Girl at War: A Novel

by Sara Novic

  Afterward, I sat up and looked around. Stallone was beside me, pressing his sleeve to a slash across his forehead, saying something I couldn’t hear; my ears were still ringing. I took the gun from the dead man next to me, a Wolverine, and slipped its strap over my head. No one noticed. There were three other men on the floor, not moving. Red Sonja had me rip a bedsheet into squares, and she closed the dead men’s eyes and covered their faces with the fabric. The Bruces were stacking weapons—guns and knives and brass knuckles newly available. I pushed the gun up against my back and knew from that moment it was mine.

  The strongest men heaved the corpses down the stairs and laid them out behind the house, waiting for nightfall so they could transport them to the cemetery at the far end of the village. At dusk Stallone and I went out on recon and counted Četnik casualties. We kicked the bodies, searched their pockets for ammo.

  —

  Damir taught me how to fieldstrip and reassemble an AK. Forward grip, gas chamber, cleaning rod, bolt (piston first), frame, magazine.

  “Function check!” It meant to cock the gun as a test, the last step in reassembly, but anyone completing the check yelled it triumphantly, a battle cry preceding the first bursts of gunfire. The fieldstrip was a protocol that never changed, and I found solace in the repetition.

  The old men let me keep watch while they were eating lunch. Too short to shoot with my feet on the ground, I’d climb up and kneel in the windowsill. I shot over toward the schoolhouse at anything in camouflage moving in the windows, or outside ground-level on the other side of the street, then jumped down and ducked in case a Četnik was clearheaded enough to shoot straight back. With every round I envisioned killing the soldier with the brown teeth, the one who’d struck my father in the back of the knee and laughed. I relished the power that seemed to run through the chamber of the weapon directly up into my own veins.

  Occupation under the Četniks was a delicate balance. In their state of perpetual intoxication they’d been satisfied in rape and pillage mode, their genocidal appetites satiated by picking off Safe Housers and the occasional roadside murder of travelers like my parents. The danger of killing too many of us and losing their UN meal ticket staved off any large-scale assaults. But the JNA, closing in on the area, sent reinforcements, and the reinforcements were not yet weary of the place, were not content with exchanging fire from the comfort of the schoolhouse. They had salaries, uniforms, better weapons, and a functioning chain of command. Relatively, they were sober. They were ready to attack.

  I was at the attic window keeping watch with the Terminator when we spotted a band of armored vehicles, about ten it looked like, but it was hard to tell from the curve in the road. The trucks were green, not UN issue, and when I looked up at the Terminator he was gesturing frantically. I bolted across the attic to get Stallone, who, upon seeing his brother’s signs, yelled, “Holy shit! The JNA! They’re coming down the street!” The trucks were closer now, and I could see the red Yugoslavian stars on their doors.

  “Let’s move!” said the captain, and everyone who’d been without a gun lunged for the extras on the hat rack. I turned to the captain for his next instructions, but from downstairs we heard gunfire, the blowback of broken glass, and the door guards screaming.

  “They’re here,” said Stallone.

  We ran—down the uneven rear stairs and out the back door, through the packed-dirt alley by the market, and out into the wheat fields. The stalks bowed with rotting, grain-laden heads abandoned by farmers when the bombing started, but even in their hunched posture they were taller than I was, and I could see nothing but wheat in all directions. I wondered where Stallone had gone. Then, from a side row, I saw Damir darting toward me.

  “You’ve got speed, girl,” he said when he caught up. He grabbed me by the hood of my sweatshirt and yanked me to the left, hard. “No sense of direction, though.” The butt of my rifle banged a bruise into the back of my leg as we ran.

  A pack of JNA foot soldiers were coming from the other side of the field now; there were at least twenty of them, running in a clean, arrowlike formation. I froze, gaping as they closed the meters between us—one hundred, seventy-five, fifty—but Damir pushed me ahead of him and released a spray of gunfire on them. In the corner of my vision I saw him go down, but he yelled “Don’t stop!” so I kept running, made a sharp turn into the field’s middle strip. The wind hit my face fresh and hard—my nose dripped and my eyes watered. Dragging my sleeve across my face, I pumped my legs faster until I could no longer feel the ground, until gravity slithered off the treads of my sneakers.

