Girl at War: A Novel

by Sara Novic

  By the time I reached Luka’s front stoop I was so nervous it was all I could do not to run away. What if he’d been killed by some back-alley sniper, or burned beyond all recognition by a mine in the park? What if he was angry with me for getting out? What if we didn’t like each other anymore? I rang the doorbell and listened for footsteps. There weren’t any that I could hear, but then the lock clicked and the door opened to reveal the foyer through which I’d tracked mud countless times, and a tiny woman in fuzzy slippers and a housecoat. It was Luka’s grandmother. Luka and I had visited her flat down the street occasionally after school. Even in the darkest months of rationing she’d managed to slip us something sweet. But now she looked much older, more hunched. Beneath the open robe she wore a black blouse and a woolen skirt hiked up to her flaccid breasts. Her hair was tied in a dark scarf. She was in mourning.

  “Baka,” I breathed, not meaning to say it aloud. She looked me over, her eyebrows raised at my use of a familial term.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m, uh—”

  “No soliciting.” She closed the door in my face and I retreated to the bottom of the stoop, where I sat sweating and trying not to panic. In Bosnian villages, where Luka’s grandparents were from, once you went into mourning for a close family member, it could go on for years; for a particularly troubling death one might never wear color again. I allowed myself to fall into an antifantasy of what had happened to Luka—death by land mine, malnutrition. I envisioned his funeral, a small stone marking his remains up on Mirogoj.

  The morbid string of daydreams made Luka’s appearance on the sidewalk before me even more startling. I shot up when I caught sight of him farther down Ilica, and felt him look me over, first with the general curiosity that one directs at a person lingering in front of his home, then with the more exacting gaze of trying to place someone.

  Luka was tall and broad-shouldered, a departure from the scrawniness we’d once shared, but he was recognizable in other ways—his hair still thick and stiff, the same serious, close-lipped smile. I caught in his eyes the exact moment he recognized me.

  “My god,” he said. We hugged, and his arms exuded an unfamiliar strength. I pulled away in a rush of self-consciousness that I smelled of sweat and plane food. Luka kissed me on both cheeks and took my suitcase into the house.

  His family was in the kitchen—Baka crocheting at the table, Luka’s mother aproned and dishing out potatoes, his father in police uniform, home for lunch, wiping the droplets of soup stuck in his mustache on the back of his arm.

  “Use your napkin,” Luka’s mother said.

  “Mama,” Luka said, and all three of them looked up. Baka stared at me, confused by my presence in the house. Luka started to say something, but his mother had already bypassed him and taken me by both hands.

  “Ana?” she said. “Is it you?”

  “Ja sam,” I said. She pulled me into a smothering hug, and Luka’s father stood and placed a beefy hand on my shoulder.

  “My god.”

  “Ana,” Baka muttered, contemplating who I might be.

  “Welcome back,” said his father.

  “I’m going to make some calls,” said Luka’s mother.

  “Ajla, wait.” I’d never called Luka’s mother by her first name before, and it surprised us both.

  “What is it, honey?” She put down the phone and gave me an encouraging smile. I wanted to ask her about Petar and Marina. But she was happy. Everyone was.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

  Luka dragged my suitcase up the stairs but bypassed the spare bedroom, which was filled with luggage and a peculiar collection of dated housewares: chipped china, rusted cast-iron pans, and a cardboard carton of slotted spoons.

  “Baka’s staying in there now.”

  I remembered Baka’s black clothes. “Your grandfather?”

  “He’s—she’s in mourning.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. He was old. I mean, we were expecting it.”

  I’d never come across death when I was expecting it, but I doubted that would make it any easier.

  “Still,” I said. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s tough.” Luka had always been stoic, but the detachment with which he spoke about his grandfather was unnerving. It occurred to me that he may have gotten used to saying goodbye. He picked up my bag again and we headed to his room. Except for a bigger bed and a desktop computer, it looked the same. “You can sleep here. I’ll go downstairs.”

