by Sara Novic
“I’m fine. Sorry,” I said. “Just a little under the weather.”
“Sebald has that effect on people. I call it the ‘spell of despair.’ ”
I tried to protest, not wanting him to think I couldn’t manage his assignments, but he turned and stared right at me and I fell silent.
“Where did you say you were from again?”
“I—well. Originally?” I had not said. I didn’t want to say. But it came out anyway. “From Croatia. Zagreb.” A strange, weightless feeling came with having spoken the truth. I gripped the side of the chair as if I really was at risk of floating away.
Professor Ariel did not seem surprised. “Mmm,” he hummed. “I thought so.”
“What?”
“I had an inkling. Not Croatia, exactly. Just from somewhere else. Though the Balkans makes sense.”
“But how could you tell?”
“You have an old soul. I should know—I’ve got one, too. Also, you read too much.” He winked, and I allowed myself a little smile back. “The good news is your friends will catch up.” He swiveled back toward the corner bookshelf. “Now, for next week. Can you handle another Sebald? I’ve got his latest around somewhere…” Slowly he stood and jimmied the book off the shelf with a skeletal finger. “Here it is. Austerlitz.”
“Sorry I didn’t bring the other one back. I came straight from—a meeting.”
“Never mind. You keep it anyway. I’m sure I have another copy.”
He shuffled around his desk and put the book in my lap. “Go on then.”
“Thank you,” I said. But something else had caught his attention and he was far away now, running his fingers along the spine of a book as if it were braille, or the hand of someone he’d long loved, so I closed his heavy office door behind me.
I returned to my dorm, glad to find the hallways quiet and my roommate gone. I should call Brian, I thought, but could not bring myself to do it. Now that I’d told Professor Ariel even just a little about me I felt dangerously open. If I saw Brian I might tell him, too, and I was not ready to deal with the consequences of my deception. Instead I filled my oversize skateboarder’s backpack—remnant of my high school antiestablishment phase—with homework and Sebald and dirty laundry, and left. At Penn Station I bought a dollar bag of oversalted popcorn and climbed aboard the first in a series of commuter trains to Pennsylvania.
—
By the time I boarded the commercial jet in Frankfurt I hadn’t slept in two days and was afraid of nearly everything. I was frightened by the pressure in my ears at takeoff, of catching the sickness of the man who was throwing up into a paper bag across the aisle, of whatever was waiting for me on the other side of the ocean.
When we landed flight attendants took turns reading the airline tag around my neck like I was lost luggage. One grabbed my wrist and dragged me toward customs, where I moved through a series of roped-off queues and signed my name to a form I couldn’t read. An announcement over the intercom caught her attention, and she stared at the wall clock and tapped her foot. A man with too many badges rifled through my passport, eyeing my makeshift visa with its crooked staple. Behind him I watched suitcases wind around a black track. The officer asked me a question that, from what I could understand, was about whether I’d recently been on a farm. I looked at his badges and shook my head.
The officer stamped my passport and sent me onward, and the flight attendant said goodbye. At the baggage carousel I found my suitcase and followed everyone else toward a set of glass doors. The doors looked sealed, with no knobs or handles, but no one else seemed to notice. I thought about yelling out that everyone should be careful, but couldn’t think of how to say it in English. As the first people pushed ahead I narrowed my eyes, anticipating a spray of broken glass. But the doors slid open at the last minute, like magic.
On the other side, groups of excited loved ones clustered around the opening. A little boy attached himself to his mother’s leg; two friends hugged and jumped and screamed in one another’s ears. Beyond them, men in suits bearing signs with people’s names ringed the lobby. I continued through the crowd, head tilted to compensate for the swirling feeling inside me, until I ran right into a man holding a toddler who looked like my sister.
The man looked down, and for a moment it was unclear which one of us was more terrified. The woman beside him—who was holding a handwritten sign bearing my name with diacriticals in odd places—shuffled through a handful of paperwork. She was short and tan, and her face was set in a smile.
“Rahela?” I peered up at the healthy, curly-haired little girl perched in the crook of the man’s arm. She’d grown so much she was almost unrecognizable, except around the eyes, where we had always looked alike.
