Girl at War(47)
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “You wanna go somewhere?”
“Like for a pizza?”
“Tiska.”
“Tiska. You sure you want to go down that way, on the southern road?” There was only one main road that spanned the country north to south. A day’s drive from Zagreb to Split, then a few smaller offshoots to take us the rest of the way down to Tiska.
“I’ll be fine.”
“I heard you leave last night.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I just went for a bike ride.” He knew I was lying, I could tell, but he had seen history blaze across my pupils, and left it alone.
“I’ll see if I can get the car.”
In the morning Luka began a campaign of pleading with his mother to let us borrow the family Renault 4. As children we’d been much freer than American ten-year-olds, but now there’d been a strange reversal: Luka and all the other university students were living at home, beholden to their parents.
In the end it was unclear whether or not we’d actually gotten permission to take the car, but we acted as if we had, Luka palming the keys from their nail on the wall. The car, which had once been white, was now mostly rust. We packed the trunk with clothes, water jugs, two orange blankets, and a machete from the shed and left without saying goodbye, in case we weren’t supposed to be going.
We stopped at the grocery store for provisions. We filled a cart with cases of milk—the kind in cardboard boxes that doesn’t need to be refrigerated—bags of granola, farmer cheese, and a fresh loaf of black bread. In the first winter of the war, after my parents had been killed and we were hungry, Luka and I had swept through this same store, gathering packets of powdered soup and carrying them to the pet food aisle, which no workers monitored. We tore at the packaging with our teeth and passed a packet between us, salty and stinking of onions. In Croatia, at the start of 1992, this did not feel like stealing. I glanced at Luka for any sign of this memory, but he had probably been in the store hundreds of times since then, and he pushed the cart toward the checkout. We paid.
A few minutes later, before we’d reached the highway entrance, Luka pulled off the road into the parking lot of the technical high school.
“You drive?” he said.
“Yeah. Not stick though.”
Luka got out of the car, and I slid over the center console into the driver’s seat. Driving stick was like a seesaw, Luka explained. About keeping a balance of pressure. “Press that pedal on the left all the way to the floor.”
I pressed the wrong one, and the engine revved wildly.
“Your other left.” The car was so old it had a manual choke, and he reached across me to slide the vented lever up until the motor sounded less like it was being strangled. I looped around the lot for a while without stalling, shifted into first, second, third.
“All right,” he said, gesturing for me to turn out onto the main road. “You’re ready.”
—
“WHAT DO I DO?” I yelled. I had caught a traffic light on a steep incline, and when the light changed and I took my foot from the brake the car began an unfamiliar backward slide. I slammed the pedal back against the floor.
“Just give it a little gas.” Behind me the drivers honked. I pulled my clutch foot up too fast, and the car sputtered, then went quiet. Someone passed us on the shoulder. Luka reached over and turned the car off, then told me to restart it, but I just glowered at him until the light had gone red again.
“Calm down,” he said in an unfazed manner I found infuriating.
“Fuck this.” I wrenched the key in the ignition; the engine howled as I gunned it across the intersection. More honking. I pulled over.
“You were doing fine. You have to learn. I can’t drive the whole trip.”
“That was not fine.”
Luka sighed. “You’re impatient,” he said, which, because it was true, hurt more than a harsher insult. We switched places. “You’re driving once we get out of Zagreb,” he said, and flipped on the radio.
—
On the highway I was calmer. I was driving again, but without stop signs and traffic lights it was easier. We took off our shoes, threw them in the backseat, cranked down the windows, and let the breeze flow through the car. The air was hot, but at least it was moving. The dashboard vibrated with the folk-techno mash-ups that pervaded the country’s airwaves. A mix of traditional Muslim and Mediterranean melodies overlaid with thumping house beats, they’d become the new postwar pop. A far cry from the nationalistic anthems of our childhood, they were what Luka termed a “cultural cease-fire,” an effort to bring the segregated nationalities back into communion with one another.
“I like the new songs,” he said, fiddling with the dial to clear out the static as we passed the last of Zagreb’s suburbs. “It’s genius, really. People in the discotheque, all drunk, rubbing up against each other to music that everyone thinks came from their own heritage.”
Outside of Zagreb things quickly became rural—sheep and chickens and rows of corn along the roadside—and it was hard to tell one farm or cluster from the next. Luka spoke about the end of the war and which friends from elementary school were doing what, and I told him stories about Rahela and American high school and New York City.
I looked at the clock; we’d been driving for a few hours. Bullet-dented road signs showed we were approaching the place where the road split toward Sarajevo. I got nervous and swerved to follow a sign toward Plitvice Lakes National Park. Luka noticed but didn’t say anything. Plitvice was famously beautiful, even outside Croatia, and I’d never been there, so it was an easy enough stop to justify.