Novic Sara - Girl at War

“I had to pee. Can’t you sleep?”

“People don’t sleep in college,” I said, which was not exactly a lie. “Go back to bed.”

Instead Rahela pulled back my comforter and wriggled her way in. “I heard you yelling last night.”

“It was just a bad dream. Sorry if I woke you up.”

“Tell me about the night I was born.”

“Where did that come from?”

“I’m just curious,” she said. “I mean, you’re the only one who knows.”

Rahela knew, in theory, that we’d been adopted, had been told enough to account for her earlier memories of my accent, for the fact that our sable eyes didn’t match Jack’s and Laura’s dark green and watery blue ones. She knew, empirically, but she didn’t feel it. For her, there was no one before our American parents, and the loss of these other people, the parents of technicality, was objectively sad but nothing more.

I thought of my father’s stories, the way he’d made my own birth sound so exciting. My parents had been in Tiska and had to drive two towns down, where there was a hospital: You were almost born cliffside — you just couldn’t wait to get out and go swimming!

“Once upon a time,” I said. “We lived in a little flat in the middle of a great big city.”

“What’s a flat?”

“Like an apartment.”

“A flat apartment?”

“Okay just listen.”

Rahela quieted.

“Our mom was going to have you very soon, but it was a cold winter and a blizzard hit the city. The snow was this high”—I swung my hand in the air to mark a meter’s height—“like up to your chin!”

“Up to your chin?”

“Yeah, I was nine years old. Our dad joked that if I walked on an unplowed road all that would be left of me would be the pom-pom on my hat.

“You waited until the middle of the night. Our godparents came running over from their apartment through the snow and dug out the car so Mom and Dad could get to the hospital. I had to stay in the house, and I was so mad about missing out that I cried like a baby. But then, just a few minutes after Mom and Dad had left, Dad came running back up into the apartment. It was so cold that he’d grown tiny icicles in his eyebrows!”

“What happened?”

“Everyone was screaming at each other. The car was stuck in the road!”

“Did you call an ambulance?”

“Dad didn’t think an ambulance would get there in time.”

“You just left Mom out in the snow?”

“They had to — there were no cellphones back then. So Petar and Dad ran and got Mom out of the car and carried her toward the center of town, where the roads had been cleared. Then they found a taxi driver who took them the rest of the way, though he charged them triple the price.

“You were stubborn and Mom was in labor with you for twenty-seven hours, so it turned out they should’ve just waited for the ambulance. But everyone called Mom Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba for months afterward because of the way they hauled her downtown, and Mom wouldn’t let Dad live down how nervous he was.”

“Can I see the picture?” Rahela asked after a while.

“What picture?”

“From yesterday. The picture of you that you said wasn’t you.” I felt foolish for thinking I had outwitted her and reached across her to tug the envelope out from under the mattress. I felt for the gloss of the photo among the other papers, but when I pulled my hand from the envelope I was instead holding the Christmas picture of our entire family. Rahela grabbed it before I could return it to the packet.

“This isn’t the one—” I watched the image pass through her eyes and register. “Is that…me?” she said. “And that’s, those are—”

“Our parents.”

“Does Mom…I mean—” She looked at the photo, then back at me. “Do Mom and Dad know you have this?”

“Of course.” Laura had been the one to talk me out of carrying the photos around in my jeans pocket, relegating them to their place in the file box, for “safekeeping.” “All right, let’s put it away for now,” I said. “You’ve gotta get to sleep.”

“I just wanna see it a little more.”

She held the photo so close to her face it looked like she was staring right through the paper. I thought of our parents and felt sorry that she could only see them blurred.

“Do I look like them?”

I examined her, the wavy hair and warm complexion. “You look a lot like Mom.”

She looked embarrassed. “Can I still see the pictures? While you’re away at school?”

“Sure. I keep them in the file box. Just don’t take them out of the house or anything. Don’t lose them.”

Eventually she nodded off, and I tucked the photo back into the envelope and carried her to her room. I stayed up most of the night reading Austerlitz . I had read many books by writers long gone but found myself lingering on the fact of Sebald’s death only three months before, and was fixated on the notion of holding someone’s final thoughts in my hand. I called Brian but hung up after two rings. I’d talk to him tomorrow, once I got back to the city and sorted out what I was going to say to him that night.

Brian was a year older, the kind of person I’d imagined meeting at college — sensitive, worldly, independent — and I had first developed a crush on his intellect. He had studied abroad in Tibet; he had been to the Louvre and the Uffizi; he read Chomsky and Saussure for fun. If anyone was going to understand my story, it would be him. Several times I’d come close to telling him everything, but each time I tried I’d gotten nervous and backpedaled the conversation another way.

“I missed you,” I said when we kissed in the street. “I thought maybe I’d finally take you over to my uncle’s place, if you want.” I could feel myself talking too quickly. Brian pulled away a little. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just—”

“What?”

“You kind of blew me off this weekend.”

“I was home. I sent you a message.”

“You didn’t say goodbye.”

“I wanted to get an early start. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” He conceded that I hadn’t missed much over the weekend, that he’d spent most of the time in the library working on his thesis, a study of universal grammar theory via Nicaraguan Sign Language. Previously isolated across the country, deaf students had been brought to a special education school with the intent of training them in spoken Spanish, but on the playground and in the dorms they’d rapidly developed a signed system of their own. Linguists flocked to the site, eager to witness the birth of a new language.

“It’s really amazing,” Brian said. “After only a few years they had developed subject-verb agreement and classifier systems.” I liked listening to him talk about the project, how he got so excited about the finer points of grammar, but I knew nothing of the topic beyond what he’d told me, so the conversation soon petered out. He saw Austerlitz protruding from my purse and pulled it out. “Oh, not Sebald again.”

Brian and I did not have the same taste in books, which led to a kind of intellectual jousting I usually enjoyed. But I did not feel like debating, not about this.

“Where are you getting this old-man stuff?”

“From an old man,” I said. “But I like him.”

“Ariel or Sebald?”

“Both.”

“What is it about him? Is it the loopy sentences? The man does know his way around a comma.”

“Maybe.” Really it was because of the feeling of grief that ran through his books like a subterranean river. But I didn’t want to say that aloud. Not yet.

“He’s a bit of a German apologist, though, no?” Brian said.