Girl at War(11)

I handed Rahela to my mother, and she shut the bedroom door. After a few minutes, my father came in and sat down at the piano. He played the first few bars of a Springsteen riff that had been popular before the war, then hit a wrong note and stopped. In happier times he’d played often; he’d take the pile of yellowing sheet music from inside the bench and let me pick a song. It was never perfect but always recognizable, and he’d never had a lesson.

Music, I’d heard him say, was like dessert. He could live without it, but life just wasn’t as good. Some nights when I was supposed to be doing homework, my father and I would take the cassette player down from the shelf and put it in the middle of the living room floor. When a song we liked came on the radio, we’d stop whatever we were doing, rush back to the living room, and dive at the cassette player like football goalies, arms flailing. One of us would push the Record button as we landed in a mess of rug burn and overenthusiastic athleticism. Then, before I was sent to bed, we’d add the new songs to the label and put the stereo back on the shelf, carefully filing the tape into our collection of songs missing the first ten seconds. Sometimes if a tape broke we would pull out its filmy, iridescent insides and stretch them around the room, running and laughing, our shins knocking against furniture legs. My mother, who called to us impatiently throughout most of our other attempts at procrastination, never interrupted these giddy dissections.

But tonight when my father turned on the radio it was only static. “They bombed Sljeme, too,” my father said. “Tried to take out the signal tower.” He twisted the tuning knob all the way in both directions before switching it off. I heard his breathing fall into a rhythmic cycle and he began to hum, a new song that had been floating through Zagora’s hills, the anthem of the Croatian soldiers in the east. “Ne?ete u ?avoglave dok smo ?ivi mi.” You’ll never get to ?avoglave—not while we’re alive.

“Ne?ete u ?avoglave dok smo ?ivi mi!” I joined in.

“Be quiet,” said my mother through the wall.

“Dok smo ?ivi mi!” my father yelled back at the bookshelf. I giggled. My mother was in the kitchen now, banging dishes together, and my father’s smile faded. “Time for bed, Ana,” he said.

“Sing the rest first,” I said as I stretched my sheet and blanket across the couch. He looked over his shoulder for my mother, then turned off the lamp and whispered it to me in the dark.

—

In the morning the police built the sandbag walls. I stood on the balcony before school and watched as they sealed off the roads into the city. They heaved the bags bucket-brigade-style into neat, crosshatched stacks, with men on stepladders straightening out the higher sections.

The sandbags were supposed to be strongholds we could stand behind and shoot from if the Serbs came to capture us. But instead of a sense of safety, the barricade imparted an air of na?veté. It was as if we believed a flood of tanks was like a flood of water and could be stopped by a pile of sacks. It was as if we’d never seen the footage of the tank plowing over the little red Fi?o in the streets of Osijek, of an army truck crushing a passenger bus into a ditch on the side of the road. It was as if it never occurred to anyone that blocking the incoming roads was the same as blocking the escape routes.

But already yesterday’s fear had grown stale, and my friends and I decided to meet at the nearest blockade after school; it begged to be climbed, so tall and alluring it might as well have been a jungle gym. By the end of the week we’d absorbed the sandbags into our playscape. War quickly became our favorite game and soon we had given up the park altogether. We gathered near the sandbags because the lines were predrawn. If we could convince enough people to be Serbs we’d play teams, ?etnici versus Hrvati, which meant you only got one life, and when you died you had to stay dead. The game was over when one team had killed the other in its entirety. Other times, we played every-man-for-himself war, in which you got three lives and everyone got to kill everybody else indiscriminately.

In both versions, the idea was to kill a person by shooting him with your imaginary gun; a block of wood or empty beer bottle served as a good standin. It was essential to make eye contact with the person you were killing, so as to avoid discrepancies. There were also two subcontests within each game. One was who could make the most realistic machine-gun sound effects; top players could distinguish between a Thompson, a Kalashnikov, and a Zbrojovka. Luka usually won. The second was who could act out the best death. If there had been points, players would have been awarded extra for a slow-motion fall. Postmortem twitching or delusional babbling was also a plus, if it wasn’t too dramatic. Those who died with their limbs bent in unnatural angles and could hold their positions the longest were the winners.

—

Even if the sandbags might have been useful against an outside attack, they couldn’t protect us from those already inside the blockade. There were stories that Serb civilians in Zagreb had taken matters into their own hands, mixing explosives in their kitchens. They booby-trapped household items and left them on sidewalks; Matchbox cars and ballpoint pens were their favored vessels. Mate swore they nearly got him with a beer can, which caught fire when he kicked it. It burned the cuff of his pants but sputtered out instead of exploding, he said, and we weren’t sure whether to believe him. But our teacher seemed to take the stories seriously, reminding us each afternoon that we were never to pick anything up off the street, no matter how shiny. A hard lesson for an already frugal population under pressure of rations.