Girl at War (4 page)

Even if the sandbags might have been useful against an outside attack, they couldn’t protect us from those already inside the blockade. There were stories that Serb civilians in Zagreb had taken matters into their own hands, mixing explosives in their kitchens. They booby-trapped household items and left them on sidewalks; Matchbox cars and ballpoint pens were their favored vessels. Mate swore they nearly got him with a beer can, which caught fire when he kicked it. It burned the cuff of his pants but sputtered out instead of exploding, he said, and we weren’t sure whether to believe him. But our teacher seemed to take the stories seriously, reminding us each afternoon that we were never to pick anything up off the street, no matter how shiny. A hard lesson for an already frugal population under pressure of rations.

Our classmate Tomislav found his older brother in an alley a block from their house, his blood already congealing and caked into the sidewalk cracks. No one ever told us what had happened, not directly, but from the conversations that occurred above our heads, we knew.

I saw Tomislav underground during a raid two days later. The rest of us were shoving in line for the generator bike
when he showed up. We stopped pushing and stared. The starkness in his eyes scared me much more than if he had been crying. The boy who was riding stopped without discussion. Tomislav passed us and mounted the bicycle.

For a moment I watched him as he pedaled furiously, turning his pain into power, something tangible and scientific. Then we dissolved the line and moved to another corner of the shelter to give him some privacy, which seemed like the right thing to do according to the code of wartime behavior we were making up as we went along.

Summer gave way to fall in the abrupt, unbeautiful way Zagreb always changed its seasons. The leaves turned only brown before falling, and the sky looked like it had been whitewashed with a dirty rag. Some days it felt cold enough to snow, but instead the clouds hung fat and heavy, releasing just enough drizzle to stop us from playing outside. My friends and I stayed in and grown-ups walked around donning frowns and black umbrellas.

After the bombing of the palace, Croatia had officially declared independence, inciting a flurry of modifications that called even the most mundane detail of our former lives into question. Pop singers famous across Yugoslavia recorded dual versions of their hits in both dialects; seemingly innocuous words like
coffee
had to be replaced with
kava
and
kafa
for Croatian and Serbian audiences. Even one’s greeting habits could be analyzed—a kiss on each cheek for hello was acceptable, three kisses too many, a custom in the Orthodox Church and therefore traitorous.

Luka and I navigated the breakdown of our language with more questions. “You think we’ll have to get new birth certificates now that Yugoslavia isn’t Yugoslavia anymore?” he said.

“Probably not. It was still Yugoslavia when we were born.”

“What about health cards? Passports?”

“Passports.” I mulled it over. “I guess we’ll need new passports when we win the war.”

“Tram passes?”

“Tram—who cares? We never buy passes.” I looked at him and he flashed a goofy smile.

“Gotcha.”

After a while I said, “When we get married, will it say our kids are Croatian or Bosnian on their birth certificates?”

Luka braked abruptly. “What?”

“When we get married—”

“What makes you think we’re getting married?”

I hadn’t thought about it, really; I had just assumed. “Because we’re best friends?”

“I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“Why not?”

“You have to be in love and stuff. You know.”

I considered it. “Well I love you,” I said. “I’ve known you forever.”

“You don’t know whether you’re in love until you’re a teenager and you kiss,” said Luka. “I mean we’ll have to wait and see, to test it.”

“Sure.”

“But you can’t say that kind of stuff at school. They make fun of me enough already.”

I hadn’t realized the boys were teasing Luka just like the girls were teasing me. “I won’t,” I said, embarrassed. I wished I hadn’t mentioned it and thought about making up some excuse to go home, but Luka swung his leg back over his bicycle and started off again, so I followed. We passed by a roadblock where some of the boys from our class were climbing the sandbags. Luka waved.

“Let’s talk about something else,” he said. “Have you seen the money?”

The government had already started producing new currency, also called dinar, but with an image of Zagreb Katedrala stamped on the back of every note, regardless of denomination. It was thrilling at first, to hold money that said “Republic of Croatia” in the bland typeface of an official country, exciting that the featured illustration was a place I could see from the back of my flat. But no one even knew how much a dinar was worth; the value fluctuated wildly from day to day, and certain stores with Serb owners, or just thrifty businessmen, wouldn’t accept it, worried the money
might change again during the course of the war. A transaction of any substantial amount was carried out in deutsche marks.

