Novic Sara - Girl at War

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.

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.