Girl at War(68)

As a child I had taken the summers for granted—a month’s vacation time was the country’s standard, and nearly everyone I knew holidayed on the coast. Now I considered how insane a month off would sound to an American. Jack could barely get a week away from the computer consulting firm where he worked, and even then he was constantly hassled by pages and phone calls from needy clients.

Luka and I had been debating whether or not the EU’s unified currency made economic sense, but now the sight of the vast beryl water on the horizon knocked me quiet and we let the conversation fade. Something new was burgeoning within me, a feeling different from the anxiety that had pervaded most of the trip: nostalgia, untainted by trauma, for my childhood. I’d learned how to swim in that sea, how to steer our neighbors’ unwieldy motorboat, to jump from the rock ledges without cutting my feet, to catch and gut and grill a fish. At night I’d sneak down to the darkened beach and talk, in a combination of broken English and charades, with the Italian and Czech children whose families had come for an inexpensive vacation.

“I hope it’s still there,” I said under my breath, an incantation. We rolled down the windows and let the salty air fill the car.

Down on the deserted beach, waves lapped against the roof of a red utility truck, capsized and rusting. The driver must have been going too fast on the road above and missed a turn. My fondness for the place was again engulfed by distress and a sense of purpose. Petar and Marina were either here or dead, and I was about to find out which.

—

There was a point, unmarked, that the road turned into a footpath. The road, which at its widest was only big enough for one car, had no guardrail and was bordered by the unforgiving rock of the Dinaric Alps on one side and the Adriatic on the other. A few meters too far and a driver might be forced to make the trip back up the mountain entirely in reverse. I parked the car on a patch of dirt before the road narrowed completely. It used to be a crowded parking spot, but now there were only two other cars and both were so old it was difficult to tell whether they were abandoned. We shouldered our bags and followed the muggy breeze into the village.

At first it was unclear whether the place was bombed out or just dilapidated. Though I’d stayed here for months at a time, looking at it now I found it hard to believe people had lived out their whole lives along the twisted innards of the Dinara, in a place so small and in such close contact with nature.

Petar’s grandfather Ante had moved to Tiska in the forties after finishing medical school in Sarajevo. He and his neighbors had built one another’s houses with concrete and mules. Decades later when I visited as a child, the village behaved as if Ante was still alive and well; our address was simply “The doctor’s house, Tiska, 21318,” the postal code of the next town over. Communal cement mixing, too, had remained a practice in the town—my earliest memories of the place were of my father and Petar hauling buckets of concrete alongside the rest of the village men to transform the path into sets of lumpy, hand-shaped stairs. The idea was that the stairs would be easier for the old people to navigate than the dirt pathways, which were slick in the smooth spots and root-riddled in others. But it had been easier to run along the pathways, and at the time I’d resented the stairs for slowing me down.

Luka and I came to the steps, descending at a jagged pace toward sea level, obeying the curvature of the mountains like a set of intestines. They snaked past the village’s single store and the stone monument to the workers of the Glorious Revolution. They swooped around the small church and to the schoolhouse, which was swathed in untamed vines. The school had been in disuse even when I was small, except where the old men had cleared the underbrush to expose the packed sand floors of bocce courts. The steps continued down toward the water, passing strips of fig trees and agave plants; the figs were soft and sugary, the agave thick and barbed, their contiguous presence a testament to the fickle soil beneath.

“It’s still standing,” Luka called from down the path. I sped up and stood beside him on the slanted step. Through a clearing in the fig trees I could see Petar and Marina’s house, sealed up and covered in weeds. The fa?ade was pitted with scars from shell fragments, and a chunk of the roof was gone. No one would live in a place like that.

I jumped the last few steps and reached the terrace, waded through dead leaves to the front door, and stupidly began to knock.

“Hello?”

“Ana.”

“Just wait,” I said, and banged harder.

“Ana, come on. Don’t do that.”

“Hey! Get off that property!” someone said in heavily accented English.

“Sorry,” I called back in Croatian.

“Hrvatske?” the woman’s voice said.

“Yeah. We’re Croats.” I walked in the direction of the voice. “I’m looking for the Tomi?s?”

The woman appeared on the balcony of a house farther up the mountain than I expected given the clarity of the sound of her voice, an acoustic wonder of the cliffs I’d forgotten. She was wizened and swaddled in a black long-sleeved dress that made me sweat just looking at it, a red flowered head scarf tied at her chin. “Sorry,” she said when we got closer. “I thought you were tourists. The kids love to break into the abandoned ones.”

“Abandoned?” I said.

“They’ve been gone for years.”

“What happened to the owners?”