Girl at War (5 page)

“Rahela,” I said. My parents seemed to slow slightly at the mention of her name. “Where is she?”

“She’s sleeping,” my mother said. They’d moved the cradle into the threshold between the kitchen and their bedroom, and I peered in. Too much blood on the blankets, down the front of her shirt. Her breathing shallow.

“What’s going on?”

“The medicine’s not working. She has to go.”

“To the hospital?”

“There’s nothing they can do for her here. There’s a program transporting out of Sarajevo. We’re going to take her tomorrow.”

“Transporting where?” I said.

“To America.”

I looked around. There were no other cases, no adult clothes in the bag. “By
herself
?”

“It’s a medical program. They’ll take good care of her,” said my father. “Once they fix her up she’ll come right back home.”

“I want to go to Sarajevo with you,” I said.

“No,” said my mother.

“We’ll see,” said my father.

The power was on for an hour or two, and my father made a series of calls, his hand cupped over the receiver to
guide his voice through the shoddy connection. At first I assumed he was trying to reach MediMission, but I noticed him later scribbling out what looked like a map, which he folded and put in his back pocket.

After dinner, when an especially violent air raid rattled the windows of our flat, my mother sprang up and held me and I knew I could win her over.

“Did you finish your homework?” she asked when we returned from the basement.

“I don’t have to since I’m not going to school tomorrow,” I tried.

My mother sighed.

“I want to say goodbye to her, too.”

“Better go to bed then. We’re getting up early.”

On the couch I lay listening to my parents shuffle around the flat.

“She shouldn’t be going with us,” my mother said. “The road isn’t safe.”

“It’s not safe here either, Dijana. What if something were to happen while we were gone? It’s better we stay together.” I heard the paper crumpling and remembered my father’s drawing. “Besides. Look. I called Miro and he gave me the latest intel. We’ll have to take the long way, but it’ll be clear. We’ll be fine.”

I stared at the ceiling, imagining the ride through the mountains with Luka’s father’s map, then some MediMission stranger carrying Rahela in the airport, on a plane,
in America. I knew little of America besides what I’d seen on television, mostly cowboy movies they played on state TV Saturday nights. The United States seemed to me a wonderland full of actors who subsisted on McDonald’s, and I wondered if Rahela would go to live with someone rich and famous. On the news men in suits were always calling on the States to help protect us, but no one had shown up yet. Maybe they were just too far away. I slept fitfully, the kind of sleep in which you never quite lose contact with the waking world, and after just a few hours I heard the clack of my mother’s shoes alongside my couch.

“Time to go,” she said. My arms and legs felt leaden and I struggled to dress, rummaging through my clothes in the morning dark.

“Ivan,
molim te
, don’t drive so fast. We don’t need to give them a reason to pull us over.” My mother pressed her free hand against my father’s knee. With the other arm she cradled Rahela, who was too weak even to cry. On the horizon, day had not yet broken. It was cold; the back window was stuck half-open, and my father gave me his jacket to use as a blanket. Whenever he turned too sharply, Rahela’s suitcase banged me in the shin and my mother implored him to slow down. At some point I fell asleep.

When I woke the sun was noon-strong through the streaky windshield and we had already crossed the border into Bosnia; the signposts were written in both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets and the road circled the bases of the Dinaric
Alps in a serpentine coil. We called the road a highway, though it wasn’t really—not the kind with streetlamps—and in the spaces between more important destinations it was only two lanes.

Like the areas in Croatia far from Zagreb, Bosnia was mainly full of nothing: vast expanses of rocky soil, so that even the grass looked like it’d prefer to be rooted somewhere else. Clusters of cement-block houses appeared every so often but seemed to dissolve against the bleach-bright sky as we sped past. Finally, signs presented us with digestible distances to Sarajevo: 75, 50, 25 kilometers.

“Allaaaaaahu akbar,”
the adhan began as we passed a peripheral mosque at the limits of the capital. We didn’t have mosques in Zagreb, at least not ones with public presences, and I cranked the window down the rest of the way to soak in the mysterious strains of the muezzin’s call. Rahela slept through it, and I craned my neck around the headrest to survey the rise and fall of her chest.

Sarajevo was on edge, the expectation and anxiety almost palpable. The war hadn’t yet come to Bosnia, and the haze of a city left to wait was familiar, though more like a remembered dream than an actual place I’d lived. We passed through the city center, the curvature of mosque domes and sharp angles of Yugoslav skyscrapers forming a rugged skyline. Still, Sarajevo and its inhabitants seemed similar to, if a bit cheerier than people in Zagreb. Markale market was not
yet infamous; the parliament building stood boxy and firm, though it was the bloodshed here, not ours, that would catch the attention of the international community in the end. Gazing through the back window at children my age playing stickball in the street, I thought of our war games and generator bike fights and wondered if the things I’d come to consider ordinary were not so normal after all.

My mother traced her finger along a sheet of directions, and my father maneuvered through the alleys in accordance with her commands.

