by Sara Novic
“Sit here.” Ms. Stanfeld led me behind an assembly of wooden crates.
“Will Petar be okay?”
“I sent some people for him. Now don’t make another sound until we’re in the air.”
“Then what?” But there were voices by the stairs, other Blue Helmets boarding, and she stood abruptly, not wanting to be seen conversing with munitions.
When the plane took off my stomach roiled and my ears popped, but I stayed hidden and unmoving, eyeing the rifle clips through the slatted crates. Eventually the turbulence evened out, and, bored and emboldened by the thrum of the engine, I slid my hand through an opening and grabbed one of the magazines. I rejigged my grip until I could pull the clip out through the hole, loading and unloading it unthinkingly. The repetitive motion calmed my stomach and my nerves.
“What’s that noise?” I heard someone say, and I froze.
“What noise?” Stanfeld said a little too fast.
“It sounds like it’s—” The voice was closer now. “What the fuck?” I looked up at the Blue Helmet in terror, and he stared back at me with equal distress.
“It’s okay. She’s authorized,” Stanfeld said. “Come here, Ana. Come sit by me.” She dug my passport out of the envelope. “See? American visa.”
The other Peacekeepers stared at her. I sat down beside her and returned to my loading and unloading of the cartridge.
“Still, I trust that you all have the sense not to—Ana! What the hell are you doing?”
“She’s fast,” one of the Blue Helmets said.
“Where did you learn how to do that?”
“I just know,” I said.
She readjusted her helmet, loosening the strap around her neck. “I trust all of you have the sense not to say anything about this. For appearances’ sake. Wouldn’t want to get poor Johnsen in trouble for an egregious failure to complete security check protocol.” Everyone looked at one of the Blue Helmets down the row.
“You fought in that village, didn’t you?” Stanfeld said.
“A little.”
She yanked the clip from my hand and stuffed it in her cargo pocket. No one spoke again until the landing gear protracted in a dull rumble beneath our feet.
Echoed by the Trees
1
“Are you sure this is the place?” Luka said.
I fumbled with my seat belt and got out of the car. “The sandbags were right here. And they had a tree across the other side of the road.” Luka got out of the car, too, and stood beside me. “My dad was driving, and the one guy with rotten teeth stuck his head in our window and he had his gun—” I touched the spot on my neck where the soldier had pressed his gun against my father.
“It’s okay.”
“It was my fault, you know. I made them stop for lunch. If we hadn’t, we might have made it back before the block.”
“You were ten. You didn’t make anyone do anything. And nobody could have known.”
I looked into the forest, but it was too shadowy inside to see anything.
“It’s over,” Luka said.
“It doesn’t feel over.”
We pushed into the roadside brush—scrubby ragweed, cleavers, and what looked like Christmas holly scratched my ankles. Then the bigger trees—towering pine and oak—overtook the shrubbery. Soon the canopy had filtered out most of the summer sun, and a cool mist hung in the lower branches. It smelled of earth and decomposition.
From far away I had hated this place, but now even that was blurring. The hatred was there, but there were other feelings, too: excitement, almost giddiness, and the strange calm of being close to my parents again.
The woods grew darker, then thinned, but when we reached the clearing it was not how I remembered it. The trees were all wrong, the forest floor different from the way I’d imagined it. The lush summertime green of the foliage confused me. The place was alive, almost pretty.
Across the clearing I spotted a tree stump, the clean, even slice the only evidence a human had been there. I scanned the area for traces of massacre, a concavity or rise in the earth suggesting interment. But there was nothing. Only dark clay ground, damp from the forest shade.
“I’ll never find them.” I ran my fingers along the tree beside me, its ashen bark ridged and fissured, a history of weathered storms on display. A beetle ran down a groove in the trunk and disappeared in the dirt.
I sat down cross-legged and raked my fingers over the ground, let the soil collect under my nails. A few acorns, still green, had fallen too early, and I took one and buried it in the furrow I’d dug.
“Where are you?” I shouted. A flock of starlings, startled by the noise, shot up from a branch and out beyond the forest.
“Ana?” I’d nearly forgotten Luka was there, and when I turned toward him I got the feeling I’d been sitting there much longer than I realized. “You all right?”
My knees cracked as I stood and wiped my hands on my shorts. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m okay.”
—
We returned to the car and I pulled a U-turn across the highway and drove back to the little road, then followed the stony path down into the valley.
The village was no longer a village—anything that had once made it deserving of the title, including residents, was long gone. Most of the buildings had been reduced to rubble, collapsed slabs of concrete. The few that were still standing were all the eerier for it; the glass was blown out, but nothing was boarded up, leaving hollow sockets where the windows had been.
We left the car in the middle of the road and continued down the main street by foot. I tried to work out which house might have been Drenka and Damir’s, but it was hard to tell where one lot ended and the other began.
“Careful,” Luka said. “Do you think there are zvončići?”
I remembered Drenka’s exploded chickens and froze in my tracks. “There were.”
“They say it’ll take another twenty years to demine everything.”
