Girl at War: A Novel

by Sara Novic

  I stopped in a bodega to buy a roll of breath mints. While digging around in my jacket for change I saw my phone flashing with a text message from Brian.

  Mornin babe. Where’d u go?

  I didn’t want to lie, so I wrote nothing and stuffed the phone back in my pocket. Brian and I had been dating for a year, but he didn’t know anything about who I really was. I’d told him, as I had everyone else at college, that I was born in New Jersey.

  At first I was confident in the choice to keep my past life a secret. I could experience college and the city without the old sadness in wait at every turn. For a while, it worked. I made a few friends, met Brian, stayed out too late smoking and drinking and dancing, walking home wide-eyed and enchanted by the city lights. Slowly, in a place uncontaminated by the specter of childhood, I was learning to live a normal life. Then, at the start of my third year, the towers had fallen.

  I was in an 8:00 A.M. chemistry class making periodic table jokes with my lab partners when a professor from a neighboring classroom appeared in the doorway. She let herself in.

  “Hank,” she said, “you’ve gotta see this.” She searched through Dr. Reid’s desk drawers while he looked on, annoyed. She found the remote and aimed it upward with a shaky hand. The television, having been left in video input mode, produced a static growl. She turned to a news channel.

  The fire was lurid even through the grain of the old set, startling in both intensity and size, but it was when the cameraman zoomed out that the entire class gasped in recognition. Professor Reid flipped the emergency switch to cut power to the gas line, deactivating our experiments, and we circled around the television.

  “You are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there,” said the news voice-over. “That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers.”

  “Oh god, which tower is that?” said a girl in the back of the lab.

  “What kind of pilot was flying that low over New York City?” a boy beside me said. “Fucking idiot.”

  “My brother works in South Tower,” the girl said.

  “What if it wasn’t an accident?” I said.

  “What do you mean not an accident?” said the boy. “What the fuck was it then?”

  Our professor punched the keypad of his cellphone, but whomever he called didn’t pick up, and he snapped the phone shut.

  “I want you to go back to the dorms,” he said. “If you live off campus find someone you can sit with for a while.” We collected our books, except for the ashen girl, who stayed below the television.

  “It was the North Tower,” I said, pointing to the ticker text. “I’m sure your brother’s fine.”

  “Guys,” Dr. Reid called as we reached the door. He didn’t look up; he was pressing keys on his phone again. “Take the stairs.”

  Outside I tried to get a look downtown, but I couldn’t see anything. I wondered where Brian was, and felt around in my backpack for my cellphone. My American parents had given it to me for my birthday the month before, but I still wasn’t used to carrying it around and was constantly misplacing it. When I found it the screen revealed several missed calls. I tried to call Brian, then home, but was met each time with a busy signal I’d never heard before, the sound of millions of people simultaneously on the phone.

  Not knowing what else to do, I ran back to my dorm and found Brian pacing the front hall. I was relieved and a little shocked to find him whole and fine and right in front of me. Instinctively, I realized, I’d been expecting the worst.

  “You’re okay,” I said, trying not to sound too surprised.

  Brian kissed me on the forehead and we went upstairs, where my floor mates were already crowded in the common room. We sat staring at the television, watched the strike on the second tower and its collapse a few hours later. The ticker had changed from “disaster” to “attack.” Eventually I got through to my family, an inexplicably whispered call, as if we were afraid speaking too loudly might send something else toppling. I was fine, I said over and over, trying to placate the woman I’d come to call my mother. And I was fine, I assured myself when I hung up. After all, nothing had happened to me.

  Brian wanted to stay, but I feigned a research paper and a string of apologies, and reluctantly he returned to his own dorm. I wanted to be alone. Even after everyone had gone to bed I stayed up watching the towers that were no longer towers, what everyone was now calling Ground Zero. A desire to be close to the wreckage overwhelmed me. I went out and walked south until I got to the fire engine roadblocks, stood there for a while, awash in emergency light. The air was still thick with the smell of burning plastic and molten steel, dry, itchy breaths filled with plaster particulate.

  When I returned to the common room the news was replaying the day’s footage—jerky shots of asphalt concealed by a layer of ashes and dead people’s paperwork, documents that had been considered important, maybe even classified, just that morning. The coverage returned to real time, a live helicopter shot of the skyline. A cloud of smoke lingered over the spot, tinged orange from the reflection of the city’s lights. I tried again to quell the solipsistic thought I’d been evading all day—that trouble would follow me wherever I went.

  It was now six months since the attacks, and the everyday things were returning to normal, first through an attitude of compulsory courage—fear means letting them win—then in a slow reinstating of routines, until we were again wrapped up in the mundane inconveniences of city life: knocking radiator pipes, subway construction reroutes, and the usual array of vermin. The country was at war, but for most people the war was more an idea than an experience, and I felt something between anger and shame that Americans—that I—could sometimes ignore its impact for days at a time. In Croatia, life in wartime had meant a loss of control, war holding sway over every thought and movement, even while you slept. It did not allow for forgetting. But America’s war did not constrain me; it did not cut my water or shrink my food supply. There was no threat of takeover with tanks or foot soldiers or cluster bombs, not here. What war meant in America was so incongruous with what had happened in Croatia—what must have been happening in Afghanistan—that it almost seemed a misuse of the word.

