Girl at War (6 page)

“Tata!”
I called out to my father as the soldier wrapped a thick coil of barbed wire around my wrists. The soldier let out a laugh and a mouthful of air that stunk of alcohol. Tides of the soured milk pitched against the walls of my stomach.

“Fuck you! Fuck all of you!” my father was yelling, struggling against his own wire cuffs. The soldier behind him struck the back of my father’s knee with the barrel of his AK. My father’s leg twisted in a way it shouldn’t have, and blood ran down the back of his pant leg. He was quiet.

I made my way over to him, leaned my head on his hip, and instinctively reached for his hand, but the wire around my wrists sunk into my flesh. “We’re going to be fine,” he said, softly now. “Just don’t get separated.” Beside him, my mother was shaking a little, even though she was wearing her coat. I’d left my jacket in the car, but somehow I didn’t feel cold.

The realization that my parents, too, felt pain and fear frightened me more than any strangers could. Panicked thoughts came like a rush of river water—they were going to take our car; we were going to be beaten; they were going
to send us to the camps. They herded us into the group of other prisoners: a series of men wearing painters’ jumpsuits and stolid expressions, a teenage couple trying to touch one another and recoiling when the wires caught their skin, a woman with a run of blood down her thigh, an old man with white stubble and scuffed black orthopedic shoes. Others.

“
Hajde!
Let’s go!” barked the leader of the soldiers. He staggered toward the forest that lined the road.

I focused on not moving my wrists beneath the wire, watching my feet as they sunk into the underbrush with each step. The child of a concrete city, I had never been in a forest before. It was cold and dank-smelling, like the basement of our skyscraper. The viny brushwood seemed to grab at the tops of my sneakers. I thought of Stribor and his kingdom and wished for a glimpse of magic inside a hollowed oak, a miraculous escape route. As we walked farther into the forest, the afternoon sunlight was swallowed by shadows.

“Tata,”
I whispered. “Why’s it so dark in here?” But the group had stopped and he didn’t answer. We’d reached a clearing, the forest floor packed so thoroughly under the heels of combat boots that there was no more plant life, only dirt and rotting acorns. In front of us were the remnants of an extinguished fire and a large hole in the ground.

Behind me someone was shouting. One of the painters had tried to run back toward the road, but his gait was off-balance
with his arms tied behind him. A soldier caught him quickly, and, after a smack of the rifle across the legs, the man was on his knees. The soldier pulled the man up by his hair, moving his head side to side at an unnatural tilt before letting him drop again to the ground. The man lay in the dirt, and the soldier wiped a clump of hair from his hand before angling the butt of his gun and dispensing a swift blow to the back of the head. Blood—runny—and a dent where bone used to be.

“Anyone else?” the soldier said. His teeth were brown.

The soldiers organized us into a single-file line. They shoved and jabbed. If someone didn’t move fast enough, they bludgeoned. They arched the line perfectly around the mouth of the pit.

The first time, the noise that came out of the AK didn’t sound like a gunshot. It sounded like a laugh. There was a unified gasp as the first victim crumpled and fell into the void below. For a few seconds, a minute even, nothing happened. Then another shot, and the man next to him—another one of the painters—went.

Witnessing these men’s deaths taught the rest of us two things: they were going to do this slowly, and they were going left to right. This was not the most efficient way to kill people. But it was not the least efficient either. It was good target practice for the new recruits. It was slow enough to make the prisoners squirm. It wasn’t messy. Bloody, maybe. But once they fell, they were already half-buried.

My father looked down at me, then back to my mother on his left side. His mouth twisted as he pulled his eyes away from hers, then spoke to me in a sharp whisper.

“Ana—Ana, listen to me.” A shot. “We’re going to play a game, okay? We’re going to trick the guards.” A shot. “They’re drunk—it’ll be easy if you pay attention. All you have to do is stay close to me, very close—” A shot. “Then when I fall down into the hole, you fall at the same time. Just close your eyes and keep your body straight.” A shot. “But it won’t work unless we both fall at the very same time, okay?” A shot. “Do you understand? Don’t! Don’t look at me.”

I didn’t understand what was happening, really, how we could trick the guards out of shooting us. But my father seemed sure that if we both fell at the same time we would be okay, and he was always right.

“Is Mama going to fall with us, too?” A shot.

“No, she—” My father’s voice cracked. “She’s going to go first.” I looked at my mother, watched my father watching her, the way something in his irises extinguished.

“Ana!” My father’s whisper was much harsher now, frantic. “Listen. Once we fall we have to stay absolutely still and wait until it’s quiet above us. Then we’ll get out together. Okay? Just remember—” A shot. My mother swayed on the rim of the muddy cavity. A dot of crimson appeared at the curve of her lip, streamed down her chin. She seemed to hover there, as if she’d jumped on purpose, landing quietly, not with the thud of the others before her.

