by Sara Novic
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “You wanna go somewhere?”
“Like for a pizza?”
“Tiska.”
“Tiska. You sure you want to go down that way, on the southern road?” There was only one main road that spanned the country north to south. A day’s drive from Zagreb to Split, then a few smaller offshoots to take us the rest of the way down to Tiska.
“I’ll be fine.”
“I heard you leave last night.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I just went for a bike ride.” He knew I was lying, I could tell, but he had seen history blaze across my pupils, and left it alone.
“I’ll see if I can get the car.”
In the morning Luka began a campaign of pleading with his mother to let us borrow the family Renault 4. As children we’d been much freer than American ten-year-olds, but now there’d been a strange reversal: Luka and all the other university students were living at home, beholden to their parents.
In the end it was unclear whether or not we’d actually gotten permission to take the car, but we acted as if we had, Luka palming the keys from their nail on the wall. The car, which had once been white, was now mostly rust. We packed the trunk with clothes, water jugs, two orange blankets, and a machete from the shed and left without saying goodbye, in case we weren’t supposed to be going.
We stopped at the grocery store for provisions. We filled a cart with cases of milk—the kind in cardboard boxes that doesn’t need to be refrigerated—bags of granola, farmer cheese, and a fresh loaf of black bread. In the first winter of the war, after my parents had been killed and we were hungry, Luka and I had swept through this same store, gathering packets of powdered soup and carrying them to the pet food aisle, which no workers monitored. We tore at the packaging with our teeth and passed a packet between us, salty and stinking of onions. In Croatia, at the start of 1992, this did not feel like stealing. I glanced at Luka for any sign of this memory, but he had probably been in the store hundreds of times since then, and he pushed the cart toward the checkout. We paid.
A few minutes later, before we’d reached the highway entrance, Luka pulled off the road into the parking lot of the technical high school.
“You drive?” he said.
“Yeah. Not stick though.”
Luka got out of the car, and I slid over the center console into the driver’s seat. Driving stick was like a seesaw, Luka explained. About keeping a balance of pressure. “Press that pedal on the left all the way to the floor.”
I pressed the wrong one, and the engine revved wildly.
“Your other left.” The car was so old it had a manual choke, and he reached across me to slide the vented lever up until the motor sounded less like it was being strangled. I looped around the lot for a while without stalling, shifted into first, second, third.
“All right,” he said, gesturing for me to turn out onto the main road. “You’re ready.”
—
“WHAT DO I DO?” I yelled. I had caught a traffic light on a steep incline, and when the light changed and I took my foot from the brake the car began an unfamiliar backward slide. I slammed the pedal back against the floor.
“Just give it a little gas.” Behind me the drivers honked. I pulled my clutch foot up too fast, and the car sputtered, then went quiet. Someone passed us on the shoulder. Luka reached over and turned the car off, then told me to restart it, but I just glowered at him until the light had gone red again.
“Calm down,” he said in an unfazed manner I found infuriating.
“Fuck this.” I wrenched the key in the ignition; the engine howled as I gunned it across the intersection. More honking. I pulled over.
“You were doing fine. You have to learn. I can’t drive the whole trip.”
“That was not fine.”
Luka sighed. “You’re impatient,” he said, which, because it was true, hurt more than a harsher insult. We switched places. “You’re driving once we get out of Zagreb,” he said, and flipped on the radio.
—
On the highway I was calmer. I was driving again, but without stop signs and traffic lights it was easier. We took off our shoes, threw them in the backseat, cranked down the windows, and let the breeze flow through the car. The air was hot, but at least it was moving. The dashboard vibrated with the folk-techno mash-ups that pervaded the country’s airwaves. A mix of traditional Muslim and Mediterranean melodies overlaid with thumping house beats, they’d become the new postwar pop. A far cry from the nationalistic anthems of our childhood, they were what Luka termed a “cultural cease-fire,” an effort to bring the segregated nationalities back into communion with one another.
“I like the new songs,” he said, fiddling with the dial to clear out the static as we passed the last of Zagreb’s suburbs. “It’s genius, really. People in the discotheque, all drunk, rubbing up against each other to music that everyone thinks came from their own heritage.”
Outside of Zagreb things quickly became rural—sheep and chickens and rows of corn along the roadside—and it was hard to tell one farm or cluster from the next. Luka spoke about the end of the war and which friends from elementary school were doing what, and I told him stories about Rahela and American high school and New York City.
I looked at the clock; we’d been driving for a few hours. Bullet-dented road signs showed we were approaching the place where the road split toward Sarajevo. I got nervous and swerved to follow a sign toward Plitvice Lakes National Park. Luka noticed but didn’t say anything. Plitvice was famously beautiful, even outside Croatia, and I’d never been there, so it was an easy enough stop to justify.
At the park I pulled my camera from the trunk and slung its oversize strap across my chest. We talked our way through the front gate without paying. The woman manning the booth said she was just relieved to hear someone speaking Croatian. She could go a whole day without coming across another Croat, she said, spent hours conversing in pantomime and broken English with tourists from Italy and France. The German tourists were better, she said, because she knew a little German.
