Girl at War: A Novel

by Sara Novic

  —

  For the first week I sat on her kitchen floor with my back to the wall and my knees to my chest. I counted the squares in the linoleum, stared at the crack in the dining table leg, scratched at my gauze-wrapped wrists. I blinked rarely, and moved with a halting, mechanical edge. At night I slept in the same spot, curling into a knot on the floor.

  The woman’s son, a boy a few years older than I was, left the house early each morning and came home after dark. He stomped around in combat boots and talked incessantly of the “Safe House.” It was a phrase I’d never heard before, and I assumed it was the village’s bomb shelter. The boy never spoke to me, walked in wide arcs around my spot as if I had a contagious illness. I felt like I did. The woman gave me water in a tin cup and bread with butter, but it was hard to eat. Even breathing was a conscious effort. The first few times the air raid siren sounded the woman tried to coax me into going to the shelter with her, but I stayed in my corner. The explosions of that first week were inconsequential; I was anesthetized to fear.

  The woman had visitors who entered under various pretenses and examined me from the corners of their eyes but spoke as if I wasn’t there at all.

  “Maybe she’s just stupid,” someone offered.

  “Maybe she’s mute.”

  “She’s not stupid,” said the woman, whose name these conversations revealed was Drenka. “It’s not that she can’t talk. She just won’t. I can tell.”

  “Seems to me she got a shock,” said one of the kinder old women. “I saw her all bloodied up when you found her.”

  Eventually my novelty wore off, and I became privy to the women’s gossip—stories about the mixed Serb-Croat family who had lived across the street and disappeared in the middle of the night, about the next-door neighbor’s daughter, who was fifteen and pregnant.

  The JNA air force had crushed the village at the start of the war as part of their mission to make a Serbian path to the sea. Afterward, a small band of Četnik rebels—some of them villagers themselves—had taken control. The Četniks made alternating rounds between this village and several others along the same stretch of highway, interdicting humanitarian aid and Croatian military supplies and holding down the settlements as way stations for their own convoys. They had decided not to kill us, at least not all of us, not yet, so the UN and NATO food aid would keep coming. When they were in town, the Četniks maintained headquarters in the schoolhouse at the center of the village, the shutters lashed closed with a convoluted twist of bungee cords. From the women’s screams, everybody knew what happened inside.

  “Now you will give birth to a little Serb soldier,” they had told the neighbor girl as they raped her. When she came to borrow flour, I stared at the stained brown shirt stretched thin over her growing stomach.

  —

  I left the house for the first time when the chickens exploded. These days the JNA bombed the village sporadically, almost as if by accident. The initial detonations resulted in predictable damage—blown-out buildings, shattered glass—but the real danger lay in the clearing smoke. As the bombs fell they released showers of tiny metal balls. The outside world called them “cluster bombs.” We called them zvončići, jingle bells. They were not like traditional land mines or trip wires constructed to kill in combat zones. Zvončići clung to tree branches and roof tiles, nestled in patches of grass; they fell indiscriminately, like combustible hail. They were patient, making up for what they lacked in size with the element of surprise. They had surprised the chickens. The blast shook the floor, and I jumped up and ran out the front door. The sun hurt my eyes, and on unsteady legs I strained to keep up with Drenka and her son. Behind the house a cloud of feathers was settling, and I tried not to look.

  Most of the village sat along a single street, the homes unvarying in style and size. Exposed cinder block was the prevailing façade in those mountains, chosen to say “we are sturdy and permanent.” But the gray brick appeared perpetually unfinished, blurting out instead “we are poor.” Now riddled with shell fragments, the pockmarked houses looked even more dismal. Beyond them, uneven plots of farmland sprawled along the valley, a collage of mottled greens and browns, singed fields of wheat and corn. At the traffic circle were the school the Četniks had commandeered and the Catholic church, which, likely because it was missing a wall, they had left alone. There was also a post office and a market, though neither functioned, not the way they should. An armored truck delivered UN flour, milk powder, and vegetable fat to the post office (no one could say for sure whether they’d seen actual Peacekeepers in person) and depending on the week—whether or not the Četniks were around—either we got it or we didn’t.