“That’s it!” she said suddenly, and my father pulled the car up on the curb to make room for passersby on the narrow street. I recognized the MediMission logo, red and gray and loud, affixed to a corner concrete building. Clutching Rahela, my mother ran across the street without even checking for traffic.

“Lock the car,” my father said, tossing me the keys and ducking through the undersize doorframe.

The waiting room gave off the impression of having once been a different kind of room hastily decorated to look like a doctor’s office. The carpet was stained; the plastic upholstery of the chairs was hard and cracked. It smelled of antiseptic and rotting fruit. Still, it was more official-looking than the living room–turned-clinic we’d been to in Slovenia, and there was comfort in this formality. But Rahela was shaking with fever now, and a nurse took her from my
mother and into an exam room. Dr. Carson, with her insufferably white teeth and a matching lab coat, appeared from the back soon after and ushered us inside.

“Good to see you again,” she said. No one replied.

By the time we reached her room, Rahela was already strapped down to the infant-size examination table, one flex of plastic tubing in her nose and another in her foot. Her chest and mouth moved as if she were crying, but produced only the faintest trace of what appeared to be a full-blown wail. I tore a corner off the exam table paper and scrunched it into a ball.

“Okay let’s flip her,” the nurse said.

“What’s going on?” said my mother.

The nurse rolled Rahela onto her stomach, then refastened the straps restraining her arms and legs.

“We have to do a lumbar puncture to check for bacterial infection,” Dr. Carson said in sterile but much improved Croatian. She snapped on her latex gloves; a long needle gleamed on the tray beside her.

“Lumbar?” said my mother. “You’re going to put that in her spine?” She lunged toward Rahela, but my father caught her by the elbow and pressed her firmly against the wall, whispering things I couldn’t hear.

My mother began to scream. Somehow it was easier to watch the needle. I uncrumpled the paper and shredded it, the scraps falling to the floor.

My father forced my mother down into the room’s single chair. The doctors turned Rahela back over, shot her with pain medication, gave her a pacifier. She looked comfortable for the first time in months.

“All right then,” said Dr. Carson, placing a hand on my mother’s shoulder. For a moment I saw what looked like sadness flicker across the doctor’s face, but it was gone quickly. “Here are the forms for Rahela’s transport to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. They have some of the best pediatric specialists for renal failure in the world. We’ll have her on the plane as soon as she’s stable.” Dr. Carson gestured to the second of two piles of paperwork on the counter. “And here are the foster family consent forms.” My father looked up and my mother lowered her eyes.

“Foster family?” my father said. “Dijana, what is she talking about?”

Dr. Carson jiggled some change in the pocket of her lab coat. “Your wife informed me that your visas were denied?” she said, pausing for my father to affirm this statement. He didn’t. “Rahela will be admitted to the hospital upon her arrival, where she’ll be housed in the intensive care unit.” Dr. Carson was gaining speed now, employing the most professional of the range of tones in which we’d heard her speak. “However, after emergent care is completed, there is an outpatient treatment portion, for weekly dialysis and examinations.”

“Outpatient?”

“Rahela will stay with a volunteer emergency foster family until her program at the hospital is complete. Rest assured that all foster families are screened for safety by MediMission—”

“I thought you people were just going to fix her! Fix her and send her home!” The vein in my father’s neck, the one that usually signaled that I’d done something wrong and was going to get a whack with a belt, had bulged out precariously far, banging along with the rhythm of his heart. I shied away instinctively, but all the anger and frustration instead compacted into a single tear that passed over his cheek. It was the only time I’d ever seen him cry. “I can’t even take care of my own children,” he said.

Dr. Carson tried for a reassuring smile, but it came off lopsided. “You are taking care of her. This is the only way Rahela will get better.”

“Fuck off,” said my father.

“I’ll wait outside so you can say goodbye.”

I stared at my sister. For once she was quiet. Her eyes were glassy and she looked deep in thought or far away, as if she had already crossed the ocean. I wished I knew more about her and less about the patterns of her sickness. She was so small, so busy surviving that we hadn’t gotten the chance to be like other sisters, but her hands still fit well in mine. I hoped her foster family in America would be kind, would tell her stories and take her to the park and sing to her.

“We’ll see you soon, baby,” my mother was saying over and over. My father put his hand on Rahela’s head, ran his fingers through the black hair that was beginning to curl, and said nothing.

“When you get back I’ll teach you everything,” I whispered to her. “How to walk and talk and color and ride a bike. And everything will be good.”

Outside, my mother sobbed so ferociously that she got dizzy and had to sit down on the curb. My father sat next to her and rubbed her back.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” my mother said. “I didn’t want you to get upset. This is the best we can do.” When her breathing steadied, we got in the car and drove out of the city.

At border control a meaty guard checked our documents dispassionately, becoming suspicious only when he came to Rahela’s picture. Babies had no passports of their own, only pages within their mothers’.

“And your daughter?” he asked.

“She’s with her grandmother,” my father said. Both my grandmothers had been dead for a decade, and though I knew it was a lie designed to simplify, I didn’t like its implications. The guard handed our passports back through the window, and my father snapped the rubber band tight around them and stretched across my mother’s lap to stow them in the glove compartment. The guard waved us through the crossing.

