Girl at War(4)

The shelter smelled of mold and unwashed bodies. When my eyes adjusted I surveyed the room. There were bunk beds, a wooden bench near the door, and a generator bicycle in the far corner. My classmates and I would come to fight over the bike in subsequent raids, elbowing one another for a turn converting pedals into the electricity that powered the lights in the shelter. But the first time we barely noticed it. We were occupied with surveying the odd collection of people seized from their daily activities and smashed together in a Cold War lair. I studied the group closest to me: men in business suits, or coveralls and mechanics’ jackets like my father’s, women in pantyhose and pencil skirts. Others in aprons with babies at their hips. I wondered where my mother and Rahela were; there was no public shelter near our building. Then I heard Luka calling for me and realized we’d been separated by an influx of newcomers. I felt my way in his direction, identifying him by the outline of his unruly hair.

“You’re bleeding,” I said.

Luka wiped his chin with his arm, tried to make out the line of blood on his sleeve.

“I thought it would happen. I heard my dad talking about it last night.” Luka’s father worked for the police academy and was in charge of training new recruits. I was annoyed Luka hadn’t mentioned the possibility of a raid earlier. He looked comfortable there in the dark, his arm draped on the rung of a bunk bed ladder.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to scare you.”

“I’m not scared,” I said. I wasn’t. Not yet.

The siren again, signaling an all-clear. The men pressed back the door and we ascended the stairs, unsure of what to expect. Aboveground it was still daylight and the sun obscured my vision as much as darkness had below. I saw spots. When they dissipated, the playground came into focus just as I’d remembered it. Nothing had happened.

At home I barged through the front door, announcing to my mother that there was no milk left in the entire city of Zagreb. She pushed her chair back from the kitchen table, where she’d been grading a pile of student assignments, and shifted Rahela closer up against her chest as she stood. Rahela cried.

“Are you okay?” my mother asked. She gathered me up in a forceful embrace.

“I’m fine. We went to the kindergarten. Where’d you and Rahela go?”

“In the basement. By the ?upe.”

The basement of our building had only two notable characteristics: filth and ?upe. Every family had a ?upe, a padlocked wooden storage unit. I loved to press my face against the gap between the door and the hinges to see inside, a private viewing of a family’s lowliest possessions. We kept potatoes in ours, and they fared well in the darkness. The basement didn’t seem very safe; there wasn’t a big metal door or bunk beds or a generator. But my mother seemed sad when I asked about it later. “It’s just as good a place as any,” she said.

That night my father came home with a shoe box full of brown packing tape he’d pilfered from the tram office, where he worked some days. He pulled big sticky Xs diagonally across the windows and I followed behind him pressing the tape down, smoothing out the air bubbles. We put a double layer on the French doors that led to the little balcony off the living room. The balcony was my favorite part of our flat. If I ever felt a twinge of disappointment after coming home from Luka’s house, where his mother did not have to work and he slept in a real bed, I would step outside and lie on my back, letting my feet swing over the ledge, and reason that no one who lived in a house could have a high-up balcony like mine.

Now, though, I worried that my father would tape the doors shut. “We’ll still be able to go outside, right?”

“Of course, Ana. We’re just shoring up the glass.” The tape was supposed to hold the windows together if there was an explosion. “And anyway,” my father said, sounding tired, “a little packing tape’s not good for much.”





2


“Which color are we again?” I stood behind my father, resting my chin on his shoulder as he read the newspaper, and pointed to a map of Croatia splashed with red and blue dots indicating the opposing armies. He’d already told me once but I couldn’t keep it straight.

“Blue,” my father said. “The Croatian National Guard. The police.”

“And the red ones?”

“Jugoslavenska Narodna Armija. The JNA.”

I didn’t understand why the Yugoslav National Army would want to attack Croatia, which was full of Yugoslavian people, but when I asked my father he just sighed and closed the paper. In the process I glimpsed the front page, a photo of men waving chain saws and skull-emblazoned flags. They had felled a tree across a road, blocking passage in both directions; the headline TREE TRUNK REVOLUTION! ran across the bottom of the page in fat black type.

“Who are they?” I asked my father. The men were bearded and wearing mismatched uniforms. In all the military parades, I had never seen JNA soldiers carrying pirate flags.

“?etniks,” he said, folding the paper and tucking it on a shelf above the television, out of my reach.

“What are they doing with the trees? And why do they have beards if they’re in the army?”

I knew the beards were important because I’d noticed all the shaving. Across the city, men with more than two days’ stubble were eyed suspiciously by their clean-shaven counterparts. The week before, Luka’s father had shaved off the beard he’d worn since before Luka and I were born. Unable to part with it completely, he’d left his mustache, but the effect was mostly comical; the bushy whiskers atop his upper lip were a specter of the face we’d known, and left him looking perpetually forlorn.