Girl at War: A Novel

by Sara Novic

  Rahela coughed, the dribble at her lip tinged a foreboding pink.

  “It’s the new medicine. Dr. Carson said it might happen.”

  “Does that mean it’s working?” I said. My mother slammed her dresser drawer.

  When my father got home my parents argued. They shouted about doctor bills and border crossings, about Banski Dvori and the shelters and America. They shouted about Rahela, then about me.

  I held Rahela and paced the living room. The yelling seeped through our shared wall.

  “I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of you telling me to wait,” my mother said.

  “What do you want me to say? We have no other choice except to see if the medicine works.”

  “It’s not working. We need to go.”

  “We can’t get visas if we’re a flight risk.”

  “We have steady jobs. We have a flat.”

  “The city is burning, Dijana. We’re a flight risk.”

  One of them was banging things around on the desk. “Besides,” my father said after a while. “I’ve already applied. For all of us.” I only vaguely understood the rules of passports and visas, what an attempt at obtaining them implied, but I knew better than to interrupt an argument. Instead I wrapped Rahela in an extra blanket, tugged at the doors still fortified with a double layer of X tape, and escaped out onto the balcony. The view from nine stories up spanned most of the city. A cluster of skyscrapers on the far right was a representative sampling of Zagreb’s more modern, uglier architecture. They were the Braća Domany towers, though no one seemed to know any Domany brothers or why they had apartment buildings named in their honor. The complex housed so many people it was a citywide joke that if you couldn’t track down an acquaintance, sending a letter in the general direction of the towers would suffice.

  On the left, the twin peaks of Zagreb Katedrala stretched taller than all the surrounding buildings. I couldn’t remember a time when the cathedral wasn’t at least partly swathed in scaffolding and tarps, but that only added to its sense of majesty, its wounds a physical manifestation of the sorrows and confessions of the city. In nights before the war, two spotlights lit the stone towers in dual rushes of warm gold. Now, with the lights quelled in anticipation of a blackout, it was difficult to pinpoint the boundary between the spires and the night sky.

  The hint of smoke still hung in the air, but the cloud over the upper town was slowly receding. I lay down on my back, pushed my legs between the metal slats of the railing, and hugged Rahela to my chest. She was awake but quieter now. Being out on the balcony always made me feel better when I was upset, and I wondered if she felt that, too.

  After a while my mother called me back inside, scolding me for taking Rahela out in the cold. I tried to think of my mother the way she was before my sister was born, whether she had always been annoyed with me, but found it difficult to remember a life that did not revolve around a crying baby. “You’ve gotta get better,” I whispered to my sister. I wanted it as much for myself as for her, and felt guilty when I realized it.

  I handed Rahela to my mother, and she shut the bedroom door. After a few minutes, my father came in and sat down at the piano. He played the first few bars of a Springsteen riff that had been popular before the war, then hit a wrong note and stopped. In happier times he’d played often; he’d take the pile of yellowing sheet music from inside the bench and let me pick a song. It was never perfect but always recognizable, and he’d never had a lesson.

  Music, I’d heard him say, was like dessert. He could live without it, but life just wasn’t as good. Some nights when I was supposed to be doing homework, my father and I would take the cassette player down from the shelf and put it in the middle of the living room floor. When a song we liked came on the radio, we’d stop whatever we were doing, rush back to the living room, and dive at the cassette player like football goalies, arms flailing. One of us would push the Record button as we landed in a mess of rug burn and overenthusiastic athleticism. Then, before I was sent to bed, we’d add the new songs to the label and put the stereo back on the shelf, carefully filing the tape into our collection of songs missing the first ten seconds. Sometimes if a tape broke we would pull out its filmy, iridescent insides and stretch them around the room, running and laughing, our shins knocking against furniture legs. My mother, who called to us impatiently throughout most of our other attempts at procrastination, never interrupted these giddy dissections.

  But tonight when my father turned on the radio it was only static. “They bombed Sljeme, too,” my father said. “Tried to take out the signal tower.” He twisted the tuning knob all the way in both directions before switching it off. I heard his breathing fall into a rhythmic cycle and he began to hum, a new song that had been floating through Zagora’s hills, the anthem of the Croatian soldiers in the east. “Nećete u Čavoglave dok smo živi mi.” You’ll never get to Čavoglave—not while we’re alive.

  “Nećete u Čavoglave dok smo živi mi!” I joined in.

  “Be quiet,” said my mother through the wall.

  “Dok smo živi mi!” my father yelled back at the bookshelf. I giggled. My mother was in the kitchen now, banging dishes together, and my father’s smile faded. “Time for bed, Ana,” he said.

  “Sing the rest first,” I said as I stretched my sheet and blanket across the couch. He looked over his shoulder for my mother, then turned off the lamp and whispered it to me in the dark.

  —

  In the morning the police built the sandbag walls. I stood on the balcony before school and watched as they sealed off the roads into the city. They heaved the bags bucket-brigade-style into neat, crosshatched stacks, with men on stepladders straightening out the higher sections.

  The sandbags were supposed to be strongholds we could stand behind and shoot from if the Serbs came to capture us. But instead of a sense of safety, the barricade imparted an air of naïveté. It was as if we believed a flood of tanks was like a flood of water and could be stopped by a pile of sacks. It was as if we’d never seen the footage of the tank plowing over the little red Fićo in the streets of Osijek, of an army truck crushing a passenger bus into a ditch on the side of the road. It was as if it never occurred to anyone that blocking the incoming roads was the same as blocking the escape routes.

  But already yesterday’s fear had grown stale, and my friends and I decided to meet at the nearest blockade after school; it begged to be climbed, so tall and alluring it might as well have been a jungle gym. By the end of the week we’d absorbed the sandbags into our playscape. War quickly became our favorite game and soon we had given up the park altogether. We gathered near the sandbags because the lines were predrawn. If we could convince enough people to be Serbs we’d play teams, Četnici versus Hrvati, which meant you only got one life, and when you died you had to stay dead. The game was over when one team had killed the other in its entirety. Other times, we played every-man-for-himself war, in which you got three lives and everyone got to kill everybody else indiscriminately.

  In both versions, the idea was to kill a person by shooting him with your imaginary gun; a block of wood or empty beer bottle served as a good stand-in. It was essential to make eye contact with the person you were killing, so as to avoid discrepancies. There were also two subcontests within each game. One was who could make the most realistic machine-gun sound effects; top players could distinguish between a Thompson, a Kalashnikov, and a Zbrojovka. Luka usually won. The second was who could act out the best death. If there had been points, players would have been awarded extra for a slow-motion fall. Postmortem twitching or delusional babbling was also a plus, if it wasn’t too dramatic. Those who died with their limbs bent in unnatural angles and could hold their positions the longest were the winners.

  —

  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 expl
osives 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.

  5

  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 mont
hs 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.

  6

  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.