Girl at War(41)

I remembered Baka’s black clothes. “Your grandfather?”

“He’s—she’s in mourning.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. He was old. I mean, we were expecting it.”

I’d never come across death when I was expecting it, but I doubted that would make it any easier.

“Still,” I said. “Is she okay?”

“She’s tough.” Luka had always been stoic, but the detachment with which he spoke about his grandfather was unnerving. It occurred to me that he may have gotten used to saying goodbye. He picked up my bag again and we headed to his room. Except for a bigger bed and a desktop computer, it looked the same. “You can sleep here. I’ll go downstairs.”

“I’d rather take the couch,” I said.

“Suit yourself.”

“Did you get my letter?”

He went to the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a rubber-banded stack of envelopes addressed in my unsteady ten-year-old scrawl.

“Didn’t you get mine?”

I shook my head. “But those are old. I wrote you last month, to say I was coming.”

“Well, I didn’t get—Oh. The postal codes all changed after the war. A lot of the street names, too. It might get here eventually; it takes them a while to sort through the stuff rejected by the computer system. And if you don’t write First Class, god knows what they do with it. Hey. Why did you stop writing? In ’ninety-two?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just got scared.”

“That something happened to me?”

“That you wouldn’t write back,” I said, though I’d been equally afraid of what he’d say if he did.

Outside around the backyard table everyone spoke much faster than I remembered. Luka’s mother, from a Herzegovinian family, had thirty-one cousins and invited them to everything. About half of them had actually shown up, and they crowded around the patio in mismatched chairs hailing from various decades. From what I could make out, the cousins were engaged in an argument that swung with a bizarre effortlessness between the profligate behavior of parliament’s ruling party and two different brands of spreadable cheese.

Luka sat across from me, a mischievous grin surfacing whenever a member of his family called for another round of rakija, brandy cooked in bathtubs by old ladies in the mountains and sold on the side of the road in Coca-Cola bottles. The alcohol just made me sweatier; the temperature hung steady at thirty-seven degrees even though it was dusk, and I had grown accustomed to air-conditioning. Each shot of brandy lit a fire in my mouth and carried a torch down into my chest. Had I really drunk this when I was young? And as medicine? As if in answer to my thought Luka’s eight-year-old cousin slammed his glass on the table and let out a drunken belch.

I should have gone to the hostel, I thought, as the group filled the yard with spirited laughter. The language that in my mind had existed for so long only in past tense was alive again in conversation and pulsing from the radio. Every time I spoke I was met with a correction of my childlike grammar. English words welled up in my mouth and I swallowed them with difficulty.

Now the cousins, already into their second bottle of rakija, had nicknamed me American Girl. I mulled over the vinegary phrase with distaste, struggling to construct a grammatically sound sentence I could wage against them. In the end, self-consciousness blocked all productive channels of thought, and I resigned myself to eating in silence.

Afterward I climbed up to the roof and tried not to cry.

“What was I thinking?” I said to Luka, who had followed me. “I can’t stay here.” Luka, who’d always gotten nervous when I was sad, turned away. I knew it was only because he liked to be alone when he was upset and wanted to afford me the same privacy. After a while, though, when I hadn’t calmed down, he sat beside me, pulling his knees to his chest to get traction with his bare feet against the clay roof tiles.

“You’re just tired,” he said. He put his arm around my shoulder, tentatively at first, then letting his full weight come down on me.

“I want to go home,” I said, all too aware I had no idea where that might be.





6


In the morning I felt better. I’d spent the night in a jet-lag coma, dreamless, on Luka’s living room couch, its worn upholstery retaining just enough texture to leave a checked pattern on my cheek. The couch was the same one they’d always had, recognizable in an innocuous way—just an old couch in the home of an old friend.

Still, when I saw Luka standing in the kitchen I felt unsettled. He offered me a plate as he took one down from the cabinet, but we were clumsy with one another; he pulled away too quickly and I felt the china slipping between our hands. I set it safely on the counter and sorted through my archive of go-to conversation topics, searching first for something witty, then just anything to say.

I smeared Nutella over the remains of yesterday’s bread, and Luka mixed a pitcher of fluorescent yellow Cedevita. As a public health initiative we’d been organized into lines in the school yard and handed little cups of the stuff, chalky powder injected with vitamins and stirred into water, to make sure we got something of nutritional value in the weeks when food was hard to come by. They hadn’t expected an entire generation to become addicted to the concoction—lemonade on steroids—but we had, eventually making its producers the most successful pharmaceutical company in the country.