Girl at War: A Novel

by Sara Novic

  “Luka,” I whispered. “It’s so fucking cold.” Luka stirred, and I hoped he’d wake up, but instead he mumbled something that to my best guess was “socks” and turned over. My thoughts felt slow, my limbs weighted. I inched my chair closer to his.

  2

  Hours later I felt the sun on my face, first pleasant, then hot and pulsing. We died, I thought. Then a jagged pain tore up the length of my leg. I sat up, shielding my eyes against the morning and saw the outline of the fake policeman, now striking Luka with his nightstick and cursing.

  “Derelicts!” he yelled, along with insults about our mothers’ relationships with livestock. “You tricked me! Get the hell out of here!”

  “We can’t walk when you’re smashing us in the legs!” I said. He stopped for a moment, as if to consider the argument, and Luka and I took off over the fence, trailing the orange blankets behind us.

  We pushed through thick sea grass toward the public beach. The air was salty-sweet, a seawater and pine mix that had in my childhood signaled the start of summer vacation. It was still early and there were few people on the beach. I slipped off my sandals and was met with the stabbing pain of tiny pointed rocks.

  “Jesus,” I said, jumping back into my shoes. “They’re so sharp.” I had grown used to the less spectacular but sandy coastline of south Jersey.

  “Yeah, you’ll have to work on your calluses.”

  At water’s edge Luka dropped his blanket and pants and ran into the sea. “It’s warm!” he called and dove beneath the surface. I stripped to my bra and underwear, then immediately felt embarrassed. I’d studied Luka’s shirtless physique back in Zagreb; it was only natural that he might examine me in my adult form, with hips and breasts. I wanted him to like what he saw. I looked down at my thighs, adjusted my bra strap. I wished for a towel. Nothing to be done about it now, I thought, and ran awkwardly into the sea until I was deep enough to swim, eager to cover myself and lift my smarting feet from the rocks.

  The water was calmer than I remembered, nothing like the constant fight against tide and undertow that came with swimming in the ocean. Looking down, I was surprised to see my own legs, unobscured by the swirling sediment of the mid-Atlantic. I put my head back and succumbed to the bobbing rhythm of the not-quite-waves. Just when I’d begun to wonder whether one could sleep that way, something slick and powerful gripped my ankle and pulled me downward. I screeched and kicked until the thing released me and Luka appeared beside me in hysterics.

  “God, you’re evil,” I said.

  We were treading water, and our legs brushed one another. Luka ran his hand through his hair. “Come on. We better go if we want to get to Tiska before dark.”

  We jumped the fence back into Solaris to retrieve the car. We sat on the hood and downed half a bag of muesli and a box of UHT milk, and afterward I changed my clothes in the backseat. The guard gave us the finger as we sped through the exit, and we returned to the main road.

  Luka drove and I lay across the back, paging through the final segment of Rebecca West’s journey and looking out the window. The landscape was growing increasingly mountainous, the highland vegetation parched a tawny hue, making the ridges look almost golden.

  Luka was trying to calculate how long it would take to forget the war.

  “Maybe we’re already on the way,” I said. “The last five or six years’ worth of kids have been born outside of wartime. Postwar babies.”

  “Everyone’s still talking about it,” said Luka.

  “Here maybe. But talking’s not the same as living through it.”

  “You don’t need to experience something to remember it. You’re going to have kids, and eventually they’re going to want to know where their other set of grandparents is.”

  “And I’ll say they died.”

  “You should tell them the truth.”

  “That is the truth. They died.”

  “The whole story. You should tell Rahela, too. She deserves to know.”

  “I know,” I said. I let the book fall closed in my lap. I looked out at the gilded mountains and thought of the centuries of wars and mistakes that had come together in this place. History did not get buried here. It was still being unearthed.

  “What is that monstrosity you’re reading?”

  I told him about West and her trip through Yugoslavia. “Same shit, different war.”