  In the shelter, seeing everyone at once, I noticed that the villagers had uniformed up in various shades of olive. They studied my bloodied T-shirt with equal interest. Some people had uniforms with Hungarian writing stamped on them, leftovers from their revolution decades earlier, but most just wore any combination of green they could put together. Afterward, when we returned to her house, Drenka offered me the smallest green attire she had—a T-shirt and cargo pants with a patch over the knee, which her son had outgrown.

  “Now that you’re going outside,” she said. Reluctantly I surrendered my own clothes to her for washing. I wanted to tell her not to get rid of them. She seemed to understand, or else she didn’t want to be wasteful; she didn’t throw them out.

  Outside, I learned about running. Not the bouncy, pleasurable kind I’d done while playing football or tag with my friends, but a streamlined, adrenaline-injected version of my normal stride. Once I started I ran everywhere—to the water pump, to the post office for UN food, to the underground shelter. When one was maneuvering from house to bomb shelter, it might at first seem logical to travel in as straight a line as possible, to take the quickest way. But I always ran in a haphazard zigzag—believing I could upset the statistical probabilities of hitting a land mine by forging an incoherent path, believing, in the egocentric mind-set of all children, that I was the main target. I was afraid one of the soldiers had seen me pretending to die in the forest and now, spotting me alive and well, was out to finish what he’d started. After a while, though, I noticed that others were running in crooked lines, too. When the Četniks climbed to the rooftop of the school and sprayed bullets along the road, it was clear we were justified in our self-centeredness. Somewhere in the dead space between house and shelter civilians became soldiers.

  —

  A few days after the chickens’ demise, Drenka’s son talked to me for the first time.

  “I’m Damir.” I’d known his name already, but this was the first time he’d addressed me directly, and I nodded as if he’d told me something new. “You can come with me if you like.” He handed me a khaki sweatshirt and a camouflage cap, then walked out the door without checking to see whether I was coming. The shirt was huge and smelled sweaty, but I pulled it on anyway. Over the weeks I’d come to like Damir, the confident way he marched around the house, the excited chatter about his “safe house,” which, I was piecing together, was not the same as the shelter. Could he be inviting me there? Pressing the hat down hard on my head, I followed him into the street. He ducked down an alley and through the side door of a house perforated with bullet holes.

  The Safe House had once been just a regular house, though no one ever spoke of whose it was or what had happened to them. Inside, my eyes watered; the rooms were dim, shutters drawn, and the whole place was cloaked in a nicotine haze. Damir was talking to the front door guards, and I hung as close to him as I could without being a nuisance, studying the house as my vision cleared. On the walls were pictures of well-oiled topless women and the deep-browed, prominent-nosed face even I recognized as General Ante Gotovina, whose likeness was fast becoming the logo of the Croatian resistance. Ultranationalist slogans were spray-painted on every smooth surface: walls, doors, countertops—za dom, spremni—for the home, ready. The furniture was smashed, save for one red leather chair in the middle of the
kitchen, which no one ever sat in. Gotovina’s Chair, we called it.

  I followed Damir up the stairs to the top floor, a single large room that seemed inexplicably bright until I realized a chunk of the roof was missing.

  “Wait here,” he said, and I got nervous. I watched Damir approach an ancient man with glasses so thick the lenses protruded from their frames. They spoke in low voices while I stood in the doorway. Despite the winter chill, just as noticeable inside because of the missing roof, the man wore only jeans and a sleeveless undershirt that revealed dry, scabbed arms. The man looked over at me as Damir talked, then raised a hand in my direction and motioned for me to come. I heard his knees crunch as he bent down to my eye level.

  “What’s your name there?” he said.

  “She, uh, doesn’t talk,” Damir said.

