Girl at War (16 page)

Like everywhere else in the village, the Safe House had no running water or electricity, and the shuttered-up first floor was dark as night at all hours. Besides equipping the guards, using the bathroom was the only reason to go downstairs. The shadowy lower rooms were by far the scariest parts of the house, and I approached both tasks with breakneck speed.

The actual bathroom had exploded in an air raid. It had been boarded off and replaced by an unfortunate replica in the coat closet, complete with bucket, hand-crank flashlight, and UN-issue toilet paper. Whoever got on the captain’s bad side during the course of the day would be saddled with the foul duty of emptying the bucket in the evening.

Each night when we returned from the Safe House—after the second shift took over—Damir would settle opposite his mother at the kitchen table to suck down root soup and play
tač
. While we were at the Safe House I was busy, felt useful, but at night I longed for my parents, ran their final moments through my head. In that first month I wasn’t quite mourning. Instead my mind felt hazy and detached, crowded with ideas I knew weren’t true even as I entertained them; maybe, if I worked hard enough, I could win them back.

For days I choked down my bread and watched from my spot on the floor as Drenka and Damir fumbled in the candlelight, rushing to slap piles of dog-eared playing cards together. I felt suspended between living and dead, as if joining them would mean abandoning my own family. And yet, every evening I found myself inching closer to the table, my shadow elongated in the flickering light, until eventually I sat down to play, too. If they were surprised by my appearance there, they didn’t show it. Damir made a bad joke and Drenka laughed at it anyway, and I felt a smile push its way
up through me. Her brown face glowed gold in the low light.

The next night I sat at the table at dinnertime, too, and ate soup and bread with preserves. Before she blew out the candles, Drenka spread a sheet across the sofa and called me over. I felt my spine lengthen like it hadn’t during the weeks of sleeping contracted on the kitchen floor, and I stretched my arms over my head and pushed myself deep into the cushions of the couch.

I’d been working at Safe House Headquarters for a few weeks when the girls showed up. Mostly teenagers, the girls had been on a reconnaissance mission down south but had been waylaid by a JNA battle outside Knin. Now they returned bearing updates from the surrounding towns. They stomped up to the attic, muddy and commanding attention, then reeled off a list of names from a receipt-paper scroll. From the reactions of the Safe Housers, I gleaned that it was the latest in casualties or missing persons from the front.

After the announcements, the conversation descended quickly into the realm of justs—speculations leveled at the bearer of the list:

“He’ll be fine. He’s just missing, not wounded?”

“Just shot, it says. Not necessarily
killed
.”

“Probably only a flesh wound.”

The list reader scanned her paper in an attempt to offer some affirmative responses to the barrage. I’d always assumed Damir’s father was in the army, but Damir never mentioned him, and he didn’t come up on the list while I was there.

When people got frantic the captain stepped in and took the paper. He folded it in a lopsided accordion and attempted to put it in his shirtfront pocket before realizing that he wasn’t wearing a shirt and stuffing it in his waistband instead.

“The boys are all fine,” he said firmly, and everyone dispersed back to their posts.

“Who are you?” said one of the girls when she came to get a new clip. She wore a patrol cap and long auburn hair, and fiddled with both as she talked.

“She’s Indy,” Stallone said, having grown accustomed to his role as my spokesperson. “Indiana Jones.” He turned to me, lowering his voice. “That’s Red Sonja. She’s the girl boss.”

There was a philosophical divide in the Safe House about whether or not the girls should take on exclusively female nicknames. Some argued that they didn’t want their pick of badass characters limited on the basis of gender, while Red Sonja said there were plenty of worthy women action stars who were actually more badass than their male counterparts, given they had to fight in tighter pants.

“Indy,” she said, frowning, no doubt at the gender attached to my adopted name. “Well, too late to change it. Nice job with this, though.” She gestured at my latest organizational effort for munitions, bullets separated by cartridge type and stored in terra-cotta flowerpots. I gave her a thumbs-up and she tied off the braid she’d plaited during the exchange and went to reload.

Sorted munitions made the Safe House run smoother, but the older girls all had their own assault rifles, and I was getting restless. I had proven myself a good worker, I thought, and wanted to fight like everybody else. The following week during morning meetings, when weapons were issued to the new recruits from neighboring villages, I lined up with the rest, tucked my hair up under my cap, and hoped the dirt on my face covered any traces of girlhood. The captain looked me up and down and said there was not enough for everyone. But the next day we took on mortar fire that tore a new hole in the south wall. The captain made Stallone and me lie facedown on floor, and I loathed the familiar feeling of helplessness. I tried to lift my head but could only see boots. Someone fell beside me—I couldn’t tell who—and his weapon discharged as he hit the floor. A hollow, wobbling tone filled my ears, then a roaring sound like rushing water. The man was bleeding in spurts from his neck, and I closed my eyes again.

