Novic Sara - Girl at War

By the time I reached Luka’s front stoop I was so nervous it was all I could do not to run away. What if he’d been killed by some back-alley sniper, or burned beyond all recognition by a mine in the park? What if he was angry with me for getting out? What if we didn’t like each other anymore? I rang the doorbell and listened for footsteps. There weren’t any that I could hear, but then the lock clicked and the door opened to reveal the foyer through which I’d tracked mud countless times, and a tiny woman in fuzzy slippers and a housecoat. It was Luka’s grandmother. Luka and I had visited her flat down the street occasionally after school. Even in the darkest months of rationing she’d managed to slip us something sweet. But now she looked much older, more hunched. Beneath the open robe she wore a black blouse and a woolen skirt hiked up to her flaccid breasts. Her hair was tied in a dark scarf. She was in mourning.

“Baka,” I breathed, not meaning to say it aloud. She looked me over, her eyebrows raised at my use of a familial term.

“Who are you?”

“I’m, uh—”

“No soliciting.” She closed the door in my face and I retreated to the bottom of the stoop, where I sat sweating and trying not to panic. In Bosnian villages, where Luka’s grandparents were from, once you went into mourning for a close family member, it could go on for years; for a particularly troubling death one might never wear color again. I allowed myself to fall into an antifantasy of what had happened to Luka — death by land mine, malnutrition. I envisioned his funeral, a small stone marking his remains up on Mirogoj.

The morbid string of daydreams made Luka’s appearance on the sidewalk before me even more startling. I shot up when I caught sight of him farther down Ilica, and felt him look me over, first with the general curiosity that one directs at a person lingering in front of his home, then with the more exacting gaze of trying to place someone.

Luka was tall and broad-shouldered, a departure from the scrawniness we’d once shared, but he was recognizable in other ways — his hair still thick and stiff, the same serious, close-lipped smile. I caught in his eyes the exact moment he recognized me.

“My god,” he said. We hugged, and his arms exuded an unfamiliar strength. I pulled away in a rush of self-consciousness that I smelled of sweat and plane food. Luka kissed me on both cheeks and took my suitcase into the house.

His family was in the kitchen — Baka crocheting at the table, Luka’s mother aproned and dishing out potatoes, his father in police uniform, home for lunch, wiping the droplets of soup stuck in his mustache on the back of his arm.

“Use your napkin,” Luka’s mother said.

“Mama,” Luka said, and all three of them looked up. Baka stared at me, confused by my presence in the house. Luka started to say something, but his mother had already bypassed him and taken me by both hands.

“Ana?” she said. “Is it you?”

“Ja sam,” I said. She pulled me into a smothering hug, and Luka’s father stood and placed a beefy hand on my shoulder.

“My god.”

“Ana,” Baka muttered, contemplating who I might be.

“Welcome back,” said his father.

“I’m going to make some calls,” said Luka’s mother.

“Ajla, wait.” I’d never called Luka’s mother by her first name before, and it surprised us both.

“What is it, honey?” She put down the phone and gave me an encouraging smile. I wanted to ask her about Petar and Marina. But she was happy. Everyone was.

“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

Luka dragged my suitcase up the stairs but bypassed the spare bedroom, which was filled with luggage and a peculiar collection of dated housewares: chipped china, rusted cast-iron pans, and a cardboard carton of slotted spoons.

“Baka’s staying in there now.”

I remembered Baka’s black clothes. “Your grandfather?”

“He’s — she’s in mourning.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. He was old. I mean, we were expecting it.”

I’d never come across death when I was expecting it, but I doubted that would make it any easier.

“Still,” I said. “Is she okay?”

“She’s tough.” Luka had always been stoic, but the detachment with which he spoke about his grandfather was unnerving. It occurred to me that he may have gotten used to saying goodbye. He picked up my bag again and we headed to his room. Except for a bigger bed and a desktop computer, it looked the same. “You can sleep here. I’ll go downstairs.”

“I’d rather take the couch,” I said.

“Suit yourself.”

“Did you get my letter?”

He went to the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a rubber-banded stack of envelopes addressed in my unsteady ten-year-old scrawl.

“Didn’t you get mine?”

I shook my head. “But those are old. I wrote you last month, to say I was coming.”

“Well, I didn’t get — Oh. The postal codes all changed after the war. A lot of the street names, too. It might get here eventually; it takes them a while to sort through the stuff rejected by the computer system. And if you don’t write First Class , god knows what they do with it. Hey. Why did you stop writing? In ’ninety-two?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just got scared.”

“That something happened to me?”

“That you wouldn’t write back,” I said, though I’d been equally afraid of what he’d say if he did.

Outside around the backyard table everyone spoke much faster than I remembered. Luka’s mother, from a Herzegovinian family, had thirty-one cousins and invited them to everything. About half of them had actually shown up, and they crowded around the patio in mismatched chairs hailing from various decades. From what I could make out, the cousins were engaged in an argument that swung with a bizarre effortlessness between the profligate behavior of parliament’s ruling party and two different brands of spreadable cheese.

Luka sat across from me, a mischievous grin surfacing whenever a member of his family called for another round of rakija , brandy cooked in bathtubs by old ladies in the mountains and sold on the side of the road in Coca-Cola bottles. The alcohol just made me sweatier; the temperature hung steady at thirty-seven degrees even though it was dusk, and I had grown accustomed to air-conditioning. Each shot of brandy lit a fire in my mouth and carried a torch down into my chest. Had I really drunk this when I was young? And as medicine? As if in answer to my thought Luka’s eight-year-old cousin slammed his glass on the table and let out a drunken belch.

I should have gone to the hostel, I thought, as the group filled the yard with spirited laughter. The language that in my mind had existed for so long only in past tense was alive again in conversation and pulsing from the radio. Every time I spoke I was met with a correction of my childlike grammar. English words welled up in my mouth and I swallowed them with difficulty.

Now the cousins, already into their second bottle of rakija , had nicknamed me American Girl. I mulled over the vinegary phrase with distaste, struggling to construct a grammatically sound sentence I could wage against them. In the end, self-consciousness blocked all productive channels of thought, and I resigned myself to eating in silence.

Afterward I climbed up to the roof and tried not to cry.

“What was I thinking?” I said to Luka, who had followed me. “I can’t stay here.” Luka, who’d always gotten nervous when I was sad, turned away. I knew it was only because he liked to be alone when he was upset and wanted to afford me the same privacy. After a while, though, when I hadn’t calmed down, he sat beside me, pulling his knees to his chest to get traction with his bare feet against the clay roof tiles.