  At the center of the field I threw myself beneath a tractor and curled into a compact ball, covering my face with my hands. There was gunfire and yelling from every angle, and I tried to listen for voices I knew. I thought of Damir and waited for the familiar sadness to set in, but found only anger in its place. With one hand I felt the ground for my AK and was relieved to find it there beside me.

  —

  “Viči ako možeš!” Yell out if you can. The cry reverberated through the village as the remaining Safe Housers combed the fields for survivors.

  “Viči ako možeš!” Other than the rescue call it was eerily quiet, that odd part of evening when the sun had set but it was still more light than dark. I ran my hands over my face and body, taking inventory, impossibly unharmed save for the blood on my wrists, where the last of the barbed-wire scabs had reopened when I hit the ground. I waited, listening for any definitive JNA sounds, watched for passing boots. But there was nothing, so I pulled myself on my elbows out from beneath the tractor. It occurred to me that I’d never seen a tractor up close before, and I marveled momentarily at its size, the tire alone taller than I was, before a resurgence of the rescue call returned me to soldier mode.

  I jogged back the way I’d come, looking for Damir, and found a group of Safe Housers squatting around a body I knew must be his.

  “Indy!” Bruce Willis said, noticing me. “Don’t—don’t look. Go home and tell Drenka to make a bed for him.”

  “She doesn’t talk,” said Snake.

  “Well then she’ll do a goddamn charade. Just go!”

  I pressed myself on tiptoe, trying to catch a glimpse of Damir’s face, to see if Bruce had meant a sickbed or a dead-person one. But Damir was obscured by the men around him.

  “Hey!” Bruce said, and I spun back toward them. “Hold the gun out in front of you, at least till you get out of the field.” I nodded and pulled the AK up over my head, adjusting the twisted strap around my shoulder.

  Damir was right—my sense of direction was terrible, and now that the men had turned me away from the path toward the Safe House, I’d lost my reference point. I walked down a row of wheat, but that only seemed to take me deeper into the field. Ahead, I thought I heard a rustling. I had practiced the fieldstrip so many times that cocking the gun was more an act of muscle memory than conscious thought. I pulled the handle back along the bolt carrier, then released it, heard a round click into the chamber. Whoever was nearby must have heard it, too, because there was rustling again, then the unmistakable sound of running in boots. I tried to call for Stallone, but nothing came out.

  When he came around the corner, I froze. It was not Stallone. The man was looking over his shoulder but was headed straight for me. He wore a patchy beard and a green jacket, no JNA insignia. By the time he turned and saw me, we were so close we could have touched. He was visibly shocked by my size and my gun. I felt him look me over, trying to decide what to do, and for a moment I glimpsed his hesitation. Then it passed. He reached around for his gun, and I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled the trigger.

  On the ground, the man was writhing and making a choking noise. I had hit him in the upper stomach, or maybe the ribs. He was probably only a few years older than Damir, acne pockmarks still visible along his cheekbones.

  The blood was passing through his shirt and pooling beside him. But he was still awake, wide-eyed and angry and confused. He was trying
to talk but his speech was slurred, and I couldn’t understand until he stopped whatever he had been saying and just repeated “Please,” over and over again.

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I stepped over him and crept through the wheat, searching for a way back to the house.

  In the kitchen I called out to Drenka, but my vocal cords groaned with the vibrations of disuse. She turned and looked me over, trying to gauge whether I’d actually spoken. I saw her eyes catch on something and realized I was covered in blood, a little from my wrists, but mostly from the blowback of the soldier. I coughed and tried again to speak; my voice came stronger this time. “Damir’s hurt.”

  She jumped from her chair. “Where is he?”