Afterward, I sat up and looked around. Stallone was beside me, pressing his sleeve to a slash across his forehead,
saying something I couldn’t hear; my ears were still ringing. I took the gun from the dead man next to me, a Wolverine, and slipped its strap over my head. No one noticed. There were three other men on the floor, not moving. Red Sonja had me rip a bedsheet into squares, and she closed the dead men’s eyes and covered their faces with the fabric. The Bruces were stacking weapons—guns and knives and brass knuckles newly available. I pushed the gun up against my back and knew from that moment it was mine.

The strongest men heaved the corpses down the stairs and laid them out behind the house, waiting for nightfall so they could transport them to the cemetery at the far end of the village. At dusk Stallone and I went out on recon and counted Četnik casualties. We kicked the bodies, searched their pockets for ammo.

Damir taught me how to fieldstrip and reassemble an AK. Forward grip, gas chamber, cleaning rod, bolt (piston first), frame, magazine.

“Function check!” It meant to cock the gun as a test, the last step in reassembly, but anyone completing the check yelled it triumphantly, a battle cry preceding the first bursts of gunfire. The fieldstrip was a protocol that never changed, and I found solace in the repetition.

The old men let me keep watch while they were eating lunch. Too short to shoot with my feet on the ground, I’d
climb up and kneel in the windowsill. I shot over toward the schoolhouse at anything in camouflage moving in the windows, or outside ground-level on the other side of the street, then jumped down and ducked in case a Četnik was clearheaded enough to shoot straight back. With every round I envisioned killing the soldier with the brown teeth, the one who’d struck my father in the back of the knee and laughed. I relished the power that seemed to run through the chamber of the weapon directly up into my own veins.

Occupation under the Četniks was a delicate balance. In their state of perpetual intoxication they’d been satisfied in rape and pillage mode, their genocidal appetites satiated by picking off Safe Housers and the occasional roadside murder of travelers like my parents. The danger of killing too many of us and losing their UN meal ticket staved off any large-scale assaults. But the JNA, closing in on the area, sent reinforcements, and the reinforcements were not yet weary of the place, were not content with exchanging fire from the comfort of the schoolhouse. They had salaries, uniforms, better weapons, and a functioning chain of command. Relatively, they were sober. They were ready to attack.

I was at the attic window keeping watch with the Terminator when we spotted a band of armored vehicles, about ten it looked like, but it was hard to tell from the curve in the road. The trucks were green, not UN issue, and when I looked up at the Terminator he was gesturing frantically. I bolted across the attic to get Stallone, who, upon seeing his
brother’s signs, yelled, “Holy shit! The JNA! They’re coming down the street!” The trucks were closer now, and I could see the red Yugoslavian stars on their doors.

“Let’s move!” said the captain, and everyone who’d been without a gun lunged for the extras on the hat rack. I turned to the captain for his next instructions, but from downstairs we heard gunfire, the blowback of broken glass, and the door guards screaming.

“They’re here,” said Stallone.

We ran—down the uneven rear stairs and out the back door, through the packed-dirt alley by the market, and out into the wheat fields. The stalks bowed with rotting, grain-laden heads abandoned by farmers when the bombing started, but even in their hunched posture they were taller than I was, and I could see nothing but wheat in all directions. I wondered where Stallone had gone. Then, from a side row, I saw Damir darting toward me.

“You’ve got speed, girl,” he said when he caught up. He grabbed me by the hood of my sweatshirt and yanked me to the left, hard. “No sense of direction, though.” The butt of my rifle banged a bruise into the back of my leg as we ran.

A pack of JNA foot soldiers were coming from the other side of the field now; there were at least twenty of them, running in a clean, arrowlike formation. I froze, gaping as they closed the meters between us—one hundred, seventy-five, fifty—but Damir pushed me ahead of him and released a spray of gunfire on them. In the corner of my vision I saw
him go down, but he yelled “Don’t stop!” so I kept running, made a sharp turn into the field’s middle strip. The wind hit my face fresh and hard—my nose dripped and my eyes watered. Dragging my sleeve across my face, I pumped my legs faster until I could no longer feel the ground, until gravity slithered off the treads of my sneakers.

At the center of the field I threw myself beneath a tractor and curled into a compact ball, covering my face with my hands. There was gunfire and yelling from every angle, and I tried to listen for voices I knew. I thought of Damir and waited for the familiar sadness to set in, but found only anger in its place. With one hand I felt the ground for my AK and was relieved to find it there beside me.

“Viči ako možeš!”
Yell out if you can. The cry reverberated through the village as the remaining Safe Housers combed the fields for survivors.