  “I’d rather take the couch,” I said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Did you get my letter?”

  He went to the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a rubber-banded stack of envelopes addressed in my unsteady ten-year-old scrawl.

  “Didn’t you get mine?”

  I shook my head. “But those are old. I wrote you last month, to say I was coming.”

  “Well, I didn’t get—Oh. The postal codes all changed after the war. A lot of the street names, too. It might get here eventually; it takes them a while to sort through the stuff rejected by the computer system. And if you don’t write First Class, god knows what they do with it. Hey. Why did you stop writing? In ’ninety-two?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I just got scared.”

  “That something happened to me?”

  “That you wouldn’t write back,” I said, though I’d been equally afraid of what he’d say if he did.

  Outside around the backyard table everyone spoke much faster than I remembered. Luka’s mother, from a Herzegovinian family, had thirty-one cousins and invited them to everything. About half of them had actually shown up, and they crowded around the patio in mismatched chairs hailing from various decades. From what I could make out, the cousins were engaged in an argument that swung with a bizarre effortlessness between the profligate behavior of parliament’s ruling party and two different brands of spreadable cheese.

  Luka sat across from me, a mischievous grin surfacing whenever a member of his family called for another round of rakija, brandy cooked in bathtubs by old ladies in the mountains and sold on the side of the road in Coca-Cola bottles. The alcohol just made me sweatier; the temperature hung steady at thirty-seven degrees even though it was dusk, and I had grown accustomed to air-conditioning. Each shot of brandy lit a fire in my mouth and carried a torch down into my chest. Had I really drunk this when I was young? And as medicine? As if in answer to my thought Luka’s eight-year-old cousin slammed his glass on the table and let out a drunken belch.

  I should have gone to the hostel, I thought, as the group filled the yard with spirited laughter. The language that in my mind had existed for so long only in past tense was alive again in conversation and pulsing from the radio. Every time I spoke I was met with a correction of my childlike grammar. English words welled up in my mouth and I swallowed them with difficulty.

  Now the cousins, already into their second bottle of rakija, had nicknamed me American Girl. I mulled over the vinegary phrase with distaste, struggling to construct a grammatically sound sentence I could wage against them. In the end, self-consciousness blocked all productive channels of thought, and I resigned myself to eating in silence.

  Afterward I climbed up to the roof and tried not to cry.

  “What was I thinking?” I said to Luka, who had followed me. “I can’t stay here.” Luka, who’d always gotten nervous when I was sad, turned away. I knew it was only because he liked to be alone when he was upset and wanted to afford me the same privacy. After a while, though, when I hadn’t calmed down, he sat beside me, pulling his knees to his chest to get traction with his bare feet against the clay roof tiles.

  “You’re just tired,” he said. He put his arm around my shoulder, tentatively at first, then letting his full weight come down on me.

  “I want to go home,” I said, all too aware I had no idea where that might be.

  6

  In the morning I felt better. I’d spent t
he night in a jet-lag coma, dreamless, on Luka’s living room couch, its worn upholstery retaining just enough texture to leave a checked pattern on my cheek. The couch was the same one they’d always had, recognizable in an innocuous way—just an old couch in the home of an old friend.

  Still, when I saw Luka standing in the kitchen I felt unsettled. He offered me a plate as he took one down from the cabinet, but we were clumsy with one another; he pulled away too quickly and I felt the china slipping between our hands. I set it safely on the counter and sorted through my archive of go-to conversation topics, searching first for something witty, then just anything to say.

  I smeared Nutella over the remains of yesterday’s bread, and Luka mixed a pitcher of fluorescent yellow Cedevita. As a public health initiative we’d been organized into lines in the school yard and handed little cups of the stuff, chalky powder injected with vitamins and stirred into water, to make sure we got something of nutritional value in the weeks when food was hard to come by. They hadn’t expected an entire generation to become addicted to the concoction—lemonade on steroids—but we had, eventually making its producers the most successful pharmaceutical company in the country.

