Novic Sara - Girl at War

“Not anymore. She came down for a while after Petar died. She was trying to get out. To Austria to live with her sister, she said.”

“Do you know if she made it? Where in Austria? How can I contact her?”

The woman shook her head. “Sorry, kid. You look familiar, though. Where did you say you were from?”

“We used to come for holidays with Petar and Marina when I was small. I’m Ana. Jurić.”

“Jurić. Yes,” she said, adjusting her head scarf. “So you’re the one.”

I looked at the woman and tried to discern what she meant. “The one what?” I said finally.

“The one who lived.”

“I lived.”

“You look like your father.”

“You knew him?”

“I knew them all.”

“Baka,” a small voice called from inside the house.

“I’m going to the church now. Come later, to talk.”

“I will,” I said, but she was gone quickly back into her house, and I stayed on her terrace staring up at the space where she had stood.

—

Luka broke open the back window, and I slid through into the cobwebbed darkness. The air inside was heavy, laden with years of dirt. The walls were bare, the kitchen supplies gone, and I tried to determine how much of a hurry Marina had been in when she left. The ugly auburn couch was still pressed against the wall, the table and stove next to one another in the area that, though technically part of the same room, Marina had declared the kitchen. Despite its barrenness and sour smell, the place looked the same.

“Go open the front,” Luka called. “I’m too big to fit through here.”

I lurched toward the door, but my presence in the house was a trip wire of disintegration; a set of blinds fell from their place in the side window and a thick beam of light penetrated the dark kitchen.

I saw my parents — summer skin, sweat-slicked and tanned. My mother stood at the kitchen sink, wringing out laundry and humming an old children’s rhyme, my father rounding the corner and joining her song with a whistle. His hands crept up the folds of her dress, exploring her hip bones. The water sloshed in the sink as he spun her around and kissed her forehead. From this angle, I saw her dress clinging tight around her midriff and realized she would have been a few months pregnant with Rahela the last time we’d gone to Tiska.

I heard Luka fiddling with the front door, and soon he’d managed to break it open himself. An overwhelming glare filled the house. I blinked my parents away.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Nothing.” He opened the remaining shades and shutters and windows, then disappeared into the back bedroom, where I could hear him doing the same. A concrete box, the house had been designed as a haven from the southern sun — but now, with all the blinds up and the roof broken, it was the brightest I’d ever seen it. The breeze pushed the stale air out the windows.

Luka emerged from the bathroom with a set of brooms. Petar and Marina had always used the bathtub for storing cleaning supplies and tools; the house had no hot water, so there was no real difference between the outdoor shower and the one in the bathroom.

“Come on, then,” Luka said, jabbing me with the end of a broomstick.

“How’d you know they were in there?”

“Don’t you remember that summer your father and Petar were resurfacing the terrace and they kept tracking the cement dust in the house and your mom and Marina were going mental?”

“Now that you mention it.”

“You and I swept for like three days straight. I’m practically traumatized.”

“I’m sure that excuse goes over well with your mother.”

Inside Luka swept and scoured the floor and scrubbed the countertops, and I spent the afternoon pulling the vines that choked the windows. The space between my shoulder blades got sore quickly, and I realized how little I actually moved anymore, how content I was to be hunched in a subway seat or over my desk at school. But I liked the discomfort now, a productive pain, and I moved on from the façade to the patio itself, weeding and cleaning in methodical square patches. The roots of the overgrowth were deep and clung obstinately to thick clods of soil. I threw the weeds and vines in what used to be the compost pile and set my sights on the layers of dirt and dust and sand that coated the terrace, sweeping it into piles and scooping it away with a metal dustpan and brush I remembered Petar banging out in the front yard.

Beneath a dirty patch near the front door I unearthed the handprints. In the summer my father and Petar had poured new concrete for the patio, we’d each left a handprint in the square by the door. It was my idea.

“If you’re bad, I’ll cover up your handprint and you’ll be erased from the family!” Petar had teased whenever he wanted me to run an errand for him. Now I stood before the inlay, pressed my hand into the contours of his, and considered how easy it was to erase a family. I traced my parents’ hand shapes, then my own, my nine-year-old fingertips barely reaching the first knuckles of my fingers now. At the corner of the block, a vaguely toe-shaped smudge was pressed in the cement. Jealous but too embarrassed to add his own handprint to what he deemed to be a family plot, Luka had planted his big toe in the concrete. Then, even more ashamed, he hadn’t washed the cement off quickly enough, and it took days to peel from his skin.

“Hey, Luka! Come see this!”

Luka appeared, sweaty and shirtless. “What is it?”

“Your toe has stood the test of time!”

“Are those your parents’?”

“And Petar’s and Marina’s, yeah.”

“And yours,” he said.

“Yeah. And mine.”

“I’m glad you have this,” he said, turning back in to the house. For a minute I wondered whether he was going to try to cut the rock out of the ground, but he returned instead with my backpack, and dug through it to find my camera. “Here.”

I took two pictures and set them inside on the table to develop. “Get my wallet out of there, too,” I said. “Let’s go to the store.”

We climbed the stairs back to the upper footpath toward the village store.

“Do you think you’ll go look for Marina?” Luka said. I thought of the day I escaped and wondered whether Petar had died or had gone back to the front and saved others. If he’d been caught in those woods, Marina might think I was dead, too.

“I want to. But it’s harder for me to wander around Austria than it is here.”

“I could go with you if you want.”

“Maybe I’ll try to write her somehow first.”

“If she’s alive, you should visit.”

“Let me do it,” I said.

“I will. But I won’t let you wait another decade this time.”

—

The bells on the door jingled when we made our way inside, and an ancient man glanced up from his Dalmacija News with disinterest. The store’s main stock — bread, fatty white cheese, stamps, and cigarettes — was laid out on a card table. In the cooler nearby were mackerels and mussels the fishermen had brought in. Luka and I picked two mackerels from the case. Luka asked for olive oil, and the man wrapped the fish in newspaper, then retrieved a small cruet. He added a book of matches to the pile.

“Does the pay phone still work?” I said. The phone attached to the side of the store had been the only one in the village when I was young, and even then it was finicky.

“Sometimes,” he said. “Do you want a phone card?”

“Please,” I said. “For America.”

He pulled a plastic card from beneath the till in the register that said NORTH AMERICA in bold lettering across the front, and added it to our total. Luka peeled a hundred-kuna note from his billfold, and the man put our food in a brown paper bag.