Novic Sara - Girl at War

I wanted to know more — what a beard had to do with being sad, why the Serbs had both the JNA and the Četniks on their side and we only had the old police force, but my mother set a knife and a bowl of unpeeled potatoes in front of me before I could bring it up.

—

Amid the disorder, Luka analyzed. It had always been his habit to ask me questions I couldn’t answer, hypotheticals that supplied our bike rides with endless conversation. We used to speak mostly of outer space, how it was possible that a star was already dead by the time we saw it shooting, why airplanes and birds stayed up and we stayed down, and whether or not, on the moon, you’d have to drink everything from a straw. But now his investigative attentions had turned exclusively to the war — what did Milošević mean when he said the country needed to be cleansed, and how was a war supposed to help when the explosions were making such a big mess? Why did the water keep running out if the pipes were underground, and if the bombings were breaking the pipes, were we any safer in the shelters than in our houses?

I’d always loved Luka’s inquiries, and that he trusted my opinion. With other friends, the boys at school, he usually just kept quiet. And given the grown-ups’ penchant for evading my questions, it was a relief to have someone who’d talk about it all. But the moon was far away, and now that he was dissecting issues so close to home I found my head aching with the idea that all the familiar faces and parts of the city were pieces of a puzzle I couldn’t fit together.

“What if we die in an air raid?” he said one afternoon.

“Well they haven’t actually blown any buildings up yet,” I reasoned.

“But what if they do, and one of us dies?”

Somehow, the prospect of just him dying was a scarier place than I’d allowed my imagination to go thus far. I felt sweaty and nervous, unzipped my jacket. I was so rarely angry with him I almost didn’t recognize the feeling.

“You’re not going to die,” I said. “So you can just forget about it.” I took a sharp turn and left him there alone in the Trg, where the refugees were untangling their belongings and getting ready to make their next move.

—

We entered an era of false alarms. Air raid warnings and pre — air raid warnings. Whenever police reconnaissance spotted Serb planes approaching the city, a strip of alert text ribboned its way across the top of the television screen. No siren sounded, no one ran to the shelters, but those who’d seen the warning would poke their heads out into the hallway and begin the Call: “Zamračenje, zamračenje!” It drifted down the stairwells, across clotheslines to neighboring buildings, through the streets, the air humming with the foreboding murmur—“darken it.”

We pulled the blinds over our taped-up panes, secured strips of black cloth atop the shades. Sitting on the floor in the dark I wasn’t afraid; the feeling was more like expectation during a particularly intense round of hide-and-seek.

“Something’s wrong with her,” my mother said, one night when we were squatting beneath the windowsill. Rahela cried, was still crying, it seemed, from a spell she’d begun a few days earlier.

“Maybe she’s afraid of the dark,” I said, though I knew that wasn’t it.

“I’m taking her to the doctor.”

“She’s fine,” my father said in a way that ended the discussion.

A Serbian man who lived in our building refused to pull down his shades. He turned on all the lights in his flat and, through the most impressive of boom boxes, blasted cassettes of garish orchestral music that had been popular during the height of communism. At night, families took turns begging him to turn out his lights. They asked him to have a heart and help them protect their children. When that didn’t work they appealed to logic, reasoning that if the apartment building was bombed, he would surely die in the explosion as well. He seemed willing to make the sacrifice.

On weekends when he was in the car park working on his broken Jugo, we lurked around the lot and stole his tools when he wasn’t looking. Some mornings before school we’d gather in the hallway outside his flat. We’d buzz his doorbell again and again, and run when we heard him pad toward the door.

—

The refugee kids showed up at school a few weeks after their arrival in the city. With no record of their academic skills, the teachers tried to divide them among the classes as evenly as possible. Our class got two boys who looked close enough to our age to blend in. They were from Vukovar and spoke with funny accents.

Vukovar was a small city a few hours away and had never meant much to me during peacetime, but now it was always in the news. In Vukovar people were disappearing. People were being forced at gunpoint to march east; people were becoming hemic vapor amid the nighttime explosions. The boys had walked all the way to Zagreb and they didn’t like to talk about it. Even after they settled in they were always a little dirtier, the circles beneath their eyes a little darker than ours, and we treated them with a distant curiosity.

They were living in a warehouse we’d referred to before as Sahara because of its desertedness; it was where the older kids used to go to talk and smoke and kiss in the dark. Rumors swelled: people were sleeping on the floor and there was only one bathroom, or maybe not even any bathroom, and definitely no toilet paper. Luka and I tried to sneak in a few times, but a soldier was checking refugees’ documents at the door.

Soon they were checking IDs at the front of my apartment building, too. Families in the building alternated sending an adult down in five-hour shifts to guard the door, an attempt to prevent some Četnik from coming in and blowing himself up. One night there was an argument; the men outside were yelling so loudly we could hear it through the window. The guard didn’t want to let the Serbian man back in.

“You’re an animal! You’re trying to get our children killed!” the doorman screamed.

“I’m doing nothing of the sort.”

“Then turn your fucking lights out during the blackout!”

“I’ll turn your lights out, you filthy Muslim!” said the Serb, followed by more shouting and grunting.

My father opened our window and stuck his head out. “You’re both animals!” he said. “We’re trying to get some sleep up here!” The noise woke Rahela, who resumed her crying. My mother glared at my father and went into the bedroom to retrieve my sister from her cradle. My father pulled on his work boots and ran downstairs to keep the brawl from getting out of hand. All the policemen were away being soldiers, and there was no one else left to do it.

“Will you have to go to the army someday?” I asked my father.

“I’m not a policeman,” he said.

“Stjepan’s dad isn’t either, and he had to go.”

My father sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Let’s get you back in bed.” He scooped me up with a deft swing of his arm and plopped me on the couch.

“The truth is, I’m embarrassed. But I’m not allowed to be in the army. Because of my eye.”

My father had a crooked eye and couldn’t tell near from far. Even when driving he’d sometimes close the bad eye and squint the other, guessing his distance from cars and hoping for the best. He’d learned to make do this way, and liked to brag that he’d never had an accident. But the police-turned-army were harder to convince that hoping for the best was an effective methodology, particularly when grenades were involved.

“At least for now. Maybe, if forces are down, I could be a radio operator or a mechanic. Not a real soldier, though.”

“That’s not embarrassing,” I said. “You can’t help it.”