Novic Sara - Girl at War

Our classmate Tomislav found his older brother in an alley a block from their house, his blood already congealing and caked into the sidewalk cracks. No one ever told us what had happened, not directly, but from the conversations that occurred above our heads, we knew.

I saw Tomislav underground during a raid two days later. The rest of us were shoving in line for the generator bike when he showed up. We stopped pushing and stared. The starkness in his eyes scared me much more than if he had been crying. The boy who was riding stopped without discussion. Tomislav passed us and mounted the bicycle.

For a moment I watched him as he pedaled furiously, turning his pain into power, something tangible and scientific. Then we dissolved the line and moved to another corner of the shelter to give him some privacy, which seemed like the right thing to do according to the code of wartime behavior we were making up as we went along.

Summer gave way to fall in the abrupt, unbeautiful way Zagreb always changed its seasons. The leaves turned only brown before falling, and the sky looked like it had been whitewashed with a dirty rag. Some days it felt cold enough to snow, but instead the clouds hung fat and heavy, releasing just enough drizzle to stop us from playing outside. My friends and I stayed in and grown-ups walked around donning frowns and black umbrellas.

After the bombing of the palace, Croatia had officially declared independence, inciting a flurry of modifications that called even the most mundane detail of our former lives into question. Pop singers famous across Yugoslavia recorded dual versions of their hits in both dialects; seemingly innocuous words like coffee had to be replaced with kava and kafa for Croatian and Serbian audiences. Even one’s greeting habits could be analyzed — a kiss on each cheek for hello was acceptable, three kisses too many, a custom in the Orthodox Church and therefore traitorous.

Luka and I navigated the breakdown of our language with more questions. “You think we’ll have to get new birth certificates now that Yugoslavia isn’t Yugoslavia anymore?” he said.

“Probably not. It was still Yugoslavia when we were born.”

“What about health cards? Passports?”

“Passports.” I mulled it over. “I guess we’ll need new passports when we win the war.”

“Tram passes?”

“Tram — who cares? We never buy passes.” I looked at him and he flashed a goofy smile.

“Gotcha.”

After a while I said, “When we get married, will it say our kids are Croatian or Bosnian on their birth certificates?”

Luka braked abruptly. “What?”

“When we get married—”

“What makes you think we’re getting married?”

I hadn’t thought about it, really; I had just assumed. “Because we’re best friends?”

“I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“Why not?”

“You have to be in love and stuff. You know.”

I considered it. “Well I love you,” I said. “I’ve known you forever.”

“You don’t know whether you’re in love until you’re a teenager and you kiss,” said Luka. “I mean we’ll have to wait and see, to test it.”

“Sure.”

“But you can’t say that kind of stuff at school. They make fun of me enough already.”

I hadn’t realized the boys were teasing Luka just like the girls were teasing me. “I won’t,” I said, embarrassed. I wished I hadn’t mentioned it and thought about making up some excuse to go home, but Luka swung his leg back over his bicycle and started off again, so I followed. We passed by a roadblock where some of the boys from our class were climbing the sandbags. Luka waved.

“Let’s talk about something else,” he said. “Have you seen the money?”

The government had already started producing new currency, also called dinar, but with an image of Zagreb Katedrala stamped on the back of every note, regardless of denomination. It was thrilling at first, to hold money that said “Republic of Croatia” in the bland typeface of an official country, exciting that the featured illustration was a place I could see from the back of my flat. But no one even knew how much a dinar was worth; the value fluctuated wildly from day to day, and certain stores with Serb owners, or just thrifty businessmen, wouldn’t accept it, worried the money might change again during the course of the war. A transaction of any substantial amount was carried out in deutsche marks.

My mother sent me to the butcher with a wad of new dinar and instructions to buy a bag of bones, and I watched as she made soup from the flavor of meat. She ladled out ever-shrinking portions, sometimes skipping meals completely herself, feigning headaches or student paperwork as excuses to leave the table. After dinner I was never full, but I was more adept at reading my parents’ faces than they gave me credit for so I kept quiet.

Petar and Marina still came over every weekend, with my mother and Marina pooling supplies to feed everyone at once. There was no longer money for wine or cigarettes, so we drank water and Petar chewed bubble gum and, when that ran out, his fingernails.

One Sunday, Marina arrived looking pale. My mother handed Rahela to me and the two of them went into the bedroom, where they whispered behind the door. Trying to ignore the nervous atmosphere, I paced the flat with Rahela facing out so she could see everything, so she would be distracted from the fact that she was sick and probably hungry. I whispered jokes from the playground in her ear. What’s small and red and moves up and down? A tomato in an elevator. What do you get when you sit twelve Serbian women in a circle? One full set of teeth . Sometimes I thought I saw her smile after I delivered the punch line. Rahela was skinnier but crying less, which I’d decided meant the medicine was working, despite the tiny wheeze that sounded each time she took in air.

Finally Marina and my mother emerged from the bedroom and Petar made his announcement: he was due at the training base in a week.

“Are you nervous?” said my father.

“No,” Petar said. “Just out of shape!” He patted his stomach and grinned at me, hoping to get a laugh, but even I could see that he’d lost weight and his smile didn’t match his eyes.

“Where are they going to send you?”

“I’ll be close by. After training I’ll be part of the Ring of Defense for Zagreb. Maybe even come home on weekends.”

“You can stay with us, Marina, if you like,” said my mother.

“Don’t be silly. I’ll be fine.”

“She won’t even notice I’m gone,” he said. The four of them looked at each other and I felt that frustration so common to childhood, like when everyone laughs at a joke you don’t understand, though it was silent in the flat save for the clinking of spoons against bowls, and Petar’s heavy sighs when he swallowed.

I stayed awake as long as I could that night, listening to my parents in the kitchen.

“I should be out there. Everyone who can stand should be defending the city,” my father said.

“There are plenty of soldiers. With your eyes — it’s better this way.”

“It’d be better if I could protect my family.”

“Everything’s going to be okay,” my mother said. Usually he was the one reassuring her, and hearing the reversal made me feel guilty for eavesdropping. “Besides, I’m glad you’re here with me. With us.”

“Me, too,” he said after a while, and I heard them kiss before I fell asleep.

The air raid siren was our alarm clock, one that in those first months we diligently obeyed. A siren at one in the morning meant a collective rolling out of bed and pulling on of boots, an outpouring of groggy neighbors into the fluorescent light (or, in an outage, the impermeable darkness) of the hallway. That night it seemed like I’d only been asleep for seconds when my father took me and my blanket from the couch, my mother with Rahela close behind. I bounced sleepily against his chest as he carried me down the stairs to the basement, our hearts beating out the quick, irregular rhythms of those abruptly pulled from their beds. The basement air cut cold through my pajamas, and I sat leaning against our šupa and pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders, waiting for sleep.