Girl at War(22)

The room was windowless and paneled in dark wood, the tables and chairs arced in a semicircle. I chose a seat and took a swig of the coffee that turned out to be hot chocolate. I choked it down; I usually took my coffee black. The sweetness stuck in my mouth, and it dawned on me that, for Sharon, I would always be ten years old.

—

In America I’d learned quickly what it was okay to talk about and what I should keep to myself. “It’s terrible what happened there,” people would say when I let slip my home country and explained that it was the one next to Bosnia. They’d heard about Bosnia; the Olympics had been there in ’84.

In the beginning, adults operating somewhere between concern and nosiness had asked questions about the war, and I spoke truthfully about the things I’d seen. But my descriptions were often met with an uncomfortable shifting of eyes, as if they were waiting for me to take things back, to say that war or genocide was actually no big deal. They’d offer their condolences, as they’d been taught, then wade through a polite amount of time before presenting an excuse to end the conversation.

Their musings about how and why people stayed in a country under such terrible conditions were what I hated most. I knew it was ignorance, not insight that prompted these questions. They asked because they hadn’t smelled the air raid smoke or the scent of singed flesh on their own balconies; they couldn’t fathom that such a dangerous place could still harbor all the feelings of home. Soon I changed my approach, handpicking anecdotes like the Great Ding-Dong Ditch affront on the Serbian man’s flat, or the games we invented in the shelters, until I’d painted Zagreb with the lighthearted strokes of some carnival fun house. The version of things they ended up with was nonthreatening, even funny. But to create a palatable war was tiring and painful, so one day, I stopped completely. I grew and my accent faded. For years I didn’t reveal anything at all. I passed as an American. It was easier that way—for them—I told myself.

But the UN delegates, now making their way to their seats, knew who I’d been a decade ago. They would be thirsty for gore. I wasn’t sure what to tell them. I’d stayed up late thinking of what to say, had tried to organize things into an outline, but all these years later I still had no narrative to make sense of what had happened. Across the room two teenage black boys shuffled into the front row and slumped low in their chairs. Africa, I thought. Lost Boys, or RUF child soldiers. I wondered whether Sharon had recruited them, too, or if they were someone else’s project.

Sharon stood and gave an introduction while the projector blinked a big red NO SIGNAL on the screen. I watched an intern jiggle the connection wires. After a second reset the slide show appeared—“Children in Combat” in 3-D Word Art autofocusing overhead.

“Presenting first is Ana Juri?,” Sharon said. “Ana is a survivor from the Yugoslavian Civil War.” The slide exhibited before-and-after maps of Yugoslavia and its subsequent color-coded divisions. “At age ten, she was also involved in rebel combat missions against Serb paramilitary forces.” A quiet murmur floated across the tables at this. “I’ll let her introduce herself more fully though,” Sharon said, which I took as my cue to stand.

Unsure applause rippled through the room, and I walked to the spot where Sharon had been standing. The auditorium felt much bigger from the front. I pulled the folded index cards from my pocket, but the bullet points now seemed useless. I coughed, and it echoed across the chamber. A memory of my father resurfaced. I had been nervous about performing a solo part in my third-grade Christmas concert. Just sing loud, he had said. If you’re loud, everyone will believe you got it exactly right.

“I’m Ana,” I said. “I’m twenty and in my third year at NYU, studying literature.” There was a time when I would have been afraid of this room, of the dignitaries and their stiff, suited language, but now I felt more weary than scared. I’d grown out of fear like my childhood clothes, and after the initial adrenaline subsided my voice settled.

“There’s no such thing as a child soldier in Croatia,” I declared as the next slide flashed—two teenage girls sporting camouflage and scuff-marked assault rifles. “There is only a child with a gun.” It was a semantic argument, and bullshit at that, and just like in the lecture halls at university they were eating it up.

The girls in the picture were strangers, but they could have just as easily been me. Caught in that void between childhood and puberty, skin still smooth but limbs gawky from growth spurts. Each held a Kalashnikov across her chest. The taller girl had her other arm over the shorter one’s shoulder; they might have been sisters. Both gave half smiles to the camera, as if they remembered from another time that one was supposed to smile in photographs.

Who had taken these pictures, I wondered as I continued on with the speech, recounting our journey home, my parents’ murder, the village I’d gone to after. Certainly not the locals, who wouldn’t find the image notable enough to warrant a photograph. Too early in the war for trauma tourists, who appeared only after the danger was gone. Must have been journalists, a breed of people I still couldn’t understand. Outsiders who claimed the moral high ground, then stood back and snapped photos during encounters with bloodied children.

“Combat was not an option,” I said. “It was just a thing we did to live. A part of home.”

The slides made the girls look foreign—animals captured on safari—but we were far less exotic than that. When I thought of my own weapon I remembered not its existential power but its weight, heavy against my slight frame. The way its strap rubbed a raw spot on my shoulder. The almost ticklish sensation of my stomach absorbing the pulsating mechanical rhythm as I shot from the hip.