Girl at War(48)

At the park I pulled my camera from the trunk and slung its oversize strap across my chest. We talked our way through the front gate without paying. The woman manning the booth said she was just relieved to hear someone speaking Croatian. She could go a whole day without coming across another Croat, she said, spent hours conversing in pantomime and broken English with tourists from Italy and France. The German tourists were better, she said, because she knew a little German.

“Everyone learns German in school now because they were quick to recognize us as a country,” Luka said to me. His sidebar didn’t slow the park attendant down at all—the problem with the Germans was that they were a little rude and all dressed like Boy Scouts, and anyway we should go in if we liked, because it was silly that Croats should have to pay to see their own park.

“Once, when the war was just over, my mother and I went to Germany to visit her sister,” Luka said as we passed through the gate and onto the main trail. “I was fifteen and wearing a Croatian flag T-shirt, police academy issue, and in the Frankfurt airport a man came up to me and asked me if I was Croatian.”

“Never a good sign.”

“I said yes, and he said he’d lived in Germany for a long time but was a Croat, too, and was sorry for all I’d had to go through. He gave us a box of expensive chocolate and walked off.

“That was the only good thing I ever got just for being a Croat. Until now.”

“I guess this was a first for me,” I said. Once on the subway I’d stared too long at a couple speaking Serbian, lingering in a manner that must have betrayed comprehension.

“Govorite srpski?” the boyfriend had said.

“Hrvatski.”

“Oh!” they’d said simultaneously. The boyfriend had stuck out his hand, and we’d shaken. We’d spent a few minutes in desperate friendliness, and I’d gotten off at the next stop, which wasn’t mine. Nothing good had come from that; they’d looked embarrassed and I was late for class.

Luka and I passed a gilded plaque laid in the ground that read, IN MEMORY OF JOSIP JOVI?. Plitvice had been at the center of the war before the war even began—the region was one of the first to be seized because the Serbs wanted cross-country access to the sea. During the takeover, which came to be called Bloody Easter, Croat and Serb police forces had clashed, and the resultant dead officers, one on each side, were eulogized as martyrs. It was months before the air raids started, but technically, the war’s first blood spilled here.

The edge of the park didn’t look like much—we were still at a high elevation and we’d have to hike down to get to the water. We examined the map the woman in the window had given us and decided on a route that would take us past the biggest waterfall.

The lakes, the pamphlet suggested, were named entirely after legendary people who had drowned in them.

“I wonder what they called them before all these people drowned,” Luka said, stuffing the paper in his back pocket.

“Probably nothing. No need to differentiate.”

“Why were they all drowning anyway? It’s a lake. It’s not like you get caught in a riptide.”

“Did your dad know the guys who fought here?”

“Huh?”

“On Krvavi Uskrs. The cops who got killed.”

“God, I forgot about that. Is this too close for comfort?”

“The whole country is too close for comfort,” I said. I’d meant it to sound like a joke, but it came out wobbly and Luka didn’t laugh. “Let’s just go look at the water. Surely there’s a reason all these Germans are wandering around a sad little battlefield.”

“He didn’t know the guy,” Luka said. “I think he was from Zagora.”

We arrived at the edge of a bluff and peered down at the lakes, the water a shocking turquoise. The shallows were bridged by wooden-slat walking paths, and the sound of the falls overwhelmed the garble of foreign languages. The place was so obviously beautiful it was almost disturbing—perhaps people had drowned here because they’d wanted to, or at least allowed themselves to succumb to that unfathomable blue. Its beauty was completely unmarred by the bloodshed, and it was easy to see how tourists could push all that history from their minds.

We found a secluded place at the bottom of the canyon to put our feet in the water. Touching the water wasn’t allowed, a sign in several languages warned, but Luka didn’t seem worried about the rules, and I was emboldened by the ticket woman at the gate, who’d called the place mine. The water was clear and warm, and I watched a fish brush against Luka’s ankle. He flinched, then faked a cough to pretend he hadn’t noticed. I laughed and switched on my camera.

The camera was a Polaroid, the pop-up kind, which I’d bought at a garage sale before I’d gone to college. I’d purchased it out of a desire to be interesting—Gardenville could bring out that kind of desperation in a person. The camera gears whirred, and Luka looked startled by the mechanical grinding amid the white noise of rushing water.

“What is that?” he said, right as I snapped a picture. The camera churned the photo square from its front slot. A specter of Luka materialized, mouth agape and eyes wide and black against the brilliant blue background. I held the photo up, and he scoffed. “That’s so…American.” It wasn’t the response I’d been expecting, and I knew he didn’t mean it in a good way.