Girl at War (8 page)

I told her it was okay.

“Petar would be so proud of you.”

I mumbled a thanks and concentrated on my salad until the waiter mercifully appeared with the check. I reached for
my wallet. Twenty and studenthood was an interim existence in which I frequently found interacting with “real adults” awkward, them waving off my offers to split bills as something ridiculous, and making me feel even more like a child.

“Don’t even think about it.”

“Are you sure?” I said, though in this case I was thankful; my work-study check was sure to take a hit from the priceless menu. Sharon gave an exaggerated nod as she tipped back the last of her wine.

Outside, the burst of spring had given way to a thin, cold drizzle. Sharon pulled the belt of her trench coat tight as we stood together on the curb. “Do you ever think about going back?” she said.

“I tried not to think about it at all until you called.” I moved to pull my coat closed, too, but the zipper was jammed. “Do you?”

“I don’t think it’s good idea. For me.” She stuck her arm out to hail a cab. “Looks like the skies are about to open up. You need a ride somewhere?”

I shook my head. Anyway, we were going in opposite directions. A taxi pulled to the curb on the other side of the street. “Guess I’ll take that,” she said. We shared a mannered hug and she ran across the street, still poised in her heels on the slick asphalt. I watched her into the cab, but she was typing something on her BlackBerry and didn’t look up again.

As I walked to the subway my mood blackened, something like anger but about what I couldn’t pinpoint. Frustration, maybe, that I still understood so little. Instead of clarity and insight, adulthood had only brought more confusion. At the next corner I dumped the index cards in the trash.

The city was crowded and wet and grim, with that air of gray desperation it sometimes took on in March. Lunch had gone long and I was going to be late for my appointment with Professor Ariel.

I tried to gauge whether I had enough time to return to my room to retrieve the book he’d loaned me, but decided against it and headed straight for his office.

Reading was one of the only ways in which I allowed myself to think about the continent and country I’d left behind. Though I hadn’t told the professor anything about myself, he seemed to know I was not at home in the world, and so he lent me books—Kundera and Conrad and Levi and a host of other displaced persons. I’d read one and return to his office, where he’d wax eloquent about the authors
with such intimate detail I was convinced they were all his close friends. I’d just finished
The Emigrants
, and though most of the week’s anxieties had been UN-focused, the book hadn’t been much easier on my mind. I’d followed the wandering protagonist—at once forlorn and whimsical—all the while with an uneasy feeling that the professor somehow knew more about me than I cared to reveal.

I ran up the stairs to his office and knocked though the door was half-open. The room was small and warmly lit, with shelves covering nearly every surface. Stacks of overflow books lined the floor. Professor Ariel sat at a desk in the center, looking little and frail amid his collection.

“Come in. Sit down,” he said in his trembly way. “What did you think of the Sebald?” I moved some papers from the chair and put them on his desk. Behind him on the wall a giant poster of Wisława Szymborska, whom he’d also made me read, watched over our meetings like a chain-smoking guardian angel.

“It got to me,” I said.

“Remarkable prose, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” It was true, but that wasn’t the reason. “Not just that, though. The characters. To come face-to-face with people who never recover from their traumas. It was…”

“Disconcerting?”

I nodded.

“And yet Sebald continually points to the imperfections of memory. Not what we usually think of as the ‘searing’ of
a certain trauma into one’s mind. That haunting lucidity. What do you make of it?”

That had been what scared me most. What if my memory of my parents’ final moments was all wrong? I felt certain I had kept them fresh and protected inside me. The idea that the whim of the subconscious might corrupt what little I had left of them was too much to accept. “But, maybe it’s not that way for everyone. Maybe some people do remember,” I said.

“Certainly. But that comes with its own problems, no? Consider the character of Ambros Adelwarth.”

“His uncle?”

“Tormented by such clear images of his past—”

“He opts for electroshock therapy. To wipe out the thoughts.”

“Precisely.”

“So what am I supposed—I mean, what are we supposed to take from it?”

“Damned if you do—” He smiled a little, then turned to look out the window. He began talking about Sebald’s recent death, a car crash of questionable explanation, but I was feeling too rattled to respond. “Ana, you all right? You’re looking a bit peaked.” He said my name the Croatian way, not with the long, flat
a
’s most Americans used.

“I’m fine. Sorry,” I said. “Just a little under the weather.”

“Sebald has that effect on people. I call it the ‘spell of despair.’ ”

I tried to protest, not wanting him to think I couldn’t manage his assignments, but he turned and stared right at me and I fell silent.

“Where did you say you were from again?”

