Girl at War(13)

Finally Marina and my mother emerged from the bedroom and Petar made his announcement: he was due at the training base in a week.

“Are you nervous?” said my father.

“No,” Petar said. “Just out of shape!” He patted his stomach and grinned at me, hoping to get a laugh, but even I could see that he’d lost weight and his smile didn’t match his eyes.

“Where are they going to send you?”

“I’ll be close by. After training I’ll be part of the Ring of Defense for Zagreb. Maybe even come home on weekends.”

“You can stay with us, Marina, if you like,” said my mother.

“Don’t be silly. I’ll be fine.”

“She won’t even notice I’m gone,” he said. The four of them looked at each other and I felt that frustration so common to childhood, like when everyone laughs at a joke you don’t understand, though it was silent in the flat save for the clinking of spoons against bowls, and Petar’s heavy sighs when he swallowed.

I stayed awake as long as I could that night, listening to my parents in the kitchen.

“I should be out there. Everyone who can stand should be defending the city,” my father said.

“There are plenty of soldiers. With your eyes—it’s better this way.”

“It’d be better if I could protect my family.”

“Everything’s going to be okay,” my mother said. Usually he was the one reassuring her, and hearing the reversal made me feel guilty for eavesdropping. “Besides, I’m glad you’re here with me. With us.”

“Me, too,” he said after a while, and I heard them kiss before I fell asleep.

The air raid siren was our alarm clock, one that in those first months we diligently obeyed. A siren at one in the morning meant a collective rolling out of bed and pulling on of boots, an outpouring of groggy neighbors into the fluorescent light (or, in an outage, the impermeable darkness) of the hallway. That night it seemed like I’d only been asleep for seconds when my father took me and my blanket from the couch, my mother with Rahela close behind. I bounced sleepily against his chest as he carried me down the stairs to the basement, our hearts beating out the quick, irregular rhythms of those abruptly pulled from their beds. The basement air cut cold through my pajamas, and I sat leaning against our ?upa and pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders, waiting for sleep.

Just as my mind was growing warm with unconsciousness the siren sounded, signaling an all-clear. I rubbed my eyes as my father carried me back up the stairs and returned me to the couch. But as soon as he’d gone from the room the siren began to howl. Again Rahela cried. I pulled the blanket over my head. My father appeared in the doorway, embracing a pile of blankets and pillows.

“Come here, Ana.”

“I don’t want to go again,” I said, but I got up anyway.

He dropped the pile in the middle of the kitchen and led me to the pantry, clearing the floor inside and spreading my blanket as best he could in the small area. I looked at my father, read on his face a silent apology before stepping in and pulling my knees to my chest. My mother arranged Rahela on a pillow beside me, then she and my father lay down in front of the pantry door. I slept with a broom pressed to the back of my head, and my father held my hand, squeezing it tighter whenever the siren called out through the earliest hours of the morning.





6


I woke to an empty flat. Rahela was gone from the pillow, and I crawled out of the pantry on stiffened knees and pulled myself to my feet. The television blared at the empty kitchen chairs. The door to our flat was open in a display of carelessness uncharacteristic of either of my parents, and, panicked, I rushed out into the hallway. My neighbors’ doors were ajar as well, televisions on and rooms vacant.

“Tata! Where are you?” I yelled down the hallway, hoping at the very least I could incite a neighbor to come out and chastise me for making a racket. No one appeared. I was beginning to think I was the only one left in the building when someone from the flat across the hall murmured my name.

“Psssssst. Juri? kid,” the voice hissed. It was Rahela’s ancient babysitter. Her door was open a crack and I pushed my way in. She was hunched over her kitchen counter, entwined in her phone cord, whispering. When I looked her way she covered the receiver with a hand so pallid and veined it looked green.

“They’re all down there,” she said to me. She tapped a bony index finger to her window. I took off for the stairs.

Outside, what looked like the residents of the entire building were huddled in tight conversational knots in the courtyard. Handkerchiefs, hugging, rivulets of mascara. I spotted my parents, Rahela wiggling in a tangle of blanket in my mother’s arms, and felt relief, then an uprush of anger that they’d forgotten about me.

“Tata!” I slipped my arm around his leg. My father put his hand on my shoulder but remained immersed in a discussion with one of the main door guards.

I squirmed from my father’s grip and pushed my way into the center of the circle my parents and neighbors had created. I tried my mother this time, tugging at the pocket of her apron. The fact that she was in her apron outside was indicative of the weightiness of the morning’s events; she wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing it in public otherwise. “Mama,” I said, on tiptoe now. “Why’d you leave me upstairs?”