Girl at War by Sara Novic Read Free Book Online Page B

chastise me for making a racket. No one appeared. I was beginning to think I was the only one left in the building when someone from the flat across the hall murmured my name.
    “Psssssst. Jurić kid,” the voice hissed. It was Rahela’s ancient babysitter. Her door was open a crack and I pushed my way in. She was hunched over her kitchen counter, entwined in her phone cord, whispering. When I looked her way she covered the receiver with a hand so pallid and veined it looked green.
    “They’re all down there,” she said to me. She tapped a bony index finger to her window. I took off for the stairs.
    Outside, what looked like the residents of the entire building were huddled in tight conversational knots in the courtyard. Handkerchiefs, hugging, rivulets of mascara. I spotted my parents, Rahela wiggling in a tangle of blanket in my mother’s arms, and felt relief, then an uprush of anger that they’d forgotten about me.
    “Tata!”
I slipped my arm around his leg. My father put his hand on my shoulder but remained immersed in a discussion with one of the main door guards.
    I squirmed from my father’s grip and pushed my way into the center of the circle my parents and neighbors had created. I tried my mother this time, tugging at the pocket of her apron. The fact that she was in her apron outside was indicative of the weightiness of the morning’s events; she wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing it in public otherwise. “Mama,” I said, on tiptoe now. “Why’d you leave me upstairs?”
    Again neither of my parents acknowledged me, but Ilearned of the news through a collective murmur that floated through the court, at times so synchronized it seemed intentionally in unison.
    “Vukovar je pao.”
The sound of such a large whisper was haunting, in keeping with the message it carried. Vukovar had fallen.
    Vukovar had been under siege for months. The people from the string city now living in Sahara, the boys who’d joined our class mid-lessons, had gotten out early. We knew the stories of their families who were marched to displaced persons camps and never heard from again; we’d heard about the people who’d stayed behind, men and women with do-it-yourself weaponry gunning at the JNA from their bedroom windows. But I didn’t understand what it meant, that Vukovar “had fallen,” and tried to come up with a comparable image. First I thought of an earthquake, though I’d never experienced one. Next I pictured the cliffs of Tiska, where we had spent the summers, imagining the side of the mountain crumbling and dropping into the Adriatic. But Vukovar wasn’t a tiny village and it wasn’t near the sea. The rocket at Banski Dvori had collapsed part of the Upper Town, but that was only a little piece of Zagreb. I knew a fallen city must mean something much worse.
    After a while it became clear that the clusters of people were not static, were instead moving in a circular crush toward something I wasn’t tall enough to see. Eventually the whirlpool of people pushed out from the courtyard onto themain street, and I caught sight of the center of attention: a shivering band of men and boys awash in a brand of terror so unique even I could identify them as refugees. They looked more desperate than those from the first round, wild-eyed and concave in all the wrong places. They clutched scraps of paper marked with the addresses of in-laws, cousins, family friends, anyone who might be willing to take them in, and thrust them in the faces of my parents and neighbors, exchanging bits of information about the front lines for directions to their relatives’ houses.
    One man from the group reached out and grabbed my father’s forearm, holding his address close to my father’s nose with a shaky hand. His face was shadowed, empty troughs beneath his cheekbones.
    “They’re killing them,” the man said.
    “Who?” said my father, studying the paper for clues.
    “Everyone.”
    “Would you like some soup?” said my