I felt myself yell as I realized what had happened. Another shot, one that echoed. I waited, watched my father, then held my breath and fell.

It was dark and sticky and it smelled like sweat and piss. I turned my face to the side so I could breathe. Something heavy came down on my legs, but I felt far away from my body and couldn’t move. I concentrated only on the corner of my once white T-shirt as it soaked up other people’s blood. I used to think all languages were ciphers, that once you learned another’s alphabet you could convert foreign words back into your own, something recognizable. But the blood formed a pattern like a map to comprehension and I understood the differences all at once. I understood how one family could end up in the ground and another could be allowed to continue on its way, that the distinction between Serbs and Croats was much vaster than ways of writing letters. I understood the bombings, the afternoons sitting on the floor of my flat with black fabric covering the windows, the nights spent in concrete rooms. I understood that my father was not getting up. So I waited, my head light and spinning and my eyelids heavy, and came around to the stench of stale fear and the beginnings of decay.

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll get the bulldozer in from Obrovac,” the leader of the soldiers said. Already the bodies around me were cooling, beginning to take on the puttylike feel of dead flesh. My heartbeat thundered in my ears, panic coursing up my neck. But the soldiers obeyed orders, and I
listened as the footsteps disappeared and the echoes of the footsteps disappeared, stayed motionless until I convinced myself I had heard them starting up their jeeps.

“Tata,”
I said. I knew already, but inched closer against him anyway, nudged his shoulder with mine. “Wake up.” His eyes were clamped shut tight, as if he were counting for a round of hide-and-seek, but there was blood—at his neck, on his lips, in his ears. “Wake up!” It was impossible to take a deep breath. I tried to move, but my legs were pinned down beneath the leg of the person who’d fallen next to me, a teenage boy missing the back of his head. The weight of his body made it worse. I was sure I was suffocating and kicked wildly, trying to shake him off. My hands were still bound and I struggled to sit. Then, using the dead as stepstools, I climbed out of the ground.

I pulled my wrists out of the wire—squeezed one hand through violent and quick, then unwound the steel and freed the other. Strings of my skin clung to the barbs. Blood dripped in staircases down toward my fingertips. We hadn’t been very deep in the forest, and I followed the boot prints out to the road. The soldiers had left the felled tree but had taken the sandbags with them. They had set our cars on fire. I saw the charred skeleton of what I thought had been our car pointing like a giant arrow, and decided to continue in the direction we’d been driving, homeward.

It seemed important to keep walking, but my legs were stiff with shock and the path ahead blurred in and out of
focus. I moved with excruciating slowness. Night turned to dawn though I didn’t notice the change until it had already passed, as if I’d been a sleepwalker awakened by the sunlight. The shadows were shrinking as I arrived on the outskirts of a village in the glow of a new morning.

I woke in the cobalt part of dawn. It was too early to leave but there was no chance I’d fall back to sleep now. Not wanting to wake Brian, I compelled myself to stillness for a minute or two, tried to match the rise and fall of my chest with his, but already consciousness had quickened my heartbeat and I found it difficult to keep from fidgeting. I slipped from his bed and he breathed a deep, surfacing kind of breath but did not wake up.

I returned to my dorm to change, tried to smooth the cowlick on the right that emerged with exceptional stubbornness whenever something important was scheduled. Outside the cold burned my throat but I continued on foot anyway, to kill the time. The roads were slushy, leftovers from a late-night snowplowing, slippery beneath my sneakers
as I crossed the avenues and headed uptown. A few business owners were pushing up their grilles to start the day, but overall the city was stark and quiet, as empty as Manhattan gets. For long stretches of my walk I didn’t cross paths with anyone.

The lobby of the UN headquarters was not what I expected. Though I’d been attending college in New York for nearly three years, I’d managed to avoid the complex on the East River. Now, inside and waiting in a metal detector line, I felt an odd mix of anticipation and disappointment. Over the years I’d lost faith in the UN—their interventions, in my country and across the globe, were tepid at best—but I’d still assumed the compound would be impressive, decorated with vainglory. In parts it was: the four-story ceilings made me feel small; the balconies of glass and concrete curved around the entrance hall in a slick modernist wave, suggesting progressivism. In other ways, though, the interior was unremarkable. The checkered marble floor was covered in strips of stained industrial carpet. The surveillance cameras were so conspicuous I was sure they were fake, and that streamlined equipment was positioned at more clandestine angles.