  “Never mind that. We’re not looking for speechmakers. We need workers. I can see you’re a tough guy.” Behind the glasses his eyes were magnified round like an insect’s, and I was doubtful about whether he could see anything at all, but I liked that he’d called me tough and I smiled a little. He tugged on the brim of my cap. “An adventurer, maybe?” I didn’t know what that had to do with anything, but I wanted the captain to like me, so I nodded. He extended a knobby hand, and I tapped it in a hesitant high five. “Okay. Indiana Jones it is.” He pressed himself back into a standing position and put his hand on Damir’s shoulder. “Why don’t you go set her up with Stallone?”

  “Yes, sir,” Damir said, removing an AK from its spot on a hat rack before guiding me to the back of the room, away from the windows.

  The Safe House was populated by leftovers: the elderly and teenaged, men too old to be drafted, and boys like Damir technically too young to fight. The Safe Housers had replaced their given names with those of American actionmovie icons. The house contained two Bruces (a Lee and a Willis), Corleone, Bronson, Snake Plissken, Scarface, Van Damme, Leonardo, Donatello (of the Turtles, not the painters, they were quick to assert), and several men from the next town over who answered to the general appellation Wolverines. Though I didn’t know enough about the movies to decode the system, the nicknames were usually assigned by vote and were somewhat indicative of rank. Damir, for his valor in an operation past, had been awarded the most coveted moniker: Rambo. I was the only girl there.

  In the corner we found Stallone, a boy about my age, swathed in ammo belts and sporting an eye patch of indeterminate medical necessity.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “She’s Indiana,” Damir said. “She’ll be with you now.”

  “Indiana Jones?” He seemed impressed. “Where you from?” I looked up at Damir, but he had already gone. “You don’t talk?” I shook my head. He raised his hands in a series of gestures synchronous with his speech. “You deaf?” I shook my head again. “My brother’s deaf,” he said. He pointed to a gunner at the side window, the only person of regular military age in the house. “The Terminator.” The floor around Stallone was littered with bullets and cartridges. I cleared a place beside him and sat down. “Okay,” he said. “This is how you do it.”

  From then on I reloaded magazines. My fingers were small and agile, perfect for filling the clips. I sat on the floor with Stallone amid piles of munitions, sorting and loading. The ammo, Stallone said, was smuggled in through Hungary, too. Or Romania, or the Czech Republic—countries who knew what it meant to overthrow a Communist government and were willing to ignore the EU embargo.

  Stallone also manned the CB radio, taking in strings of garbled code from other Safe House strongholds across the region, and alerting the captain of JNA plane sightings or Četnik activity in the neighboring towns. Sometimes we picked up broadcasts from the Croatian police force, and I took their coordinates and labeled them on a map on the back wall. When we caught their frequency, Stallone always sent an SOS to see if they were coming to get us, but we never heard back. “Must be busy,” Stallone would say and readjust his eye patch.

  A rough-and-ready army unit, most of the Safe Housers went out on missions for days at a time, leaving only a skeleton crew back at headquarters to protect the town. We’d fill large sacks with ammo for the men to take on their trips, and after we finished all the packs I’d run through the house distributing new belts and collecting the empties from the rest of the gunners.

  Though the house had three floors, we almost exclusively used the top one; it was better to have the higher ground, to shoot at a downward angle. The room lacked any peacetime artifacts, but the parts of the ceiling that remained were so steeply sloped it was clear we were in the attic. The best gunners got the prime real estate of the front dormer window, so I resupplied them first, then the side-window shooters, and then the door guards, who were the only people on the ground floor.

  Like everywhere else in the village, the Safe House had no running water or electricity, and the shuttered-up first floor was dark as night at all hours. Besides equipping the guards, using the bathroom was the only reason to go downstairs. The shadowy lower rooms were by far the scariest parts of the house, and I approached both tasks with breakneck speed.

  The actual bathroom had exploded in an air raid. It had been boarded off and replaced by an unfortunate replica in the coat closet, complete with bucket, hand-crank flashlight, and UN-issue toilet paper. Whoever got on the captain’s bad side during the course of the day would be saddled with the foul duty of emptying the bucket in the evening.