“I thought the airline was supposed to bring you—well—” The woman found the paper she was looking for. “Dobrodošli u Ameriku, Ana,” she read haltingly from her sheet.
“Hvala.” I searched again through my school lessons for any English words that would fit together and make sense. The woman bent down and hugged me.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” she said.
Their names were Jack and Laura, and they said it was okay for me to call them that. But Rahela called them Mommy and Daddy in her high-pitched toddler voice, and for the first few months, I called them nothing at all.
—
I changed trains in Trenton and fell asleep in a saggy leather SEPTA seat. I dreamt of bodies. They were nightmares I’d had years ago, when I first arrived in America. Dreams in which I’d be cliff-diving from the rock ledges in Petar and Marina’s fishing village and, in a midair exchange, was no longer headed for the warm Adriatic but was instead careening toward a pile of bloated corpses. Then, as I was landing, a powerful tingle radiated from my neck to the backs of my knees and jolted me awake. The train pulled into the station and the conductor yelled, “Last stop!” and I gathered my things.
On the platform I watched the train ready itself for reversal, part of me already wishing I could go back with it. I trudged down the town’s main thoroughfare, lined with interconnected strip malls: a two-story pet supply, the Kmart where I worked summers, all the major fast-food chains, and Vacuum Mania.
Sometimes I felt guilty that Jack and Laura had moved here for Rahela and me. I wondered if they ever missed their life before us. For years they, too, had been city dwellers, their apartment just enough for newlyweds and the baby they couldn’t have. Then Rahela arrived, and soon she was rosy-cheeked and growing, toys and clothes brimming from her allocated chest of drawers, annexing the arms of furniture. Of course they knew they’d have to give her back. But with her presence they began to want the things they’d always dismissed as the desires of people older than they were. They bought a cheap piece of land on a hill that was going to become a neighborhood, and began to build.
When construction started I was nothing to my American parents but the older sister mentioned in Rahela’s MediMission fact sheet. Then, before the building was finished, I was there.
“Which bedroom do you want?” Laura asked me on move-in day. The thought of my own bedroom was an alien concept and I defaulted to silence, thinking I’d misunderstood. In the end I picked the room with the bigger window because it reminded me of the balcony in Zagreb. The hill overlooked acres of farmland and, beyond that, forest. When family and friends came to visit the new house, all of them remarked on the beautiful view. But in those first months I spent each day searching the skyline for a building, craving something dirty or metal to break through the dark green. I never got used to the forest, not after months or years, not even in daytime, when the sunlight passed through the leaves. I made up excuses to withdraw from neighborhood games of Manhunt that ventured too close to its edge. At night the trees seemed to lean inward, casting shadows on my wall. They were chestnut oaks, Jack said, when I asked him after some sleepless night of tracking their silhouettes out my window. Like in Stribor’s forest, I tried to tell myself, but I could think of nothing b
ut the white oaks and rotting acorns in the place my parents had fallen.
America was not what it looked like in the movies. I had been right about the McDonald’s at least; they were everywhere. But the bravado and gallantry, that spirit of adventure touted in the Westerns so loved across Yugoslavia, was absent in the life I found in Gardenville. In Zagreb I had always been excited about a trip in the car. In Gardenville you needed the car to do anything, even to buy groceries. There were no bakeries anywhere. Everything in the supermarket was presliced and prepackaged. In stores bigger than any I’d ever seen in Europe, stores that had everything, I followed Laura around incredulous that I could not find a fresh loaf of bread.
The culture was noticeably conservative, even in juxtaposition with the dual traditions of communism and Catholicism back home. In Croatia, topless women graced the covers of most newspapers and were common on the beaches, but in America nudity of any kind was something shameful. In Zagreb I ran the streets without curfew and bought cigarettes and alcohol for the grown-ups. In Gardenville, adults nursed a perpetual fear of kidnappers, and I stayed close to home.
