Girl at War(14)

Again neither of my parents acknowledged me, but I learned of the news through a collective murmur that floated through the court, at times so synchronized it seemed intentionally in unison.

“Vukovar je pao.” The sound of such a large whisper was haunting, in keeping with the message it carried. Vukovar had fallen.

Vukovar had been under siege for months. The people from the string city now living in Sahara, the boys who’d joined our class mid-lessons, had gotten out early. We knew the stories of their families who were marched to displaced persons camps and never heard from again; we’d heard about the people who’d stayed behind, men and women with do-it-yourself weaponry gunning at the JNA from their bedroom windows. But I didn’t understand what it meant, that Vukovar “had fallen,” and tried to come up with a comparable image. First I thought of an earthquake, though I’d never experienced one. Next I pictured the cliffs of Tiska, where we had spent the summers, imagining the side of the mountain crumbling and dropping into the Adriatic. But Vukovar wasn’t a tiny village and it wasn’t near the sea. The rocket at Banski Dvori had collapsed part of the Upper Town, but that was only a little piece of Zagreb. I knew a fallen city must mean something much worse.

After a while it became clear that the clusters of people were not static, were instead moving in a circular crush toward something I wasn’t tall enough to see. Eventually the whirlpool of people pushed out from the courtyard onto the main street, and I caught sight of the center of attention: a shivering band of men and boys awash in a brand of terror so unique even I could identify them as refugees. They looked more desperate than those from the first round, wild-eyed and concave in all the wrong places. They clutched scraps of paper marked with the addresses of in-laws, cousins, family friends, anyone who might be willing to take them in, and thrust them in the faces of my parents and neighbors, exchanging bits of information about the front lines for directions to their relatives’ houses.

One man from the group reached out and grabbed my father’s forearm, holding his address close to my father’s nose with a shaky hand. His face was shadowed, empty troughs beneath his cheekbones.

“They’re killing them,” the man said.

“Who?” said my father, studying the paper for clues.

“Everyone.”

“Would you like some soup?” said my mother.

—

Inside, on television, I saw what it meant for a city to fall. The footage was foreign. Any Croats in Vukovar were either fighting or being captured, so the Croatian news network had intercepted a German broadcast, their correspondent narrating in a mix of unfamiliar consonants. The feed was live and the voice-over untranslated, but the refugee, my parents, and I stared at the screen, as if looking at it hard enough would somehow advance our German skills. The cement fa?ades of homes were disfigured, scarred by bullets and mortars. JNA tanks barreled down the city’s main street, followed by convoys of white UN Peacekeeping trucks. Alongside the road, in a place that had probably once been grass but was now trampled and muddy, lines of people were lying facedown, their noses pressed into the dirt and their hands behind their heads. A bearded soldier with an AK-47 walked between the rows. He fired. Somewhere, someone was screaming. The camera jerked up and away, capturing instead a collapsing church steeple. The dull roar of a distant explosion rumbled through the TV speakers. In the background more bearded men with black skull flags marched down the empty street, singing, “Bit ?e mesa! Bit ?e mesa! Kla?emo Hrvate!” There will be meat; there will be meat. We’ll slaughter all Croatians.

“Please turn that off,” the man said.

“One minute,” mumbled my father.

Just then Luka burst into our flat, the doorknob coming to rest in the same dent I’d made.

“Ana! Vukovar je pao!”

“I know,” I said. I gestured to the television and the hunched man at the table with his back to the screen, who was devouring the soup that was supposed to have been my father’s lunch in quick, greedy swallows. Luka reddened and greeted my parents. He thrust his hands in the pockets of his jeans and the four of us stood around the TV, surveying each other’s reactions to the on-screen carnage.

“Does your mother know you’re out?” my mother said.

“Yes,” Luka said, a little too fast. He grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the door.

“Maybe you should both stay here. I’ll make you a snack.”

“Mama.” I slumped my shoulders in protest. I knew Luka had come because he’d deemed the desecration of Vukovar a good reason to skip class, but our chances of leaving were better if we acted as if nothing had changed. “We have to go to school,” I said. “We’re gonna be late.” But my mother, who refused to negotiate with whining, ignored me and began mixing Rahela’s formula. Luka and I skulked into the living room.

Having downed the soup and eager to escape the television, the refugee followed us and sat on the far end of the couch. His face was coated in stubble and mud, dirt smeared across his shirt and lodged beneath his overgrown fingernails. He made me nervous, and I wished my parents would be more attentive to their guest, but they were busy trying to get Rahela to eat something—an effort that had essentially become force-feeding—and neither of them noticed.

“He took my wife,” the refugee said. “I heard her screaming through the wall.”