  My phone rang and startled me, and I answered in a shaky voice. It was Sharon.

  “Ana? Where’d you go?”

  “I just needed some air. Should I meet you in the lobby?” I realized I had wandered farther west than I should have. I jogged back across the avenues and up to the gates of the UN, where a tour group was clogging the entrance portals. I hit Redial on Sharon’s number, but she appeared through the exit moments later with an armful of file folders and my index cards.

  “I figured you wouldn’t be able to get back through that mess,” she said. “Do you want these?” She handed me the index cards. “You hungry?”

  I wasn’t, but I was eager to get away from the UN and have Sharon to myself.

  “I’ve got a reservation. We can walk.”

  I trailed behind her back up the stairs, in awe of the ease with which she carried herself in high heels. I still clomped whenever I tried to wear them, and the older I got the more unlikely it seemed I would ever learn the grace other women had. Each time we passed an expensive-looking restaurant, I held out hope we’d be going someplace more casual, where I wouldn’t make an ass of myself. Sharon pecked at her BlackBerry and gestured absently to UN-affiliated properties—the Malaysian consulate, the hotel where all the bigwigs stayed. I looked at them inattentively, but could think only of how I might begin the conversation I’d been suppressing for a decade.

  The sun broke through a patch of gray, warming my cheeks and sending India’s mission building shimmering. At the top, the inset porch was now awash in a spring gold, sun spilling through the latticed skylight and glancing off the mirrored cut-ins along the walls.

  “It is a beautiful one,” Sharon said, leaning back on her heels. “Something futuristic about i
t, almost.”

  I’d been thinking the opposite—that the russet granite suggested desert, an ancient-temple kind of beauty, but I said nothing and followed her across the street.

  The restaurant looked a little dingy, its awning faded and curtains caked in dust. When we entered, though, I was dismayed to find the place was indeed upscale, if not exactly clean. The tables were sheathed in stodgy white linen even for the lunch hour. I looked down at my sneakers.

  “I’ll have the house red,” Sharon said to a waiter in a metallic vest.

  “Can I have a Coke, please?”

  The waiter smiled and took my wineglass away with him. The room was lit with patchy spotlights, and I squinted at the menu. There were no prices on anything.

  “I think that went very well, don’t you?” said Sharon. I told her I thought so, too, but in reality I wasn’t so sure. I fiddled with my napkin, folding and unfolding the little cloth rectangle, and asked about her project. She responded with stock lines about busyness and moved her file folders beneath her chair.

  “But enough about that. How’s college? And your sister—Rahela?”

  The use of my sister’s name, the one no one had called her in years, caught me off guard. “They—we—call her Rachel here.”

  “And she’s well?”

  “She’s good, yeah. I’m surprised you remembered her.”

  “Petar often spoke fondly of your family when we were on duty together. Particularly during the period in which you were…missing.”

  Speaking of Petar. For all the times the question had lingered in my mind, it was difficult to shape in my mouth. The finality of knowing. “Do you—” I faltered. The waiter returned with our drinks, and I hoped Sharon, who had not picked up the menu, would tell him to go away. But she ordered a steak salad with mustard dressing, and, unprepared, I ordered the same. When the waiter left, Sharon sipped her wine and looked at me expectantly. “What were you saying?”

  “Nothing.”

  She paused but decided to take me at my word. “Then tell me more about you. I want to hear all about your new family, your new life.”

  I clenched my teeth at her use of the word. New, like I had traded one family for another in a used-car deal. I swallowed the resentment and told her that my family was kind and had taken good care of me. Rahela was healthy now, as if nothing had ever been wrong with her at all. We’d spent most of the last ten years in a suburb of Philadelphia, where everything was clean and calm. That I had come to New York to get away from that quiet. Sharon nodded along like a woman at church. She meant to be encouraging, I knew, or else she was pleased with herself, but either way it bothered me that my life was something for her to evaluate and take some kind of credit for. “Anyway,” I said. I looked down at my plate. “I wanted to ask you about Petar.”

  Sharon stopped nodding.

  “Do you know what happened to him? The day we left?”

  “No,” she said. “The men I sent—they couldn’t find him. Then I was in Germany for a month, and after that Bosnia, out of communication. I was sort of hoping you had—”

  “I haven’t,” I said.

  “I tried. I wrote letters. Even asked the people who set up the new embassy. But there was nothing.”

  “What about all the other guys in the unit?”

  “I think of all of them, of course, but none of them were as close—Petar and I were friends. And, after you, I just wanted to know that everything was okay.”

  “Petar told me he saved your life.”