Conversations, particularly with respect to me, were crafted carefully. After those initial bursts of curiosity, no one spoke to me about my past, even within the family. Laura developed euphemisms for my “troubles,” the war and its massacres reduced to “unrest” and “unfortunate events.”
Throughout that first summer I passed the days clinging to Rahela, which was harder now that she could walk. I sat in a tiny chair and pretended to eat the plastic food she prepared in her plastic kitchen, or followed her up and down the driveway in her Flintstoneesque foot-powered toy car, unwilling to let her out of my sight. Sometimes I whispered to her in Croatian, to see if she remembered. She’d parrot back a word or two, but the things she babbled of her own accord sounded like English.
When it was time for her nap I’d hide in the crawl space beneath the porch and look at her picture books, practicing English, matching the illustrations to words. Sometimes I scoured the newspaper for any headlines with “Croatia” or “Serbia” in them, which I pasted in a notebook I hid beneath my bed. When Laura could will me out into the open, she’d speak to me loudly, as if volume was the reason I couldn’t understand. Having studied English all my school days, I could comprehend most of what she said, but struggled to summon the right words in the right order fast enough to respond. She bought me summer school workbooks, and I powered through the math problems and guessed on all the reading fill-in-the-blanks until I had completed enough pages for her to declare me finished. Then I’d return to my spot beneath the porch and fight the urge to sleep. I stayed awake most nights and was always exhausted, but sleep meant dreaming, and so I avoided it.
One afternoon we had a barbecue in the new backyard. When it got dark, I heard rumbles in the distance.
“It will rain?” I said.
“I don’t think so, kiddo,” Jack said. He was right. The sky was cloudless.
Then the explosions started. Bursts of red and orange clustered along the horizon, followed by a series of violent crackles. I yelped and took off toward the house, brushing past Jack.
“Hey, Ana! Wait!” he said. “It’s just the Fourth of July!” I could not understand what the date had to do with an air raid and was not about to stop and find out. I dove beneath the porch, tucking my head between my knees and covering my neck with my arms like we’d learned to do at school if we didn’t have time to get to the shelter.
“Ana. It’s okay.” He was lying in the grass on his stomach now, his head poked into the crawl space. “It’s the Fourth of July. It’s a celebration of—of the end of our war. They’re just fireworks. For fun.”
“You have a war?”
“No. Well, yeah, but a long time ago. Hundreds of years.” He’d grass-stained the shoulder of his shirt and his glasses were crooked on his face.
“Fireworks?”
“Yeah you know, like, the BOOM”—he mimed a big flash with his hands—“and the pretty colors?”
“We had it. In the New Year’s Eve. Before the war.”
“Yes, right. For celebrating.”
I reached out and straightened his glasses on the bridge of his nose.
“Thanks,” he said. After a while he put his hand on my knee. “So it’s okay. All right?”
I nodded.
“Do you want to go watch?”
I shook my head. “You. Please.”
“Well I’ll just be over there if you change your mind.” I hugged my knees to my chest and watched him return to the party. He ran his hands through his hair and whispered something to Laura, who shot sideways glances back at the porch, and I didn’t come out for the rest of the night.
—
At home I shed my muddy sneakers and stood alone in the kitchen. Little magnetic frames featuring pictures of Rahela and me clung to the refrigerator—her as a baby, crawling, walking, graduating kindergarten; me as a sixth, seventh, eighth grader, teeth in transitional positions.
“Hello?” I said, but no one was there.
I pulled a chair from the table toward the kitchen’s highest cabinet. The file box inside contained the family’s essential documents—marriage certificate, property deed, social security cards, insurance records—the ones it would be the most unpleasant to replace. I pulled a manila envelope from the back of the box, a large, slanted “Ana” scrawled across it in felt tip.
Inside was my expired Yugoslavian passport and my unused American one, the documents asserting that I’d actually been born in New Jersey, and a pair of photographs creased down the middle from when I’d folded them and shoved them in my pocket ten years ago.
