Girl at War Read Online Free Page A

kitchen table with Rahela on my lap and tell them both what I’d learned that day. My parents were strict about school—my mother because she had been to college and my father because he hadn’t—and my mother would interject questions about my times tables or spelling words, little quizzes after which she sometimes rewarded me with a bit of sweet bread she hid in the cabinet under the sink.
    One afternoon an extra-large block of special report text caught my attention and I let my account of the day’s lessons trail off and turned up the television. The reporter, pressing on her earpiece, announced there was breaking news, uncut footage from the southern front in Šibenik. My mother darted away from the stove and stood behind me to watch:
    An unsteady cameraman jumped a ledge to get a better view as a Serbian plane spiraled toward the sea, its engine on fire and blending with the late September sunset. Then to the right, a second plane ignited in midair. The cameraman spun around to reveal a Croatian antiaircraft soldier pointing incredulously at his handiwork saying,
“Oba dva! Oba su pala!”
Both of them! They both fell!
    The
oba su pala
footage played on both television channels for the remainder of the day, and continuously throughout the war.
“Oba su pala”
became a rallying cry, and whenever it appeared on TV, or when someone yelled it on the street or through the walls at the Serb upstairs, we were remindedthat we were outnumbered, outweaponed, and we were winning.
    That first time we saw it, my mother and I together, she patted my shoulder because these men were protecting Croatia and the fighting didn’t look too dangerous. She smiled and the soup steamed, and even Rahela wasn’t crying for once, and I allowed myself to slide into the fantasy I recognized as such even while my mind was still spinning it—that there in the flat, with my family, I was safe.

3
    “There is no way a doctor is going to see us on a Saturday,” my father said. My mother ignored him and continued filling her purse with bread and apples.
    “Dr. Ković already called her. She knows we’re coming.” Rahela had been vomiting for two weeks, the second of which my mother had spent taking unpaid sick days from school to navigate the complex web of Communist healthcare—bouncing from doctor to doctor, receiving one referral, then the next, this doctor open only on Wednesdays, that one only Tuesdays and Thursdays, from one to four. They had run blood tests, taken X-rays (one doctor to take the X-rays, another to read them), tried bottle-feeding Rahela with a special formula that was expensive and nearly impossible to get. She’d only gotten skinnier, and my parentsnow stayed awake through the night, taking turns holding her upright so she wouldn’t choke on her own vomit.
    “But Slovenia, Dijana. How are we going to pay for it?”
    “Our daughter is sick. I don’t
care
how we are going to pay for it.” I carried Rahela out to her car seat.
    In Slovenia there’d been a ten-day war. They didn’t share a border with Serbia or have full access to the sea; they weren’t the wrong ethnicity. Now Slovenia was a free country. A separate country. We passed through the desolate fields of northern Croatia and my father slowed as a Slovenian police officer waved us toward a makeshift customs booth, hastily constructed to mark the new border. My father cranked down the window and my mother dug through her purse for our passports. In winters past we’d come to Slovenia to spend the day in Čatež, an indoor water park just over the border. Strange, I thought, to need a passport to go swimming. The policeman licked his thumb and flipped through our documents.
    “What’s the purpose of your visit?”
    “We’re visiting cousins,” my father said. I wondered why he didn’t just tell the truth.
    “How long will you be staying?”
    “Just for the day. A few hours.”
    “Right,” said the officer, smirking. I remembered the inky