“Everyone learns German in school now because they were quick to recognize us as a country,” Luka said to me. His sidebar didn’t slow the park attendant down at all—the problem with the Germans was that they were a little rude and all dressed like Boy Scouts, and anyway we should go in if we liked, because it was silly that Croats should have to pay to see their own park.
“Once, when the war was just over, my mother and I went to Germany to visit her sister,” Luka said as we passed through the gate and onto the main trail. “I was fifteen and wearing a Croatian flag T-shirt, police academy issue, and in the Frankfurt airport a man came up to me and asked me if I was Croatian.”
“Never a good sign.”
“I said yes, and he said he’d lived in Germany for a long time but was a Croat, too, and was sorry for all I’d had to go through. He gave us a box of expensive chocolate and walked off.
“That was the only good thing I ever got just for being a Croat. Until now.”
“I guess this was a first for me,” I said. Once on the subway I’d stared too long at a couple speaking Serbian, lingering in a manner that must have betrayed comprehension.
“Govorite srpski?” the boyfriend had said.
“Hrvatski.”
“Oh!” they’d said simultaneously. The boyfriend had stuck out his hand, and we’d shaken. We’d spent a few minutes in desperate friendliness, and I’d gotten off at the next stop, which wasn’t mine. Nothing good had come from that; they’d looked embarrassed and I was late for class.
Luka and I passed a gilded plaque laid in the ground that read, IN MEMORY OF JOSIP JOVIĆ. Plitvice had been at the center of the war before the war even began—the region was one of the first to be seized because the Serbs wanted cross-country access to the sea. During the takeover, which came to be called Bloody Easter, Croat and Serb police forces had clashed, and the resultant dead officers, one on each
side, were eulogized as martyrs. It was months before the air raids started, but technically, the war’s first blood spilled here.
The edge of the park didn’t look like much—we were still at a high elevation and we’d have to hike down to get to the water. We examined the map the woman in the window had given us and decided on a route that would take us past the biggest waterfall.
The lakes, the pamphlet suggested, were named entirely after legendary people who had drowned in them.
“I wonder what they called them before all these people drowned,” Luka said, stuffing the paper in his back pocket.
“Probably nothing. No need to differentiate.”
“Why were they all drowning anyway? It’s a lake. It’s not like you get caught in a riptide.”
“Did your dad know the guys who fought here?”
“Huh?”
“On Krvavi Uskrs. The cops who got killed.”
“God, I forgot about that. Is this too close for comfort?”
“The whole country is too close for comfort,” I said. I’d meant it to sound like a joke, but it came out wobbly and Luka didn’t laugh. “Let’s just go look at the water. Surely there’s a reason all these Germans are wandering around a sad little battlefield.”
“He didn’t know the guy,” Luka said. “I think he was from Zagora.”
We arrived at the edge of a bluff and peered down at the lakes, the water a shocking turquoise. The shallows were bridged by wooden-slat walking paths, and the sound of the falls overwhelmed the garble of foreign languages. The place was so obviously beautiful it was almost disturbing—perhaps people had drowned here because they’d wanted to, or at least allowed themselves to succumb to that unfathomable blue. Its beauty was completely unmarred by the bloodshed, and it was easy to see how tourists could push all that history from their minds.
We found a secluded place at the bottom of the canyon to put our feet in the water. Touching the water wasn’t allowed, a sign in several languages warned, but Luka didn’t seem worried about the rules, and I was emboldened by the ticket woman at the gate, who’d called the place mine. The water was clear and warm, and I watched a fish brush against Luka’s ankle. He flinched, then faked a cough to pretend he hadn’t noticed. I laughed and switched on my camera.
The camera was a Polaroid, the pop-up kind, which I’d bought at a garage sale before I’d gone to college. I’d purchased it out of a desire to be interesting—Gardenville could bring out that kind of desperation in a person. The camera gears whirred, and Luka looked startled by the mechanical grinding amid the white noise of rushing water.
“What is that?” he said, right as I snapped a picture. The camera churned the photo square from its front slot. A specter of Luka materialized, mouth agape and eyes wide and black against the brilliant blue background. I held the photo up, and he scoffed. “That’s so…American.” It wasn’t the response I’d been expecting, and I knew he didn’t mean it in a good way.
“It’s not!” I said, defensive. “It’s old. People had Polaroids here, too.”
“Seriously, what’s more ‘instant gratification’ than this?” He flicked the photo. “You can be nostalgic within three minutes.”
“It’s not like that. This photo’s one-of-a-kind. Impossible to copy. It’s like art.”
“Art, eh?” Luka said, taking the photo and shaking it.
“That actually doesn’t work. Shaking it. It’s a myth.”
He stopped and handed me the photo. We drew our feet from the water and let them dry on the cracked wood. Then I stood and slipped the Polaroid into my pocket. I thought of Sebald and his photos—maybe they were his way of bypassing the slipperiness of memory. “Anyway, they’re for Rahela,” I said. We trekked up out of the valley and back toward the car and the road and the coast.