The first was a picture of my family in Zagreb the Christmas before the war—me on the table; Rahela, a newborn, asleep in my lap. My mother and father, who’d been engaged in a tussle with the camera’s automatic timer, had run into the frame late and were captured mid-movement, my mother flipping her hair behind her shoulder, my father trying to slip his arm around her waist. I had taken the photo to a camera shop once to see if it could be fixed. No, the man behind the counter had said, there was nothing he could do to unblur them.
The second photo was me on the beach in Tiska, two or three years old, wearing an oversize sweater and squatting down to touch the blue-green water. I stared into the lens with a wide grin. My father had no doubt been behind the camera, and I wondered what he had been saying that made me smile like that.
I looked again at the photo of my parents and tried to picture them more precisely. Maybe Sebald was right, and time and trauma had darkened my memory. Sometimes I could see fragments of them—my mother’s severe cheekbones, my father’s fair, bushy eyebrows—but I could neither zoom in nor cling to these moments of clarity. Long ago I forgot what they smelled like. I could no longer conjure my father’s soap or my mother’s perfume. Slowly, I was forgetting them.
I heard the door slam in a way Laura would not approve of and knew my sister was home. Her backpack still slung over one shoulder, she didn’t notice me; instead she immediately submerged her head in the deepest sector of the freezer and began sorting through generic-brand popsicles. Clutching the photos and the envelope, I shoved the box back on the shelf, closed the cabinet, and jumped down from the chair.
“Hey, Rahela,” I said. She didn’t respond. “Rachel!” She pulled her face up from the icy drawer. “Hi. How was school?” Rahela was in fifth grade now, like I had been when she’d gotten sick.
“I only like the grape ones,” she said, peeling off the iridescent wrapper. “Or Fudgesicles. Miss Tompkins was a real jerk today. She made us do multiplication time tests at recess because Danny Walker wouldn’t stop making armpit fart noises during morning announcements. Hey, what are you doing here? Mom didn’t say you were coming.”
“She doesn’t know,” I said. “I mean, it’s a surprise.”
“Want to come to my soccer game tomorrow? Who’s that?” She pointed her popsicle toward the ph
oto in my hand. Excess syrup dripped from the wrapper.
“No one,” I said. “You’re getting popsicle on your shirt.”
“Crap.” She wet the corner of a dish towel and dabbed at the stain on her chest while I went upstairs to my room. “Don’t tell Mom I said ‘crap’!” Rahela yelled up from the kitchen.
I had attended the same elementary school as Rahela, though it hadn’t been easy to get me enrolled. As summer waned I overheard anxious conversations between Jack and Laura about the upcoming school year. Registering me for school was going to be a problem, I gathered, because I had entered the country on a forged visitor’s visa, and it was hard to sign someone up for school who technically didn’t exist. I watched Laura sit on hold with the INS helpline and pore over photocopies of a policy book from the library, but she wasn’t getting anywhere. One night, frustrated, Jack dumped the entirety of her research directly from the kitchen table into the trash. He didn’t say anything afterward, even when Laura yelled at him, and instead retreated to the basement with the phone, where he stayed until long after I’d been sent to bed.
Jack had uncles. He had uncles who worked construction. He had uncles who owned racetracks. He had garbageman uncles, a fire chief uncle, and even a mayor-of-a-small-town uncle. He had uncles in prison.
They came at night. They wore odd clothes. Uncle Sal dressed all in black—a colossal medallion of Jesus’s face strung from a gold chain and submerged in a tuft of chest hair. Junior wore a red suit with flame-licked shoes one night, a pink one with white snakeskin boots the next. They smoked in the house. Laura gritted her teeth each time they flicked back their lighter caps. They brought Rahela and me presents: gold wristwatches and pocketknives that Laura put on high shelves to “keep until you are old enough.”
The Uncles convened standing up, forming a horseshoe around the kitchen table, half-joking about how no one could stand with his back to the door. They spoke a miry blend of English and Jersey-accented Italian and laughed too loud. Every night, the conversation ended the same way: one of the Uncles would say, “I’ll take care of it for ya,” and clap Jack on the back. They’d go out the front door, which no one else used, slip into their Cadillacs, and drive down the hill with their headlights off, leaving silvery oil stains on our new driveway.