Novic Sara - Girl at War

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.

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.