—
Luka’s mind was a cavernous place I couldn’t navigate, though the ambling course of our conversations was familiar. I was both fascinated and annoyed by his willingness to pull apart things I would have left in one piece, just like he had when we were small.
“Communism is fascism, in all practical applications,” he was saying now. “Can you think of a Communist country sans dictator?” But I was thinking of Rebecca West, of how the people she’d met in Yugoslavia were all killed or enslaved, tangled up in this same debate at the start of the Second World War. Croatia had been on the wrong side of history then—a puppet state of the Germans and Italians—and had killed its share of innocents. I hated this most of all, that my anger could not be righteous against such a murky backdrop.
“True,” Luka said, when I mentioned the fascist faction in the forties. “But before that they were starving us out; we couldn’t even own land. We’ve been fighting for thousands of years. And most of those guys got executed when Tito came into power. That’s just how it is.”
He spoke with some finality, and I was relieved when the conversation swelled past the ghosts of ex-governments and into a broader sweep of ethics. We began with Voltaire (Luka loved the witty attack on religious dogma, it being the driving force behind our ethnic tensions as far as he was concerned) and pushed up through Foucault (whose amoral take on power infuriated him), I all the while feeling that my American education had left me remarkably ill-equipped for a discussion of philosophy. Luka seemed to have read at least chunks of the seminal texts in high school, while I kept up by regurgitating lines from the single critical theory course I’d taken my freshman year, until I saw a sign that marked the impending road split. I pulled over and reached for the map in the glove compartment.
“What are you looking for?” said Luka. “You just need to follow the signs for Dubrovnik.”
I ignored him and traced my finger along the road, squinting to read the names of the smallest villages.
Luka put his arm across my lap, blocking the map. “Ana. Look at me.”
“What?”
“I’m here. I’ll go with you wherever you want. But you can’t shut me out.”
“I’m not—”
“Whatever it is. Maybe I can help.”
“I don’t exactly have a master plan here.”
“I could’ve asked my dad for old intel or something. You should just be honest with me.”
“I know. I know.”
“You promise?”
“I promise,” I said. It was a lie even as it was coming out of my mouth. There was still one thing I hadn’t told him, had never told anyone.
“Okay,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”
I pointed to a part of the road with a bend like a boomerang and restarted the car.
—
Back on the road I felt almost dizzy with anticipation. I’d pictured a return to this place hundreds of times—had dreaded it and yearned for it—but in all my imaginings it never involved feeling so faint. I studied the landscape for clues, but nothing was familiar, or everything looked the same. We passed strips of black pine and ash, some vibrant green, some blackened and bare from wildfires. I white-knuckled the steering wheel and pushed my foot down hard against the gas pedal. I could see Luka watching me from the corner of his eye.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you want me to drive?”
“I’m fine.” The tree line was becoming less patchy, more mature, until thick bands of white oak lined both sides of the highway.
“Seriously, Ana, you’re going too fast. The cops will double the bribe if they see your American license.”
I glanced at the quivering needle of the speedometer but didn’t slow down.
“If you just pull over I can—”
“I don’t want to stop here.”
A small side road, almost completely obscured by overgrowth, caught my eye. I craned my neck to watch it take a steep drop down into a valley. Luka protested again, but I shushed him. My stomach lurched, but I tried to ignore it; there were probably a lot of villages in the valley, with a lot of sinuous little offshoots that
followed the same arc.
Then, after a few minutes the main road made a harsh curve, and I knew.
“Oh my god.”
“What is it?”
I slammed on the brakes and swerved to the shoulder. We slid to a stop on the roadside grass, the smell of burning brake pads drifting through the open windows.
“What the hell, Ana! Are you crazy?”
“No” was the correct answer, the one I wanted to say, but instead what came out was “probably,” then a wet, congested sound in my chest. Luka sighed and dropped a hand on my knee, and I cried the kind of suffocating sobs I hadn’t since I’d been on the other side of this same road, ten years before.
Safe House
1
My eyes burned. The sun sat on the horizon and I walked toward it. The road forked. The main road was big and level, and the smaller road was unpaved and sloped down into the lowlands. A spiral of smoke twisted up from the valley, beckoning me with a wispy finger. The big road said nothing. I followed the smoke. It led me to the center of a village, down a rocky street lined with houses. A woman wrapped in a purple shawl was feeding leftover crusts to emaciated chickens in her yard. I felt her looking but kept walking. As I got closer, her mouth slackened at the sight of me—a tiny, blood-crusted zombie, soaked in other people’s bodily fluids. She approached, called out to me. I stopped in the middle of the street.
She came to me and kneeled, asked my name, where I was from, what had happened. I tried to determine from her accent whether or not she was a Serb, if it was safe to speak to her. I couldn’t tell, and decided it didn’t really matter, that I had nowhere else to go and I might as well answer. But somewhere along the way my body had taken a vow of silence; she talked and talked and I stayed quiet. She reached for my hand, and I vomited on the asphalt. In the end she grabbed my arm and led me to her house. She stood over me and rinsed the blood from my wrists. It was only cold water, but the cuts were dirty and it stung. My eyes welled up, but no tears escaped.
