabbed at the pipe and twisted it in her direction, pegging her in the backs of the legs. We were hysterical now, laughing so hard it didn’t even make a sound. The old lady’s tolerance ran out and she came at us full-hobble, swinging her empty gas cans until one hit me upside the head.

  “Get out of here before I call your mother,” the woman said. “All your mothers!” Ashamed, I quickly filled one of my canisters and darted home.

  Inside my mother pressed a hand to her hip and pulled at the strands of wet hair plastered to my face.

  “Ana, were you wasting the water?”

  “It wasn’t my fault. Some girls from school sprayed me,” I said. Silence hung between us and I mumbled a sorry to break it.

  “Let’s hope everybody has enough to drink now,” she said. Then after a while, she smiled a little and swiped again at my hair. “At least I don’t have to boil any for you. You’ve already had quite a shower.”

  I smiled then, too, and watched as she heated the water on the stove and bathed with a washcloth in the middle of the kitchen. My mother’s hair was the color of burnt chestnuts, and when she moved, it shone.

  —

  That night I arrived home from school to find my mother and father standing face-to-face, staring hard at one another. Something was wrong. My father was home too early; his fists were clenched. When the door swung in and hit the wall, they jumped. My mother turned to wipe her eyes. My father began plunking dishes and spoons down on the table with too much force. My mother busied herself, too, was throwing tiny clothes that had once been mine and were now Rahela’s into a suitcase on the floor.

  “Rahela,” I said. My parents seemed to slow slightly at the mention of her name. “Where is she?”

  “She’s sleeping,” my mother said. They’d moved the cradle into the threshold between the kitchen and their bedroom, and I peered in. Too much blood on the blankets, down the front of her shirt. Her breathing shallow.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The medicine’s not working. She has to go.”

  “To the hospital?”

  “There’s nothing they can do for her here. There’s a program transporting out of Sarajevo. We’re going to take her tomorrow.”

  “Transporting where?” I said.

  “To America.”

  I looked around. There were no other cases, no adult clothes in the bag. “By herself?”

  “It’s a medical program. They’ll take good care of her,” said my father. “Once they fix her up she’ll come right back home.”

  “I want to go to Sarajevo with you,” I said.

  “No,” said my mother.

  “We’ll see,” said my father.

  The power was on for an hour or two, and my father made a series of calls, his hand cupped over the receiver to guide his voice through the shoddy connection. At first I assumed he was trying to reach MediMission, but I noticed him later scribbling out what looked like a map, which he folded and put in his back pocket.

  After dinner, when an especially violent air raid rattled the windows of our flat, my mother sprang up and held me and I knew I could win her over.

  “Did you finish your homework?” she asked when we returned from the basement.

  “I don’t have to since I’m not going to school tomorrow,” I tried.

  My mother sighed.

  “I want to say goodbye to her, too.”

  “Better go to bed then. We’re getting up early.”

  On the couch I lay listening to my parents shuffle around the flat.

  “She shouldn’t be going with us,” my mother said. “The road isn’t safe.”

  “It’s not safe here either, Dijana. What if something were to happen while we were gone? It’s better we stay together.” I heard the paper crumpling and remembered my father’s drawing. “Beside
s. Look. I called Miro and he gave me the latest intel. We’ll have to take the long way, but it’ll be clear. We’ll be fine.”

  I stared at the ceiling, imagining the ride through the mountains with Luka’s father’s map, then some MediMission stranger carrying Rahela in the airport, on a plane, in America. I knew little of America besides what I’d seen on television, mostly cowboy movies they played on state TV Saturday nights. The United States seemed to me a wonderland full of actors who subsisted on McDonald’s, and I wondered if Rahela would go to live with someone rich and famous. On the news men in suits were always calling on the States to help protect us, but no one had shown up yet. Maybe they were just too far away. I slept fitfully, the kind of sleep in which you never quite lose contact with the waking world, and after just a few hours I heard the clack of my mother’s shoes alongside my couch.

  “Time to go,” she said. My arms and legs felt leaden and I struggled to dress, rummaging through my clothes in the morning dark.

  7

  “Ivan, molim te, don’t drive so fast. We don’t need to give them a reason to pull us over.” My mother pressed her free hand against my father’s knee. With the other arm she cradled Rahela, who was too weak even to cry. On the horizon, day had not yet broken. It was cold; the back window was stuck half-open, and my father gave me his jacket to use as a blanket. Whenever he turned too sharply, Rahela’s suitcase banged me in the shin and my mother implored him to slow down. At some point I fell asleep.

  When I woke the sun was noon-strong through the streaky windshield and we had already crossed the border into Bosnia; the signposts were written in both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets and the road circled the bases of the Dinaric Alps in a serpentine coil. We called the road a highway, though it wasn’t really—not the kind with streetlamps—and in the spaces between more important destinations it was only two lanes.

  Like the areas in Croatia far from Zagreb, Bosnia was mainly full of nothing: vast expanses of rocky soil, so that even the grass looked like it’d prefer to be rooted somewhere else. Clusters of cement-block houses appeared every so often but seemed to dissolve against the bleach-bright sky as we sped past. Finally, signs presented us with digestible distances to Sarajevo: 75, 50, 25 kilometers.