We drove in unbearable silence. I ached for the distraction of staticky music, talk radio even. When I thought of Rahela on her way to America an unexpected emotion welled up in me: relief. Then, when I recognized the feeling, shame. What was wrong with me? I was supposed to be sad. I forced my eyes shut in hopes of squeezing out a tear, and got one or two before my forehead lit up with a jagged ache from all the clenching.

“Mama, I need some water,” I said, half because of the headache and half from the desire for my parents’ full attention, something unattainable since Rahela had been born. My mother sighed and turned to look at me, her face contorted with such anguish that immediately I wanted to say never mind, that I was okay. But my father, as if he’d been waiting for an excuse to stop, had already veered toward a derelict gas station. A huge piece of arrow-shaped particleboard had been nailed to the abandoned pumps.
TRUCK STOP
, it read in unpracticed permanent marker scrawl.

We passed a mechanic’s garage, graffitied and doorless, and pulled into the car park of a building labeled, a bit more carefully than the first sign,
RESTAURANT
. It was a bucolic structure; the wood was stained black but maintained its treelike properties—the imperfect curvature of trunks, the knots and whorls of unfinished planks. The gravel lot was completely empty.

Inside was a single room with high-beamed ceilings and picnic tables. We approached the cafeteria-style counter and
collected orange trays and rolls of tin silverware. There was no menu, just a few steaming pots on the line. A woman in a dirty apron appeared from the back and eyed us cagily.

“How’d you get down this way?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” my father said. “Aren’t you open?”

“This place is always full at supper. The roads must be closed.”

“We came down from Zagreb to Sarajevo, now back. They were clear.”

“They must be closed,” she said, beckoning at our trays. We handed them to her and she slopped down bowls of dense bean soup and hunks of bread. Next to the cash register, thick glass mugs of soured milk perspired, leaving wet patches on an adjacent napkin pile.

“And three of those,” my father said, gesturing to the drinks.

“I don’t want any. It’s bitter,” I said.

“It’s good for you,” he said, taking my mug onto his tray.

At home my mother always cooked, and it was the first time I could remember going to a restaurant. I ate greedily, sopping up the beans with my bread, even downing the tangy milk in the end. My mother ate nothing.

“Do you think the roads are really closed?” my mother asked as we returned to the car.

“We were just there a few hours ago,” my father said, though I noticed him glance at his watch. “It’ll be okay.”

We drove for an hour, then two, passed signs for Knin and Ervenik. A pickup truck in the opposite lane flashed his headlights at us.

“Slow down. There must be cops,” my mother said. My father braked and another car appeared, this one driving much faster, laying on his horn as he went by. “Maybe we should turn around.”

“There’s no space for a U-turn,” my father said, looking around. But as we rounded the corner the roadblock came into view. “Shit.
Shit
.” I pulled myself up and rested my head atop the driver’s seat to get a better look. A cluster of bearded men stood talking and laughing in the road. They wore mismatched fatigues, shoulder-slung ammo belts, and black sword-and-skull arm patches. They had cut down a large tree, which prevented passage on our side of the road. The other side was blockaded with sandbags.

“Can’t we get around?” my mother said. “Tell them we just want to get home.”

Two men stood apart from the group, motioning disjointedly at us.

“Shit.”

“Okay, just pull over!”

“What’s happening, Mama?” I said.

“Nothing, honey, we just have to stop for a minute.”

“Mama—”

“Just sit down, Ana.” My father cranked open the window as one of the soldiers staggered toward the car. The glimmer in his eye matched the reflection of the sunlight off the vodka bottle he held. In his other hand was an AK-47. A Soviet stamp covered the butt of the weapon, and the paths where the ink had dripped and dried looked like tear tracks.

“Is there a problem?” my father asked.

“Need your ID,” the soldier slurred. My parents’ faces grayed as my mother searched the glove compartment for our passports. Giving up our IDs would provide the soldier with the greatest weapon against us: the knowledge of our names. Our last name specifically, the one that carried the weight of ancestry, ethnicity.

“We have a child,” my father said. “We’re just going home.”

“Jurić?” the soldier read aloud. My parents were silent. The soldier readjusted his gun, looked away.
“Imamo Hrvate!”
he called over his shoulder.
Hrvati
. Croatians. Despite his drunkenness, he still managed a clear inflection of disgust. Another soldier approached and pressed his gun against the soft skin of my father’s neck. “Everybody out,” he said, then, turning to the rest of the men, “Get the others.”

“Mama, where are we—”

“I don’t know, Ana. Just be very quiet. Maybe they want to search us.” The car bobbed on its corroded shocks as we
climbed from our seats. A line of cars had formed along the side of the road. Farther off, a group of civilian prisoners stood on a patch of browning grass, shifting their collective weight uneasily. I stared at them, tried to get someone to look back at me, but no one would. I was jolted from my gaze when a soldier jammed his gun into my back, sending a shock of pain up my spine.