The woman who’d asked me here had called over Christmas break. I was easy enough to track down; I hadn’t strayed from the people or places to which I was headed when we’d first met. She told me that after her stint in Yugo Peacekeeping she’d returned to New York and muscled her way
through the bureaucracy to a liaison position. Now she was working on a new project, forming a committee to focus specifically on human rights. She told me she needed me. I told her I was at college in the city, and she said, “Remarkable,” which offended me though I knew she had a point. Then I said something cheerful like “Fridays are perfect. I won’t even have to miss class!”—something she was pleased with and I regretted before I hung up the phone.

I was early, and took a seat on a bench to wait. I gazed at the men in suits, wondering if any of them had been in the decision room or on the ground during my war. The woman—Ms. Stanfeld—had never been anything but kind, and I felt guilty about the derision running through me as I scanned the lobby for her face. Finally I caught her in my peripheral vision: dressed in a suit and high heels, her hair straightened and pulled into a bun. The last time I saw her she was in combat boots and a blue flak jacket, a tangle of wavy hair beneath her helmet. Her face was the same. It occurred to me that my appearance had likely undergone a more radical transformation—I’d grown about a foot and a half since then—so I stood and started in her direction. Before I even tried to get her attention, she called out to me.

“Ana Jurić?” It was a last name I hadn’t heard in a long time.

“Ms. Stanfeld.” I thrust my hand out prematurely and it dangled.

“Please, call me Sharon.”

“How did you recognize me?”

“The eyes.” For a moment she looked unsure whether she should say more. “And we don’t see those shoes much around here.” I snuck a peek down at the Converse high-tops I’d pulled on in a last-minute fit of groggy defiance.

I followed Sharon out of the main lobby and down a corridor. She excused herself to go to the bathroom and I wandered the hall. I poked my head into open conference rooms trussed in heavy curtains and adorned with religious-looking paintings that, upon closer inspection, were devoid of any actual religion, eagles and haloed planet earths in place of crucifixes.

Farther down the hallway I noticed a set of ornate wooden doors and a plaque declaring
CHAMBERS OF THE SECURITY COUNCIL
. I imagined the delegates of a decade ago convening on the other side of that wall, discussing the body count of my parents and friends and determining that yes, something would have to be done to keep up appearances, but that it would be best to stay out of such a messy conflict. I slipped my fingers around the handle and tugged gently, but the door was lighter than it looked and opened wide. A rush of air wind-tunneled into the room and a few delegates in the back row turned to look at me.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was enough to startle me into loosening my grip, and the door swung closed. Sharon was offering me a cup of coffee and a frosted croissant in wax paper.

“They’ll be done in a few minutes. Then a quick coffee break and we’re on.” She tried to snap her fingers, but the wax paper got in the way. I followed her to a smaller room with fossilized adhesive on the wall where a plaque had been removed.

She tracked my gaze. “It’s our room now,” she said with pride. “But I haven’t had half a second to put in the application for new signage. Why don’t we go get settled at one of the front tables?” She handed me the cup and the pastry. “Any of the ‘reserved’ spots is fine.”

The room was windowless and paneled in dark wood, the tables and chairs arced in a semicircle. I chose a seat and took a swig of the coffee that turned out to be hot chocolate. I choked it down; I usually took my coffee black. The sweetness stuck in my mouth, and it dawned on me that, for Sharon, I would always be ten years old.

In America I’d learned quickly what it was okay to talk about and what I should keep to myself. “It’s terrible what happened there,” people would say when I let slip my home country and explained that it was the one next to Bosnia. They’d heard about Bosnia; the Olympics had been there in ’84.

In the beginning, adults operating somewhere between concern and nosiness had asked questions about the war, and I spoke truthfully about the things I’d seen. But my descriptions
were often met with an uncomfortable shifting of eyes, as if they were waiting for me to take things back, to say that war or genocide was actually no big deal. They’d offer their condolences, as they’d been taught, then wade through a polite amount of time before presenting an excuse to end the conversation.

Their musings about how and why people stayed in a country under such terrible conditions were what I hated most. I knew it was ignorance, not insight that prompted these questions. They asked because they hadn’t smelled the air raid smoke or the scent of singed flesh on their own balconies; they couldn’t fathom that such a dangerous place could still harbor all the feelings of home. Soon I changed my approach, handpicking anecdotes like the Great Ding-Dong Ditch affront on the Serbian man’s flat, or the games we invented in the shelters, until I’d painted Zagreb with the lighthearted strokes of some carnival fun house. The version of things they ended up with was nonthreatening, even funny. But to create a palatable war was tiring and painful, so one day, I stopped completely. I grew and my accent faded. For years I didn’t reveal anything at all. I passed as an American. It was easier that way—for them—I told myself.

But the UN delegates, now making their way to their seats, knew who I’d been a decade ago. They would be thirsty for gore. I wasn’t sure what to tell them. I’d stayed up late thinking of what to say, had tried to organize things into an outline, but all these years later I still had no narrative to
make sense of what had happened. Across the room two teenage black boys shuffled into the front row and slumped low in their chairs. Africa, I thought. Lost Boys, or RUF child soldiers. I wondered whether Sharon had recruited them, too, or if they were someone else’s project.