“I—well. Originally?” I had not said. I didn’t want to say. But it came out anyway. “From Croatia. Zagreb.” A strange, weightless feeling came with having spoken the truth. I gripped the side of the chair as if I really was at risk of floating away.

Professor Ariel did not seem surprised. “Mmm,” he hummed. “I thought so.”

“What?”

“I had an inkling. Not Croatia, exactly. Just from somewhere else. Though the Balkans makes sense.”

“But how could you tell?”

“You have an old soul. I should know—I’ve got one, too. Also, you read too much.” He winked, and I allowed myself a little smile back. “The good news is your friends will catch up.” He swiveled back toward the corner bookshelf. “Now, for next week. Can you handle another Sebald? I’ve got his latest around somewhere…” Slowly he stood and jimmied the book off the shelf with a skeletal finger. “Here it is.
Austerlitz
.”

“Sorry I didn’t bring the other one back. I came straight from—a meeting.”

“Never mind. You keep it anyway. I’m sure I have another copy.”

He shuffled around his desk and put the book in my lap. “Go on then.”

“Thank you,” I said. But something else had caught his attention and he was far away now, running his fingers along the spine of a book as if it were braille, or the hand of someone he’d long loved, so I closed his heavy office door behind me.

I returned to my dorm, glad to find the hallways quiet and my roommate gone. I should call Brian, I thought, but could not bring myself to do it. Now that I’d told Professor Ariel even just a little about me I felt dangerously open. If I saw Brian I might tell him, too, and I was not ready to deal with the consequences of my deception. Instead I filled my oversize skateboarder’s backpack—remnant of my high school antiestablishment phase—with homework and Sebald and dirty laundry, and left. At Penn Station I bought a dollar bag of oversalted popcorn and climbed aboard the first in a series of commuter trains to Pennsylvania.

By the time I boarded the commercial jet in Frankfurt I hadn’t slept in two days and was afraid of nearly everything. I was frightened by the pressure in my ears at takeoff, of catching the sickness of the man who was throwing up into a paper bag across the aisle, of whatever was waiting for me on the other side of the ocean.

When we landed flight attendants took turns reading the
airline tag around my neck like I was lost luggage. One grabbed my wrist and dragged me toward customs, where I moved through a series of roped-off queues and signed my name to a form I couldn’t read. An announcement over the intercom caught her attention, and she stared at the wall clock and tapped her foot. A man with too many badges rifled through my passport, eyeing my makeshift visa with its crooked staple. Behind him I watched suitcases wind around a black track. The officer asked me a question that, from what I could understand, was about whether I’d recently been on a farm. I looked at his badges and shook my head.

The officer stamped my passport and sent me onward, and the flight attendant said goodbye. At the baggage carousel I found my suitcase and followed everyone else toward a set of glass doors. The doors looked sealed, with no knobs or handles, but no one else seemed to notice. I thought about yelling out that everyone should be careful, but couldn’t think of how to say it in English. As the first people pushed ahead I narrowed my eyes, anticipating a spray of broken glass. But the doors slid open at the last minute, like magic.

On the other side, groups of excited loved ones clustered around the opening. A little boy attached himself to his mother’s leg; two friends hugged and jumped and screamed in one another’s ears. Beyond them, men in suits bearing signs with people’s names ringed the lobby. I continued
through the crowd, head tilted to compensate for the swirling feeling inside me, until I ran right into a man holding a toddler who looked like my sister.

The man looked down, and for a moment it was unclear which one of us was more terrified. The woman beside him—who was holding a handwritten sign bearing my name with diacriticals in odd places—shuffled through a handful of paperwork. She was short and tan, and her face was set in a smile.

“Rahela?” I peered up at the healthy, curly-haired little girl perched in the crook of the man’s arm. She’d grown so much she was almost unrecognizable, except around the eyes, where we had always looked alike.

“I thought the airline was supposed to bring you—well—” The woman found the paper she was looking for.
“Dobrodošli u Ameriku, Ana,”
she read haltingly from her sheet.

“Hvala.”
I searched again through my school lessons for any English words that would fit together and make sense. The woman bent down and hugged me.

“It’s so nice to meet you,” she said.

Their names were Jack and Laura, and they said it was okay for me to call them that. But Rahela called them Mommy and Daddy in her high-pitched toddler voice, and for the first few months, I called them nothing at all.