  “Some people say the Balkans is just inherently violent. That we have to fight a war every fifty years.”

  “I hope that’s not true,” I said.

  3

  We arrived on the edge of Tiska a few hours later. Tiska had been a provincial outpost even by Yugoslavian standards—the electricity was spotty, phone and television lines were few, most homes didn’t have hot-water heaters, and it was twenty-five minutes’ drive from the nearest real town. But what it lacked in amenities it made up for in clear air and sun and a cliffside view of the Adriatic.

  As a child I had taken the summers for granted—a month’s vacation time was the country’s standard, and nearly everyone I knew holidayed on the coast. Now I considered how insane a month off would sound to an American. Jack could barely get a week away from the computer consulting firm where he worked, and even then he was constantly hassled by pages and phone calls from needy clients.

  Luka and I had been debating whether or not the EU’s unified currency made economic sense, but now the sight of the vast beryl water on the horizon knocked me quiet and we let the conversation fade. Something new was burgeoning within me, a feeling different from the anxiety that had pervaded most of the trip: nostalgia, untainted by trauma, for my childhood. I’d learned how to swim in that sea, how to steer our neighbors’ unwieldy motorboat, to jump from the rock ledges without cutting my feet, to catch and gut and grill a fish. At night I’d sneak down to the darkened beach and talk, in a combination of broken English and charades, with the Italian and Czech children whose families had come for an inexpensive vacation.

  “I hope it’s still there,” I said under my breath, an incantation. We rolled down the windows and let the salty air fill the car.

  Down on the deserted beach, waves lapped against the roof of a red utility truck, capsized and rusting. The driver must have been going too fast on the road above and missed a turn. My fondness for the place was again engulfed by distress and a sense of purpose. Petar and Marina were either here or dead, and I was about to find out which.

  —

  There was a point, unmarked, that the road turned into a footpath. The road, which at its widest was only big enough for one car, had no guardrail and was bordered by the unforgiving rock of the Dinaric Alps on one side and the Adriatic on the other. A few meters too far and a driver might be forced to make the trip back up the mountain entirely in reverse. I parked the car on a patch of dirt before the road narrowed completely. It used to be a crowded parking spot, but now there were only two other cars and both were so old it was difficult to tell whether they were abandoned. We shouldered our bags and followed the muggy breeze into the village.

  At first it was unclear whether the place was bombed out or just dilapidated. Though I’d stayed here for months at a time, looking at it now I found it hard to believe people had lived out their whole lives along the twisted innards of the Dinara, in a place so small and in such close contact with nature.

  Petar’s grandfather Ante had moved to Tiska in the forties after finishing medical school in Sarajevo. He and his neighbors had built one another’s houses with concrete and mules. Decades later when I visited as a child, the village behaved as if Ante was still alive and well; our address was simply “The doctor’s house, Tiska, 21318,” the postal code of the next town over. Communal cement mixing, too, had remained a practice in the town—my earliest memories of the place were of my father and Petar hauling buckets of concrete alongside the rest of the village men to transform the path into sets of lumpy, hand-shaped stairs. The idea was that the stairs would be easier for the old people to navigate than
the dirt pathways, which were slick in the smooth spots and root-riddled in others. But it had been easier to run along the pathways, and at the time I’d resented the stairs for slowing me down.

  Luka and I came to the steps, descending at a jagged pace toward sea level, obeying the curvature of the mountains like a set of intestines. They snaked past the village’s single store and the stone monument to the workers of the Glorious Revolution. They swooped around the small church and to the schoolhouse, which was swathed in untamed vines. The school had been in disuse even when I was small, except where the old men had cleared the underbrush to expose the packed sand floors of bocce courts. The steps continued down toward the water, passing strips of fig trees and agave plants; the figs were soft and sugary, the agave thick and barbed, their contiguous presence a testament to the fickle soil beneath.