  Each night when we returned from the Safe House—after the second shift took over—Damir would settle opposite his mother at the kitchen table to suck down root soup and play tač. While we were at the Safe House I was busy, felt useful, but at night I longed for my parents, ran their final moments through my head. In that first month I wasn’t quite mourning. Instead my mind felt hazy and detached, crowded with ideas I knew weren’t true even as I entertained them; maybe, if I worked hard enough, I could win them back.

  For days I choked down my bread and watched from my spot on the floor as Drenka and Damir fumbled in the candlelight, rushing to slap piles of dog-eared playing cards together. I felt suspended between living and dead, as if joining them would mean abandoning my own family. And yet, every evening I found myself inching closer to the table, my shadow elongated in the flickering light, until eventually I sat down to play, too. If they were surprised by my appearance there, they didn’t show it. Damir made a bad joke and Drenka laughed at it anyway, and I felt a smile push its way up through me. Her brown face glowed gold in the low light.

  The next night I sat at the table at dinnertime, too, and ate soup and bread with preserves. Before she blew out the candles, Drenka spread a sheet across the sofa and called me over. I felt my spine lengthen like it hadn’t during the weeks of sleeping contracted on the kitchen floor, and I stretched my arms over my head and pushed myself deep into the cushions of the couch.

  2

  I’d been working at Safe House Headquarters for a few weeks when the girls showed up. Mostly teenagers, the girls had been on a reconnaissance mission down south but had been waylaid by a JNA battle outside Knin. Now they returned bearing updates from the surrounding towns. They stomped up to the attic, muddy and commanding attention, then reeled off a list of names from a receipt-paper scroll. From the reactions of the Safe Housers, I gleaned that it was the latest in casualties or missing persons from the front.

  After the announcements, the conversation descended quickly into the realm of justs—speculations leveled at the bearer of the list:

  “He’ll be fine. He’s just missing, not wounded?”

  “Just shot, it says. Not necessarily killed.”

  “Probably only a flesh wound.”

  The list reader scanned her paper in an attempt to offer some affirmative responses to the barrage. I’d always assumed Damir’s father was in the army, but Damir never mentioned him, and he didn’t come up on the list while I was there.

  When people got frantic the captain stepped in and took the pape
r. He folded it in a lopsided accordion and attempted to put it in his shirtfront pocket before realizing that he wasn’t wearing a shirt and stuffing it in his waistband instead.

  “The boys are all fine,” he said firmly, and everyone dispersed back to their posts.

  “Who are you?” said one of the girls when she came to get a new clip. She wore a patrol cap and long auburn hair, and fiddled with both as she talked.

  “She’s Indy,” Stallone said, having grown accustomed to his role as my spokesperson. “Indiana Jones.” He turned to me, lowering his voice. “That’s Red Sonja. She’s the girl boss.”

  There was a philosophical divide in the Safe House about whether or not the girls should take on exclusively female nicknames. Some argued that they didn’t want their pick of badass characters limited on the basis of gender, while Red Sonja said there were plenty of worthy women action stars who were actually more badass than their male counterparts, given they had to fight in tighter pants.

  “Indy,” she said, frowning, no doubt at the gender attached to my adopted name. “Well, too late to change it. Nice job with this, though.” She gestured at my latest organizational effort for munitions, bullets separated by cartridge type and stored in terra-cotta flowerpots. I gave her a thumbs-up and she tied off the braid she’d plaited during the exchange and went to reload.

  Sorted munitions made the Safe House run smoother, but the older girls all had their own assault rifles, and I was getting restless. I had proven myself a good worker, I thought, and wanted to fight like everybody else. The following week during morning meetings, when weapons were issued to the new recruits from neighboring villages, I lined up with the rest, tucked my hair up under my cap, and hoped the dirt on my face covered any traces of girlhood. The captain looked me up and down and said there was not enough for everyone. But the next day we took on mortar fire that tore a new hole in the south wall. The captain made Stallone and me lie facedown on floor, and I loathed the familiar feeling of helplessness. I tried to lift my head but could only see boots. Someone fell beside me—I couldn’t tell who—and his weapon discharged as he hit the floor. A hollow, wobbling tone filled my ears, then a roaring sound like rushing water. The man was bleeding in spurts from his neck, and I closed my eyes again.