Down the street I could see a large stone building, painted black. If I was in the right place it must be the schoolhouse, but I didn’t remember it being so dark.
“Walk like this,” I said to Luka, high-stepping toward the school. “Gives you more time to look before you put your foot down.”
When we got close enough, I could see that the building hadn’t been painted at all; it was black with soot, the window glass gone and shutters burned off.
“Četnik headquarters,” I said. “They raped so many women here.”
Luka stuck his hands in his pockets, looking squeamish.
“I was too little,” I said. “And I had a gun.”
Our own headquarters should have been across the traffic circle. But what was there looked more like the surface of the moon than the Safe House, all cratered earth and broken chunks of cement. Initially I had allowed myself to think that maybe the Safe Housers had torched the schoolhouse and the soldiers had gotten what they deserved. Maybe the villagers had won, or at least escaped. But now, staring at the sunken ground, I knew it couldn’t be true. I turned back to the charred building. On the far wall a wooden plank, unburned, poked through the overgrowth.
“What is that?” I said. Luka reached out and swiped at the vine to reveal a placard, written in jagged lettering:
In memory of our neighbors, who were burned alive by Serb paramilitary forces during the Croatian War for Independence, March 1992. Count 79
“Jesus,” said Luka.
I pulled away the rest of the weeds and dusted the loose ash from the plaque until my hands were black with soot. The carving was uneven, like it had been done by hand.
“Seventy-nine people.”
“You’re sure this is the town?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. As sure as I could be. The grave undetectable, the village demolished; this was their biggest victory. I looked out toward what must have been the wheat fields. “And if it is, I killed a man in that field.” I was headed there before I knew what I was doing.
&nb
sp; “Fuck, Ana, the mines!” Luka said, but I did not stop. If the village was beyond recognition, the field was even worse—no sign of wheat or any crops, just an expanse of wild grass. The lack of corroborating evidence could almost convince a person she was crazy, that she had dreamt everything up, or at least that things had not happened the way she said.
In the center of the field I slowed and Luka caught up. “Careful. You trying to get blown up?”
“I killed someone here,” I said. “I mean, I think I did.” I told him about the man in the field, how we’d stared at each other before I shot him.
“Maybe he didn’t die.”
“Luka, I killed a man. Maybe more than one—who knows what happened when I was just shooting out the window. I could have hit someone else.”
“You were defending yourself.”
“I’m no better than any of them.”
“You were a little kid. You didn’t even know what you were doing.”
“No, that’s the thing. When I was shooting—when I shot that guy—I liked it. I knew it was bad and I liked it. I wasn’t sorry.”
Luka let me stand there until the sun began to set.
“It’s going to be dark soon,” he said.
“I know.”
“The mines and everything.”
“I know.”
“Come on.” Squinting at the ground, we returned to the car. I threw Luka the keys, and the engine sputtered, then turned, and Luka adjusted the choke.
“Who do you think made that plaque?” I said.
“Church from a neighboring town, or some NGO. All the projects now are about counting. They call it the Book of the Dead. They want to list everyone by name.”
“My parents.”
“My dad reported them.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“If that really was the spot where your parents…we should report it, too. They have dogs or X-ray machines or something to find the graves.”
I took out the map and made a mark on the spot.
“You’re not a killer,” Luka said, and I tried to believe him.
—
As we drove farther south, billboards with a familiar face cropped up with increasing frequency; it was a while before I realized it was General Gotovina. But instead of the nationalistic slogans popular when I was young, new text rimmed the posters—Heroj, a ne zločinac. Hero, not criminal.
“What’s that about?” I said when we passed another.
“Part of the EU entrance talks. To be considered for membership we’ve got to do all sorts of stuff to prove we’re ‘committed to peace.’ The cops had to turn in their guns. And we have to give up our war criminals.”
“We have war criminals?”
“So they say.”
“So who says? The Četniks?”
“The UN,” Luka said. “And we’re not supposed to say Četniks now. It’s derogatory.”
“They were calling themselves Četniks. Singing those awful songs.”
“And ‘za dom, spremni’ was a fascist slogan first,” said Luka. “Our soldiers killed Serbs in the Krajina, Bosniaks killed Serbs in Banja Luka—Bosniak and Croat armies were fighting each other, too, before we joined forces…”
“But the UN,” I said. “They should talk. They raped more women than anyone. They videotaped Srebrenica. Eight thousand people in that grave, in their fucking safe zone. Even the American news caught that story.” I had cut the article out of the paper and kept it in my room in Gardenville.
“I know,” Luka said. I had wanted him to be outraged, too, but I knew in the end the guilt of one side did not prove the innocence of the other.
—
I drove into the night, pushing through the briny humidity toward the sea. Luka was asleep, and I hadn’t seen a town in a long time. Across the road we passed a shack with SEXI BAR spray-painted across the front in fluorescent pink.
“Hey, wake up. Where are we going to stop?”
“Soon.” He yawned and sat up. After a while he pointed to an exit that looked like a dead end. “There it is. Wait.” He pushed the gearshift into park.
“Jesus, you’re gonna stall it.”