  “It’s still standing,” Luka called from down the path. I sped up and stood beside him on the slanted step. Through a clearing in the fig trees I could see Petar and Marina’s house, sealed up and covered in weeds. The façade was pitted with scars from shell fragments, and a chunk of the roof was gone. No one would live in a place like that.

  I jumped the last few steps and reached the terrace, waded through dead leaves to the front door, and stupidly began to knock.

  “Hello?”

  “Ana.”

  “Just wait,” I said, and banged harder.

  “Ana, come on. Don’t do that.”

  “Hey! Get off that property!” someone said in heavily accented English.

  “Sorry,” I called back in Croatian.

  “Hrvatske?” the woman’s voice said.

  “Yeah. We’re Croats.” I walked in the direction of the voice. “I’m looking for the Tomićs?”

  The woman appeared on the balcony of a house farther up the mountain than I expected given the clarity of the sound of her voice, an acoustic wonder of the cliffs I’d forgotten. She was wizened and swaddled in a black long-sleeved dress that made me sweat just looking at it, a red flowered head scarf tied at her chin. “Sorry,” she said when we got closer. “I thought you were tourists. The kids love to break into the abandoned ones.”

  “Abandoned?” I said.

  “They’ve been gone for years.”

  “What happened to the owners?”

  “Petar was killed in the war. That’s what Marina said. Did you know them?”

  When she said it, it sounded true, like I had always known it, but that did not stop the feeling of loss, hard and stonelike, from dropping into my stomach. Still, she had spoken to Marina. “Marina’s here?”

  “Not anymore. She came down for a while after Petar died. She was trying to get out. To Austria to live with her sister, she said.”

  “Do you know if she made it? Where in Austria? How can I contact her?”

  The woman shook her head. “Sorry, kid. You look familiar, though. Where did you say you were from?”

  “We used to come for holidays with Petar and Marina when I was small. I’m Ana. Jurić.”

  “Jurić. Yes,” she said, adjusting her head scarf. “So you’re the one.”

  I looked at the woman and tried to discern what she meant. “The one what?” I said finally.

  “The one who lived.”

  “I lived.”

  “You look like your father.”

  “You knew him?”

  “I knew them all.”

  “Baka,” a small voice called from inside the house.

  “I’m going to the church now. Come later, to talk.”

  “I will,” I said, but she was gone quickly back into her house, and I stayed on her terrace staring up at the space where she had stood.

  —

  Luka broke open the back window, and I slid through into the cobwebbed darkness. The air inside was heavy, laden with years of dirt. The walls were bare, the kitchen supplies gone, and I tried to determine how much of a hurry Marina had been in when she left. The ugly auburn couch was still pressed against the wall, the table and stove next to one another in the area that, though technically part of the same room, Marina had declared the kitchen. Despite its barrenness and sour smell, the place looked the same.

  “Go open the front,” Luka called. “I’m too big to fit through here.”

  I lurched toward the door, but my presence in the house was a trip wire of disintegration; a set of blinds fell from their place in the side window and a thick beam of light penetrated the dark kitchen.

  I saw my parents—summer skin, sweat-slicked and tanned. My mother stood at the kitchen sink, wringing out laundry and humming an old children’s rhyme, my father rounding the corner and joining her song with a whistle. His hands crept up the folds of her dress, exploring her hip bones. The water sloshed in the sink as he spun her around and kissed her forehead. From this angle, I saw her dress clinging tight around her midriff and realized she would have been a few months pregnant with Rahela the last time we’d gone to Tiska.

  I heard Luka fiddling with the front door, and soon he’d managed to break it open himself. An overwhelming glare filled the house. I blinked my parents away.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Nothing.” He opened the remaining shades and shutters and windows, then disappeared into the back bedroom, where I could hear him doing the same. A concrete box, the house had been designed as a haven from the southern sun—but now, with all the blinds up and the roof broken, it was the brightest I’d ever seen it. The breeze pushed the stale air out the windows.