My mother sent me to the butcher with a wad of new dinar and instructions to buy a bag of bones, and I watched as she made soup from the flavor of meat. She ladled out ever-shrinking portions, sometimes skipping meals completely herself, feigning headaches or student paperwork as excuses to leave the table. After dinner I was never full, but I was more adept at reading my parents’ faces than they gave me credit for so I kept quiet.

Petar and Marina still came over every weekend, with my mother and Marina pooling supplies to feed everyone at once. There was no longer money for wine or cigarettes, so we drank water and Petar chewed bubble gum and, when that ran out, his fingernails.

One Sunday, Marina arrived looking pale. My mother handed Rahela to me and the two of them went into the bedroom, where they whispered behind the door. Trying to ignore the nervous atmosphere, I paced the flat with Rahela facing out so she could see everything, so she would be distracted from the fact that she was sick and probably hungry. I whispered jokes from the playground in her ear.
What’s small and red and moves up and down? A tomato in an elevator. What do you get when you sit twelve Serbian women in a circle? One full set of teeth
. Sometimes I thought I saw her smile after I delivered the punch line. Rahela was skinnier but crying
less, which I’d decided meant the medicine was working, despite the tiny wheeze that sounded each time she took in air.

Finally Marina and my mother emerged from the bedroom and Petar made his announcement: he was due at the training base in a week.

“Are you nervous?” said my father.

“No,” Petar said. “Just out of shape!” He patted his stomach and grinned at me, hoping to get a laugh, but even I could see that he’d lost weight and his smile didn’t match his eyes.

“Where are they going to send you?”

“I’ll be close by. After training I’ll be part of the Ring of Defense for Zagreb. Maybe even come home on weekends.”

“You can stay with us, Marina, if you like,” said my mother.

“Don’t be silly. I’ll be fine.”

“She won’t even notice I’m gone,” he said. The four of them looked at each other and I felt that frustration so common to childhood, like when everyone laughs at a joke you don’t understand, though it was silent in the flat save for the clinking of spoons against bowls, and Petar’s heavy sighs when he swallowed.

I stayed awake as long as I could that night, listening to my parents in the kitchen.

“I should be out there. Everyone who can stand should be defending the city,” my father said.

“There are plenty of soldiers. With your eyes—it’s better this way.”

“It’d be better if I could protect my family.”

“Everything’s going to be okay,” my mother said. Usually he was the one reassuring her, and hearing the reversal made me feel guilty for eavesdropping. “Besides, I’m glad you’re here with me. With us.”

“Me, too,” he said after a while, and I heard them kiss before I fell asleep.

The air raid siren was our alarm clock, one that in those first months we diligently obeyed. A siren at one in the morning meant a collective rolling out of bed and pulling on of boots, an outpouring of groggy neighbors into the fluorescent light (or, in an outage, the impermeable darkness) of the hallway. That night it seemed like I’d only been asleep for seconds when my father took me and my blanket from the couch, my mother with Rahela close behind. I bounced sleepily against his chest as he carried me down the stairs to the basement, our hearts beating out the quick, irregular rhythms of those abruptly pulled from their beds. The basement air cut cold through my pajamas, and I sat leaning against our
šupa
and pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders, waiting for sleep.

Just as my mind was growing warm with unconsciousness the siren sounded, signaling an all-clear. I rubbed my eyes as my father carried me back up the stairs and returned me to the couch. But as soon as he’d gone from the room the
siren began to howl. Again Rahela cried. I pulled the blanket over my head. My father appeared in the doorway, embracing a pile of blankets and pillows.

“Come here, Ana.”

“I don’t want to go again,” I said, but I got up anyway.

He dropped the pile in the middle of the kitchen and led me to the pantry, clearing the floor inside and spreading my blanket as best he could in the small area. I looked at my father, read on his face a silent apology before stepping in and pulling my knees to my chest. My mother arranged Rahela on a pillow beside me, then she and my father lay down in front of the pantry door. I slept with a broom pressed to the back of my head, and my father held my hand, squeezing it tighter whenever the siren called out through the earliest hours of the morning.

I woke to an empty flat. Rahela was gone from the pillow, and I crawled out of the pantry on stiffened knees and pulled myself to my feet. The television blared at the empty kitchen chairs. The door to our flat was open in a display of carelessness uncharacteristic of either of my parents, and, panicked, I rushed out into the hallway. My neighbors’ doors were ajar as well, televisions on and rooms vacant.

“
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.