I changed trains in Trenton and fell asleep in a saggy leather SEPTA seat. I dreamt of bodies. They were nightmares I’d had years ago, when I first arrived in America. Dreams in which I’d be cliff-diving from the rock ledges in Petar and Marina’s fishing village and, in a midair exchange, was no longer headed for the warm Adriatic but was instead careening toward a pile of bloated corpses. Then, as I was landing, a powerful tingle radiated from my neck to the backs of my knees and jolted me awake. The train pulled into the station and the conductor yelled, “Last stop!” and I gathered my things.

On the platform I watched the train ready itself for reversal, part of me already wishing I could go back with it. I trudged down the town’s main thoroughfare, lined with interconnected strip malls: a two-story pet supply, the Kmart where I worked summers, all the major fast-food chains, and Vacuum Mania.

Sometimes I felt guilty that Jack and Laura had moved here for Rahela and me. I wondered if they ever missed their life before us. For years they, too, had been city dwellers, their apartment just enough for newlyweds and the baby they couldn’t have. Then Rahela arrived, and soon she was rosy-cheeked and growing, toys and clothes brimming from her allocated chest of drawers, annexing the arms of furniture. Of course they knew they’d have to give her back. But with her presence they began to want the things they’d always dismissed as the desires of people older than they were.
They bought a cheap piece of land on a hill that was going to become a neighborhood, and began to build.

When construction started I was nothing to my American parents but the older sister mentioned in Rahela’s MediMission fact sheet. Then, before the building was finished, I was there.

“Which bedroom do you want?” Laura asked me on move-in day. The thought of my own bedroom was an alien concept and I defaulted to silence, thinking I’d misunderstood. In the end I picked the room with the bigger window because it reminded me of the balcony in Zagreb. The hill overlooked acres of farmland and, beyond that, forest. When family and friends came to visit the new house, all of them remarked on the beautiful view. But in those first months I spent each day searching the skyline for a building, craving something dirty or metal to break through the dark green. I never got used to the forest, not after months or years, not even in daytime, when the sunlight passed through the leaves. I made up excuses to withdraw from neighborhood games of Manhunt that ventured too close to its edge. At night the trees seemed to lean inward, casting shadows on my wall. They were chestnut oaks, Jack said, when I asked him after some sleepless night of tracking their silhouettes out my window. Like in Stribor’s forest, I tried to tell myself, but I could think of nothing but the white oaks and rotting acorns in the place my parents had fallen.

America was not what it looked like in the movies. I had
been right about the McDonald’s at least; they were everywhere. But the bravado and gallantry, that spirit of adventure touted in the Westerns so loved across Yugoslavia, was absent in the life I found in Gardenville. In Zagreb I had always been excited about a trip in the car. In Gardenville you needed the car to do anything, even to buy groceries. There were no bakeries anywhere. Everything in the supermarket was presliced and prepackaged. In stores bigger than any I’d ever seen in Europe, stores that had everything, I followed Laura around incredulous that I could not find a fresh loaf of bread.

The culture was noticeably conservative, even in juxtaposition with the dual traditions of communism and Catholicism back home. In Croatia, topless women graced the covers of most newspapers and were common on the beaches, but in America nudity of any kind was something shameful. In Zagreb I ran the streets without curfew and bought cigarettes and alcohol for the grown-ups. In Gardenville, adults nursed a perpetual fear of kidnappers, and I stayed close to home.

Conversations, particularly with respect to me, were crafted carefully. After those initial bursts of curiosity, no one spoke to me about my past, even within the family. Laura developed euphemisms for my “troubles,” the war and its massacres reduced to “unrest” and “unfortunate events.”

Throughout that first summer I passed the days clinging to Rahela, which was harder now that she could walk. I sat
in a tiny chair and pretended to eat the plastic food she prepared in her plastic kitchen, or followed her up and down the driveway in her Flintstoneesque foot-powered toy car, unwilling to let her out of my sight. Sometimes I whispered to her in Croatian, to see if she remembered. She’d parrot back a word or two, but the things she babbled of her own accord sounded like English.

When it was time for her nap I’d hide in the crawl space beneath the porch and look at her picture books, practicing English, matching the illustrations to words. Sometimes I scoured the newspaper for any headlines with “Croatia” or “Serbia” in them, which I pasted in a notebook I hid beneath my bed. When Laura could will me out into the open, she’d speak to me loudly, as if volume was the reason I couldn’t understand. Having studied English all my school days, I could comprehend most of what she said, but struggled to summon the right words in the right order fast enough to respond. She bought me summer school workbooks, and I powered through the math problems and guessed on all the reading fill-in-the-blanks until I had completed enough pages for her to declare me finished. Then I’d return to my spot beneath the porch and fight the urge to sleep. I stayed awake most nights and was always exhausted, but sleep meant dreaming, and so I avoided it.