  “The JNA. They got him.” My throat burned. “Safe Housers are bringing him here. They said to get ready.”

  “Get ready? What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Drenka instructed me to undress. I put on her nightgown as she wrung the blood from my clothes in a bucket on the kitchen floor.

  —

  Damir had been shot in the thigh, and the bullet was still inside him. It took two Safe Housers to carry him because they were trying to keep his leg straight. When they first put him on his bed, I still couldn’t tell if he was alive. But when Drenka cut his pant leg off and poured alcohol on the wound, he jerked awake and began to yell.

  “Thank God,” I said. Bruce Willis stared at me, then tried to play off his surprise at my speaking.

  The Bruces sat with us for a few hours, assuring Drenka that Damir was going to be fine. The captain was already radioing the neighboring villages to call for the doctor, they said. I thought of the soldier I had shot, wondered if he had been rescued or if he was still out in the field, bleeding to death.

  Damir moaned and sweated in his sleep. Drenka and I stayed up all night staring at him and waiting for the doctor to come. He mumbled incessantly about his grandfather and watermelon, while Drenka cradled his head and poured swallows of rakija in his mouth.

  “Listen,” she said to me the next morning as I slung my gun over my shoulder and double-knotted my shoelaces. “If you tell me where you’re from I can help you get back. There must be someone waiting for you.” I eyed her from across the table until she resumed her pacing. I thought about what it would be like if the doctor had to cut off Damir’s leg in front of us, right in his own bed. I thought of Luka knocking on the door of our flat, of his impatience and worry at the silence on the other side. The red shine of his bicycle streaked across my vision. I thought about the man I had shot, but I was not quite sorry. I went to the Safe House.

  There was no one guarding the door. Inside, the house was trashed. The posters had been torn from the wall; their taped corners clung obstinately to the cement. It looked like Gotovina’s Chair had been set on fire. I ran upstairs, where I found the captain warbling a distress signal into the CB. Besides the Bruces and one of the Turtles, the place was empty.

  “Stallone?” I managed, my voice still clumsy. The captain looked startled but quickly regained composure.

  “A lot of people are okay. They’re at home, healing up for a day or two.”

  “Stallone?” I said again, taking note of the captain’s evasion.

  “Stallone is missing,” he said. “His brother is out looking.” I stood there frozen, the strength I’d gained over the past months gone all at once, as if it had drained out my feet. “Don’t worry about that now. Tell me about Damir.”

  I told him Damir’s leg was swollen and oozing something yellow. “He needs help,” I said. “He’s dreaming of his dead grandfather.”

  “Indy. You must go home and take care of Drenka now. The doctor will be there soon.” I stood there, immobile, which the captain mistook for protest. “That’s an order,” he said, so I gathered myself and went.

  —

  In Damir’s room the curtains were drawn, and he stirred as I sat on the edge of his bed, jamming and releasing the lever that detached the forward grip of my gun.

  “Almost as good as a boy,” Damir said, surfacing momentarily from the fog of fever and brandy. From him this was a compliment. But his leg was twice the size it should have been, and there was pus. I left the gun leaning against the bookshelf and returned to my corner of the kitchen floor.

  I thought of telling Drenka the whole story of where I’d come from and what had happened, but she was ripping bedding for bandages and worrying. Just as I was beginning to think I’d worked up the courage to open my mouth, a pallid face appeared above me in the kitchen window. I jumped to my feet and let out a yelp.

  “Psst. Indy. Open up!” the face whispered through the glass. I looked again, the magnified eyes now familiar. I unbolted the door.

  “How’s he doing?” the captain asked.

  “He’s alive,” I said.

  “Oh good, Josip, you’re here,” said Drenka from down the hall. It was the first time I’d heard anyone call the captain by another name. But her face dropped when she came round the corner. “Where’s Dr. Hožić?”

  The captain lowered his eyes. “We, uh, can’t find him.”

  “What do you mean? You were supposed to—you said you were bringing a doctor.”

