Girl at War(37)

I listened to his heartbeat slow. “Brian?” I said after a while. He didn’t respond. I slid from his bed and searched his desk for a piece of scrap paper. Sorry to leave. Been having trouble sleeping.

I took a detour to the library. I was nearly finished with Austerlitz and needed a new book. The circulation desk was about to close for the night, and the work-study girl scowled when I walked in and showed my guest pass. I found myself typing “Croatia” into the catalog database, and followed the resulting call number to the Eastern European section at the back of the stacks. I pulled the biggest nonreference book—Black Lamb and Grey Falcon—from its place on the shelf and thumbed through the first few pages in the volume of over a thousand. It had been published in Britain in the forties, and I was wary of what kind of light a dead Englishwoman might shed on modern-day anything, never mind a country so drastically changed as mine. But when I turned to the dedication page my breath seized at the stark precision of its single sentence: To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved. I snapped the heavy cover shut.

The book hadn’t been checked out since 1991, and the work-study girl made a point of looking me over before stamping the due date card with the twenty-first century. I thought of the person who’d borrowed it more than a decade ago, when I was still across the ocean. A journalism student, I decided. An overeager one, looking for some deep background to inject sense into an article about ethnic cleansing.

I went home but didn’t open the book again. I could not shake the thought of friends gone missing. I turned on the computer and trolled the Internet in search of Luka. I’d done it only once before, but finding no trace of him had sent me into a weeklong depression and I’d forbidden myself from making it a habit. Now, I reasoned, I couldn’t feel much worse. But Luka’s life, if he was still alive, had produced no techno-footprint. At two in the morning my roommate, Natalie, came home drunk and fell asleep with her shoes on. I walked to the bodega and bought a Coke and a frozen burrito. Going to bed now would surely bring on another set of nightmares, so, sufficiently caffeinated, I went to the common room, turned the TV on loud, and read Rebecca West’s book until the sun came up.

—

Over the next few weeks I told Brian pieces of my story—the sandbags and air raids and snipers in Zagreb, the ?etniks in the forest, and the little village afterward. He was patient and didn’t push me if I stopped mid-thought, but it didn’t matter; I could feel myself slipping, and had no way to contend with the fact that all his kindness and understanding could not fix me. Each night I’d wait for him to fall asleep, then return to my dorm to pace the halls. Once I stumbled over my shoe and woke him.

“You can stay, you know. Elliot’s probably at Sasha’s for the night.”

“I don’t want to keep you up.”

“You have work to do? You can turn the desk lamp on.”

“It’s not that. The dreams I told you about. I wake up yelling.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I do.”

“But if we’re going to live together—”

“Brian, don’t.”

“A few bad dreams are no big deal in the grand scheme of things.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I just can’t have that conversation right now,” I said. I fumbled with my shoelaces in the dark and left.

—

“There you are,” said Professor Ariel when I appeared in his doorway one afternoon. “That big research paper in Brighton’s class keeping you busy?”

“Yeah, sorry. And I’ve been reading…something else.”

“Come, sit.”

I put Austerlitz down on his desk.

“Lovely, no?”

I nodded.

He leafed through the volume. “I find the symbolic use of train stations throughout to be his most successful integration of photos. What have you dog-eared here?”

“Gosh, I’m sorry. I don’t even remember doing that.”

“The wily ways of memory.” He chuckled. “Not a problem. Here.” He handed me the open book, and I skimmed the page I’d bent. It was easy to find what I’d been trying to save.

“This,” I said. “?‘I had never heard of an Austerlitz before, and from the first I was convinced that no one else bore that name, no one in Wales, or in the Isles, or anywhere else in the world.’?”

“What do you like about it?”

“The isolation, I guess. That he can describe an emotion so perfectly, without any adjectives.”

“A rare talent.”

I passed the book back over the desk and nodded again.

“What do you make of his critics?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that there could be critics of such a writer. Brian was one thing, but he hadn’t even read the book. “What do you mean?”

“He’s got no new material. That it’s just more of the same.”

“Of course it’s more of the same. What else is there to write about when you have this?”

“That is the counterargument,” Professor Ariel said.

—

By mid-April the gray skies were receding, and I tried to let the sunny weather permeate the vacant feeling inside me. Brian attempted to coax me into talking about what was bothering me, and in response I picked petty fights with him until we had spiraled into a cycle of bickering and making up. I studied more than I needed to just to fill time. There were only three weeks left in the semester, and then I could get out of this city.