Girl at War(9)
“The woman was excited by the prospect of being young again, and out of the clutches of her evil daughter-in-law. She agreed.
“So Stribor stirred all the magic of the forest into motion.” My father paused for dramatic stirring pantomime. “And a giant gate appeared before them. Stribor told the woman that when she passed through, she would go back in time. The woman had one foot over the threshold when she had a thought:
“?‘Wait! What will happen to my son?’
“Stribor scoffed at this question, which he thought was a stupid one. ‘He won’t be there, of course, in your new life, in your youth.’
“The woman shied away. ‘I’d rather know my son than live happily as a young woman without him,’ she said. And just like that”—my father snapped his fingers—“Stribor disappeared and the magic of the forest was gone. The evil daughter-in-law became a snake again. The one who preferred her own sorrows to all the joys in the world had entered the forest and broken the spell.”
My father pulled the blanket up around my chin.
“Do you understand, Ana, that sometimes hard things are worth the trouble?”
“I think so.” Suddenly I was very tired again.
“Good.” My father kissed my forehead. “Laku no?,” he said. He reshelved the fairy tales and turned out the lamp as I shrank down into the creases of the couch.
4
The Presidential Palace was rocketed two days later. In the shelter my schoolmates and I waited for the all-clear to release us from the confines of mildew and shadows. This shelter had bunk beds stacked three high, and while waiting for our turn on the generator bike we’d made a game of clambering to the top level and jumping off, measuring our success by the volume of the smack our sneakers made against the cement floor. Our teacher, normally quick to snuff out such athletic outbursts, gave us a stern command not to break any bones but let us continue. Something was taking longer than usual. I glanced sidelong at the butcher, self-nominated guardian of the door, his flabby form swaddled in a bloody apron. A handheld police scanner protruded from his front pocket, and he whispered with the cashier from the shop next to his. Then, almost frantically, he spun around and fumbled with the door latches, his thick hands moving faster than I’d ever seen them work behind his counter.
“Did you hear the signal?” Luka asked. I hadn’t, but the door was open and the push of the crowd toward the stairs overpowered the spindly legs of children. Besides, we didn’t want to miss out on the excitement. My classmates and I pressed against one another as we mounted the steps toward daylight.
At first, the smell. The earthy scent of burning wood, the chemical stink of melted plastic, the stench of something sour and unfamiliar. Flesh, we’d learn.
Then the smoke: three burgeoning columns above the upper town, broad and dense and dark red.
It was not anxiety or excitement now, but real fear. I felt dizzy, as if someone had tied a rope around my middle and squeezed out all my air. Somewhere behind us our teacher was shouting instructions for us to go home. Still, everyone who’d emerged from the shelter moved as one toward the explosion. I grabbed for Luka’s hand; a girl beside me clutched a clump of my T-shirt, and the others joined until our whole class had formed a disorderly human chain. It was scarier now to separate than to walk into a city on fire.
We reached the base of the stone steps that led to the upper town, toward Banski Dvori. The police had already blocked off the stairways, so we weaved through the adult crowd, pushing ourselves up onto a cement ledge to get a better view. My father worked in the transportation office in the upper town some days, though now I couldn’t remember which. It wasn’t close enough for him to have been hurt in this explosion, was it? In the haze it was impossible to tell, and I scanned the faces of all the broad-shouldered men in sight, but did not find him.
Fragments of conflicting reports churned around us:
“Have you heard? The president exploded right at his desk!”
“Come on, they’ve had him in a bunker since last week.”
“Have you heard? His wife was inside, too!”
A voice from behind: “Are you kids up here alone?” My classmates and I were startled to find someone talking to rather than over us, the same shock of nerves firing as if we’d been caught sharing answers to a math test. I spun around to see a newsman wielding a large microphone and fiddling with a wire in his ear. He wore a gray vest with a sheen of nylon and metal.
“We’re not alone,” I said. “My dad just—”
“What’s it to you?” Luka cut in, puffing out his chest to mimic the man’s bulky vest. The reporter, whose cameraman had come over to get a shot with the children, now stuttered.
“You should be at home,” he said, his apprehension exposing a French accent. His revealed foreignness dissolved any remaining authority.
“You should go home, stranac,” I said, emboldened. My classmates giggled, and I reveled in the girls’ acceptance, if only momentary. I was brave, powerful even.
“Stranac, stranac,” my classmates chanted. One of them threw an apple core, and it bounced off the newsman’s padded shoulder.
“Oh, what do I care if you all blow up, you gypsy vermin!” he said. He motioned his cameraman to move a few feet over so we were out of the picture and began to refilm his report.