Girl at War(20)

“Anyone else?” the soldier said. His teeth were brown.

The soldiers organized us into a single-file line. They shoved and jabbed. If someone didn’t move fast enough, they bludgeoned. They arched the line perfectly around the mouth of the pit.

The first time, the noise that came out of the AK didn’t sound like a gunshot. It sounded like a laugh. There was a unified gasp as the first victim crumpled and fell into the void below. For a few seconds, a minute even, nothing happened. Then another shot, and the man next to him—another one of the painters—went.

Witnessing these men’s deaths taught the rest of us two things: they were going to do this slowly, and they were going left to right. This was not the most efficient way to kill people. But it was not the least efficient either. It was good target practice for the new recruits. It was slow enough to make the prisoners squirm. It wasn’t messy. Bloody, maybe. But once they fell, they were already half-buried.

My father looked down at me, then back to my mother on his left side. His mouth twisted as he pulled his eyes away from hers, then spoke to me in a sharp whisper.

“Ana—Ana, listen to me.” A shot. “We’re going to play a game, okay? We’re going to trick the guards.” A shot. “They’re drunk—it’ll be easy if you pay attention. All you have to do is stay close to me, very close—” A shot. “Then when I fall down into the hole, you fall at the same time. Just close your eyes and keep your body straight.” A shot. “But it won’t work unless we both fall at the very same time, okay?” A shot. “Do you understand? Don’t! Don’t look at me.”

I didn’t understand what was happening, really, how we could trick the guards out of shooting us. But my father seemed sure that if we both fell at the same time we would be okay, and he was always right.

“Is Mama going to fall with us, too?” A shot.

“No, she—” My father’s voice cracked. “She’s going to go first.” I looked at my mother, watched my father watching her, the way something in his irises extinguished.

“Ana!” My father’s whisper was much harsher now, frantic. “Listen. Once we fall we have to stay absolutely still and wait until it’s quiet above us. Then we’ll get out together. Okay? Just remember—” A shot. My mother swayed on the rim of the muddy cavity. A dot of crimson appeared at the curve of her lip, streamed down her chin. She seemed to hover there, as if she’d jumped on purpose, landing quietly, not with the thud of the others before her.

I felt myself yell as I realized what had happened. Another shot, one that echoed. I waited, watched my father, then held my breath and fell.

It was dark and sticky and it smelled like sweat and piss. I turned my face to the side so I could breathe. Something heavy came down on my legs, but I felt far away from my body and couldn’t move. I concentrated only on the corner of my once white T-shirt as it soaked up other people’s blood. I used to think all languages were ciphers, that once you learned another’s alphabet you could convert foreign words back into your own, something recognizable. But the blood formed a pattern like a map to comprehension and I understood the differences all at once. I understood how one family could end up in the ground and another could be allowed to continue on its way, that the distinction between Serbs and Croats was much vaster than ways of writing letters. I understood the bombings, the afternoons sitting on the floor of my flat with black fabric covering the windows, the nights spent in concrete rooms. I understood that my father was not getting up. So I waited, my head light and spinning and my eyelids heavy, and came around to the stench of stale fear and the beginnings of decay.

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll get the bulldozer in from Obrovac,” the leader of the soldiers said. Already the bodies around me were cooling, beginning to take on the puttylike feel of dead flesh. My heartbeat thundered in my ears, panic coursing up my neck. But the soldiers obeyed orders, and I listened as the footsteps disappeared and the echoes of the footsteps disappeared, stayed motionless until I convinced myself I had heard them starting up their jeeps.

“Tata,” I said. I knew already, but inched closer against him anyway, nudged his shoulder with mine. “Wake up.” His eyes were clamped shut tight, as if he were counting for a round of hide-and-seek, but there was blood—at his neck, on his lips, in his ears. “Wake up!” It was impossible to take a deep breath. I tried to move, but my legs were pinned down beneath the leg of the person who’d fallen next to me, a teenage boy missing the back of his head. The weight of his body made it worse. I was sure I was suffocating and kicked wildly, trying to shake him off. My hands were still bound and I struggled to sit. Then, using the dead as stepstools, I climbed out of the ground.

I pulled my wrists out of the wire—squeezed one hand through violent and quick, then unwound the steel and freed the other. Strings of my skin clung to the barbs. Blood dripped in staircases down toward my fingertips. We hadn’t been very deep in the forest, and I followed the boot prints out to the road. The soldiers had left the felled tree but had taken the sandbags with them. They had set our cars on fire. I saw the charred skeleton of what I thought had been our car pointing like a giant arrow, and decided to continue in the direction we’d been driving, homeward.

It seemed important to keep walking, but my legs were stiff with shock and the path ahead blurred in and out of focus. I moved with excruciating slowness. Night turned to dawn though I didn’t notice the change until it had already passed, as if I’d been a sleepwalker awakened by the sunlight. The shadows were shrinking as I arrived on the outskirts of a village in the glow of a new morning.