  “Last we heard he was over in Blato, but that was a few days ago now.”

  “Well then, he should be here soon, right?”

  “Drenka.” The captain sounded almost tender now. “We don’t have time.”

  The captain pressed by us and began banging around the kitchen, neck-deep in the cabinets. When he reemerged he was holding a paring knife and salad tongs. “We need to take it out.” Drenka collapsed into a nearby chair, and the captain turned to me. “Can you boil some water?” he said.

  —

  The scream that came out of Damir was not human—guttural and even more desperate than the cries in the forest. I stood in the doorway of his bedroom looking and trying not to look as Drenka held Damir’s arms down against the bed and the captain bent over Damir’s leg in the candlelight. I clapped my hands over my ears and ran back to the kitchen to boil more water.

  The canisters were almost empty. Should I go to the pump, or wait and see if they needed me here? Soon, though, the captain came out into the kitchen. He gestured to the remaining water, and I poured it over his bloody hands in the sink. He wiped his palms on his jeans, and I stood by, staring, waiting for my next order. But the captain just rested his hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s all right, Indy,” he said, though he was looking over my head. “You can stand down. You did good.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and went out into the night.

  —

  I fell asleep on the floor and woke up cold. Turning sideways, I slipped through the door of Damir’s room, where Drenka was sleeping in a chair pulled close to his bed. She looked older now, skin sallow without the warm tones of her shawl up around her face. I grazed my fingers against her arm and she jerked awake.

  “Zagreb,” I said, and she looked confused. “I’m from Zagreb.” The name of my city felt foreign.

  Drenka stood haltingly and stumbled as she led me to the couch. “Okay,” she said, covering me with a blanket. “Okay.”

  3

  News had spread about Damir, and the next day the women of the village came through the house offering help. They brought broth, towels, jam jars of rakija, and war cakes—flat, hard discs made with a quarter of the normal amount of yeast and no sugar. I was sitting in my corner and tried to listen for news of other Safe House casualties, but since I’d spoken Drenka had reduced herself to whispers in my presence, and the other women followed. I assumed they’d be rehashing recent events, planning what to do when the JNA came back, but instead I felt them staring at me sidelong and exchanging crinkled dinar notes.

  At sundown Drenka counted the money. She took the last two hard-boiled eggs left from the chickens and packed them along with a heel of bread in a plastic sack, tying the ends of the bag tight. We were leaving. She brought m
e my old T-shirt, and I put it on, then pulled the sweatshirt Damir had given me back over top.

  While Drenka was putting on her shoes, I slipped into Damir’s room. “Thank you,” I said into the darkness. Damir muttered something and moved like he was going to roll over, but they’d strapped his leg down to the bed, and he gave up without much of a fight. “Good night,” I said, and closed his door.

  The sky was black and wintry, smudged with smoke from an earlier raid—had it been somewhere else it might even have been pretty. Drenka held my hand, and, gazes fixed downward to calculate each footfall, we crossed through the high grass to the house next door. There was a faded blue car in the driveway, the only car I remember seeing in the village. Drenka rapped a syncopated knock on the front door, and a lantern appeared in the upstairs window. A girl a little older than I pushed open the glass and threw down a set of keys, then quickly swung the shutters closed. Drenka put the car in neutral, and we rolled out of the driveway and into the street. Headlights off, we drove out of the village. The air raid siren let out a farewell whoop as we turned back onto the big road from which I’d come, and I pulled the hood of Damir’s sweatshirt up over my eyes, afraid to see my family’s car, the soldiers, or the ghosts of the forest.

  The bus was already at the stop, idling, puffs of exhaust stark against the icy air. Drenka handed me the bag and led me up the steps. Inside it smelled like rancid meat, and I suppressed a gag. The exterior had looked like a regular tour bus, the same kind that ran the summertime route from Zagreb to the coast, but now I noticed the camouflage rucksacks overflowing from the first three rows of seats, the driver in partial police uniform, the assault rifle prominently affixed to the dashboard.