  I put the glass to my lips and felt the juice fizz in my mouth.

  “This is what my life has been missing,” I said.

  “They don’t have Cedevita in America?” Luka asked. “I thought they had everything there.”

  “They don’t need it in America. It’s war food. Speaking of.” I remembered the gifts I’d brought for Luka and his family, mostly food I’d found exciting when I first arrived in America. “I forgot. I brought you some stuff from over there,” I said. “It’s probably stupid.”

  “You brought me a present?” Luka’s voice was almost syrupy, and for a moment I thought he might be mocking me. “Can I have it?”

  In the living room I unzipped my bag and pulled out the plastic sacks that accounted for a third of the space in my suitcase. Inside was an “I NY” T-shirt, M&M’s, Reese’s peanut butter cups and a jar of Jif, and three boxes of instant macaroni and cheese. Now I felt silly offering him a bag of gifts for a little boy.

  “I kind of underestimated the state of things here. I’m sure you have all this stuff by now—”

  “Cool! What is this?” Luka said. He pulled out the Jif and tried to smell it through the lid.

  “You really haven’t had it before? But you’ve got a mobile phone. I just got a mobile phone in America.”

  “We only have them because the government didn’t feel like repairing the bombed-out landlines. Though you can imagine how obsessed everyone is.” Luka was struggling to talk through a mouthful of peanut butter. “So superficial. Everyone in this fucking country gets their shit paycheck, wastes it all on clothes from Western Europe, then complains about how they don’t have any money. Idiots.”

  “That’s what happens when you ban Levi’s, I guess,” I said. During the height of communism jeans had been a symbol of rebellion, Americanness. For some reason the aura hadn’t worn off.

  “Too bad I didn’t know you were coming. I would’ve made you bring me a pair.”

  “Ana.” Ajla’s voice trailed in from an upstairs room. “Come here.”

  “I thought everyone was stupid for caring about that stuff,” I said.

  “This is really good,” Luka said, scooping out another spoonful of peanut butter. I downed the rest of my Cedevita and went upstairs.

  I found Ajla in her bedroom among an array of unmatched socks. “Do you have any washing?” she said. “It might rain tomorrow and I want to get everything out on the line. Come, sit.”

  I sat cross-legged opposite her and plucked a matching set of socks from the pile.

  “Sorry if the cousins were a bit much for you yesterday. I didn’t think of it.”

  But I knew holding a big meal in my honor was the utmost compliment she could give. “It was great,” I told her. “The food and everything.”

  “So how is it,” she said. “In America? The family?”

  In truth, things were strained between us. I’d only spoken to Laura once more after I’d snapped at her. She’d called a few times, but I hadn’t answered. She’d sent my passport. Finally I’d forced myself to call her back the day before I left. I’d given her my flight details and she’d told me resignedly to be careful. But I did not want to tell this to Luka’s mother. “They took good care of me,” I said.

  “Are they happy for you? That you’re coming back home?”

  “They worry a little. But they understand,” I said, and hoped it was true.

  “They sound like good parents.” She pulled me into an awkward embrace. She smelled of rosemary and bleach and something else I remembered but could not name.

  “Ana!” Luka was yelling from what sounded like the opposite end of the house. “Come on! I’m going to be late.”

  But I couldn’t put it off anymore. Halfway down the stairs I reversed and stuck my head back through his mother’s doorway. “Do you know if Petar and Marina are—” I paused. “Okay?”

  Ajla’s smile waned; she looked ashamed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t tried to contact them in a long time.”

  —

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” Luka looked wary as we walked to the Trg, like the sight of the city might set me off crying. We spoke Cringlish, a system we’d devised without discussion—Croatian sentence structure injected with English stand-ins for the vocabulary I was lacking, then conjugated with Croatian verb endings.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just having culture shock.”