“Viči ako možeš!”
Other than the rescue call it was eerily quiet, that odd part of evening when the sun had set but it was still more light than dark. I ran my hands over my face and body, taking inventory, impossibly unharmed save for the blood on my wrists, where the last of the barbed-wire scabs had reopened when I hit the ground. I waited, listening for any definitive JNA sounds, watched for passing boots. But there was nothing, so I pulled myself on my elbows out from beneath the tractor. It occurred to me that I’d
never seen a tractor up close before, and I marveled momentarily at its size, the tire alone taller than I was, before a resurgence of the rescue call returned me to soldier mode.

I jogged back the way I’d come, looking for Damir, and found a group of Safe Housers squatting around a body I knew must be his.

“Indy!” Bruce Willis said, noticing me. “Don’t—don’t look. Go home and tell Drenka to make a bed for him.”

“She doesn’t talk,” said Snake.

“Well then she’ll do a goddamn charade. Just go!”

I pressed myself on tiptoe, trying to catch a glimpse of Damir’s face, to see if Bruce had meant a sickbed or a dead-person one. But Damir was obscured by the men around him.

“Hey!” Bruce said, and I spun back toward them. “Hold the gun out in front of you, at least till you get out of the field.” I nodded and pulled the AK up over my head, adjusting the twisted strap around my shoulder.

Damir was right—my sense of direction was terrible, and now that the men had turned me away from the path toward the Safe House, I’d lost my reference point. I walked down a row of wheat, but that only seemed to take me deeper into the field. Ahead, I thought I heard a rustling. I had practiced the fieldstrip so many times that cocking the gun was more an act of muscle memory than conscious thought. I pulled the handle back along the bolt carrier, then released it, heard a round click into the chamber. Whoever was nearby must
have heard it, too, because there was rustling again, then the unmistakable sound of running in boots. I tried to call for Stallone, but nothing came out.

When he came around the corner, I froze. It was not Stallone. The man was looking over his shoulder but was headed straight for me. He wore a patchy beard and a green jacket, no JNA insignia. By the time he turned and saw me, we were so close we could have touched. He was visibly shocked by my size and my gun. I felt him look me over, trying to decide what to do, and for a moment I glimpsed his hesitation. Then it passed. He reached around for his gun, and I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled the trigger.

On the ground, the man was writhing and making a choking noise. I had hit him in the upper stomach, or maybe the ribs. He was probably only a few years older than Damir, acne pockmarks still visible along his cheekbones.

The blood was passing through his shirt and pooling beside him. But he was still awake, wide-eyed and angry and confused. He was trying to talk but his speech was slurred, and I couldn’t understand until he stopped whatever he had been saying and just repeated “Please,” over and over again.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I stepped over him and crept through the wheat, searching for a way back to the house.

In the kitchen I called out to Drenka, but my vocal cords groaned with the vibrations of disuse. She turned and looked
me over, trying to gauge whether I’d actually spoken. I saw her eyes catch on something and realized I was covered in blood, a little from my wrists, but mostly from the blowback of the soldier. I coughed and tried again to speak; my voice came stronger this time. “Damir’s hurt.”

She jumped from her chair. “Where is he?”

“The JNA. They got him.” My throat burned. “Safe Housers are bringing him here. They said to get ready.”

“Get ready? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

Drenka instructed me to undress. I put on her nightgown as she wrung the blood from my clothes in a bucket on the kitchen floor.

Damir had been shot in the thigh, and the bullet was still inside him. It took two Safe Housers to carry him because they were trying to keep his leg straight. When they first put him on his bed, I still couldn’t tell if he was alive. But when Drenka cut his pant leg off and poured alcohol on the wound, he jerked awake and began to yell.

“Thank God,” I said. Bruce Willis stared at me, then tried to play off his surprise at my speaking.

The Bruces sat with us for a few hours, assuring Drenka that Damir was going to be fine. The captain was already radioing the neighboring villages to call for the doctor, they
said. I thought of the soldier I had shot, wondered if he had been rescued or if he was still out in the field, bleeding to death.

Damir moaned and sweated in his sleep. Drenka and I stayed up all night staring at him and waiting for the doctor to come. He mumbled incessantly about his grandfather and watermelon, while Drenka cradled his head and poured swallows of
rakija
in his mouth.

“Listen,” she said to me the next morning as I slung my gun over my shoulder and double-knotted my shoelaces. “If you tell me where you’re from I can help you get back. There must be someone waiting for you.” I eyed her from across the table until she resumed her pacing. I thought about what it would be like if the doctor had to cut off Damir’s leg in front of us, right in his own bed. I thought of Luka knocking on the door of our flat, of his impatience and worry at the silence on the other side. The red shine of his bicycle streaked across my vision. I thought about the man I had shot, but I was not quite sorry. I went to the Safe House.