  “That, too—I owe him. Really it was probably more than once. His unit actually used their guns and we were carrying ours around like handbags.”

  My face must have betrayed my anxiety because Sharon said, “I’m sorry. Sometimes I just feel like if I don’t laugh about it, something really ugly could take root in me. I’m sure you understand.”

  I said I did.

  “You know, in the end, you’re my biggest success story.”

  I thought of Sharon’s speech, the photos of the grave excavations. All the others, like my parents, who hadn’t yet been found.

  “I don’t know if success is the word.”

  She smiled faintly. “Maybe not. Truth is I don’t think I’ll ever get over the things I saw there.” She paused. “But I shouldn’t be putting that on you.”

  I told her it was okay.

  “Petar would be so proud of you.”

  I mumbled a thanks and concentrated on my salad until the waiter mercifully appeared with the check. I reached for my wallet. Twenty and studenthood was an interim existence in which I frequently found interacting with “real adults” awkward, them waving off my offers to split bills as something ridiculous, and making me feel even more like a child.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Are you sure?” I said, though in this case I was thankful; my work-study check was sure to take a hit from the priceless menu. Sharon gave an exaggerated nod as she tipped back the last of her wine.

  Outside, the burst of spring had given way to a thin, cold drizzle. Sharon pulled the belt of her trench coat tight as we stood together on the curb. “Do you ever think about going back?” she said.

  “I tried not to think about it at all until you called.” I moved to pull my coat closed, too, but the zipper was jammed. “Do you?”

  “I don’t think it’s good idea. For me.” She stuck her arm out to hail a cab. “Looks like the skies are about to open up. You need a ride somewhere?”

  I shook my head. Anyway, we were going in opposite directions. A taxi pulled to the curb on the other side of the street. “Guess I’ll take that,” she said. We shared a mannered hug and she ran across the street, still poised in her heels on the slick asphalt. I watched her into the cab, but she was typing something on her BlackBerry and didn’t look up again.

  As I walked to the subway my mood blackened, something like anger but about what I couldn’t pinpoint. Frustration, maybe, that I still understood so little. Instead of clarity and insight, adulthood had only brought more confusion. At the next corner I dumped the index cards in the trash.

  3

  The city was crowded and wet and grim, with that air of gray desperation it sometimes took on in March. Lunch had gone long and I was going to be late for my appointment with Professor Ariel.

  I tried to gauge whether I had enough time to return to my room to retrieve the book he’d loaned me, but decided against it and headed straight for his office.

  Reading was one of the only ways in which I allowed myself to think about the continent and country I’d left behind. Though I hadn’t told the professor anything about myself, he seemed to know I was not at home in the world, and so he lent me books—Kundera and Conrad and Levi and a host of other displaced persons. I’d read one and return to his office, where he’d wax eloquent about the authors with such intimate detail I was convinced they were all his close friends. I’d just finished The Emigrants, and though most of the week’s anxieties had been UN-focused, the book hadn’t been much easier on my mind. I’d followed the wandering protagonist—at once forlorn and whimsical—all the while with an uneasy feeling that the professor somehow knew more about me than I cared to reveal.

  I ran up the stairs to his office and knocked though the door was half-open. The room was small and warmly lit, with shelves covering nearly every surface. Stacks of overflow books lined the floor. Professor Ariel sat at a desk in the center, looking little and frail amid his collection.

  “Come in. Sit down,” he said in his trembly way. “What did you think of the Sebald?” I moved some papers from the chair and put them on his desk. Behind him on the wall a giant poster of Wisława Szymborska, whom he’d also made me read, watched over our meetings like a chain-smoking guardian angel.

  “It got to me,” I said.

  “Remarkable prose, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” It was true, but that wasn’t the reason. “Not just that, though. The characters. To come face-to-face with peop
le who never recover from their traumas. It was…”

  “Disconcerting?”

  I nodded.

  “And yet Sebald continually points to the imperfections of memory. Not what we usually think of as the ‘searing’ of a certain trauma into one’s mind. That haunting lucidity. What do you make of it?”

  That had been what scared me most. What if my memory of my parents’ final moments was all wrong? I felt certain I had kept them fresh and protected inside me. The idea that the whim of the subconscious might corrupt what little I had left of them was too much to accept. “But, maybe it’s not that way for everyone. Maybe some people do remember,” I said.

  “Certainly. But that comes with its own problems, no? Consider the character of Ambros Adelwarth.”

  “His uncle?”

  “Tormented by such clear images of his past—”

  “He opts for electroshock therapy. To wipe out the thoughts.”

  “Precisely.”

  “So what am I supposed—I mean, what are we supposed to take from it?”

  “Damned if you do—” He smiled a little, then turned to look out the window. He began talking about Sebald’s recent death, a car crash of questionable explanation, but I was feeling too rattled to respond. “Ana, you all right? You’re looking a bit peaked.” He said my name the Croatian way, not with the long, flat a’s most Americans used.