  “You can’t get culture shock from your own culture.”

  “You can.”

  In the Trg the morning sun bounced from tram to tram in spectral refractions. I felt myself beginning to move with the rhythm of the city again. The buildings were still tinted yellow, a remnant of the Hapsburgs; billboards hawking Coca-Cola and Ožujsko beer were propped up on rooftops with the familiar red and white lettering. Teenagers in cutoffs and Converse high-tops formed sweaty clusters beneath the wrought-iron lampposts. And Jelačić was at the center of the square, sword drawn, right where I’d left him.

  “Wait. Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “Zid Boli.” The Wall of Pain had been constructed over the course of the war, each brick representing a person killed, until the memorial of brick and flowers and candles spanned the whole square. I’d made my parents bricks there, when I’d gotten back to Zagreb, and it was the closest thing they had to a gravesite.

  “They moved it.”

  “Moved it? Where?”

  “Up to the cemetery. A few years ago. The mayor decided it was too depressing to have it in the Trg. Bad for tourism.”

  “It’s supposed to be depressing. Genocide is depressing!”

  “There was a big fight about it,” Luka said. “Shit, that was our train.” We arrived at the tram stop just as a full car pulled away and were alone on the platform.

  “I’ve got to drop off some forms at my college,” Luka said, fanning the papers in my face. “We can go up to the cemetery tomorrow if you want.”

  But I could not visit my parents there, not really, and I felt a creeping sadness at the thought. I pushed it from my mind.

  “It’s funny, you at college,” I said instead.

  “I’ve got good marks.”

  “I just mean you’re all grown up.”

  “Same as you,” he said. “What are you studying?”

  “English.”

  “English? You still haven’t gotten the hang of it?”

  “Not the language. Literature and stuff. What about you?”

  “Finance.” I was underwhelmed by his choice. I’d imagined him as a philosopher or a scientist, holed up in some library or laboratory in a profession that would allow him to scrutinize the minutest of details like he’d always done. “In third year at high school, all the adults were asking me what I wanted to study at university.
I hated talking about it so I just made up the most practical answer I could to shut them up. Then, when it came time to apply, it actually sounded like a good idea.”

  “Sounds stable.”

  “It’s not as boring as you think.”

  A man with a shaved head and unshaven face was staggering down the platform in our direction. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes shifting rapidly inside deep-set sockets. He clawed at his face as he walked, bumping shoulders with Luka as he passed. An odor of sweat and urine followed him.

  I tried to refocus on our conversation, but the man spun around and now came toward us with a purposeful look. He clamped his hand down on Luka’s shoulder.

  “Did you touch me?” the man asked.

  Luka said he hadn’t. The man pushed Luka, asked again.

  “No,” Luka said, more forcefully. “Keep walking.”

  “You wanna fight?” The man swayed. “I’ll show you a real fight.” He reached into his sock and stood up quickly, wielding a serrated knife.

  Luka stood in front of me protectively, straightened his shoulders. “Just calm down,” he was repeating. The man grinned and tightened his grip around the handle of his weapon.

  I scanned the empty platform, wondering where all the witnesses had gone. Had I really come this far to be stabbed in the middle of the Trg in broad daylight? I was sure something terrible was about to happen, but panic eluded me. I found myself thinking of the next logical move. The violent Zagreb was, after all, the place I knew best. I considered a way to jump the man from the side and knock the knife from his hand, planned my route to the nearest shop where I could run for help if Luka was hurt, rehearsed a dialogue with the shopkeeper in my head. The man pressed the blunt side of the knife against Luka’s cheek.

  But nothing happened. A crowded tram slowed to a stop, and Luka and I ran to the farthest car and ducked in, melting into the commuters as the doors shut behind us. The man stared up from the platform, then stuffed his knife back into his sock.

  Luka, who had been calm throughout the encounter, was now cracking. Streaks of perspiration had formed at his hairline, and he pulled the back of his unsteady hand across his forehead.