“Transmission’s about to drop out anyway after the number you did on it.” Luka motioned a switch and climbed across the center console. In a tangle of arms and legs I dove over him into the passenger’s seat. He took a harsh left down an unpaved seaside path. There weren’t many private beaches in Croatia, but a fence topped with barbed wire had appeared along the docks. In the water, boats with spiral staircases and electricity bobbed and hummed.
“We’re not breaking into a yacht,” I said.
“We’re not breaking in. We were invited. Sort of.”
We pulled up to a tollbooth where a man in fake police uniform slid open his foggy Plexiglas window. “Welcome to Marina Yacht Solaris. Name and code word?” he said, readying his clipboard.
“Hello, sir,” said Luka in formal conjugation. “We’re friends of Danijela Babić’s and we’re meant to meet her at her boat.” The guard shone his flashlight into the car, then thumbed again through his roster.
“She’s not here yet. I can’t let you in without the express permission of the owner.”
There was no way this was going to work, I thought, but Luka remained composed. “She said she might be late. I know the password.”
“Which is?”
“Absolut,” Luka said, then, more to me than the guard, “It’s the name of her dog.”
“She named her dog Vodka?” I said, and Luka shushed me.
“I’ve got the key,” he said, and held his house key up to the guard’s flashlight. The guard, who was now more confused than authoritative, was checking boxes on his sheet.
“Sign here.” He passed the clipboard down to Luka. Luka scribbled some illegible signature—his handwriting had always been atrocious—and handed it back through the window.
“We hope you enjoy your stay at Solaris,” said the guard, sounding almost defeated. He pressed a button that rolled back the gate, and we drove through.
“Amazing, right?” said Luka. “Her family’s always in Italy this time of year.”
“I can’t believe she named her dog Vodka.”
“Oh, come on. What’s your problem with her?”
“I just—” But I could not think of a reason to dislike her beyond the annoying way she touched Luka’s arm when she talked, so I didn’t finish the thought.
Inside the resort we parked and took the blankets from the trunk. Along a path of brick pavers we passed a restaurant with a crystal chandelier and fancy liqueurs lined up across a mirrored bar, and a wood-paneled hut labeled SAUNA. On the opposite side, yachts and boats bobbed beside the dock. Some had lights in the windows, but most were dark shadows atop the black water.
“Where’d Danijela’s family get their money?” I said.
“They owned a lot of seafront property and sold it to some German investment bankers who built a hotel on it.”
“Which one is her boat?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then where are we going to sleep?”
“Here.” We came to a black wrought-iron fence encircling a swimming pool and a cluster of plastic lounge chairs, the gate padlocked shut. Luka slipped one foot between the stakes on the bottom crossbar and jumped over with ease. I handed him my blanket and followed in an unsteady copycat.
We set up camp on the chairs. I lay on my back to look at the sky, black and varnished with more stars than I’d seen in years, even more than I could see from the back field in Gardenville.
“Wow,” I breathed.
“Perks of being in the middle of nowhere.”
“New York doesn’t really lend itself to stargazing.”
“Neither does Zagreb.”
“I guess not.” I remembered nights Luka and I had spent on the balcony of my flat, searching relentlessly for Orion, which we’d deemed the best constellation because he had a sword. Now it seemed more
likely we’d just been looking at airplanes or Russian satellites.
Luka didn’t say anything for a while, and I assumed he had fallen asleep. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, too, but I was keyed up, images of the forest and our break-in and Danijela all looping through my head. “Good night,” I said.
“I would kiss you,” Luka blurted.
“What?” I turned to look at him but could only see his outline in the dark.
“I’m not going to,” he said. “It’s not a good idea. But I thought you should know. That I would kiss you.”
“Why?”
“Well, you’re attractive and we’re sleeping outside together under the stars—”
“I mean,” I said, glad the darkness covered my blush, “why is it a bad idea?”
“Because I mess up relationships. Because you’re going home at the end of the summer.”
I thought of Brian and wondered if he had emailed. “I mess up relationships,” I said. “I basically broke up with my last boyfriend because he was too nice.”
I considered what it might mean to be with Luka, whether it was even something I wanted. Was the envy I felt at every mention of Danijela a sign that I had feelings for him, or simply a longing for the way things used to be, when we were young and each other’s whole worlds?
We hadn’t talked much about my plans beyond the summer, and in more whimsical moments I’d considered staying—I could transfer to the University of Zagreb, teach English afterward. Deep down, though, I knew I’d return to the States to finish school, go back to my family. I let the question float out to sea, and we lay still, comfortable as we always had been in one another’s silences.
“Besides,” Luka said eventually, as if he’d continued weighing the pros and cons of our potential relationship in his head. “You know too much.” But I couldn’t help thinking as I hovered between waking and sleep, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.
I resurfaced a few hours later; it was still dark and my feet had gone numb. Once in New York water had seeped into my snow boots and frozen between my toes, but I still couldn’t remember a time when I felt this helplessly cold. Covered in gooseflesh and shivering, I unrolled the jeans I’d been using as a pillow and pulled them on over my shorts.