Girl at War(49)

“It’s not!” I said, defensive. “It’s old. People had Polaroids here, too.”

“Seriously, what’s more ‘instant gratification’ than this?” He flicked the photo. “You can be nostalgic within three minutes.”

“It’s not like that. This photo’s one-of-a-kind. Impossible to copy. It’s like art.”

“Art, eh?” Luka said, taking the photo and shaking it.

“That actually doesn’t work. Shaking it. It’s a myth.”

He stopped and handed me the photo. We drew our feet from the water and let them dry on the cracked wood. Then I stood and slipped the Polaroid into my pocket. I thought of Sebald and his photos—maybe they were his way of bypassing the slipperiness of memory. “Anyway, they’re for Rahela,” I said. We trekked up out of the valley and back toward the car and the road and the coast.

—

Luka’s mind was a cavernous place I couldn’t navigate, though the ambling course of our conversations was familiar. I was both fascinated and annoyed by his willingness to pull apart things I would have left in one piece, just like he had when we were small.

“Communism is fascism, in all practical applications,” he was saying now. “Can you think of a Communist country sans dictator?” But I was thinking of Rebecca West, of how the people she’d met in Yugoslavia were all killed or enslaved, tangled up in this same debate at the start of the Second World War. Croatia had been on the wrong side of history then—a puppet state of the Germans and Italians—and had killed its share of innocents. I hated this most of all, that my anger could not be righteous against such a murky backdrop.

“True,” Luka said, when I mentioned the fascist faction in the forties. “But before that they were starving us out; we couldn’t even own land. We’ve been fighting for thousands of years. And most of those guys got executed when Tito came into power. That’s just how it is.”

He spoke with some finality, and I was relieved when the conversation swelled past the ghosts of ex-governments and into a broader sweep of ethics. We began with Voltaire (Luka loved the witty attack on religious dogma, it being the driving force behind our ethnic tensions as far as he was concerned) and pushed up through Foucault (whose amoral take on power infuriated him), I all the while feeling that my American education had left me remarkably ill-equipped for a discussion of philosophy. Luka seemed to have read at least chunks of the seminal texts in high school, while I kept up by regurgitating lines from the single critical theory course I’d taken my freshman year, until I saw a sign that marked the impending road split. I pulled over and reached for the map in the glove compartment.

“What are you looking for?” said Luka. “You just need to follow the signs for Dubrovnik.”

I ignored him and traced my finger along the road, squinting to read the names of the smallest villages.

Luka put his arm across my lap, blocking the map. “Ana. Look at me.”

“What?”

“I’m here. I’ll go with you wherever you want. But you can’t shut me out.”

“I’m not—”

“Whatever it is. Maybe I can help.”

“I don’t exactly have a master plan here.”

“I could’ve asked my dad for old intel or something. You should just be honest with me.”

“I know. I know.”

“You promise?”

“I promise,” I said. It was a lie even as it was coming out of my mouth. There was still one thing I hadn’t told him, had never told anyone.

“Okay,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”

I pointed to a part of the road with a bend like a boomerang and restarted the car.

—

Back on the road I felt almost dizzy with anticipation. I’d pictured a return to this place hundreds of times—had dreaded it and yearned for it—but in all my imaginings it never involved feeling so faint. I studied the landscape for clues, but nothing was familiar, or everything looked the same. We passed strips of black pine and ash, some vibrant green, some blackened and bare from wildfires. I white-knuckled the steering wheel and pushed my foot down hard against the gas pedal. I could see Luka watching me from the corner of his eye.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you want me to drive?”

“I’m fine.” The tree line was becoming less patchy, more mature, until thick bands of white oak lined both sides of the highway.

“Seriously, Ana, you’re going too fast. The cops will double the bribe if they see your American license.”

I glanced at the quivering needle of the speedometer but didn’t slow down.

“If you just pull over I can—”

“I don’t want to stop here.”

A small side road, almost completely obscured by overgrowth, caught my eye. I craned my neck to watch it take a steep drop down into a valley. Luka protested again, but I shushed him. My stomach lurched, but I tried to ignore it; there were probably a lot of villages in the valley, with a lot of sinuous little offshoots that followed the same arc.

Then, after a few minutes the main road made a harsh curve, and I knew.

“Oh my god.”

“What is it?”