Novic Sara - Girl at War

At the center of the field I threw myself beneath a tractor and curled into a compact ball, covering my face with my hands. There was gunfire and yelling from every angle, and I tried to listen for voices I knew. I thought of Damir and waited for the familiar sadness to set in, but found only anger in its place. With one hand I felt the ground for my AK and was relieved to find it there beside me.

—

“Viči ako možeš!” Yell out if you can. The cry reverberated through the village as the remaining Safe Housers combed the fields for survivors.

“Viči ako možeš!” Other than the rescue call it was eerily quiet, that odd part of evening when the sun had set but it was still more light than dark. I ran my hands over my face and body, taking inventory, impossibly unharmed save for the blood on my wrists, where the last of the barbed-wire scabs had reopened when I hit the ground. I waited, listening for any definitive JNA sounds, watched for passing boots. But there was nothing, so I pulled myself on my elbows out from beneath the tractor. It occurred to me that I’d never seen a tractor up close before, and I marveled momentarily at its size, the tire alone taller than I was, before a resurgence of the rescue call returned me to soldier mode.

I jogged back the way I’d come, looking for Damir, and found a group of Safe Housers squatting around a body I knew must be his.

“Indy!” Bruce Willis said, noticing me. “Don’t — don’t look. Go home and tell Drenka to make a bed for him.”

“She doesn’t talk,” said Snake.

“Well then she’ll do a goddamn charade. Just go!”

I pressed myself on tiptoe, trying to catch a glimpse of Damir’s face, to see if Bruce had meant a sickbed or a dead-person one. But Damir was obscured by the men around him.

“Hey!” Bruce said, and I spun back toward them. “Hold the gun out in front of you, at least till you get out of the field.” I nodded and pulled the AK up over my head, adjusting the twisted strap around my shoulder.

Damir was right — my sense of direction was terrible, and now that the men had turned me away from the path toward the Safe House, I’d lost my reference point. I walked down a row of wheat, but that only seemed to take me deeper into the field. Ahead, I thought I heard a rustling. I had practiced the fieldstrip so many times that cocking the gun was more an act of muscle memory than conscious thought. I pulled the handle back along the bolt carrier, then released it, heard a round click into the chamber. Whoever was nearby must have heard it, too, because there was rustling again, then the unmistakable sound of running in boots. I tried to call for Stallone, but nothing came out.

When he came around the corner, I froze. It was not Stallone. The man was looking over his shoulder but was headed straight for me. He wore a patchy beard and a green jacket, no JNA insignia. By the time he turned and saw me, we were so close we could have touched. He was visibly shocked by my size and my gun. I felt him look me over, trying to decide what to do, and for a moment I glimpsed his hesitation. Then it passed. He reached around for his gun, and I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled the trigger.

On the ground, the man was writhing and making a choking noise. I had hit him in the upper stomach, or maybe the ribs. He was probably only a few years older than Damir, acne pockmarks still visible along his cheekbones.

The blood was passing through his shirt and pooling beside him. But he was still awake, wide-eyed and angry and confused. He was trying to talk but his speech was slurred, and I couldn’t understand until he stopped whatever he had been saying and just repeated “Please,” over and over again.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I stepped over him and crept through the wheat, searching for a way back to the house.

In the kitchen I called out to Drenka, but my vocal cords groaned with the vibrations of disuse. She turned and looked me over, trying to gauge whether I’d actually spoken. I saw her eyes catch on something and realized I was covered in blood, a little from my wrists, but mostly from the blowback of the soldier. I coughed and tried again to speak; my voice came stronger this time. “Damir’s hurt.”

She jumped from her chair. “Where is he?”

“The JNA. They got him.” My throat burned. “Safe Housers are bringing him here. They said to get ready.”

“Get ready? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

Drenka instructed me to undress. I put on her nightgown as she wrung the blood from my clothes in a bucket on the kitchen floor.

—

Damir had been shot in the thigh, and the bullet was still inside him. It took two Safe Housers to carry him because they were trying to keep his leg straight. When they first put him on his bed, I still couldn’t tell if he was alive. But when Drenka cut his pant leg off and poured alcohol on the wound, he jerked awake and began to yell.

“Thank God,” I said. Bruce Willis stared at me, then tried to play off his surprise at my speaking.

The Bruces sat with us for a few hours, assuring Drenka that Damir was going to be fine. The captain was already radioing the neighboring villages to call for the doctor, they said. I thought of the soldier I had shot, wondered if he had been rescued or if he was still out in the field, bleeding to death.

Damir moaned and sweated in his sleep. Drenka and I stayed up all night staring at him and waiting for the doctor to come. He mumbled incessantly about his grandfather and watermelon, while Drenka cradled his head and poured swallows of rakija in his mouth.

“Listen,” she said to me the next morning as I slung my gun over my shoulder and double-knotted my shoelaces. “If you tell me where you’re from I can help you get back. There must be someone waiting for you.” I eyed her from across the table until she resumed her pacing. I thought about what it would be like if the doctor had to cut off Damir’s leg in front of us, right in his own bed. I thought of Luka knocking on the door of our flat, of his impatience and worry at the silence on the other side. The red shine of his bicycle streaked across my vision. I thought about the man I had shot, but I was not quite sorry. I went to the Safe House.

There was no one guarding the door. Inside, the house was trashed. The posters had been torn from the wall; their taped corners clung obstinately to the cement. It looked like Gotovina’s Chair had been set on fire. I ran upstairs, where I found the captain warbling a distress signal into the CB. Besides the Bruces and one of the Turtles, the place was empty.

“Stallone?” I managed, my voice still clumsy. The captain looked startled but quickly regained composure.

“A lot of people are okay. They’re at home, healing up for a day or two.”

“Stallone?” I said again, taking note of the captain’s evasion.

“Stallone is missing,” he said. “His brother is out looking.” I stood there frozen, the strength I’d gained over the past months gone all at once, as if it had drained out my feet. “Don’t worry about that now. Tell me about Damir.”

I told him Damir’s leg was swollen and oozing something yellow. “He needs help,” I said. “He’s dreaming of his dead grandfather.”

“Indy. You must go home and take care of Drenka now. The doctor will be there soon.” I stood there, immobile, which the captain mistook for protest. “That’s an order,” he said, so I gathered myself and went.

—

In Damir’s room the curtains were drawn, and he stirred as I sat on the edge of his bed, jamming and releasing the lever that detached the forward grip of my gun.

“Almost as good as a boy,” Damir said, surfacing momentarily from the fog of fever and brandy. From him this was a compliment. But his leg was twice the size it should have been, and there was pus. I left the gun leaning against the bookshelf and returned to my corner of the kitchen floor.