Sharon stood and gave an introduction while the projector blinked a big red
NO SIGNAL
on the screen. I watched an intern jiggle the connection wires. After a second reset the slide show appeared—“Children in Combat” in 3-D Word Art autofocusing overhead.

“Presenting first is Ana Jurić,” Sharon said. “Ana is a survivor from the Yugoslavian Civil War.” The slide exhibited before-and-after maps of Yugoslavia and its subsequent color-coded divisions. “At age ten, she was also involved in rebel combat missions against Serb paramilitary forces.” A quiet murmur floated across the tables at this. “I’ll let her introduce herself more fully though,” Sharon said, which I took as my cue to stand.

Unsure applause rippled through the room, and I walked to the spot where Sharon had been standing. The auditorium felt much bigger from the front. I pulled the folded index cards from my pocket, but the bullet points now seemed useless. I coughed, and it echoed across the chamber. A memory of my father resurfaced. I had been nervous about performing a solo part in my third-grade Christmas concert.
Just sing loud
, he had said.
If you’re loud, everyone will believe you got it exactly right
.

“I’m Ana,” I said. “I’m twenty and in my third year at NYU, studying literature.” There was a time when I would have been afraid of this room, of the dignitaries and their stiff, suited language, but now I felt more weary than scared. I’d grown out of fear like my childhood clothes, and after the initial adrenaline subsided my voice settled.

“There’s no such thing as a child soldier in Croatia,” I declared as the next slide flashed—two teenage girls sporting camouflage and scuff-marked assault rifles. “There is only a child with a gun.” It was a semantic argument, and bullshit at that, and just like in the lecture halls at university they were eating it up.

The girls in the picture were strangers, but they could have just as easily been me. Caught in that void between childhood and puberty, skin still smooth but limbs gawky from growth spurts. Each held a Kalashnikov across her chest. The taller girl had her other arm over the shorter one’s shoulder; they might have been sisters. Both gave half smiles to the camera, as if they remembered from another time that one was supposed to smile in photographs.

Who had taken these pictures, I wondered as I continued on with the speech, recounting our journey home, my parents’ murder, the village I’d gone to after. Certainly not the locals, who wouldn’t find the image notable enough to warrant a photograph. Too early in the war for trauma tourists, who appeared only after the danger was gone. Must have
been journalists, a breed of people I still couldn’t understand. Outsiders who claimed the moral high ground, then stood back and snapped photos during encounters with bloodied children.

“Combat was not an option,” I said. “It was just a thing we did to live. A part of home.”

The slides made the girls look foreign—animals captured on safari—but we were far less exotic than that. When I thought of my own weapon I remembered not its existential power but its weight, heavy against my slight frame. The way its strap rubbed a raw spot on my shoulder. The almost ticklish sensation of my stomach absorbing the pulsating mechanical rhythm as I shot from the hip.

We were not like the children of Sierra Leone who, a continent away, were fighting their own battles that same year; we weren’t kidnapped and spoon-fed narcotics until we were numbed enough to kill, though now that it was over I sometimes wished for the excuse. We took no orders, sniped at the JNA from blown-out windows of our own accord, then in the next moment played cards and had footraces. And though I had learned to expel weapons from my everyday thoughts, speaking of them now I felt something I wasn’t expecting—longing. As jarring as the guns were to the pale crowd before me, for many of us they were synonymous with youth, coated in the same lacquer of nostalgia that glosses anyone’s childhood. But I knew no matter how
I twisted my words I could never explain that I felt more at ease among those rifles than I did in their New York City skyscraper.

Instead I tried for pragmatism, to say something that might at least help someone else. “You should know that your food aid does not reach the people it’s supposed to,” I said. “In the place where I stayed, there were no Peacekeepers, and the Četniks stole the aid meant for civilians. If you drop the food and leave, you’re just feeding your enemy. We had guns, but they had more. Firepower is the only thing that determines who eats.”

Eventually I felt the telltale warmth of a person beside me and realized Sharon had returned and was waiting for me to finish. “Thank you for your time,” I said. The audience clapped more assuredly now; they were either intrigued by what I’d said or glad it was over. Sharon squeezed my shoulder, then transitioned into her segment on Serbian concentration camps. I looked over at the African boys, whose eyes were permanently reddened from too much rubbing or crying or coke, concealing some unidentified tragedy. I returned to my seat, relieved I had gone first. But when they got to the photos of the mass graves, I slipped out a side door and vomited in a potted plant. I didn’t come back for the rest of the presentation, not wanting to see someone I recognized.