  Luka emerged from the bathroom with a set of brooms. Petar and Marina had always used the bathtub for storing cleaning supplies and tools; the house had no hot water, so there was no real difference between the outdoor shower and the one in the bathroom.

  “Come on, then,” Luka said, jabbing me with the end of a broomstick.

  “How’d you know they were in there?”

  “Don’t you remember that summer your father and Petar were resurfacing the terrace and they kept tracking the cement dust in the house and your mom and Marina were going mental?”

  “Now that you mention it.”

  “You and I swept for like three days straight. I’m practically traumatized.”

  “I’m sure that excuse goes over well with your mother.”

  Inside Luka swept and scoured the floor and scrubbed the countertops, and I spent the afternoon pulling the vines that choked the windows. The space between my shoulder blades got sore quickly, and I realized how little I actually moved anymore, how content I was to be hunched in a subway seat or over my desk at school. But I liked the discomfort now, a productive pain, and I moved on from the façade to the patio itself, weeding and cleaning in methodical square patches. The roots of the overgrowth were deep and clung obstinately to thick clods of soil. I threw the weeds and vines in what used to be the compost pile and set my sights on the layers of dirt and dust and sand that coated the terrace, sweeping it into piles and scooping it away with a metal dustpan and brush I remembered Petar banging out in the front yard.

  Beneath a dirty patch near the front door I unearthed the handprints. In the summer my father and Petar had poured new concrete for the patio, we’d each left a handprint in the square by the door. It was my idea.

  “If you’re bad, I’ll cover up your handprint and you’ll be erased from the family!” Petar had teased whenever he wanted me to run an errand for him. Now I stood before the inlay, pressed my hand into the contours of his, and considered how easy it was to erase a family. I traced my parents’ hand shapes, then my own, my nine-year-old fingertips barely reaching the first knuckles of my fingers now. At the corner of the block, a vaguely toe-shaped smudge was pressed in the cement. Jealous but too embarrassed to add his own handprint to what he deemed to be a family plot, Luka had planted his big toe in the concrete. Then, even more ashamed, he hadn’t washed the cement off quickly enough, and it took days to peel from his skin.

  “Hey, Luka! Come see this!”

  Luka
appeared, sweaty and shirtless. “What is it?”

  “Your toe has stood the test of time!”

  “Are those your parents’?”

  “And Petar’s and Marina’s, yeah.”

  “And yours,” he said.

  “Yeah. And mine.”

  “I’m glad you have this,” he said, turning back in to the house. For a minute I wondered whether he was going to try to cut the rock out of the ground, but he returned instead with my backpack, and dug through it to find my camera. “Here.”

  I took two pictures and set them inside on the table to develop. “Get my wallet out of there, too,” I said. “Let’s go to the store.”

  We climbed the stairs back to the upper footpath toward the village store.

  “Do you think you’ll go look for Marina?” Luka said. I thought of the day I escaped and wondered whether Petar had died or had gone back to the front and saved others. If he’d been caught in those woods, Marina might think I was dead, too.

  “I want to. But it’s harder for me to wander around Austria than it is here.”

  “I could go with you if you want.”

  “Maybe I’ll try to write her somehow first.”

  “If she’s alive, you should visit.”

  “Let me do it,” I said.

  “I will. But I won’t let you wait another decade this time.”

  —

  The bells on the door jingled when we made our way inside, and an ancient man glanced up from his Dalmacija News with disinterest. The store’s main stock—bread, fatty white cheese, stamps, and cigarettes—was laid out on a card table. In the cooler nearby were mackerels and mussels the fishermen had brought in. Luka and I picked two mackerels from the case. Luka asked for olive oil, and the man wrapped the fish in newspaper, then retrieved a small cruet. He added a book of matches to the pile.

  “Does the pay phone still work?” I said. The phone attached to the side of the store had been the only one in the village when I was young, and even then it was finicky.