Girl at War(50)

I slammed on the brakes and swerved to the shoulder. We slid to a stop on the roadside grass, the smell of burning brake pads drifting through the open windows.

“What the hell, Ana! Are you crazy?”

“No” was the correct answer, the one I wanted to say, but instead what came out was “probably,” then a wet, congested sound in my chest. Luka sighed and dropped a hand on my knee, and I cried the kind of suffocating sobs I hadn’t since I’d been on the other side of this same road, ten years before.





Safe House





1


My eyes burned. The sun sat on the horizon and I walked toward it. The road forked. The main road was big and level, and the smaller road was unpaved and sloped down into the lowlands. A spiral of smoke twisted up from the valley, beckoning me with a wispy finger. The big road said nothing. I followed the smoke. It led me to the center of a village, down a rocky street lined with houses. A woman wrapped in a purple shawl was feeding leftover crusts to emaciated chickens in her yard. I felt her looking but kept walking. As I got closer, her mouth slackened at the sight of me—a tiny, blood-crusted zombie, soaked in other people’s bodily fluids. She approached, called out to me. I stopped in the middle of the street.

She came to me and kneeled, asked my name, where I was from, what had happened. I tried to determine from her accent whether or not she was a Serb, if it was safe to speak to her. I couldn’t tell, and decided it didn’t really matter, that I had nowhere else to go and I might as well answer. But somewhere along the way my body had taken a vow of silence; she talked and talked and I stayed quiet. She reached for my hand, and I vomited on the asphalt. In the end she grabbed my arm and led me to her house. She stood over me and rinsed the blood from my wrists. It was only cold water, but the cuts were dirty and it stung. My eyes welled up, but no tears escaped.

—

For the first week I sat on her kitchen floor with my back to the wall and my knees to my chest. I counted the squares in the linoleum, stared at the crack in the dining table leg, scratched at my gauze-wrapped wrists. I blinked rarely, and moved with a halting, mechanical edge. At night I slept in the same spot, curling into a knot on the floor.

The woman’s son, a boy a few years older than I was, left the house early each morning and came home after dark. He stomped around in combat boots and talked incessantly of the “Safe House.” It was a phrase I’d never heard before, and I assumed it was the village’s bomb shelter. The boy never spoke to me, walked in wide arcs around my spot as if I had a contagious illness. I felt like I did. The woman gave me water in a tin cup and bread with butter, but it was hard to eat. Even breathing was a conscious effort. The first few times the air raid siren sounded the woman tried to coax me into going to the shelter with her, but I stayed in my corner. The explosions of that first week were inconsequential; I was anesthetized to fear.

The woman had visitors who entered under various pretenses and examined me from the corners of their eyes but spoke as if I wasn’t there at all.

“Maybe she’s just stupid,” someone offered.

“Maybe she’s mute.”

“She’s not stupid,” said the woman, whose name these conversations revealed was Drenka. “It’s not that she can’t talk. She just won’t. I can tell.”

“Seems to me she got a shock,” said one of the kinder old women. “I saw her all bloodied up when you found her.”

Eventually my novelty wore off, and I became privy to the women’s gossip—stories about the mixed Serb-Croat family who had lived across the street and disappeared in the middle of the night, about the next-door neighbor’s daughter, who was fifteen and pregnant.

The JNA air force had crushed the village at the start of the war as part of their mission to make a Serbian path to the sea. Afterward, a small band of ?etnik rebels—some of them villagers themselves—had taken control. The ?etniks made alternating rounds between this village and several others along the same stretch of highway, interdicting humanitarian aid and Croatian military supplies and holding down the settlements as way stations for their own convoys. They had decided not to kill us, at least not all of us, not yet, so the UN and NATO food aid would keep coming. When they were in town, the ?etniks maintained headquarters in the schoolhouse at the center of the village, the shutters lashed closed with a convoluted twist of bungee cords. From the women’s screams, everybody knew what happened inside.

“Now you will give birth to a little Serb soldier,” they had told the neighbor girl as they raped her. When she came to borrow flour, I stared at the stained brown shirt stretched thin over her growing stomach.

—

I left the house for the first time when the chickens exploded. These days the JNA bombed the village sporadically, almost as if by accident. The initial detonations resulted in predictable damage—blown-out buildings, shattered glass—but the real danger lay in the clearing smoke. As the bombs fell they released showers of tiny metal balls. The outside world called them “cluster bombs.” We called them zvon?i?i, jingle bells. They were not like traditional land mines or trip wires constructed to kill in combat zones. Zvon?i?i clung to tree branches and roof tiles, nestled in patches of grass; they fell indiscriminately, like combustible hail. They were patient, making up for what they lacked in size with the element of surprise. They had surprised the chickens. The blast shook the floor, and I jumped up and ran out the front door. The sun hurt my eyes, and on unsteady legs I strained to keep up with Drenka and her son. Behind the house a cloud of feathers was settling, and I tried not to look.